Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (14 page)

Dwayne rolls himself to the door. I open it for him.

“Take care,” I offer weakly, my whole entire being feeling so terrible for shaming Dwayne the Wheelchair Guy.

And, Mrs. Molin, I haven't seen Dwayne since.

Chad has offered to hire me, after my hundred hours are over next week, because I'm an exemplary employee—you'll find his letter attached—but I can't take the job because I can no longer enter the video store without worrying about Dwayne. I can't get through a shift without thinking about him wheeling up to the store. Where is he getting his porno now? Does he have to wheel himself through the snow to the next video store, eight city blocks away?! I can't take the pressure.

Of the many lessons I've learned in my hundred hours of work, the biggest was this: that being a good employee can very possibly mean having to bend your own code of values. I was so engrossed in my position at the store that I didn't even consider the feelings of the customer. From now on, I will always consider the feelings of the customer, even if I am being paid as an employee. Work Experience has taught me this. I would be a terrible soldier. I would be a terrible police officer. I would be a terrible teacher. But the good news is, I do NOT need ketones to not be any of those things.

Mrs. Molin, thank you for giving me the opportunity to work for school credit. I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but now I know what I don't want to do with my life. And thank you for the opportunity to write this report for you. It was my favorite part of the Work Experience course.

FINDING
LEO

“Leo's going to be in a BLOCKBUSTER!!!”

Behind the Sugarbowl café, in an alley along a ravine on the university campus, I showed Aimee the tattered coffee-shop copy of
Us
magazine. We weren't students; we just liked to hang out in the alley and smoke pot.

“Look!” I shouted, thrusting the magazine in her face, feeling that prickly, about-to-sweat sensation in my armpits. My hands were trembling. I shouted the article out to her: “ ‘Leonardo DiCaprio is currently filming the movie
Titanic
with director James Cameron, due in theaters next Christmas.' CHRISTMAS, Aimee! Movies that are released at Christmas are BIG. The
Titanic
was big, and this is going to be BIG!”

Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Aimee pulled her Natty Gann hat down over her red dreadlocks, put out her joint, tucked the corners of her lips up to deepen those dimples, and exhaled dramatically.

“You're fucked. He's going to be the next Johnny Depp. I'll never get Johnny, and now you'll never get Leo.”

I stroked the photo of Leo's face—his almond-shaped eyes, his chiseled Ted Danson jawline—and tried to lower my heart rate. “You're right. He'll never date me once this movie comes out.”

Unless I could make him my boyfriend first.

Leo DiCaprio was my Lionel Richie love song. I'd been projecting all the qualities of my ideal man onto him ever since
Gilbert Grape
. Yes, I found that little handicapped kid hot. Judge me, I don't care. I loved Leo, and I was TERRORIZED at the thought that he'd soon be a household name. Within months he'd have millions of girls throwing themselves at him, offering him blow jobs in elevators. This was war. This was my Normandy.

There was only one solution: I had to get to Los Angeles and stalk Leo before it was too late. To me, this wasn't an outlandish idea. It was perfectly normal. And it was my only option.

I dragged Aimee across the street to the travel agency and stormed in. The quiet room was suddenly under my control. I pointed at a rotund woman behind the desk and commanded: “I NEED TWO ROUND-TRIP TICKETS TO LA, ASAP!”

The woman gave me a look like she was up against Andre the Giant in
WrestleMania 2
's “Battle Royale.” She quickly tapped out a few words on her computer.

“I-is tomorrow okay?” she stammered.

“Tomorrow might be too late, but we'll take it!” My life had suddenly become a male teen road movie: I was running on 100 percent gut-lust.

Aimee called the coffee shop where she worked and told her boss she'd be gone for a few days because of a family emergency in Quebec. I called my boss, who was also my dad, and told him I wasn't coming to work, or coming home, for the next three days. I'd been doing basic office jobs for my dad for over a year. Making coffee, organizing files—I was basically the receptionist's assistant who had great lunchtime office stories for the girls who worked there. Aimee and I were horrible employees who lived at home and had less than a thousand dollars to our names. And now we were sinking almost all of that money into two tickets to LA.

