It had been nearly ten years since I’d last had a cigarette,
my failure to become a successful smoker due in large part to my excessive
guilt smoking anywhere near other people. I made a point of only smoking by
myself outside the least-used doors on my undergrad campus, either walking away
or turning around whenever another person approached in order to save them from
my waves of potential cancer. I think it was the trail of smoke flowing
directly into my right nostril that jogged that particular memory—a
bottlenecked crowd outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater forcing me to stand with
my chin over the shoulder of the woman ahead of me and share her cigarette like
a comically contrary Siamese twin.
I’d navigated the usual obstacle course outside the
Hollywood/Highland Red Line station, weaving around the carts selling spinning
shining things, the bucket drummers, the evangelicals. I’d dodged a variety of
loose interpretations of pop culture icons—Shrek in a corset, fleece sheet
Spongebob, the girls with pieces of latex stuck to their bodies that I guess is
from a movie. And I’d spotted the crowd up ahead, an immobile group jammed
around the barricades on the sidewalk, cameras and phones raised
periscope-style in the hope that whatever they wanted pictures of would show up
in their viewfinders.
I proceeded confidently, for surely they would open space
for me to pass—I was wearing business clothes! I was on business! Multiple
copies of my resume were on my person, tucked in a clear plastic document
holder. I was on a mission to commit an act of proactivity.
A well-intentioned friend had pointed out to me the night
before while I was brooding on her couch that I was never, ever, ever going to
get a job if I all I did was sit at my computer emailing resumes. “People want
to hire someone who makes a point of showing up, that they can see in person
isn’t some random weirdo.” I had my doubts about a line of logic predicated on
the assumption that being able to see me in person would convince a potential
employer that I wasn’t a weirdo, but I figured it was at least worth giving the
proactive thing a shot.
The same well-meaning friend also composed a metaphor for
me, one about hurdles and how when people come across them in their path, usually
they look for ways to leap over. I, on the other hand, seem to see hurdles
coming and just crash straight into them.
This struck me as funny, since what I remember from my
seventh grade attempt at Track and Field was the coach telling us that if you
couldn’t get over a hurdle, just keep going—the point was to get past and
continue on to the finish line. So that’s what I’d do—I’d run as fast as I
could, then kick one foot out to knock the hurdle over, and keep running into
the next one. I learned to accept my limitations and keep moving forward, which
seemed like a valid enough lesson to me.
Mulling over my friend’s words, I found an ad on Craig’s
List for the new Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum opening in Hollywood. The word
“Artist” was in the position title, and I had to apply if for no other reason
than this was the first time I’d ever seen “oil painting” listed as a desirable
skill in a job description. Oh! Those years pouting with a cigarette on the art
building’s loading dock were not to be wasted after all!
Enticed by the sheer weirdness factor of getting paid to
paint on the faces of wax likenesses of Hollywood celebrities, I pledged myself
to my mission—infiltrate the wax museum, present myself as someone well-dressed
and not a weirdo, and hand someone who’d presumably be standing behind a
counter or possibly sitting at a desk my resume and cover letter, printed on a
tasteful ivory cotton bond and attached with an elegant gold paper clip.
I left the house in the most professional, cleanest selections
from my wardrobe. Once in transit, however, I realized the shortcomings of my
ensemble—that my professional, cleanest shirt and professional, cleanest pants
were both black, and my all-black outfit coupled with ironically oversized
sunglasses made me look like I was trying to look like I was up to no good. The
slacks in particular had been purchased years ago by a thinner and possibly
shorter version of myself, the cuffs resting just above my ankles to reveal a
pair of black loafers that I had chosen to pair that day with white socks.
It dawned on me that this was one of those things people get
confused over qualifying as irony, to find oneself on the Walk of Fame one
white glove shy of an unintentional parody of a Michael Jackson costume, having
completely forgotten that he’d died four days earlier until stuck in a crowd of
mourners swarming his star to wave their cameras around and take a picture of
something.
Inside the tangle of overstuffed Jansport backpacks and
screenprinted replicas of the Thriller album cover I waited patiently,
knowing that just on the other side of a crowd comprised entirely of people
exactly one foot taller than myself and my cigarette-smoking chimera was my
target destination. A jet stream of intercrowd traffic swept me along and spat
me out in front of a haunted house-like wooden tunnel constructed over the
sidewalk, and onward I pressed—almost there!
On the other side of the tunnel I arrived at a chain link
fence separating me from trenches of naked dirt filling the courtyard of a
seemingly vacant building. Judging from the presence of backhoes and a
predominance of fluorescent orange tape, it appeared that the only thing
construction was complete on was the sign, clearly marking this site as the
future home of Madame Tussaud’s Hollywood.
I
wrapped my fingers in the fence, straining to see beyond the crisscrossed tape
in the windows. There had to be one administrator, one HR assistant, crouched
in her yellow hardhat over a cup of yogurt at a desk accessible only by catwalks
and scaffolding. I couldn’t believe I’d come all this way—an entire mile! Some
of it on foot!—only to discover what a more thorough reading of the web site
would have told me—that the museum didn’t quite exist yet.
What
was the proactive thing to do now? What would convince my potential employers
that I was motivated and competent? Maybe they would be impressed if they saw
me scaling a fence dressed almost like Michael Jackson, snapping through the
Caution tape yelling, “I’ve graduated from art school! I want to paint your
dummies!”
The route to giving up and returning home in defeat required
crossing the street and walking down the empty side of the Walk of Fame. From
the other side I could see that the barricades around Michael Jackson’s star
had formed a sort of trough to contain a nearly three foot deep pile of mashed
flowers, silver foil pinwheels, and teddy bears. Directly across the street
from the pilgrimaged memorial, a lone photographer squatted to zoom in on one
star. I looked down to see it was Ed McMahon’s, whose death preceded Michael
Jackson’s by only two days.
