Background Chronicles Three

Background Chronicles Three. 

            I’m standing in a parking lot at UCLA and it’s about a quarter mile from the front of a line where two beleaguered Production Assistants check people out, sign off on their paperwork so they can get paid.  When wrap is called for the day, you’ve got to go through this so they’re sure you’ve turned in wardrobe if there was any, not going to scarper with the high fashion Payless shoes they stuck you in at six in the morning although with a thousand extras they haven’t re-wardrobed too many people today.  If they were dressed incorrectly they just sent them home.  A thousand, a thousand and ten, nine hundred and eighty, it doesn’t really matter.  Especially on this set in one of the college auditoriums.  In the very back row of the balcony they used plastic silhouettes.  They never cheered but they never went out to smoke a cigarette or use the bathroom.  They stayed put. 

It is raining as I stand by the overflowing latrines.  The show is called “Glee.”  I don’t know anything about it but that a lot of gay teenagers like it.

            Wait, am I allowed to say that?  Earlier on, about 14 hours ago although it seems like three days, I remember signing a non-disclosure agreement.  What it is I’m not supposed to disclose wasn’t clear until about four hours ago.  It is the result of a dance contest where everybody looks alike to me.  I wouldn’t know one set of plucky teenagers from another.

            Young, trained, agile kids dancing their asses off in some of the hardest work I’ve seen but after the first five go rounds as an audience member: parent, grandparent, supportive aunt, I just didn’t give two shits.  I have been standing up, applauding, high fiving the person next to me, whooping and hollering all day, prompted and prodded and harangued for more enthusiasm then sent back to the holding area, a big white tent chock full of long tables and metal folding chairs, so many times the only thing I’m gleeful about is the fact that the latrine is not overflowing directly onto me. 

            It’s only water.  Puddles of water coming from  sky droplets running down my back, the sides of my face, taking gravitie’s orders as I step out of one into another and the line moves forward  about a foot and a half.  I’ve been standing still for ten minutes.

            “There are only two people up there?”  The girl behind me in a skimpy string dress and four inch heels eyeballs the scene then furiously text messages someone.  Her downturned head keeps the rain from falling directly on her phone, for a second or two.

            “Yeah, we’ll be here forever,” she says.  It is ten-thirty at night and most of us have been here since five-thirty or six AM.  The only people not completely exhausted are the ones on drugs.   The west LA guy in front of me, in the pinstriped suit, yellow tie and car salesman’s hairdo, is here because he likes it, or did until about three hours ago.  He liked being in the same room as Lindsey Lohan aka America’s Sweetheart.  That’s how she was announced.  She was one of the pretend judges as was a celebrity blogger with a square head, and somebody else.

            “Why don’t they have more people?”  I’m at the edge of despair.  How it has come to this?  A few years ago I was an upper middle class suburban mom married to a professional.  I had status, class and enough dough that I never thought twice about things I considered necessities.  Getting the dogs’ teeth cleaned, new clothes, buying a piece of silver jewelry simply because I liked it, buying two windshield wiper blades when only the one on the passenger side is shredded. Back in those days I wore shoes I was comfortable in and skirts?  If I wore one at all it was one I could walk in  without taking truncated medieval Japanese lady steps.  My tight white skirt, tit accentuating sweater and jacket are all turning to mush now in the rain.  In three inch pumps with off center heels I stopped feeling my feet hours ago.

            The line moves forward a few more feet and I try to look at the bright side.  Looking on the bright side is a religion in Los Angeles, born of a virulant new-ageiness insisting that you can will reality into being what you want via your thinking.  Like Uri Geller’s  spoon bending.  They never figured out it was a hoax here.  Having negative thoughts along the line of holy shit I’m standing downriver from an overflowing latrine, I can’t feel my feet and by the time I get home it will be close to midnight and they want me back at six in the morning all for eight dollars an hour, is wrongheaded.

            Rain comes down in earnest now.  I’m still new to this but some of the seasoned extras have umbrellas.  They bring bags, suitcases containing every contingency they could possibly need.

            Uri Geller was a fake and reality is a steel hard non-malleable Great Wall of China.  Rain is wet, shit and piss stinks, flesh balks at abuse.  The front of the line is a hundred miles away and I will be in this line forever.  It’s a level of hell I’ve been relegated to for sins I can’t remember committing.   It will go on and on.  The texter gets a reply.  The West LA Lohan guy can’t keep his hair together.  Suddenly the line is broken in half, couple of soaked PA’s attempting to herd us like livestock into lines half as long.  Apparently, another checker outer has materialized.  People from the longer half try to dash the short half, get rebuked, pretend they don’t understand or have been misunderstood.  The floodlights illuminating raindrops, dropped trash, disillusioned hipsters and me shine more brightly as another flap of tent is pulled back.  Fuck it.  Charge.  The crowd surges forward as individuals try both to better their positions and get out of the rain.  Couple of PA’s look to each other worriedly.  They may be facing a situation they cannot control.  Like cattle with bad breath from smoking too many cigarettes.

            Fourteen plus hours ago everybody was much more cheerful.  “Glee” is a big show and Eric Stoltz, the guy from Mask, is directing.  All the movers and shakers are on Glee and the craft services prove it.  Real waffles, cereal, fruit and of course coffee, plenty of coffee.  On any movie or TV set the background artists are kept segregated from both the crew and the “talent,” and sometimes the food is substantially worse.  But not here.  Fourteen hours ago we had waffles and everyone was full of piss, vinegar and maple syrup.

            By the time I get to the sign out table I’m not feeling much of anything anymore.  I’ve been thinking about John Paul Sartre and something he said about choice.  Even with a gun to your head you have a choice.  Philosophically, I’ve wondered whether that’s really a choice.  If I’m a Nazi officer and am given the order to shoot a bunch of people or eat my own gun, the moral choice, Sartre would say, if he was in the mood to speak of such things, would be to dine a la Walther, thereby not committing an atrocious act.  But when your choice is to live with the fact that you’ve committed atrocities or not live at all, is that really a choice?  Wouldn’t a real choice be more along the lines of having the option not to shoot anyone, including yourself.  Doesn’t reason dictate anything anymore?

