Take Five

Last week marked the five year anniversary of my residence in Los Angeles.

I worked as a waitress near Cape Cod in a seafood restaurant for eight months AFTER I earned my degree from B.U. to save up. I deposited my tips at the bank every single day. I even had one of those thermometer charts. Three g's and I was gone. My boyfriend and I were going to drive off into the sunset on the first weekend of November, giving the freezing winter the finger to have a fabulous life together in sunny southern California.

He told me two weeks before we were scheduled to leave that he wasn't coming.

Damn, was that a buzz-kill. He dumped me and I was crushed... plus, that fucker was my ride! I called everyone I've ever known to tell them my sob story. One of those lucky people was my old pal from New Hampshire. In true stupid-girl-with-a-serious-boyfriend fashion, I hadn't spoken to her in about a year. She said she also had plans to move to Los Angeles in two weeks and her copilot had just bailed out on her!

It was settled. Right on schedule, we packed up her Stratus and the Sears snail on the roof rack, said goodbye to our families and friends, and drove across this great country of ours. I was ready. Except I had no job. No apartment. No boyfriend. I didn't know anyone in LA. There was no pre-move visit. I did have two pots, a frying pan, a toaster oven, one suitcase barely full of clothes and shoes, two pillows, one set of sheets, a blanket and $2,500.

It cost about $500 for gas, food and hotels to get there. (We went out of our way to drive through Memphis. When we got there Graceland was closed because they clean it the first Tuesday of the month in the fall.)

We found a cheap apartment in Hollywood. I wrote a check for the first and last month's rent, bought a brand new bed for $80 and split a futon/couch with Teal. In ten days, I had spent almost 75% of what took eight months to save.

Three weeks later, we still had no jobs. Turns out, every actress in Hollywood is also a waitress. It's the hardest job to land in LA -- next to a paying acting gig. It would have been easier to become a movie producer. It was two months post 9/11 and no restaurants were hiring anyway. There goes that plan. I finally had an address in California, but no bites on the real-job front. "Hmm. It's almost Christmas, I bet we could get retail jobs at the mall." Every single store in the BEVERLY HILLS mall turned us away. Two weeks after that, I was happy to be wearing a food-service uniform at the Universal Studios theme-park serving churros and pre-made frozen margaritas. Hell, it was $7 an hour more than I was making and a free meal every day.

In January, I finally landed a cushy job answering phones for a cable company. All my high-school co-workers at Universal were jealous. "Ooh, I heard it's hard to get a job there!" Shit. I have a degree from one of the best communication colleges in the country. Maybe this was a mistake. At least I wasn't stripping...

They gave me health insurance and I got to sit on my ass in an air-coditioned building in front of a computer. No uniform. Plus, I more than doubled my hourly income -- a whopping $14.50 an hour. Free cable. I worked three to midnight answering calls from cranky old customers who complained that the buttons on their remotes were too small to read and that we should give them a senior discount so they could watch themselves on The History Channel for less.

It's about 20 degrees hotter in Chatsworth -- the planet's porn production capital -- than anywhere else in hot Los Angeles. I drove for an hour through the scorching desert during peak heat in a car with no air-conditioner. I was like a dog, panting with my head out the window desperate for any breeze I could get. It was quite a step up from chillin with some sophomore listening to the Back to the Future theme song six hours a day in awkward khaki pants with a foot-long zipper.

After a year in customer service, a marketing assistant job opened up in Orange County. Remind me to write a blog about my rent-a-wreck car rental experience. A year after that, I was promoted to coordinator. Now we're in the middle of the biggest merger/acquisition the cable industry has ever seen in the planet's entertainment capital.

My car has air conditioning now.