“Mickey Rourke lived here. He just moved out, oh . . . what . . . it’d be a couple of months now. He had three little dogs, Chihuahuas I believe.” It annoyed me that people find celebrity so impressive that they have to talk about it. What annoyed me more was that I was impressed. Somehow the building was instantly more valuable to me just because a celebrity had lived in it.
“I’ll show you his apartment if you like, but don’t tell the agent—I’ll get in trouble.” Jeff spoke from the corner of his mouth in an exaggerated whisper even though there was no one else in the lobby to overhear. It was dramatic and I would usually have found it annoying, but I liked the fact that he’d invited me to share a secret with him. It felt warm, welcoming.
“It’s on the ground floor, but I like it more than the penthouse you’re going to see because it has the beautiful coffered ceilings, you know.”
On our way see Mickey Rourke’s apartment, Jeff told me of other celebrities who had lived at the Granville: Brendan Fraser, David Bowie, and Amy Locane. Michael Michele, an actress on ER, was a current resident.
“You know, the place was built in 1929 and it was called the Voltaire. It was a hotel back then, but sometime after that it was made into apartments and apparently, though there’s no real proof of this, Marilyn Monroe lived here with Joe DiMaggio.”
Jeff wore a jacket and tie. In fact, everything about him was old-fashioned. He seemed to be part of the history he so loved to talk about, as if he lived in a black-and-white movie. If he weren’t so enamored with movie stars, I could also picture him living in the South before the Civil War. I could see him as a gentleman on a plantation in Georgia in his hunter green library dwarfed by ceiling-high shelves filled with leather-bound books. But Jeff clearly loved Hollywood, and he loved his job. He was the doorman, the gatekeeper of the Granville Towers, and his excitement over me made me feel as though I could be one of his movie star stories, just as Mickey Rourke and his dogs and his ceilings will forever be one of his stories.
The penthouse apartment wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have the molding on the baseboards or the high coffered ceiling that Mickey’s had. It wasn’t particularly spacious, and the views, although beautiful from the east window, were blocked on the north side by the Virgin Megastore building at Sunset 5, the shopping complex next door to the Granville. In fact, from the first floor of the apartment, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the north side created the optical illusion of a scorching desert. The yellow paint on the Sunset 5 building looked like sand and the heat that spewed out from the air conditioning vents on the roof created that warped-air look of a heat wave. After seeing the small galley kitchen and the modest bedroom and living room, we took the staircase next to the public elevator that led to the attic above the penthouse apartment, while the real estate agent explained to me the resale potential if I connected the penthouse apartment to the attic with an interior staircase. I hadn’t planned on renovating, but when I saw the view from the spacious high-ceilinged attic I no longer had a choice. I had never been so excited in my life. On the north wall were thirty or so large windows in rows of three, pitched in an A-frame, and beyond the windows, instead of the desert that I saw from the floor below, was the vast industrial roof of the Sunset 5. Clouds of smoke billowed from the metal chimneys and swirled in the wind, occasionally clearing to show the enormous steel tubes in a cross-section of right angles looking like the indecipherable circuit boards my brother as a kid used to spend hours soldering wires onto to make LEDs light up. The space was currently being used as a studio for the portrait photographer who owned the unit, and the tungsten lights and paper backdrops clamped onto C-stands made the apartment even more loftlike. I felt as though I had been transported to an artist’s loft in a city like Philadelphia, which was much more exciting to me than where I actually was. Where I was, was predictable. But the apartment made me think there was more to life than being an actress on a David Kelley show. It made me remember who I used to be and where I had wanted to live if I had stayed in law school in Melbourne: in a nongentrified artist neighborhood off Brunswick Street, the place that made me happier than any other place on earth. For on Brunswick Street I was gay. I wore motorcycle boots, had slightly dreadlocked hair, and wrapped leather around my wrists. I drank beer at the Provincial and ate penne Amatriciana at Mario’s and saw indie bands with my best friend, Bill.
“I’ll take it.”
I left my new apartment with its own industrial city and flew past Jeff, the doorman, in a hurry. I had to get back to my sublet in Hancock Park in time to make dinner. Since lowering my calorie intake to exactly 1,000 calories a day, I discovered that the best time to eat dinner was at exactly six o’clock to give my body a head start in burning the calories. If I ate at six, I still had five or six hours to move around before I lay still for six hours. If I ate any later than that, I worried that overnight the unused calories would turn to fat. I discovered that although I didn’t want to lower my calorie intake to under 1,000, as anything lower would be the equivalent of crash dieting, I could speed up the weight loss by increasing the amount of exercise and eating at the right times. Occasionally, if I felt particularly energetic, I could squeeze in a quick workout before bed and if I didn’t actually get on the treadmill, I would do sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor next to my bed.
When I got home, I prepared four ounces of lean ground turkey and a spattering of ketchup, cooked with Pam and lightly sprayed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. As annoying as the name of the product was, every time I doused my food with the stuff I would silently congratulate the marketing team behind the brand. For yes, I too, couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter. More than that, I couldn’t believe something that delicious didn’t have any calories. I sprayed it on everything. It tasted great with my morning oatmeal, mixed into my tuna at lunch, and was a perfect partner for my ground turkey with ketchup at dinner. It even tasted delicious as an ingredient of a dessert I concocted: Jell-O, Splenda, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray all mixed together. At 10 calories per serving, it satisfied my sweet tooth and was my favorite new recipe that I had created. I had never thought of myself as a chef before, but I was quite impressed with my cooking. I was impressed that I had the ability to take foods that weren’t usually paired and put them together for a delicious, low-calorie meal.
I picked up the phone before deciding which number to dial. Kali? Erik? Would either of them care about my new apartment? I had originally wanted to live with Erik. I wanted to buy an apartment that was big enough so I could have Erik as my roommate. But the thought of what the pantry in the kitchen would look like stopped me from pursuing it. Erik would buy food. All kinds of food would assault me as I opened the cupboard to reach in for a can of tuna. And I would have to prepare myself mentally every time I opened the refrigerator, as maybe one of those foods would tempt me enough to trigger a binge. On Sundays he might invite friends over to watch a game, eat pizza, and I would be left alone cleaning up the kitchen with the tortuous decision of whether to eat the remaining slice or throw it in the trash. Even if I threw it in the trash I couldn’t be certain that the thought of eating it wouldn’t keep me up all night, worried that I would retrieve it and eat the cold discarded piece despite the fact that it smelled of cigarette ash and beer. I would certainly get up out of bed and eat it. Then, knowing that I’d blown it, I’d have to keep going. I’d eat every bit of his food, his potato chips, and his leftover Chinese food, his breakfast cereal, and those chocolate cookies he eats when he needs to be comforted. My kitchen would be a dangerous temptress—and she would constantly flirt with the fat slob inside.