Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (15 page)

His house was a seven-hundred-square-foot kind of place with bars on all the windows and doors. The yard was covered in spiderwebs. I felt very privileged to be there: I knew this was the kind of neighborhood I wouldn't normally get to visit unless I was an actor traveling with a police officer while researching a role. This was my version of the Universal Studios tour. And, from the looks of it in the dark, it was actually a very nice-looking community.

“Johnny, thank you so much for bringing us here.”

I looked around for any lowriders bouncing on hydraulics, then got out of the car. The entire walk up to the front door, I was braced to hear gunshots and feel stings in my body. I imagined getting shot, like, twenty times.

The house was dark, and it smelled of weed and incense. It looked like the home of a clean hoarder: lots of stuff, but no garbage, mummified animal carcasses, or rotting meat. The place was full of gold-plated statues and artwork. This family truly gave a shit about their house. I saw a hookah pipe in the corner, and there was a cat sleeping on the keyboard of a computer on the far wall. I imagined Johnny sitting there the night before, chatting with me, a far cry from the Johnny Depp in a pristine Victorian that I'd imagined.

Then, all of a sudden, a large black woman in a belly-dancing costume rounded the corner and swept into the gilded living room, her electric-green outfit bedecked with hundreds of clanking silver disks. Her top and bottoms were separated by at least four rolls of body, but I tried not to stare; I had perfect teeth and I didn't want them to get knocked out. I assumed this was Johnny's mom, but I'd just learned about a thousand lessons in assumptions in a short period of time, so I tried not to get too far ahead of myself.

“Mam, these are the girls I told you about. Aimee and Kelly, this is my mam. She's a belly-dance instructor.”

The way Johnny said, “these are the girls I told you about” made me feel like I'd just walked into a slave ring. Girls go missing all the time. Maybe we were about to be herded into an underground tunnel feeding into a warehouse two blocks away, where hundreds of girls all shared cigarettes and mattresses and made the neighborhood gangs' new XXL jeans and puffy coats. All I wanted was to find Leo.

“Hi!” I stepped forward and shook her hand. “I'm Kelly. We're here to find Leonardo DiCaprio.”

“Gurrrl, shit. Leo, that kid always yellin' outside? He ain't here.” She giggled and took a hit off a joint I hadn't noticed she was holding.

“Mam!” Johnny said, motioning for her to put the joint away. “Mam!”

“No, he's an actor,” I said.

Aimee stepped up from the brown velour recliner where she'd already made herself at home. “Can I have a hit of that?” Weed always found us.

Mam took a long hit off the joint and passed it to Aimee. Then she seemed to look her up and down for the first time. “Gurl!” she said. “You have a ras on yo' head?” in that weird voice people make when they're holding the smoke in their lungs. “You have a ras on yo' head?”

Aimee nodded. “Ja, man.”

Oh, sweet Jesus, I was not going to smoke the weed. I knew where this was headed: we'd get stoned, forget all about Leo, and end up on the couch for two days wrapped up in a Raiders blanket eating Cheetos, drinking Fanta, and watching
Moesha
on UPN while Leo was twenty minutes away waiting for me to find him and change his world.

“Sorry to sound like a total bummer, but we really have to get going to our hostel and check in. We've got major jet lag.” Of course we'd flown into the Pacific standard time zone from the nonfictional mountain standard time zone, so we'd only lost one hour. What a liar.

I let Aimee finish bonding with Mam (one or two more tokes to form lifelong affection) and told Johnny it was time to hit the road. We were out the door before
Moesha
came on.

To get our Hostelling International cards, we'd needed photo ID stating that we were over twenty-one, since that was the legal drinking age in Los Angeles. To get our fraudulent IDs, we had asked around at the coffee shop until we found two girls who were willing to lend us their Social Insurance and health care cards, which had their birth dates printed on them. Elizabeth and Veronica were both twenty-two, and now we were Elizabeth and Veronica.

When Johnny pulled the car up to the hostel, we said our good-byes and got his phone number, in case we needed another ride. I didn't feel guilty about not inviting Johnny out with us. I mean, I'd made it very clear that we were here for one reason, and having Johnny with us wasn't going to help, because:

1.   Johnny didn't know Leo.

2.   Two underage girls trying to get into clubs to find a guy was much more functional than two underage girls and a guy trying to get into clubs to find a guy.

