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

by Morris, Amelia

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Absolutely.”

  For the next two days, I wrap elaborate holiday gifts from the talent agency to their various actor and director clients. In the afternoon, I stuff envelopes. But they’re not just any envelopes. They are residual checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some of them are going to people whose names I’m extremely familiar with. It seems crazy to me that they’ll let just anyone do this. But then, someone has to do it, right?

  It’s the end of 2004, before every cell phone is also a camera, so Matt and I have a bunch of actual Kodak-printed photos from this era, many of which involve me happily posing in a way that best highlights my bright-yellow cast, which Matt signed at the very top in thick capital letters and an exclamation point: MATT!

  And all I can say is thank God for being young and naïve; that the woman who read my eye didn’t also read my palm and give us a forecast of the road that lay ahead. Because, although our Hollywood experience wasn’t going very well so far, and while we might not have moved out there just to be unemployed and laid up, you can’t tell from these photos. No. We look as hopeful, as optimistic, and in my case, as parasite-eyed as possible.

  Chapter 12

  Starting from Scratch

  Between the last days of 2004 and first weeks of 2005, I get my broken foot in the door temping full-time at a production company in Hollywood; we find an affordable two-bedroom apartment in centrally located West Hollywood; and so that I can stop relying on Matt for rides to work, with a gracious loan from Bruce, I buy a five-year-old Toyota Echo from a woman in Glendale who is marrying a guy who “isn’t going to have his wife driving around in a five-year-old Toyota Echo.”

  Meanwhile, having given up on finding work through temp agencies, Matt finds a job through a friend of a friend as an occasional assistant to the guy who writes lyrics for Barry Manilow. His name is Marty Panzer. Mr. Panzer lives, works, and chain-smokes out of his Sunset Strip one-bedroom apartment, the walls of which are adorned with many gold records as well as a giant-size oil painting of his mother.

  Mr. Panzer doesn’t drive, so a large part of Matt’s job consists of chauffeuring him around in his Hyundai. Another part of his job includes heating up Mr. Panzer’s Lean Cuisines. At the end of each workday, Matt gets a check for $125 as well as a directive to either come back the next day or not.

  It doesn’t take long living in Los Angeles to realize you spend the vast majority of your time surrounded by extremely ambitious, successful people, their assistants, and their possessions.

  Our new apartment is located one block away from an auto mechanic shop that exclusively services super-high-end cars like Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. And because of the general overabundance of cars as compared to garage spots in Los Angeles, Matt and I find ourselves parking on the street in front of or behind a $300,000 car on a daily basis.

  When you’re surrounded by such blatant success, it’s difficult not to be fueled by it, to be pushed by it. Yes, I wanted to be a writer and, most likely, a comedy writer, but if I were truly living the dream, I would also be a comedy performer.

  That winter, I sign up for improv classes at the famous Groundlings theater, which is less than a mile from our new apartment and is where Saturday Night Live cast members like Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig started out.

  As for Matt, he and his old friend Geordie, who just moved out to Los Angeles as well, team up and begin working on an idea for an urban fishing show. Geordie is an avid fisher from New York City, and of all the Saturday morning fishing shows he watches, he realizes that none of them is doing anything different from the others and certainly none touches upon the fact that there is actually great legal fishing in most major cities throughout the world. You simply need a permit and to know where to go.

  Together, Matt and Geordie come up with a concept for a new kind of fishing show that could find a home on the Resort TV Network or even ESPN. They call it Urban Angling with Brooks Hoffstadt—Mr. Hoffstadt being a comedic yet informative fictional character (played by Geordie) who while traveling to various cities (London, Paris, Chicago, etc.) on business, always finds time to sneak away and do a little fishing. Geordie has a small budget for this project, and they decide to shoot the pilot episode themselves on location in Central Park (the lakes of which, in case you didn’t know, are stocked with a variety of fish including smallmouth bass).

  At the same time, Matt’s work with Mr. Panzer comes to a close. As he explains to Matt, he’s looking for his own personal Michael J. Fox. “You’re not Michael J. Fox,” he declares. Unable to argue with this, Matt accepts his last check and continues to search for work on Craigslist.

  One position he ends up applying for is described as a blackjack banker. He goes on the interview and is hired right away. Though the job sounds strange and includes two weeks of intensive training, which he’s told not everyone makes it through, it is paid training and it is blackjack. He takes it.

  What is a blackjack banker, you’re wondering? As we discover over the next two weeks, it’s actually quite complicated.

  Gambling laws are different in California than those in other states—one difference being that California only allows games that are player vs. player, not player vs. house. For example, in Las Vegas—which allows games that are player vs. house—in a game of blackjack, the dealer acts as the house, so if the dealer busts, he or she pays out all of the players at the table who didn’t.

  In California’s specific brand of player-vs.-player blackjack, however, one of the players must act as the house, and if he busts, he has to pay out the other players at the table, which could very well be impossible if he has only twenty bucks in front of him and owes each of the other five players twenty bucks.

  This is where Matt’s company enters the picture. They hire and train people like Matt to arrive at a blackjack table with a bulletproof case of $100,000 in chips and act as a player who agrees to be the “all-time banker” for eight-hour shifts at a time.