            “I-9, where is it?” says the shagged out bedraggled slightly unnerved and really crabby PA.  She went to college.  She has dreams and aspirations far beyond herding a bunch of minimum waged losers around a collage campus parking lot cum show set.  She is beginning to suspect nobody cares.  An I-9 form is the one that says you’re a US citizen or have a legitimate reason why not.  You can be a convicted felon, sex offender, drug addict, alcoholic, barely functioning over-medicated mental patient, a non-medicated mental patient, a thug, reprobate, high school drop out tweaker on his downtime and still work as an extra.  But you got to have the I-9 filled out and filled out correctly.  She doesn’t much care for mine and once I’ve fished it out of my bag I get an eye roll.  “Just for future reference, your driver’s license number needs to go in the first column and social security number in the second.”

            “I can never remember.  Different on every show.”

            “Well, here.”

            I walk across the parking lot, then through another and around the corner towards the one with my car.  There was a shuttle bus filling to take people back but I estimated, rightly it turns out since when I drive off I can see it under the sodium vapor lamp still idling, that it would be quicker to walk.  The vision of my car, my little spacecraft that is going to wind its way somehow to the freeway and eventually to my driveway, is better than having spotted an old friend.  I’m not much of a smoker but I rifle the glovebox for a cigarette; I usually have some stashed for emergencies.  It won’t necessarily make me feel better, but feeling something is better than nothing, even if it’s something bad.

            The rain has let up.  I can barely see it.  The parking lot exit is bottlenecked but nobody’s acting out from behind the wheel.  We’re all way past that.   

            I’ve thought a little about a lot of things and not a lot about one thing, which is why I’m here today doing this.  One of the things I’ve thought about is why people want to be on TV.  The first time I thought about this was when OJ Simpson was in his white Ford Bronco running away from the police.  I was in Aspen, Colorado and the vision on TV of all those police cars aligned and strung out a respectful distance lest OJ do something rash, was surreal enough.  But the number of people cheering him on from the freeway overpasses took it over the edge to bizarre.   Some of them, the ones who habitually run from cops, clearly wanted him to get away; some probably didn’t care, they were just in the neighborhood and it seemed like a thing to do.  But as I sat there watching from the safety and calm of a mountain condo, it occurred to me that the majority of people cheering from the sidelines and overpasses simply wanted to be on television.

            This was a 1993 or 4, before every friggin’ thing anybody did was digitally recorded somehow by someone so the opportunities aren’t what they are now.  But the conclusion I came to all those years ago has never changed.  People want to be recorded on film, video, digitally or whatever because they are not sure they exist.

            The philosophical origins of this problem go back centuries but the guy who put it most succinctly was the 18^th century philosopher and dedicated sitter by the Dutch Oven because everywhere else in Europe in the 18^th century was fucking cold, Rene Descartes.  Decartes wasn’t sure he was there or the only time he was, was when he was thinking something.  He’s came up with, “Cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am, meaning that as long as he was thinking he was sure he existed.  He had to do a lot of thinking after that.  Talk about pressure.

            But then other philosophers too numerous to list here but among them a Bishop of the Catholic Church called Berkeley—the hippie town in California is named for him—said, “now hold the bus right there, Rene.  Maybe you only think you exist.  Reality might be one big illusion and nothing you said proves otherwise.”  Berkeley, being a man of the cloth decided that it was God’s thinking, not any individuals’ thinking, that held reality up.  Then a Scottish philosopher called David Hume came along and knocked the shit out of that.  Prove to me there’s a God, he said, and I’ll take your point.  Nobody could.

            Nobody is really sure they exist.  The reflexion in the mirror?  Who is there to witness it but you?  Someone might come into the bathroom and go, “hey, I see you too,” but what’s one person, even two?  They might simply be part of your delusion.  What you need is consensus.  Numbers, Dammit.  This is a democracy and everything’s up for a vote.  If millions of people view an episode of CSI and you, as a Featured Extra, get to be a corpse on a slab, all your friends and a bunch of people you don’t know and have never heard of will be sure in that brief time, that you exist.  Well, ish.  You are after all, a corpse.

            Being a corpse on a slab is something that almost all background artists aspire to.  Featured Extras get more money or a “bump.”  The bump is coveted and can bring your daily take into the hundreds of dollars.  But very few background artists do it for the money.  It’s the glamour.  The makeup people who generally don’t notice if you live or die—you’re expected to show up to every shoot, “hair and makeup ready,” fuss over you, manicuring your “Y” incision, applying all that make up so you’ll look as if you really have been the in the Hudson Bay for 24 hours.  Just the coloring and the bloating takes forever.  And if you’re a female, chances are they’re going to show you almost naked—maybe a cloth draped over your pubis—and that is what’s called “exposure.”  Not only are millions of people going to know you exist, with a little luck they’re going to realize that you’ve got a great, albeit cold, set of tits.

            You can record the episode and watch it over and over again.  It’s the Norma Desmond Syndrome writ small.  In the movie Sunset Strip, Gloria Swanson played an aging silent film star who never went anywhere except chauffeured by Otto Preminger in a vintage twenties car.  She spent almost all her time sitting in her living room watching her old films not only to prove to herself that she HAD existed, but that she still did.  Inference is a big deal in the whole existence thing.  For instance, if I see a pile of dog poop, no one would argue with me the fact that at some point a dog has been on the lawn.

