by Dan Bevacqua
“It was the horror thing, right?” she asked Jared. She reached out and touched his shoulder. At some point, they had to talk about bills.
“Yeah,” he said, annoyed. “The horror thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t call it a thing,” Jared said. “Horror gets out there. Horror gets you seen. Doors open with horror.”
“I know,” Molly said. “I wish I’d auditioned.”
“Then don’t call it a thing,” he said. “I don’t call your auditions things. It was a horror audition. Horror. The working title’s Funhouse.”
“Funhouse?” Molly asked. “That’s a terrible title.”
“I didn’t make it up,” Jared said. “I didn’t name it Funhouse.”
“Sorry,” Molly said, but she wasn’t. She’d always thought older guys would be less touchy, but they were actually worse. A man in his thirties understood when his life was falling apart. A young one didn’t care—he thought he had more chances.
“I got there on time. I was early even. There were a few changes, but nothing big. I was feeling good,” Jared said. “Probably another seven or eight guys were waiting. That guy from that FOX show was there.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy with the forehead. I forget his name. Anyway, I’m going over the new lines. They were okay. Not awful. I’m totally there, ready to go, and then this guy walks out of the audition room.”
“The guy with the forehead?”
“No. Another guy. Some guy. I’ve seen him around,” Jared said. “You know how it is. He comes out of the audition room, and everybody looks up, or pretends not to be looking, but actually everyone is. We’re all looking up at him, and then this guy—this fucking guy—slams the door behind him so hard a picture of David Duchovny falls off the wall.”
“What?”
“Wait. It gets worse. He slams the door, and then he stands there for a second, kind of hyperventilating, and squeezing his fists in front of his face. Then he tears the shirt he’s wearing off of his own body. I swear to God. He starts shouting, ‘Fuck this town! Fuck this whole motherfucking place! I’ve wasted my whole life! My whole goddamn life has been a waste!’ ”
“Total breakdown,” Molly said. “What did you do? What’d the other guys do?”
“Nothing,” Jared said. “He walks past everybody to the end of the hall, turns around, and yells, ‘They cast the whole thing! The whole fucking movie’s cast! It’s all bullshit! Life is bullshit! You’re all bullshit!’ ”
“Then what happened?” Molly asked.
“The producer came out, put David Duchovny back on the wall, and called my name.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was terrible. I was so there, and then it was just like, ‘What the fuck? Why am I here? What is this?’ It was the worst audition I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
“What did they say?” Molly asked. “Was the casting agent there?”
“They didn’t say anything. That was the worst part. They acted like nothing had happened at all. It didn’t even faze them. They were like, ‘Hi, Jared. What do you have for us today? We’re all heartless-monster-psychopaths who don’t give a shit about you or your time.’ I could have been Daniel Day-Lewis and they wouldn’t have noticed.”
“They probably would have noticed—”
“You know what I mean,” Jared said, putting his forehead down on top of the bar. “That guy was right. He was insane, but he was right. It’s all bullshit. It’s all pointless bullshit. How much longer can we do this? Really. I mean, how much longer?”
She didn’t like that we We did quick work in her brain. It eradicated any notions of suicide or self-pity. It made her hate him a little.
“And what would we do? Move back to your parents’ house in Idaho? Work the land?”
“I can do things.”
“Like what?”
“I could be a carpenter.”
“Why do men always—” she started. “You couldn’t be a carpenter.”
“I’m handy. I can fix things.”
“What things?”
“I fixed the lightbulb the other day.”
“You changed it,” she said. “You changed the lightbulb.”
“The toilet,” he said. “I fixed the toilet. That was impressive.”
She could have fixed the toilet too, she knew. She could have stuck her hand down inside the top part and jiggled the whatchamacallit, but she didn’t want to.
“You did,” she said. “That’s true. That was very impressive.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “What’s the point of doing this if you don’t make it?”
“Make what?”
“It,” he said. “It.”
