Going Down in La-La Land (5 page)

“
Oh sistah, he didn’t waste any time getting busy!”

Besides, nothing came close to the cruising at American Fitness gym in Chelsea, back in Manhattan. That place was an ongoing orgy, and most of the guys partaking in the festivities were very yummy. Everyone knew monkey business went on, but nobody cared. All the members were cool about it. Either you participated or ignored it. And yes, I had more than my share of additional workouts there. I even went so far as to plan my workouts around a hot blond guy from Baltimore who worked for Amtrak and frequented the gym on his daily route to the city. God, he was so fun. At the time I figured a little hanky-panky never hurt anyone just so long as it was safe.

About my third or fourth time at Crunch, I went to work out with Candy. We finished at the same time and both went in the locker rooms to change. I finished first and waited out by the lobby, talking it up with the aging surfer. I was beginning to get more infatuated with him after each visit. All of a sudden I heard Candy call out in an urgent and excited tone, “Adam! Adam! Come here!”

“
What is it?” I walked over and asked, wondering what could be so important to pull me away from my new blond obsession.

“
Look!” she pointed down the hall to the sides of the locker rooms, laughing hysterically.

“
What?” I snapped impatiently, seeing nothing and getting annoyed.

“
Oh . . . shit,” I murmured. To my dismay I found myself staring at the silhouettes of men and women showering. The glass was opaque, but I never really noticed it before. And you could see it all—members soaping up their privates, douching out their assholes with water, everything.

“
Adam!” Candy sputtered, now beet red and gasping for air between convulsions of laughter. A model-type girl walked past us and laughed, getting a kick out of the fuss Candy made.

“
You guys never noticed that?” she asked.

“
Uh . . . no,” I answered, gazing at the figures in front of me in dismay.

Candy just shook her head, her hands over her mouth and tears coming out of her eyes. Was this Crunch’s way of trying to be titillating and promote a sexy image? No wonder those sides of the showers were always empty. I was actually a little pissed. I had used one of those stalls and could imagine how stupid I looked yanking away at my penis with soap and water, no idea that what I was doing was completely visible from the other side.

It was a good thing I didn’t have the nerve to invite someone else in my stall here. What a show that would be. I swear, if Candy hadn’t pointed out this discovery I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed it for weeks.

After we got ourselves together and left for home, I sat in Candy’s car having rather paranoid thoughts. The shower stalls just defined LA—one big fucking tease for the eyes and senses. They probably designed the showers like that so they could catch people doing something dirty. I mean, this town went gaga for catching people with their pants down, just look at Heidi Fleiss or Hugh Grant.

My other big purchase that week besides my new gym membership was the
Thomas Guide,
a massive book of maps that illustrated the countless street grids of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. Candy had kept pestering me to buy it, and so far I had gotten lost more than once.

“
You’re going to need it if you want to find anyplace on your own,” she said in a scolding tone when I told her for the tenth time I still hadn’t grabbed a copy.

When I finally broke down and bought the
Thomas Guide
I was horrified. It looked like it weighed a ton and was hundreds of pages long.

Shit,
I thought. I hadn’t even read the whole Bible from front to back, but I was sure it was less of a challenge than this monstrosity.

At the end of the week I decided to make the trip to Central Casting in Burbank. Central Casting was the largest service for extras in town and had been around forever. It was in the depths of the valley, and getting there would be a challenge for me. I was still terrified of freeways.

“
Can’t I just take the boulevards?” I asked Candy meekly.

“
No, you can’t just take the boulevards!” Candy responded in a baby voice clearly meant to mock my freeway phobia.

“
It will take you way too long,” she continued in a no-nonsense tone. “I really want you to stop being such a pussy about this. You lived in the toughest city in the world and you’re scared to merge?”

I guess it was something I would have to learn to get over fast if I ever needed to be anywhere in Los Angeles other than Hollywood and Beverly Hills. As a New Yorker, my vision of LA freeways was miles of endless, crisscrossing vessels of aggression and road rage with shootings and televised car chases thrown in for good measure.

I would come to find that I wasn’t too far off. And, not being great at multitasking to begin with, having the
Thomas Guide
was of no use whatsoever. For starters you needed a magnifying glass to read the print. Then you had to keep glancing at it to keep up with where you were going while driving, not an easy thing in LA traffic. I could just picture myself veering off the road and colliding into a palm tree. I was a
Thomas Guide
disaster.

I found Central Casting in the core of Burbank, and it took forever to get there as I abandoned the freeways altogether and took the scenic route over Laurel Canyon to the boulevards that never seemed to end. The San Fernando Valley was miles of endless sprawl and the worst architecture I’d ever seen, a lot of stuff straight out of a
Brady Bunch
episode. Actually a lot of buildings looked as if Mike Brady had proudly designed them himself, complete with avocado exterior tile and faux Tudor stucco.

Central Casting was located in a nondescript two-story building. Parking was a bitch, and I left my car around the corner and a few blocks down.

There were already dozens of people when I arrived, and a form with a number waiting by the door. The form asked the usual crap, such as measurements, wardrobe, skills, and talents. After filling it out, I sat with the other hungry actors in a room with tables and mismatched furniture.

I hadn’t seen a sadder cast of idiots in some time, actually not since the filming of
Sect of Lucifer.
It was just plain depressing looking at the hopefuls who had obviously passed their prime in Hollywood and hadn’t much of a prayer of going further than having their back to a camera in some restaurant scene. One deluded girl with runs in her stockings was going on about how the people at Spelling Television always called for her, and kept throwing the term “Spelling” around as if she were a cast member of
Beverly Hills, 90210.