  Matt’s first shift is at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood from six p.m. to three a.m. on a Tuesday, with an hour break at midnight for dinner. And if success and ambition abound in West Hollywood, the complete opposite can be said for the Hollywood Park Casino, which on a weeknight is mostly filled with drunks and gambling addicts.

  As we know, the house always wins (unless you happen to be in Vegas with your non-gambling girlfriend who forces you to quit while you’re up), so Matt’s company always won and Matt got paid an hourly wage. Sounds like a weird job, but hey, if you’d been unemployed for months and you like blackjack, it just might work.

  But probably not.

  Growing up with two doctor parents, you learn not to worry about your health. Nothing is ever a big deal to them, as displayed by Billy’s and my respective broken feet, which we were basically told to shake off.

  So, when Matt calls me from his car about a week after quitting his blackjack banker job (as he realized he didn’t want to be the one taking money from gambling addicts at two o’clock in the morning) and tells me he thinks he is dying, it’s really hard for me to believe. He was running an errand and had to pull over, thinking that he was going to die right there in his car. He’s less than three minutes away, so I convince him to get back in the car and drive home so that I can see him before he dies.

  When he arrives back at our apartment, he won’t sit still; I can hardly get him to look at me. His skin is clammy and he’s pacing from room to room asking if he should call 911. I tell him he’s fine, that he’s young and healthy and breathing and that there is no way he could possibly be dying. But he won’t be stopped. And so I stand in our living room, which is empty, save for our recently purchased IKEA futon, and listen as he calls himself an ambulance.

  I know he isn’t going to die, that he’s probably just having a panic attack, but at the same time, I don’t know anything about panic attacks beyond the way the two words are thrown around in casual conversa
tion to connote a certain kind of freak-out.

  When the paramedics arrive, I mostly just feel strange and slightly embarrassed about having these men in our sparse living room. And to be completely honest, when Matt asks one of them, “Am I going to die?” I have to suppress a giggle.

  But of course, it isn’t funny.

  They take him via ambulance to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, which is a few minutes from our apartment, and I follow behind in my new-to-me silver Toyota Echo—our second emergency-room visit in three months.

  I know a lot about panic attacks now. I know how we humans are all wired differently, how some of us will always be more anxious than others. I know how your mind can find ways of expressing itself in the body, how perhaps being twenty-three years old and going from feeling that your dreams are within arm’s reach to presently identifying as an unemployed (and seemingly unemployable) ex–blackjack banker within a matter of a few months might cause moments of panic, or physiologically speaking, surges of adrenaline, which cause your heart rate to rise, which can cause you to hyperventilate, which causes a lack of oxygen in the body, which will eventually cause you to pass out, unless of course you can manage to calm yourself down or seek medical treatment before things reach that level.

  But back then, I had no idea about any of this. Back then, I remember recalling that character from Pretty Woman, the one walking Hollywood Boulevard, shouting: Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream?

  Chapter 13

  Learning on the Job

  My temp job turns permanent when they officially hire me as a production coordinator at the end of February. It’s my first full-time, salaried, office job, and as such, it teaches me a lot about life. Because as I discover, like so much of life, the office is a big show. First of all, there’s this seemingly constant need to demonstrate my value to the company, and the easiest way to do this, as I soon find out, is by simply being there from nine to six even if I don’t have enough to do to fill those hours. And because of this structure, I also quickly learn that, for the most part, efficiency is not rewarded. What is rewarded are things like dedication and loyalty.

  The company is primarily known for producing movie trailers, but they have a new division that is producing DVD bonus features—those short little segments found on most DVDs, e.g., The Making of One Tree Hill, Season One. As the production coordinator on these shoots, I’m mostly responsible for making sure the talent—which is Hollywood-speak for whichever person we’re interviewing (whether or not he or she seems to exhibit much talent)—has everything he or she needs to be comfortable. When we’re not shooting interviews, I’m mostly responsible for making sure that each producer has everything he or she needs to be comfortable.

  We don’t have a computer at home, so one April day, just a few months after being hired, I stay after six to file my taxes. My desk just sits in a hallway, so when one of my superiors walks by on her way home at around seven o’clock, she sees me and pauses in her tracks. “Oh, Amelia,” she says. “It’s so good to see you here after six.”

  I smile and shrug. “Yeah, well, this work isn’t going to finish itself.”

  At the same time, I discover how difficult it is to stay late at work, as that postpones my absolute favorite part of the day: going home and eating dinner.

  Recovering dieter that I am, I still have a few bad habits. Namely, I still believe that I don’t like certain foods when in reality I do like them; I had just forbidden myself from eating them for so long that I started to believe I didn’t. For example, when Matt and I’ve finally tired of microwaved dinners and takeout, and Matt offers to make pasta for dinner, I actually say the following words aloud: “I don’t like pasta.”

