She'll turn the glitter into litter and your dreams into pyramid schemes.
When I turned twenty-one I lived in a glass house in Beachwood Canyon with a wrap-around porch that overlooked the Hollywood sign. I smoked a pack of a day and earned my pay by working as a night receptionist for The New York Film Academy in Burbank. I spent my days driving to auditions for parts I’d never get.
The glasshouse was a mid-century modern mini-mansion that looked as if it had been plucked right out of a 1970s porn film. I know what you’re thinking: "How did a receptionist afford a house in the hills? We all know a failed acting career doesn’t pay the bills. Must be a trust fund baby."
Listen up, lady. I’m no a trust fund baby. Trust me. If I was living off some colossal inheritance I wouldn’t be sitting around in this ratty nightgown! I’d be somewhere more fitting; rehab somewhere fab. Tahiti. Talum. Telluride.
But let me tell you a little secret about LA. LA has an interesting way of keeping her inhabitants stuck in her wicked kingdom. She’ll choke you with her toxic smoke and polluted mirrors. She’ll render you sick from her smog and will cover up the sparkly California sun with opaque melancholy fog. The gloom extends far beyond the month of June and before you know it you’ll be teeming with looping thoughts of pending doom doom doom. She’ll turn the glitter into litter and your dreams into pyramid schemes. She’ll send the sweet promise of fame right on the next plane somewhere bleak like Spokane. And when you finally realize you’ve had enough—CHRIST all this palm-tree chasing is far too rough on your soul which is now perforated with bullet holes—she’ll bestow you with a miracle so lyrical
you won’t help but be able to stick around this no-good town.
Right before I moved into the glasshouse I lived in a haunted, rat-ridden apartment with an unhinged neighbor who’d call the cops on me whenever I watched TV. I’m serious! The LAPD would knock on my door twice a week armed with guns and noise complaints. I let my ambition rot. Smoked too much pot. My best friend had died and I was thinking maybe I should too? I wanted to be an actress but at what cost? The industry tossed me into the sea and rendered me oh-so-lost. I began to notice that everyone I knew in LA was dripping in shame, shuffling cards, playing into the nefarious fame game. Collectively we were gripping on tight with desperate might to the same rope of hope
but the rope was wearing thin like a pin
and was about to SNAP—
until one fine day
there was too much hell to pay
So I decided I wanted
OUT
of this town
before I fell
and landed dead on the ground.
(Somethings—they don't come back around. They're just too far gone to ever be found).
I sat in a car parking contemplating a nap when I felt my flip phone vibrate on my lap.
It was Charlotte.
I liked Charlotte.
“Zara?” Charlotte asked, even though she wasn’t asking. Charlotte—you see was nothing like me—she was a born and bred Valley Girl with the voice of a stoned rabbit and possessed an unshakeable habit of turning statements into questions. Not that I minded. I found the upspeak of the California Girl to be super fucking chic.
“Hiiii,” I vocal-fried trying to sound aloof because I was twenty and when you’re twenty caring is creepy.
“Do you want to move in with me? Say yes and I’ll make you a key!” purred she.
Charlotte lived in the glasshouse and I’d been there several times slugging back tequila with limes among other ~illicit~ underage crimes. She was 22 and no one knew how she afforded her sexy, sprawling, mini-mansion but no one cared. In LA no one is hell-bent on how you make rent. New York is the opposite. Tell a stranger about your studio apartment and you’re in DANGER. How much is your rent? Is your dad a drug lord—how else could you possibly afford? Not to be catty but who is your sugar daddy?
“I'd love to.” I heard myself coo. “That would be a dream. A beam of hope. But I’m as broke as a joke!” I flicked cigarette ash out the window and sighed, wishing to forever bury my head in the sand.
“You, like, totally can Z—you’ll see! I’ll charge you six hundred a month—you can do that—plus doesn’t your place house a rat?”
It seemed too good to be true but what else could I do?
That was that. I said goodbye to the rats and moved into the glasshouse a few days shy of my twenty-first birthday.
The glasshouse felt like a fever dream: floor-to-ceiling windows, white couches soiled with cigarette burns and a red wine stain, champagne bottles rattling around garbage cans, passed-out party girls with fabulous Malibu tans bronzy legs strewn across bean bag chairs, downy blonde baby hairs, a larger-than-life painting of Madonna hung heavy in the corridor. My room had Soviet red walls and I fell asleep to the sounds of palm trees swishing in the Santa Ana winds.
The morning of my twenty-first birthday I woke up and felt like my life had started for the very first time. Life before twenty-one had fleeting moments of reckless fun but it wasn’t a life that was mine—I was always on someone else’s time. Clocking in, clocking out, asking for permission to breathe, to live, to take up space. Always making myself smaller—
but I swear to Lana Del Rey—
that morning I woke up three inches taller.
