It’s unfair, though, when I say that these are things Los Angeles does to us. That’s kinda true but there’s so much more to it. Better said than “what Los Angeles does to us” is “what Los Angeles graciously allows us to do to ourselves”. That’s closer to the truth? The Curse merely enables us.
When you leave your home on a Greyhound Bus from Possum Scrotum, West Virginia, heading out to Tinseltown, you may well tell yourself that you have a Message for Humanity or that you want to entertain the people. You may even lie to yourself you’re just doing it to get rich so you help out your family and friends with your metric fuck tons of cash? But that isn’t why we go to the Thirty Mile Zone, if we’re being honest. It’s because someone or some-thing ripped holes in us where a self-worth should be and were left with unhealed sucking chest wounds that can only be bandaged up with adulation by millions of total strangers who can never really know us at all.
I like to think I’ve grown out of that impulse, but I’ve blown enough smoke up my own ass over the years, I should probably be cramming Nicorette Gum in there on the regular. I can’t even tell.
A different time at the production offices, I’d just gofer-ed lunches for everyone at the best chain Tex Mex place around, the sort of restaurant where even natives from Mexico would say ‘it’s not authentic but it’s fucking good.’ Sitting around, eating lunch between editing sessions, one of the producers broke that silence with a question for us all. “Would you all rather be rich or famous?”
He said rich. I said rich. Nearly everyone in the room said ‘rich’, of course, partly as wealth has more utility and less downsides, but likely also out of performative faked humility. Is that why I said that myself? Depends how much smoke I blew up my own ass that week. Finally, The Boss simply asked “Would I still be, uh, comfortable?” “How do you mean?” “I’m still middle class? I’m not digging ditches for a living?” Richest man in the room, the nearest to fame to boot, was the one to ask that. “Sure?” the producer conceded. “Oh… then, famous. Absolutely. Famous.”
As a dumb twenty something, it was sort of disheartening to hear my hero say that, the ‘Wrong’ answer to the question, but if you manage to survive to middle ages, you realize that’s not your hero being wrong. That’s just a man, same as you, speaking honestly. If you wanna be rich, you can drop out of College, live in your parents’ attic, work forty hours a week in a gas station and spend it all on lotto tickets. Better odds of winning The Jackpot than getting rich in Hollywood.
But if a chasm where a heart’s supposed to be is the issue, all you can do is go west, young man.
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