Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!)

by Morris, Amelia

  In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar on medium speed until well combined, 2 to 3 minutes. With the mixer on low speed, add the eggs one at time, letting each one fully absorb before adding the next. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and mix for a bit longer. Keep the mixer on low and gradually add the flour mixture until it’s completely combined. Add the milk and vanilla and beat the mixture on medium speed until just combined.

  Divide the batter between the two pans. Smooth the tops with the back of a spoon. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 28 to 32 minutes. Let the cakes cool in their pans on wire racks for about 15 minutes, then turn them out onto the racks to cool completely.

  When the can of sweetened condensed milk has simmered for two hours, use tongs to remove it carefully from the simmering water and let it cool for about 10 minutes. Carefully (again), open the can and scoop the dulce de leche into a bowl: It should look like creamy caramel. Whisk until smooth.

  Ideally, you want to move straight into assembling the cake at this point. (You want the dulce de leche to still be fairly warm so that you can pour it onto the top cake layer and get some pleasing drips along the side of the cake. The goal is for it to look rustic. But if the dulce de leche is too cold to form proper drips, no worries! Just spread it over the top with a butter knife in a nice thick layer.)

  To assemble the cake:

  Place one cake layer on a platter. Spread a layer of dulce de leche over the surface. Top with the second cake layer. Finish by topping with the remaining dulce de leche.

  Chapter 10

  Parasites in My Eyes

  You can use your Spanish!” my mom said, wide-eyed, after I told her about my plan to move to Los Angeles. She and Bruce are practical people, and though I majored in both Creative Writing and Spanish, my mom liked to focus mainly on the Spanish.

  I nodded and smiled. “Totally.”

  Of course, my plans didn’t include using my Spanish. My plans included finishing my novel, enrolling in improv classes, and getting a job waiting tables. My friends, who as recently as two months ago, received letters from me from Argentina quoting long passages from Letters to a Young Poet, worried that I was going to find Los Angeles vapid and superficial, but when I told them how cool the Esquire party in New York was, and how famous the judges of the short film contest were, they seemed to get it. Oh, Matt is on the verge of super success? In that case, God bless and have fun counting the money!

  Within two days, we are in the highway town of Shamrock, Texas, and have listened to enough Counting Crows, Les Misérables Original Broadway Recording, and Built to Spill to confirm our standings as suburban, upper-middle-class, white people who came of age in the nineties. As far as we can see, there are two hotels and not much else in Shamrock. We choose the Shamrock Inn. (When in Rome, right?)

  The abundant images of green shamrocks on the hotel’s various signage cannot hide the fact that we are in Texas. Our car is the only non-pickup truck in the lot, and a man donning a cowboy hat unself-consciously checks in right before us. In the lobby, a banner touts a Free Hot Breakfast! and in the morning, we’re treated to mediocre but Free Hot grits, sausage, bacon, and eggs.

  We take I-40 west through the Texas panhandle and into New Mexico before heading north to Taos, where we’ve planned to stay with my aunt and uncle for two nights. We arrive at their sprawling adobe house and are welcomed by two grown Goldendoodles and seven of their recently born puppies. My aunt, uncle, and their son, Dylan, have just moved there from Boston in order to expand their business—a book publishing and distributing company focusing on holistic medicine and healing. They are a hippie success story for the books. (And yes, Uncle Bob, my mother’s brother, has a ponytail.)

  With all of the space their new southwestern home affords them, my aunt has created the garden of her dreams, from which she has plucked many an ingredient for the night’s dinner. We eat and talk politics—the 2004 presidential election is just a month away—while eleven-year-old Dylan, named after both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas—occasionally chimes in with his own two cents, e.g., “Conservatives are killing America!”

  Speaking of conservatives, my mom has told my aunt and uncle that Matt is “just a good friend of mine,” but they instantly know better. They set us up in the guest room together, and before wishing us good night, give us one simple rule: We are not allowed to smoke cigarettes, though we are allowed to smoke weed. We aren’t “holding,” so don’t take them up on the offer, but thank them all the same. In the morning, we wake up to the puppies, all of which someone has loosed into our room. Matt swiftly picks them up and places them on the bed with us. It’s a good start.

