I couldn't have been more incompetent. The office was always out of
everything I was supposed to be supplying it with. It was like the
clichéd sitcom plot where a really brilliant person is unable to do
some menial job because he's too busy writing a successful screenplay,
only without the screenplay. In my case I was too busy trying to find
a real job during the longest writers strike in Hollywood history. It
took all of my energies, frankly, and if I was willing to give up apple
juice, soap, toilet paper and other office luxuries in order to further
my career, well, I expected my coworkers to make similar sacrifices.

One day about four months into the strike I got a craving for a nice
cool bottle of apple juice and remembered to do my job. As a thank you
my long-suffering boss gave me two tickets to a movie premiere. These are
generally swank affairs attended by well-dressed people, so my first order
of business was to find some decent clothes. Luckily I had a gay roommate
who worked for a famous clothing designer with quality control problems,
so I was the grateful recipient of an irregular but incredibly hip gray
polyester suit with big padded shoulders, big buttons, big everything.
I looked like David Byrne in a tent, but my roommate assured me that
was the style at the time and I've always felt it was dangerous to argue
with fashion.

The premiere was for The Dead, the last film from John Huston, one of
our greatest directors, adapting a book by a great author, James Joyce,
and starring Academy Award winning actress Angelica Huston. It was a
crushing bore, but the evening was salvaged when I pointed out to my
girlfriend none other than Andy Warhol walking among the guests at the
post-premiere party. When she pointed out that Andy Warhol was several
months dead I pointed out that everyone was wearing such huge suits that
it was very easy to make such errors.

While we were scanning the room for alive celebrities and eating our
quiche puffs we heard the unmistakable sound of a four-car crash outside
the theater. Multi-car pileups are just background noise during the rainy
season in Los Angeles, which is the week of February 20th. For eleven
months the roads are thoroughly coated with oil dripping from a million
engine blocks, with no rain to rinse it into the storm drains. Then rain
falls for ten minutes, forms a thin layer between the pavement and the
oil, and automobiles become three-ton air hockey pucks. Picture black
ice suddenly crystallizing on every inch of every road in Norfolk County
and you can imagine the mayhem. Meanwhile houses are sliding down hills,
acres of prime cliffside real estate are washing out to sea, and the
phones at FEMA are ringing off the hook. Rain is a curse in L.A.

Living in a desert is bound to give you a weird attitude toward water
in general. Since it comes from pipes and almost never from the sky
you tend to think of it as a man-made product. Not for drinking, but
for washing your driveway and the roof of your house, a decorative item
that can get filthy unless you give it a good rinsing every couple of
weeks. Drinking water comes exclusively from bottles, usually from
overseas. I'm pretty sure it was Los Angeleans who first decided it
was a good idea to put French tap water into bottles, load it onto
freighters and ship it eight thousand miles to sit next to Orangina in
the 7-Eleven. Now we're all convinced that water should cost $1.50 a
quart. When Californians start trucking in air from out of state I'm
telling you we can all kiss our IRAs goodbye.

The writers strike finally broke in late 1988, and I found a new job at a
special effects company. My first task was to help build a giant model of
Freddy Krueger's throat, in which fifteen slimy half-naked extras moaned
and writhed while the camera spun downward as if falling into Freddy's
gullet. Between takes we made smoke and kept everyone properly slimed
up. It was chaotic and slippery and a guy was calling "Action!" and
"Cut!" with fans blowing and smoke billowing and cameras whirring,
just like in the movies.

The eighteen months that followed found me on the set of many grade-Z
productions with no artistic aspirations, but I approached every shoot
as if I were working for the great John Huston. Since he was dead I did
a fair amount of goofing off.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset, spending most of his time trying to
de-slime his children. In Part 3 of "L.A. Story" careers are made,
innocence is lost, and names are dropped at an increasingly ferocious
pace.