There were times when Molly believed she had changed, that she had grown and matured as a human being. Living on her own since she was nineteen had forced her to grow up faster than most people her age. She’d had to be more realistic, more practical. It was all on her. If forced to, she would act in teen soaps for the rest of her life. Or infomercials. This was her top layer of thinking, the layer most immediately exposed to whatever bullshit rained down on her (rejection, disappointment, waiting tables). Whatever grew there (her smile, a kind word, a hug) made it appear as if she were humble. But beneath that humility, beyond the reach of the insults that leeched down into her, was the truth. And the truth was, Molly Bit thought she was the best young actress in Hollywood nobody had ever heard of. All she needed was a break.
“You will make it. You will,” she lied. Molly could make herself smaller or larger. She could be beautiful, ugly, or in between. She could dial herself up and down at will. Jared couldn’t. He worked hard, but he was all technique. It wasn’t technique, she wanted to tell him. It was, but it wasn’t. Molly knew her way around a scene, a partner; she’d learned all sorts of tricks—but so did dogs. It was something else. It came to her. It took her over. It wasn’t anything she could explain.
“Honey, it’s one day.”
“Over and over again,” he said.
Lorenzo Lamas brought over Jared’s dinner, salmon and a vegetable called kale that everybody in LA was just exactly then beginning to talk about. Food always made Jared feel better. He was simple like that. She let him eat half of it, and then asked.
“How do I look?”
“Insanely beautiful,” he said. “As ever. A classic.”
They liked to talk about her beauty as if it were a car.
“Should we take it for a spin? Go to this comedy thing?”
“Sure. We can drive it over there. I wanna park it out front.”
“I feel like it’s getting kind of old.”
“Shut up,” Jared said, and kissed her.
* * *
They went to the Laugh Factory on Sunset and watched the Upright Citizens Brigade. Molly laughed so hard her face hurt. Afterward, she ran into Lena from her acting class out on the sidewalk.
“There’s this thing,” Lena said. She had a beautiful, spacey quality. She’d grown up on a commune. “You should come.”
The party was up in Beechwood Canyon. The mansion had once belonged to George Harrison. No one knew what the party was for. Christian Slater was there. Each floor had its own DJ. The upper rooms had fragmented themselves into separate parties of young producers, agents, and creative execs. There was a piece of talk getting passed around about a special sex room.
Molly and Jared hung with Lena, who had a thing for comedians. Molly understood the fetish. For the most part, LA was shockingly earnest. Everyone was a striver. They chanted secret mantras. Comedians were the opposite of that. The most honest joke Molly had heard recently was during a female stand-up’s bit about anal sex. “You know, I was down on all fours,” she’d said, “and I was thinking about my day. I was thinking about my agent, who can’t remember my name, and how my best friend stole my producer’s credit, and how—even though I had been
promised the part—it went to that other, dumber, prettier, skinnier bitch, and I said, ‘Go for it, Jim! Ram it on home! Let’s keep this theme going!’ ” As far as Molly was able to understand, comedian was only another word for working-class manic-depressive. Like Lena, she loved them.
She went upstairs to use the bathroom. It was the techno-floor. Standing in line, she felt the bass in her teeth. A conversation screamed behind her.
“Color has a problem with syncing!”
“It has something to do with the file locations!”
“I hate computers!”
“I have another composer! It’s my roommate’s ex-boyfriend, but they just broke up, so I don’t know!”
“We don’t know how any of this will work out!”
The bathroom interior shook with the deep throb of party life. After Molly peed and washed her hands, the door opened up on her. She said, “Hey-hey-hey, occupied!” but Abigail from her acting class was already inside, holding a script in her hands.
“This is weird, I know,” Abigail said.
She was the tiniest, strangest little person. Abigail Kupchik was from the Midwest, from a little town with a German name outside St. Paul. Aside from whatever scenes Molly had performed with her in class, they’d had few interactions. She was a little over five feet tall. Molly loomed over her.
