everyone wants to know

this was how i got to work in los angeles

Everyone wants to know, they ask with such incredulity that I might have just told them that I ride a dinosaur to work.  “Why would you move from California to Seattle?”  There are so many answers that I choose one.  “We’re from Seattle.”  This only confuses them further because then they want to know, “You mean you lived in Seattle before, then you moved to California, then decided to move back here?”  I get what they’re saying, to them it just doesn’t make sense that having lived in Seattle, then California that I would choose to move back.

Sometimes I take it a step further.  “We lived in Los Angeles.”  I will say, and those who have spent a significant amount of time there understand everyone else does not.  At this point I usually stop because they will either be people who don’t understand why anyone would leave Los Angeles or can’t understand and nothing that I can say will change their mind.

It’s been six months since the move and every time I show my ID’s or change an address we have to answer this question.  Every time I answer it I mentally list all the reasons why we left.

Reasons for leaving;

-traffic

-self centered people

-distance from home

-career changes

-constant sunny weather

-smog

-loneliness

-expensive... everything

I am surprised that by the time I get to this part of the list I stop thinking about all the things that drove me crazy and start thinking about all the things I loved and miss.  I begin to get confused, why did I leave Los Angeles?

I’ve mentioned in the blog before how when we were in LA I longed for Seattle and took joy in the things that connected me to this wonderful city.  My Seattle Mariners license plate was a badge of honor that I displayed with pride.  I simply wanted to be reminded of the city I left at twenty four, for the lonely, smoggy, self-centered urban war zone of Los Angeles.

Now in Seattle I take an equal amount of pride in my California license plate, my Intelligentsia coffee mug embossed with the bear flag, and I watch television shows and listen to music that remind me of the places I spent my mid twenties.

Am I destined to long to be living somewhere other than where I currently am?  Or can I not as the Ram Dass professes Be Here Now?  I remember back to May of 2010, Jaime and I were finally going on our honeymoon to Maui.  Because airline tickets were cheaper from Seattle to Maui than from LA, we decided to drive home and spend an extra week then fly to Maui from there.

In all our previous trips out of LA, just before we left I began to identify on a communal level with everything around me.  As much as I tried to reject the city I had slipped right into her consciousness without realizing it.  To my utter disbelief I began to miss the city.  When we would return I was stunned to find that I felt like I had returned home.  It wasn’t my real home, but I began to feel more comfortable in Los Angeles than Seattle.

In departing for our honeymoon I didn’t feel any of that, I wanted to get out of LA county as fast as possible, leave nothing but a trail of dust settling behind me.  In Maui, like so many before me, I didn’t want to leave.  Yes I wanted to stay there because it was such a freeing place with immeasurable beauty and life, but also because I knew that once we left that island we would have to return to LA.  Over and over I imagined leaving everything we owned there and never going back, making a new life anywhere else.

On our return trip home our car got stuck in a freak snow storm and we spent the night in a hotel at Mt. Shasta City.  I had been planning on driving straight through but this snowstorm halted all that, in the hotel room I felt relieved to not have to return to LA for one more night.  I no longer felt like I belonged there, it wasn’t welcoming.  I hated my job, Jaime hated her job, our best friends had moved to Brooklyn while we were away and our other friends would be leaving in the next year as well.  Things felt empty.

Not long after we returned I concluded that I was ready to leave Los Angeles.  I didn’t need to pack up immediately (our lease wasn’t up until November).  In my heart I knew that when Jaime finally came to me and suggested that we should move home, I would not disagree.  I didn’t have to wait long, by June Jaime was no longer interested in becoming a Hollywood actor and in August we began talking about moving.  By the end of August we had a location and date; Seattle, October 31st.

I suppose I don’t really have an answer for those who ask why I would leave LA.  I could tell them that it’s not really the paradise that it seems so many imagine.  I could tell them the horror stories about what it is like to fall on hard times in a foreign place where the city is virtually made up of only rich or poor.

