The Hollywood Assistant: Life Below The Line

I am nothing, no one and nowhere. 
Five months shy of my thirtieth birthday, I walked off the lot, past the majestic Paramount gates and crossed Melrose Ave. It was the beginning of spring, and everything seemed to be blossoming but my life. 
In my arms a banker box contained my personal effects: a copy of the latest O magazine, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, two standard yellow notepads, and a box of pens. Nearly eight years of sixty to eighty-hour workweeks on feature films, episodic television series, Movie of the Week, and pilots, then finally obtaining my dream job as Director of Development at the prestigious Paramount Pictures, and this box was all I had to show for it. 
I looked back at the beautiful gates and internally screamed, “Never again!” 
In three short words, “This isn’t working,” my life had shattered like glass. My entire world was frozen but everything around me moved more rapidly. I no longer knew what to do, where to go, who to speak with, or how to get anywhere. I had drowned and no one could help me.
I had been silly to think that I belonged in this magical world of beauty and make believe. I was not exceptionally beautiful, proved to be unintelligent, and this was as far as I was going to go. Dreams were for the beautiful, the gifted, the rich, and the elite. I was just some poor African cab driver's son and was never meant to amount to anything or “make it.” The cycle was not meant to be broken. No, it's meant to repeat and repeat and repeat. 
Ideas of being special, different, that someone like me could amount to something, had all been fabricated in my mind. God, life, the universe…they had told me nothing. The journey I was on had come to an end and it led nowhere. 
Though my exterior appeared like armor, the same couldn’t be said for how I felt. I wasn’t weak. I was shattered. Hollow, completely empty. My spirit, the essence of who I was, broken, dissolved. I was nothing. 
I had no direction, didn’t know where to go or what to do. My position’s availability had already been posted, and I spent the entire week receiving calls for my potential replacements and forwarding the calls to my employer, Derek.
Just after lunch a young lady arrived at the office. She was in her late twenties, wore high-waisted white pants, a beige blouse, and carried a Louis Vuitton tote bag that accentuated her confidence. She stood quietly while I ended the call I was on.
“Hi, can I help you?” I wasn’t sure who she was, and she definitely didn’t resemble any of the studio mail delivery employees. 
“Hi, I’m the new assistant,” she said removing her oversized sunglasses and revealing piercing blue eyes. She smiled at me with a grin fit for a Crest commercial and extended her hand. I did the same while taking a full body glance. 
She ignored me sizing her up as she wiped her palm on her thigh after shaking my hand. She was incredibly thin and had a jaw line she must have paid for. Anything was better than someone who just happened to be born with every advantage. 
I hadn’t been informed anyone was hired, that they would be starting today, and that today would be my last day. “Oh ok,” I said, hoping to hide my surprise. “Well, Derek isn’t here right now—”
“I know. I’ve spoken to him,” she stated placing her sunglasses in her designer case. “He just wanted me to come in and familiarize myself with the office.” She strutted past me into her new employer’s office and placed her Louis Vuitton tote on his desk. 
“Where were you working before?” I asked, taking off my phone headpiece.
“I haven’t actually been in the industry for a while. I left a few years back to start my own wellness blog which didn’t take off, and due to my parents’ hopes of me following in their footsteps, I enrolled into Berkeley for medicine. But it just wasn’t for me,” she said casually while skimming through Derek’s in-tray.
“What do your parents think of you coming back to the industry? Do they even know?” I stood under the doorframe like it was me who was new to the office.
“They’re aware. It’s not an ideal situation but this is what I want to do. Their main concern is the financial part of it. Nine-hundred a week isn’t really a living wage, especially in LA,” she said laughing. 
“Nine-hundred?” I was stunned to hear that number. I was more experienced and was making two thirds of her salary, it was a pay cut I had to take when I moved down from Vancouver.
“I know, right? But I worked out a deal with Derek. After three months, if he’s happy with me and wants me to continue working for him, we will increase my pay. I can’t continue to have my parents pay all my bills,” she said just as Derek walked in.
Intuitively I knew I had to go back to my desk, so I did while watching them greet each other. The door slowly shut behind them, cutting me out. I could hear parts of their conversation, mainly when they both erupted in laughter. 
She was better than me in every possible way. She and Derek both came from a world that people like me read about in glossy magazines. 
I decided to leave early, hoping to hide my shame and embarrassment from the odd person I would see on my way out. It was the only way I could leave without having to explain to everyone who the new girl was and why I was leaving. My boss gave me one weeks’ severance pay, enough to pay for a “flight back to Canada” he said. Except I had no home to go to. 
After receiving his offer for the job in the City of Angels, I had given away all my things to pursue my new life. What I couldn’t give away I simply threw out. I didn’t even get detoured when my engine blew on the highway somewhere in Oregon and I had to leave my car behind. The one-week severance pay, based on my reduced salary, would barely cover my flight to a destination unknown and a Starbucks at LAX.
Back at my home, I crawled into bed covered in fear and doubt. I played the events over in my mind. 
‘This isn’t working. This isn’t working. This isn’t working.’
I spent the next six weeks in bed chain-smoking and trying my best to avoid lengthy calls from family and friends. I told them that I was busy reading scripts—anything I could do to get them off the phone. No one knew. I didn’t know how to tell anyone something I wasn’t able to digest myself. 
The blinds were shut, and the television was on all day and night. Somehow, I’d find the energy to shower every second day, cross the street to stock up at the Russian bakery, stop by the Starbucks on the corner of Santa Monica and Fountain for my non-fat, extra-foam Grande in a venti latte, cross the street to the 7-11 and purchase four packs of Marlboro lights cigarettes, then walk the single block home. Then I’d strip down, climb into bed, and eat, smoke three cigarettes back-to-back, eat, and smoke again. 
I did this for weeks. I no longer had ideas or visions to act on; there was no path to take. 
But it wasn’t always like this. It only seemed like yesterday that I began in this business with my whole life and all its possibilities ahead of me—the greenest and keenest of them all. 
This is that story.