            In the name of full disclosure I must state that I never reached the pinnacle of being a corpse on a slab, but I’ve talked to people who have.  The heartache comes in the fact that no matter what the emotional/artistic cost, no matter how much of your true self you put into being the corpse that’s been in the Hudson Bay for 24 hours and no matter how good a job you do, chances are you are not going to be called back to do it again.  In a normal world there would not be legions of individuals who have made it their mission in life to point out the fact that the same corpse was on the coroners’ slab in both CSI and Murder Incorporated, albeit months apart, nor would they have written and installed their own computer program called, provisionally ,”Identistiff.”  But this is not a normal society.  It doesn’t matter if you were the best, deadest, non-accidentally grabbing a gasp of air during a take and blowing the whole illusion corpse ever, somebody is going to notice, tweet and blog about it.  You may get a bump in pay for the day, but it is not going to launch your Hollywood career.

            I’m not talking about psychological insecurity here but Ontological Insecurity.  It’s a huge problem.

            As is the, being in on something interesting, problem.  Whether OJ Simpson was burned in a fiery crash that day, shot by police, taken out to dinner and served Blue Whale sushi or arrested that day, everybody on the bridges who watched him pass under would have been able to tell the tale and the part they played in it.  Even, and this is a big even, if there was none.

            As far as I can tell, celebrities are made of the same stuff my dogs, me, all my friends, every squirrel in the trees and rat in the rafters is made of.  Flesh, bone, and blood.  The difference is they’re famous flesh, bone and blood but you are not.  If I tell the story of tending bar and almost spilling a drink on a handsome guy because he’s so startlingly handsome, some of my friends might laugh a bit but mostly because they’re my friends and think I’m amusing or they want to punch my emotional card or whatever.  But if I am in a room full of people talking about the fact that I was pretending to tend bar on the set of Californication, and I almost spilled a drink on David Duchovney’s lap because he’s so startlingly handsome, everybody’s ears perk up.  Is David Duchovney that handsome?  Sure, Agent Mulder has something but we all thought people like Brad Pitt define “handsome.”  Duchovney, if you take all his features individually is not classically handsome.  But if Catherine thinks he’s handsome, and most people who know me know I’m a hard sell, then he must have a certain special something and that’s interesting.  Now they can say to their friends, I know someone who says David Duchovney is handsome, or exaggerate slightly and who would blame them—name dropping in this town gets you more attention than cocaine, well, almost—and say they know somebody who met David Duchovney’s handsomeness and now you’ve got something.  Now you’ve got something to talk about other than the fact that the front rotors of your brakes are down to dinner plates and do I know anyone who will replace them on the cheap?

            This is all innocuous and really, who gives a shit?  The problem comes in on the human being as trainwreck side of things.  Many people simply love the idea of being in on a human trainwreck.  Glee and Lindsey Lohan for example.

            It wasn’t just the guy next to me in line in the rain had gotten off bigtime on being in the same room as Lindsey Lohan, lots of people did to the point of dropping her first name only.  I heard Lindsey did this or that, that she was up partying all night and “Eric” (the director) is mad because she was late and so and so said she didn’t even make it to the set yesterday and they had to shoot around her.  Whether any or all of these things are true who cares?  The point is, there is a very high probability that a celebrity like Lindsey Lohan is going to go down at some point.  She gets arrested, goes to rehab, shows up somewhere with her goofy mother who wants everybody to think she’s really her sister.  People who act this way don’t have long shelf lives especially in Hollywood.  I don’t know much about the lass-- I stopped following celebrities around the time I found out Harrison Ford is a Republican—she might be the most talented actor in the world but obviously the poor little thing is not doing well and waiting around for her to finally collapse into herself and die because when the day does come you can name drop to your friends, is fucking macabre.

            “Oh, yes, when I saw Dean Martin he was drunk.  Oh yeah, when John Lennon was on heroin I was one of his roadies and saw him puke into a bucket.  Oh, yes, when I was on the set of “Glee,” Lindsey didn’t look so good.  It’s all the same shit.  It’s all slowing down and watching the trains telescope into each other and watching for blood leaking out the fissures.

Did I mention David Duchovney is attractive?  I knew there was a reason I watched the X-Files all of those years even when the stupid black goo and bees came into it.

I’m standing in the living room of the house where I live.  The white walls blanch whiter, my makeup feels heavy and like there are ball bearings in my eyes.  My dogs get up of their beds to greet me but barely.  It’s past greeting time and what am I doing getting home so late anyway?  They got past wanting their biscuits hours ago.

Tomorrow, I will get up and do it all over again.  I will try to remember to bring an umbrella.

Background Chronicles One

Background Chronicles One

                They used to call them “extras” but Ricky Gervais changed all that by making a show by that name.  Mostly, it caused more laughing than thinking, but someone somewhere realized they didn’t much like being thought as “extra.”  Don’t they know?  Isn’t that insulting?  I’m an artist; they just haven’t realized what I can do yet.  I’m the kind of artist who, rather than being in the foreground am behind it in, like, the background.  Yeah, that’s it.  I’m a background artist.

                Hollywood could not survive without background artists.  When you see Doctor House walking down a busy hospital hallway or a bunch of fans watching a football game in which a Hollywood star makes a touchdown, those aren’t real hospital visitors or football fans.  They are about 20% people who have nothing better to do, starving artsy types who really need all the dough they can lay their hands on, people who just came off a 12 hour janitorial shift at a nursing home, and people basking in the reflective glow of show business.  Then of course your ex-felons or perverts who can’t rustle up other work.  

For a long time background artists were members of a union called AFTRA, which kind of looked out for them and made sure they received something resembling plausible wages.  AFTRA has recently combined with the Screen Actors Guild to create one union that almost nobody cares about.  There are so many productions and so many people willing to be in them that most of the people milling around, crossing the street, eating in restaurants, sitting in stadiums, pouring drinks and bussing tables in television and movies are non-union.  They get paid 8 dollars an hour or, as they say in the biz 64 for 8.