  Though my aunt Martha is a soft-spoken, extremely thin, kindhearted product of Haight-Ashbury in the sixties and has always been incredibly sweet to me, she is not someone I would want to get in a disagreement with. So when she tells me that she’s set up an appointment for me to get my eye read in order to help with the migraine headaches I sometimes get, even though I have no idea what she means, I say, “OK.”

  And so after spending the morning exploring Taos, Aunt Martha, Matt, and I arrive at my eye appointment, in another simple adobe-style house, separated from its nearest neighbors by maybe half a mile.

  Within minutes, a woman sitting on a stool, her legs straddling one of mine, leans into my face like she’s about to kiss me and looks deep into my left eye with some sort of magnifying glass. At this point, I’m assuming that this is akin to having your palm read, and so half-expect her to pull back and tell me that I’m embarking on an amazing adventure. But instead, she says, “You have a sensitive digestive system and more parasites than normal.”

  I nod understandingly.

  She prescribes me an herbal remedy that will hopefully help with this. I thank her, and forever after, when Matt looks into my eyes, he tells me that he sees parasites—many, many parasites.

  In the morning, we’re anxious to get back on the road. Not because we’re ready to leave Taos, but because Las Vegas, a city I’ve never been to as an adult, awaits.

  During the twelve-hour drive, Matt gives me an education in everything I need to know about blackjack. At points, I have a deck of cards and am dealing us hands, balancing the cards on the tops of my legs. But nothing can really prepare you for Vegas.

  I’m initially most impressed by the ease of the city. You are driving along this empty desert highway and then, out of nowhere, you are in a city driving directly underneath towering hotels and their neon lights.

  In another moment, we have parked free of charge in the garage of the Bellagio and are taking the elevator to the casino floor, but first, Matt wants to show me the Chihuly glass sculpture hanging from the ceiling in the lobby. “Isn’t it cool?” he asks, whisking me outside, where he shows me the giant fountain spouting water in choreographed ways in the middle of a lake in front of the hotel.

  But then he can’t wait any longer; it’s time to play some blackjack. And so, with the confidence and fluidity of an experienced expert, Matt is suddenly exchanging two-hundred-dollar bills for a not-so-big stack of chips. He’s sitting on a stool in a semicircle of other blackjack players, all facing the dealer. I’m standing behind him so he can’t see my mouth drop. Two hundred dollars? All at once? What is he thinking? I pinch his shoulder and whisper into his ear, “What are you doing?”

  “You have to start with that much. You’ve got to get into a rhythm.”

  I stand back and close my mouth. The minimum bet at this table is ten dollars, which I will soon find out is as low as the minimum ever gets at the Bellagio and is the reason why this particular table is full, as the one across from us, with a minimum of fifty dollars, has only one player. So, what is Matt doing betting twenty-five dollars on the first hand? He doesn’t even have to bet that much. I cross my arms and grip into them with my fingers, watching as he’s dealt a jack
and a ten. The dealer has seventeen. And just like that, Matt has won twenty-five dollars. He looks back at me and smiles. I loosen my grip a little.

  In less than ten minutes, he goes down a hundred dollars and then up a hundred dollars. I pull at his elbow and tell him to take a break, but he’s ordered a free drink with the cocktail waitress and wants to wait for her to return. Waiting for his cocktail, he loses another seventy-five. I dig my fingers back into my arms.

  Matt looks back at me and raises his index finger. “One more and then we’ll go.”

  I nod and watch as he places twenty-five dollars on his next bet. He’s dealt two eights. The dealer shows a six. From the morning’s blackjack training, I know that Matt is assuming the dealer has sixteen and that even if she doesn’t, there’s a high likelihood she’ll bust. Matt then splits his hand, which I also know from my training means he now has two hands and must put down another twenty-five dollars. His next card on top of the eight is a face card. He stays. But the next card on the other eight is a two. He doubles down, which means he must put down another twenty-five dollars and then he can only receive one more card from the dealer. On one hand alone, he’s bet seventy-five dollars—a night’s worth of tips at the restaurant where I was still working just five days before.