On the other hand it has many redeeming qualities.  Six months later I miss the consistent warm weather, the beautiful Summer evenings, walking with Jaime and our dog Olive in Griffith park, I miss Los Feliz and Silverlake, I miss the feeling of being in the middle of all the hustle of Hollywood, I miss all the little surprises that a city like LA has waiting around every corner.  

What it really comes down to however is the fact that I don’t believe that you should live in a city when you don’t want to be there.  We are free creatures who have the choice to live and be wherever we want, there may be factors that draw you to specific places but the choice is still yours.  I remind myself constantly that what is possessing me is not genuine love for LA but rather a nostalgic memory of the best times I had there and the feeling of being somewhere other than where I am.  I believe I will return many times in my life and I will be able to visit all the places I love and I won’t be hampered by the reality of living there.  In the end I would rather be miserable in Seattle than miserable in Los Angeles.

the first year is the hardest part ii

this is a thanksgiving dinner for two

            Often I would meet people in LA who seemed to be making their dreams happen,  be it acting, directing, writing or working in some capacity for a production company.  I would stare at them like they were a mechanic working on a car engine or a complex math problem, something I wanted desperately to understand but could not begin to wrap my mind around.  I was curious to know just how they seemed to be making this happen, nine times out of ten what I would find out is that they were one of three kinds of people.  A.  There was family money which was paying for their living expenses leaving them with wide open days to audition.  B. They had a relative involved in the business who was advancing their career regardless of their talent.  C. While appearing to do well for themselves they were actually quietly drowning in debt which will eventually swallow them up.  That one out of ten is a real rarity, yet this is the type of person whose story the media glorifies over and over.  Everyone else that isn’t one of those ten is just hustling, trying to make it.

The week before Thanksgiving Jaime applied to a stylish new restaurant in the heart of Hollywood, called Citizen Smith.  This was one of those restaurants where it was you along with 1000 other actors/writers/directors hopefully applying for 5-10 jobs.  It seemed like a long shot but when the interview went well things were looking promising.  The initial interview was designed to weed out the completely incompetent, so Jaime was called back for a second interview.

The writers strike was still going strong, we had to dodge protests to get to the restaurant.  Despite this Hollywood shutdown Jaime and I traveled deep into the Valley to an agency which claimed to help actors get agents.  This is basically like going to someone who promises to find you a temp agency, not a job, your paying them to talk to agents who may or may not be interested in you.  Best case scenario is that you sign with a talent agent who then still will need to find you an audition.  At the interview which lasted two hours they told Jaime something we would hear a lot over the next year and a half.  “Your great!  But with the writers strike there’s just no work.”  Even reality shows employ writers and so many of them had stopped production as well.

Trying to find a balance between accessing auditions, getting jobs and having actual consistent work which pays you enough to cover your bills is the biggest hurdle to overcome by far, harder than any audition you will go on.  Most former actors I met left acting exactly for that reason, they were busily working to find that balance when they landed a good day job and never went back.  You’ll eventually learn what your truly passionate about (even if it takes you 15 years) you’ll either stay passionate about acting or find something else you enjoy doing just as much.  There’s no shame in that it’s just the reality of the business, many great actors have found jobs they were much happier at.

Jaime wasn’t anywhere near that point, she was still full of hope and willing to make huge sacrifices to make her dream happen.  During her “call back” interview with Citizen Smith Jaime really hit it off with the manager and his suggestion to her was to come back that night and have dinner, get a feel for the restaurant.  Citizen Smith is a swanky place and there is nothing cheap about it, but in the hopes of getting Jaime this job we sucked it up opened our wallets and went in for a few drinks and appetizers. 

Like most of the trendy Hollywood clubs and restaurants, Citizen Smith looked like nothing from the outside but on the inside it was a sight to behold.  The design could best be described as the offspring of an Andy Warhol painting and a TexMex family restaurant.  If there was ever a place that screamed out “HOLLYWOOD” this was it.  The seat cushions were cow hide and the tables looked like (and for all I know were,” enormous slabs of sliced Redwood trees.