                Becoming a background artist is like, totally, the easiest thing in the world.  You go to Central Casting in Burbank, California, sit in a room that looks like traffic school and hand over your ears to a perky “casting professional,” who tells you what a good idea it is that you came in today.  This is after standing in line for an hour waiting for the place to open being harranged by a tweaker telling you all the ways you can parlay being “background” into fame and fortune.  If you want to get a bump from being a schmuck in the crowd to being the one whose face they go to for reaction or, reaching the pinnacle of Gervaisdom-- being granted a line, you’ve got to hump the leg of the Second Assistant Director or 2nd AD.  Said tweaker reminds you several times to by all means leave the leg of the first AD alone.  All you’ll get for pestering him is a kick in the balls and maybe even thrown off the set.

Once you get inside the building the perky casting professional tells you this is where many famous Hollywood actors got their start. Brad Pitt for example, and that becoming a Hollywood background artist is a great career move.  Every ass sitting in every chair listening to her is a hundred percent convinced that they are going to be the standout, the Brad Pitt rather than the Elmo Stevenson.  Ever hear of Elmo Stevenson?  Exactly.  Elmo, rather than dating what’s her name from Friends, having 12 houses and all the eccentricities he can hold in his gullet, went on to become a photo assistant at Walgreens who in his spare time has his own production company.  What he produces is anyone’s guess but the image of himself as a Producer is a much more pleasant thing to contemplate than the image of himself making nine dollars an hour working for a big drug store chain.  Elmo takes the extra dollar he’s making at the drug store and secretes it in a special “production fund” that only he knows about.  He may have to skim the child support or the rent to maintain it but it is his right as an artist and it is hidden in the old laser printer box on in the closet on the third shelf.  No one will ever suspect it is there however, his girlfriend may throw it out someday thinking it is only more of the worthless clutter her erstwhile lover has accumulated and he will throw a grand mal hissy fit, breaking up with her since she doesn’t understand the artist side of him.  There will have been 63 dollars in there along with a “my smileage card” from Menchies Frozen Yogurt.

                But it is not as easy as simply signing up with Central Casting, where Hollywood legends like Brad Pitt got started.  After having your picture taken, body contours measured, demographics and “type,” analyzed, you walk down three steps into the bright yet oddly particulate sunlight of the greater Burbank area and a girl with a hairdo that looks like toasted merangue on top of a coconut cookie, hands you a red flyer.  “Don’t throw this away,” she cautions. “You might want it later.”

                When you get into your car you throw it in the back seat.  You will get rid of it the next time you clean the shit out.  They want, what? Eighty dollars a month to book you a job?  What’s the big deal?  Extras Management indeed!  The perky casting professional just told you how it works.  A television show like “Desperate Housewives,” says they need 20 upscale ladies in a courtroom, you call in tell them, “I’ll do it,” and go to work.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.  Right?

                Wrong.  Because in “this economy,” you know the one that’s making you miserable at this very second, 300 people a week show up at Central Casting to register as “background artists.”  In keeping with local ethos, they have elected to take this opportunity—and it is an opportunity and not a misfortune that they lost their job as mortgage broker, electrician, realtor, drywall hanger, exterminator, roofer, salesperson, museum curator, high school teacher, telemarketer, dockworker, interior designer, upholsterer, gardener, au pair, plumber, guitar player, opera singer, barnacle scraper, air traffic controller or taxi driver, it is the one chance they have to do the thing they’ve always wanted!  To Act.

                Every week there are thousands of people trying to get through on ten Central Casting lines and nail down twenty jobs for most of which they are too young, too old, too fat, too brown-haired, too ethnic, not ethnic enough, too unattractive, too blond, too tanned, not tanned enough, too dorky and or pimpled or simply not what they are thinking of.  After a few weeks of calling Central Casting without a prayer of getting through, which kicks you in the head but good when your cellphone bill with the additional minutes charges running hundreds of dollars, you go into your car, rifle through the McDonald’s bags, store receipts, Starbucks cups, jackets, dog hair and overdue library books to find the fucking red flyer that the merangue headed woman stuck in your hand outside Central Casting. 

Then you sign up with Extras Management, conveniently located just across the street from Central Casting.  They can get through to Central Casting on the phone and will notify you when they’ve assigned you a job.

                They don’t offer you jobs, they assign them to you.  You get text messages the night before telling you to be in Culver City at 5 am, makeup and camera ready.  Generally, they want two or three “wardrobe options,” meaning that if you are cast as rich lady, you must own 3 outfits making you look like one.  In an Alanis Morrisetty way, this is ironic.  If you had the dough to buy those kinds of clothes you probably wouldn’t be working as a “background artist” in the first place.  Often when you call into the information line, the pre-recorded message telling you where to show up warns you that if you do not bring wardrobe alternatives, you will be turned away thereby forfeiting 64 dollars less taxes, time and a half for overtime should you be so lucky and after 12 hours double time.  Also, even if you’re as dumb and a box of rocks, by this point you have done the math in your head.  At the rate of pay you’re getting, if Extras Management gets you 4 calls a month, one and about 15% of another of your paychecks goes to them.

                I got into background artisting in a roundabout way.  There I was one night, just me and Craigslist, looking for a job.  I made a big mistake about twenty five years ago and left Los Angeles, my native land, in search of a better life owing to the fact that I’d come to hate it.  In the mid-eighties it seemed like I spent my entire life late for something, sitting in a traffic jam.  Sometimes I think about my stomach now and attribute the fact that I can barely eat before nine in the evening, ¾ of a klonipin and half a bottle of wine—currently weaning self off the former, wish me luck—to aging and a decreased ability to handle stress pursuant to that process.  But that’s not it.  I remember feeling this way at twenty-six, stuck on the Ventura Freeway about a mile and a half short of the Ventura/405 interchange my stomach producing enough hydrochloric acid to burn through Superman’s cape, fretting about being late for work at the Griffith Observatory planetarium one more time and how there was going to be big trouble.  I pictured throngs streaming in, seats full, ushers freaking, a plucky one like I used to be deciding to take a hit for the team, stepping up into the console and doing the show himself.  Hell, he’d seen it enough times; didn’t look so hard to him.