  “C’mon! Big card!” Matt shouts and claps his hands together. I look at him as if he’s a stranger.

  But when the dealer flips the card over and it’s an ace, I’m the one jumping up and down and clapping. Twenty-one!

  The dealer busts, and I can hardly contain myself, fighting the urge to pick Matt up onto my shoulders and parade him around the casino floor like my own personal Rudy.

  I beg him to quit while he’s ahead, and as soon as he does, I try to get him to spend the winnings. But Matt has an idea. The Bellagio VIP room, where all the VIPs go to check into the hotel so that they don’t have to wait in line with all of the normals, is an unassuming little annex behind two large doors with a gold sign that reads: VIP SERVICES. Most people probably don’t even notice it, but on his last trip here, Matt did, realizing that today’s VIPs look just like the two of us, a young couple dressed in jeans and T-shirts who just spent twelve hours in a car. And if you act like you know what you’re doing, everyone just assumes you know what you’re doing. And the last thing any casino employee ever wants to do is offend a VIP by asking whether or not you do, indeed, belong in the VIP services lounge.

  The services for the very important people include a help-yourself buffet-style bar. And we do help ourselves—to a couple of gin and tonics in sizable lowball glasses. There are snacks too: fresh strawberries, dried mango, chocolate, crackers, cheese, and a wide assortment of nuts. As we step back out onto the casino floor, I can already feel the gin working its way through my system. The world is our oyster; the future is bright. Apart from my sky-high eye parasite levels, I am the luckiest girl in the world.

  “Should we find a blackjack table?” Matt asks.

  I smile and nod. “Yes, please.”

  Chapter 11

  The Road to Vons Is Paved with Pavement

  The Esquire party is held at the Beverly Hills mansion of NFL superstar Keyshawn Johnson. We valet Matt’s Hyundai, accept a couple of passed drinks, sip them by the pool, and gawk at the sweeping views and sweet C-and D-list celebrities we know so well from The Real World and Road Rules. (Randy from American Idol is there too.)

  We wake up in the morning in the two-bedroom condo on the west side of town that we’re subletting for three months. The owner of the place is a working actor in his forties who is giving us a deal because he is most concerned about the well-being of his two cats, one of whom is eighteen years old and has a hard time with any activity involving moving or eating. We have no job leads and no place to report to.

  I’m ready to start looking for a waitressing gig, but Matt’s friends encourage me to send my résumé to a particular temp agency that helped them get good assistant positions within the entertainment industry. But even after the multiple job interviews the agency has found me, no one has hired me. At the same time, the talent agent who was interested in Matt has stopped returning his calls. He resorts to sending his résumé to the same temp agency. He also applies to every entry-level job within the industry he can find and sends his short films out to every contact he has and even ones he doesn’t.

  But by early December, we’ve been here for two and a half months, and we’ve just about given up on finding jobs before the town shuts down for the holidays. (When celebrities go on vacation, everyone who works for them does too.) It’s set to be a bleak Christmas for us. We don’t have enough money to fly home, nor do we feel we can, since, uhm, we just got here.

  And then I get a call from Julian, my white-haired temp-agency agent.

  “I’ve got an assignment for you at CAA,” he says.

  CAA stands for Creative Artists Agency, which is the best-known talent agency in the business. I’d been there the previous month for an interview for a second-assistant position—basically the assistant to the assistant—during which I doubt my jaw closed once. The place exuded money and success, from the valet parking for guests to the giant Lichtenstein in the lobby to the twenty-two-year-olds dressed in slim-fitting suits. “It’s a temporary position, but with the right attitude, it could lead to more.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Now, can you gift-wrap?”

  “Sure!”

  I start the next morning.