It was early about 6:30 and Hollywood doesn’t come to life until 9:00 or 10:00 so the place was mostly empty.  At the bar we ordered two $15 drinks a $20 Macaroni and Cheese and something else which I found so memorable that I cannot remember it now.  We watched Easy Rider on the t.v. and when are bill came the total was $60, which for two kids with no income was pretty steep.  We never met with the manager and I just hoped that somehow he would know that we’d been there.

On our way back to our car we saw the most adorable black and white cat sitting lonely in an empty parking lot.  It was the spitting image of our cat at home only about fifteen pounds lighter.  He sat looking mournfully as if asking me to come and take him home.  We watched each other for a long moment and I crouched low and slowly moved to pick him up.  I’m sure he was covered in flees and his intestines were full of worms but I just had to see how close he would let me get to him.  I was right on top of him when he darted away and under a car on the opposite side of the street.

The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, our first away from friends and family.  Often the week before a big holiday you would run into someone you knew and start talking.  The subject of Thanksgiving would be brought up and they would mention some orphan dinner that was taking place at a friends place or a friend of a friends place.  You would either show up with a dish or you find an excuse to decline.

Since the only two people we knew were going to be out of town we held our own Thanksgiving dinner in our apartment.  We got dressed up and spent the day watching t.v. and snacking as if company was going to arrive any minute.  For dinner we made enough food to feed eight people and then preceded to make ourselves sick trying to eat it all.  It was lonely knowing that 1,100 miles away our families were laughing, catching up, and getting full together without us.  On the other hand doing this all by ourselves made me feel more like an adult then I’d ever felt before.

The following week Jaime waited patiently to hear from Citizen Smith, after two days she gave them a call, only to be told that they were going to need another week to decide.  This was their way of saying “sorry we didn’t hire you.”

It was upsetting for her not to get the job but infuriating that we went down there and dropped $60 on mediocre drinks and appetizers with money we really didn’t have.

By the end of the week I got a call from Borders bookstore to schedule an interview.  I had applied for it two weeks previous and had forgotten all about it.  I would be going in Monday for an interview at their Century City store.  

To be continued...

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....

new city

self explanatory

       Having never moved to a new city before I wasn’t exactly prepared for this moment, the moment that occurs right after you’ve unpacked all your boxes and put things in their proper place.  The moment after your new home begins to feel like your only home.  The moment that you realize you have nothing left to do but to introduce yourself to this new city.  

There is a picture that sums up how I best remember those first days in our new home, I was on the phone with my mom telling her about our new apartment and walking from room to room taking detailed pictures like I was a crime scene photographer.  While taking a picture of the living room I caught Jaime asleep on the couch a blanket covering her.  The reason I remember this image most from those days was because that was exactly how I felt, tired and overwhelmed.  We hardly knew Los Angeles and on more than a few occasions I would lay down and drift off to sleep and dream of being somewhere more recognizable and comfortable.  When you don’t know what your next move is sleeping is as good a way as any to put off making it.

We were officially settled in by Friday the week we arrived and though we would soon be burning through what little money we had we decided to give ourselves the weekend to just relax without looking for jobs.  This gave us time to try and get ourselves acquainted with the city, learn the layout a bit.  If you’ve been to LA then you know that knowing the layout of the city is practically impossible as it essentially is one massive urban sprawl.  Not like New York with tall skye scrapers and twelve story apartment buildings contained in a small space or like Seattle where there are simple land marks to help orient yourself.

As our luck would have it the only two people we knew in the city were out of town the week we arrived, coincidentally in the Northwest.  It was up to us to get our bearings on our own.  We started small, with a trip to the Gelson’s kitty corner from our building.  At first we were excited to live so close to a grocery store but once we went inside we realized that we were living next to a grocery store priced like it was inside of an airport.  People often would ask us, what is Gelson’s like, and I would say “well it’s like any other grocery store accept add $2 to everything, so the celebrities can shop there.”

Our next big adventure out was to a Hollywood Bed Bath and Beyond and though it was less than two miles away we had to google map it and spent fifteen minutes looking for it.  By the time we got there I felt like an Alzheimer’s patient who didn’t really know where they were, how they got there or how to get home.  In fact we were so close to our apartment we could almost see it from the store.  By the time we arrived home there was a surprise, our first piece of mail.  It was a note from my mom noting that she was sending us our first piece of mail.