Then we got our keys from the front desk of the hostel and let ourselves into the room.

The hostel was a converted one-level parking lot motel, and our room was a standard motel room, with a dresser, a TV, and a wooden chair. There was only one difference: it had three sets of bunk beds.

Aimee threw her suitcase up on the top bunk. “Mind if I take the top?”

I sat on the bottom bunk. “Nope, take it. Ladders are kinda blue collar.”

We lay out on our beds and discussed the plan for that night.

“I think we should spend the night at the Viper Room and then go to Damiano's Mr. Pizza.”

Aimee rolled over and looked down at me. “How do you know he goes there?”

I just shook my head. “The Internet! Those are Leo's hangouts. And this girl Brit who I met in a Hollywood chat room told us to meet her at Damiano's at one
A.M.
She said she knows Leo.”

Suddenly, the doorknob to the room turned, then started jiggling violently. Someone pounded on the door. “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!?!” a woman's voice roared from the other side.

Neither of us moved.

“What do we do?” Aimee said, peeking out the window. “Should I open it?”

“No.” I shook my head. “We have a key. Whoever that is, if they belong in here, they'll have a key. Do you see anything?”

The banging stopped. “She stormed off,” Aimee said. She dropped the curtain.

From the bed I had a clear view into the bathroom. A second later, I saw movement at the bathroom window. The window looked out on a retaining wall—there was probably no more than a foot of space between the wall and the window—but standing out there was someone who looked exactly like Gary Coleman, only she was six feet tall and a girl.

“Aimee . . .” I whispered. “She's coming in through the window.”

I stretched out stiff on the mattress, pulled the top sheet up to my chin. I couldn't die yet. Not before I'd kissed Leo.

The girl's legs came through the open bathroom window, like a spider's.

“MO-THA-FUCKAHS!!” she screamed as she stormed into the room.

I lay there with my eyes shut, pretending to sleep. Aimee sat up in bed, dangling her feet, staring right at this girl, who stared right back at her.

“DON'T LOCK THAT FUCKING DOOR!” Gary Coleman puffed.

I opened my left eye and took a peek. The girl's nostrils were flaring. That was it for me. I faked waking up. I'm always the worst at fake waking up.

“What's going on?”

“DON'T LOCK THAT MOTHAFUCKING DOOR, BITCH. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING ON!”

“Okay, can we just calm down here and not yell so loudly, please?” I said, remembering to rub my eyes like someone waking up in a cartoon. “Why can't we lock the door?”

She put her hand on her hip. “I LIVE HERE. THIS IS MY ROOM.” Then she grabbed the chair and sat down in front of the TV, her back to us.

I took a photo of her with my disposable camera. Suddenly, I felt like instigating.

“Then why don't you have a key?” I instigated.

She turned her head around to face me, slow and deliberate, giving me the “Oh no you di'int” body language I was so hoping to receive.

“If this is your room, you must have a key,” I continued.

She stood up and stomped to a drawer, opened it, and pulled out a key.

“Here's my key.”

“Great.” I smiled charmingly. “You should bring it with you, because I'm not leaving this door unlocked so that anyone can just walk in here and murder me. Okay? Hey, do you know Leonardo DiCaprio?”

Gary Coleman laughed. “
Pffft
. White girl.” She sat back down in her chair.

I looked up at Aimee. “We're leaving in ten minutes.”

 

Aimee and I took a cab down to the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard. I hopped out of the cab wearing blue velvet pants, black platform boots, and a velvet tiger-striped crop top that tied up in the back. Aimee was wearing a short skirt, boots, and a tank top. (It was the '90s, people.) The line to get into the bar wrapped around the corner, so we followed it to the front of the line at the door, looking for Leo in the line along the way. (I knew he wouldn't be in the line, but I had to dot my
i
's.) We got to the front of the line and pulled out our IDs.

The night before, I'd gone online and done some reconnaissance. For some reason the Viper Room website had a “special VIP reservation” page, so I put my fake ID name and a plus-one on the form, hit submit, and hoped they'd receive it.