  That night, Matt and I are still in unemployed mode, and so when we get a craving for ice cream at eleven-thirty p.m., we walk to the nearby Vons grocery store to pick up a pint of cookies and cream as we have done on so many other nights. Only, this night, I’m wound up. I’m running and jumping onto Matt’s back for a piggyback ride. To make it extra fun, he is dodging my jumps. After one such jump, I am rebounded off his body, and my foot hits the pavement at a weird angle. I stand up and know something’s wrong, but Matt thinks I can walk it off, and I try. I make it to the frozen-foods section before sitting down on the cold grocery store floor and taking off my shoe and sock to see what I’ve done.

  The side of my foot has swelled up into into an odd-looking mound. I instantly start crying. It’s broken. I’m positive.

  But I call my mom anyway to see if she agrees with my diagnosis. It’s almost three a.m. on the East Coast. She picks up the phone, half-asleep.

  “I just broke my foot,” I tell her.

  But once she wakes up a bit more and gets the whole story, she isn’t so sure.

  “There are so many bones in the foot, Ame. Why don’t you go home and sleep on it and see what it looks like in the morning.”

  But the mound is growing by the minute. Plus, in high school, my brother famously walked on a broken foot that both of my doctor parents said wasn’t broken for a solid week before finally taking him to get X-rays and confirming that yes, in fact it was.

  “No, Mom. I wanna go to the ER.”

  She sighs. “Fine.” And then right before I hang up, “Thank God I got you health insurance!”

  Matt and I go to a nearby emergency room, get X-rays, and return home at three in the morning with an officially diagnosed broken foot, a pair of crutches, a prescription for Vicodin, and the name of an orthopedist who can put a cast on it tomorrow.

  Hanging on the walls in the guestroom of our subletted condo are posters from many of the Broadway shows the owner has been in—it appears he had a good run as the lead in The King and I. When he gave us his keys, the three of us chatted for a while, getting to know one another a bit. He told us about his most successful role to date: a scene he shared with Viggo Mortensen in the Disney movie Hidalgo. He seemed so proud, and rightly so.

  And one day, a week or two into our stay there, when we had sent our résumés out to a couple of places and had nothing to do the rest of the day, we put his copy of Hidalgo into the DVD player. Neither of us had seen it before, so we turned the lights down, made some popcorn, and allowed
ourselves to be entertained. And we were. It was exciting, too, when we saw someone we knew from real life on our television screen. But the scene was so short, maybe two minutes long. And I remember thinking that what you really remember from the scene and from the movie on the whole is the ruggedly handsome Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen was the star of the show. But more important, what I remember thinking was: Matt and I are going to do better than this nice man and his two-minute spot in a Disney movie. Sure, he’s done well for himself. He owns a condo in California with a little back patio and a community pool. But Matt and I are headed for bigger things, and more quickly too.

  The following morning, Matt drives me to CAA. My crutches are in the backseat and my throbbing foot is in a Velcro and plastic boot they’d issued me last night in the ER. We make it halfway there before I flip down the visor and look at myself in the mirror. I’d hardly slept and hadn’t showered.

  “I can’t go to work like this,” I say to Matt.

  I call in to Julian and tell him about my foot. He understands, sort of.

  At this point in my life, I am just beginning to experience the straightforward kind of stress that comes with needing to make rent and pay for car insurance. As for health insurance, my mom was right. Thank God she’d signed me up for a plan on my behalf. (If she hadn’t, I’m sure I would still be paying for that emergency-room trip.)

  By my third month in Los Angeles, my Aladdin’s Eatery savings are running low. More than that, I’m worried I don’t have what it takes to make it in this city. Compared to Matt’s friends and all of those assistants who had interviewed me that month, I feel so timid and breakable, my foot just another reminder of how fragile I am.

  Since I’m not at work after all, I can get my cast on in the afternoon. I choose bright yellow for the color and am surprised to learn that though the bone I’ve broken is on the right side of my foot, the cast goes from my toes almost to my knee. But once it’s on, I feel so much better. I feel protected. I call Julian and tell him I’m all casted up and can go in to CAA the next day if they still need me.