Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (18 page)

I wasn't sure if I was overreacting, but I wasn't going to risk it if the outcome meant having a bunch of old Asian dudes run a train on me.

All of a sudden Trent changed. His face got all hostile. “Do not go into the lobby. You'll go down the back stairs.”

What the fuck?! As if I was going to go down the back stairs! That was clearly where all his Jackie Chan karate buddies were hiding.

Aimee grabbed our things. I sped down the hall to the elevator in my panties and a tank top, and we headed down to the lobby.

“Can I use your phone?” I gasped when I got there. “The guy in room three-fourteen is a freak and I need a phone.” The front desk clerk passed me a phone without question. He probably thought we were hookers, like Vivian Ward. But I didn't give a shit—I was not going to get raped by those guys! I pulled on my pants and cardigan, dug Steven's phone number out of my bag, and prayed he was home.

“Hello?”

“Steven? It's Kelly. From the Viper Room last night?”

“Oh, right. Hello!”

“Hey, do you think we could do that sightseeing thing right now? Or maybe go hang out?”

“Sure. I'm just watching
The Thin Man
and eating deviled eggs right now, but I'm headed to the Good Luck Club in half an hour. Do you want to meet me there? I'll give you the address.”

I dug for my pen—and that's when I realized my passport wasn't in my bag.

I'd left it upstairs with Trent the rapist.

“Oh, fuck.”

“What's wrong?”

“I left my passport with a rapist.”

“A rapist? Get it back.”

“I'm scared.”

I told Steven I'd call him back and passed the phone to the clerk.

“Can you come upstairs with us?” I asked him. “I left something in the room and I'm scared to go back alone. You don't have to come in—just stand outside the door.”

As Aimee, the front desk guy, and I walked to the bank of elevators, the door of the elevator opened. Trent was standing there.

We froze. The desk guy walked right in and stood beside Trent, who wasn't moving. He looked like he was going to kill us.

Aimee and I got in the elevator with the desk clerk and the rapist, and the door closed behind us.

I broke the silence. “I need my passport.”

Trent cleared his throat. “You didn't take the back stairs.”

This was horseshit. “Trent, I brought your car back. My passport isn't yours. I think I can call the LAPD on you for keeping it from me.”

Aimee piped up. “This is the manager of the hotel!”

The little front desk clerk looked like he really didn't want to get involved. “Oh, no, I'm just the desk clerk.”

“Yeah, but he knows
everything
, Trent,” I added.

The elevator doors opened, but I stood my ground. “The three of us will wait here,” I said. “Please bring me my passport.”

Trent went back into his room. For a moment I was horrified that he might walk out the door, hold the passport in the air, and then light it on fire with my lighter, which I'd also left in the room. (Although I didn't ask to have that returned. No need to push it.) But he came out a minute later, slapping the passport against his hand, and slapped it into my hand.

“You're crazy,” he said.

I agreed with him. “Yeah, maybe I'm crazy. Or maybe you were going to gang-rape us with a bunch of Chinese men. I don't know. The lesson here is, you can trust a stranger with your car, but don't nap with them. Or something like that.”

And then Aimee put on some pants in the lobby restroom, and we walked out onto Olympic (me with passport in hand) and hailed a cab up to the Good Luck Club.

“So what are you doing in LA?”

Aimee and I were sitting across from Steven and some woman friend he'd run into at the bar. She was a studio executive of some sort.

The bar, like the entire day, was a dive with an Asian theme.

We'd been there only half an hour, but already I was two shots and half a martini in, which was excessive for me. Then again, I'd just run through a lobby half-naked, convinced I was being chased by a hundred Chinese men.

“Well, long story short,” Aimee said, “we came here from Canada to find Leonardo DiCaprio. We haven't been able to find him, but we've been taken home by a stranger from the Internet, driven around by a Czech meth head, and attacked by a hostile hostel roommate. We've also borrowed a Mercedes and smoked weed in Compton.”

I pointed at Aimee. “Well,
she
smoked weed in Compton. What else? Well . . . we saw a stabbing on a bus. We got pot from Andy Dick. We saw Bill Maher dancing with a black woman. Oh, and we were almost gang-raped by a bunch of Asians.” I sipped my drink.

