Box Girl (31 page)

However artistic an endeavor I may have assured myself this is, the strangers in the lobby don't necessarily see it that way. They see a girl on exhibit, clad in very little clothing, and they must think this is just another typically LA gimmick. Am I no different than the strippers down the street at The Body Shop?

I've asked a lot of people about this. While some feel the box is just a cheap, Hollywood attempt at grabbing attention, others, fortunately, see it as something more substantial. A friend told me one day, “What's so intriguing about the girls in the box is that they are
not
dancing, or posing seductively. For the most part, they are reading.” This, she said, “Makes them that much more attractive.”

During our first trip to LA, that summer after college, Rachel, Heather, and I went to The Standard. We had dinner in its twenty-four-hour diner with some guys we knew from college, and as we were leaving, we noticed the box. I said what I thought the people I was with wanted to hear, something like, “Oh my god, can you believe that? Weird. I mean, can you imagine?” But as the sliding-glass doors clicked open, I couldn't help but look back one more time, thinking,
That is so awesome
.

It's as if being a Box Girl is some strange LA badge of honor. And in that weird way, I like being seen in the box. I like this recognition. Attention is seductive, intoxicating. That
is a hard thing to admit. That's not something you're supposed to admit.

But writers, after all, are performers. Though we are more bashful about it than actors who stand on stage and shout their talent to the world, the art and craft of writing is still a performance. Yet I spend the majority of my days sitting in front of a computer, by myself, staring out a window. It is an incredibly isolating way to make a living. (Or, almost make a living.) When I write in the box, in a sense, there is an audience. It is my stage.

The box also feeds my impulse to watch, and to record. I can observe—stealthily—but I don't have to engage. I am surrounded by the action and armed with a pen, but I'm not forced to join in. I get to report from inside this world. Like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe and Lillian Ross and Gay Talese and all the other reporters I have admired all my life, I get to be a true fly on the wall. But unlike all of them, no one is questioning my tape recorder. Because of this, I like to think that I am using the box as much as it is using me. I like to think it's my little experiment. I get to know what it's like to be a creature in captivity that is pointed at and talked about by passing tourists. I get to be the monkey at the zoo—the monkey at the zoo with a human-sized brain and a laptop. They might be watching me, but I am watching them, too.

Women often ask if I feel vulnerable with all those people looking at me. The truth is, I feel powerful. Proud, even. This, I think, has everything to do with overcoming certain eating and body issues. So, in some ways, I have this sense of pride that I am finally at a point in my life where I can sit in a box in very little clothing and look good, knowing it's not because I deprived myself or ran twelve miles, but because I am actually, finally, healthy. I can wear this scanty outfit with triumph.

It has to be noted, though, that while The Standard has locations in Miami and New York, its Hollywood location is
the only one with a box. Which is no surprise, really, given LA is a city that often seems entirely focused on external beauty, eternal youth, and so on. I'll pull the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote from my dad's photocopied page of
Forbes:
“Only remember—west of the Mississippi: it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.” I used to believe this when I first moved to LA. I loved this quote. I took pride in it. I'd think,
I'm from the part of the country where people's brains are more valued than their bodies
. It took no time, however, to realize that there were as many artistic, intelligent, and interesting people on the “left coast” as on the right. And look at me now: a writer moonlighting as a Box Girl, relying on body, not brains. I'm sure tourists at the hotel assume I'm some bimbo, and you know what? I deserve that, for initially and irresponsibly writing off Los Angeles, its people, and its intellect. It's a city of countless contradictions, and perhaps for that reason above all others, it's a city that speaks to me so strongly.

Even from a geographical perspective, Los Angeles is a city mired in contradiction, the urban planning itself a dismembered mess of patchwork: Silverlake, Sherman Oaks, Westwood, Watts . . . Hollywood, Hawthorne, Brentwood, Bel Air . . . Koreatown, Compton, Marina del Rey. These neighborhoods have as much to do with one another as they do with Des Moines. Downtown Los Angeles is not even really downtown. Or maybe it is? It's impossible to tell. With its labyrinthine webs of expressways, LA is a city that is impossible to figure out. For my first year here, I didn't even know there was anything east of Fairfax Avenue. I had gone to the Farmer's Market, and to The Grove, and I thought that was it. I didn't know there was anything else over there. Unlike in Oakland, where Gertrude Stein says, “There's no there, there,” in LA, there are countless theres, there. It just takes a while to find them.

Because of the city's fragmentary, far-flung floor plan, accessible almost exclusively by car, there is no collective sense of community, no overarching sense of “we.” Unlike in New York, or Boston, or Chicago, where there is civic pride in spades, in LA, there is no central rallying cry. It's a city of transplants. When I meet someone who is actually from LA, my reaction is, “Really? You're whole life?” I want to put my friend Madison in a museum. (But that's also because her dad arrested O.J.) Everyone moves to LA with plans not to stay. But then we stay. Because somewhere along the way, this Garden of Forking Freeways burrows itself inside our hardened, from-elsewhere hearts, and slowly, we begin to love the place we claimed to hate.

