Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (17 page)

We sat down on a bench outside and smoked our joint.

Maybe we'd find Leo tomorrow.

The next day we woke up to find we were the only people left in our hostel room, because it was noon and we were assholes. I changed clothes and told Aimee we should go to the beach. Our only true mission that day was to go to the Hollywood Athletic Club to look for Leo, but we couldn't do that till it got dark. Things were looking grim for Leo and me, but I wasn't going to let that get in my way. My chances of finding him had always been slim, but I took comfort in the fact that I was totally still his soul mate. As the trip went on, I'd come to see it almost as a Peace Corps mission. I was saving Leo. I was going to make his life so much better.

After grabbing muffins at the hostel, we got a ride to the beach with another guest, a boring Australian girl. It was a very normal ride: no drugs, no stopovers in Compton, no dog on the floor. For a moment I felt like everything was ordinary again. She dropped us off at the end of the Santa Monica Freeway. The beach was cold. It was empty. It was March.

“Wow.” I nodded, looking out to sea. “This is terrible.” I wrapped my arms around myself. After a few minutes, we decided to go back to Hollywood.

By bus.

What we didn't know: the city bus to Hollywood seats all unstable patients, poor seniors, and young black girls who sing like TLC.

At the back of the bus, we met a crazy guy from Venice Beach who thought he was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“I'm Basquiat!” he said out loud to no one in particular.

No one else answered him, so I did. “Basquiat died in the eighties,” I said, looking at him skeptically. “After he dated Madonna.”

He looked pleasantly surprised that I responded. He leaned his head back into a patch of sunlight and shut his eyes.

“I'm glad you believed that lie,” he said. “It's given me so much peace and freedom to live.”

“What do you do now?” He was actually better looking than Basquiat, but I could see why he'd chosen him. There were similarities. They were both black, for one.

He sat up and looked at me. “I live in Venice. I draw people on the beach.”

“Oh,” I said. “You gave up being a lucrative artist in New York to be a street sketcher in Venice Beach? Makes total sense.” I noticed an old woman a few seats ahead of us moving her hand in her purse.

Basquiat nodded. “It was the smartest thing I did.”

“
Hey! Hey! BUGS AND BOYS, BOYS AND BUGS!!
” It was the woman with the purse. She pulled a sharp pencil out of her bag, then raised it over her head. She didn't plunge it down into the kid in the seat beside her; she sort of just brought her arm down and slashed him a little with it. Like she was using a butter knife to spread butter on toast, only with the sharp tip of a pencil on his throat.

The driver stopped and kicked the woman off the bus. The boy was fine, with the exception of probably having nightmares about old ladies for the rest of his life.

“This is why I take the bus,” Basquiat said. “Inspiration.”

We got off the bus in East Hollywood, without a case of crabs or stabs. After walking for a few blocks, I spotted the Bourgeois Pig, a restaurant I'd heard was a Leo hangout, so we went inside.

“Are you an actress?” The guy working behind the counter looked, as a lot of guys in LA did, like Adam Goldberg. I was more sick of the actual answer to this question—“No, I'm a Canadian stalking Leo”—than the question itself, so I lied.

“No, I'm in a band.”

He passed me my cappuccino. “So am I. I play lead. You?”

Shit. “I'm the singer.” I'm a terrible liar. “But I have nodules right now. So I can't sing for you or anything. It's tough not being able to use my instrument.” I sipped my drink.

Aimee made a tour of the café and came back shaking her head.

“He isn't here, but I met a guy back there who wants to play pool.”

I looked past her and saw five Asian guys with one white guy—who, again, looked like Adam Goldberg. I shrugged, and Aimee went back to them.

“I'm Dave,” the guy behind the counter said to me, holding out his hand.

“I'm Veronica. So that castle over there—is that the Scientology Celebrity Centre?”

Across the street was a giant and beautiful building and garden with a huge yellow neon sign on the roof:
CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY CELEBRITY CENTRE
.

He nodded. “Yep. That's where Tom Cruise and John Travolta like to play. It used to be a hotel, like the Chateau Marmont. It was going to be demolished in the seventies, but the church bought it.” So it was a church full of bedrooms? I appreciated the convenience.