When I got home later and explained to my dad what we were doing, he sat back in his chair. “What do you
mean
you're going to LA?”

“I'm going to find Leonardo DiCaprio and become his girlfriend. He's going to be in this huge movie soon, and if that happens I'll never get my chance.”

“Who is Leonardo DiCaprio?”

“Exactly.” I pointed at him. “You won't be asking that after Christmas.”

“Do you need some money?”

Dad gave me a hundred dollars, which doubled my available spending money. As far as I knew, that was plenty; I'd never paid for anything in my life. I had no idea that flying to LA with two hundred dollars to my name was basically deciding to become a hobo. But let's face it: I shopped at Goodwill, I smoked weed in alleys, and I believed I could circumvent the future if I headed to California. In essence, I
was
a hobo.

The next morning, Mom gave us cookies for the flight and drove us to the airport. As soon as we got our boarding passes, we were picked out by security, probably for smelling like pot-smoking hobos. My search went quickly; all I had was my one little orange suitcase I'd picked up at Goodwill. Aimee's took longer. As I sat on a gray plastic chair watching two agents comb through her dreadlocks one by one, I ate every single one of Mom's cookies.

“WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY'RE GOING TO FIND IN THERE?” she shouted to me.

“PROBABLY WEED,” I yelled back.

Of course, they found nothing. We knew enough not to travel with weed—and we knew we didn't need to. Weed always found us.

We got on the plane safe and sound.

“I can't believe you ate every cookie,” Aimee said.

The flight attendant asked if we wanted drinks. “Sure, a Coke,” I said. “The regular kind. With sugar. Can I go to the cockpit?” I leaned forward and touched her arm to show her I was being sincere and also to make sure she was listening to me. “I usually visit the pilot on my flights. I don't really like flying. Hanging out with the pilot lowers my heart rate.” (Note: This was my first flight without my parents, and it was back in the days when armrests had ashtrays and children were allowed to stand three inches from an airplane's control panel. I loved being in the cockpit; it was like hanging out in the front of your grandparents' RV as they drove down the highway. Only instead of a highway, you were in a tube in the sky.)

For reasons unknown to me, the flight attendant took my teenage request very seriously. After bringing me my Coke, she escorted us into the cockpit.

“Do you want to know what these buttons do?” said the younger pilot. He looked like Woody Harrelson.
Natural Born Killers
Woody.

“No,” I said. I suddenly realized I was leaning against the wall like I was James Dean or something. I'm the Isaac Newton of embarrassing myself with body language.

“Do you want to sit in my seat?” Woody asked. His copilot, a Tom Selleck look-alike, shot Woody a WTF look.

“I DO!!!” shrieked Aimee, and she jumped onto his lap. Can you imagine the fucking animal sounds that would have come from the passengers if they knew a white girl with dreadlocks was behind the buttons and levers that were keeping them from becoming a pile of shitty pants and flaming metal?

“I'm, like, basically only in here to prevent myself from freaking out,” I said, trying to talk through my anxiety. “I hate flying. It really scares me.” I stared straight ahead and had a vision of a slower plane's ass popping out from the clouds ahead of us, just in time for us to plow into it. I saw Big Bird up there too, with his striped tie and tiny suitcase, getting sucked into the engine as he was giving us the Queen's wave. Only a bit of tie was left behind, and the cabin filled with the smell of KFC.

Tom Selleck spoke up, licking his mustache like a pervert. “You know, flying is safer than driving. You don't have to be scared of it.”

“I don't drive either,” I said. “My dad told me that if I got my license he'd buy a sedan limo and make me drive him around like a chauffeur. I'm not going to get my license until I move out.”

“But you're in cars all the time,” he said condescendingly.

“Yes, well, please forgive me for having an opinion on this, sir, but crashing a car doesn't scare me as much as falling from the sky strapped to a small chair.”

“Look, there's Vegas!” said Woody, pointing out the right window.

And there it was: Las Vegas, looking like a computer chip someone dropped in the sand.

We landed, said good-bye to Tom and Woody, and disembarked from our flight, bags in hand.

When we got to baggage claim, I spotted a guy holding a sign reading
CHICKEN CATCHATORI
.