“I need to talk to you,” Abigail said, staring up. “I saw you come in here. I thought, ‘Here’s my chance.’ ”
“Okay,” Molly said. “Can we like talk out there? Get out of the bathroom?”
“No-no-no,” Abigail said, speedily. Molly realized Abigail had done a little, or maybe a lot, of coke. “It’s too noisy out there. That techno turns my brain to mush.”
“Is it important?” Molly asked.
“Super important,” Abigail said. “Super-duper-important.”
Molly sat down on the edge of the tub. Abigail, as though she was assuming an actual throne, took the toilet. The script—who didn’t know a script when they saw one?—was on Abigail’s lap.
“I’m just gonna jump right in here,” Abigail said, drumming the pages with her fingers. “I’ve noticed something about you.”
“What’s that?” Molly asked.
“You don’t have a community,” Abigail said.
“Is that so?” Molly asked. It was the first time in her life she’d heard her mother’s voice come out of her own mouth.
“You don’t have a community,” Abigail continued, “and you need one to make it in this town. You need something. There’s all sorts of girls out there, and they’ve all got three or four girlfriends who are all doing the same exact thing with their lives, day in and day out. They’re going over lines together, and taking overnight trips to Ojai. They’re doing all sorts of stuff all the time together, and each one of them is a member of another friend group, and so it keeps getting exponentially larger all the time, their community. They don’t even know they’re doing it, but they are. These women out there are helping one another get auditions and grocery shop and take care of their kids—some of them have kids—and little by little they’re doing something in a really, really weird way.”
“What weird way is that?” Molly asked. “What are they doing?”
“They’re mapping this place,” Abigail said. “They’re mapping it like ‘Tracy lives off Fountain and she can do this because she knows Lisa who works at this place and heard from Deborah about this woman named Charlie who’s a lesbian and is plugged into this gay cohort of casting agents that pretty much runs a certain corner of Universal due to the fact…,’ and it goes on and on like that.”
“You’re talking about networking,” Molly said. “I know about networking.”
“No. No, I’m not,” Abigail said. “Men network. They shake hands and make contacts. They have buddies and business partners. ‘Hey, pal. How are you, bud? Good to see you, man.’ Women make friends because their lives depend on it. They make communities, and you don’t have one, and that’s a problem. You’re too alone. You can be alone later, if you want—or if that’s what happens—but right now you can’t be.”
“What do you mean, alone?”
“I mean alone,” Abigail said. “Alone. Maybe if you were in New York, you could do it. But this isn’t New York. It’s LA. You can’t be alone in LA. It’s the desert! You’ll die! I think you’re too good for that. Too good of an actress. You shouldn’t die out in the desert without anyone knowing who you are.”
Molly didn’t care for people who were able to look past her beauty and charm to see the person she actually was. Abigail had hit upon a sensitivity—because Molly did prefer to be alone, alone or with a man, which was a better kind of solitude. She liked acting and acting class and the short films she’d done in part because those relationships were contained. Those friendships didn’t get weird or too much. They didn’t follow you into the bathroom.
“Are you asking me to be your friend?”
“Sort of,” Abigail said. “More to the point, I’m asking you to be my actress.”
“Your actress?” Molly asked. “Aren’t you an actress?”
“I suck, Molly,” Abigail said. “I’m the worst actress in the history of the world. We both know that.”
“What are you, then?”
“A writer,” Abigail said, lifting the fat script up into the air and then smacking her knees with it. “Obviously. But I’d like to be a director too. I need you for that. I’ve got the community. I need the lonely thing at the center of it.”
“I’m not lonely. Who said I was lonely?”
“Sorry. Self-sufficient,” Abigail said, holding the script out in the air. “Whatever you’d like to call yourself. Will you read it?”
It was as heavy as the first draft of War and Peace, Molly imagined, a hulking ream of ambition. The title was Starcatcher.
“Read it. You have to read it, and then you have to do it,” Abigail said. “You have to. But read it. Will you read it? Will you?”
She would.