“No!” Steven's friend said. “Really?!”

I stirred my drink with a tiny plastic samurai sword. “Why would I make that up?”

“Have you been offered your own sitcom yet? Because that would really round off your trip.” She and Steven shared a Hollywood laugh. I was totally ready for this trip to be over.

“Well,” I said, downing my drink, “I think we're off.”

Steven asked, “Where to? We were thinking of heading over to the Derby. I know a guy who can get us in. It's been jammed since October when
Swingers
came out. Have you been there?”

In my head, I was already packing up my stuff. I was ready to find no Leo at the Athletic Club and leave and go back to Canada and go back to smoking weed behind the coffee shop every afternoon.

Aimee could sense that I was wandering into drunken “fuck this shit” territory and took over. “No, we haven't been there,” she told Steven. “I think we might just head over to the pool place, though. It was nice meeting you,” she told the movie exec, then shook her hand, because that's what you do with a woman who's wearing a business suit in an Asian-themed purposefully divey bar.

Steven walked us outside to catch a cab. “Are you sure you're all right?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, not really, but I really appreciate you letting us come and have a drink with you. You're a nice guy.” And I meant it. He wasn't creepy or gross and didn't smell like cologne.

Then I had a thought. “Do you have the Internet?”

“No.”

“Well, do you like to write to people?” I asked. “Because you seem to like nostalgic things, and I wouldn't mind a pen pal. I hate the phone.”

“Really?” he said. “That's surprising. I mean, I'm just basing this on the entertainment value of your one phone call to me. It was highly entertaining.”

Steven and I exchanged addresses while Aimee bummed cigarettes off people and put them in her empty cigarette box.

This is the part of the story where I always say we got to the Hollywood Athletic Club and didn't find Leo, but it's okay because I did play a game of pool with Tobey Maguire. I apologize to all of my friends, because this is a lie. I didn't meet Tobey. But I hate it that I didn't find Leo there. It always seemed like a terrible end to the story. I don't think finding Tobey Maguire makes it a better story, but it at least makes my detective work sound like it was half-decent. Like I was legit Jessica Fletcher
Part Deux
material.

What really happened was this:

Our cab pulled up to the club just as a BMW full of guys pulled a U-turn and drove off.

“
Shit!
” I snapped my head back, looking at the BMW. “That was totally them!”

I was already preparing myself for the obvious no-Leo letdown—which was 100 percent confirmed a few minutes later when we stepped into the virtually empty club.

“Kelly, why do you even care about finding him anymore?” Aimee asked, exasperated. “It was fun in the beginning, but now it's annoying me. Can't you try to forget about him and have some fun?”

Aimee was right. I wasn't super-obsessed with him, but I did hate being wrong.

And I hated the thought that I couldn't even manage being a good stalker.

I wandered up the stairs alone, following the hall to the bathroom to Ace of Base's “All That She Wants,” while Aimee set up a table for us to play on.

“Good evening, ma'am.”

I was startled. There, on a chair in the bathroom, sat an old black woman.

I was confused. I'd never seen a bathroom attendant before. So I stopped to talk to her.

“Hi there. Are you okay?” I asked.

She wasn't wearing a name tag or anything that would make it obvious to me that she was working there. Except maybe the bow tie, but that didn't occur to me until later.

“I'm fine,” she said. “How are you?”

“You really want to know?” I asked, completely ready to divulge everything.

“Sure,” she said, rolling her hips back, getting comfortable.

“I'm not good.” I leaned on the counter. “I'm seventeen years old and I'm not going to university. I work for my dad. I don't drive. I never got a year abroad.”

She snorted. “Neither did I!”

I shook my head. “I don't think that I'm
owed
these things. I mean, a European vacation would have been great. My friend Aimee got to go to Europe. You hear this song?” I pointed to the ceiling, where Ace of Base´s “All That She Wants” was streaming from the speaker. “I lost my virginity to THAT SONG! To a twin named Alex, when his twin brother was in the kitchen making a tuna sandwich.” I lifted my eyebrows for emphasis.