                “Well, I had to Doctor Krupp!  Catherine wasn’t here.”

                “And a fine job you did, young man.  Catherine’s fired now.  We’re going to have you instead.”

                Although he never did get the job.  There was something wrong with that guy.  Everyone knew it.  Never trust somebody who talks about himself in the third person, that’s my advice.  “Sam does this; and Sam thinks that” when he’s Sam?  Watch the fuck out.  At best you’ve got bipolar at worst a budding schizophrenic with a grudge.

                Where was I?  The point is, it got to the point way back then that I couldn’t handle the LA thing, whatever it was, anymore.  I wanted a normal life.  Granted, I didn’t know what a “normal” life was but I figured it had something to do with shows like Leave it to Beaver.  Normal people grew up in towns with names like Springfield and Beecher’s Corners.  Not vast expanses of asphalt and cement that go on forever and realizations like the one where you’ve lived in an area your entire life and someone wants you to come to a part of it an hour’s drive away, like Downey, and you have no idea where the fuck it is!  Okay, okay, maybe you’ve heard it mentioned in a television ad for a car dealership but no one you know has ever been there and you have no idea even what direction it’s in.  How can the town you grew up in continue to be so unwieldy and confusing?  Shouldn’t you have it wired by now?  Shouldn’t Goober Pyle be hanging out at the filling station and Kitten from Father Knows Best cinching her belt tighter because dammit, is it my imagination or what…?  Kitten is getting FAT.

                So you leave Los Angeles never realizing the depth to which it has gotten into your blood and become part of you.  The chaos, confusion, absence of individual depth and character.  The asphalt, cement, smog, Santa Ana winds, Mexicans in “shorts” on Van Nuys Boulevard, the steamy stink of oil and moisture creeping through the myriad cracks sprung off the capillaries of the San Andreas fault, spidering under sidewalks and mini-malls and the cigar smoking greaser standing in the doorway of the liquor store where you bought candy as a kid, the store that even though the sign in the front five foot high and ten feet long says, “liquor store,” you are told by your parents is called a “candy store.”  You leave all that.

                And it is like leaving a crowded movie theater on a Saturday afternoon, the cheapo double feature matinee.  When you come back you have lost your seat.  Someone else with their own popcorn and Junior Mints has taken it.  Moving back to LA was a lot like never having been here at all.

                So  there’s me in LA looking for a job on Craigslist.  Problem is, I don’t have many qualifications.  My old job being a mom and wife had a built in redundancy that I never considered properly.  And yeah, yeah.  Being a mom never ends emotionally, but the jobbing part, where they need you to drive them to the mall and take them to the dentist, that has an expiration date.  So often, does marriage.

                “Extras needed for Feature Film,” the add said.   Call bla bla bla, blab la bla, bla, bla, bla.  So I call Bla bla and the really harried girl sounding so Hollywood busy I wanted to buy her an all expense paid vacation to anywhere says, “can you come in Tuesday at 1:30?” Sure.  I’m not doing anything else.  I know extras don’t make much but it’s got to be better than what I’m making sitting on my ass watching my bank account shrivel.

                The building’s non-descript, brown-colored multi-storied Hollywood and Vine-ish.  Door’s locked so you have to be buzzed in and whatever this place is called it’s not listed next to the numbered buttons.  After pressing a bunch of them I’m buzzed into and elevatored up to a dingy green fluroscently lit hallway with three or four others hanging outside a locked door.  I smile at a couple; they don’t smile back.  This is Hollywood.  Everybody wants to be a star, nobody is, and the mindset is like too many dogs waiting on one chicken bone.  Nobody wants to be caught short or distracted when it is finally thrown.  Everybody standing there but me has got folders, notebooks, papers, resumes detailing years of this same shit punctuated by an occasional success or two.  A young girl in black, preternaturally skinny and white, gave food up a couple of years ago, apparently.  There’s the standard issue gay guy standing apart and texting his friends.  He is trained, BA in Theatre Arts and brilliant; somebody’s going to notice one day soon; his friends know but these wankers in the hallway have no idea.  The 45 year old a long while past her sell by date, hard mileage, trailer park coffieur, rolls her eyes.  Yea, I agree.  Why do we have to stand in this fucking hallway?  It’s past time and did we put enough money in the parking meters?  Do I even have any more quarters?

                Finally a guy with Mr. Potatohead gray hair—you know, like it’s stuck to his head with a peg-- ushers us into a room with couches and a TV.  A girl on the periphery behind a counter performs officious paper moving and phone thingies.  She is heavily made up, trendily dressed in something that will look ridiculous in two years but looks cool now.  As hard as I can think right now I can’t remember what it was.  I’ve been around awhile and my relationship with “cool” is virtually non-existent.

 The trailer parky girl gets called first, but after about five minutes storms out looking hurt, rejected and pissed off.   My turn.  I don’t want to go.  What if they do that to me?

                “I feel so awful.  It’s not easy doing my job sometimes.”  Teresa has her own office, is 60 but looks 45 thanks to “work done,” and weight control.  She’s dressed to the nines in a short skirt and very high heels.  Without them, she’s about 4’11”.  With them she’s 5’4.  “But her head shots are twenty years old!  Carmen’s got to have recent head shots.  We have to know what people look like now!”  Carmen is the boss of the place.  Teresa gives me a Imdb credit sheet detailing all the productions she’s cast to prove she’s not a phoney.

                “Yeah.”  I nod, knowingly.  Poor pathetic trailer park girl probably thinks her looks haven’t changed in 20 years.  Body dysmorphia, or whatever it’s called when you don’t know what you actually look like.   WTF?!  I have some of it now.  I look pretty good for 54 but I’m still 54 and surprised daily by mirrors and photographs reflecting that astounding fact.

