Hidden Bodies (8 page)

My tour continues and I pass the dilapidated bookstore where I’ll be working. A sign in the window reads
BACK IN FIVE OR TEN
and I continue toward the UCB theater.
It’s smaller than I expected, like a storefront. Posters cover the glass begging for my attention and a chubby girl holding a clipboard asks me if I want a ticket.

“Yeah,” I say,
improvising.
“Does the beginner class have a show soon?”

“Which class?” she asks. Someone inside pounds on the window and she waves her clipboard. “Did you want a ticket for the Master Blasters at five?”

No I do not want that. She burrows back into the building and I keep walking. I’m almost home, near the corner of Franklin and Tamarind and walking here is uncomfortable, not like
strolling in New York. I take out my phone and check Facebook and
fuck it all
because someone’s commented about Off-the-Grid Amy dropping out of her UCB class. My head pounds, the
heat, the news. Fuck.

And then it’s that phenomenon, where you’re thinking about someone and they suddenly appear. Because right there, in the window of Birds Rotisserie Chicken Café & Bar, is
a photo of Amy. It’s a surveillance shot, grainy black and white, but it’s her, down to the long blond hair and
STANFORD SWIMMING
T-shirt. Beneath the photo are
the words:
Window of Shame.

I go into Birds. I sidle up to the bar. When the hot bartender chick asks what I want I tell her to surprise me. I smile. This woman has to want me. That’s how I will get her to tell me
about Amy.

She winks. “I hope you like pineapples.”

I fucking hate pineapples. “Love ’em,” I say. “Bring it.”

Her tits are hard, fake, harsh like her, strapped against her chest by her black tank top. Her name is Deana and she is what happens when the hot girl in the Guns N’ Roses video grows up.
It’s real now and she tells me how Amy made it onto the
Window of Shame.

“She started coming in a couple weeks ago,” she says. “She was a pain in the ass from day one, asking for
blueberry vodka
and sending back drinks claiming they were
weak or not what she wanted. Totally shady. Like, bitch, I saw you water it down. Then she just walked out, didn’t pay her bill.”

“The worst,” I say. “Did you call the police?”

Deana stops shaking my drink and looks at an old guy with slick red hair. They laugh in an inside joke sort of way. “Did we call the police?” she repeats.

“How many minutes ago exactly did you move here?” the man asks.

“Earlier today,” I say. Deana gets excited and rings a bell and grabs a megaphone and I get a free shot of Patrón.

The man introduces himself to me. His name is Akim, and Deana says they didn’t call the cops because this is Hollywood. She shrugs. “They have better things to do than chase down
girls who run out on checks.”

Deana says that Amy is allowed at La Poubelle because it’s different there. “Guys buy drinks for chicks like that, model types.” She doesn’t mask her disgust.
“Personally, I don’t go anywhere where I can’t pay for my own booze. Self-respect.”

I stay at Birds for hours, drinking that pineapple shit, making things right with Deana, laughing at her jokes, letting
her
be the one to tell me that she doesn’t date customers.
I leave a fat tip and bring my groceries home and change and rush over to La Poubelle, the place where Amy should be. It’s a long dark bar, like the hull of a Parisian pirate ship. I sit in
the back corner. I stay until two, waiting for Amy to get there. I buy some Xanax off Dez. I’m sure that I’ll find Amy within twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. She
doesn’t have class. She’ll be here. She will.

BUT
she wasn’t there. She didn’t go to La Pou that night, or any night. And now it’s been a month and I’ve tried
everything—hiking, Craigslist, breaking into Harvey’s occupant database, even Pilates—but I still can’t fucking find Amy. All I have to show for it is a farmer’s tan
and a bunch of new muted button-down shirts that I never would have bought in New York. My brain hates me for all the stupid casting calls I’ve posted. None of it works. I stay optimistic. I
listen to “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses and I think of hunters and explorers who spent countless nights in the wild, unsure of where they were, or if they would find what they were
looking for. But LA is fucking monotonous and it’s wearing on me, the way I keep not finding her. And when I try to talk to people, everyone says the same thing: Tinder!

