When word spread among the homies in the freshman dorm that I had scored a permit but didn’t have a car, Dennis Pennis knocked on my door with an offer.
DENNIS PENNIS: You want to share the Panoch?3
ME: What’s the Panoch, Dennis Pennis?
DENNIS PENNIS: You’ve never seen the Panoch?
ME: I don’t think so, what is it?
DENNIS PENNIS: The Panoch is the name of my car, man. I don’t have a parking permit, so I always gotta look on the street. What if we join forces and share? You pay for the permit and your share of gas. I pay for insurance and my share of gas. You can drive the Panoch anytime I’m not using it.
ME: YES.
I was a genius!
As soon as our friends learned that Dennis Pennis and I struck a deal, they started rooting for us in a way that made me suspicious. “Maaaaan,” said DLC, “your guys’ deal sounds super tite. You think you’ve got what it takes to drive the Panoch?”
What exactly did it take? “Is it stick? I actually can’t drive stick.”
“Nah,” DLC continued. “It ain’t stick. It’s the Panoch. The Panoch is super tite.”
My college buddies—especially DLC—had an understated, shorthand way of speaking when something was up. I once stumbled upon a pair of handcuffs with the key inside （as one does）， so I handcuffed DLC and our buddy Zach together as a prank and walked away. I intended for this to only last a few minutes, but I’m so easily distracted, I forgot that I had handcuffed them until about four hours later. “Oh, it’s all good, man. You tite,” DLC said upon my return as I sheepishly unlocked the handcuffs. Except it wasn’t “all good”—the guys quickly jumped on me and carried me to a stairwell railing to which I was then handcuffed and left alone for four hours. （I clearly deserved it.）
Another time, I called DLC in a panic after playing Edward Fortyhands （a drinking game named for the movie Edward Scissorhands, in which players duct-tape forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor to each of their palms）。 It should probably be called Edward Eightyhands, since that’s how much you’re actually drinking, but in my case it was only Edward Twentyhands because I finished just half a bottle before realizing something was wrong. I was perspiring. My heart was racing. The room spun and my mouth was dry. I ran home as fast as I could and picked up the phone for help because I was freaking out and this could only mean one thing.
“DLC,” I said, “somebody put cocaine in my forty.”
“What are you talking about? You’re just drunk.”
“No way man, I’ve been drunk before. It’s never felt like this. Plus, I only had like half a bottle.”
“Yeah, half a bottle of malt liquor. It can make you feel like that if you’ve never had it before.”
“Are you sure? I’ve never had cocaine either, but this is what articles have described it feels like.”
He put me on speakerphone.
“Cocaine is really expensive, Kalpen Modi. Nobody put it in your forty, I promise. Go to sleep. You tite.”
So, in hearing “the Panoch is super tite,” I knew DLC meant either:
1） Dennis Pennis had been hiding something dramatically wrong about the Panoch or
2） Dennis Pennis had been hiding something amazing about the Panoch or
3） Both
It was both. The Panoch turned out to be a mud-brown-colored 1981 Datsun hatchback. When he took me to see it for the first time, Dennis Pennis opened the driver’s-side door, which creaked like an elephant had stepped off a tall pile of rusted mattresses. He got inside, reached across, and manually unlocked and opened the passenger door. Was I about to share a car that had no power locks and a broken door handle?
“Welcome to the Panoch!”
The busted handle wasn’t the only thing that made the Panoch “super tite.” In addition to having no power locks, the Panoch had no air-conditioning, no power windows, no FM radio, no cassette player, and, obviously, no CD player. The only available music was on a few Spanish-language AM stations. I took French in high school.
“Titest” of all, the Panoch had no power steering. At low speeds—say, anything under fifteen miles an hour—changing lanes without power steering is the same as a high-intensity interval workout. You really have to use your body weight to pull the wheel in one direction to get it to move, then lean and push it back in the other direction to get it to stay. Because this was Los Angeles, you rarely achieved speeds above seventeen miles per hour. Every time I drove the Panoch, my arms and core got a little more ripped. Especially while parallel parking.
This had its challenges when it came to those Back Stage West auditions. Many people have a gym bag. I had a Panoch bag—with a towel, some water, deodorant, and an entire extra set of clothes （the first was to drive and sweat in, the second to change into just before a casting session）。 But I had access to a CAR! Subject to the continued durability of the Panoch—and the strength left in my arms—the opportunities for internships and auditions were suddenly limitless. Yes, the Panoch was, like, super tite.4
* * *
UCLA is a big school. It wasn’t uncommon to be in a lecture hall with four hundred and ninety-nine other strangers. The University of California system is designed primarily for students from the state; very few nonresidents are admitted. This means that the School of Theater, Film and Television has an acceptance rate of about 3 or 4 percent. Nobody from my high school had ever gone to UCLA. In fact, the only other kid from my high school who went to California that year was our valedictorian, Nancy Adelman, up at Stanford. So, you can imagine my surprise when I was walking out of an American history class one day and saw a guy I recognized from home!
He already had an unmistakably LA vibe, and it impressed me that he learned it so quickly. He was about my height, close-cropped hair, very cool shoes. I felt like his name was Sean? No, Steven, yes, definitely Steven something, I just couldn’t place him exactly. I thought he could have maybe been a year or two ahead of me in high school, and somehow I didn’t know he had transferred to UCLA. Or did I know him from the farmhand job the previous summer? I followed him for a few minutes, racking my brain. The more I walked, the more I noticed that Steven seemed to have a lot of friends. Definitely a big man on campus. With each intersection we crossed, more and more people would nod approvingly. I needed to just go say hello. Surely between the two of us, we’d remember exactly how we knew each other. I picked up the pace to catch up to him, trying hard to recall Steven’s last name. I felt like it started with a U. Umbila? Urwell? Urkel!
“Steve Urkel!” I blurted out, before freezing and realizing what I had done. Holy shit, it’s Jaleel White, the actor who played Steve Urkel on Family Matters. Dude is in my history class?! I ran around a corner to disappear. Hopefully he didn’t hear it. Not because I was embarrassed,5 but because I didn’t want to be seen as the guy who Steve Urkel thought was uncool.6
Seeing someone like Jaleel White around campus was a good motivator for an aspiring actor like me. In moving to LA, I had hoped to rub elbows with the casts of my favorite shows at the grocery store or something. I hadn’t really imagined that we’d actually be going to university together.