Free Going Down in La-La Land by Andy Zeffer Page B

impatiently, “just background.”
    “ Well, didn’t he see the photos you took? Isn’t that enough?” I asked. It was a bit much to want someone to drive out to Santa Monica during a workday to be an extra.
    “ He still wants to see everybody in person. Can you do it?” she pressed.
    “ Not this time.”
    That was the last I’d ever hear from Central Casting.
    It amazed me that people were willing to drive miles to audition for an extra job that wasn’t even guaranteed. Was everyone out here on crack? Wasn’t it enough that Central Casting already had a picture of me that I had waited around for half a day to take? Not to mention all the frustrated and deluded professional extras I had to wait around with. What a waste of time, gas, and mileage. Not to mention the fifty bucks they charged to register with them.
    There had to be something else I could do other than answer phones and stick bright orange validation stamps on parking tickets.
    I thought about modeling, but the reality was that I just wasn’t that stunning. An attractive guy, maybe, but no stunner. While in college I had given it a try. My modeling career had lasted a mere few months and consisted of a page in Details Magazine and a hack runway show at a downtown nightclub named NV Bar where the biggest name in attendance was Grace Jones. I didn’t have money to sink into pictures, but if you looked that great you shouldn’t have to, an agency took care of that. That should have clued me in at the beginning that modeling wasn’t in the cards for me.
    Always being strapped for cash, however, I was not above doing another kind of modeling. And LA was the capital for this sort of modeling. I had done nude modeling before in New York, when Candy gave me the number of her hung-like-a-horse photographer friend. If I did it back there, I could do it again here.
    After getting out of Acclaimed one night, I drove to the nearest magazine stand and grabbed XXX Showcase Magazine. In the back it had the Adam Gay Video Directory which listed all the gay adult film companies. I was sure I could call some numbers out of the back of this and find some jobs that would help me out with some extra funds to pay my bills.
    I even recalled the name of a company that an aspiring independent director I met in New York told me about. His name was Perry Bristol, and he supported himself and his mainstream film aspirations by moonlighting as a director of porn.
    The company was ingeniously titled HUNG Video. Perhaps if I told the people there that I knew Bristol, their star director, they’d come up with some gigs for me right away.
    In the meantime, life at Acclaimed Talent Agency continued. Surely I could find a better job in a week or so; it couldn’t be that hard. After all, I found a job at this shit hole after only a few weeks in town. I had shot myself in the foot before, quitting a job without having another one lined up. But this place was just making me miserable, with no time to interview for anything else. And my misery must have really showed.
    “ You might think you are too good for this job, but we all have a job to do and you need to do yours too,” Matthew the head receptionist said one day in a sharp tone that basically conveyed all the venom and contempt he had for me.
    Management had begun to split up Kim and me, for fear that we were getting along too well and not paying enough attention to the phones. The consensus was we were not behaving stoic and serving enough to visitors.
    Which was kind of the truth.
    Still, it didn’t feel any better to be treated as though you were kindergartners who had to take their mats to opposite corners of the room during nap time.
    And to top it all off, I knew the Mexican valet guys were reckless with my new car, noticing some dings on it already and hearing them come around the corner like Speed Racer. One valet in particular liked to fart in it before I got in, so it stunk to high heaven. And man, could he ever