University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Fear and penury in Los Angeles

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Fear and penury in Los Angeles

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Content 1

FEAR AND PENURY IN LOS ANGELES
By
Catherine O’Sullivan

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A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

May 2014
Copyright 2014 Catherine O’Sullivan
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis chairman, Tim Page for his unflagging kindness, his tireless
support, his red pen, his extraordinary ear for both the rhythm and melody of prose, and for
the occasional kick in the back side. I’d like to thank my other committee members, Sandy
Tolan and Michael Parks, without whose contributions I could not have persevered, and Jina
Virtue for believing in me, looking me in the eye and allowing me to see it.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 2
Abstract 4
Fear and Penury in Los Angeles 5

4

Abstract
Fear and Penury in Los Angeles is a work of non-fiction prose, an accounting of the effects of
the Recession of 2008 on one particular woman, me. It details the ravages of economic ruin,
homelessness, loss, finally and perhaps most terribly, a fateful journey into The Entertainment
Industry, the very Heart of Darkness itself.

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Fear and Penury in Los Angeles
Tucson, Arizona and Seattle, Washington
When I think about it now there were rumblings in the aether. My husband, soon to be
ex, needed a loan to buy me out of our house and for no obvious reason the bank got pissy. It
denied him, made him re-submit materials, failed to answer questions or return phone calls. I
pushed it, had to. Our second kid was finished with high school and I was anxious to leave
town, start a new life. I figured the ex was dragging his ass on purpose. That’s the nature of
divorce. Everybody’s always doing everything on purpose.
But eventually the loan came through. He handed me the check the night before I was
scheduled to leave for Seattle and said he was sorry, sort of, for leaving it until the last minute
only it wasn’t his fault. It was the “economy’s” fault you see, and The Economist, which he read
cover to cover every week, said this was going to be the big one, unlike any recession we’d ever
seen. I didn’t pay much attention. Economists are always talking about recessions. They’d
never seemed to amount to all that much before.
Once I got that check into my hands I didn’t give it another thought.
Until two years later when I’d lost the entire wad on a house in Hood Canal,
Washington, a sweet rural area just across Puget Sound from Seattle proper. Yeah, I’d bought a
house. I just had to have one and completely ignored people admonishing me, “You sure you
want to buy already? Why don’t you wait awhile, get settled in.” But I just didn’t feel
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comfortable renting, hadn’t done it since college, and so what if I bought a house? Real estate
was always a good investment. If worse came to worst I could sell it in a couple of years and
move on. I’d been a co-owner on three previous houses and that was always how it had
worked.
But in 2010 it didn’t work that way anymore. I couldn’t find a job close to my new place,
had to move across the Sound to Seattle and when I went to rent my house out, its value had
dropped like a piano plummeted from a fifth floor window. Potential renters looked at me like I
was stone cold crazy. You want how much? So I ate a couple hundred dollars on that every
month and with the obscenely high rent I had to pay in Seattle, before I knew it I was leaking
five-hundred dollars a month.
Oh, how I didn’t want to sell my sweet little Hood Canal house. I wept, I rent my
garments, prayed, meditated, chanted the “nam me oh-ho renge kyo.” I promised God I’d go
back to The Holy Mother Church if He’d intervene, a strategy that had never worked before—
just as well because I really don’t like The Church-- but I thought, “This time, I’ll do it. Just let
me keep my house.”
But my metaphysical ejaculations came to naught. When the value of my property
sunk below the most recent property tax statement, I had to sell it, short.
I lost the whole fifty-thousand, and then some.

