Welcome to the jungle: Part 2

Los Angeles, continued (cut from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY)

Not much has changed tbh

Below is Part 2 of an essay cut from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY. This is the last piece from the cutting room floor that I’ll share. For context on this essay and to read Part 1, go here.

ICYMI, I reviewed Gillian Anderson’s new book, WANT (focused on women’s sexual fantasies) for The Washington Post. You can read that review and the gender war in the comments here. Thanks to a sharp-eyed pal, I found out that one of the sentences in my review was included in Frank Bruni’s New York Times newsletter under the section For the Love of Sentences. It made my week!

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Welcome to the jungle: Part 2

The early weeks of summer after college graduation were spent desperately searching for a full-time real job. Unfortunately I had had the bad luck of graduating into a real recession and all the real jobs seemed to have been taken. Still, every week I’d walk to the newsstand, pick up the latest copy of ADWEEK and pore through the job listings in the back, circling my hopes for a real future.

I’d spend the following days typing up cover letters and printing my resume out on the better, fancier paper at Kinko’s, which cost extra because of the speckles in it. I’d then send it all off in the mail or drop my envelopes off in person at reception desks around Los Angeles and wait and wait.

In the meantime, I still needed to make money. I was hired as the weekend receptionist at a real estate office in Beverly Hills. I woke up early on Saturday mornings and took the bus, made coffee with the goal of quantity over quality, and watched as the agents arrived in their expensive cars for their full day of showing rich people more expensive houses than the ones they were currently living in.

My weekday job was also located in Beverly Hills, where I worked a couple days a week as a personal assistant to a beautiful young Japanese woman. She was a former Playboy bunny married to an older and uninteresting, unattractive, and uncharismatic white man. I regularly hoped for her sake that his money was worth it.

She was smart, direct, and kind and always ordered Numero Uno pizza for lunch whenever I was working. Given that I had the palate of a toddler, it was fitting that it was the favorite choice for both me, a college graduate, and her son who wasn’t even two. It was, without exception, always the best meal I had had in any given week.

One of her passions was teaching earthquake preparedness, so I spent some of my time helping her put together teaching materials or assembling the actual kits. I learned that you should include maxi pads in your kit to absorb heavy bleeding from a wound and that in a major earthquake there would be no electricity or banking or basic systems so you always needed cash in your kit and garbage bags to use as toilets.

It felt far-fetched to my young privileged American mind to be sitting in a Beverly Hills living room, imagining structural and civil collapse on that scale ever happening here. But I thought, everyone needs their thing to care about, I guess.

When I wasn’t working on earthquake preparedness, I was researching modeling agencies for her son. Sometimes I would take him to parks to play, even though I was never—and still am not—what you’d call “natural with kids”. She once gave me the keys to her Mercedes and suggested I take her son out to lunch somewhere, to a restaurant. That car is still the nicest car I’ve ever driven, to this very day.

What Los Angeles does better than almost anywhere else is to make you want. No matter how happy you are, you could be happier, it whispers. No matter how much fun you think you’re having, you could be having more. That boyfriend seems okay but don’t you want someone hotter? With better hair? A better job? A bigger dick?

Are you sure you couldn’t just want more of absolutely everything?