Patti Smith is ready to take you under her wing!

It’s hard to break out in Los Angeles. Fresh-faced young folk flock to the City of Angels from the likes of Isleton, California, or Sutter Creek, California, or possibly even Carmel-by-the-Fuckin’-Sea, California. Everywhere else in the state, too, even. Possibly the rest of the country, but I’ll need to check my sources. All these bright, doe-eyed youth have the exact same single thought in their heads: “I’m going to be the biggest fucking star this city has ever seen!” After all, all you need to become the next breakout talent in Hollywood is to 1) move out of your shithole town where your best friends Kyle and other Kyle still work at Uncle Tuggy’s Quarry Supplies Surplus, 2) already have over $10,000 in your bank account to cover six months of living expenses, 3) have a job lined up waiting tables at the P. Diddy House of Sex Party Pancakes, 3) collect a stack of professional headshots where you’re wearing your best Saturday Night Live T-shirt, 4) line up a series of acting classes led by seasoned celebrity Professor Uncle Joey from Full House, 5) register for costly audition submission websites, 5) collect a group of friends to expensively write, produce, and act in experimental independent art films about semen dripping delicately from half-flaccid penises, 6) network with casting directors, haggard podcast hosts, and grumpy uninterested talent agencies, and 7) suck the right genitals to get a spot as an extra on CSI: Papua New Guinea. It honestly couldn’t be more simple!

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of the Los Angeles acting scene, the very FIRST person I think about is bohemian New York punk beat poet Patti Smith. After all, nobody is more respected by the entire production crew of America’s Top Model Season 43 than a woman who has done more endeavors of artistry while eating breakfast this morning than I have ever done in 3+ years of pretending to be any kind of humorist at all, let alone a successful one. In spite of this, my brain decided for a night’s dream that Patti Smith would be a suitable mentor to me for my path to stardom. She was, in fact, proud to be considered by me to be a “mom-figure”. I wish I was fucking kidding.

Patti Smith has a lot of respect for dime-a-dozen actors in incredibly minor non-speaking roles!

Before all that, let’s get into what kicked things off in Dreamworld. If I had to guess, I was initially in Los Angeles to make money busking. This is based on the fact that I was carrying an oversized saxophone around. Hey, now that I think about it, busking is exactly the kind of situation that Patti Smith could relate with! Maybe that’s why my brain was keeping her in the inner recesses of my subconscious while the scene suddenly shifted to me playing a lion in some sort of live-action Lion King knockoff starring Martin Sheen. I was definitely not a top-billed credit in the cast for this. As I recall, I was prowling around like a overstuffed child sex offender among a dozen other lions in a location that can only be best described as the Macalania Forest from Final Fantasy X. And it didn’t matter if I was with a dozen other lions. It didn’t matter if I was with a million other lions, because Patti Smith (the woman who co-wrote “Because the Night” with Bruce Springsteen in 1977) was so impressed by my performance consisting entirely of rutting around and grunting that she singled me out as the hottest new talent to take under her wing. Patti Smith did this.

What happens next is pretty hazy mostly because it’s more asinine than a screen door on a butthole, but I quickly fell out of Patti Smith’s good graces after telling her QUITE STUPIDLY that I needed to continue pursuing my career in engineering before I can try making it big in Los Angeles. This upset her greatly, as if higher learning was a completely laughable enterprise. I mean, it is, but she didn’t have to be a jerk about it.

At this point I was attending an afterparty which was nothing more than a fucking high school cafeteria where celebrities like (I’m not kidding) Ed Asner and Ted Danson were rubbing elbows. There was a Cheers marathon on late the previous night, so that explains the Danson. The Asner I’m not sure, but maybe my brain was trying to sex up the dream a little bit! Everything at this point played out like high school cliques isolating themselves while Patti Smith deliberately stopped acknowledging my existence; going so far as to acknowledging my existence by pretending I don’t exist by purposely avoiding eye contact with me while she flashed Morse code across the cafeteria with a hanging chad to her other Hollywood buddies. Needless to say, I was livid and embarrassed. My whole career was getting flushed down the tubes because I lost the Patti Smith endorsement within milliseconds because I was dumb enough to bring up college.

I woke up the next morning completely disoriented and bewildered. I felt like a piece of me was missing, like I was grieving the loss of an opportunity that never was. Most of all, I wondered where my saxophone went.