Authors: Hillary Carlip
Find Me I'm Yours (10 page)
If you didn't go watch it, here's what it said:
Hey. So far so good. You might be wondering why I'm sitting here wearing only one boot. Well, as you know, I'm looking for my SOLE mate. All you gotta do is find my other boot, which is somewhere in this region here [points to map on his lap], and you'll be one STEP closer to finding your prince. Maybe not Prince Charming, but I'm definitely not a HEEL.
Cool, are we done? Cut? Good, because I think there's someone coming actually.
OMGggggg!!! He was sitting on some outdoor stairs wearing only one boot. Seriously, THAT WAS ALL! (Now you gonna go watch?!)
Coco was laughing her ass off.
“How could you not fall for that?” I asked.
“He is funny. And not bad eye candy,” Coco relented. “If he's for real,” she couldn't resist adding.
I threw a pillow at her.
“OK”âshe was back to being niceâ“so last time we cracked the first clue by figuring out where he was when the tape was shot. Why don't we start there again?”
Great. A purpose. A plan.
“Well, he's outdoors on some stairs,” I offered, with my oh-so-keen powers of observaysh.
“Maybe it's one of those stair walks,” Coco deduced. “I've seen books about them at Skylight.”
Skylight is one of the coolest independent bookstores in L.A. still standing. I go in there all the time to see, feel, and even smell the pages of real books. Also, they still sell a zine I did a while back in one of my productive phases.
If you wanna make some art that you can touch and hold, you can get my zineâwhich is chock-full o' kick-ass images, scraps, and “Snip Its” (®, not) that you can cut out to make your own collagesâat a smattering of independent bookstores. I keep a pretty updated list of who carries it on my website:
I returned to the task at hand. “But aren't there like a million stair walks in L.A.?”
“Well, there are also a million dog parksâthat didn't stop us,” she said. “There should be just as many websites about stairs, too.”
She put the computer on her lap and started clicking away. I was fading, having only slept about an hour the night before.
“We need more brainpower,” I said. “Be right back.”
I went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses filled with my own cocktail concoction, a mix of Drambuie and Red Bull.
“Here's a Drambully.”
We drank and searched. We found a site with a map of eighty-one different stair walks, from Topanga to South Pasadena. But there were no pictures, so how would we ever match Mr. WTF's stairs? We found videos of people on stair walks, books (the bible being
Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles
), even an iPhone app from the book's author. But no pictures. With addresses. Which was what we needed. And couldn't find.
“Wait a min! Wait a sec! Hold on! I think I found something!” Coco shouted. “Stairwalksla.com. Anything sound familiar?”
“The la.com?” I guessed. “Like dogparksla.com, right?”
Coco perked up. “Maybe that's a clue, like his initials or something. Get out the pic you took at the Villa Seaside Apartments.”
I grabbed my phone and looked at the list of tenants. “There's an L.A.! L. Astin! We so rock, we could freakin' solve freakin' murders if we freakin' wanted to!” We tried to high-five and missed. It took four times before we connected solidly.
“I'll start researching L. Astins,” Coco said, “you check out the site.”
I looked at it on my phone. “Well, it's a way better design than Sandi Stern's,” I reported. It suddenly made me a little sad to think my new friend Sandi, of dogparksla.com, may not be a real person. Which of course meant that Mr. WTF might not be as well. What if the troubled, homely old housewife with the severely handicapped twin stepsons
was
behind this? What if Coco was right? I had to focus. “The girl who does the blog has some funny icons describing the stair walks on itâlike PEE ALERT, NOSY NEIGHBORS, and CARRY MACE. And there are PICS! With addresses! Halle-fuckin'-lujah!”
“Let's check 'em out.” Coco joined me, having found nothing on L. Astin except that
Lastin
is elastic used for sewing cloth diapers. Good to know. There were four photos on StairwalksLA.com that we decided could possibly be of the stairs in the video. We would start there.
“Ready to go?” Coco asked.
“What do you think?”
We gathered our stuff and my dogs and piled into Coco's car. As we drove to the first set of stairs, my phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey, honey.”
It was Liza. That's one thing I've found a lot of gay women have in commonâthey call each other “honey” even well after they've broken up. And of course they mostly continue on being friends with their exes, so if they're all at a party and someone calls out HONEY, every head turns.
“Hi, sweet pea.” I like to mix it up, keep it fresh.
“You OK?”
“Yeah. No. Whatever. First, how are you? And how's Kelly?”