“
The people at Spelling told me I should keep my hair this length, even though I’m dying to cut it,” I overheard her telling someone across the foldout table.

At the same time a guy in his forties with glasses and bad skin loudly shelled out acting advice to his moronic cohorts sitting nearby.

“
Make sure not to get too tan,” he ordered to a blank-looking beach dude. “The camera doesn’t like it.”

Many people were here to reregister and had probably been doing this for years. I had heard about people in LA who did this for a living. They were just professional extras living on union wages and driving around with twenty different changes of clothing in the trunk of their cars. After almost an hour of waiting, I had begun to really hate myself for failing to bring a good book. An older and somewhat haggard bleached-blonde woman with a helium voice came through with a basket of apples and cookies for the casting people upstairs, jarring me from my thoughts.

“
I just had to give them something,” she gushed to someone nearby me. “They kept me working two months straight!”

Obviously, job security was not a priority with these people.

Finally it got closer to my number being called and I was allowed to go upstairs and wait in a smaller line to have my picture taken. Then it was up to a window to pay the twenty-dollar fee to register. The frumpy girls behind the windows barked orders at me.

“
Stand behind the strip of tape at the floor! Look straight at the camera! Now turn to the wall and give us your profile!”

It was like getting arrested and having your mug shot taken. I should have known they were all a bunch of raging bitches. When listening to their phone recording for directions I remembered the hostile voice on the other end exclaiming in disdain “If you are sick, please do not come to the office. We do not want the whole office to get sick!”

When the whole thing was over I felt like I had been at the DMV, only a strange, surreal DMV full of drivers with stars in their eyes.

It was almost evening by the time I made it back to Candy’s. Dean wasn’t there because Frank was coming into town the next day. I was glad it was just the two of us. Before long we were laughing hysterically as I went on in detail about my day.

“
That’s why I refuse to do extra work,” Candy rambled on while munching chocolate chips. “You sit there for hours feeling like a piece of dirt.”

Neither of us felt like going out, so we settled for baking chocolate chip cookies instead. Candy climbed onto the counter to search the cupboard for vanilla, her blonde ponytail bouncing behind her. Her cats, Goldie and Frosty, watched in wonder as we danced around the kitchen to ABBA
Gold.

“
Take a chance on me . . . take a chance, take a chance, take a chance,”
I sang to the cats while jumping up and down. Used to being around erratic behavior, the cats didn’t flinch.

After eating half the batch between us, she went to bed and I scanned the papers for work. I had picked up some local gay papers at the Abbey that first night. Maybe there was something in there.

Before hitting the sack I prayed to God that I would have an easy work search. My thoughts drifted back to the few times I had done extra work in New York, besides the Woody Allen project. The worst experiences that stuck out in my mind were the films
The Mirror Has Two Faces
and
54.

The first was shot on location at Columbia University and consisted of a slew of college-age extras crammed into a huge lecture hall while Barbra Streisand paraded around as our supposed professor, in the ugliest Donna Karan dress I’ve ever seen. It looked like she was wearing a black potato sack. We were subjected to early-morning calls and being kept all day until the following morning while Ms. Streisand did take after take. The scene consisted of her playing a professor and giving a lecture that her students are just mesmerized by. Then, as her admirers, we applauded in sheer admiration and adulation at the end.

I guess it’s hard for her to lose the diva personification, even playing a teacher.

By the time the whole thing was done and over I hated Barbra Streisand’s guts. Talk about the walking, breathing, and living definition of neurotic. That and the fact she was addressing us like we were a herd of simpletons and providing the most unrealistic college scenarios in order to direct us.

“
So you’re just in awe of this professor,” she gestured wildly with her hands.

In reality most of the people there were college students anyway, but the way she spoke to us made it clear she had never stepped into a lecture hall in her life. I ran out of there screaming. This was before I joined the union, so one could say I ran screaming with nothing but peanuts for pay.

In contrast, the
54
set was a complete circus in freezing subzero temperatures. The film, which turned out to be a huge bomb, was based on the legendary club and shot at the actual location of the former nightspot in the middle of the winter. The problem was, the geniuses behind the project decided to film exterior summer shots outside the front of the building in unbearable, freezing cold weather. They even had contraptions to blow hot air at the masses outside, which dissipated immediately and didn’t do shit to keep us warm. Even more bizarre was the number of elderly people there dressed in disco outfits, people who never would have thought of venturing into the actual club in its heyday. After being herded out a few times in the frigid air, I told myself there was no way in hell I was going to contract pneumonia for the slim chance of being glimpsed on camera for a split second. Freezing to death while waving my hand around like a maniac and posing as some stupid loser unable to get into Liza and Halston’s playground just wasn’t worth it.

Lucky for me and twenty other smart people, we found a stairwell in the corner of the club that led to a few locker rooms and a boiler room that you could squeeze through a narrow opening to get into. We hid out for hours, sipping hot tea and coffee, basically talking crap. When the production assistant went on this search for us we ran like the most frightened refugees you’ve ever seen.

“
Here they come! Everybody run!” the person on lookout would urge, and we’d scatter faster than mice.

We stood silent, ignoring the impending doom that threatened us. Stifling laughs, we kept still as the exasperated production assistant yelled.