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The lawyers said, “Buck up. Plenty of people are a lot more underwater than you are!”
Those assholes really know how to comfort a gal.
So back to the aethereal rumblings, the ones that had radiated all the way across the
country from Wall Street to a podunk branch of Wells Fargo in Tucson, Arizona almost two
years earlier. Those had been the sounds of mortgage bankers and Wall Street traders tossing
around something so diabolical no one had thought to invent them before. They were called
“bundled sub-prime mortgages,” and were why, throughout most of 2010 and 2011, I never got
a mortgage statement with the same return address twice. One month it would be Washington
Mutual, the next it would be “Ed’s Chicken-liver Bank of Wisconsin.” I thought this was a little
weird, but every time I’d tried to call someone to find out what was going on they would have
gone out of business or if I got someone they’d say, this is business as usual. Apparently you
don’t know anything about the complexities of high finance, ma’am. Don’t sweat it; just pay it.
So I did.
Turned out “bundled sub-prime mortgages” were the ones taken out by people like me,
who didn’t take out bigger mortgages than they could handle, combined with those of people
who for whatever reasons, did. The payers got bundled with the non-payers and no individual
bank actually knew the exact value contained in any specific wad. One might be worthless or it
might be worth millions. All they knew was that they had to trade it fast because in the end
whoever got stuck with the crap ones went belly up. It was like a kids’ game, only not.
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All these banks knew exactly what they were doing and that it would all end in tears.
But being pretty sure they wouldn’t be theirs and with the lure of gigantic profits, they just kept
on doing it until they ran the economy into the ground.
And for the first time in my life I was right under its wheels.
So I lammed it back to the land of my birth with my tail between my legs. Los Angeles,
La Ciudad de Angels, though I’ve never seen one there. Hey, I sure wasn’t going to go back to
Tucson in disgrace and listen to all the nanny nanny nyah nyah’s, which probably weren’t there
but were pounding me so hard from inside my skull I wouldn’t have been able to tell the
difference.
But in returning to a place I hadn’t lived in for twenty-five years I had forgotten the
primary maxims. One, Los Angeles is a place you should never leave, and two, if you do, never,
ever go back there. The landscape was the same but all my old friends and connections had
moved, married, died. I rented a room from a childhood friend and we’d agreed it would all be
platonic, but then he wanted to make dinner together every night and hang out. I’d be
watching the Daily Show on my computer and he’d plop down next to me and try to eat my
cheese crackers. He had a wart removed from his back and kept expecting me to rub ointment
on it. There was a hole in his sweat pants and I saw his bumhole. Holy moly, I hadn’t signed up
for this.