Fuck them. Amy’s not on Tinder. She’s too smart. Too phony. Too old-fashioned.
We are the same.
I get so mad that I can’t sleep and Dez laughs—
you do like
your downers
—and I collect Percocets, just in case I need to drug her.

I hate it here. Everyone is wrong. Delilah is bad at flirting. Harvey is too aggressive about drinking. And every day is actually three days, a freezing morning, a blistering day, and a cool
night. You need a lot of clothes. And every day is the same day, which is why it’s important to hang a calendar. I see why people move here and wake up one day scratching their heads,
wondering when they turned forty or what year it is.

It’s claustrophobic and I have no car and I hate Amy for not being on Facebook, for not having an e-mail I could hack. I live almost exclusively in this one giant square of earth bound by
Tamarind Avenue on the west and Canyon Drive on the east. In New York, you can walk for hours and go unnoticed and you can follow a woman for several blocks without her knowing. But the
cliché is real and people don’t walk here unless it’s to improve their precious fucking bodies or to reach another form of transportation, a car, a bus, a Lyft. They put on
sneakers and carry silver canteens around and what I would do to just have one hour on Seventh Avenue in the middle of the night. I miss being invisible. I think I might be getting fat too.

Every day some awful noise wakes me up, Stevie from the Pantry accidentally texting me instead of his girlfriend, Harvey practicing with his ukulele, or people showing up to shoot piece of shit
shorts in the building. I am not a snob, but the average person here is just, well . . . it’s not New York. I stare at my popcorn ceiling and think about my beautiful old apartment. I check
up on Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam; I live vicariously through them now. Sometimes I think about friending them and confessing everything. Maybe Amy mixed up and told one of the girls
something that would help me find her. But she’s a professional. She knew what she was doing.

AT
the beginning of July I sign a rent check and hand it over to Harvey.

“Don’t look glum,” he says. “They say it takes about ten years to settle in here. You gotta stay positive. Am I right or am I right?”

I give him the thumbs-up he wants so badly and he claps and I flee and I’m so sick of the stupidity of it all, Harvey and his big fucking smile, my boss Calvin, who is a whole other kind
of annoying
.

It’s nothing like Mooney Books and Calvin is one of those people who is better on Facebook than he is in real life. He would be wiser to evaporate and live exclusively online with his
telegenic swath of thick, dark hair. I want to wipe it the fuck off his forehead and take his stupid oversized eyeglasses too. I feel that way a lot here, like I want to tear people’s clothes
off their bodies in a nonsexual way, shave their heads, line them all up for
Silkwood
showers. Calvin keeps all his passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet, fucking moron, and
there’s always a movie playing in the bookstore, as if this is a video rental store in the ’90s. Today it’s
True Romance
so that Calvin can tell me for the fiftieth time
that they shot part of it up the street on Beachwood.

“Sup, Joe-Bro?”

“Sup, Calvin.”

Something is
always
up with Calvin and he launches into a story about his manager that sounds made up. In the past month I’ve learned that there are many Calvins, dependent on
which drugs he’s on. There is Cocaine Calvin, amping up for a
Better Call Saul
audition. There is Marijuana Calvin, chill and watching Tarantino and dreaming of being in a Tarantino
movie and laughing out loud at jokes that are meant to make you smile. There is Reject Actor Calvin, gut protruding through a tight purple T-shirt, glasses on, reeking of hair products, telling me
to be quiet because he’s
visualizing.

Some days, Calvin is a writer. He puts his hair in a ponytail. He works on something called
Ghost Food Truck.
Some days it’s a self-aware campy teen horror flick about a haunted
food truck. Some days it’s a pitch for IFC about a food truck that is run by ghosts. Offbeat, he likes to say, as if this somehow means a TV show doesn’t need a
story.
Still
other days
GFT
is a pilot script—possible HBO or FX but
never
network—about a serial killer who roams the country killing people and making burritos out of them. The
thing is,
Ghost Food Truck
is like Calvin and like everyone here, so flipping
flimsy.
It changes depending on what he watched last night. On what his friends watched.

At least today I’m dealing with the good kind of Cocaine Calvin. He’s dancing and pounding his chest and telling me about
True Romance
again and he’s best like this,
getting hyped for an audition, wearing himself out like a toddler. He leaves to try and
make it in Hollywood
and I post another useless casting call on Craigslist—
tall blond
beautiful
.

