Box Girl (3 page)

Startled awake by the knocking, I tripped toward the door, disoriented and lacking pants.

“Who is it?” I said through the door.

“Your pizza's here,” the voice answered.

“My what?” I said, pinching the corners of my eyes, trying to extract some moisture from my contacts.

“Your pizza!” the voice was shouting now.

“Who is this?” I said, wishing this person would go away.

“It's Ken! From downstairs!”

“Oh, hey Ken,” I said, relieved, and still through the door. “No listen I'm good, I don't want any pizza, but thanks though.”

“No, I'm not offering you pizza,” he said. “You ordered pizza and it was delivered to our house.”

“Oh right, yeah,
obviously
. I was totally just messing with you. Want a slice?”

Or perhaps an observer might catch me during the day, sitting at my desk, my left foot propped up on my chair, my chin perched on top of my knee. I'd probably be peeling the polish off my nails while staring at the blinking cursor of a blank Microsoft Office document,
blink, blink, blink
. Like staring into the refrigerator, hoping something will magically appear for me.

Maybe, on that particular day, I had decided that wearing a hat might make me more focused. But which hat? They were all so disorganized.
Maybe I should organize them
, I might have thought. It's amazing all the things I suddenly realize I need to do when I am supposed to be doing something else.
Maybe
, I might have thought,
since I'm up, I should water that plant? Maybe I should tweeze my eyebrows? Maybe I should go through my closet and see what old jeans might make good cut-offs? Maybe I should make a pair of cut-offs and wear them while I Clorox the bathroom? Maybe I'll bleach the shower in my new shorts, which will be both stylish and utilitarian, and then I'll have to open every window because of the fumes, have to determine the apartment a biohazard, and be forced to evacuate immediately and seek shelter at the bar down the street, where the air is much safer and where there happens to be a very reasonable Happy Hour going on
.

One might observe
that
process, were they to see me alone in my lack of living room. But no lip gloss.

Hello, Box Talent!

At the end of each month, all the Box Girls receive an emailed
schedule marked with the red exclamation point that indicates “High Priority.” These emails typically open with the salutation, “Hello, Box Talent!” A curious phrase for a job that requires no talent. This mass message reminds us that a Box Girl can only work once a week. This is to keep variety. If a guest is staying at the hotel for, say, five days, he'll see a different girl each day—The Blonde Box Girl, The Brunette Box Girl, The Asian Box Girl, The Hispanic Box Girl, The Black Box Girl, and so on—like his very own bag of Box Girl Skittles.

For a short while, I think there was a Box Boy, though I heard he was very androgynous. Then again, I have no idea what he looked like, or what any of the other Box People do either. Our schedules never overlap; I get their texts and emails asking to cover shifts, but aside from that, they are as faceless to me as the maids who turn down the sheets. The Standard hosted a Christmas party one year, but it was still hard to tell. Is she a Box Girl? Is she? Is she a random guest? A hotel employee? Everyone in West Hollywood looks so similar anyway. It was impossible to know.

Prep

My 1989 BMW sputters into The Standard's valet driveway
and takes its place in line with BMWs from this century. An eager young man in a snug-fitting shirt asks if I'm a guest of the hotel.

“Box Girl,” I say, while gathering my things from the passenger-side seat.

“Oh, right!” he says, pretending to recognize me. I am sure we all start to look the same after a while.

The valets are all very fit young men. Actors, presumably.
Aspiring
actors. The service industry in Los Angeles has got to be one of the best looking, whitest-toothed bunches in the world. (Sometimes, during breaks from the box, I'll strike up a conversation with another employee in the cafeteria—a valet, a bellhop, a room service deliverer. “So what brought you to LA?” I'll ask, while sucking down a Diet Coke and shoving a handful of dry cereal in my mouth. Every time the answer is the same: acting.)

The guy in the snug-fitting shirt gets in my car and hands me a valet ticket.