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He assured me that I would not wind up on the street but after a few times with the
whole wart thing the street started to look pretty good.
I’d broken Maxim Number One about twenty-five years earlier because quite frankly, I’d
come to hate the whole Los Angeles thing. Mid-nineteen eighties L.A. resembled a massive
parking lot suffocated by mustard gas and infested with four wheeled maggots trundling over a
mostly eaten carcass, only they called it a city. It seemed like I spent my entire life stuck on the
Ventura Freeway about a mile and a half short of the 405 interchange, my stomach producing
enough hydrochloric acid to burn through a manhole cover, because goddammit, I was going to
be late to work again!
Back in those days all I wanted was a normal life. Problem was, I didn’t know what a
“normal life” was. But born in Hollywood and weaned on television, I figured it had something
to do with nineteen-sixties sit coms, where the women wore pointy bras and the Brylcreamed
husbands playfully cuffed the cherubic and devilishly mischievous, cow-licked and starched
kids. Normal people grew up in towns like Springfield and Beecher’s Corners, not vast expanses
of asphalt and cement that go on forever and realizations like the one where you’ve lived in
some place your entire life and someone wants you to come to a part of it that’s an hour’s drive
away, like Downey, and all you know about it is that it’s the home of Ralph William’s Ford,
where you can get any car for nine-hundred and ninety-nine dollars! No one you know has ever
been to Downey. You have no idea even what direction it’s in. And when you get there—hell,
where’s the off ramp?—then once you pass the pork packing plant you’re already out of it. TV
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was my template for normalcy but my real life wasn’t anything like it. How can the place you
actually live in be so unwieldy and confusing? Shouldn’t you have it wired by now? Shouldn’t
Goober Pyle be hanging out at the filling station and Kitten from “Father Knows Best” loosening
her belt some more because dammit, is it my imagination or is Kitten getting FAT?
So you leave home never realizing the depth to which the City of Angel’s has gotten into
your blood and become part of you. The chaos, confusion, almost complete absence of
individual depth and character. The asphalt, cement, smog, Santa Ana winds, Mexicans
hawking stuff on Van Nuys Boulevard, the steamy stink of oil and moisture creeping through
the myriad cracks sprung off capillaries of the San Andreas fault, spidering under sidewalks and
mini-malls, and the cigar smoking greaser standing in the doorway of the liquor store where
you bought candy as a kid, the store that even though the five foot high, ten foot long sign out
front says, “LIQUOR,” you are told by your parents is called a “candy store,” you leave all that in
search of the Good Life.
And doing so is like stepping out for a smoke from a crowded movie theater on a
Saturday afternoon, the cheapo double feature matinee. When you come back you’ve lost your
seat. Someone else with their own popcorn and Junior Mints has taken it and when you try to
muscle them out they look at you like you’ve never existed and anyway, are you crazy?
So there’s me in Los Angeles looking at the jobs ads on Craigslist, the be-all and end-all
of classified ads. Problem is, I don’t have that many qualifications. I’ve been a mom, a
zookeeper, a planetarium lecturer, a journalist and a medical lab worker, had tons of part time
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jobs but always in the service of something else: my kids, a new guitar, paying rent, eating.
There was nothing that had ever morphed into that whole ineffable “career” thing. Maybe I
have an attention deficit, or maybe I simply hadn’t had the time. Whatever it is I was turning
up nada, ninguno or as the Brits say, fuck all.
And then I saw it. “Extras needed for Feature Film,” all in capital letters leapt off the
computer screen. Call, bla bla bla. So I call bla bla and this incredibly harried girl, sounds like
she’s talking on at least three phones at one time, frantically responding to text messages,
instant messages, Tweets, and emergency demands from Tumblr for the most recent pictures
of her dog “Foofy,” she’s so Hollywood busy that spontaneous human combustion is not just a
possibility but a foregone conclusion.
She puts me on “hold” a time or two, or three, and finally manages a “can you come
Tuesday at 1:30?”
Sure. I’m not doing anything else. I know extras don’t make much—or hadn’t when I’d
left-- but this ad says a hundred and fifty to two-hundred fifty a day! At that rate I’d only have
to work a few days a week and still have time to do all the stuff I really like to do: write, play
music, ride my bike, hang out with my dogs. And even if it wasn’t quite that much, it had to be
better than what I was making sitting on my butt listening for the sound of my bank balance
outgassing.