                I should have smelled a rat right there, but the problem with rats is you only smell them when you want to.  The walls can be covered with the bastards but if their presence doesn’t suit your agenda you tell yourself it’s normal for walls to undulate.

                “Can you read for me?” Teresa holds a page, same one I was given in the waiting area.  I went over it once and didn’t fret much.  Most of the people there looked like they couldn’t read a cereal box and it’s only a few lines of dialogue.  But I thought this was for an extra job?  Why do I have to read?  Could it be because I’m special and that my specialness, the kind I’ve always know I have but has yet to be recognized to this very day, could it be that this Teresa 4’11” finally sees it?  Is a career in acting what my life’s been leading up to?  Is this why I’ve come back to LA after all these years?  Perhaps I’ll out Nancy, Nancy, my bitch ex-friend actress who’s been jealous of my looks since high school!  I’ll show her.  I’ll show them all.

                “I’ll tell you, Catherine.  We’ve got a lot of parts for people in your demographic,” meaning graying to middle age but still fucking hot, I’m thinking.  Of course they do.  There are millions of young whippersnappers out there.  There is only one me.  “But Carmen needs headshots.  Do you have recent headshots?”

                Nope.  Why would I?  All I did was answer an ad on Craigslist.

                “You can go wherever you want to, obviously.  But I’d recommend this guy.  He did mine.”  She shows me her headshots, slides a business card across the desk; and hers are nice.  I’ll give them that.  Unlike real life her face in the photos is lineless, smooth, blemish free yet capturing just  enough Hispanic perkiness that it positively shines through.  “Most people will charge you four or five hundred dollars; this guy’s under two.” Casually stated, shoulders shrugged, neither here nor there to me.  It’s up to you.

                Two hundred dollars?  Shit, hell.  I’ve got it, but… Gads.  Just the price of getting jobs I guess.  But if they’ve got work for me like they say they do it’ll pay for the photos  fast enough.  Why would this nice girl mislead me?

                I call the next morning.  When the photographer answers the phone he doesn’t identify himself as such, but sounds the way I do when I think it might be a creditor, wary and ready to proffer an excuse.  But he perks up fast when he hears what I’m after and I get an appointment the next day. 

There’s another guy from Teresa 411 and Carmen’s extra shop waiting when I arrive and a big fat girl, the kind of fat you wonder how her heart can pump any blood anywhere at all sitting behind that desk.  She sucks at a half gallon sized Big Gulp through a straw.  “He’ll be with you in just a minute.  He’s just finishing up his last client.”

                Hollywood Photographs is a shotgun shack of a mini-mall space with the enormous woman handling receptionist and photo editing duties, getting images taken in the back downloaded in the front where they’re photoshopped to the customer’s liking and burned onto a CD.  Then you pay cash and get out. When I got home all the files were too big to access on either my PC or my laptop but after six or seven phone calls I got them to edit a couple so I could actually use them.

                There’s also a big screen TV up front, which the receptionist watches, casually looking up intermittently from her click click move mouse around photo editing duties.  It is court TV show called “We the People” with Gloria Alred.  A mouthy stripper defends her position from a podium.  I don’t know what it is but from the way she’s acting she’s pretty sure she’s in the right.

                Robert’s kind of a schlumpy, stooped over guy with a pot belly, and he dwells in the back of the building.  It is all painted black where he is and stuffed full of the requisite lighting, reflectors and other photographer stuff.  He takes a lot of digital pictures and seems to know one end of the camera from the other.  Inevitably, some of the pictures turn out pretty well and after the receptionist edits out a few lines, wrinkles and dark spots, I choose a couple that they agree are the best.  They do this every day and I figure they’ve got an eye.  I’m really stoked at this point.  Robert and the receptionist seem nice enough, good flow of customers in and out yet the session was not rushed.  I’m thrilled with photographic evidence that I am still a looker.  Hell, a lot of these don’t look all that different from my high school yearbook photos!  I am so pleased I write a testimonial for their Internet site, gladly.  What a great experience.  And not only is he giving me the best price in town, he genuinely cares what I think. 

When I get back to the reception area he announces to everybody that he’s going to throw in something for free.  Something you won’t get anywhere else in town.  His famous ten minute talk about how to make it in Hollywood.  Have I come to the right place, or what?

                All the stuff he tells us is photographically oriented.  Send lots of postcards to casting directors, hand postcards out at sets, go to a website called “Actors Access,” which requires you to upload a headshot but never gets you any jobs.  Well, one.  I did get one job off Actors Access playing a lesbian grunge biker chick in a music video for a pot smoking Swedish rock band, but that’s another story.  All the while he’s talking, he and the receptionist continually glance over at the big screened TV set yammering on in the corner.  The mouthy stripper is still defending her position.

                “You think she’s a real person?” says Schlumpy Robert.  “She’s not a real person.  She’s background just like you are.  Gets ten, fifteen minutes of screen time.  “Seriously.  She looks like a stripper, right?  She’s not.  She’s just like you.”

                Well, she’s not exactly like me.  She’s way younger and angrier.   Plus, she’s on TV and I’m not.  “I did her head shots.  She’s got a hell of a career going now.”

                The next day when I take my headshots back to Teresa and Carmen casting, Teresa praises them and says I need to get twenty-five eight by tens so that they can submit me for lots of work.  Gladly.  My career in Hollywood is good to go.  I’ll make the one-seventy five I just dropped at Hollywood Photographs back in no time.  Everybody’s going to want me.  There is one project she’s got specifically for me in mind and then of course there’s “We The People.”  You only get fifty bucks for that but it’s plenty of screen time—every actors’ wet dream. 

                I got to CostCo and get twenty-five head shot prints made the next day.  It costs me about forty bucks.

                Then I start poking around.  Any time someone tells you they’re going to make you money, only you’re the only one who’s put any money out, it’s not likely to turn out well.  Some lessons you have over and over again but when your ego gets into it you turn stupid.  I had once forked out 100 bucks to a bona fide literary agent who, she assured me, could find a publishing house for my novel and though she didn’t charge reading fees, she needed money for “office” supplies.  I was later contacted by the FBI.  Seems that bona fide literary agent had a lot of people buying her office supplies.

