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  The house was not portraying a haunted house in our show, however. It was doubling as a frat house, which to me was scarier. In the scene we were shooting, my Leading Best Friend and I had to go to this house and demand money that is owed to us by a particular frat bro named Doogie. But Doogie’s frat bros tell us he’s not home, so we leave. As we walk down the stairs from the house, my character decides to fix the situation by tweeting angrily at Doogie, which is always effective.

  “Stop,” the Director said immediately as I began my tweeting. “John, stop.” She said my tweeting looked fake. She was right. I was just typing random nonsense into my phone. She could tell from twenty feet away.

  “Write actual words,” she said. And I did, and it was much better. If you want to see what I wrote, just search my Twitter account for the words: “Doogie please resoind to my emai.”

  A small part of what made acting hard for me was that it was not clear why Leading Best Friend and I would be friends in the first place. Both the actor and the character are tall, handsome, athletic, affable, and liked. And I was me, the stunted weirdo deformed brother who never comes downstairs but instead only hangs out in his furnitureless room taking pictures of his creepy dolls.

  In real life, Leading Best Friend was also from Massachusetts, which gave us a little bit to talk about. But he had grown up in a different town playing hockey, a sport he continued to play and enjoyed watching. My efforts to engage him on my favorite sport—the history of logos of extinct hockey teams—only went so far.

  At some point I did come down from my room full of dolls. Feeling low and bad about my acting, I sat at the bottom of the stairs playing Scrabble against the computer on my phone. This was back when I was playing Scrabble a lot. I was pretty good at it. You probably remember from all the games my wife and I played as I live-tweeted the results: I knew how to drop seven-tile bingos for fifty extra points, I knew all the non-U uses of Q, and I was pretty deft at hitting those double- and triple-letter-score spaces.

  My Leading Best Friend took interest in my game.

  “Do you play?” I asked.

  He said yes. He said he often played Words with Friends. I told him there is no Words with Friends in this life: there is only Scrabble, with enemies. He laughed at that and suggested we play. It was a nice gesture on his part, and also I thought it would make me feel better to flatten this dumb handsome hockey player beneath the weight of all my sweet bingos.

  That is not how it happened, however. I had a strongish early game, but it was only his third or fourth turn when he packed an H and M against SMALL to form SH, HM, and MM, hitting the triple-word square with H twice for a total of something like six thousand points. I realized that Hockey Man knew his two-letter words cold. I had no chance. Over the next few moves he casually dropped BOOSTS, BOLSTERS, SULFURS, and XU on my head before finally emptying his rack with KREWE and handing me my phone back.

  “Good game,” he said.

  Smaller, smaller.

  But no matter what happened at work, at the Hotel, I never felt small. That was the danger of it. I would return from a day of shooting and the graceful woman at the bottom of the driveway, the one whose job it was to coldly turn unwanted people away, would instead smile at me and say, “Welcome home.”

  Justin at the little bar in the lobby would know I wanted a martini and make it without asking and talk to me about the Hartford Whalers or some other extinct hockey team I was obsessed with. And there I was: sitting at a bar, talking to a man about sports (or as close as I was ever going to get to talking about sports). I would feel a sudden sense of normalness, of welcome in the culture, and I knew it was false, but I accepted that gift. This generosity was only exceeded by the time I put out a call on Twitter to ask if anyone in LA knew where to find scrapple. If you do not know what scrapple is, the name really says it all: it is mushy gray cake of cornmeal, sage, and leftover pig hearts, livers, tongues, and skin. In Philadelphia and Baltimore and some other places, you cut it into crumbly slices and fry it and then you eat it on purpose, because it is delicious and hilariously honest. It does not hide what it is. The only more truth in advertising it could offer were if it weren’t called scrapple but “Genuine Gray Offal-Loaf.”

