The Hollywood Mouse and the Ivory Tower Mouse

By Eric Strand

When you're A.B.D. and about to enter that slough of despond otherwise known as the dissertation, it's tempting to imagine alternate lives for yourself -- as a lawyer, editor, bassist for a neo-'80s synth-pop band. So, you wouldn't think that an evening with old friends that included tales of heart-to-hearts with Russell Crowe at celebrity-studded Los Angeles parties would make me glad for my stodgy, homebody graduate-student lifestyle.

Yet that was my ultimate response to a reunion of people I had worked with at a Southern California magazine in the late 1990s.

My initial reaction to their stories had been overwhelming jealousy. The feeling probably began with Jim's icebreaking anecdote about the most recent movie premiere he'd been to. "Yeah, I was just chilling in the corner with that actress from Baywatch -- you know, the brunette one? -- and then Russell Crowe comes over and asks for a light. So we all talked for 15 minutes. He's totally cool, real down-to-earth."

"He bashed that hotel worker's head in with a phone," I objected.

"No, it wasn't his fault, he just lost it for a moment," replied Jim, launching into a strong defense of Crowe. Everyone at the table disagreed with Jim, but I was impressed that he had such a strong opinion. It seemed so exotic, somehow, so much more interesting than the disquisition I was expected to give on Cleanth Brooks for my Ph.D. exams. Sure, I look at tabloid headlines when I shop for groceries, but it's been years since I was compelled to take a stand on something like the Crowe phone debacle or Brad and Jennifer's marriage woes. I was starting to miss it all.

The tale of Russell Crowe led into a discussion of that subcultural activity known as "party pigeoning." That, Thomas explained, is "when you go to any event -- a premiere, a magazine launch party -- and just scam whatever you can. Drink everything, smoke everything, sell the stuff in the gift bags on eBay."

Next came the story of how he and Janelle had smoked a cross-section of a display case of fine cigars at (of all places) a Disney Home Video event.

"We're going to write a novel about the lifestyle," Janelle added. "Like Glamorama. Now that Bret Ellis is living in Manhattan, we'll do LA."

Los Angeles has been described as the land of the artificial, the simulation, but at this point it seemed I was the one removed from real life. My friends were enjoying the lives of West Coast Ellises and Jay McInerneys, tapping into the energy of urban youth culture and commerce, and then recording it all for posterity.

The Party Pigeons would be climbing the bestseller lists, while I spent hundreds of hours sequestered in the library trying to prove that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance owed its origin to 1840s pulp novels (probably twice as much time as it took Hawthorne to write the damn thing in the first place).

For a while I was able to console myself with the thought that my former colleagues weren't exactly raking it in, not if they had to sell gift bags on eBay. But Anne, who had moved on from our magazine to a photo agency, dispelled that small comfort with a story about a guy she had met on Match.com.

"He was so lame. Just really boring, divorced two times. Totally different than his picture. So we walk back to the parking lot and he just sort of looks at my car in this downcast way and says, 'Oh, so you drive a Porsche. My Honda Civic is over there.'"

Everyone laughed except me. Anne must have noticed my stricken appearance, because she said, "No, it's not that I had a better car, it's his reaction -- that he was so insecure about it. Honda Civics are fine."

I understood her basic point -- that many men will be intimidated by a successful woman. But truly, my friends and I travel different walks of life.

I drive a Civic. It's 13 years old. And it's not even something I can afford on my own, but a family hand-me-down. And it's a Rolls compared to the cars driven by some of my grad-school friends. Most of them are elated if they can hit 60 on the freeway without green foam spraying from under their hoods. Merely having an AC system that works seems like an indulgence, an extra perk of getting tenure a decade from now.

At that point my mood was decidedly melancholy -- reinforced, instead of alleviated, by the light and chatter of the Santa Monica happy hour. Here was my own tale of the city mouse and the country mouse, or rather the Hollywood mice and the mouse from the ivory tower.

Why had I ever left the enchanted city? I could be trying to win Jessica Alba's favor with the well-timed offer of a cigarette lighter, storing up anecdotes for my own roman à clef. I could be party pigeoning. I could be driving, if not a Porsche, then a new Civic.

"I don't know where my home is," Nelly Furtado sang from the stereo system, and Thomas drew laughs by embroidering, "I don't know where I'm flowin'. I don't know what I'm editin', I don't know where I left my car keys." Goofy as they were, the song and Thomas's ad-libs gave expression to my state of ennui.

A few minutes later, though, I realized the song lyrics also captured the mood of Thomas, Janelle, Anne, and Jim. As the third margarita pitcher began to empty, new narratives emerged -- of demonic bosses, of everyday workplace discontent. Anne looked at me and remarked that I was lucky to still be in school: Her UCLA days seemed so long ago.

"You were a womens' studies major, right?" I asked.

"Yeah, at first. Then I switched to fine arts."

I remembered a remark she had made during the discussion of online dating, about how confident men often were about their physical appearances in contrast to women. "Do you ever feel critical of your business -- setting up a photo shoot of a super-thin actress or whatever? You know, sort of enabling the male gaze?"

"Oh God, the male gaze," she laughed. "I haven't heard that term in 15 years." I laughed myself, feeling sort of nerdy and incredibly awkward, but Anne suddenly turned serious. "No, that's an excellent question. Everything I do now is what I was totally against when I was in college. I hate what I do."

I was a little stunned. I had been expecting her usual outspoken take on things, and hadn't meant to prompt anything so personal. "Well, you don't really hate it, right?"

"It pays the bills. That's all."

"It's something we struggle with every day," Thomas remarked. The material he edited was often fluffy and barely relevant to what he'd studied for his master's in journalism. At the same time, it was a demanding job that left him with little free time. His Bret Ellis-inspired fiction would probably never get written.

Anne's and Thomas's comments reminded me that for all of the long apprenticeship and low pay, a job in my discipline is still one of the best gigs for intellectual independence and a sense of personal continuity.

I'm still working my way through intellectual issues that I started thinking about as an undergraduate. I can pick up an old paper I wrote and chart my mental growth from then to now. And there's the hope that in some small way, that growth will not just be measured by career advancement, but will lead to a contribution to a wider public sphere. That, I think, is why we forge ahead in the face of a grim job market in which only half of us will get positions.

I don't mean to malign my friends by suggesting that underneath it all, they simply lead lives of quiet desperation. The margarita pitcher can exaggerate one's moods, and I know they feel much happier and more fulfilled in their jobs than they were letting on. Conversely, there are plenty of times when I feel like a sellout of one sort or another: What I do is hopelessly abstract and self-indulgent; at bottom, my big desire in life is to have a typical bureaucratic sinecure.

But I don't think that my renewed appreciation for academe is just a good-face rationalization made by "the most bitter person in the world," to use Matt Groening's term for a graduate student. As I sank into my friend's couch later that night, I found that I was looking forward to the next morning (or the next afternoon rather, as the morning would probably involve rituals of aspirin and seltzer water). I was my own boss, with my own self-directed tasks to perform, and I even enjoyed calling myself into the office on weekends.

The renewed awareness of my good fortune was a gift that my Los Angeles crowd presented to me: I may not be hobnobbing with Russell Crowe, but my ivory-tower niche isn't so bad. I'll need to remind myself of that, anyway, in two years when my Civic gives its inevitable death rattle and leaves me high and dry by the side of the freeway, wondering if I can lure AAA out with a card that expired the previous millenium.