The Gofer (A Short Story)

I’m not going back to Los Angeles. Not today, not tomorrow, not any time soon.

I dreamt I was back stage at the Oscars. A friend of mine, an actress living in New York with her tea total boyfriend, was working on a production up for awards and I was there care of her invitation.

The dream ended with close ups of a young woman like myself, riding on the back of a horse, the sexy rugged feminine type I aspire to be. The narrator described the progression of her hair color over the years, from plain brown to super mega ultra red.

Close ups of Nicole Kidman decked out in a pink crepe sheer chiffon, a sweep of webbed pink lace across her face. Boiling eyes, coming down the stage that felt more like a runway. Some electric blue look of knowing. Looking right at me, as though into my eyes. But this seemed strange as I was all around her. I was the dream weaver. Her look, right down to the pupils pointing back at me, was my total creation.

There was a close-up of her hips and crotch moving around inside the dark pink gown, the legs crossing back and forth like gears in a machine, the hips pointing and thrashing like corresponding parts.

Everyone behind stage was running around in the dark. I was to retrieve a woman from the waiting lounge (wherever that was). A young, plump blonde pushed a clip board into my hands and dragged me through a maze of stairs and levels with different lighting fixtures and different sized crowds. Then she pushed me onto an escalator. Between my thoughts I heard her, “Go find the ticket holder.”

As the escalator caused me to rise I realized its design was rather unique. First of all, the further up I we went the less railing there was to hold onto, which scared me. Also, we kept going higher, and, in the initial portion of the ride, looking up, I could not see exactly where this moving step under my feet was leading me. And once we passed so many floors, the railing having disappeared altogether, terrorized, I realized I was set on a frail slab of moving stairs stretching straight through an enormous emptiness that would not stop, but only run alongside the ledge of the foyer, as it continued to loop back down to the bottom floor where it began. It was a moving arch that left it’s surviving passenger off not too many feet from where it started.

I wished I was back at the moment in the dream where I entered a Hollywood press conference late, wearing a fantastic gown that complemented my strong hip bones and softly squared off shoulders. Everyone unabashedly stole glances at me, including some men with thick bobs, wavy—dark, and styled—whose money boosted their collective (and therefore individual) sex appeal. I told myself they were budding directors.

The other young women/aging girls seated beside me at the front of the room weren’t hiding so well that they too were captivated by me. None of them budding directors, all of them girls I know in real life as pioneering homemakers. Capturing the fascination of these females was only thing more valuable to me than the steady hushed attention from the crowd of onlookers presumably involved in this VIP Q & A session. The occasional bulb going out and off like a silent white explosion shouting in the distance. My greatest hope was that the other girls would see that they couldn’t help to steal a look away from me to see if others were staring as well, and they were. Everyone was obsessed.

When it came time to be photographed arbitrarily I watched as the girls nervously, piously stepped onto the white tape X and, in lieu of posing, blushed. I instead was overcome by my dream self’s perception of the spirit of the great Marilyn Monroe. I held the moment, wrapping one arm around the torso, and the other around that one, plumping my cleavage up out of the dress said it was OK to look a lot, as much as you could, because I loved it. I loved them for it.

Standing on the white X, a harmony of cameras calling out to me in white echoes. All around me. My breasts, my arms, my hips. My eyes sought it all in, then closed, and I watched from inside as I pulled open a white, loud smile. I felt the light painted over my eyelids and again. Starting at the neck, I jostled my head from side to side, but beginning at the base of my spine, everything in slow motion. For uh uh moment, the world was in love, with me.

The escalator was getting closer to the top. An Indian woman from India hung over the brass railing. She was pointing a packet of papers resembling two tickets at me, shaking them to get my attention. Petrified, but brought back to my mission to get these tickets to their holders and finally to the seats.

In the dream I’d moved away from Los Angeles. And returned to find that it resembled the place I’d left and was, to my surprise, worse. Is a place just a place? Is it the same to be a beggar as it is to be a doctor? They’re both simply living lives. L. A. was darker, and stranger, the way the things we know take on a different shape or size or character all together and yet we know they’re meant to represent something else, something completely different in real life.

This sense of dream displacement was heightened by the fact that I was crashing with a half Greek guy who in real life desired me (heavily), lived alone (divorced in his mid twenties) in a remodeled garage with his dog, trying to start non-profit. And I last saw him turning back at the top of a hill in Echo Park, running away, as he crouched beside his mutt dog, who was having a mild seizure. It was purple, almost dark. I passed a lesbian couple walking their dogs and asked for directions, deciding to tell them that I was trying to get away from a real creep. I still wonder if they ran into him that night, or ever again, or ever.

Los Angeles was like a dark maze, a landscape of infinite unique characters meant for a role playing video game. So caught up in feeling lost, amazed, and ceaselessly entertained I couldn’t decide whom to trust—neither in the moment nor after the fact. Either no one, or everyone except the homeless. Except that in the end the homeless people were probably the most honest, wearing their intentions on their shabby sleeves.

The half Greek in the dream was the proud owner of this makeshift German WG (a group living community with cheap rent). His tenants were a couple other artists. One of whom was presumably queer and meanly showed me his collection of 80’s gadgets and toys.

I’m starting to understand why some people never leave home. I still haven’t traveled nearly as much of the globe as I plan to in my lifetime, and yet there are already too many impressions to contend with, too many moving ends to mend or sculpt together. Too many times going out to eat alone, paying the check, leaving a nice tip, then going to a bar alone to get drunk, avoid conversation, and ponder life. Studying the people around me, gaining nothing but forgettable impressions while childishly focusing on the impression I’m making: A very sad, strong, strange, lovely, youngish thing who finishes some drinks alone at the bar, leaves, looks for a conversation somewhere, but finds herself waking up in her bed at the time wondering where her next bed will be, what that stay will be like, and will she find a dancing partner one of these lonely days. She really just wants to dance with someone, someone sweet.

This half Greek person was angry with me in the dream. My lover from Los Angeles was almost non-existent. Never mentioned nor considered and never missed caused the dark flavoring of this stranger Los Angeles. Without my lone true angel to hold a lantern to LA into its honest hellish form. Without his love I had come to revisit a place of death.

There was an ominous car ride in the middle of the night whose queerness was so bland I hardly remember. Just dark stretches of emptiness antithetical to the mapping and actual physical makeup of LA, and the occasional blurry ball of light whizzing over our heads. Streetlights were mere accessory in certain Boulevards of LA, ones that weren’t residential, ones where everything was just on. Open. Running. Always waiting for you. They were interrogating me. Alex’s new roommates couldn’t believe I’d left LA. Couldn’t believe I’d come back, since I’d left. Were wondering how long I’d hold out this time, because they knew the truth. I wasn’t holding up in LA, not in a place so impossible. I was holding out. Holding out until something killed me or until I decided I needed my life, and left. Maybe that’s why so many people leave. They thought they’d come to live out their dreams, but decided that LA wasn’t a place for that. No, this was a place you went to die, to be destroyed, or to get raped, over, and over, and over again.

At the end of the ride, at least my portion, they dropped me off at some nowhere, in the blackness, on the side of the road. No one around, but I was OK to be alone and happy to be rid of them, the questions, the talk, and thoughts.


My actress friend was in from New York. She had a “Great Job” doing important things that required travel and brought her to LA to help organize a community of artists for a film in the Oscars. It didn’t matter except that she had a better job than me. The woman who shoved me onto the elevator was her lackey. I was there by my friend’s invitation and could only travel behind the scenes if I offered my services as a sort of gofer.

As my step had me approaching the Indian woman she began saying her last name at me. I scanned the clipboard. Whatever she was saying didn’t match, and the escalator seemed to be getting narrower. If I fell off this rail-less, slim-fitting person mover I would indeed drop to my death. It wasn’t the pain of hitting that scared me—that never even occurred to me. It was death itself, the unknown, loss, and the possible gain of only God (even if there’s no such being) knows what. I asked not hell.

Shaking my head at her as the escalator, only wide enough to house the width of three human feet, began its ride alongside the foyer floor before angling down for it’s decent. The names didn’t match. She was shocked. If it wasn’t her name, whose was it? After all, it was an Indian name. It must be a mix up. But I was sent to perform this one piece of duty. If I knowingly muffed it up I was a fairly shoddy friend, and I was not a professional. I wanted to be a professional. And yet, the pieces fit. She was, after all, Indian, and looking for—no, demanding—her two tickets. And, as well, she was the only person waiting for me after my lengthy and increasingly tapered escalator ride.

She could tell that I was giving in. She and another Indian larger Indian woman yanked me up over the brass railing. They were determined to get to the bottom of this issue, which was fine by me, because I was grateful be off that escalator and lying on sort of actual ground, and to hopefully finish this transaction by returning to the basement via the wide, carpeted, grand and safe stairway.

The day before our year anniversary was the day of my year anniversary with Los Angeles as well as the day I decided to leave my lover. That night he handed me a little box. The next day I’d be boarding an early morning flight to return home for my sister’s wedding. I opened it. Inside was a little piece of paper cut into the shape of a tiny heart with the words “YEAR ONE” printed on it. Meaning, it’s all about meaning. Year one sounded more like a death sentence than a celebration. More like a game show host saying “This is YEAR ONE of the rest of your life!” He points the microphone at me, the long wire resting on the floor, snaking off stage. I give him a look. A pause. I collect myself, inhale, kiss him on the cheek, turn and step away behind the curtain. Into the darkness, alone.

The doors opened to the great hall. The Oscars. The Indian women were gone like that, forgotten. I was out of my body, a wireless camera floating over the giant black and white rumbling that hardly resembled a grouping of individuals. Beyond the audience, to the stage, Nicole Kidman in pink, coming towards us on the white marble stage. Stunning. She was staring.

Then suddenly, the announcer describing the progression of her hair colors over the years, form plain Jane, natural, sandy brown to this red, red, red red that made her blue contacts Pop like a color scheme in Pop Art. She was a (real?) living beauty.

Back at the ranch the rustic lovely gal with a soul as strong as her horse settled into the saddle as he stamped back and forth in the dusty morning sunshine. Some attendants stood by, preparing her for the ride. But she was ready, a little timid, but that would soon go when the cool air was twisting around inside her top. She wanted that tingle, that fear of racing forward, willful, free, on the back of another free being. She held the reigns loose, but tight. She smiled to herself inside. Beautiful, she thought. And to look at her you’d know it. She was ready to ride.