Hours upon hours were spent constructing and gathering the necessities to put this set together. When the twelve-hour shoot ended and I sought out my boss for instruction on where to take the components of the now-broken-down marketplace, he pointed at the giant green dumpsters and said, “Just throw it all right in there.”

“All that food?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You can take it if you want it. But it’s been sitting in the sun all day.”
“It hasn’t gone bad, though. That bread was baked yesterday and all the fruit and vegetables are fine.”
“Well, take it home then.”
“So you’re saying that if I don’t, it just gets thrown away?” My mind flashed to countless movies, commercials, and music videos I’d seen that had had banquet scenes, or elaborate dinners, or third-world marketplaces. What was that video where everyone got into a huge food fight? I’d been working in the art department for nearly a year, and the wastefulness of the industry only then dawned on me. Was it all just going into the trash? When L.A. had so many homeless, hungry people wandering its streets? Was this even allowed?
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to make ten tons of salad or eat bread that’s gotten hard.”

I decided I would take the remnants to the mission district in downtown L.A. and donate them. I loaded everything back into my car as my boss watched disbelievingly. In the morning, I sped down the 110 to Los Angeles’ surreal urban center that wasn’t really the center of anything. I found the streets where the homeless were camped out, streets lined with tarps and shopping carts stuffed with dirty unidentifiable things. I pulled up by one of the homeless shelters and began unloading the food. Some of the people on the street approached and took bread, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots. I wondered when the last time they’d had a vegetable might have been. I put on my car alarm, glad I’d dressed down and worn sneakers rather than my usual height-adjustor platform sandals.

I carried crate by crate of bread to the entrance of the shelter. A black man with cornrows approached me with an air that said he was in charge of things around here.”Are you making a donation?” he asked.
“Yes, are you the manager?”
“I’m Dante,” he said, extending his hand. We shook.
“Where’d you get all this?” he asked.
“A Celine Dion music video shoot, if you can believe that. It was all going to go in the garbage.”
“Damn.” Dante shook his head from side to side, surveying the amount of food. “We can make soup for two weeks with this stuff. And look at that gorgeous bread…”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. Do you ever get donations from film sets?”
“Naw,” he said, shaking his head some more. I shook my head, too. We both stared at the crates of food.
“Hey, Jerome,” Dante shouted to another worker. “C’mere and help me take these down to the kitchen.”

Driving back along the 110, mission-donation mission accomplished, I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I was driven by some sort of underdeveloped will to do good in the world, to bring light, to spread joy. Tell me, why are you in this business? Leo had asked. I’m not sure anymore, I had said. I was sure now. What was I doing in this industry? Getting out.

In the final cut of the video, the Moroccan market scenes occupy less than ten seconds of screen time. Never once do you catch a glimpse of food.

“This actor is dying,” I said to Bill, holding the freight elevator door open with the entire 110-pound weight of my body.

“Well, what are you standing there for? Take him to the hospital, quick!” Bill shouted. Then he turned back and shouted to Sam and Sean across the room. “Hey! How did that last take look? Can we get a stand-in for the sick dude?”

Oh, the infinite challenges of commercial production.

“Is everything okay?” She immediately panicked at the slightest hint that things weren’t “nice” and “exciting.”

“Sort of. Except I’m not moving to New York anymore.”

“What do you mean you’re not moving to New York anymore?” my mother asked. It had been all set up: she was going to fly from Athens to L.A., get a rental car at the airport and come get me, and then we were going to drive up the West Coast to Seattle, a road trip in honor of the next stage of my life. She’d already made reservations at places she wanted to stay in Big Sur, San Francisco, and Portland. I could only imagine the hours she’d spent online researching the best hotels, restaurants, and sights all along Route One. I already had that ticket to fly from Seattle to New York two weeks later, to start my new life.

“Well, you see, there’s been a slight change of plans,” I said. “Adrian and I broke up. We ended the engagement.”

“Why, Lize? What happened?” I could hear the shock and horror in my mother’s voice. It was more obvious than the sun high up above me in the parking lot, pounding through my windshield. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I was alone amongst a sea of parked cars, their owners busily working away in their entertainment industry jobs in air conditioned offices around the neighborhood. I suddenly felt completely, totally lost – yet another relationship refugee in Los Angeles, fresh off the boat from love gone wrong.

“I guess we’re just too young. It was all happening too fast, too soon.” I had to bite down on my hand to stop from losing it all over again.

“I’m going to come there and we’ll figure out what you’re going to do.”

“I know what I’m going to do. I’m staying.”

“I’m keeping my reservation and I’ll see you in a week. Don’t go anyplace.”

“Okay, Mom. I have to go back into the Perilous Films office now.”

“You should hurry up and get them to offer you a paying job. Oh dear.”

“I’m working on things.”

“Oh, dear,” she repeated.

