It all started with a question. “How exactly do you get one of those production assistant jobs?”, I asked my roommate. He’d been working in entertainment for a while, having roles in a few feature films here and there. I figured if anybody I knew would know that, it would be him.
“You pretty much have to live in Los Angeles.” Yikes. Los Angeles. I’d been to California. A few times, in fact. For work. Of course, I hadn’t been to Los Angeles, except for the airport. I’d been in Santa Barbara. There’s no pollution in Santa Barbara, and really, there aren’t that many people. Not real people, anyway. There’s affluent white people, sure, and people working who commuted two hours to be there. The median housing cost is like, what, a million dollars? That didn’t seem like a good representation of the entire state. Still, if that’s where you had to be, that’s where you have to be.
Except, Los Angeles isn’t somewhere it seemed desirable to be. I grew up in a town of around ten thousand people. I couldn’t go to the store without running into at least three people I knew. Bad traffic consisted of both lanes being backed up for at least a quarter of a mile. Everybody shopped at the local Wal-Mart. If they weren’t there, they were at the theater. No, not that theater. The other one. The good one. Now, at the time, we were living near Miami. To me, that was the big city. The huge city. The monstrous city. I’m from Florida, and, well, Miami is the biggest city in Florida. So it’s sortof a question of relative size. And yes, Miami has bad crime, but not the part we lived in. We were living on Fort Lauderdale Beach, and it wasn’t half bad. Not bad at all, really. The sun was usually shining, the temperature was around 75 degrees on Christmas Day, and there wasn’t a hint of pollution in the air. Going to the beach wasn’t a day trip, it was something we did on our way back from breakfast.
Los Angeles, though. That was a different beast. It’s huge. It’s disconnected; spread out. Sprawl, they call it. That’s just a fancy name for poorly planned, though. Three hundred square miles of concrete spanning four counties. And right there at the northern end, was Hollywood. The center of it all. The entertainment capital of the world. Where the successful go to live in poverty. Where dreams go to die.
I looked over at my roommate. “You want to go?”
“Yeah, fuck, if you want to go to LA, let’s go.”
“Let’s do it.”
Well, that was easy.
Tags: Narratives
Glad to see your writing again
*waits anxiously for the next edition*
Hey what happened to it was all my fault? hehe
“Where dreams go to die”
I like that…
It should have been *Where gum goes to die* haha
