Down and Out in California

By Zoe Bloom

Loosely based on George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Down and Out in California is a story of how labor shapes identity in the modern American West.

Follow Lucy through the gritty and glitzy tropes of Los Angeles and San Francisco as she loses her privilege, her faith, and her Hollywood dreams, creating her own profession as she works over a dozen jobs in over a dozen fields in 21st century California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe Bloom
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005111687

Book preview

Prologue

HOLLYWOOD

It’s four in the morning on Hollywood Boulevard. I’m carrying three knives: a serrated bread knife, a meat cleaver, and a small, sharp kitchen knife. I’ve sloppily wrapped these and a roll of duct tape in a couple issues of the Los Angeles Times. I’m dressed all in black, with black leather driving gloves and a black balaclava. I’m wearing black running shoes, laced tightly.

There is a chill in the air and the sound of sprinkler systems watering strips of grass in front of apartment buildings is punctuated only by the occasional slow lull of tires on asphalt as disheveled partygoers carefully commute home. Street lights throw pools of orange light onto the sidewalk and I do my best to dart between these.

I’m tiptoeing. I’m chilly, but there’s a thin, nervous sweat on my skin. I’m a few blocks West of the strip, and these buildings are filled with sleeping residents. Every half a block or so I stop and listen, and look back over my shoulder. I’m cautious. I’ve overshot my goal and am circling the block, up Gardner to Franklin and then back to Curson. As I near my destination I slow, and again look around. No one is here.

Soon I see Wattles Mansion, and the grounds surrounding it. Sloping lawns, elaborate gardens. There’s a tall fence around most of the gardens, with locked gates in front of each entrance. I make my way down the slatted wooden fence until it turns to chain link and then quicken my step. The garden butts up against and bows the fence, with many of the plants growing through it. There are a couple of palms nestled into the fence, consuming it slowly. Then some fibrous plants and next to them, in the middle of a stretch of cacti, there are tall lengths of one of the most common ornamental cacti in Southern California - Echinopsis Pachanoi, or San Pedro.

I’m broke and improvising. I know these aren’t optimal, and won’t be the most potent. These grow about a foot and a half a year if properly cared for. These ones are tall and thick, the grove looks over a decade old. There’s been a small hole cut in the fence to allow towering pillars of cacti to grow through.

I look both ways, and scan the fence for cameras. I see none. I take a deep breath and spring into action. I drop the bundle of newspapers, the knives clatter on the ground. I grab the cleaver first and begin cutting the cactus. It does nothing but make dents. I’m moving frantically. I don’t know what will cut through these other than a saw, and I didn’t have a saw at home. I use the sharp knife to score a route around two of the cacti trunks, then pick up the serrated bread knife and begin sawing.

The bitter, alkaloidal smell hits me, and my eyes sting. I’m holding the cactus with one hand and sawing at it with the other, all at face level. The spines poke through the leather of the gloves and embed in my hands. My arms quickly begin to ache, and then shake, and I have to change hands every few minutes.  When I hit the center of the cactus there is a wood-like core. I can’t saw through it. Here, in desperation, I pick up the cleaver again and hack through it with long swings of my arm. One of the lengths comes free and topples to the ground. Then, the other.

They’re each taller than I am, at least six feet in length and six inches in diameter. I quickly wrap them in newspaper and tape the paper closed around them, wrapping it thickly around the middle. The spines jut through the paper, the tape, and my gloves and my hands are stinging from careless contact with them. Each of the six foot lengths weighs around fifteen pounds. I grab the knife handles in my hand, jettison the duct tape and the rest of the newspaper, and heave the cacti onto my shoulders. They tip forward and hit the ground, and as I slide them back to center them for balance the spines rake scratches along my shoulders and back.

Then I am running. I am running down Hollywood Boulevard, just before dawn, with my hands full of knives and stolen psychedelic cacti over each shoulder.

This is in the midst of my efforts to find a way to palatably process the cactus, and this one is a failure. I de-spine it, grind it, dry it, and chip it off of the wax paper only to find it unpalatable still. All that work goes in the trash. I give up on randomly sourced samples and night journeys to steal from gardens and take the risk of commerce, and order the good stuff from a mail order catalogue selling psychoactive plants. It arrives, and is healthy and surprisingly fresh for being a dead cutting.

