the first year is the hardest part i

LA riots.  need i say more?

One thing that I heard over and over my first year in Los Angeles when things were difficult was “Don’t worry, the first year is the hardest.  The second year gets better.”  I admit that I am guilty of saying this to others in their first year.  We say this like a Junior or a Senior in college might say to an in coming freshmen.  The truth about that saying no matter how true it is (because it’s totally true) is that when you first move to LA the last thing you want to hear from someone is that this first year is going to be shit, you begin to hear it so often that you tell yourself this and it becomes your mantra.  Then before you know it that saying has become a self fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t know if there’s ever a good time to move to Los Angeles but if there is, late 2007 definitely was not it.  I would go so far as to say that the only worse times to move there would have been the 1992 riots or the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

The week we arrived the big news story was the impending writers strike.  Everyone openly said that an agreement could be reached without striking but deep down in the center of the brain which holds all our pessimism we knew that there was going to be a strike.  As we all know it couldn’t be avoided and it lasted from November 5th to February 12th, during which production shutdown on just about everything.  Add that on top of an economy which was going down like the Titanic, and there were Jaime and I walking the decks looking for jobs.

Good Luck!

Due to the strike thousands of production crew members whose productions had been shut down were suddenly out of a job, then there were thousands more extras, stand ins and background actors who were also looking for work.  Last you can add to that rapidly shrinking pool all the other already out of work actors.  Available work went from an olympic size swimming pool to one of those little inflatable ones for children, with people spilling out the edges.

Since I didn’t have the luxury of being picky I will willing to take just about anything to get a paycheck.  The only incoming cash flow we had was the balance of my two week vacation from my previous job which when it arrived would be about $1000.  There was $150 which I would be receiving thanks to the CDC who was in town and randomly selected me to fill out two questionnaires and take a physical examination. (Our time in LA was full of these little money making surprises which often managed to keep us afloat.) Then there was Jaime’s unemployment which was about $200 a week.  Aside from those we were just burning through money.

By the end of the first week of job hunting I’d turned up empty but Jaime had managed to get two interviews, both restaurants both on Melrose.  A lesson for anyone in LA seeking a waiting job is, if you apply for it and don’t have to fight off 150 or so other aspiring actors then there is something wrong with the restaurant.

One day while driving through Hollywood I passed Beso, a trendy restaurant owned  by a desperate housewife.  The previous day I’d seen a “now hiring” sign up outside the main entrance.  Now there was a line of people out the door and around the corner.  Easily 200 people strong all vying for the same 10 jobs.  This was just their first day of hiring.

In LA applying for restaurant jobs is akin to going in and auditioning for a casting cattle call.  Each restaurant is catering to a specific audience and wants their wait staff to look the part.  Just like an acting audition you’ll probably find yourself in line with dozens if not hundreds of people who look just like you.  Hipsters, models, rockers, hippies you name it, just like acting you’re going to be typecast and they will be hiring based on that role.

The first of the two restaurants Jaime had an interview with was one of those restaurant/club/bar places where they try to do a little bit of everything.  He was some kind of Eastern European dissent and though I never saw him I imagined a stocky guy with balding hair that he hid by shaving it completely.  He wore a sports coat with a brightly colored shirt unbuttoned down to his sternum, he had thick Brillo pad hair emerging from beneath that shirt and gold around his neck and on his fingers.  Jaime didn’t trust him and so this was the image I conjured of him.  Jaime’s second interview was for an upscale Cuban fusion restaurant called Xiomara run by a fiery Cuban woman named... Xiomara.  She ended up getting both jobs and chose Xiomara because she didn’t trust the other guy and because they wanted her to start that evening.

I was relaxing at home thinking the dominos were falling into place and that everything was going to be okay, when I got a cryptic text from Jaime saying “I don’t know about this.”  This was bad news because if a situation is a little bit dicy Jaime is always able find the positive within and work through it.  On the flip side if something is truly dicy  I will get texts like this one which amounted to her waving the white flag of surrender.  I began to worry that this job was not going to work out.

When she got home she explained her evening.  If you’ve ever been a waiter (I have not, though I have lived with one for seven years.) then you know that it is very unusual to start the night you are hired, it is even more unusual to start serving on your first night without any training or knowledge of the menu.  Her first table was a group of B-List actors and when one of them asked her what came with the “yucca blah, blah, blah,” she was forced to feign ignorance.  Asking for help was useless because the other employees hardly spoke any english.

I felt horrible for her being placed in such a tough situation.  What we needed most of all was money and when you need money you don’t quit jobs, but this job was going to be nothing but problems and offer little in compensation.  Jaime was scheduled for a double shift the following day and after completing the first half I picked her up and she told Xiomara that she would not be making her evening shift.  Just like that she was jobless again.

I on the other hand had an interview with H&M for a customer service position in their store opening at Hollywood and Highland.  My interview was held in the outdoor food court atop the Beverly Center which... you just have to go to the Beverly Center to understand it.  The following week I was called in for a second group interview at their LA offices on Sunset in West Hollywood, which seemed a little backwards to me.  Prior to the interview they had us sign a form stating that I would not reveal what activities actually occur within the group interviews.  Since I was already sued by a national corporation last year I will refrain from mentioning the details here.  I will say that it involves group oriented activities too childish and complicated to explain.  If you find that you’re really that interested to know what H&M feels that you need to be able to do in order to sell cheap clothes for  minimum wage, then you can buy me a beer and I’ll tell you.

I left the interview without ever hearing from them again which I really wasn’t too broken up over.  I wanted a job but after that interview I could feel that I really, really didn’t want that job.  After three weeks four interviews and one job later, we were both still jobless and getting more desperate.

I gave up a difficult but well paying job in Seattle when we moved.  A job which is nearly always in demand.  A job I easily could have transferred to Los Angeles.  Instead I thought I would start over at something new, I was just hoping that I hadn’t shot myself in the foot.

To be continued....