Aside from the grocery store we also lived across the street from what is called “Franklin Village” which is home to a series of restaurants, a very expensive cafe, a pet store, clothing store, used bookstore, wine store, a video Hut (more on that later) and finally the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.  That first month we spent nearly every night there, the shows were cheap (about $5 a person) and there was guaranteed to be someone that we admired performing that evening.  It was like our chance for a cheap night on the town, we would even get a little dressed up to go stand outside the theater to get our hands stamped and watch an hour to two hours of raunchy comedy.  We didn’t miss one show in particular which was performed every Wednesday evening, until one night when the girl in the box office recognized us.  This may not seem like a big deal however there was another guy who saw every show the theater performed, we’re talking 3-4 different shows a night 7 nights a week, you could not walk by that place without seeing him first in line for the next show.  Clearly this guy had no life and when the box office girl recognized us I had this vision of becoming best friends with that guy waiting in line with him before every show and as we walked outside past that guy he stopped us.

“Hey do I know you?” He asked Jaime.  “Are you on a TV show?”

This wasn’t unreasonable to ask because as I was well becoming aware, if you think someone is famous they probably are.  In this case however he was wrong he recognized us not because we were famous but because we’d been going to the same shows for the last fucking week.  That was the moment that made me realize that perhaps we needed to diversify our entertainment options.

This is when we discovered Video Hut.  If you haven’t been to one they’re mostly extinct now but imagine your local video store before Blockbuster and Hollywood video took over the brick and mortar video rental business.  Small spaces with small selections and movies released two years ago that were still on the “just in” shelf with sun faded covers.  You had to love it’s old world charm but the thing you really had to love is that they would rent out movies the week before they were released.  In order to keep ourselves from becoming that creepy fanatic waiting in line we supplemented our theater going with “officially”  unreleased movies from video hut.

Our first Sunday we spent the morning by venturing all the way out to IKEA in Burbank, a city which I had heard of many times but didn’t know what exactly could be found there.  As it turns out... nothing.  After we returned home we sat around trying to think of something not too far away or expensive that we could do.  Somehow we decided on driving over to the Kodak theater at the heart of Hollywood.  This was the only time in three years we ever spent time there just to visit.  The reason being that you only need to go once to realize that that place is a total nightmare.  A couple of boring landmarks, stores you could literally shop at in any mall in America, a bunch of assholes dressed up like super heros, shops full of stripper clothes, and a million disappointed tourists.  They came here expecting exciting photo opportunities but instead found something far more depressing.  A street of broken dreams.

Back at home we silently acknowledged to one another that we would not be returning there anytime soon.  In a few hours our grace period would be over, we would no longer be allowed to nap on the couch in the middle of the day without feeling guilty.  We could no longer ignore the balance of our shrinking checking account and live a carefree lifestyle.  We had to get jobs and become productive members of society.  I wasn’t stupid, I didn’t think that would come easy. 

It didn’t.

you’re never lonely when brad pitt’s around.

this is comforting 

When you live in Los Angeles if you see someone that you think might be famous they probably are.  It took me about two and a half years for me to get used to that.  When you live in Seattle if you think you see someone famous, they’re not, unless that person is a TV news anchor.  It has been an adjustment period to suddenly find yourself in the middle of a room full of strangers with whom you have no connection.

Every time I would meet someone who was visiting Los Angeles they would lean in to me and say some along the lines of “I’ve been here for 5 days and I still haven’t seen any celebrities yet.”  They would stagger up and down the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard hoping to catch a glimpse of Matt Damon standing right next to his star, they would hang out near the entrance to the Chateau Marmot or the lobby of Capital Records or front gates of Paramount studios without spotting even a single celebrity not even Andy Dick.  The trick if you really want to see a celebrity in Los Angeles is to think mundane.  In three years I never saw a celebrity in an obvious place, they all caught me by surprise because of how normal the situations were.  Lawrence Fishburne standing next to me a the used bookstore, John Hamm driving his car past my street corner, Patton Oswald pushing a stroller on my sidewalk, Judd Apatow asking me for assistance at Borders Bookstore.