“Oh, thank God,” Abigail said. From out of her purse, she took out a tiny bag of coke. “Do you?” she asked, shaking the bag.
“Not in years,” Molly said.
“Want to?”
“Auditions tomorrow. But thanks.”
“I love that!” Abigail shouted for some reason. “You’re so serious! You’re so focused!”
As Abigail tapped out some coke onto the top shelf of the toilet, Molly slipped past her to the door.
“Will you close that behind you?” Abigail asked. “I’m gonna camp out here for a while. See you in class!”
Molly went back downstairs past a line of twenty angry people who wanted to do their own drugs, and found Jared. He was yelling at a comedian: “I know! I know! That’s so true!” The misery of his day had evaporated out of him in a way she hadn’t expected. She yelled into his ear that she wanted to leave, and then they both yelled good-bye to Lena, and to the five stand-ups who had gathered around her. It was all so much joyful chaos. When they stepped out into the street, the near-silence of the canyon was like a curtain coming down across the play that was the party.
Driving alone in her car, she followed him. At more than a few stoplights, she looked down at the script on the passenger seat. Finally, after a mile or two, when she knew the way by heart, she picked it up and began to read.
* * *
I have friends, she thought in the morning. I have a lot of friends. But she didn’t, she knew. Not really. She had acquaintances. She had people who she thought were nice, who she said hi to at the gym. She had contacts, but little true connection. Molly often feared she wasn’t plugged into Hollywood enough, wasn’t connected to it in the way one had to be: all at once and everywhere, on the tip of every tongue, fuckable and friendable, an actor/producer/writer/director who was part of a posse made up of the same, knocking on the door of the future, one big Sundance premiere away from taking over the world.
She was only Molly, Molly thought, s
taring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, “and Molly looks like shit today,” she said aloud. The skin under her eyes was puckered and purple. She had sleep lines cutting up and down her face. Leaning across the bathroom sink, she examined herself. She looked old. She looked thirty, or even older, ancient. Was it all over? It was all over!
She took a shower. She did her hair and makeup. She nearly forgot her panic, but now she was sad. Her beauty would one day expire, she knew, and in a strange way she missed it—like it was already gone. Thinking this, vanity blended into guilt, and she hated herself. What was wrong with her? Her neck, for one thing. Her neck was too long. Her thighs were thicker than she wanted them to be. She hated her hands, her fat knuckles. And if she were being honest, she’d noticed the other morning her ass was starting to drop.
Feeling this way, she put on a pair of jeans that raised her butt up half an inch, chose a vintage Richard Hell and the Voidoids T-shirt, cleaned off her sunglasses, and hit the road. Her hair was thick and full and long. She didn’t want to muss it at all, and kept the windows closed in the Toyota, even though the morning temperature was close to eighty, and the AC was on the fritz. At the long traffic stops on the 101, she rolled the windows down, stuck her head out, and inhaled the bus fumes. By the time she pulled off into Studio City, her back was all sweaty, and she regretted the tight quality of her good-butt-jeans, swamp-assed as they were.
It was a deodorant commercial, and she’d forgotten to wear any, not a swipe of Sure to speak of.
In the parking garage, she dug through the backseat and found a program from a Clifford Odets play, Rocket to the Moon. Molly used it to wipe her armpits, but all that did was streak the sweat around and make her feel disgusting and ridiculous. The underground parking garage was like a shallow region of hell, and she continued to sweat as she went up the dank, gray stairwell. She sensed, with each confident step she pretended to make, failure.
There were three other women in the hallway outside the office. She could have been walking into the opening scene of a movie about clones. All the women were white, five-ten, and perfect. An elevator-music’d version of “Shiny Happy People” by REM played over unseen speakers. Like Molly, each of the women wore tight boutique jeans and a vintage rock-’n’-roll T-shirt. None but her, however, were sweating like a seventh grader. The women were seated on Molly’s right against the wall. Walking past, she gave them each her best closed-mouth smile. She spotted the silhouette of a lady on the nearest door, and went inside.
