Going Down in La-La Land (2 page)

“I’m such a fruitcake. Can you believe I bought this thing?” she’d laugh while tossing a periwinkle fur scarf around her neck.

Faithful dedication to acting classes and auditions filled the rest of her time. With Frank’s help she even created her own calendar, involving countless photo sessions with a photographer named Rocco. She later introduced me to him, and he took nude pictures of me for a sex mag called
Hotguy,
that was quite a few notches below
Playgirl.

“Turn your torso a little more to the right,” he would say.

“That’s good. Hold it there,” he went on as he held the camera with only a T-shirt on and his cock flopping around. Despite having bad teeth and being completely lit on pot, Rocco was a lot of fun and had a dick like a log. This made our photo sessions a very interactive and enjoyable experience. It also made it much easier for me to get aroused and hold a boner for the pictures.

After
Sect of Lucifer
Candy decided to take a few agents’ advice and move to Los Angeles where they felt she could make it in movies and television. She had since married Frank, and he was willing to finance her career aspirations. I stayed in touch with her while finishing my degree in theater from Eugene Lang College/The New School in Greenwich Village.

Eugene Lang College could only be described as a bizarre amalgam of characters that weren’t exactly cut out for your typical state university. The student body consisted of militant lesbians with shaved heads, aspiring live poets, drugged-out club kids, and students who wanted to go to school in downtown Manhattan but couldn’t get into NYU. These were the people who were freaks and outcasts in high school. To say the curriculum was a little out there was putting it mildly. Classes included “The Drama of Opera” and “Sex in the City,” long before the book or television series existed. Participation in the latter class included a field trip to go witness a fisting take place. Hardly the course work taken by sane people with direction in their lives paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

Parsons School of Art and Design was the sister school to Lang, so everyone in the dorms saw themselves as the next Calvin Klein, Andy Warhol, or Madonna. Living in such an out-there environment fueled my visions of becoming a great star on stage and screen despite having no prior experience in either acting, singing, or dancing, and only contributed to my delusions of grandeur in general.

While waiting for stardom to touch down on me, I acted in plays at school and took dance classes around the city. Part-time jobs came and went, and included such stints as a gym receptionist at half of the better gyms in the city. The pay sucked, but the job provided a place to work out for free, which I learned was a must as a gay man upon moving to Manhattan. That is, if I ever hoped to have a date or be looked at twice, an unfortunate but harsh reality of gay social life. Then there was the shoe sales job at the Capezio store in Times Square. It was right above the Winter Garden Theater where
Cats
played, which attracted busloads of tourists. That meant fitting tap shoes on gaggles of dancing girls and drill teams on field trips with Miss Katy’s Dance School, or whatever the fuck small-town dance studio they took the bus from.

That was always fun, having some fat slob of a mother stand over you repeatedly asking, “Does she have enough room at the toes?”

Needless to say, shoving tap shoes on sweaty feet was the closest I got to being on Broadway.

Don’t let me forget the waiter gig at a bistro in Chelsea working for a grumpy family of Persians. I can’t remember any one of them smiling a single time when I was there.

I was also registered with more than one temp agency that sent me on assignments all over the city, which included everything from stuffing envelopes to fetching Diet Coke for a rabbi who ran a charitable organization.

Finally there was my occasional night job, turning tricks as a male escort. I always swore it would never happen again after each call. But a few months later I’d find myself so far in the hole that I had no other choice.

So no, I wasn’t completely innocent before moving to LA. But at least I was still hopeful.

I think the event that really convinced me to take a break from New York was when I was rushing through wind and torrential rain to get to my apartment on East 11th Street and Avenue A. It was one of those days when you see dozens of battered black umbrellas sticking out of every garbage can on the corner. Walking up my doorstep I looked through the glass door into the foyer in disgust. Sitting in the corner was a big brown pile of shit. What made it even worse was that I knew it didn’t come from a badly trained dog. No dog in creation takes a dump that big.

I’m paying hundreds of dollars a month on rent to live in an apartment the size of a coat closet and be greeted by someone’s feces when I get home?
I thought to myself.

I loved Manhattan and my friends but felt it was time to get out for a while and get my thoughts together. Not having a clear path just made life depressing, even debilitating. I thought I could move someplace where it was possible to save some money and start thinking about graduate school. It was time for me to get a dose of reality and come back to planet Earth. At least, that’s what I had in mind.

When I mentioned the idea of moving back into my parents’ home in Las Vegas for a short time my mother almost had a cardiac arrest. The thought of having either one of her two children back in her house frightened her beyond imagination. I suppose I would have taken it harder if she hadn’t felt the same way about my older sister, who is the opposite personality type of myself, mainly heterosexual and, for the most part, conservative.

Mom had always been irritable and nervous when we were around, even as children. As a child I could play at the neighbor’s house till nine p.m. and she wouldn’t have noticed. Actually I could have been out till dawn and she would have preferred it. She was loving and generous in her own way, always sending help when I needed it most. But at the same time, her kids just drove her plain nuts.

It didn’t help that she was a tad bit on the obsessive-compulsive side when it came to keeping her house clean. She ran around the place with a Dust Buster in hand 24-7. She could give Joan Crawford a run for her money when it came to having an obsession with cleanliness.

“
Ish! Ish!” and “Kaka!” were her favorite expressions as she raced around the house with a dust cloth and a can of Pledge.

“
I can’t believe how much cat hair there is around this place from just yesterday. Adam, did you brush the goddamned cat today?” she’d bellow across the house.

The Dust Buster was her most favorite object in the whole world. If you left one crumb on the counter you risked having her shout expletives at you for an hour, despite the fact it gave her the opportunity to use her favorite toy. All the while she’d go on at length and berate, “Do you know how long and hard your father stands on his feet to pay for a nice home while you do your best to shit the place up?”