12

Tuesday rolls around and excited about my appointment, I hit the freeway and head to
Hollywood and Vine, the most famous of all famous intersections because maybe a famous
busty actress was famously discovered there, or could be James Dean famously threw up in the
gutter one evening after eating a bad pierogi only rumor had it he’d been hitting the cheap
rotgut again. Anyway, these days it’s just a regular dirty intersection with Burger King
wrappers overflowing the garbage cans, concrete smelling of urine, and a guy dressed up as a
green Lady Liberty dancing on the corner so you’ll stop in and get your taxes done.
The building’s non-descript, multi-storied brown brick with a homeless guy out front,
Caucasian once probably, though now his skin’s the same color as his filthy clothes. I give him a
buck. The door’s locked so they have to buzz you in, only they neglected to give me the suite
number so I just press all the buttons, bam, bam, bam. There’s always somebody who will let
you in out of boredom, loneliness, or an ongoing desire for anarchy. A second later I’m buzzed
up to a dingy green fluorescently-lit hallway with three or four other budding stars hanging
outside a locked door.
I smile at a couple of them; they don’t smile back. This is after all, Hollywood,
chronically inflamed backstabbing malice writ large on every surface, the result way too many
thespians doggedly following their destinies, waiting on every chicken bone tossed down by
someone with more power and influence than they have, which is almost everybody.
They’re all holding folders, resumes I’m thinking, detailing years of theatric
accomplishments, none of which I have. A chickie all in black, preternaturally skinny and
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blanched, rolls her eyes only to be ignored by the handsome, busily texting standard issue gay
hipster keeping himself as far apart as possible from everybody without falling out of a window.
He is trained, dammit, BA in Theatre Arts from US fucking C and somebody, well, somebody
other than his mother and guy he is sleeping with, is going to notice one day soon. A forty-five
year old, a long while past her sell-by date, hard mileage, trailer park coiffeur, sighs wearily and
I agree. Why do we have to stand in this hallway? It’s past time and did we put enough money
in the parking meters? Do I even have any more quarters in my purse? Usually, since I moved
back to this town, I have enough change that if I hit somebody in the head they’d go down like
they’d been sapped, but not so much today. I bought a Fatburger and a Coke earlier.
It’s important to note here that the City of Los Angeles has the most vicious, merciless
and efficient parking cops in the world. It’s an ego problem akin to underdeveloped genitals.
Here they are in a city famous for its hard-assed Hatfield/McCoy police departments-- the LAPD
and the L.A County Sheriffs-- and they have to drive around in puny, three-wheeled white
vehicles--you can’t even call them cars really--which renders their entire raison d’etre making
people already down on their luck, suicidally miserable. You can beg, plead, get down on your
knees and lick their shoes clean but once they’ve spotted that meter tick from green to red, you
are getting a ticket, a big one.
Finally a guy with Mr. Potatohead gray hair-- like it’s stuck to his head with a peg--
ushers us into a room furnished with couches and a TV. A heavily made up, trendily dressed girl
behind a counter knits her brow and concentrates on her computer screen.
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The trailer parky girl gets called first. After about five minutes she storms out looking
hurt, rejected and pissed off. God! I don’t want to go in there. They might do that to me.
But I’m next.
***
“I feel so awful. It’s not easy doing my job sometimes.” Teresa looks to me for
understanding, as though I am her new best friend. She has her own office, is sixty but looks
forty-five thanks to “work done” and weight control. She’s dressed to the nines in a short skirt
and very high heels. Without them, she’s 4’11.” With them she’s 5’4.”
“Her head shots are twenty years old! Carmen’s got to have recent head shots. We
have to know what people look like now.” Carmen is the boss of the place, though nobody’s
seen her. Teresa gives me a credit sheet detailing all the productions Carmen’s cast. Mostly
they’re B-list zombie and slasher movies.
“Yeah.” I nod, knowingly. Poor trailer park woman probably thinks her looks haven’t
changed in twenty years. Body dysmorphia, or whatever it’s called when you don’t know what
you look like anymore. I have it now. I look okay for fifty-five but I’m still fifty-five and
surprised daily by mirrors and photographs insisting on-- no, belaboring-- this astounding and
persistent development.
“Can you read for me?” Teresa holds a page, same one I was given in the waiting area. I
glanced at it but didn’t fret much. It’s only a few lines of dialogue. But I thought this was for an
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extra job. Extras don’t talk. If you talk on camera they have to pay you real dough, as in
hundreds, as in enough to actually pay a bill or two. Why do I have to read? Could it be that
because I’m special and that my specialness, the kind I’ve always known I possess, that
ineffable and singular je ne sais qua forever bubbling just under the surface but yet to be
recognized, could it be that this Teresa 4’11” finally sees it? Is a career in acting what my life’s
been leading up to? Is this why I’ve come back to L.A. after all this time? Could it be that after
a zillion years of wondering where the hell it is, “Fate” has finally taken a hand?
“I’ll tell you, Catherine. We’ve got a lot of parts for people in your demographic,”
meaning graying to middle age but still fucking hot, I’m thinking. Of course they do. Young
whippersnappers are a dime a dozen, but there’s only one me—right? “But Carmen needs
headshots. Do you have recent headshots?”
I look around, slightly embarrassed. I guess that’s what was supposed to be in the
folders. Nope. Why would I? All I did was answer an ad on the Internet and it didn’t say “bring
headshots.”
“You can go wherever you want, obviously. But I recommend this guy. He did mine.”
She slides her own along with a business card across the desk. They’re nice. I’ll give them that.
Unlike in real life, greying eye circles, incipient lines and clumped all-day mascara, her face in
the photos is coffee-cream smooth, blemish free yet possessed of just enough Hispanic
perkiness that it positively shines through. “Most people will charge you four or five hundred
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dollars; this guy’s under two.” Casually stated, shoulders shrugged, neither here nor there to
her.
Two hundred dollars? Shit, hell. I’ve got it, but… Gads. Just the price of getting jobs I
guess. But if they’ve got work for me like they say it’ll pay for the photos fast enough.
I call next morning, first thing. When a guy answers he doesn’t identify himself or his
location but sounds the way I do when I think it might be a creditor: wary, ready to hang up as
fast as possible and wondering in the back of his mind whether living in Mexico is really as bad
as they say it is. But he perks up quick when he hears what I’m after. I get an appointment the
next day.
There’s another guy from Teresa 411 and Carmen’s shop waiting when I arrive, and a big
fat receptionist, three-hundred pounds easy, the kind of obesity that puts you in such
admiration of the human heart you almost get religion. She sucks a half gallon sized Big Gulp
through a straw. “He’ll be with you in just a minute. He’s just finishing up with his last client.”
Hollywood Photography is a shotgun shack of a mini-mall space and the enormous
woman handles both receptionist and photo editing duties, getting images taken in the back
downloaded in the front where they’re photo-shopped to the customer’s liking and burned
onto a CD. There’s a big screen TV up front and the receptionist watches it with casual interest,
looking up intermittently from her click-click-move-mouse-around photo editing duties. It’s a
court TV show called, “We the People, with Gloria Allred.” Allred’s a famous lawyer with a
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penchant for attaching herself to high profile cases involving rich peoples’ broken engagements
and babies dangled out windows by Michael Jackson. She has never met a camera she didn’t
like. Now she’s got her own show.
On the screen a mouthy stripper defends her position from a podium. I don’t know
what it is, but from the way she’s going at it she’s damn sure she’s in the right.
Robert, the photographer is kind of a pasty, stooped over guy with a pot belly, who
mostly dwells in the rear of the building where it’s painted black, stuffed full of the requisite
lighting, reflectors and other photographer stuff. He takes a lot of shots and seems to know
one end of the camera from the other, clicking away for around forty-five minutes all the while
regaling me with nuggets of insight he’s learned about “the Industry.” This town’s rotten with
work. For example his wife the receptionist, hell, just crossing a parking lot in Hollywood she
was offered five-hundred dollars for being in a scene. I’m thinking, well no wonder. If she can
act at all she could have played the mama in Gilbert Grape.
Some of the pictures turn out well and after a few lines and blemishes are edited out, I
look twenty years younger. I’m stoked, so pleased that when Robert asks me, I write a
testimonial for their Internet site. What a great experience! And not only is he giving me the
best price in town, he genuinely cares what I think.