I went straight to the bathroom and washed my face. When I emerged, Erin was eyeing me from the entryway of her cubicle. She gestured towards the mountains of directors’ reels that still needed to be alphabetized. Sam & Sean had to be separated from Nzingha Stewart and Antoine Fuqua was all mixed up with Michael Bay. It should have seemed trivial given that my entire life’s plan was unraveling, but for some reason it rendered the miscategorized reels magnified in importance. I had to organize those reels. I had to organize those reels like it was my one purpose in life. I was put on this earth to organize those reels. And so I alphabetized the directors’ reels – with a brain surgeon’s focus and precision – all afternoon.

“Radiohead gets me emotional, you know? It was just so powerful.”

She looked at me like she understood. This was an acceptable answer.

“Where are you meeting Adrian? I can drop you off somewhere. I have to go meet some friends.”

“I’m supposed to call him,” I said, looking at the black cell phone he’d given me for the first time that evening and noticing I’d missed five calls from his number. “I guess just drop me off at a bar and I’ll tell him to go there. What’s around here?”

“The Dresden is nearby, how’s that?”

“Sure,” I said, pressing the talk button as we slipped into the Cabriolet. Erin started the engine.

“Hello?” Adrian sounded annoyed.

“Baby, I’m so sorry,” I said. “The concert ran way over schedule. Now there’s so much traffic leaving the Greek.”

“I’ve been driving around for an hour. Where are we meeting?”

“The Dresden Room in Los Feliz?” I squeaked.

“Where the fuck is that?” Okay, he was definitely annoyed. Adrian’s flipside was not pleasant. Part of what got him ahead so far in his career was how intimidating he could be when he turned up the volume and got aggressive. Did I want to marry someone who had the potential to become so enraged? I lacked the anger gene myself. Even when I was furious, all I could do was cry. Not that that was preferable somehow. We were programmed however we were programmed.

Adrian showed up at the Dresden Room forty minutes later. He was pissed.

“You are so fucking selfish and inconsiderate,” he said after we ordered drinks and a quesadilla appetizer. Marty and Elaine, the notorious lounge singers that had been in that Vince Vaughn movie Swingers, were crooning away. I always wondered whether they were bad on purpose, or if on some level they actually thought people flocked to see them because they were good.

“I’m sorry, baby, I told you, the concert just went long.” Why couldn’t he just understand?

“I don’t know. You’ve haven’t been yourself these past few weeks.” I hadn’t?

“However I’m being is part of how I am,” I snapped.

“Well I hope this isn’t how it’s going to be,” he said.

I’d tried to be careful to keep my doubts and nerves under wraps, because the reality was, I loved Adrian and didn’t want to upset him with anxious nonsense. I wanted to be strong and real and wonderful for him. I wanted that for myself. Looking back, if I had come clean about my fears right there, everything might have taken an entirely different turn – for better or for worse.

“I’m probably just in kind of in a funk I guess,” I said. “Maybe it’s PMS.”

“Whatever it is, you’ve been acting weird,” Adrian said, and I sniffled a little. “Stop already with the goddamn sensitivity,” he continued. “Toughen up.

Whatever it is, just suck it up for a change.”
The tears I’d been holding back spilled over and I reached for a triangle of quesadilla as the waitress put the plate in the center of the table. Elaine hit a warbled high note as Marty banged on the piano and I felt like running someplace far away, to be anywhere but here.