The minute you stop thinking about them they magically appear.  My wife and I once saw Lindsey Lohan at a Gelson’s grocery store across the street from our apartment, Michael Cera while we were walking home from Albertsons, one of the hobbits at that same Albertsons.  None of these were star studded events, never did I imagine that while I was looking for Orange Juice Buster from Arrested Development also be looking for Orange Juice as well or even that I would walk in front of Harrison Ford in his car at a stop sign.  It’s not just knowing that anytime you go anywhere in Los Angeles you could cross paths with someone famous, they also had this effect on me where once I found myself in their presence I started to feel truly alive.  I’m not sure if I can completely explain their powers but I could feel the blood flowing through my veins.

Of all my celebrity sightings the one which seemed most surreal was the time my wife and I saw Brad Pitt at a well known restaurant in West Hollywood.  The best way to describe this place was well... it’s on Santa Monica boulevard in West Hollywood, the ambiance is dark, the chair cushions and couches were the color of dried blood and I’m sure this floor had seen the vomit of more than a hand full of OD(ing) rockstars.  It was a Thursday evening and we were with our softball team, it was the last game of the season and we were celebrating our second glorious win.  The restaurant had a private room just off from the entrance where we all gathered in our sweaty dirt covered shorts and softball shirts.  I’d fallen into third base and had a terrific raspberry on my left arm.  We were enjoying some drinks that cost enough to feed an entire village in Ethiopia when a small entourage of people walked in and then shuffled into our room, they stood around for about a minute before Jaime looked up and without taking a breath blurted out “Oh shit! It’s Brad Pitt.”  It was loud enough he definitely heard us and a moment later he and his entourage shuffled back out of our room and into a secluded booth at the far end of the restaurant.

What?  Maybe you were expecting that he sat down with our team and bought us all a round of beers to congratulate us on our victory.  He slapped me playfully on the back laughing hysterically at my jokes and made a toast every time a new round was brought out.  No.  “Oh shit!  It’s Brad Pitt.”  That’s it and he was gone but I felt like Jesus was nearby.  I was now in a kind of  celebrity sphere where I was protected and nothing bad could happen.  Even though I knew non of that was true.

I’m embarrassed to admit this because I’m no celebrity whore.  I never went looking for them, in fact most the time Jaime would notice them first or would have to point them out to me.  “That was Emma Roberts” she would whisper to me as we passed by Little Dom’s (which by the way if you are looking for your Los Angeles celebrity sighting, Little Dom’s Italian restaurant on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz always has a celebrity sitting outside.)  But there is something, a feeling that I can’t fully explain or completely identify that when in the presence of a celebrity of any kind I suddenly felt less lonely more like I was in the presence of a family member or an old friend.  Had Sarah Palin walked into my favorite restaurant and taken a table next to me all the supreme hatred I have for that woman would have melted away like an ice sculpture and left me only with a feeling of familiar comfort.  Once she was safely away from our vicinity I would carry on loathing her pathetic celebrity.

Now that I am back in Seattle there is a noticeable element of surprise missing in my life.  I stroll up and down the aisles of Trader Joe’s, wander out to the street to retrieve my mail or sit at a table in a restaurant with my wife and I can look at all the faces around me and no one is familiar in a famous celebrity way no one will enter the frame of my personal movie and place the bubble around me.  For now I will simply have to find the company of compete strangers satisfying and surprising enough to keep making me feel alive.

1,100 miles

last signs of beauty until you drive out of LA

It’s 1,100 miles from Seattle to Los Angeles and the directions are fairly simple.

-Get on 1-5 drive south for 1,100 miles

-Take Los Feliz blvd exit.

These deceptively simply directions can make the trip look shorter than feel longer.

The day after we returned from Los Angeles with a new lease I celebrated my 24th birthday.  Looking back on it now I can’t believe that my parents didn’t try to stop us from going.  At the time 24 seemed incredibly old I thought that having lived on my own for the last three years that I was prepared to live 1,100 miles from all my family and take on any of the challenges life could throw at me.  The 27 year old me could tell some stories that would scare the shit out of me.