  I wanted the scrapple for a joke I wanted to play on a late-night television show I was going to tape. But I despaired of getting it. You almost never saw it in stores outside the mid-Atlantic. I don’t know how long it was after I tweeted—one hour? not more than two—when there was a knock on my hotel room door. A room service waiter offered me a tray and on the tray sat a pound of scrapple, defrosted, compliments of the house. This is still the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen. I didn’t end up making the joke on television. I blew it off so I could fry up slices of scrapple on my hotel suite’s little art deco stove and eat it, by myself.

  It is hard to feel lonely at the Hotel, even when you are alone in your room eating scrapple. You can go down to the big lobby in the afternoon and see this or that most famous person in the world sitting right across from you, also alone, and it feels like you are all just loafing around in the living room of your family house together, and you and Charlize Theron over there, reading a book, are secret siblings. Often I would get a room whose window faced the patio, so at night, alone in bed, I could fall asleep to the clatter and murmur of the late diners below. It was comforting, like falling asleep to a downstairs dinner party hosted by my and Charlize’s sophisticated mom and handsome stepdad.

  If you really want to be alone at the Hotel, you have to go to the gym. No one wants to go to the gym at this Hotel, and even the Hotel hates the concept of fitness, with its air of virtue and discipline. That is why the “gym” is just one treadmill and one elliptical machine and a photogenic but unused heavy bag all shoved into what is essentially an attic crawlspace. No one ever goes there. I take it back. One time I went to the gym and Ralph Fiennes was there doing curls with some silver dumbbells and listening to the Rolling Stones very loudly.

  “I’m sorry,” Ralph Fiennes said. “Is the music too loud?”

  “No,” I said. “This is all totally perfect.”

  (I double-take it back. Sometimes you might see Tom Sizemore in the gym, doing manic bicep curls while still fully dressed in street clothes. Truth be told, it’s sometimes a mixed bag in the celeb department at the Hotel. The point is, the Hotel is full of weird serendipities and bright distractions, and you never feel small.)

  On one night after shooting the television show, all of the following things happened: I got back and the Graceful Woman in the driveway said, “Welcome home.” I went to the patio to have dinner alone. It was a beautiful early evening, and I was looking forward to a quiet night and an early bedtime. But then I got a text from a friend. He said he had just left our mutual friend, a screenwriter, in his room at the Hotel, and now the Screenwriter wanted me to come up. My friend said the Screenwriter had a surprise for me. So I went up. The Screenwriter greeted me at the door saying I was about to be surprised, and then he let me in. There were two women in his room, friends of his from Denmark, and they were hiding. They weren’t doing a good job, however. One was hiding behind a very slender potted plant. The other was hiding under a glass coffee table. When I came into the room, they said, “Surprise!” Then they left.

  Then the Screenwriter took me down to dinner and sat me between a famous director and an actor from the television show Lost, and also all of a sudden Benedict Cumberbatch was there, at the table next to us, with a large group of friends. Someone slid me a drink because we are all famous friends together, and then all of a sudden Benedict Cumberbatch was alone, under the table with his phone light on, looking for his dropped credit card. He found it, and then came back up and apologized to me.

  “I’m sorry,” said Benedict Cumberbatch, and then, even though it was loud and I couldn’t quite hear him, I swear he said, “My mother just died.”

  Which I now
know from Wikipedia was not true and still isn’t, but I am sure he said it. Or at least I cannot figure out what else Benedict Cumberbatch was trying to convey to me before I was spotted and then hugged by Griffin Dunne, and after a long, deep conversation with him, I went to rejoin my acquaintance, who had gone to another table. There I was seated next to a different young Danish woman named Reggae who complimented me on my mustache.

