Eric Roberts I: Just Horsing Around
I remember the day I decided to move to Los Angeles well. My college boyfriend was something of a jazz guitar wonderkind and a month before he'd announced he was moving to Las Vegas to back up a Canadian Latin/pop singer who was about to slide off the charts forever and take a lot of careers with him. Lance was working in a record store and the gig paid a lot of money so I couldn't blame him for packing up his duffel bag and leaving me with the orange crate furniture and a house full of pot-smoking Caribbean bongo players.
Yes, we were quite the hip couple. At the time I was squeezing myself into skinny black leather pants and waitressing at a college club called The Edge where two young promoters had made a name for themselves bringing bands like The Police and the B-52s into a room the size of a two-car garage. Actually the space ended up more like a one-car garage after their roadies hauled in gigantic speaker towers suitable for a venue the size of the SuperDome and aimed them at the unsuspecting tables about two feet away. I wore earplugs and stuffed a lot of tip money from dazed and deafened patrons into my apron before carousing into the night with a lot of coulda, woulda muscians who filled in between the big acts. (Sting did ask me to go to an after-party but he was shorter than the bar where I was picking up my drink orders so I passed....)
Aside from these early brushes with fame (they were a high-strung lot: most of them seemed to end up kicking holes in the upstairs bathrooms, including a major stiletto incident courtesy of Debra Harry) I was drifting along in Toronto with nary a career in sight. Before accidentally landing this sought-after job in one of the city's hot spots ( I started with the previous owners who were booking bluegrass bands on Spagetti Wednesdays), I had been taking temporary jobs as a relief receptionist in law firms and other very non-creative establishments ("my dear, that crop top just won't do, you're fired!") while I skirted around the idea of actually trying to get work as an actor. Strange, I'd made it through the rigors of a very competitive theatre school but the idea of actually auditioning was more terrifying than finding myself a virtual prostitute to my ideals and I learned just how powerful denial could be. I did manage to get jobs in a couple of 99-seat productions. One that still crops up in my nightmares was an Elizabethan farce where I continually and pathologically forgot my lines while trying to keep the cheap wig they'd provided to cover my unrurly long hair from sliding backwards under my hat. (Perhaps the fact that I was playing a man had something to do with my disconnection.) But as exciting as these opportunitites were, alas none of these acting jobs paid.....actual money. To bring home the bacon I found myself, week after week, boarding an early morning streetcar in faux-office clothing, girding my loins for yet another encounter with the business world where I felt misplaced, lonely, and a flapping, if somewhat gaudy, fish out of water.
Months after my guitar-playing companion had gone west I was still writing bad poetry in my red plastic binder and teaching dance class to early Madonna songs when I finally decided I had better get my behind out of the rut I was in or go back to school and become a lawyer or something. So I called Lance, now ensconced in a cheap motel in Hollywood because the one-shot Canadian wonder had lost his Vegas contract, and floated the idea of my coming down for a really big adventure. He seemed amenable, so I vacated the attic room in Musician Central, stashed all my worldly belongings in the basement, and took a train to L.A.
Yes, I suppose I could have flown. But a) I wanted to really experience the distance I was travelling from my grey, wet hometown to the golden city on the blue Pacific to start my new life, and b)I was nail-bitingly terrified of flying after a nasty experience in hurricane turbulence the year before on a trip to Florida.
And c) I had no money.
Back then taking the train was cheap. Flying was still a luxury for jet-setters cocooned in fur stoles and a set of nesting Samsonites. No-one except stewardesses brought actual luggage onto the plane in those days unless you were a student and had all your stuff in a nylon backpack, the kind with a sleeping bag roll on the bottom and a Canadian flag sewn somewhere prominenly so you wouldn't be mistaken for an American. Those of us who were still in the student visa mode either hitchhiked, took a bus, or bought a rail pass. I think a Eurorail Pass back then was about $50.00 a year. You could see a lot of countries in a year, and if you didn't mind the guy eating bratwurst in his underwear on the bunk above you, the sleeping accomodations weren't half bad.
It was like this on the trains in Canada and the States, too. Droves of kids were doing their post-college tours of cities along the California Zephyr and Empire Builder routes and you expected to meet a lot of new friends along the way. The soothing, rythmic confines of the train made it especially easy and since I'd already experienced the Canadian version (The Maritimes to British Columbia) I knew what to expect: We were cocooned together for four days, sleeping side by side for three nights and there would be a lot of soulful conversations, impromptu guitar concerts, and a few lucky couples who found romance nestled together between the seats (or under them). All this against the backdrop of a passing landscape of lush Kansas cornfields, a pink and grey Arizona desert, and the young, snow-capped mountains of the American West. I couldn't wait!
So on a rainy May afteroon I said goodbye to my family over lunch at a downtown Chinese restaurant and boarded an Amtrak feeder train at Toronto's Union Station with one large suitcase, Lance's extra guitar in a battered leather case, and a little over a hundred dollars in my wallet. Much like the passengers and crew of The Minnow, I was planning to set sail for a three hour tour. This was to be my big adventure in Los Angeles before coming home to Toronto and figuring out what to do with my life.