I am now an expert at removing the spines and skin from the cactus and do so one final time, at the cost of my fingertips, especially the area underneath the nail bed where flecks of the sharp, waxy skin break off and embed themselves as I use my nails to separate them from the cactus flesh. After hours of preparation, it takes more hours to boil it into a tea, and even more hours boil it down to a reasonable amount to consume.

I drink it just after my twenty-third birthday with my dear friend Julius, who I have known since childhood and who I call my brother. He is retching with every sip, and because he has trouble getting it down it’s incredibly difficult for me to keep my portion down. There’s nothing that settles the stomach less than the sound of another person vomiting. Nothing except perhaps the taste and feeling of drinking the disgusting brew that caused it. After finally downing a cup with excruciating effort, the bitter, lingering taste of the cactus throbbing through my system with every breath, I look at the second cup with resignation.

I’ve tried so hard. I’ve come this far. I repeat the lines from the franchise that sponsored my recent education Almost there. Stay on target.

But I can’t get the second cup down, and I’m afraid if I take another sip it will make the first cup come up.

So, I do what any self-respecting druggie does: I take it anally.

And it finally works. I’m tripping on Mescaline.

The trip is as sobering as a true look at what it took to get me to the high. What am I doing with my life? Where’s my Oscar?

The Imperial Theme from Star Wars fills the Shrine auditorium as I, in cap and gown, walk across the stage where the Oscars are held to receive my MFA in Cinema-Television Production from the University of Southern California. The ominous tones resonate in my chest and are a warning of life to come. Life outside the academic structure, a life I haven’t known since I could control my own bowels.

Privilege. It’ll be a hot button concept in twenty years, but now it’s not often named, at least in my circles. Now I’m known as the prodigy, speeding my way through a top notch education on my way to becoming a big-time movie director. The program I’ve just matriculated was the hardest to get into graduate program in the world. Actually this is a bit misleading, as it is mostly based on the number of people who apply, rather than the qualifications to get in, but at least it was the most desired graduate program in the world. Everyone around me expects that I will walk across this stage again someday, this time to take the well-deserved grasp of the little gold man.

But that is not in the cards. My life only has one kind of gold in it. I’m living in a basement apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a good night when no reveler or homeless person thinks it a good idea to pee on the shrubbery planted in the window boxes outside my place. That’s the gold I get now. Piss gold.

It’s a memorable place, and my best parties and moments of being a young twenty-something happen there. All the drugs I do for the first time. The beginning of my life post-school. Visits from high school, college, and grad school friends. New friends. Parties. Pre-gaming for clubs and raves. All of it inside this cozy one-bedroom in a stucco-covered edifice with a hundred other identical apartments, inside a sixties era building with the classic Los Angeles name – Hollywood Villa. There’s a small outdoor pool and hot tub out back which is rarely used and could use just a little more maintenance, this all grumpily managed by a Romanian couple living on the sixth floor.

I’ve been a good girl up until now, working hard and overtime, summers and nights, to finish college and grad school by age twenty-one. No one ever had to push me, I set and kept my own goals. It was an unspoken expectation in my family that I would attend college, but grad school was my own idea. I’ve always been very social, but I also got my work done. I never showed up to every class, but I made A’s and B’s in all of them. I’m out of school now and have my parents lingering semi-support until I find a job, at which point I’ll be cut off for good.

I take advantage of their generosity and furnish my apartment at retail prices from hip stores in a sprawling Southern California mall. I buy a California King sized bed and frame and satin sheets. I buy a full set of kitchenware, much of which rarely gets used. I buy a nice vacuum cleaner for the wall to wall carpeting and keep it pretty clean, and a cheap table and four chairs, which ends up being the only surface and so used for everything but eating. In the corner is the TV, used often to watch Teletubbies, because I’m in a phase. Speaking of phases, I spend the first part of the summer involved in psychedelic stunts, and then I run out of money.

I’ve had a few paid jobs since school. They’ve mostly been low pay production sound gigs for people that found me through the USC sound department. One connection I make directs amazing romps through Los Angeles that involve local mini-celebrities and a lot of improv. They are films, never necessarily completed, that unveil Hollywood subcultures and the gritty Los Angeles underground. The material is brilliant, but the director Monty is on the verge of insanity. He’s a bisexual, bipolar, bicultural playboy trust fund kid from a wealthy Iranian family, and he always seems on the verge of losing control of the production and his life.