At this point I’d shelled out 40 bucks for prints, gas money driving to Hollywood three times not to mention all the quarters you have to load into the parking meters down there, and a hundred and seventy-five dollars for headshots that I’m supposed to hand back to Teresa 411 so the shadowy “Carmen,” can find me jobs.  There are a lot of times you don’t want to find out what you know you’re going to find out, but in searching for other extra jobs on Craigslist, I’ve made a phone call and gotten Teresa 411’s harried voice all over again slotting me into the very same afternoon appointment hour.  I go through the listings several days back and the same ad is there every day with the same inflated numbers on earnings 150-250 bucks a day, and it occurs to me that everyone in Hollywood Photograph’s waiting area was from the same extras casting agency and wouldn’t that be a nice way to make dough?  A closed loop.  Advertise on Craigslist, send them down the road for headshots, receive a little fee from the photographer for referrals, and send some more down.  You, in the meantime are the one conduit supplying ‘”We The  People, starring Gloria Alred, “actors.”

 People watching at home assume the people they’re seeing on those kinds of shows are real only they’re not.  They’re aspiring actors doing what aspiring actors always do, scrounging for dimes.  You can exploit that shit until the cows come home or even drop dead of old age.  The only commodity more abundant than traffic and smog in LA is blind naivete and boneheaded optimism born of the need to shine out, if only for a second or two, from the rest of the leaden masses of humanity.   And when you get what you perceive as any kind of break, the possibility that you’re being ripped off doesn’t come into it.  Someone, thank all the gods in all the heavens in all the cosmologies of every nation, is finally noticing that you are not exactly like everybody else.  Someone, in other words, has finally gotten it right.

When I think of “We the People, with Gloria Alred,” what I think about is quarters, the ones for the parking meter I didn’t have enough of and had to keep scrounging for. 

Teresa had me put my headshot in the “We the People” manila folder on the counter and said they’d call.  I would be a defendant.

 Couple of days later I drive to Culver City.   A mass of people are standing or being moved around outside a gray building by a couple of security guards.  Most of them are dressed like the lawyers they’ve seen on TV and all of them are antsy, shifting back and forth, probably for the same reason that I will be.  There’s nowhere to park and the meters down the street all have limited time.  Parking tickets in this town are as common as smashed cigarette butts and even though people drive around with loads of them in their glove boxes, I don’t want one.  I still have a Washington state registration and plates on my car and am not in the position to cough up the hundreds of dollars it would take to switch them over to California.

I feel sorry for architecture students.  They spend thousands of dollars going to school studying the cathedral at Chartres, the Lovre, medieval basilicas and flying buttresses but in the end most of  spaces they end up designing are as non-descript as the one I’m subsequently ushered into.  High ceilinged and hollow, ringed in slap dash partitioned “offices,” cement floored, particle board walls having absorbed the smells of whatever BO and takeout food has been through over the years.  In time these spaces will become uninhabitable and someone with a little power will throw up his hands, “holy fuck!  A class act like us, we can’t stay here anymore.  It’s disgusting!”  But  “We The People” has not yet reached this point.  People mill around looking for bathrooms or a place to sneak out and have a smoke while a crabby British functionary signs people in and directs them to a waiting area with almost but not quite enough folding chairs.  Everybody eyes them like a game of musical chairs is about to start and they don’t want to get caught out. 

Once almost everyone’s settled, a plucky production assistant comes in and gives us the low down.  She wants big.  She wants emotion.  The more emotion and intensity the greater the likelihood of being chosen for screen time.  The implication is that some of us will not make it.  I can do mouthy and self-righteous pretty well so I’m not all that worried but still...  most of these people are young and look much more well versed in the product than I do.  Tattooed and hair-producted, lots of makeup and a feel for the Hollywood oeuvre I’m beginning to suspect that I lack.  I’m starting to get the feeling that everyone here actually watches television sometimes or even a lot. 

As far as “reality television” goes, I’ve never gotten into it but assumed it is what it purports to be: reality.  But that’s not what it is at all.  Reality television is just cheap programming cheap hiring actors to ad lib.  There is no written script because that would cost money, the production value is extremely low—there’s only one set on “We The People,” the support staff required is minimal and poorly paid—I’ve chatted up both an assistant director and the makeup lady and been pretty appalled particularly by what the makeup lady said.  She gets an hourly wage but has to buy her own makeup.  They give her 500 dollars.  I’m sure that’s not even close to the amount needed to cover what she uses.  Makeup is expensive.

Creatively speaking, court TV doesn’t take any imagination at all.  You just go down to a courthouse and rifle the files.  “These are real cases, and each of you will argue a side.  Make it your own.  Work it,” says the PA, full of enthusiasm, trying to transmit it to us.

Everyone’s given a set up and instructed to ad lib to their heart’s content, although she doesn’t used that word.  “Just pretend that this is you,” she says.   After watching about thirty people audition and be chosen, I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ll get picked at all.  Then I am.

They send us into individual cubicles to hash things out with assistant producer.  Me, a skinny girl, and a long haired guy with pierced nipples—I know because he tells me, sit and chat a little.   He’s none too comfortable with his part.  He’s suing me because I put a big sign up in his front yard declaring for all the neighborhood to see, that he’s a pervert.  This act of mine, my character’s, has caused him emotional distress and he is suing me to pay for his therapy bills.  I put the sign up because when he was the coach of the high school girl’s basketball team, which he no longer is, he had a party at his house for the team and gave my under-aged daughter alcohol.  I don’t know if he molested her or anyone since he was never convicted of such and the fact is he’s got a case.  There is no evidence he is a pervert, just a giver of alcohol to minors. 