I head to the bathroom, which is my first stop, always. I brush my hair, put on lip gloss, and apply thigh-firming lotion. Then I smile and pick whatever food I ate on the way to the hotel out of my teeth. Tonight it's a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, and I'm kicking myself for forgetting a toothbrush, again, since a large portion of the sandwich still seems to be stuck in the sides of my mouth.

A deejay is setting up her equipment in a booth to the left of the box. This is a relief. For about a year, there was live music in the lobby bar. Music is a stretch. I am no songbird, but this singer must have been friends with someone who worked at the hotel because there is no way anyone would have booked this person based on his abilities. He sounded like a dying whale, or maybe a whale sending a mating call. I'm not sure if there's a huge difference. Every Wednesday, without fail, he'd do this rendition of Radiohead's “High and Dry” that could peel the paint off the walls.

When I leave for the night, the valet will tell me my tires are dangerously bald.

“Thanks,” I'll say. “I'll get those checked.”

“No, not checked,” he'll say. “You need
new tires
.”

An Emotional Detroit

My dad still sends clippings the old-fashioned way. Not by
forwarding a link, but by digging scissors out of his desk, cutting out an article, circling the important parts, stuffing it in a manila envelope, and driving to the post office. It's one of his many endearing Andy Rooney-esque quirks.

While cleaning out my desk, I came across a photocopied page from a 2006 issue of
Forbes
. It was a list of famous quotes about Los Angeles, and at the top of the page, in my dad's all-caps scrawl, it said:
FOR L.A. PIG, LOVE DAD
. (He's always called me “Pig” or “Porkchop” or some other member of the swine family.) At the time that he mailed this, I had been living in LA for almost two years. He put a star next to his favorites:

       
* “California is a fine place to live—if you happen to be an orange.”

—FRED ALLEN

       
* “Hollywood: An emotional Detroit.”

—LILLIAN GISH

       
* “Only remember—west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.”

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

       
* “Living in Hollywood is like living in a lit cigarette butt.”

—PHYLLIS DILLER

       
* “Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.”

—DAVID LETTERMAN

As I re-read these quotes I could hear my dad laughing—just howling, his high-pitched honk of a laugh—as he scratched each asterisk into the page.

Oh the Horror

Los Angeles is not a place I ever thought I would reside.
Growing up on the East Coast, in very comfortable corners of Georgia and Connecticut, LA—or La La Land, or Hollywood—was not a place you lived. If anything, it was a place you read about in the tabloids and made fun of. In the beginning, when people asked why I moved here, I said I lost a bet. In actuality the decision was much less impulsive than that: It was decided over a couple bottles of white wine while eating lunch.

To my dad's horror and utter bewilderment, he and my mom (a chemical engineering major with an MBA and the recipient of a master's degree in biology, respectively) raised two English majors. My dad was successful in the pulp and paper business and retired very young. My mom is hardworking in her own right, with the framed certificate in our laundry room to prove it: “Connecticut Volunteer of The Year.” My parents were not ones to put a lot of pressure on their children—it wasn't like we
had
to grow up to do this, or
had
to become a “that,” but there were still certain
unspoken expectations. My brother at least took his BA in English down a lucrative tract: He worked on Wall Street, got an MBA, and ended up back in New York, where he works in finance. While my parents knew I loved to write, they assumed I would also move to New York and get a job in publishing. I had assumed the same thing. Thus I spent all summer after graduation living at home in Connecticut, attending informational interviews in Manhattan, not knowing that “informational” means, “We don't have a job for you, but we'll give you ten minutes of our time.” I spent these meetings fielding comments like, “University of Colorado, huh? Big party school I hear,” while shifting uneasily in ill-fitting pantsuits from Ann Taylor Loft.

Late that summer, I went to Los Angeles with Heather, my best friend from college, to visit our other best friend, Rachel. Heather and Rachel were also living with their parents, looking for jobs: Heather in the suburbs of Chicago, Rachel in a suburb of LA. Frustrated by the incessant refreshing of our Hotmail inboxes and the waiting helplessly to hear from jobs we'd applied to on
Monster.com
, Heather and I had decided a weeklong vacation in LA was just what the therapist ordered.