  Fortunately, Matt has the strength of character to see through such a ridiculous statement and the necessary enthusiasm to teach me the joy found in a bowl of spaghetti and marinara sauce with one heaping ladleful of grated Parmesan on top. And as it turns out, I am a quick learner. Other dishes I begin looking forward to coming home to thanks to Matt? Takeout moo shu shrimp with plum sauce, grocery-store salad-bar salads with blue cheese dressing, and Hebrew National hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, diced pickles, and raw onions on top. Not exactly James-Beardian cuisine, but straightforward delicious food that I cannot deny liking.

  My office job also teaches me about hierarchy, and not just the internal hierarchy—about those people in the company who are my superiors and the few who are my inferiors (interns)—but also about the hierarchies within the entertainment industry. I quickly realize that my friends who work as assistants to producers who are producing actual movies—as opposed to the DVD bonus features I’m doing—are superior to me. Similarly, the cooler the movie one’s boss is producing, the cooler that assistant is (even if at the end of the day, all of these assistants are doing the exact same thing, e.g., reading scripts, making their boss’s travel arrangements, placing their calls, and so on). I am mainly working on a piece for the DVD release of Season One of the television show The O.C. Ergo, I am not very cool.

  But one of our friends, Martha, is. Specifically, Martha is cool because she is the assistant to the director who is currently directing the movie The Family Stone, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Diane Keaton. During the production of the movie, it turns out that Ms. Keaton’s line reader isn’t working out and she needs someone new and as soon as possible to run her lines with. Martha, who knows Matt’s been looking for work, says she knows someone who could do it.

  And, just like that, Matt, ex-assistant to Marty Panzer and ex–blackjack banker, is driving to Bel Air to meet Diane Keaton, aka Annie Hall, aka Mrs. Corleone, at her house to run lines with her for money: $20/hour to be exact.

  Simultaneously, just like that, I am now dating Diane Keaton’s line reader.

  Simultaneously, I’m beginning to realize how stupid my job is. And at the same time, ironically, I’m hungrier to succeed at it. I’m hungry to rise up through my company’s hierarchy so as to be able to rise up through the industry’s hierarchy.

  But in order to do so, I understand I must put in my time. I must wait patiently for my performance review, at which time I can make a case for myself about why I’m good at what I do, but beyond that, the ways in which I’m dedicated to the work.

  Of course, all the while I’m wondering if some of the higher-ranked people, who I’m basically aspiring to be, and who hand out many of my daily tasks, somehow managed to skip my position, because had they have been where I am now, they certainly wouldn’t be going about things so horribly, and in some cases, so rudely. But then again, isn’t that part of it? Isn’t that how they weed out the weak, so that only the truly dedicated rise to the top?

  One of the things I always liked about waiting tables was not knowing how much money I’d make on any given night. There was always the promise of the rare outrageously big tipper. Of course, the outrageously small tipper was much more prevalent, but I liked the suspense of collecting my tips in my apron pocket and not tallying them up until the end of the night, just as I liked going to the bank every couple of weeks with my stack of ones, fives, tens, and twenties and seeing how much it came to.

  As a production coordinator, there is no suspense. Every two weeks, I make $940 after taxes. Oftentimes I take this number and divide it by the hours I’d worked those two weeks in order to discover just how little per hour I was making. (Sure, I have health insurance, but what’s health insurance to a healthy twenty-four-year-old who reasons that since she’s recently broken her foot, she isn’t due for another medical problem for at least a couple of years?)

  What’s more disconcerting is that after a year, I’ve taken on much more responsibility, so each of the hours I’m there is almost entirely dedicated to actual work (as opposed to checking my e-mail, Facebook, etc.). And when I find out that one of my male colleagues who is doing the exact same job as me is making more than I am, I decide to ask for a raise. The company does reviews eighteen months after your official hire date
; for me that won’t be for another seven months. So, I also decide I can’t wait that long.

  I consult with Bruce, who on top of his day job at the bank and occasional stint ministering at other churches is also paid to give lectures to businesspeople titled “Ethics: The Ethics of Decision Making” and “Managing Change: Excellence in the Midst of Change.” First things first, he gives me my own personal lecture on how you should never say things like: “I’m worth X amount of money.” Because, and as he speaks, I can hear his cadence change into that of a motivational speaker, “Your worth as a human being can’t be measured in dollars and cents. [Pause for dramatic effect.]”

  Once we get through all of that, he helps me write a professional letter requesting the opportunity to discuss how much I am worth the idea of a raise. And just as Bruce directs me, I print it out, put it in an envelope, and place it in the mailbox outside of Mitchell’s (my head boss’s) office.

  When I don’t hear from him after a week, I follow up with a friendly e-mail.

  I believe there’s a term for what happens next: radio silence.

  I broaden my already active job search to include positions outside of the entertainment industry.

  Within a couple of weeks, I’m hired to begin paid training as an SAT and PSAT tutor. It isn’t a great job, as they can’t guarantee a set amount of hours per week, but at this point, Matt has found an assistant job of his own. Plus, when Ms. Keaton has a role she needs to prepare for, she still calls on Matt’s services, which both of us feel is bound to lead to bigger and better Keaton-related opportunities. So even if this tutoring job pays much less and even though Matt and I haven’t merged our finances, Matt says he can pay a bit more in rent for the time being; I decide to take the job.