The shoots end up as much a party as they are a film set. It’s here that I do cocaine for the first time, with a rock star’s ex-wife in the bathroom as we are changing for an orgy scene. Monty asks me to be an extra in the scene. I hang an omnidirectional microphone from a C-stand, test the levels, and hit record on the Nagra before stepping into the scene as background and making out with an old college friend who I run into randomly on this shoot, writhing around on the floor in a long, purple velvet coat with tuxedo tails and nothing else.

I go to parties with Monty and the friends I meet through him and see Jack Nicholson surrounded at the coke table, while others rub elbows with minor celebs and their escorts and dates. I feel and see and taste the industry. I get an internship on a studio lot working with the Vice President of Music Video Production and learn what it is to be on the other side of the screen. I’m on sets and comped VIP to events and even do a few spins on the red carpet, holding some celeb’s purse as she vogues in front of the step and repeat. The hidden world behind the distribution is there for me, with its casting couches and its connections and its recycled myth-weaving from coked up fanfic.

But I never make it. I touch the balloon as it rises without me and my hand slides off of it.

I sidestep and take that energy to the desert and the warehouse, immersing myself in the rave scene and the early days of Burning Man. I party all the time. It gets old, and the rug of my parents' funding is being gently tugged from beneath me.

I need a job, a regular paying job. I am trained best to do sound. Post-production sound. And so I begin to look for a job, a job that will have me sit in an elephant-grey studio with no windows for eight to twelve hours a day, losing my eyesight and my posture to a screen in front of me, and slowly losing my hearing to the work itself. I went to grad school. I learned film production. I learned solid, usable skills. And so I go to work. Using them. The glamor is over the moment the work begins.

The location of my little abode is great, and when I get a job in Studio City the forty minute commute seems a blessing by Los Angeles standards. It’s an easy job to get, and the only one for the next decade that I don’t have to lie to acquire. It’s a small studio of about six people, including the receptionist, Pietro, who is the only person I really hit it off with, but who doesn’t last long.

The studio does post production sound for some terrible movies. Many of the movies we touch go straight to DVD and overseas to Latin America or Asia. It’s run by a tubby, greasy, yet fair fellow by the name of Fred Whitlock, and is named Whitlock Effects. I am hired because I can do anything in sound, and so for me it is odd jobs to find where best I am placed.

Film sound is made up of dialogue, sound effects, foley, backgrounds and music. Dialogue is usually recorded on set, but one of the jobs in post sound is to replace anything that wasn’t correctly recorded in the studio. Sound effects are designed from pre-recorded libraries of sound. Here a sound can be literal, a la a 1200cc Harley engine, or not, such as the sounds of the dinosaurs in Jurassic park. Foley is live recording of sound effects in sync with the picture, for things that are easier to record than edit into sync, or that need the specific curation to seem realistic. Backgrounds are background sounds, like wind, chirping birds, room tone, traffic, the ocean. Music is recorded and cut after sound editing is finished, and we never handle that at Whitlock.

My first day I’m tasked to cut some backgrounds for a bad sci-fi pilot. I sit in front of a chunky desktop computer screen looking at ProTools, and perusing the libraries of pre-recorded sounds. I spend the day listening to wind and peppering it with tiny specs of dust or rocks sifting across a desert landscape. I’m then called in to voice TV-safe words over non-TV safe curse words. It’s one of the lowest paid jobs in sound, cutting on-air versions of things. Many female characters now say Son of a Beach or Forget You! on TV - thanks to me.

There’s one other woman sound editor who sometimes voices these jobs as well. I’m relieved there’s at least one other female sound engineer in the world, and we have a basic understanding and respect due to shared gender, though don’t connect on any other level. She used to be a bass player for a punk band in the late eighties. She’s a scrawny thing with bangs in her eyes and a hoodie with frayed sleeves with holes she often sticks her fingers through while cutting sound on ProTools.

