Like was a no-no in my world to begin with. Back at FPAC, my affable and demanding acting teacher, Mr. Kazakoff, had a laser focus on language. Kaz hated the word like. “If you can’t introduce yourself to a director without using the word like,” he’d explain, “if you can’t have a conversation about the beats of a scene without using the word like, if you can’t get through a sentence in the English language without using the word like, people will think you are stupid and they’ll cast someone else. Your ability to communicate is key.”
Using the L-word had serious consequences. The first time you said like in his classroom, Kaz would put your name on the board. Each time after that, he added a line next to it, the way cartoon inmates do on prison walls, or college students tracking the number of drinks they’ve had on their arms. From any other teacher, this might have been a pointless hassle. But Kaz was revered. With acid-washed jeans, ponytail, and wire-rimmed glasses, he cut a singular figure. Truly cool, respected teachers are rare, so a public shaming by one of the best is both highly amusing and very effective. Kaz taught us that you are what you say. Filler words weaken your speech. Flabby use of language could make a budding actor less competitive in the creative marketplace. By the end of the year, almost no one in the class said like.
On the West Coast, clear speech and fiery East Coast motivation were my secret weapons. Todd was far from the only person in California who talked like he just woke up from a nap. I’d show up to student-film audition waiting rooms full of preposterously attractive, chiseled dudes—and the “like” ratio was off the charts. Pretty soon casting directors were regularly complimenting me for being “articulate.” Sure, some of them meant it in the casually racist way, like, “Where did you learn to speak such proper English, brown person?” But many of them also meant it in the actual way! Overusing like as a slang interjection doesn’t mean you’re stupid, but it does, like, make you seem a little flaky? In a city of Todds, I stood out.
Even with my no-“like” secret weapon and East Coast hustle, as I threw myself into the process of trying to become a professional actor, I knew that breaking into Hollywood was going to be a long, hard struggle. It is for almost everybody. My parents regularly called and encouraged me to have a fallback plan. I regularly responded by telling them with confidence that those who have fallback plans end up falling back on them, so instead, every Wednesday morning, I would walk from my dorm down to the newsstand on Gayley Avenue in Westwood to buy the Back Stage West trade paper and scan casting listings, circling any of the projects that I convinced myself I was remotely qualified for. I’d scribble notes in the margins that I’d turn into personalized cover letters, which included my brand-new pager number. （I learned early on that I couldn’t trust Todd to accurately write down messages.）
I went through the same process with lists of prospective agents who were looking for new clients. Hours of my precious time and farmhand money were spent physically printing, cutting, and stapling headshots and résumés in my dorm room before walking the envelopes down to the post office and mailing them to casting directors for those unpaid jobs, and to agents for potential representation. If I had a little extra money that week and wanted to splurge, I’d take the stack of headshots down to Kinko’s, where I’d pay to have the résumés printed. （This allowed me to use their industrial-size paper cutter, which saved hours compared to cutting each eight-and-a-half-by-eleven résumé by hand, getting it to fit the dimensions of the eight-by-ten headshot.）
Like thousands of actors, I went through this Back Stage West ritual every Wednesday in the hopes of even one audition, one phone call. I was hungry for experience! Anything that would allow me to build up credits on my résumé and work my way up the ladder to better, professional roles.
The problem was: I didn’t have that car yet. Taking the bus to auditions took several hours in each direction, and my frustration mounted. In LA, traffic affects EVERYTHING. It may seem like a minor thing to readers unaccustomed to LA traffic and car problems, and how much all people who live in LA talk about traffic and car problems like I’m doing right now, but it’s actually a really big deal. It’s like a member of your family you can’t stand but can’t stop talking about. Like my cousin Raghav who caught gonorrhea during the pandemic.1
* * *
Halfway through freshman year, I had settled nicely into Rieber Hall room 507 and was regularly spending time with some of the guys in my dorm. We initially met when one of them knocked on my door somewhat at random. “I’m DLC,” said a fun-loving bespectacled dude with tattoos and a wide grin. “This is my roommate Dennis. We call him Dennis Pennis. We’re in the room above you. 607. You wanna get some food?”
“Sure,” I said, appreciating the play on Dennis’s name for the same reason I enjoyed having a guidance counselor called Mrs. Cummings.
“Tite,” DLC continued. “I knocked on 707 first and they shut the door in my face.”
“Isn’t the seventh floor the quiet floor?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you ain’t gotta be shitty about it.”
* * *
After months of applying for internships and being rejected, I landed one! It was a coveted gig at Star Wars creator George Lucas’s company Lucasfilm. Or rather, at the Lucasfilm satellite office in Burbank, about seventeen miles from campus. （The Lucasfilm headquarters is in Northern California.） The entire interview process was done over the phone, so I didn’t realize that the bus trip from UCLA to Burbank—including traffic and transfers—would take about three hours each way.
I was a full-time student, with classes every day of the week. It didn’t matter that I had a kick-ass internship for the people who created The Empire Strikes Back, there just wasn’t enough time in the day to spend six hours commuting on top of school, so I had to quit on day two. I was disappointed that I had to walk away, but I was way more frustrated that I had moved to a city with such terrible mass transit. As I got madder and madder about the need for a car in a place that called itself a “city,” I asked myself a critical question: Even if I could get my hands on a vehicle, where would I park it? I decided this was actually something I could have control over and should sort out as quickly as possible.
At UCLA there were way more students with cars than parking spaces on campus. You had to enter a highly competitive parking lottery to vie for a spot. If you were one of the few lucky winners, congratulations! What you won was the right to pay a few hundred bucks every eleven weeks for a permit to park in a lot. Everyone else had to fend for themselves, searching endlessly around Westwood, squinting at street signs.
Motivated by having to quit my Lucasfilm internship, I entered this parking lottery. You might be saying to yourself, But Kal, you didn’t have a car yet. Correct. I didn’t have a car. It was kind of like applying for a job that requires skills you don’t have—you’ll just learn them once you get the offer, right? Plus, I used my math brain to figure out that since the probability of winning the parking lottery was so low, if I entered it every quarter, my chances of getting a permit would increase exponentially as the years went on, so that by the time I could finally afford a car （which would likely happen in my third year of college）， probability would dictate that I’d win the parking lottery and get a permit. Genius! Unfortunately, this is not at all how probability works, and I won the parking lottery on my first try.2