The older woman next to me knocks on my tray table. She points at my screen. “Are you a writer?”

I save my document. I close it. “Yes. It’s a monologue in this thing I’m writing.”

She points at the headshots. “And directing? You’re casting, right? I see pictures.”

“Yep!” Boundaries: Where did they go? “Here’s hoping.”

She nods. “You know,” she says. “If you’re casting something, my niece lives in North Hollywood and she’s very talented. You can see her at Gretchen Woods dot com.”

So that’s how it is here. I tell her that I’m making an adult movie and she gasps and whips her head toward the window, and maybe now she won’t go around telling random guys how to find her niece online. But she’s given me an idea. Being a writer is a great cover during my expedition. I’ll say that I’m working on something called Kev & Mindy Forever and it will be about me and Amy and our last weekend in Little Compton. It will begin with Amy telling me that she can’t sleep in her own bed and I know how it ends: me killing Amy.

I order another vodka and Sprite Zero and go back on Facebook. One of Calvin’s friends, Winston Barrel, has requested my online friendship. He doesn’t even know me. I accept friendship with Winston. I immediately receive an invitation to a comedy show along with 845 other people. This is good. When I pull Amy’s extra-long body into an infinity pool and make it look like an accident—dare to dream!—I will be okay because I will have become a Facebook guy, a normal dude. We live in an era where people who don’t have 4,355 friends are considered nefarious, as if socially entrenched citizens aren’t also capable of murder. I need friends so that when Amy disappears, my friends can roll their eyes at the idea of handsome, gregarious Joe killing someone. I can’t be that guy who “keeps to himself.” That’s too in-line with the dated but pervasive stereotype of a “killer” reinforced by biased TV “news” shows no matter how many happy-go-lucky husbands go and murder their wives. We all want to fear single people. It’s endemic. It’s American.

I click through my new Angeleno friends on Facebook. I love them; they are like kids, the way they just fucking hope. I hate them; they are like kids, the way they just fucking hope. I envy them. They don’t sacrifice their bodies for bookstores and they don’t waste their lives underground, riding subways and exposing themselves to chemicals and old shit. People move to LA to make it. They dream harder than people in New York and believe that ferociously socializing is critical, that life is all about “who you know.”

And honestly, I don’t hate Facebook as much as I thought I would. (Suck it, Amy. Sorry, Beck.) Once you’re a member, there’s a network in which you are the center, it’s empowering. Humans are entertaining, fun to look at. So are cats. People are so lonely, they spend their birthdays on the Internet, thanking people for wishing them a happy birthday, people who only know it’s their birthday because Facebook told them. I “Like” Fast & Furious to establish myself as a fun guy and then I write to Amy: Dear Cunt, Facebook is only people trying to help each other from being lonely. Fuck you. Love, Joe.

The pilot says we’re almost here and I lean forward and see Los Angeles through the tiny window. The city is a grid, and like Amy’s bush that first time I saw it, the thing fucking sprawls. I can’t help but smile. Amy thinks she’s off the grid but she has extremely traceable rare books and aspirations that require online socialization. I’ll find her. I wish I could break open the window right now and parachute into Franklin Village, where I know she is, but then she might see me coming and that would be like whispering to the deer, psst, I’m here, right before shooting it.

8

THE first song I hear in LAX is that ditzy fucking Tom Tom Club song about getting out of jail and it sobers me up, hard. A UCLA brat bashes into me with her oversized suitcase. People are pushy and tourists are slamming into me, all of them on an exodus to get pictures of Sean Penn, who is in baggage claim. In New York, people fight to make a train to get home or to make it to the squished aisles of Trader Joe’s. In LA, people fight to smell an actor, an old man.

I’ve received two electronic communications since I landed.

One is from Harvey: Wow! You have perfect credit! Most people who move here have horrible credit!

It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation. The other one is from Calvin: We have a Blu-ray so bring any movies you wanna watch during shift.

You aren’t supposed to watch movies in a bookstore and I get into a cab and the driver taps the address of Hollywood Lawns into his GPS and I wonder if Amy took a cab or a shuttle. I wonder when the wondering will stop. I hate this part of the split, when that girl just lives in your head. I need to get laid and we take La Cienega and the city gets glitzier as you go north and I see women in nighttime dresses walking around in the day, like this is okay. I see homeless people like from Down and Out in Beverly Hills and I see the Capitol Records building and my heart quickens when we reach Franklin Avenue—Amy, Amy, Amy—and when I emerge from the cab I step into dog shit.

“Fuck,” I seethe. My head pounds, the sun, the excessive vodka.

The driver laughs. “People in LA, man, they like their doggies.”

Hollywood Lawns looks like the building in Karate Kid and the dogs trapped in the small hot apartments bark as I walk up the stairs. The for rent sign beams: month to month. I wonder if Amy lives here, in this very building. You never know. She is just the kind of lying transient who would gravitate toward this; her sublet in New York was week to week. I should have known then, but your dick makes you blind.

Harvey looks older in person, waxen, arched eyebrows. It’s hard to look at him and I let him talk to me about his act and I agree to get drinks with him. He tells me my apartment is on the first floor, right by his office, and I brainstorm future excuses to avoid time with him. He warns me about ridiculous shit. “One thing you gotta know about the ’hood, newbie,” he says. “This isn’t New York. You can’t be jaywalking. They will ticket you and those tickets will add up.”

“I knew LA was an anti-walking city but that’s fucking ridiculous,” I say.

Harvey smiles. “You sound like me when I see Joe Rogan on TV. Downright ridiculous. Am I right or am I right?”

Conversations about Joe Rogan are not a part of my life so I don’t encourage him, the way you don’t laugh at a child who swears. “Hey,” I say. “I saw the sign outside. Do you get a lot of people moving in all the time?”

“World’s full of dreamers,” he says. “Do you have friends looking?”

“Yeah,” I say. And this is where I have to tread lightly. I don’t want to say that I’m looking for Amy Adam because then, when she disappears, I will be a suspect. I am careful. “I know this girl looking,” I say. “But she wants a share.”

Fact: Amy has never had her own place. She’s a leech.

Harvey nods. “If I had a nickel for every hot babe who moves in here to sleep on the couch and pay half the rent . . .” He shakes his head. “I’d be able to paper the walls with nickels! Am I right or am I right?”

Harvey introduces me to another guy in the building, Dez, entitled, thug-light. He lives on the first floor too, and he looks like an extra in an Eminem video circa 2000. Dez has a dog, Little D, and some advice for me.

He looks at me hard. “Do. Not. Fuck. Delilah.”

I nod. “Word.”

I need someone like this on my team, someone fluent in California ’90s moron douchebag language who no doubt has access to Xanax and various narcotics.