My listings are getting more uninspired as time goes by and every day that Amy doesn’t submit a headshot to one of my imaginary castings, I feel like a detective in one of those shows
where they hit you over the head with the fact that a missing child becomes almost impossible to find when twenty-four hours pass. It could drive you nuts, searching for someone in LA, and
that’s why people here are so miserable. It is fucking hard to find things. Fame. Love. Parking spots. Cheap gas. Good inexpensive headshots. An agent. A manager. A happy hour where the
nachos don’t suck. A tall blond con artist named Amy.

It’s been a long month without rain, without clouds, without a sighting. And it sickens me to look back because I’ve done my part. I set my traps. I assembled my team. Calvin knows
to text me the second anyone walks into this place with a copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint
and Amy should have been in by now. How does she pay for her fucking superfruits?

Harvey knows to tell me if any new girls show up, tall blondes in college shirts. Dez too. Deana from Birds quit, but I set better traps there, as well as at La Pou and all the places in
between. I bought bottles of prenatal vitamins and told the bartenders that my estranged girlfriend is pregnant. I worked up some tears. The female bartenders at Birds said we’re all
family
in the Village and they couldn’t get over how sweet I am, carrying vitamins around. The guy behind the bar at La Poubelle was empathetic. He looked me in the eye and lifted
the bag and promised me he’d be on the lookout. I had so much hope. So why the fuck haven’t I found her?

Calvin comes back all coked up, hooting and hollering and doing a stupid jig he does after he
nailed it
. He goes on Tinder.

“Jesus,” I say. “Didn’t you just hook up last night?”

He nods. “That’s not what I’m doing now. I’m working it, Joe Bro. Tinder is the most important casting database in the world,” he raves. “The place where
every
actor and actress is hanging out, like what the club used to be, or the drugstore soda fountain was in, like, the fifties.” He burps. “Fucking Tinder, dude. My buddy Leo,
he got cast off Tinder last week.”

“But isn’t it just dating and shit?” I protest. I don’t want this to be true. I don’t want to join and I don’t want Amy to be on there
Tindering
around.

Calvin burps. “Swipe. Fuck. Book.”

I have no choice. I join. I swipe. And twenty-four hours later, I think my eyes are broken and my head is so full of faces that I worry the visual part of my brain might run out of room. There
are so many girls. And they’re all here. It’s an infinite database and when girls on Tinder wander into my five-mile radius, I can see them in my phone. Now Tinder is taking over my
brain and every time I swipe, I picture Amy in a USC shirt, yawning and strolling out of my radius and I can’t stop swiping because I have to find her. I don’t sleep at all for two
fucking days.

It’s the most pathetic move yet and I think California is getting to me. I call Mr. Mooney. He has no patience. “I told you,” he snaps. “Get your goddamn dick
sucked.”

So I try. I meet a girl named Gwen on Tinder and it’s like ordering Chinese food. In the pictures, Gwen is shiny and rested, glistening like pork-fried rice. Gwen shows up and she
isn’t as shiny in person, same way the pork-fried rice is always greasier than you want it to be. Her skin is puffy. She is pale. She is proof that they can’t all be
California
girls
and she tells me about her acting class and her last bad Tinder date. She drinks red wine and looks at herself in the mirror. Her teeth stain. She sneezes. I say God bless you. I drink
vodka and search the bar for Amy. It’s different being here with a woman instead of Calvin. I’m staring at people and Gwen notices. “I was the same way my first month,” she
says. “Everyone’s just so much
prettier
here. Even the men.”

Naturally, while I’m at the bar with Gwen, I see the most attractive girl I’ve ever seen in my life. And I can’t put my finger on it. She is not classically beautiful by any
means and she is hardly young. Her off-the-shoulder soft sweatshirt showcases the right amount of her boobs, like two scoops of ice cream, soft and creamy. Her hair is cotton candy. Her legs are
caramel. When the bartender brings me the glass of water I asked for an hour ago, the candy girl and I reach for it at the same time.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Take it,” I say.