This is my impression of a 3rd year acting student watching an Inside the Actor's Studio interview

POOP STORY #1

Needless to say, this confession will be doused in stinky, steaming, fly-attracting humiliation. Picture it: November, 1999...a young Alex leaves the downtrodden, too-much-make-up-wearing musical theatre-ey twink infested streets of New York for the grittier, more real, Sean Penn-iness of Los Angeles. Really, Alex??? Naivety at its best, folks. My commercial film infused dreams fueled me in two weeks time to rent a Uhaul and drive to Lala land with my inevitable life partner, Megan Staley.

Megan was adopted from an Asian country and raised in the U.S....we call these peeps bananas...yellow on the outside, white within. If Gwyneth Paltrow's character from The Royal Tenenbaums, TV's Daria, and Sandrah Oh had a baby...that baby would be Megan Staley.

So, armed with a cat, Mountain Dew and Sour Skittles we took the four day trek to the city of (fallen) angels. Megan drove the entire way due to my phobia of truck driving and to the fact that she is the man in our relationship. Cut to:

Five days later, we arrive in L.A. a day late and after dark which makes it too late to collect the keys to our new apartment. We spend the little money we have left on one more night of motel livin' and wake up early the following Sunday morning. Off we went to the rental office which is across town from our Melrose Place shaped apartment building. An extremely confused chubby Mexican girl hands us our lease to sign and we hand over a check for a deposit which she insists needs to be paid in cash. "No problem", we say and step out onto Hollywood Blvd. looking for an ATM machine. There must be one around the corner, we thought. Around the corner there was Marilyn Monroe and the Hulk, but no ATM...we walk the streets like crazy-eyed, candy fed gypsies. Three hours later...

We return to the office with hundreds of dollars in cash to hand over to the fat Chicana...who...then informs us....she CANT...FIND...THE...KEYS!!!!
"Don't you have a copy?"
"No."
"Is there anyone you can call who has a copy of the keys?"
"No."

She suggests we spend the night in a hotel and the maintenance man who has a key will make a copy the following morning. Rage fills my lungs and Julia Sugarbaker enters my body. I suggest she make the maintenance man leave whatever pinata bashing event he's attending to give us the keys to our new place which we paid for with all the cash withdrawn from both our bank accounts after a three hour Lord of the ATM's hunt. She hears the wrath and agrees. Two hours later the man arrives with the keys. We entered the office in the morning and it was then 5 pm, but no matter. There we were, making our way to our new home. Night had fallen as we made it to our street and it seemed especially dark...so dark that we realized the only light for blocks was coming from our Uhaul. It had seemed we arrived on the eve of a rare blackout. How lucky.

After parking the Uhaul in the dead of night blocks away and making our way through dark foreign hallways with a flashlight, we sat Indian style on the floor of our empty living room with the flashlight between us and muttered in caveman unison, "hungry".

We walked...and walked....and walked towards the light...the first, the only light we could see...the light said PIZZA, and so we burst through the door. What we hadn't seen was the word KOSHER before the word PIZZA. We found ourselves in a scene from Fiddler on the Roof. Beards, curls, wigs and B.O. everywhere. They looked perplexed. What are a chubby spic and skinny chink doing in our midst? We ordered a pizza and wolfed it down ignoring the wild west saloon stares.

The best way to describe the flavor of the pizza is...FUCKING NASTY. My stomach thought so too because it protested at me the whole walk home. I walked faster knowing once we got back home and flashlighted our way back into the apartment, I could drop my load.

As our front door closes behind us, I poopie dance all the way to the bathroom. I drop my jeans and realize that we haven't moved in yet...meaning NO TOILET PAPER!!! I burst out the door, down the hall, across the street, to the uhaul where the smuggled motel room TP is. Kosher diarrhea is rushing, trying to kick the door of my asshole down. I try and try and try to fight it. I get the paper. I run half a block back and that is when I realize that I can't win.

Right there, in the middle of a street during a blackout in Los Angeles, I, Alex Altomonte, dropped pants, squatted down, spread cheeks, held jeans forward and with my mouth open in a silent cry shot splattery brown bullets out my poophole.

I am still, however, a gentleman...because, finally armed with TP, I wiped.

The next morning, I walked outside and found it gone. Sometime during the night, when the lights came back on, someone found loads o' shit and 10-12 caca smeared TP bushels. Someone had seen this and cleaned it. Someone made my embarrassing ordeal a little easier to swallow. I was not alone, someone carried me during a hardship, like in that poem. So I looked to the sky and said, "Jesus?"...and I saw one set of shitprints behind me. I smiled. Welcome to L.A.