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Back at the reception area he announces to everybody that he’s going to throw in
something for free--something you won’t get anywhere else in town--his famous ten minute
talk about how to make it in Hollywood.
Send lots of postcards to casting directors, hand ‘em out on sets, get a zillion of them
made here and he’ll give you a deal. Go to a website, upload your headshot. All the while he’s
talking his wife glances over continually and with greater frequency at the big screened TV.
Wow, this is interesting and compelling shit! The stripper behind the podium, tits thrust
forward, hand on hip, gesticulating wildly towards the poor sap at the other podium yammers
more intensely as she defends her position.
“You think she’s a real person?” says Robert, nodding towards the screen like he’d only
just noticed it was on. “She’s not a real person. She’s background just like you are. Gets ten,
fifteen minutes of screen time. Seriously. She looks like a stripper, right? She’s not. She’s just
like you only playing a role.” He pauses, letting the idea sink in.
“I did her head shots. She’s got a hell of a career going now.”
The next day when I take my headshots back to “On Track Casting,” (the name, I’ve
come to know, of Carmen’s business.) Teresa praises them and says I need to get twenty-five
eight by tens so that they can submit me for lots of work. Robert will do them for three dollars
a piece. Gladly. My career in Hollywood is good to go. I’ll make the one-seventy five I just
dropped at Hollywood Photography back in no time. Everybody’s going to want me. There is
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one project she’s got specifically for me in mind, and then of course there’s “We the People.”
You only get fifty bucks for that but you get to talk and it’s plenty of screen time. Every actor’s
dream.
I go to Cost Co and get twenty-five head shots made the next day. It costs me forty
bucks instead of the hundred it would have cost at Robert and Mama Gilbert Grape’s.
That’s when I start thinking. If the true nature of reality is going to hit you anywhere it’s
going to be at Cost Co. I dare anybody to spend more than thirty seconds in there and retain
one illusion about anything. Warehouses stacked to the ceiling full of ten gallon jars of
mayonnaise and crates the size of refrigerators stuffed with lifetime supplies of churros all for
under twenty dollars, have that effect on the human mind.
Any time someone tells you they’re going to make you money, only you’re the only one
who’s forked money out, it’s not likely to turn out well. Some lessons you have to learn over
and over again, but it’s like a law of physics: when your ego gets engaged you turn stupid. I had
once paid a hundred bucks to a bona fide literary agent who assured me she could find a
publishing house for my novel, and though she didn’t charge reading fees, she needed money
for “office supplies.” I was later contacted by the FBI. Seems that bona fide literary agent had a
lot of people buying her office supplies. She must have had the best supplied office west of the
Mississippi.