The problem for actor Pierced Nipples, and I don’t blame him one bit, is that most people myself included up until now, don’t know these court TV shows are staged and that the people mouthing the script aren’t the people actually involved in the case.  So if they see him on TV playing a pervert, and as far as they’re concerned he is a pervert.  There’s something tiny at the end of the credits  that says these aren’t real people, but it’s so small and goes by so quickly nobody sees it.  From now on when people who watch this episode see this guy on the street, they’re going to think he’s a real pervert, or at the very least a high school teacher who gets his students drunk at his house.

Me, I fling myself into my role.  I’m a nurse, a single mom who works the night shift.  I’m raising this teenage girl all by myself, thank you very much, and maybe I am a little off my rocker to go to the trouble of making a six by ten foot yellow sign declaring this guy a pervert and  posting it outside his house, but dammit!  It’s hard enough being a working mom in this world without worrying whether my daughter’s basketball coach is a sexual predator.  I have had it.  Is it a rational act?  Hell no, but what do I care?  There’s not a goddamn reason in the world a 35 year old guy needs to have a bunch of teenage girls over to his house and get ‘em all boozed up if he doesn’t want to molest or seduce one of them.  I feel this character’s pain.  I go all method actor.  I become her.

And when we go before the judge on high, me at the left podium the pervert on the right, him stumbling over his words—he’s on TV after all, defending his status of non-pervert—I go after him like a pit bull protecting her puppie.  The skinny girl playing the daughter by my side tries to get a few words in edgewise but never mind her!  I’ve got this.  I’m up all night, night after night taking care of sick people in a hospital, on my feet, risking life and limb and Hepatitis C and infectious mononucleosis and God knows what horrible things because I am an angel of mercy and this sleezebag tries to seduce my daughter with booze?  Not on my watch.  Whether he deserves a sign in his front yard or not is irrelevant to everyone.

Except of course, the judge who finds in his favor and makes me, my character, pay not only his headshrinker bills but court costs. 

When we leave the set the assistant director tells us we were so good that instead of just twelve minutes—it’s an hour show so generally it’s four cases an hour—we’re getting a full twenty.  We rocked that shit.  Well, ish.  Actor Pierced Nipples doesn’t even look happy when they tell him he can take the pervert sign home as a momento.

When it’s over the skinny, no longer so plucky production assistant gives me fifty dollars cash from a satchel around her waist.  It is the first money I have made since returning to Los Angeles a month earlier.  And better luck still, when I get back to the parking meter, which I have run out to feed twice during the proceedings, it’s still got ten minutes left on it.

Seagulls Reel

Seagulls Reel

                Seagulls reel.  They rise in a quasi-flock and at the edge of the surf and size things up.  To go out, make the effort against the wind coming off the water to pick at the leavings of sea lions, pelicans and cormorants or to turn back inshore, to sandwiches, chips, pizza, McDonalds, pork rinds, Doritos, cupcakes left unattended.

                Quasi-flock: seagulls are not loyal birds.  Their social structure ranges from that of vaguely affiliated hillbillies to unconstrained mobs.  Given the right circumstances they will peck each other senseless over a crust of bread.

                Seagulls reel.  Heading inland; the wind makes it senseless to do otherwise.  Pudgy brown children roll in the surf like churros in powdered sugar.  Fathers male bond as mothers watch hawk-like although a few barely at all.  And as the bright sunshine bounces off water concealing tormented and writhing sand shifting beneath the feet of all and sundry, conditioned by inflow and outflow, by the moon, the gods and worst of all El Nino, they play. 

The lifeguard watches.  Red-slickered, hooded to the point of chicken-bandy-legged and gymtoned, waving a fire engine red lozenge while the myriads watch not knowing or caring what he’s worried about.

                “How many you pull out today?”  At Zuma Beach there are always rescues.  It is treacherous to the point sensible people won’t go there.  You want a rip-tide that pulls you to Anacapa you go to Zuma Beach.  Swim parallel to the shore as long as you want to and nothing's going to happen but you swim into another one.  From Zuma Beach you can visit the entire west coast of north America for free and without hardly trying.  It doesn't ask if you want to go.

                And jellyfish, though technically you’re not supposed to call them “fish."  They are not fish.  They are 99.999% water and the rest don’t you fucking touch me.  Zuma Beach always had, has, and always will have jellyfish.  The man-o-war kind in fractions and otherwise dead and tentacled lolling on the breakers hitching rides or whatever gelatinous does.  Nothing helps a jellyfish sting but peeing on it, which probably doesn’t help.  But it is funny.

                Seagulls reel.  Inland like a U-turn on the boulevard.  A sunburned slacker with beach-buzz eyes loses his hot dog to a clear headed smart beak, feathers and sinew heading out to sea.  It’s alright now, the buffeting no problem.  This bird has acquired the fuel to get back.

                “Five,” says the lifeguard.  “Lots of holes out there.  That’s why I love this job.  Love to go into the water.”

                Where would we be without lifeguards?

                I know a thing or two about seagulls.  It is nearly impossible to identify one kind from the other because at different developmental stages they all look the same.  A gray one can be a white one on the way to becoming white and a white can be thirty different kinds of white.  Herring gulls have a red spot on their lower beaks so their offspring can target the food pump.

Were I to wake up reincarnated a seagull, horrification would ensue: “holy shit what did I do to deserve this?”  Because for a seagull, a broken wing, leg, an illness or serious wound is a death sentence.  And the wind, the force, the engineering of a creature constantly and persistently at the mercy of such, and the undoing should anything befall it.  I cannot snatch the hot dog before the other one can.  I lack the strength to fly out to sea.  I am going away and I cannot fix this.  The others don’t notice.  They just bicker and fight over the leavings, until the leavings are you.

Seagulls reel.  And at the end of the day settle further on down the beach.  There are no people or snack foods there.  Just beak tucked into wing fluffed with white feathers and sand.  Night will fall.  For a little while breath beneath the wing is warm