“Nothing,” she replied. Her tone was defensive. Obviously she wouldn’t tell them I was her literal partner in crime. At least not on purpose.
“We have to be prepared if they start asking questions,” I pressed.
“Well I’m not going to lie,” Holly said. “I’ve done enough of that.”
I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. They would figure out that Holly was unmarried and unemployed sooner or later. Questions were bound to follow. This was an expensive house. And the wife had clearly taken note of that.
Holly must have sensed my unease, because she added, “People in this neighborhood are rich and snooty. They’ll forget all about me by next week.”
I looked down at the cookies, arranged like a pinwheel on a thick ceramic plate. The plastic wrapping was wet with condensation. They were still warm.
“I trust you,” I said, wishing it were true.
I watched the neighbors disappear into their house. Holly was wrong. They’d be back. They’d left their plate. And they’d have questions that would rattle even a skilled liar like me.
ANDY
Three months ago
I probably needed therapy, but anyone who’s seen Good Will Hunting knows people who become therapists are the most fucked-up of all of us. Plus who the hell has the time? Yes, I was depressed, but it was no great mystery why. It had been almost a year since my last paid writing job, we were broke, and I had zero prospects. That is categorically depressing.
I used to be an investigative journalist. The money was atrocious, but I didn’t do it for the money. I wrote about fascinating people—a teenager falsely accused of murder who read law books in jail and proved her innocence, a septuagenarian who scaled Everest, a father of three who faked his own death. I trafficked in facts. But bullshit was the currency of the movie business. And I’d damn near had enough.
I’d busted my ass to get to that meeting. It had been set for five weeks. I’d prepared like I was interviewing a source, memorizing details that even the devil himself didn’t know. And then to show up just to be dismissed because “something suddenly came up”？ What the actual fuck?
I cursed myself for the pity party I was having. If I were more evolved, I would have seen the bright side. I had a foot in one of the most competitive industries in the world. I had a powerful agent who gave me access to all the big players and made me believe I would soon be a player myself.
But so far it hadn’t happened. I had been in Los Angeles for almost eight years, and I still felt like that kid at the aquarium—staring at all the brightly colored fish with his face smooshed against the glass. I tried to fall in love with the sprawling freeways （don’t call them highways!）， the endless summers, the Dodgers, but they all felt like friends of friends, never wholly mine.
My career never felt wholly mine either. There was a lot of money in Hollywood, but access was guarded by a network of gatekeepers whose most practiced skill was stringing you along. The Hollywood elites took care of their friends. As a relative newcomer from an outside industry, I was treated more like someone’s tolerated plus-one than a cherished invited guest, allowed into the room but not permitted to feast.
But Hollywood needs wannabes like me, because without outsiders there can be no insiders. And so occasionally the gatekeepers throw us a bone, to keep us salivating at the door. And we hungrily snatch up their table scraps for an opportunity to play, and the bragging rights that come with getting a deal. There were thousands like me, pawing at a door that would let in only a few. In the end, only a tiny handful of movies ever get made. As a （barely） “working writer,” I was part of this big machine that never stopped churning but produced almost nothing.
So why didn’t I just quit? The game of schmoozing and pitching was addictive. Every time I wanted to give up （e.g., now）， a carrot （e.g., interest from this mega-multihyphenate） was dangled so close I could （almost!） reach out and touch it. The Eagles nailed it: Hollywood is the Hotel California. You can try to check out, but once the business gets its claws into you, it’s impossible to leave.
Lying in bed that night, I thought about my future. The New York Times would probably have a job for me, but going back to writing for a newspaper felt like a step backward. Print journalism was a dying industry. The money, the glory, the ability to reach people in far corners of the globe—that was in the movie business. I wanted my stories told in surround sound, with sweeping music and stunning images and performances that would blow your heart wide open. Besides, I couldn’t just call my old boss and ask for my job back. I’d need a reason—a story that had to be told.