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I did the math. At this point I’d shelled out forty bucks for prints, gas money driving to
Hollywood three times not to mention all the quarters you have to load into the parking meters
down there, and a hundred and seventy-five dollars for headshots that I’m supposed to hand
back to Teresa 411 so the shadowy “Carmen,” can find me jobs. There are a lot of times you
don’t want to find out what you know you’re going to find out, but in searching for other extra
jobs on Craigslist I’ve made another phone call and gotten Teresa 411’s harried voice all over
again slotting me into the very same afternoon appointment hour. I go through the listings
several days back and find the same ad every day with the same inflated numbers on earnings,
a hundred and fifty to two-hundred fifty bucks a day. Then it occurs to me that everyone in
Hollywood Photography’s waiting area was from the same extras casting agency and… wait a
minute. It starts to become clear: neurons fire, denial hormones try to flood them out, leave
them smoking and deadened but they will not be silenced. Electricity arcs from one cell to the
next, triumphantly in an orgy of truth seeking. They know a guy who knows a guy and dammit,
they’re going to get this message through.
And whammo! It occurs to me.
It’s your basic kickback scheme. Advertise on Craigslist, send the suckers down the road
for headshots, receive a little fee from the photographer for referrals and send some more
down. In the meantime, you, “On Track Productions” have become the one conduit supplying
“actors” for ‘”We the People, Starring Gloria Allred,” which they now get for fifty bucks a day

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instead of the industry standard requiring minimum wage (or sixty-four dollars for eight hours),
thereby saving them fourteen bucks on each “actor” per day.
Teresa has me put my headshot in the “We the People” manila folder on the counter
and says they’ll call. I will be a defendant.
***
I feel sorry for architecture students. They spend thousands of dollars going to school
studying the cathedral at Notre Dame, the Louvre, medieval basilicas with flying buttresses, but
in the end most of the spaces they end up designing are as nondescript as the one I’m ushered
into, the one where they tape “We The People.” High ceilinged and hollow, stuffed with slap-
dash partitioned “offices,” cement floored, particle board walls having absorbed the smells of
whatever B.O. and takeout food has been delivered, scarfed up and spilled over the years. In
time these spaces will become uninhabitable. Someone with a little power will throw up his
hands, “holy fuck! A class act like us, we can’t stay here anymore. It’s disgusting!”
But “We the People, with Gloria Allred” is not a class act. Extras mill around looking for
bathrooms or a place to sneak out and have a smoke while a crabby British functionary signs
them in and directs them to a waiting area with almost, but not quite enough folding chairs.
Once settled in, a plucky production assistant comes in and gives us the low down. She wants

