Hollywood - Poland

Another favorite breakfast: Wasa crispbread with guacamole, red onion, cilantro and dried cherries. Orange juice, kiwi slices, and pomegranate seeds on the side.

I once had a plum job as an assistant to an up-and-coming movie star in Hollywood. That is to say, it all looked plum from the outside. From the inside of my room at Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, from which I could see the Hollywood sign at the top of Mount Lee, it was less plummy. I didn’t know why I was there in the first place. It didn’t feel real.

I had interviewed for the job in New York City, and that’s where the job had begun, with the beautiful star gliding about on long, anorectic legs in her suite at Ritz-Carlton, barely saying “hello” or “good bye”. Soon, however, the job took me to California via a short stint in Texas. As we made out trajectory out west, stopping for a rest at La Casa del Zorro in the desert, I could feel myself waver.

The job was easy enough; all I had to do was check the fiber content of the star’s orange juice and order her pizza without cheese and bread (everything is possible in LA) from the room service guy, and read dull, meaningless scripts with lots of explosions in them. At the end of my “work day” I ventured out into the lush garden and dove into the cool waters of the pool. I always had the pool to myself. All the stars and starlets sat in deck chairs, nursing their water bottles, which they carried in bags made specifically for water bottles. Their bodies were sacred vessels that could not tolerate chlorine. They all looked bored and nobody ever smiled except the busboys. 

Once a famous producer gave the star an expensive hand bag, which she flung into the back seat of the car:

"Another piece of Prada garbage!"

Nothing could alleviate my boredom. Not seeing Kim Basinger in the lobby at Chateau Marmont, nor sitting next to Johnny Depp, or ordering sandwiches at Greenblatt’s with Richard Gere. My hotel room was next to Juliette Lewis’, who at the time was dating Brad Pitt. They played Tracy Chapman’s songs all night long, while I stared out the window and wondered about the purpose of life. It all seemed so pointless. I didn’t have a bank account, so my checks kept piling up. I didn’t have to spend much in the first place, since the star's salary covered both room and board.

One day I called the agent guy back on the East Coast. His name was Alan; he had gotten me the job and negotiated a good contract for me. I liked Alan a lot and didn’t want to disappoint him, but I started crying on the phone, and I cried and cried and told him I didn’t want to be there anymore. And the next week, someone at the hotel reception let me cash all my checks, which left me with a thick wad of money. With that money I bought a ticket to Poland.

Poland was a salvation! The gloomy aftermath of the communist years lay like a gray fog over the entire country, beet fields and cities alike, and it felt soothing after the bright yellow California sun. The people were wonderfully real, unlike the thousands of Barbies I had encountered in Beverly Hills. I didn’t speak a word of Polish, of course, but not even that was a problem. I felt like I was being born again. Nobody knew who I was. I was nobody’s assistant, I was myself, finally. I got a teaching job in a smallish town near Lublin, about an hour away from Warsaw.

One problem was that I had never taught before and had no clue what teaching entailed. Now I faced a bunch of high school kids who were eager to learn English. There was a desperate lack of English teachers in Poland at that time, since the country had just about shifted from teaching Russian to English. But I didn’t worry too much, I was too happy.

My room was very small and located on the school’s premises. Lunch, obiad, was served in a canteen. I learnt to drink my kawa czarna from a glass instead of a cup, I learnt to dip slightly while dancing the Polonaise, I learnt to put up the right amount of zlotys at the train station to buy a ticket to Krakow and say:
“Do Krakowa po proszę.”

And of course I learnt all the bad words – daj mi spokoj, kurwa, dupek, cholera…

One day the local movie theater showed the movie with the star whom I had worked for. I went to see it. It wasn’t terribly bad. It wasn’t terribly good either. It had that stupid glamorous Hollywood sheen. I recognized the sets, because I had been there. I remembered what had transpired between the different takes. I thought perhaps it would make me sad to see it and to think of all that, which I had left behind. But when I walked out of the movie theater, I just thought to myself:
“Oh, Hollywood! Daj mi spokoj! Just leave me alone.”

Me in front of Wawel Castle in Warsaw, Poland, at some point during my two years as a teacher there.