“Look, girl. Now you're annoying me.”

“Oh.” I wasn't expecting that.

She sighed. “I'm probably going to lose my job for saying that.”

“Why would you lose your job?”

“Because you're a guest. But you deserved it.”

Then I noticed a plate full of one-dollar bills sitting next to her. “You
work
here?”

“No, I just pass women hand towels because I like it.” She could see I was confused. “I'm a bathroom attendant.”

“A bathroom attendant? What the hell is that??” This woman sat in the fucking bathroom all night giving people paper towels? What kind of hell was this?

“Where you from, girl?”

“Canada.”

“Oh,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I been to Toronto.”

What, she was in
Cats
too?

She looked me up and down. “You seem like a nice girl,” she said. “But look at you. You got it together. You need to stop complaining about bullshit. Look at me, sitting in some dark bathroom passing people towels for dollar bills. I don't want to hear your shit!!”

It suddenly occurred to me: this lady was my Magical Negro.

There she was, sitting in the toilet. My Magical Negro!! Helping the white girl come to grips with her reality. This, dare I say, was better than Oprah. And the reality was, she was right. I had absolutely nothing to complain about. I had my friends. I had the freedom to go to another country to find Leonardo DiCaprio. I had fifty dollars left and a plane ticket home.

I went into the stall, took a piss, and gave her five dollars when I was through washing my hands. She smiled a halfhearted, detached kind of smile, and I returned it with a big, warm grin and a thank-you.

When I got back, Aimee was playing pool with two guys.

“Aimee! I found my Magical Negro in the bathroom!!”

Everyone stopped talking and stared at me.

“You know?” I continued. “The Magical Negro who helps the white person? Like Bubba in
Forrest Gump
? Or Oda Mae in
Ghost
? Only I guess this was a smaller role.”

Aimee looked at me in mild horror, then tried to brush it off. “Great! Happy for you, Kel! So this is Carlos and Jonathan. Guys, this is Kelly, who I swear is not racist.”

The guys looked uncomfortable, so I worked my ice-breaking magic.

“Right, right. Rule number one, don't mention another race EVER, OR YOU ARE A RACIST. Jeez, Aimee. So, Carlos, you Mexican? Ha! I'm kidding. Let's break these balls!”

With just a few words, the Magical Negro had totally altered my mind-set. She had managed to make me feel so grateful for what I had. I really hadn't been living in the moment.

Now I would.

Carlos and Jonathan ended up being great, absolving Aimee of her bad intuition about Trent. They were both twenty-seven, from Long Island, and they were in Hollywood trying to make it as actors. Four more drinks, and I had an epiphany.

“Oh, man! You guys!! We should go to Vegas!! Just for the day. We'll come back tomorrow night for our flight home!”

Carlos looked at Jonathan, then back at me. “Like, just go to Vegas? Like in
Swingers
?”

“I haven't seen
Swingers
. Oh, but we
were
invited to the Derby tonight. So that's a sign we should go!” I could feel the blood pumping in my veins. “Vegas!!”

“Let's go!” Aimee said.

Jonathan nodded to Carlos. “We haven't been there yet. Let's do this!”

The four of us ran out of the club and hopped into Jonathan's convertible Toyota. This was exactly what I'd wanted adulthood to be like: ideas only kids would have, but with the means of actually accomplishing those ideas. You know how kids all want to grow up so they can do what they want, and adults all wish they were kids again so
they
could do what they want? I had just found the middle ground.

We went back to the hostel to pick up our stuff. It was one
A.M.
and the lights in the room were off.

“Gary Coleman is going to kill us when we go in there!” I said to Aimee.

“Gary Coleman is in your room?” Carlos asked.

I ignored him. “Carlos, come in with me to get the stuff. I don't think she'll kill me if you're there.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Our roommate looks like a tall version of Gary Coleman, but she's a girl,” I said, getting out of the car and getting down to business. “Jonathan, keep the car running. Aimee, Carlos, and I are going to grab our bags and pull a runner.”