  “Your mustache is tight,” she said. “It reminds me of my dad’s mustache.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  The Screenwriter intercepted me before I got to the elevator. He was angry. “Where are you going?” he said. “She said your mustache is tight!” I tried to explain to him that, while I enjoy implausible adventures and the brief, vertiginous feeling of wondering if Benedict Cumberbatch is playing mind games with me, the fact is, there is no one I want to hug and kiss other than my wife. This luminous night was now growing shadowed by the desperate and the transgressive, and I could only see it getting darker from here. And anyway, the illusion that any of this was meant for me was broken the moment Reggae complimented my mustache. I know what my mustache looks like. I know that no one wants it, not even a Danish person. This was a castle of lies.

  My acquaintance did not accept this. “I think you are an elitist,” he said.

  After this I stopped staying at the Hotel for a while. I was starting to feel it was not a healthy place for me, and I also realized that if I were going to be leaving my family behind to work here, I might as well try to actually keep some of the modest money I was making, rather than throwing all my earnings at the Hotel as quickly and as hard as possible.

  After this, I began staying with my friends Paul F. Tompkins and Janie Haddad. Paul is a brilliant comedian, and if you like comedy, you know exactly who he is. If you don’t know Janie, you should, because she is a wonderful, funny actor and human being who also happens to be married to Paul. They had just bought their first home, an adorable house on the final adorable block of an adorable residential neighborhood bordering the vaguely damp concrete trench called the Los Angeles River. It was the perfect size for a childless couple. It was slightly less than the perfect size for a previously childless couple who are forced to take in their deadbeat adult son (that’s me). They should not have, but nevertheless did give me their guest bedroom over and over as I was flown back and forth across the country. Sometimes I would stay with them for weeks.

  We always had a nice time together. If I was not working during the day, Janie and I would gossip or walk around the neighborhood. We would make plans for dinner, and when Paul got home, we would make that dinner and eat it on our laps in front of the television, just like I used to do in high school with my mom and dad. Once I had to fly from Los Angeles to Boston to perform in a comedy festival. Paul and Janie happened to be there as well, so we spent the afternoon walking up and down Newbury Street and had dinner together at a French restaurant. I was near where I grew up, within three hundred miles of my wife and children for the first time in weeks. But I did not manage to see them. I had to fly from Boston right back to LA the next day. In fact, Paul and Janie did too, and we were on the same flight, so I could drive them in my rental car back to the home we shared. Once we got in, I made myself a martini in the monogrammed cocktail shaker Paul had gotten me as a gift, and we watched television. Our little family trip had come to a close.

  One evening in LA, Janie was making dinner. Paul was watching the news while ironing some shirts in the living room. I was in my own room, just hanging out with my computer. I realized that I was doing exactly what I presume my teenage daughter does when she hides out in her room before dinner: talking to middle-aged men on the internet.

  Unlike my daughter, however, my bedroom door was open. It wasn’t a rule or anything. I just loved my fake mom and dad and had nothing to hide from them.

  “John, do you want any shirts ironed?” Paul called to me.

  “No thanks, Dad!” I said.

  Then Janie called out to say that dinner would be ready by 7 p.m., and I calmly called back to say, “JESUS, MOM! I KNOW ALREADY! I HAVE A CLOCK, YOU KNOW! I WILL BE OUT AT SEVEN. WHY DON’T YOU GUYS TRUST ME?”

  But sometimes Paul and Janie would go away for a few nights without me. You would think that with them gone, I would throw a huge house party and dance in my underwear to old rock songs, but that did not happen. Once I was alone, I could not ignore that where once I had been living the big-spender life at the Hotel, now I was saving pennies in a borrowed back bedroom of an empty house. I was in a new neighborhood and I had to figure out where to sign up for a gym membership and which was the good grocery store. When my hosts were away, I would shop for myself and eat solo dinners in front of the same third episode of Daredevil on Netflix before falling asleep on the couch, over and over. I thought I had been reliving my youth as a cared-for only child, but without Paul and Janie there, I realized now I was more a like a sad, divorced dad.