Liza caught me up and when she asked once more how I was, I broke down. In between sobs, snorts, then laughing at my sobs and snorts, I filled her in on everything that had gone down. Coco had me put Liza on speaker, and she joined in, adding, embellishing, and commenting to her East Coast counterpart (minus us ever having sex!).
Usually when people think of New York, it's dark and edgy. And L.A. is bright and sparkly. If that were true, Liza and Coco pulled a
Freaky Friday
. For as cynical and unbelieving as Coco is, Liza is a sunshiny optimist. In fact, she works for a motivational company that has the big, phat, cool spiritual/self-help website:
She runs a site for them called TEXT YOUR WISH where people⦠uh⦠obvs, text their wishes! And then wishes are picked and fulfilled.
Note to selfâmaybe it's time to give it a shot and wish for $500.00 to help out my brother?!
So when Coco said, “You've seen
Catfish
? Don't you think it's crazy to be doing this hunt?” of course Liza effused just the opposite.
“It's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard! What are the chances of you getting a camera to begin with, and that one in particular? It's TOTALLY meant to be!”
Coco withdrew a little, seeing she was outnumbered. Liza made me promise to Skype her and show her the tapes when I got home.
After hanging up, I suddenly realized that I hadn't thought of Jason in about an hour. At this point it was all about my future. No looking back.
Oops, I just did.
As dusk was rapidly approaching, the dramatic pink sun sinking behind the 405 freeway, it was a little hard to see anything once we got to the first set of stairs in Santa Monica Canyon. Nothing seemed out of place, except for a Luna Bar wrapper on the fourth stair from the bottom.
By the time we got back across town to one of the Beachwood Stairs in Hollywood, it was as if the
Survivor
tiki torch had been extinguished, and it was almost pitch-black out. We used the flashlights on our phones to light up the area, but saw nothing. Just stairs. And three cigarette butts.
“I think this might be a daytime job,” Coco said.
“Agreed. We could totally be in the dark, in the dark.” I would have to investigate the other two in the morning before work. I couldn't ask Coco to join meâshe'd be up way late tonight with Blake's show (which she tried to convince me to go to). The least I could do was let her sleep in tomorrow.
It was now up to me, and me alone, to find Prince Charming's glass boot.
DAY 4âMORNING
I woke to my phone alarm at 7:00 a.m. with a definite Drambully-over, not to mention puffy crybaby eyes. Boo, Toupee, and I were all squeezed onto my twin mattress, which I had bought for $15.00 from some aging actor's estate sale in North Hollywood. He was selling his old 8 Ã 10 headshots, too. I still regret not buying one.
I FaceTimed Cooper. Nothing. I called him. No answer. I texted him. No response. Hopefully he was out of jail and back at school. I'd try again in the afternoon.
After I walked the kids and fueled up on K & C Donut coffee, I splurged next door at Subway and used some of my remaining $7.00 to get a Mornin' Flatbread for $2.50âcuz you can “Add-vocado!” And I did. Then I set out for the third stairs on our list, between the Hollywood Bowl and Universal Studios.
I had never been to the Hollywood Hills so early before. It seemed like a small townânewspapers being delivered into driveways with a thud, sprinklers rotating, catching the morning sun in their spray. The stairs were nestled between two beige stucco houses, both with white railings leading to front doors. Very 1970. Or maybe 1980. Definitely 19Ugly.
The one thing that set these stairs apart from others, and made me hopeful, was that halfway up, there was a rickety red fence bordering the right side. It looked like I had a match!
No boot (or lap-map!) was in sight, but there was a lot more trash on these stairs than Coco and I had spotted on the last two. Candy wrappers, receipts, and a scrawled TO DO list that included “Pick up tiara.” SWEARS! But nothing seemed significant. That is until I found, slightly hidden under a crunchy leaf⦠THE GOLDEN TICKET!!!
It really felt just as dramatic and life changing as Charlie finding his ticket out of potato soup poverty into the riches of the Chocolate Factory!
Sole Mates Shoe Repair?! Isn't my husband-to-be so damn clever?
I whipped out my phone and searched for info, including what time they opened.
It seemed so legit. Would this be the ticket to Mr. WTF's other boot? I called Coco. “How was Blake's show?”
“Ugh⦠most of the acts sucked, and Blake's latest band attempt didn't go on till 2:00 a.m. and then played only three songs. I wasn't that thrilled about any of it.”