Motel laundry room, Los Angeles, September 2025, 2:00am

It’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Ellie is trying to do her laundry, and I’m a little too drunk to help.

All our change is pooled in my hands, as she meticulously picks out coins. She holds each one up against the glow of the vending machine, trying to tell a dime from a quarter.

The machines are coin operated, and the laminated instructions taped to the wall don’t help much. I try reading the instructions in an LA Valley Girl accent, and it helps even less. We fall over each other laughing and lose several coins as they roll under the vending machine. We’re both inebriated, jet-lagged, and running on fumes, having just come back from a networking party. The rest of our travel group went to bed, but Ellie insisted on doing her washing, and I came with her, not wanting the night to end.

We were part of a group of 10, there to take classes and learn about working in the American film industry. But to the Uber drivers, bartenders, clueless boys, and tour guides, we couldn’t stop the little white lies from spilling past our lips; that we were there to shoot a major Hollywood movie with huge stars and NDAs.

We finally get the machine working, and I shuffle my Spotify playlist to drown out the hum. It’s nonchalantly called ‘I’M GOING TO HOLLYWOOD BABY’, and features songs like West Coast by Lana del Rey, Fame is a Gun by Addison Rae, and the entire La La Land soundtrack, in case there was any doubt as to which Hollywood I was going to.

September in LA is scorching like Sydney, and the room is hazy from the day’s heat. The smell of cannabis clings to everything, so much so that Ellie and I stopped saying “it smells like weed” and now say “it smells like Hollywood Boulevarde”. I’m content in this little dreamscape we’ve created. I’m twenty-four in Hollywood with my agent and fellow Australian actors. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, and I know it’s fleeting.

One of my favourite songs from my tween years, Tennis Court by Lorde, plays. It sounds entirely new, the way a song you haven’t heard for a decade does, but my brain remembers the lyrics like muscle memory. I’m struck by how much it encapsulates this city.

Los Angeles is truly a tennis court in a country club. Gated but visible. You can see it from the outside, but you need to know someone to get in. The conversations are so casually competitive. A rapid, back and forth that leaves you wondering whether you’re making friends or being sized up. It’s impossible not to be influenced, surrounded by American exceptionalism, and the cheek and charisma of LA creatives, who never mean what they say (but say it so loudly it sounds true). A dizzying game of who can pretend to care the least about the one thing they would kill for. Shit talking, high school archetypes, predatory smiles, and lots and lots of offers: vodka, pills, party invites, modelling contracts – none of them in good faith.

But the days breeze past in a reel of picture-perfect moments: driving down the 405, shaking Santa Monica sand out of my Converse, line learning in the shower, sipping mango daiquiris, rehearsing in Ubers, craning my head out the tour bus window, matching heart shaped sunglasses, watery coffee, Ellie’s birthday at The Abbey, and our trip to Griffith Observatory.

We’re entranced watching the city stretch out into the horizon and I tap my fingers against the railing. I seem restless to my friends, but it’s a melody from my favourite movie, carrying a secret question.

City of stars, are you shinning just for me?

 I can’t help but ask it.

And it did, when I was on the other side of the world, severed from the tall poppy syndrome and the embarrassment of trying and the Australian humbleness which is ingrained in us since birth; that to want something so badly is embarrassing and cringe.

I felt untouchable and I knew when I went back home, it would disappear.

I cry uncontrollably on the flight back. The stranger beside me has to tell the flight attendants that he doesn’t know me and I wasn’t being trafficked.

Before I know it, I’m back commuting to my office job in the Sydney CBD. As soon as you’re there, you’re gone, and I can’t help but feel chewed up and spat out.

Eventually, my deep love for my home returned. But LA, for all its faults, tennis court and all, made me feel invincible in a way that Sydney never has.

 

Stereo Story 890

See also: Team by Lorde, story by Jesse Maskell, from 2015.

Jennifer Manoogian is a 20 something year old amateur writer and struggling actress from Sydney, waiting for the day she can take "amateur" and "struggling" out of her bio. She is known for writing once every eight months, usually at 3am, and has a deep love for contributing to the Stereo Stories contemporary collection.