Some days, Calvin is a writer. He puts his hair in a ponytail. He works on something called Ghost Food Truck. Some days it’s a self-aware campy teen horror flick about a haunted food truck. Some days it’s a pitch for IFC about a food truck that is run by ghosts. Offbeat, he likes to say, as if this somehow means a TV show doesn’t need a story. Still other days GFT is a pilot script—possible HBO or FX but never network—about a serial killer who roams the country killing people and making burritos out of them. The thing is, Ghost Food Truck is like Calvin and like everyone here, so flipping flimsy. It changes depending on what he watched last night. On what his friends watched.

At least today I’m dealing with the good kind of Cocaine Calvin. He’s dancing and pounding his chest and telling me about True Romance again and he’s best like this, getting hyped for an audition, wearing himself out like a toddler. He leaves to try and make it in Hollywood and I post another useless casting call on Craigslist—tall blond beautiful.

My listings are getting more uninspired as time goes by and every day that Amy doesn’t submit a headshot to one of my imaginary castings, I feel like a detective in one of those shows where they hit you over the head with the fact that a missing child becomes almost impossible to find when twenty-four hours pass. It could drive you nuts, searching for someone in LA, and that’s why people here are so miserable. It is fucking hard to find things. Fame. Love. Parking spots. Cheap gas. Good inexpensive headshots. An agent. A manager. A happy hour where the nachos don’t suck. A tall blond con artist named Amy.

It’s been a long month without rain, without clouds, without a sighting. And it sickens me to look back because I’ve done my part. I set my traps. I assembled my team. Calvin knows to text me the second anyone walks into this place with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and Amy should have been in by now. How does she pay for her fucking superfruits?

Harvey knows to tell me if any new girls show up, tall blondes in college shirts. Dez too. Deana from Birds quit, but I set better traps there, as well as at La Pou and all the places in between. I bought bottles of prenatal vitamins and told the bartenders that my estranged girlfriend is pregnant. I worked up some tears. The female bartenders at Birds said we’re all family in the Village and they couldn’t get over how sweet I am, carrying vitamins around. The guy behind the bar at La Poubelle was empathetic. He looked me in the eye and lifted the bag and promised me he’d be on the lookout. I had so much hope. So why the fuck haven’t I found her?

Calvin comes back all coked up, hooting and hollering and doing a stupid jig he does after he nailed it. He goes on Tinder.

“Jesus,” I say. “Didn’t you just hook up last night?”

He nods. “That’s not what I’m doing now. I’m working it, Joe Bro. Tinder is the most important casting database in the world,” he raves. “The place where every actor and actress is hanging out, like what the club used to be, or the drugstore soda fountain was in, like, the fifties.” He burps. “Fucking Tinder, dude. My buddy Leo, he got cast off Tinder last week.”

“But isn’t it just dating and shit?” I protest. I don’t want this to be true. I don’t want to join and I don’t want Amy to be on there Tindering around.

Calvin burps. “Swipe. Fuck. Book.”

I have no choice. I join. I swipe. And twenty-four hours later, I think my eyes are broken and my head is so full of faces that I worry the visual part of my brain might run out of room. There are so many girls. And they’re all here. It’s an infinite database and when girls on Tinder wander into my five-mile radius, I can see them in my phone. Now Tinder is taking over my brain and every time I swipe, I picture Amy in a USC shirt, yawning and strolling out of my radius and I can’t stop swiping because I have to find her. I don’t sleep at all for two fucking days.

It’s the most pathetic move yet and I think California is getting to me. I call Mr. Mooney. He has no patience. “I told you,” he snaps. “Get your goddamn dick sucked.”

So I try. I meet a girl named Gwen on Tinder and it’s like ordering Chinese food. In the pictures, Gwen is shiny and rested, glistening like pork-fried rice. Gwen shows up and she isn’t as shiny in person, same way the pork-fried rice is always greasier than you want it to be. Her skin is puffy. She is pale. She is proof that they can’t all be California girls and she tells me about her acting class and her last bad Tinder date. She drinks red wine and looks at herself in the mirror. Her teeth stain. She sneezes. I say God bless you. I drink vodka and search the bar for Amy. It’s different being here with a woman instead of Calvin. I’m staring at people and Gwen notices. “I was the same way my first month,” she says. “Everyone’s just so much prettier here. Even the men.”

Naturally, while I’m at the bar with Gwen, I see the most attractive girl I’ve ever seen in my life. And I can’t put my finger on it. She is not classically beautiful by any means and she is hardly young. Her off-the-shoulder soft sweatshirt showcases the right amount of her boobs, like two scoops of ice cream, soft and creamy. Her hair is cotton candy. Her legs are caramel. When the bartender brings me the glass of water I asked for an hour ago, the candy girl and I reach for it at the same time.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Take it,” I say.

She smiles. It would be a dick move to hit on her in front of Gwen and I am not a dick. This is why I agree to see Gwen’s new apartment. She lives in a guesthouse by a pool in Los Feliz. It’s depressing and small and there are pictures of Madonna everywhere. Gwen humps me and I close my eyes and picture the candy girl. We use each other. She sucks my dick.

I spend the night in Gwen’s guesthouse and this is where it’s true when the deluded aspiring actors say that the business is all about timing. The one fucking night I leave the Village and fall asleep in Los Feliz, I wake to three texts from Calvin:

Dude girl here with Portnoy Complaint

She’s being weird about money wants cash not direct deposit you want to buy it off her?

All good, she was in a rush so we worked it out got it 4 u

My hands are shaking and this guesthouse smells like soup and I am out of the squeaky bed and I am looking for my shoes and fuck. This is my fault. I lost my focus. I have to get out of here but I can’t find my fucking shoe and I look under the bed and it’s nothing but dildos and stilettos and acting manuals. Fuck my shoes. I don’t deserve them.

My Lyft is one minute away and I step out into the overbearing, in-your-face, moronic sun and I duck my head and here are my shoes, lined up next to Gwen’s, as if she wanted the people in the big house to know about this, about us.

I get into the Lyft and the driver wants to know if he should take Franklin or Fountain and he doesn’t have sunglasses and the AC is broken and he misspells the name of my street in his GPS. The phrase one-night stand is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.

11

IT’S not a book. It’s a screenplay. White, thin, single-sided pages bound by brass tacks. Calvin rubs his eyes. Stoned. Sucking on a kale smoothie. “Dude, you said Portnoy’s Complaint.”

I am livid. “The book.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Right thiggity there.”

“This is a screenplay,” I hiss. “Who collects screenplays?”

“JoeBro, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to chill. Have you ever done a juice fast?” He hits a pack of American Spirits against the desk. “You get so intense. That gets your cortisol going. Cortisol is not cool.”