A week after graduating from college, I packed up everything I could fit into my largest suitcase and moved to Los Angeles. While the majority of my graduating class stayed on the east coast, my own exodus was as certain as my destination.
After Yale, I was worn down by the elitism, the competitiveness, the way how, after four years spent among the very gifted, very few people thought they were good enough anymore. I myself was filmy and uncertain. My mood flickered between extremes. I wanted to plant myself someplace that would believe in my dreams.
I had at this point lived just outside of New York multiple times throughout my life:
for four years from pre-k to second grade, for six years from seventh grade through senior year of high school. During those times, the city was glittering, but remote and I was always a visitor. In many ways, I had also felt like a visitor while at Yale, almost, but not quite, reaching my goals—almost the lead in the play, almost part of a secret society. I was forever standing within the gates, but not allowed access to the innermost chambers. My college was an exclusive place that valued more exclusivity. I left craving open arms.
New York City is not quite so welcoming; its very geography is against it. When I was a kid, I thought of New York as the city without a sky because of how the buildings crowded out the blue. I also thought Manhattan was a cage. It was stranded on an island. The buildings were like a maze. Everything was man-made. In my post-college state, I was inclined to agree with my younger self: New York was restrictive and it shut you out. I wanted an open road, I wanted to wander aimlessly. I didn't want to live in a place where it seemed that everything had to fight for its designated spot.
Unlike New York, which I had only experienced from the outside, I already knew LA well. My family had moved to Brentwood right before I left for freshman year, only moving back a year before graduation. The lay of the land appealed to me in basic way, even if I hadn't also been interested in the film industry.
Los Angeles sprawls and buckles and its edges blur. Down the street from where my parents lived in Brentwood, a couple kept a donkey. How wonderful, I thought, this is a city where you can stumble upon a donkey. There is room to hide in LA, to set up shop unexpectedly. In LA the center does not hold; there is no center. It is a collection of suburbs in search of a city to surround. The highway system loops and doubles over itself like a ball of yarn. I used to think I could drive for hundreds of miles and somehow still be in LA, despite having driven both into the desert and into the surrounding mountains where there are trees and the air is actually cool. Yet even outside the city limits, amongst the valley towns and the lone cattle, everything just seems like a vestige of LA.
In order to convince my family to let me move, I took the first job I was offered. As an assistant at the talent agency where I worked, I was a disaster. Never an effective multi-tasker nor particularly detail-oriented, I soon got used to being screamed at on a daily basis. My bosses demanded a seamless, perfectly scripted performance. I struggled to deliver. One of my happiest memories at work involved hiding in a utility closet with a fellow assistant. When I eventually got fired, the prevailing emotion was joy: the afternoon was mine and I sped off in my car as the radio played Royals.
New York is a place that demands you have a goal and the ability to execute on that goal. While opportunities abound, they exist behind carefully locked doors, and getting fired there would have truly alarmed me. In order to be let into a given business in the city, you have to have to have a resume, or a product, and only then can you apply for a key. You have to be serious. Otherwise you suffer: the city is cold and expensive; New York won't give you anything for free. In Los Angeles, however, being temporarily unemployed, eventually led to a more adventurous time, and a better understanding of the town.
After cleaning my apartment, I set out to begin Los Angeles: Chapter Two. I sent for my headshots, signed up for Improv, and started driving all over the city for auditions. It was hard at first. The fact that it was now nearing winter, but the leaves weren't changing gave me a sense of limbo. No more classes, no clear career trajectory, only eternal sunshine. I grew increasingly uneasy, but reasoned that this was better than New York, where time would have ground down relentlessly.
Los Angeles is well-suited to at least temporally placate the dysfunctional, insecure artist. It is a city where you can get relatively far if they like your smile, your voice, or your bust; and even if they don't the city itself will still soothe your pain. The weather is easy, the rent is half the price, and some of the best activities don't cost a thing—going to the Malibu, hiking Temescal Canyon, or playing tennis at the public courts in Beverly Hills. Even the homeless sometimes give the vibe that they are just hanging out. At Venice they sprawl out in the sand and play communal games of hacky-sac. Clubs don't have cover charges and while there is sometimes a list it is not impossible to magic your way in. "I know someone, who knows someone" is the line to drop. This works because everyone is in the same business and everyone does know someone who knows somebody else.