The bouncer looked up at me with his giant bouncer head.

“Hi, I'm Veronica Miller. I'm on the list,” I cooed saccharinely.

I was on the top of the list.

He checked both our IDs. “What's this?” he asked, tilting the ID and looking at the hologram.

“We're from Canada,” I said. “It's travel ID.”

He passed them both back to us, pulled aside the velvet rope, and let us in.

We were stopped immediately by a small, skinny Mexican man. The maître d'.

“Ten-dollar cover,” he said curtly.

“We're VIP,” I said, smiling and shaking my head like I'd been there a thousand times before. “Is Leo here tonight?”

The man looked confused. I repeated myself. “DiCaprio? Is he here?”

“I don't know, but you're each going to have to give me ten dollars.”

What a useless asshole. I gave him a twenty.

We walked into the club. “Let's just walk around and look for him,” Aimee suggested. We took the main room first, but it was busy, and we didn't see him. Then Aimee pointed out a sheet of one-way glass on the back wall.

“That's where Leo is. The VIP room.”

“No, Aimee, he wouldn't be hanging out in there. Leo is a dude of the people. I know him.” God, I hoped I knew him; I'd just spent 10 percent of our budget getting into this bar.

We headed into a smaller room, which had a much quieter vibe. I took a table against the wall. I handed Aimee a few two-for-one drink vouchers I'd printed out from the Viper Room website. “Get me a vodka, 7UP, and lime.” I knew what I was doing; I'd been sneaking into bars since I was fifteen. I thought the only advantage of being a girl was getting into bars underage.

I watched Aimee go to the bar with the online voucher. I'm sure they were shocked that anyone had bothered to go online and print them.

Then a girl slid up beside me. “Can I sit here?” she asked.

I squinted at her. “Are you Rudy Huxtable?!”

She laughed. It was totally Rudy Huxtable.

“No, honey, you can't drink beside me,” I said apologetically. “I can't have Rudy Huxtable drinking beside me. It will ruin my night. Cliff wouldn't like it.”

Four drinks later, I started feeling less disappointed that Leo hadn't shown up yet. We were now upstairs in a booth with a guy who was in Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. He'd been hitting on Aimee for twenty straight minutes when I got up.

“I'm going to go hang out around the pool tables for a while.”

I crossed the dance floor, passing Bill Maher, who was dancing with an Amazonian black woman in a neon-pink dress. When I got to the bar, I leaned up against it, sipping my drink. A little ways away, I spotted a tall twentysomething guy wearing a great face and a suit. I loved that he was wearing a suit. My dad wore suits.

I walked up to him. He wasn't Leo, but my drunk instinct told me to talk to him.

“Hi.”

He smiled. “Hello.”

“I like your suit.” I turned away from him and looked at the dance floor. I initiated the conversation, but then turned: casual, detached, cold. This is how I flirt.

“Thanks,” he said.

I peeked back and caught a bit of self-satisfaction crossing his face. He was no fool. That suit was a calculated woman magnet.

“I'm Steven.” He extended his hand.

“I'm Kelly.” I shook it.

“Are you an actress?” he asked.

“God, no.”

“Then you must be on vacation, because if you lived here, you'd be an actress.”

“Yeah. I'm on a vacation.”

“Where are you from?” He took a good sip of his whiskey. Zero whiskey-face reaction. Impressive.

“I'm from Canada.”

“Kelly from Canada. I've been to Toronto,” he offered. “I was in a musical when I was a kid; we went there on tour.”

“What, like
Cats
or something? Were you Mr. Mistoffelees? Rum Tum Tugger?”

“No, I was in
The King and I
.”

“You were the kid in
The King and I
?”

“Yep.”

“Fuck, that's cool, Steven. No wonder you wear suits to dive bars.”

That was a much more obvious flirt from me.

“How long are you in town for, Kelly from Canada?”

“I'm only here for another forty-eight hours.” As soon as I said that, I wanted to take it back. Saying “forty-eight hours” was a MAJOR jinx, as in,
Did you ever see the episode of
48 Hours
where two girls like me and Aimee get murdered on a trip to LA?