I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star by Judy Greer

bugs to run into my apartment. There should be a label on the cockroach-killer bottle that reads, “If you live in an apartment building, be sure to warn your neighbors you’re bombing, as the cockroaches will probably just run next door. They’re not as stupid as you are filthy.” I actually went on a few dates with the guy across the hall. He was cute, but I remembered my mom always telling me not to shit where I ate, and that seemed like what I was doing if I dated a guy in my building. Also, he had lost the hearing in one of his ears, which he said threw off his balance, andtherefore could only stand if there was something he could hang on to or he would lose his balance and fall right over. Perhaps you think me shallow, but at that time in my life I just wasn’t ready for that kind of caregiving in a relationship. He did take me out for Indian food on our first date. I’d never had Indian food before, and I have loved it ever since. My plan was to stay in the building until something great opened up in the actual canyon. I checked the bulletin board several times, but I tend toward laziness. Luckily I met an actress who had a great little place up there and said I could take over the lease when she moved in with her boyfriend. I felt my apartment hunting was done and I could wait it out while eating Slim Jims and drinking Diet Coke with the Armenians on the street sofas. What I didn’t anticipate was how long it was going to take her to actually move in with her boyfriend. It took a
really
long time. Like, over a year. But eventually she did, and I finally got to move to actual Beachwood Canyon.
    The upgraded apartment was in a house that had been divided into three separate units. It was a little more expensive but totally worth it. It had a huge bedroom, a little living room, a tiny kitchen, weirdly, two full bathrooms, and quarter laundry in the building next door I was allowed to use. I called it my tree house and I loved it. But what I loved most didn’t have anything to do with the apartment; it was that I finally had a parking space to call my own. In the driveway. Right in front of my door. That only I was allowed to park in. This was major. I was right around the corner from a charming café and an overpriced market and right under the Hollywood sign. If the wind was right, I could probably have hit it with a well-constructed paper airplane.
    Ironically, the location, what I longed for most of all, turned out to be the only problem with my new apartment—and it was a life-and-death one. Literally. When I was waiting to find my tree house, it never occurred to me that the Hollywood sign wasa major tourist destination, that the only street I could take to get home thousands of people would drive their cars halfway up, pull over, and run into the middle of to photograph the sign. Huge tour buses of elderly people, foreign tourists, children, all jumping out of these buses, cars, vans, and walking purposefully, not looking both ways, into the middle of the main artery for this neighborhood, to take a shitty photograph of the Hollywood sign. Or, better yet, to have someone else photograph them under the sign pretending they’re holding it up! But what I really came to resent were the looks of apology that people would feign as they darted out in front of my car. One day, after I almost killed an elderly Asian tourist, I vowed to go to every bookstore I ever passed for the rest of my life and rip out the chapter in all the tour books that tells you to stand in the middle of that street for a great shot of the Hollywood sign. Tour book writers: STOP FUCKING WRITING THAT! YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR READERS KILLED! I did a spit take one day when I found out that there was talk of lighting the Hollywood sign. The community was really against it for historical reasons. I was against it because when it was dark out, and the most dangerous time for potentially hitting a tourist, there were no tourists since the sign