The count down was on, we had one month to get our affairs in order before we left Washington what we thought was for good. I began taking boxes home from work and we started packing up our life which was akin to weeding a garden which had been growing untamed for three years.  Those weeds had grown deep roots and we had had to dig deep to get them up, then instead of throwing those weeds in the compost we packed them up into boxes.  A lot of boxes.

I have a problem with keeping things, I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder but I’m definitely one step below, I keep meaningful receipts, tickets to old baseball games and theater performances, bags from items I have bought as well as their tags.  Theses things all got packed up into boxes along with two full sets of silverware, three electric shavers, five boxes labeled keepsakes, and two boxes of unbuilt IKEA furniture.  When all was said and done we packed a 17 foot U-Haul to the brim and still managed to fill our car.  We even had a garage sale and were still over flowing with stuff.

Days away from our moving date and we were mostly packed.  Halloween was on Monday (our moving day) the Saturday before was my older brothers wedding.  It was enjoyable and afforded us the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to family before we were headed out.  I expected the goodbyes to feel bittersweet but they didn’t, they mostly just mad me excited for the future.  I know Jaime and I didn’t share the same feelings about this as me, I knew that as excited as she was to finally be leaving it was hard for her and I was anticipating many nights in LA where she would lay in bed with debilitating grief for her distant friends and family.

The night before we moved we slept in my parents basement on their fold out couch, a 17 foot U-Haul with a dolly hitched to the back and our car strapped in sat outside on the street containing every thing we owned.  The following morning we woke up at 5am, it was still dark outside and we forced a sedative down our cats throat.  We said goodbye to our parents and loaded up into the cab of the truck and as we started down I-5 the tears started for Jaime, big wet sad tears like little children cry when they are genuinely sad.

Then somewhere around Enchanted Village (about 15 miles down the road) our cat lost her fucking mind.  She whaled as if she was being jabbed with a hot poker and clawed at her carrier door so hard I thought she might rip her claws out.  We stopped the car to try and settle her down but she wouldn’t.  I couldn’t get her to relax or at the very least to be quiet, in turn I didn’t know what to do... we’d been away from home for 20 minutes and I already didn’t know what to do.  It hit me like an incoming tidal wave that I was jobless and homeless and all I wanted in that moment was to turn the truck around and unpack everything back into our apartment.  But somehow, don’t ask me how because I really don’t know the cat calmed down and we were able to get her into her carried, soon I calmed down too.

* * *

If you’ve made the drive from Seattle to LA there are three landscapes you experience.  The first is Washington/Oregon, full of small run down towns resting at the edge of an evergreen filled forrest, blue-green rivers slicing through them like they were cut by an unsteady knife.  The drive is easy the views are enjoyable and things seem to move by quickly, before I knew it we were stopping for lunch at a Taco Time in Eugene Oregon (those of you from Washington should note that the Taco Times in Oregon are not the same).

The second landscape begins in southern Oregon and continues down through the Siskiyous in northern California.  Giant snow capped mountains, rolling hills of fir trees.  Deep fjords with black glassy water and Mt. Shasta sitting like a big grandmother looking over her grandchildren.  This part of the drive you don’t want to end, there is so much to look at and be in awe of it takes everything inside me not to stop the car there and say, “I’ve gone far enough.”

We stopped right in the middle of this for the night in Redding California, a city which as far as I can tell contains a Motel 6 and a Super 8.  I’ve stayed in both and on this particular occasion we stayed in the Super 8.  Laying on that bed in the room watching Mythbusters for the first time, all the fear from earlier was far behind me and for a brief evening I didn’t have any worries or fears or stresses about anything.  Navigating a new city, finding a job and balancing a very tight budget would all come later but for me on that evening I watched superhero myths get busted in a giddy excited state.

The third landscape is mind numbing in its simplicity.  Mile after mile after mile after mile of brown flat nothing.  One could become a connoisseur of these little truck stop towns and billboards urging you to “stop at Auntie Ethels, Next two exits.”