Through friends of friends, I began attending parties and listening with interest to anyone who talked to me. I became well acquainted with characters ranging from
a perpetually spaced out but actually kind of famous actress to a seventy-five year old film veteran who wanted me to call him Uncle Monroe. Through this sort of networking, I landed two steady jobs, neither of which paid much. I also acted in student films and as an extra in commercials. Occasionally, I modeled for a polyamorous photographer I met at a bar. Meanwhile, I built a life around singing karaoke badly and drinking wine with the same five people every weekend.
Unlike New York, LA courts and encourages the dreamer. In a way it even loves the promise of potential more than the realized product. Comparatively few people in LA have a set schedule. People wander. They trade in dreams. They sustain themselves on fantasy, even those who do work hard (and many don't). LA will open its doors to anyone who can talk a good game. It can't afford not to. It's difficult to distinguish between charlatans and the real deal; everyone is someone else anyway. It goes without saying that every waiter and bouncer is an actor, but those are just the most obvious examples.
When my family first moved to LA, I remember walking down the street by my house and coming across a large black limousine. There was a man inside, reclined almost all the way, with dark sunglasses, and gold fillings. As I walked past, he popped up from his reverie. We struck up a conversation and he revealed how he was going to revolutionize the media world. At the time, I was startled, but by the time I had settled into my own life, it seemed ordinary. Lyft, the car service all of LA uses when too drunk to drive, is stocked entirely with potential stars. Its slogan reads "your friend with a car;" you are supposed to sit upfront with the driver. On my way to LA nightlife, my Lyft driver and I would occasionally exchange business cards.
There is a sense that the hustle never stops, which slowly became my least favorite aspect of the city. There is something tiring in having to constantly pitch your screenplay at the bar and I never got used to saying "I'm a writer" or "I'm an actor," when I wasn't actively getting work for either. In New York, you also need to hustle, but it seems to me to be a specific hustle, one that is directed towards the office building, the client, the producer. I know this because my friends in New York have a time and a place for their work. In Los Angeles, the entirety of the environment is the working environment. Hustling for work gets conflated with clubbing, gets conflated with flirting, gets conflated with sex.
Everyone is on the make. I remember flirting with a boy at a club, when he handed me his business card. "Look me up," he said. Everyone has unlimited potential and anyone might be discovered by anyone at any time. I was stopped while on my run and while grocery shopping on a semi-regular basis. One night while walking home in my red jacket, a car pulled up to my side. If this had happened in New York, I would have been terrified, but this was West Hollywood and it really did feel like a town. A man rolled down his window. He was slightly overweight and wore a lot of rings. "I design jewelry," he said, "For the stars. You could get in on it. You have the face."
My favorite LA quote: "In New York, I'm just someone with a YouTube channel, but in LA, I'm a personality."
My favorite LA moment: The hostess of a mansion party abruptly breaks off a conversation. "Hold on a moment, I just need to finish my novel." She turns and walks into a closet. After twenty minutes, she resurfaces.
My love affair with Los Angeles ended abruptly. The lease on my apartment was up and I wanted to do something more definite with my life. There was an internship at a magazine in New York that I was going to take. Though I had fallen for the wide-eyed belief, the wondrous schmaltzy sleaze of my west coast home, ultimately I wanted something more definite if less enticing.
For all LA's promises of greatness, only a fraction are kept. Only a fraction of screenplays are filmed, only a fraction of actors get paid, only a fraction of what producers, and agents say is true. Still the entertainment machine needs that excess in order to function, in order keep the meetings flowing at WME and CAA and the restaurants serving food—maybe this is another reason for LA's open doors and come hither attitude. Moreover, in the City of Angels, the truth is largely unimportant. It is the myth we came for and not the thing itself. The Hollywood sign once advertized a failed housing project. That doesn't make it less iconic.
I left LA for a number of concrete reasons that make sense, including an internship and a desire to change the direction of my career. A more abstract reason is that I thought New York seemed more real. LA always was outside of time for me: all the seasons the same, everyone forever young, the moment always right before your big break. New York counts its minutes. Now that I've arrived I meet people frequently who refer to the illusions they once had about the city (however shattered). Every time this surprises me partially because I've always seen New York as a place unwilling to suffer illusion, ready and willing to tear apart the idle dreamer like in that song New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down. This notion itself may of course be the ultimate fantasy.
Meanwhile, I confess, that sometimes, when I'm jammed in a 6 train heading uptown at rush hour, I do yearn for my city with a donkey.
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