Wisdom of a Waitress

"Yeah sure, a Porsche is my dream car, but I'd like to keep it that way. I mean, why would you want all your dreams to come true?"

Britt said this with no hint of sarcasm as she stared out the window of her Pontiac Grand Am. She had just gotten out of an interview with a twenty-four year old in an Armani suit. It was at the turn of the millenium, when pyramid schemes were all the rage. The company in question bought chunks of cellullar airwaves from Sprint and sold them at a lower cost - the Armani manchild had twenty-nine employees under him, all of whom had to give him a percentage of their commission. "I could retire at forty," the manchild bragged. He lured her with the everlasting temptation of the get-rich-quick scheme, appealing to her impatience.

With only one more employee to go before he hit an even thirty, he must have thought he nailed it. She shook his hand and took her leave politely. He looked on as she walked away, cutting a less than intelligent figure with her platinum blonde hair her indiscreet double-Ds. He thought he had it in the bag.

And really, he should have. At the time we were completely broke. The only food in the house was peanut butter (which we would eat straight out of the jar with our two recycled plastic spoons) and instant noodles. We sold most of our CDs and DVDs, to the point where we only had one movie left, a battered VHS copy of Center Stage which we would watch quite literally every day when we got home, while eating the aforementioned peanut butter. We really could have used the money.

I picked her up in her car, and she told me what the manchild had said about retiring at forty. "Why would you want to retire at forty?" I asked. She didn't know either.

We talked for a long time, about the dilemma of taking a job you know is unethical to pay the bills, about getting rich quick, and about the dream in general. "He had a Porsche," said Britt. "A Porsche at twenty-four. Can you imagine that?" I thought for a moment. "I don't know, I don't think I'm ready for a Porsche," I said. She pondered this. "Yeah, I know what you mean. A Porsche is my dream car, but why would you want all your dreams to come true?"

I jotted it down in the tiny composition book I was in the habit of carrying, saving it to ponder until years later. In the meantime, Britt didn't take the job, and we continued on for another year or two, scraping by on whatever limited funds we could pick up in between classes and our far too active social lives. The company she interviewed with eventually shut down, and the manchild who had foolishly invested most of his earnings into both his car and the company stock lost mostly everything, and went back to just being a twenty-five year old boy. Britt is still a waitress.

I lived with Britt and our other roommate Hildie, for over a year. It wasn't an easy year. In fact, most people who knew me back then still refer to it as the worst living situation I've ever been in. They're not entirely wrong, but that's not what any of us remember when we think about that year. We think about being young and poor and full of ideas about what life was going to be. The best part about dreams, like Christmas, is the anticipation. It's how Britt knew not to take the job, and it's how we all knew to embrace each other and our situation equally, living as fully as we could within out limited means. This took different forms with all of us, and all resulted in their own unique set of consequences.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again." He elaborated on this in a lettre to his daughter, saying, "a whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun in my twenties and thirties;" His old friend Hemingway verified this in his memoir of their time in Paris, noting at the beginning of his account: "This is how Paris was in the early days, when we were very poor and very happy."

This is how LA was in the early days, when we were very poor, and very happy. A lot of bad things happened to us, and we happened to a lot of bad things. We behaved stupidly on more than one occasion,including but not limited to each and every one of us dropping like dominos out of school: first Britt, then Hildie, and lastly, in one last effort of defiance, me. But before all that, back before we knew much about the consequences of having dreams, we were really quite happy to be young, and living in America.