We all use ProTools and computers to digitally edit and manipulate the sound. Though I’ve been trained to use analog alongside digital, there never is a need for me to understand the old ways. I’m trained in them on principle, and am of the one brief generation that lives on the cusp.

At first the job is varied enough to seem fun. A few weeks in there’s a problem to solve – how do we create the sound of a flickering candle for a close-up shot in a scene where each sound is delicately delineated? I come up with the idea of fluttering cloth sounds recorded with a closely placed microphone and it works perfectly. I’m one of the boys, playing with microphones and props and filters and effects in a group of about four of us working to get just one sound right. I like the experimentation and the respect I get for solving the problem.

I get to cut the opening sequence for a flight simulator game, where the frame freezes on two airplanes and I have seventeen seconds of time to create a sound narrative out of this. I create a dogfight using authentic WWII fighter pilot audio, an exchange of fire and then a dive bomb. I never play the video game where it’s used, but creating audio apart from picture is the most fun I ever have at this job.

Once the novelty wears off, though, I feel hollow and dread my days at work. This happens within the first few months. I’m shocked at the pace of the job. I’m no longer given days to come up with fun recording solutions or edit sounds. Now I have to cut sound on a schedule.  In school I had learned how long the average sound job takes and it had been on the order of months, not weeks. At this level in the industry - sound design, editing, and mixing for B movies - we’re doing factory cut jobs on movies no one cares about anyway that will likely never be heard on a decent sound system. The constant time pressure coupled with the low standards of quality result in a bleak lack of pride in my work. It’s depressing. What happened to my Oscar? Is this what’s behind the curtain?

In general, the later in the chain of film production that work takes place, the smaller the budget left to allocate and the more it must make up for any time lost to previous mistakes. Sound is towards the end of the production process and gets the short end of the stick. Sound people are known as cynical and overworked, and many of them are anxious. Everyone around me is racing towards a goal they don’t care about, sapping their creative spirit to exacting standards on a schedule that is next to impossible. Misery permeates every studio.

I get to work with minor celebs. I am on hand for a recording session for a video game, where an up and coming local comedian comes in to record the voice of the lead character, a cartoon tiger who fights his way through ancient China. The voice actor accidentally knocks his script off of the music stand where it sits and when he bends over to pick it up a joint falls out of his pocket. I’m the only one that sees this happen and he sees that I see it, so we end up sharing said joint outside in the parking lot.

I’m high a lot for work. It doesn’t make me dread it any less, I just wish that I was at work less and doing something else while high. I start to occasionally skip work to stay home and get high. It’s the first time I’ve had a regular paycheck in my adult life, I’m cut off entirely from my parents’ support – and it’s up to me how I spend my money. Rent, weed, and video game rentals are my basic priority. I buy a Playstation gaming console about a month into work and spend a lot of time ordering pizza and mashing buttons.

This week at work I am recording ADR, or Automatic Dialogue Replacement. The process of an actor replacing lines that were not recorded correctly on set by saying them in sync with their previous performance in a studio. Today it’s Judge Reinhold, for the movie Wild Blue. He’s brusque, and impatient, and disrespectful, and it’s surprising given I was expecting Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

It’s my first time recording ADR, but I am no stranger to the boards or the process. He’s not the best at getting his lines in sync and so each line is repeated over ten times to try to get it right in intonation while matching the visual recording. It involves a lot of rewinding tape and as that’s happening he says to me Can you hurry it up, honey?

I take a breath before pressing the button on the studio mic so that he can hear me in the other room. I’m sorry Mr. Reinhold, I’m not able to make the machine run any faster than it is designed to do so.

Working relationships with celebrities sucks the suspension of disbelief out of their acting. It cuts through whatever elegance they’ve been presented with – in fact the work is the opposite of glamor. It requires being subservient to the talent at all times. Jokes about actors having meltdowns over not having a specific brand of water at their ADR session are not unfounded. There’s nothing less glamorous than babysitting a grown adult.

I don’t like recording ADR, but love recording voice talent that isn’t in sync with moving picture, for animation or video games. Actors are self-centered and looks-focused. Voice talent attracts a set of people who have more time to spend on their craft because they aren’t investing it in their Hollywood physique. I record a sequence for a video game with Alan Oppenheimer, the voice actor who voiced Skeletor in the He-Man TV cartoons from the eighties. He’s approachable, professional, and down to earth even in response to my starstruck awe and praise. During the breaks he has me in hysterics by talking dirty to me in the voice of Skeletor.