  One time Paul and Janie went to a weekend wedding to which I was not invited. (Thanks a LOT, Mark and Kristina. But I still love you.) That Friday I worked at the television show and came back late to an empty house. It had been a long day of faces and words, and I was tired. I don’t know how it happened, but this time, after I fell asleep in front of the third episode of Daredevil on Netflix again, I did not wake up on the couch at 3 a.m. as Netflix was once again rolling into the credits on the season finale. This time, I woke up in Paul and Janie’s bed. I was under the covers, and I was cuddling a clutch of plastic clothes hangers. I don’t know where I found them. I guess I was lonely.

  The light in the window was predawn, pale blue. I got up, straightened their bed, and went back to my own room. When I woke up, it was midmorning. I went back into their bedroom to stare at the bed and ponder my moral obligations. Paul and Janie would not be back for a few days, and I would be gone by then, back to New York. I didn’t want to tell them what had happened, and probably didn’t have to. The bed looked pretty neat and clean. For all I knew, I had only spent ten minutes in there. But there was the problem of the hangers. My theory was that they had been left on the bed after Paul or Janie had finished packing, and I had found them there as I sleepwalked in and mistook them for a wife or a blankie.

  I stand by that detective work, especially since the alternative explanation was that before getting into their bed, I first pawed through their closets for hurty things to sleep with. That doesn’t make any sense. If I had opened their closets, why wouldn’t I have taken one of Paul’s beautiful suits that I coveted? That would have been pathologically disturbing, but it would at least have some narrative heft.

  I decided to put the hangers back on the bed where I had probably found them. I experimented with different scatter patterns, but it was pointless. There was no way to remember how they were arranged, and Paul and Janie were sure to spot the difference. Maybe they had even left them there as a trap, the way James Bond taught you to lay a hair across your doorway to see if anyone was sneaking into your room while you were out. (PS: No one was ever sneaking into your room. No one ever cared.)

  I knew I had to come clean and tell them what happened. But wouldn’t this necessitate washing the bedding and remaking the bed? Of course it would. And wouldn’t they take that as a tacit admission that I had wet their bed? Well, probably not. They probably would just presume I had shat their bed. As anyone would presume.

  I began to appreciate that the only acceptable solution was for me to burn the sheets, fill the entire house with Purell, and then leave the earth. But I decided to postpone this plan. I had received an invitation to have dinner at the Hotel. The invitation came from essentially strangers—friends of a friend of a friend. Having dinner with them was in no way convenient to me or, frankly, desired. But I wanted to put this all behind me, and I wanted to see the Hotel again. The Hotel was the sort of place where if you soiled the bed, no one would judge you. It would be part o
f some wild adventure and not some weird shame puzzle that I had to solve.

  I took an Uber to the Hotel and got dropped off at the bottom of the driveway. I didn’t see the Graceful Woman who normally greeted me. I thought it might be her night off. Instead there was a cadre of young handsome men in matching peacoats. They were surprised to see me.

  “Where have you been?” they asked. “Why aren’t you staying with us?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, fake friends,” I said. “I have been staying with actual friends. I know, I know, I agree with you: it’s disgusting. But I’m embarrassed to admit that I have been trying to save money, and in truth my real friends have been very kind and good company. And I have repaid them by sleeping and sweating and maybe doing other things in their bed, and I am afraid to look.”

  I didn’t say this, of course. Sometimes I take some license in my retellings, but I promise I will always let you know, and I promise you that the rest of this actually did happen. I did actually say, “I’m sorry, I’m staying with friends.” And then I did actually see the Graceful Woman. She emerged from some hidden corner, back from her break, I guess. This time she did not say, “Welcome home.” This time she leveled me with her eyes and said, “Judas Iscariot.” She spoke it into the unlikely but appropriate chill of an early Los Angeles spring: a joke that was not exactly a joke.

  Ha ha, I laughed. I apologized again for not spending all my money here, and I meant it, and she seemed to forgive me. “How have you been?” I asked, as though I were talking to a fond family member after a long absence.