No I do not want that. She burrows back into the building and I keep walking. I’m almost home, near the corner of Franklin and Tamarind and walking here is uncomfortable, not like strolling in New York. I take out my phone and check Facebook and fuck it all because someone’s commented about Off-the-Grid Amy dropping out of her UCB class. My head pounds, the heat, the news. Fuck.

And then it’s that phenomenon, where you’re thinking about someone and they suddenly appear. Because right there, in the window of Birds Rotisserie Chicken Café & Bar, is a photo of Amy. It’s a surveillance shot, grainy black and white, but it’s her, down to the long blond hair and STANFORD SWIMMING T-shirt. Beneath the photo are the words: Window of Shame.

I go into Birds. I sidle up to the bar. When the hot bartender chick asks what I want I tell her to surprise me. I smile. This woman has to want me. That’s how I will get her to tell me about Amy.

She winks. “I hope you like pineapples.”

I fucking hate pineapples. “Love ’em,” I say. “Bring it.”

Her tits are hard, fake, harsh like her, strapped against her chest by her black tank top. Her name is Deana and she is what happens when the hot girl in the Guns N’ Roses video grows up. It’s real now and she tells me how Amy made it onto the Window of Shame.

“She started coming in a couple weeks ago,” she says. “She was a pain in the ass from day one, asking for blueberry vodka and sending back drinks claiming they were weak or not what she wanted. Totally shady. Like, bitch, I saw you water it down. Then she just walked out, didn’t pay her bill.”

“The worst,” I say. “Did you call the police?”

Deana stops shaking my drink and looks at an old guy with slick red hair. They laugh in an inside joke sort of way. “Did we call the police?” she repeats.

“How many minutes ago exactly did you move here?” the man asks.

“Earlier today,” I say. Deana gets excited and rings a bell and grabs a megaphone and I get a free shot of Patrón.

The man introduces himself to me. His name is Akim, and Deana says they didn’t call the cops because this is Hollywood. She shrugs. “They have better things to do than chase down girls who run out on checks.”

Deana says that Amy is allowed at La Poubelle because it’s different there. “Guys buy drinks for chicks like that, model types.” She doesn’t mask her disgust. “Personally, I don’t go anywhere where I can’t pay for my own booze. Self-respect.”

I stay at Birds for hours, drinking that pineapple shit, making things right with Deana, laughing at her jokes, letting her be the one to tell me that she doesn’t date customers. I leave a fat tip and bring my groceries home and change and rush over to La Poubelle, the place where Amy should be. It’s a long dark bar, like the hull of a Parisian pirate ship. I sit in the back corner. I stay until two, waiting for Amy to get there. I buy some Xanax off Dez. I’m sure that I’ll find Amy within twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. She doesn’t have class. She’ll be here. She will.

10

BUT she wasn’t there. She didn’t go to La Pou that night, or any night. And now it’s been a month and I’ve tried everything—hiking, Craigslist, breaking into Harvey’s occupant database, even Pilates—but I still can’t fucking find Amy. All I have to show for it is a farmer’s tan and a bunch of new muted button-down shirts that I never would have bought in New York. My brain hates me for all the stupid casting calls I’ve posted. None of it works. I stay optimistic. I listen to “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses and I think of hunters and explorers who spent countless nights in the wild, unsure of where they were, or if they would find what they were looking for. But LA is fucking monotonous and it’s wearing on me, the way I keep not finding her. And when I try to talk to people, everyone says the same thing: Tinder!

Fuck them. Amy’s not on Tinder. She’s too smart. Too phony. Too old-fashioned. We are the same. I get so mad that I can’t sleep and Dez laughs—you do like your downers—and I collect Percocets, just in case I need to drug her.

I hate it here. Everyone is wrong. Delilah is bad at flirting. Harvey is too aggressive about drinking. And every day is actually three days, a freezing morning, a blistering day, and a cool night. You need a lot of clothes. And every day is the same day, which is why it’s important to hang a calendar. I see why people move here and wake up one day scratching their heads, wondering when they turned forty or what year it is.

It’s claustrophobic and I have no car and I hate Amy for not being on Facebook, for not having an e-mail I could hack. I live almost exclusively in this one giant square of earth bound by Tamarind Avenue on the west and Canyon Drive on the east. In New York, you can walk for hours and go unnoticed and you can follow a woman for several blocks without her knowing. But the cliché is real and people don’t walk here unless it’s to improve their precious fucking bodies or to reach another form of transportation, a car, a bus, a Lyft. They put on sneakers and carry silver canteens around and what I would do to just have one hour on Seventh Avenue in the middle of the night. I miss being invisible. I think I might be getting fat too.

Every day some awful noise wakes me up, Stevie from the Pantry accidentally texting me instead of his girlfriend, Harvey practicing with his ukulele, or people showing up to shoot piece of shit shorts in the building. I am not a snob, but the average person here is just, well . . . it’s not New York. I stare at my popcorn ceiling and think about my beautiful old apartment. I check up on Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam; I live vicariously through them now. Sometimes I think about friending them and confessing everything. Maybe Amy mixed up and told one of the girls something that would help me find her. But she’s a professional. She knew what she was doing.

AT the beginning of July I sign a rent check and hand it over to Harvey.

“Don’t look glum,” he says. “They say it takes about ten years to settle in here. You gotta stay positive. Am I right or am I right?”

I give him the thumbs-up he wants so badly and he claps and I flee and I’m so sick of the stupidity of it all, Harvey and his big fucking smile, my boss Calvin, who is a whole other kind of annoying.

It’s nothing like Mooney Books and Calvin is one of those people who is better on Facebook than he is in real life. He would be wiser to evaporate and live exclusively online with his telegenic swath of thick, dark hair. I want to wipe it the fuck off his forehead and take his stupid oversized eyeglasses too. I feel that way a lot here, like I want to tear people’s clothes off their bodies in a nonsexual way, shave their heads, line them all up for Silkwood showers. Calvin keeps all his passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet, fucking moron, and there’s always a movie playing in the bookstore, as if this is a video rental store in the ’90s. Today it’s True Romance so that Calvin can tell me for the fiftieth time that they shot part of it up the street on Beachwood.

“Sup, Joe-Bro?”

“Sup, Calvin.”

Something is always up with Calvin and he launches into a story about his manager that sounds made up. In the past month I’ve learned that there are many Calvins, dependent on which drugs he’s on. There is Cocaine Calvin, amping up for a Better Call Saul audition. There is Marijuana Calvin, chill and watching Tarantino and dreaming of being in a Tarantino movie and laughing out loud at jokes that are meant to make you smile. There is Reject Actor Calvin, gut protruding through a tight purple T-shirt, glasses on, reeking of hair products, telling me to be quiet because he’s visualizing.