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big. She wants emotion. The more emotion and intensity the greater the likelihood of being
chosen for screen time, the implication being that some of us will not make it.
Everyone’s given a set up and instructed to ad lib to their heart’s content, although she
doesn’t used that word. “Just pretend that this is you,” she says. Some people schlep their
way through the dialogues like they’ve never seen reality TV before, as if they’re going to get
picked for their good looks or fancy shoes. The rest of us go for it, hamming it up like crazy,
acting like reality show television people act: mouthy, aggrieved and under-medicated.
Once picked and inside individual cubicles, we hash things out with assistant producer.
Me, a skinny girl, and a long haired guy with pierced nipples—I know because he tells me--sit
and chat. He’s none too comfortable with his part. The character he’s playing is suing my
character because I put a big sign up in his front yard declaring for all the neighborhood to see,
that he’s a pervert. This has caused him emotional distress and he is going after me in court to
pay his therapy bills.
I put the sign up because when he was the coach of the high school girls’ basketball
team, which he no longer is, he had a party at his house and gave my under-aged daughter
alcohol. I don’t know if he molested her or anyone since he was never convicted or even
charged. The fact is he’s got a case. There is no evidence he’s a pervert, just a giver of alcohol
to underage girls in his charge.

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The problem for actor Pierced Nipples, and I don’t blame him one bit, is that most
people, myself included up until now, don’t know these court TV shows are staged and that the
people mouthing the overheated and often passionate verbiage, aren’t the people actually
involved in the case. They are picked and coached so that they won’t look like actors but
exactly what they are: people with nothing better to do, laid off Staples employees, disability
frauds claiming bad backs, pot dealers, entrepreneurs flogging “steampunk” jewelry, twenty
and thirty-somethings making their parents miserable by refusing to leave home yet continually
complaining about the food. These are the people who, but for a twist of fate or two, are not
the people in the cases represented in “We the People, with Gloria Allred” but very well could
be.
So if the television audience sees actor Pierced Nipples on TV playing a pervert, as far as
they’re concerned he is a pervert. There’s something tiny at the end of the credits that says
these aren’t real people, but it’s so small and goes by so fast nobody sees it. From now on
when people who watch this episode see this guy on the street they’re going to think he’s a real
sex criminal, or at the very least a high school teacher who gets underage girls drunk at his
house.
But that’s his problem and as he frets, wonders, and asks questions nobody answers, I
fling myself into my role. I’m a nurse, a single mom grinding herself to the nub working the
night shift. I’m, dedicated, devoted, the quintessential American Mother raising this teenage
girl all by myself without a damn bit of help from my worthless, skirt chasing, ex-husband, thank
24

you very much; and maybe I am a little off my rocker, going to the trouble of making a six by
ten foot yellow sign declaring this neighborhood guy a pervert and posting it outside his house.
But dammit! It’s hard enough being a working mom in this world without worrying whether my
daughter’s basketball coach is a sexual predator. I have had it. Is mine a rational act? Hell no,
but what do I care? There’s not a goddamn reason in the world a thirty-five year old guy needs
to have a bunch of teenage girls over to his house and get ‘em all boozed up if he doesn’t want
to molest or seduce one of them. I feel this character’s pain. I go all method actor on their
asses. I become her.
And when we go before the judge on high, me at the left podium, the pervert on the
right, him stumbling over his words—he’s on TV after all, defending his status of non-pervert—I
go after him like a pit bull protecting her puppy. The skinny girl playing the daughter by my side
tries to get a few words in edgewise but never mind her! I’ve got this. I’m up all night, night
after night taking care of sick people in a hospital, on my feet, risking life and limb and hepatitis
C and infectious mononucleosis and scabies and God knows what, because I am an angel of
mercy and this sleezebag tries to seduce my daughter with booze? Not on my watch. Whether
he deserves a sign in his front yard or not is irrelevant to everyone.
Except of course, the judge who finds in his favor and makes my character pay not only
his headshrinker bills but court costs.
When we leave the set the assistant director tells us we were so good that instead of
just twelve minutes—it’s an hour show so generally it’s four cases an hour—we’re getting a full
25