Next: How to go to Film School for free.
Yes, we were quite the hip couple. At the time I was squeezing myself into skinny black leather pants and waitressing at a college club called The Edge where two young promoters had made a name for themselves bringing bands like The Police and the B-52s into a room the size of a two-car garage. Actually the space ended up more like a one-car garage after their roadies hauled in gigantic speaker towers suitable for a venue the size of the SuperDome and aimed them at the unsuspecting tables about two feet away. I wore earplugs and stuffed a lot of tip money from dazed and deafened patrons into my apron before carousing into the night with a lot of coulda, woulda muscians who filled in between the big acts. (Sting did ask me to go to an after-party but he was shorter than the bar where I was picking up my drink orders so I passed....)
Aside from these early brushes with fame (they were a high-strung lot: most of them seemed to end up kicking holes in the upstairs bathrooms, including a major stiletto incident courtesy of Debra Harry) I was drifting along in Toronto with nary a career in sight. Before accidentally landing this sought-after job in one of the city's hot spots ( I started with the previous owners who were booking bluegrass bands on Spagetti Wednesdays), I had been taking temporary jobs as a relief receptionist in law firms and other very non-creative establishments ("my dear, that crop top just won't do, you're fired!") while I skirted around the idea of actually trying to get work as an actor. Strange, I'd made it through the rigors of a very competitive theatre school but the idea of actually auditioning was more terrifying than finding myself a virtual prostitute to my ideals and I learned just how powerful denial could be. I did manage to get jobs in a couple of 99-seat productions. One that still crops up in my nightmares was an Elizabethan farce where I continually and pathologically forgot my lines while trying to keep the cheap wig they'd provided to cover my unrurly long hair from sliding backwards under my hat. (Perhaps the fact that I was playing a man had something to do with my disconnection.) But as exciting as these opportunitites were, alas none of these acting jobs paid.....actual money. To bring home the bacon I found myself, week after week, boarding an early morning streetcar in faux-office clothing, girding my loins for yet another encounter with the business world where I felt misplaced, lonely, and a flapping, if somewhat gaudy, fish out of water.
Months after my guitar-playing companion had gone west I was still writing bad poetry in my red plastic binder and teaching dance class to early Madonna songs when I finally decided I had better get my behind out of the rut I was in or go back to school and become a lawyer or something. So I called Lance, now ensconced in a cheap motel in Hollywood because the one-shot Canadian wonder had lost his Vegas contract, and floated the idea of my coming down for a really big adventure. He seemed amenable, so I vacated the attic room in Musician Central, stashed all my worldly belongings in the basement, and took a train to L.A.
Yes, I suppose I could have flown. But a) I wanted to really experience the distance I was travelling from my grey, wet hometown to the golden city on the blue Pacific to start my new life, and b)I was nail-bitingly terrified of flying after a nasty experience in hurricane turbulence the year before on a trip to Florida.
And c) I had no money.
Back then taking the train was cheap. Flying was still a luxury for jet-setters cocooned in fur stoles and a set of nesting Samsonites. No-one except stewardesses brought actual luggage onto the plane in those days unless you were a student and had all your stuff in a nylon backpack, the kind with a sleeping bag roll on the bottom and a Canadian flag sewn somewhere prominenly so you wouldn't be mistaken for an American. Those of us who were still in the student visa mode either hitchhiked, took a bus, or bought a rail pass. I think a Eurorail Pass back then was about $50.00 a year. You could see a lot of countries in a year, and if you didn't mind the guy eating bratwurst in his underwear on the bunk above you, the sleeping accomodations weren't half bad.
It was like this on the trains in Canada and the States, too. Droves of kids were doing their post-college tours of cities along the California Zephyr and Empire Builder routes and you expected to meet a lot of new friends along the way. The soothing, rythmic confines of the train made it especially easy and since I'd already experienced the Canadian version (The Maritimes to British Columbia) I knew what to expect: We were cocooned together for four days, sleeping side by side for three nights and there would be a lot of soulful conversations, impromptu guitar concerts, and a few lucky couples who found romance nestled together between the seats (or under them). All this against the backdrop of a passing landscape of lush Kansas cornfields, a pink and grey Arizona desert, and the young, snow-capped mountains of the American West. I couldn't wait!
So on a rainy May afteroon I said goodbye to my family over lunch at a downtown Chinese restaurant and boarded an Amtrak feeder train at Toronto's Union Station with one large suitcase, Lance's extra guitar in a battered leather case, and a little over a hundred dollars in my wallet. Much like the passengers and crew of The Minnow, I was planning to set sail for a three hour tour. This was to be my big adventure in Los Angeles before coming home to Toronto and figuring out what to do with my life.
Next: How to go to Film School for free.
posted by vallie at 11:10 PM
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