Box Girl (4 page)

Everything about Los Angeles was intoxicating on that inaugural trip. The whole place seemed dream-like, foreign, and fabulous, if not a little bit filthy. I was certain I was going to see a celebrity as soon as I got off the plane. Rachel was our tour guide, and she took us to the Santa Monica Pier, the Venice Boardwalk, the Sky Bar on Sunset Boulevard. As the week went on, an idea began brewing: Why did Heather and I have to get a job in our hometowns' neighboring metropolises? Why would we split up when we could cling to each other while entering adulthood? “Let's just move here!” We threw it out there, but we knew we never would. We were too scared—to tell our parents, to leave the boyfriends and lives and expectations that were waiting for us back home.

Yet, on the penultimate day of our trip, during a late lunch at The Farm in Beverly Hills, something shifted. Maybe it was the sunshine, maybe it was the Sauvignon Blanc, but giddy and high on friendship and wine, the decision was made: “Let's move here. Let's really move here.” The three of us could get a place together. We decided we had to call our parents immediately, before we changed our minds. I walked to the corner of Beverly and Santa Monica Boulevards—an intersection I cannot pass without remembering this excruciating conversation—and told my parents I was moving three time zones and 2,963 miles west; as far from Connecticut as I possibly could without wading into the Pacific.

Within three weeks, Heather and I had moved across the country, with no jobs, no cars, and no place to live. This nearly broke my sweet, Southern mother's heart. (Both my parents are originally from Georgia, with the accents to prove it.) She had assumed I would get a job in Manhattan, of course. California might as well have been another country in my parents' minds. And Los Angeles, oh the horror. At least San Francisco was
tolerable
, they'd say. Soon after I moved, my mom called to tell me she had to close the door to my bedroom. “I just couldn't bear to look at it, knowing you are so far away.”

The first few weeks we lived in LA, we didn't really live in LA at all, but rather with Rachel's parents in a San Fernando Valley suburb called Encino. We were familiar with Brendan Fraser in
Encino Man
, but not this city where Michael Jackson grew up. We quickly learned that it was not such a bad spot to be stuck in late summer while looking for a job. Rachel's parents' house was a sprawling, contemporary take on the Southern California ranch house. It had a large, slate-tile hot tub, an eco-friendly saltwater pool, and a variety of California vegetables growing in the yard, not to mention all the home-cooked food and expensive wine we could consume.

Most of our job-search period was spent in the pool. Once or twice a day, I'd flutter-kick to the shallow end, peel my waterlogged limbs off my inflatable raft, twist a towel under my arms, and shuffle inside to refresh my email on their boxy, beige desktop, my hair dripping onto the keyboard. (This was 2004, when checking your email enlisted more physical labor than just rolling over on a chaise lounge and shading your iPhone's screen from the sun.) Realizing I'd gotten no responses to my job inquiries, I'd grab an organic Popsicle from the freezer and hurry back poolside to avoid getting chilled from the air conditioning.

Unfortunately, after three weeks, we found jobs. We moved to Santa Monica because it was the only part of LA any of us had ever heard of, and I'm fairly certain that had something to do with a late-'90s Sheryl Crow song. Our apartment building was a shutter-less stucco box, painted a shade of warm salmon, the address written in loopy, spearmint cursive. It looked like something out of Sinatra-era Palm Springs, just shittier. We were pleasantly surprised to find the windows had no screens, because apparently there are no bugs in California, but less pleased to learn the apartment came with no refrigerator, because apparently LA renters are expected to lug those along as if they were fresh towels or a new set of sheets.

There is a whole underground market for used refrigerators in LA. We found ours on Craigslist, where we found most everything those days—our couch, a coffee table, my 1989 BMW convertible with a CD player that skipped when I drove over bumps. Armed with a wad of cash, which was no doubt split three ways—as if we planned on dividing the fridge three ways when we moved into our own one-bedroom apartments a year later—we met the sellers on a manicured corner of San Vicente Boulevard. (For at least a year, we called San Vicente and Abbott Kinney “The Bermuda Triangle” because, unlike every other street in LA that shoots pin-straight until eternity,
these boulevards defiantly existed on diagonals, crissing and crossing other sane streets, leaving virgin LA drivers like us feeling as though we'd just been spun around blindfolded before a whack at the piñata.)

The refrigerator transaction took place on a Sunday morning. As the couple waited for us, a handsome dog panted alongside, attached to a leash that had been needle-pointed with someone's initials. They looked like they had just finished a workout. Probably a hike. Twenty minutes late, we rolled up in various shades of hungover. I think it's a decent bet that at least one of us wasn't wearing a bra. The couple stood there smiling with their fridge, which was on a dolly. They owned a dolly. They said their new place came with its own fridge. Of course it did. They were in their late twenties, maybe early thirties—it was hard to tell back then—and they clearly had their shit together. I wiped under my eyes to remove the remnants of last night's mascara and wondered if I'd ever be that put together on a Sunday morning. I bet they had already read
The New York Times
. Probably over a soy latte at an impossibly hip, fair-trade coffee shop after their hike.

But we weren't quite sure how to be adults yet. Our four years at The University of Colorado (we affectionately called it The Harvard of The Rockies) hadn't armed us with much but liberal arts degrees and a superhuman ability to funnel beers at a high altitude. I studied journalism, which I'm not even sure is a major anymore; Rachel majored in painting, and I'll leave that at that; and Heather majored in the “smart” slacker specialty: sociology. A few weeks before our pre-move trip to LA, Heather had a meeting with a career counselor and took one of those aptitude tests that says what you should do with the rest of your life. She called me crying from the parking lot immediately after. Through the crying/hyperventilating/mini panic attack that is the wheelhouse of recent grads, she said the counselor told her that she didn't
really have any career options, and that she probably should have thought about that before she decided to major in sociology. And that she should just go kill herself. (Heather added that part.)