While my dad is the most easygoing and loving guy on the planet, the idea of having his wife going nuts every day and fighting back and forth with his kid didn’t appeal to him. My mother always wore the pants in the house anyway. So my idea of returning back home a little while to save money, look into grad school, and get grounded never stood a chance to begin with.

I continued to weigh my possibilities. By luck, I had joined the Screen Actors Guild a few months before deciding to move. I was working a nowhere job in an ugly payroll office in Midtown near Grand Central and was bored out of my skull. One day someone tipped me off that there was a call for extras in Woody Allen’s new film that very afternoon. The casting happened to be two subway stops from where I was working, so I decided to check it out, figuring if it was mobbed by people I would just get a slice of pizza and hop back on the number 6 train.

Surprisingly there turned out to be only a small line at the church where the call was. Even more surprising was the presence of Woody Allen himself, sitting at a table surrounded by casting women and assistants. They all wore Prada outfits and had their hair pulled back the same way, reminding me of the type who recently graduated from Vassar and worked a job in a PR firm. Woody Allen looked like the result of a Dr. Moreau experiment with an owl. I stood there in front of him for less than a minute while he looked me over and then scribbled something on my head shot that had been handed to him.

“
Okay, thanks,” the production assistant standing next me said after he finished scribbling and placed my picture aside.

A few weeks later the phone rang and someone asked if I would like to be an extra in the film. For three days I stood next to Leonardo DiCaprio outside the Stanhope Hotel with a prop camera hanging around my neck. The gig consisted of yelling and grabbing at him along with a gaggle of annoying preteen girls and actors impersonating the paparazzi and police officers.

In the extra list my name was described as “oddball fan.” One of the crew informed me that at first Woody Allen had me in mind to play a stalker, but that idea was scrapped. Something about the way I looked must have really disturbed Woody Allen, because a few times I caught him gazing at me with fear in his eyes. Despite the fact he thought I made a convincing fanatic, during filming when I asked him to sign my wardrobe snapshot, he graciously obliged. Soon-Yi made a visit to the set carrying a really ugly straw purse that she probably shelled out more money for than what most people make in a month.

I said nothing to Leonardo DiCaprio the whole time, figuring he did not want to be bothered by some tall, gay extra looming beside him. Besides, he had his hands full with the obnoxious prepubescent girls.

“
Girls, relax!” an exasperated Leo snapped on the third day of filming, up to his wits end with their constant screaming.

“
Oh, whatever,” one of the more overconfident and smartass prepubescent teens rolled her eyes and shot back. “Listen to you trying to be all cool.
Girls, Relaaax!
” she proceeded to impersonate and mock the world-famous heartthrob, leaving him speechless and feeling a bit stupid.

By the third day the little bitches become so bratty that I wanted to bitch slap them across the street into Central Park. I’m sure Leo would have liked to join in.

A few months later
Titanic
opened and I found myself standing next to him in various fanzines. I looked like an out-of-place dolt in those pictures, with a camera hanging around my neck and wearing ugly corduroy pants given to me by wardrobe. It didn’t help that I was standing next to the hottest young star in the world wearing a great pair of black leather pants.

On the brighter side, the gig made me eligible to join the actors union, an opportunity many people would kill for. So I borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend and joined, thinking it would help lead to the dreams of stardom that had brought me to New York in the first place.

If I moved to LA, at least I could work as an extra with my SAG card if a job didn’t turn up right away. Since my degree didn’t even qualify me to get a job as a waiter, my SAG status made me feel a little more secure. A more important influence in my decision was when my parents told me there was no way I could stay with them for an extended period of time.

Candy came to my rescue and offered to let me stay at her place until I got settled. We had spoken to each other regularly since she moved to LA. I was always waiting to hear when her big break would come

“
Adam, I’m telling you, you’ll love it out here. The weather is great. Today we had sun all day long,” she would tease over the phone after I had trudged home in the frigid cold.

I reasoned my parents were only five hours away from LA, so if worse came to worse I would have family nearby. Okay . . . well, at the very least I hoped if things got really bad my mother wouldn’t let me live in the streets.

So with that all in mind I began packing my bags. I hung around New York long enough to get my security deposit back on the apartment, then jumped on a flight to Vegas, to start what I envisioned would be a less stressful life filled with promise.

The two weeks in Vegas were excruciating. The heat was brutal, and my cousin was staying for the summer so my mother was already on the brink of a nervous breakdown. My arrival nearly drove her over the edge. To earn a little extra money and stay out of my mother’s way I paraded around Caesar’s Palace in Roman soldier gear, even though I didn’t quite meet gladiator standards. Having Japanese tourists giggle and pose for pictures with me was better than arguing at home.

My mother was still pissed I didn’t follow her advice and get a job with an advertising agency back in New York. I used the two weeks to find a car, stay out of my mother’s way, and head for LA.

Candy had given me directions to her place a few days earlier. Halfway through the drive there I was already sick of being in a car, stuck on overcrowded freeways. Not a good sign for someone about to settle in southern California. It was a typical LA moment when I arrived at her apartment to find Candy was at the gym. Her ex-boyfriend Dean, who was just as stupid as ever, answered the door. Apparently he had followed her to LA with aspirations of becoming an actor himself.

I gathered he hung around her apartment when Frank was out of town, which was most of the time. He was probably crashing from place to place, a total mess. Long ago I had given up trying to understand Candy’s relationships with men. As far as I was concerned it was her business.

“
Yeah, man, I love Vegas,” Dean grunted while I prayed for Candy to get home soon. “Lots of good pussy there, man.”