Los Angeles is such a misunderstood city. I certainly didn't understand it at first—made assumptions about it, wrote it off. It's a place that's impossible not to ridicule until you really grit your teeth and muscle through the first two years. Truly, I think it takes that long to fully comprehend what's so redeeming about the place, and to fully appreciate all its endearing inconsistencies. It is ugly, and it is also beautiful. It is fast; it is slow. It is sexy, and it is also smart.

I grew up in a house full of contradictions. My mom pulls for University of North Carolina, my dad likes N.C. State. My mom is a bleeding heart liberal; my dad thinks Sarah Palin is a “babe.” My dad believes in getting to the airport two hours before flight time; my mom once missed a flight while getting a manicure in the terminal. My mom would go to a cocktail party every night of the week; my dad likes to joke that he wants to move to a lighthouse. Every election year, they almost get divorced. My dad will walk into the kitchen and say, “I'm not staying in this room if Al Sharpton is on the TV. I have
absolutely no patience for Al Sharpton.” And my mom will laugh while turning up the volume. My parents also almost get divorced at the end of every college basketball season. During March Madness, my mom watches the games hunched over the kitchen counter—always in her lucky Carolina blue sweater—her eyes six inches away from the twelve-inch screen, screaming obscenities. While a perfect Southern lady eleven months of the year, come March, my mom starts talking like a character from
Road House
. A die-hard UNC fan, during tournament time, those “shit bags from Duke” are always up to no good. While my dad spends his Sundays watching every single golf tournament that is ever televised (“He would watch the Toilet Bowl Open, if it were on,” my mom likes to say), his passion for college basketball these days is pretty lackluster. I once called the house and asked what they were up to, and my mom said, “Well, I'm in the kitchen watching college basketball, and your father's in the den watching
The Sound of Music
.”

In all my years with the two of them, I have yet to uncover anything they have in common or any particularly compelling reason they ever got together. And still, they have been happily married for more than thirty years. That's not to say they don't have their fair share of arguments. But in some ways, I think the occasional knock-down, drag-out dispute is a sign of a good relationship. At least you're talking to each other. They say silence kills more relationships than violence. I don't remember who this “they” was, and while I'm pretty sure shooting someone with a shotgun or running them over with your car is a surefire way to end things, the sentiment still holds some merit. I don't trust couples who say they don't argue. It's like girls who don't drink beer; something's up. Somehow, after decades of being married to my dad, my mom hasn't poisoned the Metamucil, and I truly think it has something to do with their differences. They have amicably agreed to disagree.

I grew up a kind of contradiction myself. I was Southern. I was Northern. My Georgia friends teased me that I was a Yankee and my Connecticut friends called me a hick. To this day, if I say I am from Georgia in front of Connecticut friends, I get in trouble. If I say I grew up in Connecticut in front of my Southern friends, they want to give me a good ole fashioned ass whoopin'. But I don't care. I embrace it. I have always liked being the person from the other place.

Because of this, I have always been drawn to contradictions. I like the girl who works at a strip club and is also a Rhodes Scholar. I don't know if this girl exists, but if she does, I'd like to meet her. That girl has stories. To me, that girl is more honest, more real, than the girl who painstakingly crafts every aspect of her life to fit some perceived intellectual or artistic ideal. Where every book in her apartment, every artfully shot picture on Instagram, feeds some manufactured image. To me, that is more self-aware, more superficial, and way too self-serious. Do what makes you happy. Don't like what you think other people like. Because who cares, really? My friends have always been a rainbow coalition of characters from all walks of life (count it: two clichés, one sentence), because I've basically only ever had one requirement: You have to have a sense of humor about it all. You can't take yourself too seriously.

One afternoon I was having coffee with a writer friend in Echo Park and she asked, “What does your boyfriend do?” I said, “He works in finance. Or real estate. Or both. I'm not really sure how to describe it. He has a real job.”

She said, “Oh,” stabbing a straw into her iced coffee.

This was not an “Oh” like, “Oh! How cool.” It was an “Oh” like, “Oh, gross.”

The book
Hopscotch
by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was written in Paris and published in Spanish. It is a book that has multiple endings, multiple interpretations, and can be read both front to back and back to front. I am not going to pretend this book was easy to follow, or particularly fun to read, but there was one paragraph that spoke to me, so I scribbled it down on one of the countless and uncontainable pieces of paper that follow me through my life:

          
As if the species in every individual were on guard against letting him go too far along the road of tolerance, intelligent doubt, sentimental vacillation. At some given point the callus, the sclerosis, the definition is born: black or white, radical or conservative, homo- or heterosexual, the San Lorenzo team or the Boca Juniors, meat or vegetables, business or poetry
.

Maybe, in the box, I function as a piece of art. Maybe, in the box, I'm just a piece of ass. Maybe I am neither. Maybe I am both. Maybe we don't have to decide. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's too hard to analyze something when you're sitting inside it.