Shortly after we moved into our apartment, a Penske truck arrived with all of our belongings: whatever furniture was salvageable after four years of “Jungle Juice” parties in Boulder, our favorite books, framed pictures of our families, and five-pound Case Logics of CDs housing our entire music collections, which were nothing if not varied. (You know you're a child of the '90s when you can say you listened to the Grateful Dead and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony with equal gusto.) While unpacking boxes of “necessities”—the enormous black stereo with the equally sizable speakers attached by a tangle of wires, the Halloween costumes that only follow you across a continent when you're twenty-two and think that makes sense—we began to assemble our new adult lives. Or some pathetic attempt at them.

This was around the time I convinced my friend Melissa to move to LA, too. Melissa and I grew up in Connecticut together, and she spent her first four un-chaperoned years attending Georgetown University, getting a good education. Thus, she already had a job in New York. I had promised her that as soon as I found a job, we'd get an apartment together in the city. Well, I told her on the phone from California, I never found a job there, so instead I moved to LA, a mere three time zones away. This wouldn't be a big deal, right? We could still live together! We have a great house! There's plenty of room for you! Your job will transfer you, right? Great. Pick you up at the Long Beach Jet Blue terminal in what, a week? Super.

Shockingly, after a week of not returning my calls because she was so livid, Melissa caved and said yes. It was now September and she had been living at home since May, making the hour commute from Connecticut to midtown Manhattan via Metro North. Earlier that summer, we met during her lunch break, and I inquired where she had purchased that snazzy navy skirt suit. She told me Talbots, and then said, “My life is over.” During that phone call from California, I might have mentioned that no one wears skirt suits out here. I didn't even think they had Talbots. I also think I mentioned the words “beach” and “cute boys.” With that, she was packing up her Case Logic, too.

To create space for Melissa, Heather and I decided to share a room. The master was enormous, and our rent would be cheaper that way. As if two twenty-two-year-old women sharing a bedroom wasn't juvenile enough, one of the first things we both unboxed were our teddy bears, which we immediately perched atop our peach and purple pillows. Heather's bear was named Amie, after the Pure Prairie League song “Amie.” (Heather and her mom were obsessed with the softer side of late-'70s rock. Heather once punched me in the arm, pretty damn hard, when I casually mentioned that Jackson Browne sucked.) My furry friend, Gundy, was not named after a song but after his brand, Gund. Not my most creative moment. It's not that surprising; I was never particularly kind to my inanimate friends as a child. All my Barbies got brutal haircuts within the first few weeks I plied them from their plastic wombs, and one night, my brother and I lynched my largest baby doll with a noose made of shoelaces. We hung her out my bedroom window, swinging triumphantly in front of the dining room window, while our parents were mid–dinner party.

As a child, I also had to sleep with absolutely no light—not even the slightest crack creeping under the door—while
The Nutcracker
soundtrack played on my robot-shaped cassette
player. Looking back, I realize this was sort of unsettling music for a child before bedtime. In the room with Heather, it wasn't
The Nutcracker
that unnerved me, but “Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young, the first few bars of which played full-blast every morning at 6:45 from her CD-player alarm clock. I still can't hear the song's beginning chords without feeling an overwhelming impulse to get in the shower.

It was hard to believe we ever complained about 11:00 am classes. As it turned out, with real jobs, you had to show up much earlier than that. Every day. And not still wearing the shirt you slept in with a Patagonia fleece zipped over it. Melissa's company transferred her position in marketing to their office on Wilshire Boulevard. I took a job as an assistant at a talent agency, and Rachel got a job as a personal assistant, working for a woman who ended up being certifiably insane. By winter, Rachel had become suspicious that this woman might just be using her for a free place to stay in Park City during Sundance. Rachel finally quit in the spring when one of the woman's checks bounced and, in what we can plainly call the final straw, the woman's toddler son peed on her during a business trip to Berkeley. Heather got a toddler-free job as the receptionist at a post-production office, where she is now a producer and makes more money than all of us. (Take that, career counselor.)

At the post-production office, one of Heather's responsibilities was ordering lunch and dinner for the clients, who were stuck in bays editing commercials all day. She ordered from the best restaurants in Santa Monica, and she always ordered way too much. She
must
have done this intentionally—
well played, Heather
—because almost every night, she'd arrive home with giant catering containers and zip-locked bags full of gourmet leftovers. Sometimes, if it were someone's birthday, the vast majority of a very large sheet cake would make it into our kitchen. The four of us would sit on the couch, free food
on our laps, watching
So You Think You Can Dance
while drinking mugs full of Yellowtail Shiraz purchased from the CVS down the street. (Why was it always mugs at that age? Why didn't we ever have clean and/or proper glassware?) We went out to bars some nights, went out to dinner even less. We were paralyzed by the fear of managing our own money for the first time, and even more terrified of being hungover at work.

The mornings were miserable enough. Rachel and I sometimes carpooled to work, and she started calling my evil morning alter ego “Lilly,” after the name I'd give the Starbucks baristas to write on my cup. I've never understood why Starbucks employees don't realize their early-morning customers have not yet had their early-morning coffee and are not yet perky or peppy enough to chat. If I ran a Starbucks, I would tell my employees that, before 9:00 am, they had to be grumpy and irritable. It's much more relatable.