“Well,” I said, “I'd consider becoming famous just so I could apply to the church and get into that place.”

“Don't even joke about it.” Dave looked around and leaned in. I returned the lean. “I had a friend, and he met this actress who brought him there and he didn't get out for days.”

“Why?” I whispered. “Because they were fucking in one of the suites?”

He shook his head, still serious. “They were trying to brainwash him.”

Oh. “Leonardo DiCaprio isn't a Scientologist, is he?”

Dave stood up straight. “No. Why do you bring him up?”

“I don't know. I just like him. Does he hang out here?”

Dave yelled over the coffee grinder. “Yeah, he plays pool here sometimes. But he isn't a Scientologist. They don't really come in here. Everything they need is in there.”

Aimee walked back over. I pointed out the front window. “Aimee, wouldn't you join a cult if it meant you got to hang out in that exclusive club every day?”

She nodded. “Sure. Hey, Kelly, let's go hang out with this guy Trent. He has a suite at a Beverly Hills hotel.”

“Kelly?” Dave stopped. “I thought your name was Veronica.”

“I'm a terrible liar,” I said apologetically. I turned back to Aimee. “Why do we have to go to this guy's hotel? That's creepy.”

Aimee shook her head. “He's cool. They just want to smoke weed at the hotel.”

“You're sure about this guy?” I looked over her shoulder at him. He seemed harmless, but he was hanging out with a group of Asian guys, which I did not think was normal. That's not racist, that's observational.

“Yes. And just think: Leo might be in Beverly Hills. We haven't been there yet.”

Okay, I was fine with leaving. Leo wasn't there, and Dave was getting me nowhere.

Two of the Asian guys, Aimee and I, and the white guy piled into a Mercedes-Benz. The men all started chatting in Chinese.

“Aimee,” I whispered. “What are we doing?”

We sat in the backseat and the white guy, who was also speaking Chinese, was really freaking me out. I'd been in Havana once and I'd met a bunch of Japanese students who spoke Spanish and no English, so we'd communicated with each other in Spanish and that freaked me out the same way.

“That's Trent. He said he's Jackie Chan's interpreter. This is Chan's entourage. He invited us to hang out with him after I told him we had weed.”

I gave Aimee an “I don't trust these guys” face, which she interpreted correctly. “My intuition says it's fine,” she said.

My Jessica Fletcher glasses were definitely on: Trent's hotel turned out to be a Marriott on Olympic Boulevard. “Aimee,” I shout-whispered, “you said he was staying at THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL.”

Aimee shook her head. “I said
a
Beverly Hills hotel.”

His room was the cheapest standard room in the place, with stucco walls and multistained carpets and even though I was from Canada, I knew this was
not quite
Beverly Hills. A black light would have revealed too much.

I didn't believe Trent's story, but otherwise he wasn't giving off too many bad vibes. He was polite and not creepy, except when he spoke Chinese.

Trent, Aimee, and I sat in his room smoking and watching bad TV. Then, inevitably, I got a hankering for pizza. “LET'S GO TO DAMIANO'S!!”

“I'm tired,” Trent whined. “Let's get room service.”

I was not eating Marriott room service, I knew that much. And we weren't going to bump into Leo anywhere in that hotel.

“Can we borrow your car for half an hour?” I said.

Trent looked at me like I was crazy.

“Look, I'll leave my passport here so you know we'll be back.”

I have no idea why—maybe because we were girls (totally because we were girls)—but he let us take his Mercedes.

I didn't have my license, as I've mentioned, so Aimee drove. We pulled up to Damiano's and I saw the owner/manager through the window. He looked surprised.

A minute later, he came out to see us. “Yesterday you girls didn't have any money. Today you have a Mercedes?”

I lit my cigarette. “That's how we roll.” It wasn't how we rolled at all.

I ordered a large pizza and two calzones to go right there on the sidewalk. Then I stuck my nose in the restaurant's front door and looked around. No Leo.

“Aimee?” I exhaled, feeling low. I had no reason to feel low. I'd managed to get by for two days in Los Angeles spending only fifty dollars, and now we had a Mercedes to show for it. But still. “I'm so bummed we haven't found Leo. It's like this whole trip is solidifying the fact that I'm a rash, irrational asshole.”