The blandness of this drive stretches time out, sign post seem to go backwards and you feel like you’ll never get to your destination.  This doesn’t change until the Golden State Freeway splits off and you take the Hollywood freeway all the way right into the heart of LA LA land.  Right into the heart of our new home.  1,100 miles later we pull up in front of our building.

4 days in LA

not my neighbors 

         If I’ve learned only one thing from my wife it’s that when she has her heart set on doing something it will eventually happen.  Maybe not right away, it may take years but I’ve come to accept grudgingly that it will happen somehow some way.

Eight years ago when my wife and I first met she told me that when she graduated from college she wanted to move to Los Angeles.  At the time I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Seattle and my answer to her was “We’ll see.  That’s three years away, anything can happen.”  A year later we moved into our first apartment together and a year after that we adopted a cat together and the following year we graduated college.  Not long after that she began discussing Los Angeles again and I did my best to ignore it and hope that I could put off the discussion for another year.

The July after we graduated I had a three week internship with the Sundance Theater Institute in Utah which would be the longest we’d spent apart in three years.  After a week and a half she called me up and told me that she and her friend would be renting a car and driving down to spend a day with me.  This was that moment that I realized that we were bonded closer than I thought, if she couldn’t spend three weeks away from me then if she was going to LA I was going to LA too. 

For the next year it was brought up and ignored a dozen times until the spring of 2007 when our college friends Joel and Annika moved to Los Angeles and at their going away party my wife Jaime expressed to them her desire to move there as well and in return they urged her and me to do the same.  I resisted and I resisted and then in July something changed I can’t pinpoint exactly what day or why, if I’d kept an honest journal I may have been able to determine what it was that changed in me but looking back on it now nearly four years later it is still a mystery to me.

By August we were definitely moving and were beginning to plan a trip to Los Angeles to look at apartments and figure out how exactly we would move our lives from the only city we’d ever known to one we’d collectively spent less than 72 hours in.  Then in September the weekend of my 24th birthday we took a trip down to LA to get a layout of the city and find an apartment.

We flew out of Seattle early on a Wednesday morning and upon arriving at LAX we rented a car and drove from the airport to Los Feliz a little area just east of Hollywood.  We avoided the freeways and instead took Western avenue all the way and looking out the window of the car at this old dirty city I wondered what exactly we were getting ourselves into.  The rumors are absolutely true, LA is a dirty, dirty city.  Driving up Western you pass dozens of oil wells, dilapidated buildings and Mexican dollar stores.  Litter clogs gutters and dots the hills, grass has been replaced by dirt, and there are no trees.  Seattle is by far the most beautiful city in the continental United States if you stand in the middle of downtown you have Mt. Baker to the North, the Cascades Mountains to the East, Mr. Rainer to the South, and the Olympic mountains to the west.  Then You have Puget sound Elliot Bay, Lake Union and Lake Washington surrounding you as well, the beauty is staggering but surprisingly easy to overlook that is until you lay your eyes upon the dirty smoggy city of LA.

Fear was filling me up as we drove to Los Feliz and I was afraid to see what our future home might look like.  However as soon as we crossed Franklin avenue and Western turned into Los Feliz boulevard everything changed suddenly there was grass and the streets were clean and to the north was Griffith park and it was green and full of trees.  This is a trademark of LA where one street will look like a third world country and the next will look like a lush tropical garden, without warning everything changes at the turn of a corner.

We were staying with Joel and Annika and upon first seeing their apartment our great search began.  Their apartment was the envy of our eye until the day we moved away from LA.  It was large about 1,000 spare feet with a large kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom, even a place for a dining room.  Immediately we were imagining what our life would be like there, to top it all off they only paid $1,000 a month in rent.  In my mind I though that surely if they were able to find this great apartment then we should be able to find something similar and if they pay $1,000 then something smaller should go for less.

Immediately lessons were learned, to start with this was the end of September and we weren’t moving in until November first.  In Seattle this is not a problem as apartments can stay on the market for moths and often landlords will often be aware of a tenants departure a month in advance.  This is not the case is Los Angeles where we were told that it was going to be nearly impossible to find an apartment a month before we were willing to move in and it also became apparent that Joel and Annika were getting a steal on their apartment and that unless we got incredibly lucky we were definitely going to be paying more than $1,000 a month.

