Hidden Bodies (6 page)

The best resource so far is a guy named Calvin, who works at a used bookstore right next to the UCB. He posted a job listing for someone to pick up shifts and I wrote to him. I think I have the
job; none of the other
dudes
he knows have experience with a register. I ask him about rare books, if he ever sees any original editions of
Portnoy’s Complaint.
Maybe Amy
already started moving her inventory. He writes back:

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, Calvin has a website where he reveals everything you could ever want to know about him. He’s an aspiring writer-director-actor-producer-sound
designer-comic-improv player. Can you imagine yearning for attention so badly that your identity required all those hyphens? He worships Henderson and Marc Maron and suspenders and beards and
pictures of beards and Tinder and bacon and
Breaking Bad
and things from the ’80s. In Brooklyn this guy would be working at a branding firm. He would be playing poor and checking his
401(k) late at night. But Calvin has a PayPal account where “fans” can help him pay rent. I could never respect Calvin, but he’s easy and grateful that I’m willing to fill
in when he needs to audition.

I order a Sprite Zero and vodka. My second most useful Facebook friend is an older aspiring stand-up comic named
Harvey Swallows.
I applied for an apartment near UCB in a building
called
Hollywood Lawns.
Harvey’s the manager, and when I e-mailed him about the apartment, he responded with a Facebook friend request and invitation to be his fan.
Angelenos.
Harvey is the West Coast equivalent of my old coworker Exclamation Point Ethan
.
Harvey is another open book with his website: He changed his name to Harvey Swallows and
moved to LA to be a comic at the “ripe young age of fifty-seven.” His catchphrase is
Am I right or am I right?
He’s big into
#ThrowbackThursday
and he’s
shared so many photos of his old life in Nebraska, when he was married and selling insurance and growing sick with aspirations. Note to self: Do
not
get sick with aspirations. They eat
your brain and trick your heart and you wind up on a stage in a basement saying unfunny things and waiting for someone to laugh.

Nobody is laughing and/or paying Harvey to say funny things, so he manages forty-five units at Hollywood Lawns. The place is a nice change of pace for me. I get off Facebook and look at pictures
of my new home. There is a pool—I could hold Amy under the water—and there is a hot tub—I could boil the bitch—and there is a
game room
—I can choke her with a
pool stick—and it’s within walking distance of everything I could ever want. Including, of course, Amy. She may not be on Facebook but you can’t pursue an acting career in LA
without the Internet. A girl like Amy, a brand-new sociopath with no agent, no connections, she would start looking for work on Craigslist. Anyone can post a casting call on the site and actors
submit their pictures and résumés
constantly
, according to Calvin. So I write a casting call, specifically designed to appeal to Amy’s overweening ego.

I am astounded by the speed of it all. Within a few minutes, I have dozens of girls sending me pictures. My hands shake every time I open an e-mail from a girl. Some are
naked
, some are
ugly, some are even gorgeous, but none of them are the supercunt.

I order another vodka and Sprite Zero and the two girls across the aisle talk about
the Bar Method
—they love it—and
carbs
—they hate them—and
directors
—they want to know them
.
I wonder if Amy would become that kind of person in LA if I don’t kill her first. Part of me wants to tell her about the assholes on
the plane but more of me wants to scream at her, to hold her accountable for everything she did but I can’t, not yet. I open a Word document and write to myself.

The older woman next to me knocks on my tray table. She points at my screen. “Are you a writer?”

I save my document. I close it. “Yes. It’s a monologue in this thing I’m writing.”

She points at the headshots. “And directing? You’re casting, right? I see pictures.”

“Yep!” Boundaries: Where did they go? “Here’s hoping.”

She nods. “You know,” she says. “If you’re casting something, my niece lives in North Hollywood and she’s
very
talented. You can see her at Gretchen Woods
dot com.”

So that’s how it is here. I tell her that I’m making an adult movie and she gasps and whips her head toward the window, and maybe now she won’t go around telling random guys
how to find her niece online. But she’s given me an idea. Being a writer is a great cover during my expedition. I’ll say that I’m working on something called
Kev & Mindy
Forever
and it will be about me and Amy and our last weekend in Little Compton. It will begin with Amy telling me that she can’t sleep in her own bed and I know how it ends: me killing
Amy.

I order another vodka and Sprite Zero and go back on Facebook. One of Calvin’s friends, Winston Barrel, has requested my online friendship. He doesn’t even know me. I accept
friendship with Winston. I immediately receive an invitation to a comedy show along with 845 other people. This is good. When I pull Amy’s extra-long body into an infinity pool and make it
look like an accident—dare to dream!—I will be okay because I will have become a Facebook guy, a normal dude. We live in an era where people who don’t have 4,355 friends are
considered nefarious, as if socially entrenched citizens aren’t also capable of murder. I need friends so that when Amy disappears, my
friends
can roll their eyes at the idea of
handsome, gregarious Joe
killing
someone. I can’t be that guy who “keeps to himself.” That’s too in-line with the dated but pervasive stereotype of a
“killer” reinforced by biased TV “news” shows no matter how many happy-go-lucky husbands go and murder their wives. We all want to fear single people. It’s endemic.
It’s American.

I click through my new Angeleno friends on Facebook. I love them; they are like kids, the way they just fucking
hope.
I hate them; they are like kids, the way they just fucking
hope.
I envy them. They don’t sacrifice their bodies for bookstores and they don’t waste their lives underground, riding subways and exposing themselves to chemicals and old
shit. People move to LA to
make it
. They dream harder than people in New York and believe that ferociously socializing is critical, that life is all about “who you know.”