“You are. It's great,” she said, plucking the cigarette from my fingers. “God, I'm still stoned. That Andy Dick weed was good.”

She was right, the Dickweed was really good. And I was glad she wasn't falling into my pity party.

“Did you leave the weed with Trent?” I took the cigarette back.

“No way.” Aimee exhaled. “He would have totally smoked it all. I just left him a tiny bit. The rest is in my bag.” She stroked her bag like it was a precious white cat from the cat-food commercials.

We got our food and headed back to the swanky Beverly Hills (Century City) hotel (shithole motel).

Five minutes into the drive, an LAPD car pulled into the lane beside us.

“Oh God, Aimee.” I froze. “I'm so scared of the LAPD. Usually I'm not scared of police, but the cops back home are like kittens compared to these guys. These guys are like the meth of cops.”

The light ahead turned red.

“Aimee, don't pull up beside him! Don't! We have weed on us! This isn't our car!!”

She started to panic. “I can't get behind him! There's no room!”

The cop car was at the stop line. We pulled up beside him. “Don't line up with him!” I whispered. “I don't want to be beside him.” Aimee hit the brakes a little too hard, then rolled forward . . . right past the stop line.

My heart stopped. I looked over my right shoulder. There, a little bit behind us, was the LAPD officer in his car.

“Aimee,” I said, talking through my teeth like a ventriloquist so the cop wouldn't see me. “YOU-CROSSED-THE-STOP-LINE-WE'RE-FUCKING-DEAD!!!”

She shook her head subtly. “No flashing lights,” she said. “We're cool. We're cool. The light will change in a minute. We're cool.” She may have been ventriloquist-talking back to me, but I wasn't sure because I refused to turn my head and look.

Then.
Bwoop! Bwoop!
The lights flashed twice. I felt a bead of sweat squeeze out of my armpit and roll down my side. An engine roar, then another siren blast:
Bwwwooooop!
This was my fate: I was a rash, irrational asshole; weed always found me; and I was going to end up in some
Brokedown Palace
jail cell spooning with a woman named MizMAY because I was following my heart. Typical bullshit.

I turned around, ready to surrender. But the cops just tore through the red light and went off after someone much more dangerous than two stoner white girls in a Mercedes.

Back to the shitbox motel with our food.

Ten minutes later we'd devoured the cheese and carbs and were getting stereotypically tired from the weed/pizza combo. Before we went out that night, I suggested, maybe we should take a nap. It was our Hollywood Athletic Club night and I wanted to look as fresh as a stoner full of pizza could look.

Trent offered up half his bed to one of us. Aimee took it. I called the front desk and asked for a wake-up call in two hours.

Trent pulled the blackout curtains and hopped into bed. For a moment I listened anxiously, worrying that he might molest Aimee, but I figured he was too lazy to rape anyone, and maybe I was being paranoid. I curled up on the stinky couch, with a blanket I'd never want black lit from the closet, and began to pass out. And that's when I heard it.

Trent picked up the phone very quietly, dialed a number, and started speaking in Chinese.

I felt an adrenaline rush, which to me is the last primordial instinct we have in this civilized world. I bolted upright off the couch and looked at the front door. It was unlocked. As far as I was concerned (and I'd watched so many
Dateline
s—I knew my shit), I'd put the pieces together: Trent had just called his Asian buddies, who were also in the hotel, to come over and gangbang us or maybe even take us away to that underground slavery ring to make those puffy jackets and XXL pants.

I ran to the door and locked it.

Trent stopped talking his sneaky Chinese talk. “Wait! What are you doing?”

I picked up the floor lamp.

I was standing in a tank top and my underwear with a lamp over my head.

Aimee swung her legs over the bed. Both of them stared at me, waiting for something to happen.

I thought,
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT. MAKE STONE PHILLIPS PROUD
.

“Trent, if anyone comes through that door
I will kill them
. Who were you on the phone with?”

“My girlfriend,” he mumbled. Total mumbly liar!

“C'mon, Aimee,” I said. “Get your stuff. Let's go.”