“Ashley Olsen. I told the owner she was coming by tonight. She’s not.”
I was not twenty-one and neither was Ashley Olsen, yet her name had gotten a stranger through the door of a nightclub without question. The mention of fame in any form, even underage fame, cloaked me from suspicion. Personally, I was thrilled to hear the promise of her attendance was a ruse—I imagine if Miss Olsen had arrived I would have been thrown at her feet like the peasant I am and dragged out of the club.
The inside looked like a minimalist parody of itself. It was just a dark, empty space with black boxes laid out in different formations, serving as tables or chairs. The music was blaring.
“Why isn’t anyone dancing?” I shouted.
If this had been the TV version of my life, a character would have explained that you don’t dance, you just stand around looking cool. Unfortunately, people don’t explain things like that in real life—they want you to shut up and blend in until you figure it out. Luckily for Carlos, the music was SO loud that he could reasonably pretend he hadn’t understood me and trot away toward someone more interesting. Alex and I were left standing by ourselves. He seemed to immediately understand that we’d stumbled into some inner circle and playing along was the name of the game. I continued shouting.
“I don’t get it; there’s all this space, the music is too loud to have a conversation, but we’re not supposed to dance? Are you just supposed to stand around looking at each other?” Alex was trying to telepathically communicate, Yes, asshole, you are. Okay?
I kept going. “Do they have to keep the music this loud because no one in Los Angeles has anything to say to each other?” I thought constantly making fun of LA made me look smart. Alex ignored me and eventually I got the message that if I was so annoyed by the situation, I was free to leave. Sadly, the truth was that I was equally under the spell of the nightlife mythos. It didn’t matter if you weren’t having fun; you pretended that you were and bragged about it later. I wanted to do the bragging bit, so I shut my mouth and stayed.
For a while Alex and I engaged with the nightclub culture as frequently as we could. My interest in getting into these clubs didn’t last long. (It would vanish completely after my twenty-first birthday because, like guys who play hard to get, or Tickle Me Elmo, or your first period, sometimes you only want a thing until you have it.) But at nineteen I did spend a short and regrettable period in a classic trap: trying to fit into something I hated, just to prove to myself that I could.
Once I realized (to my great relief) that Hollywood Party Girl was something I was not destined to be, I found increasingly joyous ways to spend my time.
Instead of privately obsessing over them, I forced Peter to help me rehearse audition scenes. The terrible roles were far more fun (and more frequent) than the good ones. The horror scenes were especially good fodder, and we’d end up screaming bloody murder and chasing each other around the apartment. It’s weird that I never got those roles.
When some of my California-native friends heard I’d never been to Disneyland, they insisted on taking me that very moment, even though it was pissing rain. We ran around the park soaking wet but almost completely alone. I started teaching myself to bake, I went to an unreasonable number of costume parties—why did my friends throw so many costume parties? I rediscovered my favorite things—long walks and great movies—and eventually the darkness and power that I’d projected onto the city started to dissipate. I hadn’t booked a job or improved my financial situation, but I was going to be okay. Then a funny thing happened.
I started getting calls from the same friends from my hometown, the ones who’d been adapting so well to college, now in the first months of their sophomore year. Back at school again, they were no longer overwhelmed by newness or possibility. They had gone back to the same place, and the same friends—some of whom they had made hastily—and now they were lost. It was fine to be a freshman who hadn’t declared a major, but now they had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives or what kind of person they wanted to be, and they were feeling the pressure to decide fast.