“Sorry,” she said—quietly, which Sam appreciated. “No dice.”
In the end he had her run his debit card instead, which worked, thankfully, but when he pulled up his banking app he saw that not only had he maxed out his Amex, but that last round of cocktails—and he’d paid for everyone, he was feeling magnanimous—had left him with exactly $314.83 to his name.
It’s fine, Sam tells himself now, staring ineffectually at the coffee maker. He’ll get paid again in a week or so, though once he makes rent and his car payment and sends some cash home to Adam and his mom—
“Go for a run or something,” Erin advises, snapping him out of it. Sam swallows the anxiety back down into his chest where it belongs. “Or at least take a shower.” She raises her eyebrows, opens the door. “At your own house, even.”
“Your water pressure is better,” Sam protests weakly. Erin flips him the bird.
Once she’s gone he sits back down on the couch with his coffee and digs his phone out of his discarded jeans, blinking at the screen when he sees he’s got 412 text messages. Dread surges up like groundwater until he can almost feel the squish of it underneath his feet: he didn’t even have 412 text messages after the pilot of The Heart Surgeon aired last year. Right away he’s worried he accidentally tweeted something offensive about little people or made a sex tape when he wasn’t paying attention. He scrolls through the first few texts, the dread creeping coldly up past his ankles and his knees.
Dude, his trainer said at four forty-five this morning, tough break.
His agent, Russ, texted at five, which is when Sam knows he makes calls from his Peloton. Don’t panic. Call me. Let’s have lunch today.
Even his mom back at home in Milwaukee, a couple of hours ago: I tried calling, but you didn’t pick up! Remember we love you no matter what.
The dread is up to his neck now, and rising fast. Sam takes a deep breath like he’s getting ready to dive, then opens up his browser and types his own name into the search bar. The first news article to come up is from the Hollywood Reporter. The headline reads: “Midseason cancellations: Riptide, Lightning Jones done at ABN.”
Well, that’s okay, Sam thinks, his eyes flicking over the article. He’s not on Riptide or Lightning Jones. He keeps reading.
“Also axed: The Unlikelies, Half-Moon Bay, The Heart Surgeon.”
The Heart Surgeon.
Oh, fuck.
Sam jumps up off the couch, looking around wildly at Erin’s tidy living room. Belatedly, it occurs to him that he’s still completely naked. He doesn’t know what’s worse, the show being canceled or the fact that it was the third one down on the list of “also axed.” He thinks of his empty bank account. He thinks of the mortgage on his mom’s house in Wisconsin. He thinks of his Tesla sitting outside Erin’s apartment right now—she drove it back to Silver Lake, he remembers suddenly; he was too drunk—and feels a little bit like he’s going to be ill.
He knew this could happen, obviously. He just didn’t think it would happen to him.
Sam sets his coffee down on the end table and checks the clock on his phone: 9:48. Almost noon back at home, he reasons. Already after lunch on the East Coast. “Fuck it,” he mutters out loud, then opens Erin’s freezer and pulls out a bottle of vodka.
He calls Russ and gets his assistant, a bleached blond named Sherri who tells Sam to meet Russ for lunch on the patio at Soho House. “How you doing, kiddo?” she asks him. Sam doesn’t know why it’s Sherri of all people being nice to him that kind of makes him want to lie down in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and wait to get run over by a Star Tour.
Still, he goes home and jerks off in the shower and fools around with his hair for a while, smooths his eyebrows down with a little bit of Vaseline. He puts on his favorite shirt, a white linen button-down he knows for a fact makes his tan look very natural, and between all that and the a.m. cocktail he’s feeling a little bit steadier by the time he hands his keys to the valet. He loves Soho House: the glamour and the romance, the lounge chairs and the lanterns and the faint whiff of bleach from the pool. Even more than when he’s out at a club or on set somewhere, this is where LA always feels the most like LA to him, when it hits him that he’s actually doing what he always said he was going to do.
Well. He was doing it, anyway.
Now he guesses he’s unemployed.
Russ is sitting at his usual table on the far side of the patio, a seltzer with lemon on the table in front of him. Even after living here all these years Sam still pictures every agent as Ari Gold from Entourage but in fact Russ looks more like King Triton from The Little Mermaid, with a salt-and-pepper beard and longish hair and extremely muscular pectorals. When he gets up from the table at a restaurant, there’s always a second when Sam expects him to have fins instead of feet.
“Hey, buddy,” Russ says now, like he’s Sam’s dad, or how Sam imagines his dad would talk if he had one, which he does not. Russ is wearing an extremely fitted button-down shirt and a pair of buttery-looking leather loafers, a Jaeger winking discreetly on his wrist. “How you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” Sam says automatically, trying to affect the experienced nonchalance of a seasoned professional. It’s important to him, for some reason, that Russ think he’s a cool, collected man-about-town. “I guess I’m just . . . a little confused? I thought the numbers were good.” That’s not strictly true. Sam knew the numbers were not good, actually, but everyone kept telling him it was fine and he mostly didn’t question it, because it made his life easier and less stressful to believe them. A weird by-product of having gotten famous when he was a teenager is that people still treat him like a teenager a lot of the time, and it’s not actually as bad as it sounds.
The waitress appears at their table before Russ can answer. “Are you gents ready to order?” she asks.
“Absolutely,” Russ says, though Sam hasn’t looked at the menu yet. Russ orders a Cobb salad, so then Sam panics and orders one too even though he doesn’t like blue cheese or hard-boiled eggs and he hasn’t let himself eat bacon since Obama was president. The waitress is smiling in a way that could mean either that she recognizes him or that she doesn’t but thinks he’s nice to look at; Sam gets so distracted smiling back at her that for a moment he forgets both that he’s out of a job and that he just accidentally ordered a disgusting lunch he has no intention of eating.
“You shouldn’t take it personally,” Russ tells him once she’s gone, glancing at his phone before setting it facedown on the table. “These things happen, that’s all. On to the next. I’ve got an audition lined up for you tomorrow, maybe another one at the end of the week.”
“A movie?” Sam asks hopefully.
Russ shakes his head. “Not this time.”
Sam tries not to look too disappointed about that. He’s been trying to get a movie for ages; he was in that teen weeper a few years ago about the girl with scoliosis, but after that it was all guest spots on paramedic shows and “nice-but-bland guy who makes the heroine realize who she really loves” until he finally booked The Heart Surgeon. He’s thought about trying his luck with a different agent, but that feels like a lot of work for who knows what outcome. He’s been with Russ for a long time.