At least a dozen more celebrities cross my path in this short career. Most of them I dread seeing because it means they’ve stuck me to record ADR with them, which is my most hated task of all. I slowly lose the ability to be starstruck through working with stars, and it takes some of the shine out of going to the movies as I start to relate to more and more of their actors as real people.

There’s a lull in work after a few projects and Pietro and I are sent out to raid a closing studio for equipment and supplies. We box up the things that might be useful and move them back to the office slowly in small loads in his hatchback car. I’m only making twelve dollars an hour and suddenly it feels like the work is worth the price. We take our sweet time on the company dime. We also get lunch covered. I inherit a few pairs of decent studio monitors that become the sound of my next decade.

I’ve wondered how we have an Italian male receptionist, and I learn his story as we are looking through blank tape stock. He came here to be a model but became a crack addict. He lived on and off the streets for years, until meeting a girlfriend who pulled him out of the addiction, but he tells me that he replaced it with a porn addiction, and it’s straining his relationship, but when he quits porn the urge to smoke crack comes back in spades.

I thank him for sharing. I have nothing so interesting to share back. I’ve been single since leaving school and other than smoking weed and playing video games my hobbies have calmed down. This shifts when I meet Tommy Boom-Boom at a party and we launch into a relationship.

He’s a whip-smart thirty-year old who works as a film librarian. He’s a dyslexic high school dropout with a history of punk rock living, but he’s cleaned up nice and is into rockabilly and vintage clothing and cars and philosophy. We have a lot of chemistry which takes us through a rocky start into a strong relationship.

It’s about the time that I meet him that I spot, record, and edit foley for a feature length film for the first time. Once I do this work for the studio, they stop moving me around so much and keep me behind the foley board. They know I have a good ear, and still I’m the one brought into the mix or the final edit to give it a listen for issues. My technical prowess isn’t as strong, but the hearing takes me the extra distance.

The foley groove is where I land. Foley is live recorded sound effects that take place on a stage. First, I spot the foley; I create written notes of all the sounds that need to be recorded live in sync with the picture, each entry marked with the time code stamp from when it occurs in the film. This takes at least one full day. Then I record the foley for an entire feature film over the course of five business days.

They hire a foley artist to work on the film with me and we instantly hit it off, becoming fast friends. I’ve already started to sour on the job, and working alongside Eve is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. We strike up a great working relationship that transcends the studio and record foley for over a dozen films together.

Eve is bisexual, smart, sensitive, and creative, and a decade older than I am. I am inspired seeing the way she manages her career and is self-sufficient. She is cultivating a talent that is highly paid and in high demand, and after working with me goes on to be a successful, high-end foley artist.

Foley recording usually consists of three main recording passes: cloth, footsteps, and props. We lay down cloth first, running through the entire five reels of the film while Eve sits in front of a microphone with various textiles, rubbing them against one another or moving them as the characters on the screen do so. Sometimes there is a waving flag or something else that requires special cloth attention, but mostly it’s just the background noise of human movement.

During cloth we also sometimes cover some more sensitive sounds such as swallows and sips, and I learn that when it comes to these it’s surprisingly easy to hear someone’s gender through a recording. Eve is much more convincing as a female sipper or smoker or chewer than a male.

After cloth Eve dons pairs of appropriate sounding shoes and walks on various surfaces to cut the footfalls into sync. On set microphones are usually very directional and tuned to dialogue only, so no footfalls make it through into the recording. We replace all of these in the studio. I at first marvel at Eve’s ability to get the walk right on the first step, but she reveals to me that rhythm isn’t that hard to master, and though walking in sync with someone seems difficult it is not, because it occurs in a rhythmic pattern. This is where I learn that all one needs to make the sound of an army marching are three overlapping tracks of footsteps.

Props are the most fun to record and the bulk of the work. It’s here that the classic coconut shells for horse hooves are used, as well as the leather chamois over celery for punches and hits, and untold more props to make every little sound in a film that isn’t available from a pre-recorded sound library, and some that are but need an element to make them stand out. Eve comes into the studio with tackle boxes