That night we looked at our first LA apartment, a older little unit which cost considerably more than $1,000 a month.  The building featured a pool and according to the sign posted on the fence surrounding it had been closed for hygienic reasons by the city. The building included such tenants as the Dury, Benson and Eat Shit residence.  We didn’t even fill out a application hoping that in the light of day things might get a little better.  Afterwards Joel and Annika to us to a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and then to dinner for our first In-N-Out burger.

We woke up early the following morning rejuvenated and looking to put the miserable apartment from the night before us far behind us.  The first place we looked at was on Tamarind avenue across the street from the Manor Hotel and the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre. The apartment was small and the rent was over $1200 a month but boasted a view of the Hollywood sign and hideous carpeting the color of dried blood.  We also visited an apartment listed as Los Feliz adjacent but in actuality they should have just said “located in Mexico city” as the local grocery store and street signs were all in Spanish.  We saw the exteriour of an apartment in Silverlake which seemed incredibly far away even though it was less then two miles from where we were staying, we never even saw that apartment as the manager was late to show it to us and when we called to check that we were at the right place it seemed that we were inconveniencing her by wanting to fill her vacant apartment with warm bodies.  We went to bed that night feeling that we had gotten in way over our heads and that we were never going to find anything and after making this trip down all that was left was to go home and write the whole thing off.

That following day we went to see another apartment very near by and after looking at it it seemed that we’d found some place both nice and affordable but during the application process things began to get strange.  The landlord informed us that the building did not accept pets but that we should just lie on the application, we’d not expected to find anyplace so close and did not have our information on us and left large portions of the paperwork blank.  About two-thirds of the way through I decided that I didn’t care how nice and affordable this place was something just was not right about this place and that in the end things possibly would go horribly wrong.  We finished the application and handed it to the landlord knowing that we did not want the apartment even if we got it, as it turns out we never heard from the landlord again and I still feel confident that it would have been a horrible mistake.

Things were going horribly we had a day left in which to find a place to live and we were not any closer to find that then when we first arrived.  We were just getting in the car and leaving the apartment we didn’t want when the rental agent who showed us the apartment with the view called us and told us that there was another unit in the building on the opposite side which did not have a view but did have a balcony and even better it wouldn’t be ready until November 1st.  We met her at the building again and she took us up the three fights of stairs and showed us into the apartment which was being remodeled.  When I say it was being remodeled what I mean is that the only thing in the apartment was the walls, the floor had been torn up and gathered into a heaping pile in the middle of the living room.  There was no plumbing or appliances but as was explained to us they were going to be putting in new hardwood floors a glass shower and all new appliances.  The apartment was within our price range and would be ready on the exact date we planned to move, so we filled out an application.

It was late in the day and we had no other leads and so putting all our eggs in this basket we headed off to the grocery store to buy dinner.  That evening we got the call that we did get the apartment and that we could sign the lease the following day just hours before heading  back to Seattle.  Over the last three days despite all the horrible apartments we’d seen we fell in love with this little corner of Los Angeles and couldn’t wait to pack up our life and begin again in a whole new city. 

On our last day in LA we woke up and had breakfast at what would become our favorite breakfast spot, the Mustard Seed where we had our first celebrity sighting Adrian Grenier.  It was fitting for me as Los Angeles had seemed like an enormous mystery to before I began watching Entourage and after watching the first three seasons I began to see the city differently it became a little more tangible to me, more of a possibility maybe not exactly as they lived in it through the show but a general idea of the landscape.

       We left Los Feliz and dove back down Western through this dirty city that now I couldn’t wait to move to.  Just as we were getting on the airplane I sat back in the window seat my hand gripping Jaime’s tightly and I looked out the window my heart pounding as I looked at this enormous city before more.  As we took off I looked back and thought how impossible it all seemed that I would ever find my way through this city that I would ever get my bearings but mostly that November 1st would ever get here.