Afraid my new governor might call me a "girlie man" if I clicked my heels together, I realized I would be staying in Oz for a while, and needed a place to live. You might assume that because Dan, Zack and I all lived together at school, we would live together here in L.A. For all the horrors of Room Draw, you choose whom you'd like to live with-only the age-old Triangle vs. social dorms debate can break you up from your friends. On the outside, it's not that simple. Both old roommates had their own places by the time I got to town.
After a fruitless first week of apartment hunting, I conceded that I wouldn't find a Californian version of Pond 211. All I hoped for now was someone who wouldn't steal my shit. Revising my strategy, I managed to find a real jewel-or, I should say, Julie D./Jewel, because that's how she signed her e-mails.
A Mt. Holyoke alum, Julie D./Jewel was very excited about the prospect of living with an Amherst student. So excited, in fact, she proposed to me. After explaining that her lease only permitted "domestic partners" as roommates, she wrote: "I need a guy to move in, in case I'm found out. Then we go to plan B: have a quick wedding in Vegas and get it annulled." It was at this point that my trusty Amherst education kicked in-I thought of Nabokov, of Flaubert. I was sure that Julie D./Jewel was not only joking, but was also a master of Craigslist repartee.
No more than five minutes (and two mentions of the Vegas wedding) later, I realized my mistake: over-analysis-encouraged at Amherst, awkwardness-inducing elsewhere. Though I had probably been in diapers when she attended Mt. Holyoke, she was absolutely prepared, even eager it seemed, "to have and to hold" me-and not like you hold a diapered baby. I spent the next 25 minutes trying to politely escape the clutches of this Wicked Witch of the East Coast.
As I drove back to Zack's house, still homeless, I got to thinking about the phrase "apartment hunting." It's ubiquitous-the housing counterpart to the "job search." But it's also a misnomer. You can't hunt an apartment. You can hunt a job. Attending Amherst is, among many other things, part of a long, elaborate hunt for the type of job you want. Some people even pick a specific job and spend a lifetime stalking it, learning its tendencies, acquiring the right tools in hopes of one day making it theirs.
Looking for an apartment is more like gathering berries. You go out to an area where berries are supposedly to be found. Maybe you find berries, but maybe someone else got there first, and now the only ones left are sour or smushed or lording a Vegas wedding over your head. By the time I found a place in Venice Beach, I had just about given up hope of finding juicy, untainted berries. If they didn't look vomit-inducing, I was going to eat them, and that was that.
When asked what sold me on this apartment, I give the standard answers: cheap, a mile from the beach, an ocean view. In reality, I was almost sold the moment a stunning woman with a sexy New Zealand accent opened the door and introduced herself as Zoe. When I learned that she was Uma Thurman's stunt double from Kill Bill, I probably would have agreed to a Vegas wedding-not only is Kill Bill my favorite movie of the decade, but after seeing Uma chop off a couple hundred heads, my girlfriend added her to a short list of people I could have sex with without 'cheating.' But if Zoe was Uma's stunt double … that was actually Zoe chopping off heads … and by extension, her I could have sex with. That our roommate Nick turned out to be her very uptight, uncool husband did little to crush my dream. I have her frequent comparisons of me with her younger brother to blame for that.
Zoe became my Good Witch from Down Under: All I had to do was pay her the first month's rent-not quite as easy as clicking your heels together, but much less painful than it might have been (say, in New York)-and she'd give me a home. The place didn't feel like home, but if I was going to be staying in Oz a while, I might as well have an ocean view.
After less than a week in this new home, I was woken up by a squeaky man's voice, screaming about movies, and how so-and-so wanted to work with him. Out of bed 20 minutes later, I asked Zoe who that was. "Quentin Tarantino," she said, as though that were nothing out of the ordinary.
And, apparently, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Not only had she worked with him on Kill Bill, they were good friends. Too drunk to drive home the night before, he had slept on our couch. The Good Witch had taken me all the way to the Wonderful Wizard's door, and I'd still managed not to meet him.
As if this weren't enough, "Quentin" had written her into his next film, and her copy of the screenplay was sitting on the kitchen table. Of course, I read it at first opportunity. It was genuinely awful. I'd looked behind the curtain and discovered that Quentin was no wizard at all.
At Amherst, we learn to look behind most everything-words, structures, connections-in hopes of better understanding how the world works. Of course, once you understand something, it can lose its original magic-it's a little tougher to call Quentin "brilliant" knowing that he writes "collage" every time he means "college."
But looking behind the curtain helped me understand how things work here in Oz: For all the bright lights, and ocean views and celebrities, L.A. itself is not actually a dream world, not the set of a movie (even though nine out of 10 baristas you meet are actors). My favorite director can't spell, and even if you dismember with a samurai sword by night, you still struggle to make rent by day.
Now if only I could find a job behind the curtain, too, so Zoe doesn't kick my ass when my rent's due next month.
Ian will continue exploring how Amherst has prepared him for life outside "The Bubble" in his weekly column leading up to Commencement. He welcomes comments, questions and proper proposals at iglovett@amherst.edu.