twenty-two. Actor Pierced Nipples doesn’t look happy even when they tell him he can take the
pervert sign home as a memento.
When it’s over the skinny, no longer so plucky production assistant, gives me fifty dollars
cash from a satchel around her waist. It is the first money I have earned since returning to Los
Angeles.
I look at the five, ten dollar bills in my hand and it gets me to thinking. Wouldn’t it be
nice if they were hundred dollar bills, or thousand dollar bills, or better yet what if they were
five ten-thousand dollar bills? Do they make those? I believe they do though I’ve never held
one. As one thought leads to another the way they do, I think about that fifty-thousand of
mine, gone when the housing market crashed. Man, I could use that money now. Up to that
moment I had always thought of it as just sort of vanished, like a dust devil in the desert, rising
up and swirling off to myriad particulate places beyond my grasp and certainly beyond my
comprehension.
But then I got to thinking in overdrive. What if it was one guy who got the money?
What did he do with it? Buy a ring for his girl? Spend it on hookers and coke? Maybe he
bought a boat, a trip to Europe, a week in New York seeing Broadway shows and staying at a
fancy hotel. I wondered what it felt like, having fun with my money. Did he imagine he’d
earned it? Or did he feel the way he would as if he’d won it in a card game? Could that be?
Nah, how could that be? I wasn’t playing. I don’t gamble. He doesn’t even know who I am.
26

I walk on, away from the TV studio and down the street. There’s my car: a 2007, and
except for a small dent in the fender still looking pretty shiny and new. I wonder how long it
will be before it starts to look old.
And that’s when I spot him. The parking meter cop. Uh oh. That little metallic tongue
sticking up in the meter? It’s red; and if that puny bastard gets there first it’s going to cost me.
I watch him closing in and walk faster. He’s short and fat and the last thing I saw him do before
starting to advance on my Forester was toss a butt onto the ground and stomp it. He probably
can’t run very fast.
But I can and turn it on. Sometimes it all comes down to physics: length of stride,
strength and that most formidable of Nietzschian constructs, the Human Will.
I’ve got my hand on the door and am into the driver’s seat before he’s even got his little
electronic pad out of his big-butt back pocket.
I see him in my rearview mirror as I drive away. He’s already forgotten about me, and is
headed to the next poor bastard, down the street.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Fear and Penury in Los Angeles is a work of non‐fiction prose, an accounting of the effects of the Recession of 2008 on one particular woman, me. It details the ravages of economic ruin, homelessness, loss, finally and perhaps most terribly, a fateful journey into The Entertainment Industry, the very Heart of Darkness itself.

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Asset Metadata

Creator O'Sullivan, Catherine (author)

Core Title Fear and penury in Los Angeles

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 04/18/2014

Defense Date 04/18/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Background,extras,Homelessness,memoir,mortgage crisis,movies,non‐fiction,OAI-PMH Harvest,recession,television

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Page, Tim (committee chair), Parks, Michael (committee member), Tolan, Sandy (committee member)

Creator Email cosulliv@usc.edu,osullied@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-379947

Unique identifier UC11295976

Identifier etd-OSullivanC-2377.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-379947 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OSullivanC-2377.pdf

Dmrecord 379947

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights O'Sullivan, Catherine

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA