When I was 19, the thought of having to spend the summer after my freshman year of college at my Dad’s house working at the paint your own pottery studio and fighting with my sister about the car was, in one word, unacceptable. As soon as February melted into March, I began thinking about places to escape to that summer. I wanted to stay in New York but I couldn’t afford the housing. I contemplated renting a room in an old Victorian house in San Francisco run by a man with a Hotmail e-mail account, but I was a little too intimidated by that idea. Instead, when my Aunt and Uncle told me they were taking a two month vacation and needed someone to watch their house in Los Angeles, I jumped at the offer. I flew there in the beginning of June and shortly thereafter they left me with a stack of $20’s and instructions to “help yourself to the liquor cabinet.” I was 19 and it seemed too good to be true.
Of course it was too good to be true, but in nebulous, subsurface ways that wouldn’t become evident until much later. That summer it took me forever to find a job, and when I did, it was a position as a sales associate at the Forever 21 in the Sherman Oaks mall. The store’s clientele consisted primarily of washed out C-list actresses and spoiled, eyeliner-heavy Valley brats. That is to say: I hated it. The manager initially stationed me in the front of the store as a greeter, but it became evident very quickly that I was neither bubbly nor LA enough to properly perform that task. I was then designated with returning the “go-backs”–items rejected in the dressing room–to their original racks. This required an encyclopedic memory map of each section of the store, and because I woke each morning saddled with the repercussions of full access to the liquor cabinet, I didn’t really have the mental capacity for such in-depth knowledge of sequins and halter tops. If it took me longer than five minutes to find an item’s appropriate section, I would simply hide it somewhere else in the store.
I became very good at hiding clothes amongst other clothes, but honing this skill was not exactly how I envisioned spending my summer in Los Angeles. I ached to climb the ranks to cashier, a cushy role the managers seemed to reserve only for “responsible types”–those they could trust not to pocket money from the register. It did not help my case that I came back from lunch breaks reeking of Marlboro Lights.
My favorite role at the store was working the dressing room. You could occasionally sit down–which is basically HEAVEN for anyone working retail–and customers always asked you your opinion on their outfits. This never failed to make me feel important. That my fashion opinion might matter to someone, even if they were a bleachy, frazzled Fresno transplant, made me giddy and bestowed some much-needed sense of pride in my position. In the dressing room, I was an expert in poly-blend skirts, in raggedly-stitched tops, in all outfits poorly-made by tiny Chinese hands. As the dressing room archangel, I was a fashion mogul.
But the sense of self-worth derived from insecure tweens hungry for my opinion was, naturally, fleeting and false. In Los Angeles I was sadder than I have ever been; sadder even than the summer I went on my medicine, sadder than before I was on medicine at all. I did not have any purpose. I was unshakably lonely. For the most part, I lived in that big house alone. I threw parties for people I only tenuously knew through an acquaintance at NYU. They would come and raid the liquor cabinet, come and do drugs and smoke cigarettes on the patio. They would make me anxious and nervous, they would fight and it would take an hour to convince them to leave. But I kept letting them come over because I didn’t know anyone else and I wanted to have a “fun” summer, one that would validate my decision to live 3,000 miles away from Pennsylvania and New York. I was working retail at a chain store that took an hour to get to and living in a city that’s primary ethos–mainly, that appearance is everything–directly conflicted with my core beliefs. But I had just finished freshman year at NYU and genuinely believed that having a perfect thrift store wardrobe might mean something. So I suppose in a way I went to Los Angeles to figure out whether or not that was how I actually wanted to live. Could I really cope with the shallowness that had pervaded my life those past few months? Was I really okay with anorexic DJs armed with iPods acting as the unofficial icons of the young zeitgeist?
No–or, I finally realized the answer to those questions was no after the end of that summer. At the beginning of August, my Aunt and Uncle returned and I gratefully packed my suitcases and booked a ticket back to Philadelphia. By then, my parents’ house seemed like a heavenly getaway compared to the double shifts and social life that basically amounted to full-scale isolation.
Two weeks before I was to leave, I gave my notice to my manager at Forever 21, saying I had to return unexpectedly early because my mother was having surgery. This was true, I just didn’t really have to return home: I wanted to. It was time.
Sadly, I never made it to cashier.