Going Down in La-La Land by Andy Zeffer Read Free Book Online

being glimpsed on camera for a split second. Freezing to death while waving my hand around like a maniac and posing as some stupid loser unable to get into Liza and Halston’s playground just wasn’t worth it.
    Lucky for me and twenty other smart people, we found a stairwell in the corner of the club that led to a few locker rooms and a boiler room that you could squeeze through a narrow opening to get into. We hid out for hours, sipping hot tea and coffee, basically talking crap. When the production assistant went on this search for us we ran like the most frightened refugees you’ve ever seen.
    “ Here they come! Everybody run!” the person on lookout would urge, and we’d scatter faster than mice.
    We stood silent, ignoring the impending doom that threatened us. Stifling laughs, we kept still as the exasperated production assistant yelled.
    “ Come on you guys! I know you’re down here! Just a few more shots and then were done!”
    With the other few hundred suckers freezing their asses off outside, they got along fine without us. We spent the rest of the time playing with old hats we found in the basement, and laughing as we wondered when we’d creep upon one of Steve Rubell’s old cocaine vials or condoms. That night when the set was wrapped, we filtered into the rest of the crowd and got our waivers signed with no problem. A few months later, when the weather warmed, I was coerced back to the 54 set with the promise I’d get a bit on camera as one of the fabled and legendary bartenders. Sure enough, I was given a short scene on camera counting cash from the bar till, only to discover I had been cut and all you could see were my hands in the actual film. Not that it was a big loss. Nobody saw the big box office stinker anyway, and I got paid.
    Those memories coupled with today’s experience at Central Casting almost gave me a panic attack as I lay back in bed staring up at the ceiling. This was one of the many times I wished I had turned out to be a normal person with normal ambitions. Why couldn’t I have just decided on becoming a pharmacist, an architect, or an engineer? Anything with some degree of safety and order would do. Today’s events were the perfect example of the ongoing struggle between the side of me that desired creative freedom, artistic freedom, and fame and fortune, versus the side of me that desperately craved stability and order in my life.
    I guess many artists possess this inner conflict, almost a schizophrenic battle between the two. The bottom line in life is you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s either one or the other. I had made a choice in what path I had to follow, and these were the obstacles in my way. Whether I picked the right path to begin with, I wasn’t sure of. And that’s what bothered me the most. I didn’t have the strong attitude that it was all or nothing. I wasn’t prepared to eat out of garbage cans like Madonna supposedly did before hitting it big. Somehow the vision of a nervous six-foot-tall gay man eating out of garbage cans is considerably less of a charming tale than that of a sexy street urchin from Michigan.
    Oh, the life of a tortured artist!
    Good Lord, talk about envisioning worst-case scenarios. I wasn’t going to worry any more about it tonight. Tomorrow I would start afresh and begin pounding the pavement for a job waiting tables. But one thing was for sure: after today I was pretty sure my future didn’t lay in being a professional extra.
     
     
     
     

Circuit Disaster
     
    The job hunt wasn’t going so well. The hot bars and restaurants on Santa Monica were less than receptive. I was so burned out from hitting up every other restaurant in town I couldn’t keep track of where I’d gone or how many applications I filled out. It was the same story everywhere. “The manager is in tomorrow” or “We’ll keep your resumé on file and if anything happens let you know.”
    The worst moment was when I hit one popular and