Read Online Box Girl by Lilibet Snellings - Free Book Online Page B

at this point, I decided my safest option was to hunker down as close to the mattress as possible, in the no-fly zone.

I Am a Slash

    People often feel compelled to offer their unsolicited opinions about Los Angeles. One time, at a cocktail party with my mom on the East Coast, a woman in her early forties said, “Oh I hate LA,” with the kind of disdain that is typically reserved for a colonoscopy. This is where I live. Where I chose to live. This is my home. If someone tells me they’ve taken up residence in even some of my least favorite cities—New Haven, Connecticut, for example—I’ll search for something redeeming to say, like, “ Amazing pizza. You’ve got to go to Peppy’s.”
    Before I moved, the Southern California commentary was relentless. “The smog is awful,” was a common thread. “Aren’t the people very fake?” was another, typically from women. The most common criticism was, of course, about the traffic, typically from someone who had never been to LA. The critic’s closing remarks were normally along the lines of, “Why are you moving there again?”
    Soon after I moved, I realized that people who live in LA loved talking about traffic, too. It’s like Midwesterners and weather, or Southerners and humidity.
    â€œIt was an absolute goddamned nightmare getting down Olympic this afternoon,” Melissa would say, grabbing desperately for a happy hour menu.
    â€œSunset was jammed all the way to the 405,” Rachel would add, sucking a glass of half-priced sangria through a straw.
    The Saturday Night Live skit “The Californians” is not hyperbole. The freeways all take a “the” before their number. I once instructed a friend who had recently moved here, “Just take The 10 to The 110 to The 101 North,” with no sense of irony at all. She thought I was quoting SNL. In actuality, I was just trying to get her back to Silverlake.
    The bad traffic, I would learn, was one of those LA stereotypes that would prove to be true. Like the freeways being much less congested on Jewish holidays, it was just fact. And there was traffic at all hours of the day; the roads could be just as busy at one o’clock on a Wednesday as five o’clock on a Friday or noon on a Saturday. There was no method to the madness. After a few weeks of enduring traffic jams that looked like a scene from the “Everybody Hurts” music video (and contemplating getting out of the car and walking, or lying down in the carpool lane), it occurred to me that traffic patterns didn’t follow the conventional formula in LA because no one, as far as I could tell, had a job.
    In this city that centered around the entertainment industry, everyone buzzed in a million different directions, like panicked planets orbiting the sun. It was agents going to meetings, casting directors getting to callbacks, producers trying to make it to set by six. And those were just the people with full-time jobs. A bizarrely disproportionate percentage of the population seemed to be composed of freelance somethings: freelance producers, freelance set designers, freelance makeup artists, and so on and so forth. Many people seemed to be many things all at once. A line from Lonesome Jim came to mind while I was sitting in traffic: “I’m a writer. And a dogwalker. And I work part-time at an Applebee’s.” I remember thinking, What is wrong with these people?
    Yet, after two years, I quit my proper full-time job at the talent agency because I wanted to write. I scoured the editorial landscape in LA and took an internship at Flaunt , an independent arts and fashion magazine. I called my dad and told him my plan. I was going to intern during the day—get contacts, experience, clips—and work at a restaurant at night to pay my rent.
    â€œHave you run the numbers?” he asked, sounding none too thrilled. I looked down at the notepad where I