And honestly, I don’t hate Facebook as much as I thought I would. (Suck it, Amy. Sorry, Beck.) Once you’re a member, there’s a network in which you are the center, it’s
empowering. Humans are entertaining, fun to look at. So are cats. People are so lonely, they spend their birthdays on the Internet, thanking people for wishing them a happy birthday, people who
only know it’s their birthday because Facebook told them. I “Like”
Fast & Furious
to establish myself as a fun guy and then I write to Amy:
Dear Cunt, Facebook
is
only people trying to help each other from being lonely. Fuck you. Love, Joe.

The pilot says we’re almost here and I lean forward and see Los Angeles through the tiny window. The city is a grid, and like Amy’s bush that first time I saw it, the thing fucking
sprawls. I can’t help but smile. Amy thinks she’s
off the grid
but she has extremely traceable rare books and aspirations that require online socialization. I’ll find
her. I wish I could break open the window right now and parachute into Franklin Village, where I know she is, but then she might see me coming and that would be like whispering to the deer,
psst, I’m here
, right before shooting it.

THE
first song I hear in LAX is that ditzy fucking Tom Tom Club song about getting out of jail and it sobers me up, hard. A UCLA brat bashes into me
with her oversized suitcase. People are pushy and tourists are slamming into me, all of them on an exodus to get pictures of Sean Penn, who is in baggage claim
.
In New York, people fight
to make a train to get home or to make it to the squished aisles of Trader Joe’s. In LA, people fight to smell an actor, an old man.

I’ve received two electronic communications since I landed.

One is from Harvey:
Wow! You have perfect credit! Most people who move here have horrible credit!

It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation. The other one is from Calvin:
We have a Blu-ray so bring any movies you wanna watch during shift.

You aren’t supposed to watch movies in a bookstore and I get into a cab and the driver taps the address of Hollywood Lawns into his GPS and I wonder if Amy took a cab or a shuttle. I
wonder when the wondering will stop. I hate this part of the split, when that girl just
lives
in your head. I need to get laid and we take La Cienega and the city gets glitzier as you go
north and I see women in nighttime dresses walking around in the day, like this is okay. I see homeless people like from
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
and I see the Capitol Records
building and my heart quickens when we reach Franklin Avenue—Amy, Amy, Amy—and when I emerge from the cab I step into dog shit.

“Fuck,” I seethe. My head pounds, the sun, the excessive vodka.

The driver laughs. “People in LA, man, they like their doggies.”

Hollywood Lawns looks like the building in
Karate Kid
and the dogs trapped in the small hot apartments bark as I walk up the stairs. The for rent sign beams: month to month. I wonder if
Amy lives here, in this very building. You never know. She is just the kind of lying transient who would gravitate toward this; her sublet in New York was
week to week.
I should have known
then, but your dick makes you blind.

Harvey looks older in person, waxen, arched eyebrows. It’s hard to look at him and I let him talk to me about his act and I agree to get drinks with him. He tells me my apartment is on the
first floor, right by his office, and I brainstorm future excuses to avoid time with him. He warns me about ridiculous shit. “One thing you gotta know about the ’hood, newbie,” he
says. “This isn’t New York. You can’t be jaywalking. They will ticket you and those tickets will add up.”

“I knew LA was an anti-walking city but that’s fucking ridiculous,” I say.

Harvey smiles. “You sound like me when I see Joe Rogan on TV. Downright ridiculous. Am I right or am I right?”

Conversations about Joe Rogan are not a part of my life so I don’t encourage him, the way you don’t laugh at a child who swears. “Hey,” I say. “I saw the sign
outside. Do you get a lot of people moving in all the time?”

“World’s full of dreamers,” he says. “Do you have friends looking?”

“Yeah,” I say. And this is where I have to tread lightly. I don’t want to say that I’m
looking
for Amy Adam because then, when she disappears, I will be a
suspect. I am careful. “I know this girl looking,” I say. “But she wants a share.”

Fact: Amy has never had her own place. She’s a leech.

Harvey nods. “If I had a nickel for every hot babe who moves in here to sleep on the couch and pay half the rent . . .” He shakes his head. “I’d be able to paper the
walls with nickels! Am I right or am I right?”

Harvey introduces me to another guy in the building, Dez, entitled, thug-light. He lives on the first floor too, and he looks like an extra in an Eminem video circa 2000. Dez has a dog, Little
D, and some advice for me.

He looks at me hard. “Do. Not. Fuck. Delilah.”

I nod. “Word.”

I need someone like this on my team, someone fluent in California ’90s moron douchebag language who no doubt has access to Xanax and various narcotics.

Harvey digs up the keys to my new home and tells me that Delilah is just
sweet
and
friendly
and I know this means
desperate
and
slutty
and he says a lot of
the guys in the building are crass. “It’s kinda like I’m the talk show host and everybody comes into my office to work out their bits,” he says. Why must everyone want to be
Henderson? “So you come by anytime, work stuff out. It’s like a Seth MacFarlane vibe in here, ya know, Broseph?”

“Sounds great,” I lie.

“Am I right or am I right?” he asks, as if he has a contract with himself to spew out his own catchphrase at least twice an hour.

My apartment smells like rotten oranges and chicken and it’s full of pink furniture, girl furniture. The former tenant
Brit Brit
moved out suddenly, against her will.

“Her parents showed up here all upset,” Harvey says, turning on a pink bubble-shaped lamp and illuminating a Kandinsky poster
.
“She spent half the money they gave her
on a nose job and the rest on
nose candy
and then she wound up in a hospital cuz her
nose bled.
” He shakes his head and pats the hot pink futon. “I know there’s
a joke in there. Funny things come in threes. I’m gonna find it, I swear. Anyhoo, the good news is you scored, Broseph. The futon, the chicken in the freezer, the TV, it’s all yours.
Her parents wanted us to dump it.”