When I first moved to an inconspicuous block where Chelsea meets the West Village meets the Meatpacking District, a neighborhood old-time lured me in with a smile that lit up his face despite a dark gap from a single missing tooth.
“Hey, beautiful,” he catcalled. “Are you Persian?” I’m Italian and Jewish, but I got this question so often maybe my family was hiding the truth about my adoption from a Tehran orphanage.
“No,” I answered. “Though I get that all the time.” But it didn’t matter what I said; he had already made up his mind. “I am Persian. I think you are too. Can I offer you something, my dear? Anything at all?” he asked, leaning out the window of his rickety steel coffee cart. I guessed his age between thirty-nine and fifty. His skin was smooth and tan, his wide eyes kind with a mischievous glint.
I was born in Seattle. Being a Starbucks snob was genetically ingrained. Setting foot in the place brought back childhood memories of peering into plastic drawers full of brown beans in the original Starbucks, back when there was only one. My mother scooped Colombian roast for her morning espresso. I stood behind her trying to stick my nose in the drawer. In my mid-twenties, I was addicted to the double-soy, sugar-free vanilla latte. Fate in the form of a delicious, overpriced beverage was not available at the corner coffee cart.
Still, I felt an affinity for this man, who in the rush-hour bustle of the city took time to make light conversation before I was shoved into a subway car. I knew he was just like any other salesman, in it for the patronage. I didn’t want to forfeit my latte for his watered-down coffee. Yet when I looked up at his kind brown eyes I couldn’t say no.
“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll have an iced with skim, two Equals.” He poured it into a waiting plastic cup pre-filled with ice. “How much?” I asked. “For you? Free,” he said.
I bit my lip and looked down at the oversized bagels in his window. They resembled alien rocks excavated from an archaeological dig. At only a dollar they were a quarter of the price of my usual beverage, plus he gave me coffee for free, so I bought a whole- wheat bagel. It was chewy and delicious.
The coffee cart is one of those things that makes Manhattan feel like a small town. The guy at the helm knows your name, how you take your coffee, and your carbohydrate of choice to start the day. He asked how I was doing, whether I liked my job, and if I missed my family. (They were mostly still in Seattle.) Soon he knew more about my life than most of my boyfriends, and he knew them, too. “I don’t like him for you,” he whispered about the TV agent. The investment banker got a better review, and I ended up marrying him. My parents divorced when I was four, and I barely knew my father, so maybe I welcomed the coffee guy’s overprotective-dad act.
That was exactly what it was, an act. The no-charge café kept coming for a month until one day it didn’t. He was really a crack dealer, getting his customer hooked before making me pony up. He had gotten me off Starbucks and I was saving twenty-five dollars a week, which I put towards more of his coffee. A one-cup-a-day habit soon turned into five-plus. Once I had to pay, I returned to the designer drug of the overcaffeinated – Starbucks – and my relationship with the street dealer of the cheaper stuff turned ugly.
“Hey,” he yelled out. “You don’t like me anymore?” I waved as I crossed the street, entering the Starbucks via the side door so he wouldn’t see. He soon caught on to my scheme.
He would yell, “You prefer that Evil Empire to me?”
First the guilt was unbearable, and soon things just got brutal. I had a guilt-tripping Jewish mother already, I didn’t need another one. It sent me running for the Frappuccinos, never wanting to look back.
I’d walk down the street the other way to avoid his castigations. I headed west down Fifteenth, one block north then east again to Sixteenth and Eighth, the wrong end of the train. I’d have to walk another block inside the subway. It made me late for work. I was a wreck. I reminded myself of those ridiculous mugs that read “Instant Human. Just Add Coffee.”
“Are you okay?” a colleague asked when she saw me huff into my cubicle, frazzled, for the third time that week.
“It’s just…this guy.”
“Bad date?”
“Bad relationship.”
Angry Coffee Guy was interfering with my morning routine, something I had perfected because I was not a morning person. Running into him was as uncomfortable as bumping into an old boyfriend on the sidewalk, the kind of ex you’d be happy never to see again.
After a year of avoiding his corner, ducking behind Con Ed trucks, I quit my job to freelance. At ten in the morning on my self-imposed first day, I allowed myself a break and snuck by the cart and down the street to try a new little West Village café. As I headed home, he saw me – and the rival cup.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Do you need a bag for your iced coffee?”
I’d had enough. I went over to his window.
“Where’d you get that?” He pointed at the offensive plastic cup of ice and that particular mud-puddle color that comes from mixing with skim instead of whole.
“Down that way.” I quickly changed the subject.
“So what’s your name?” I asked. I was surprised I’d never found out.
“Max,” he said.
I extended my hand, and we shook. “It’s nice to finally know,” I said. This was followed by an awkward silence.
“I started working from home,” I said, wondering why I felt the need to repair our estranged relationship. “I really should come by here more often.”

The next morning I got my bagel and coffee there, and that night I went out. When I came home at 4am, Max had already arrived and was setting up his cart for the morning to come. The father-figure complex resurfaced and I tried to avoid him, embarrassed for him to see I’d been out so late. While he ducked down inside the cart, I attempted to run by. I could not let him see me drunk stumbling home at an ungodly hour. But I couldn’t keep out of his line of vision.
“Hey, you,” he said. “Long night?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“You go to a club?”
“Yeah, out dancing.”
“By yourself?”
“No, with my girlfriends.”
“You live alone?”
“No, I’m married now. To the one you liked.”
Max flashed his wide smile at that. “You’re up late,” he said.
“You’re up early.” I started to walk away.
“Wait,” he called. I turned around. He was holding up a bagel. My usual, wheat with light cream cheese. I took it and thanked him. “See you in a few hours,” I said. Of course, I overslept and by the time I got outside around noon, he had already packed up and left for the day.
The following week, there was a teenager in the coffee cart with Max.
“New assistant?” I joked.
“This is my cousin.”
The cousin, it turned out, was trained to take over. I recognized an opportunity. Max Junior didn’t say anything if I walked by on my way to Starbucks. He didn’t know who I was and did not get upset if I skipped his coffee. Every day, I waited for the “Hey, you” that didn’t ring out over Fifteenth Street anymore.
I saw Max several months later in Midtown, where he took a busier corner. “Hey, Persian girl,” he called out. We greeted each other like old friends. He offered me a coffee on the house. Without waiting for a reply, threw in skim milk, two Equals and a smile with a missing front tooth. Like most of my relationships with the opposite sex, I liked him more now that he’d moved on without me.