Lost In LA
Eve Marx
Word Count 1276
I’d written a screenplay about my young life and, shock of shocks, someone in the film business expressed interest. It took me six months to write the script, and I had no clue what I was doing but didn’t think that was a deterrent as it was LA. We had a sweet rental in Venice Beach, and just about every person I met was either an actor or a screenwriter or an A.D. or a film editor or working in development. Every conversation was about getting meetings and creating buzz or who struck gold, landing a sweet studio job, or on a TV series. These conversations put ideas in my head that I could write and sell a script, too, just like every other person.
I felt I had an advantage due to the fact my husband was already working in the film business. He was a screenwriter, and a few of his scripts were produced and made into B-movies that turned out to be early vehicles for future big-name stars like Kristen Davis and Julia Roberts, as well as end-of-the-road jobs for semi-has-beens like Oliver Reed and Eartha Kitt. While my husband was out all day networking and getting meetings, I was becoming increasingly caught in the stranglehold clutch of motherhood, feeling lost and like a noose was closing around my neck due to my limited existence revolving around the drop-off at my kid’s Montessori pre-school, hitting Gold’s Gym to lift some weights, and then doing pretty much nothing at all until it was time for pick up.
If my life was claustrophobic, it was partly my own fault because I barely drive, and LA is all about driving. I’ve never felt a need for speed except while cantering a horse, and LA freeways are all about speed, which overwhelmed me. I timidly maneuvered my way around the west side’s surface streets in an old BMW that belonged to my husband. It lacked power steering, so I never strayed far, preferring to plot my routes around Lincoln Boulevard, where traffic moved at a reassuring snail’s pace; if I was ever forced to leave the beach and travel inland, I would only drive on Santa Monica Boulevard because as long as I stayed on it, it was impossible to get lost, getting lost being at the top of the list of my driving anxieties, matched only by my fear of parallel parking. Luckily for me, Santa Monica Boulevard runs from Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica all the way to Sunset Boulevard, passing through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. If it wasn’t happening in Bev Hills or West Hollywood, I probably had no reason to go there.
After I my script was finished, I entered it in a prestigious competition for unproduced screenplays, where it made the first cut, which was exciting. My script squeaked through the second cut, and just when I was allowing myself to feel optimistic, I received a letter in the mail telling me thanks so much, but my screenplay was no longer in competition. I gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks but soon after began submitting it to anyone I even vaguely knew in the film business. After it sat around on somebody’s slush pile for many months, it attracted the attention of a woman I barely knew who was working in development. We'd met at a party hosted by a mutual acquaintance, and I thought I’d pass out from excitement when she called me one day and said she loved my script and invited me to meet her. The catch was our meeting was to take place not in her workplace office but at a tiny restaurant in an enormous outdoor mall forty-five minutes away in a part of LA with which I was acutely unfamiliar.
After I’d rubbed off half my eyebrows from anxiety and suffered through three nights of lost sleep, I pleaded with my husband to drive me to this mall and then leave me to my meeting. He grumbled and asked what he was supposed to do with himself while I was chatting up this woman but finally agreed to be my chauffeur if not my babysitter. We drove to the mall, which sat above two levels of enormous underground parking, the kind of parking accommodation that always triggered stress for us as we’d both become confused and lost more than once in these gigantic lots where it was all too easy to forget where one parked or not be able to find one’s car, especially if your car looked like everybody else’s.
By the time we found a parking spot, and I dutifully scribbled the location down in one of the reporter’s notebooks I always carry, I only had seven minutes to get to my meeting. I still had no idea where the restaurant was actually located, and the mall was multi-tiered, forcing me to consult a directory I found posted by an escalator. All this ate up precious time, and by the time I figured out where the restaurant was, I was sweating profusely.
I decided to douse my pits with cold water and pat them dry with a paper towel lest I stink up this meeting with a virtual stranger who was, in my imagination, the sole gatekeeper to my script moving forward. I ducked into a capacious multi-stalled women’s lavatory that, unbeknownst to me, had multiple entrances and exits. I quickly attended to my sweaty underarms and even had time to take a quick piss. Then I went out the exit I thought was closest to the restaurant but in my agitated state, instead went through the wrong door, which led me to a part of the mall that was nowhere near the restaurant. I walked around and around, but I was clearly lost and feeling panicked.
I was a full ten minutes late for my meeting. The development woman I was supposed to meet was not happy. I found her sitting at a table with a bottle of San Pelligrino, frowning. She said she only allotted fifteen minutes to meet with me, and I’d wasted ten of them. I babbled something I hoped sounded conciliatory, and she said she had no more time to talk and that while she liked my script, there were problems with it, serious problems. First of all, it was a period piece set in the 1960s, and period pieces are always more expensive to shoot, and then there was the issue of my narrator who, in the course of the story, goes from pre-pubescent to full-on teen and that would require two actresses to play the part, and that would be a problem. I listened to everything she said with a sinking heart, knowing it would be the last time I’d ever see her. She got up and left the table without ordering any food, and I left immediately after.
I found my husband sitting on a bench in the middle of the mall’s outdoor courtyard. He was holding a paper cup of coffee and reading a book which is what he always does if he has to wait anywhere for anyone. How’d it go? he asked.
I got lost, I said. I got lost in a bathroom.
Just as I predicted, I never heard from the woman who worked in development again. I never tried to show anyone else my script. Thirty-three years later, it’s still sitting in a plastic bin at the back of my closet, and I still can barely drive and live in dread of getting lost even though I know full well we’re all lost anyway.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