“There he is!” I shouted.

The guy with the sign was Johnny, a guy I'd met the night before on the Internet. It was 1996, the Internet was a BABY, and I was invincible. It didn't occur to me until years later, while I was watching
Dateline
, that this was one of many events on this LA trip that could have landed me on
Dateline
. “Chicken CatchaTORI” was my chat room handle, one of my famous plays on the name Tori. (After Amos, that is. It was 1996 and I had a vagina.) My other Internet names included NoTORIous (which Tori Spelling would totally steal from me in the future) and RheTORIcal SarTORIal (way over Tori's head).

I'd started talking up this guy in the chat room because his name was Johnny. Only I'd been envisioning a Depp, and this guy was more of a Johnny LaRue. I peppered him with questions about Leo, but he didn't know anything about him, which I found irritating considering he was in a HOLLYWOOD chat room.

Aimee and I walked up to him. “Johnny?”

He put the sign down and looked at both of us. “Hey! Uh, whoa. It's
crazy
that you guys came. Like, you're actually here!”

He was soft-spoken and sweet, and a 100 percent bona fide computer nerd. Heavy, with an all-gray wardrobe and the complexion of the bottom of a white sock. He wasn't ugly, though, and that made the free ride okay in my mind. I couldn't get into a car with an ugly stranger.

Johnny was supposed to drive us to the Banana Bungalows on Cahuenga, but when we got in his rusted-out Datsun, he asked if we could stop by his mom's place first. I knew this wouldn't get me closer to Leo, but since it was a free ride and his vibe wasn't too creepy, I said sure. Aimee and I sat in his backseat (neither of us wanted the front; it was a
Driving Miss Daisy
situation in there), smoking cigarettes and asking Johnny questions.

“Where do you live?”

“With my mom.”

“No,
where
do you live?”

“Compton.”

We laughed. Johnny the Internet nerd had a sense of humor. “Are you a Crip?” I asked, throwing my head back and hitting my knee with my hand, like a seventeen-year-old girl who thought she was fucking hilarious.

“No,” he said, then paused. “But neither of you are wearing head-to-toe blue, right?”

Wait. Johnny was serious! I sat straight up in my seat.

“No blue. Johnny, take us to your house immediately. You live in COMPTON?! I gotta see Compton.” As a sheltered white girl I was obsessed with my gang films, especially
Menace II Society
and
Boyz n the Hood
.

“Yep, my mom's lived there since the sixties. She isn't really my mom—I mean, she is, but only because my real mom gave me to her. Dad's black, Mom's white.”

I suddenly felt really shitty for Johnny, not only because he was half black but looked 100 percent white and lived in Compton, but also because he was an abandoned baby who was willing to drive strangers around LA. I guess I was also terrified for myself. I mean, we were little white girls. Oh, and Aimee had those fucking white-girl dreadlocks, which I'm sure would mean immediate social acceptance in Compton.

I tried to look on the bright side:

1.   I was about to see my favorite movie genre, up close and personal.

2.   It was dusk, so maybe our whiteness wouldn't be as apparent.

“Whoa—so have you ever been, like, gangbanged? Or shot?” Aimee said as she threw her cigarette out the window.

“Well”—Johnny sighed—“last month I was walking up to my house, along the hedges, and I knew someone was behind me. And then he grabbed my arm and swung me around and shoved a gun into my stomach, hard, and said, ‘MOTHAFUCKA, MONEY AND DRUGS OR YOUR GUT ON THA GROUND!' ”

I sat up and put my hand behind his headrest. I was ENTHRALLED.

“What did you do?”

“I kinda pissed my pants. And shit myself, like at the same time. And I gave him my wallet. He left.”

Aimee sat back. “Good for you,” she said. “I would have totally shit myself too. That's always been my plan if anyone ever tries to rape me. I'm going to have instant diarrhea, then rub it all over. No one will want to rape that.”

I shook my head. “Girl, the rapist would go haywire with all that diarrhea and totally just kill you.” I was already saying “girl” like I was Tyra Banks when she's talking black to make it obvious she's having fun. (Tyra only talks white when she wants you to know she's serious.)