La (Los Angeles)

Jared's Sweet Deal Jared Larson tingled all over. He was high on, and in, the heady hills of Hollywood. A wide smile of contentment spread across his classically chiseled face as he eased the Lexus convertible into the narrow driveway. The house it belonged to was empty and all his, all summer long. He planned to make excellent use of it. Rent out rooms, pocket a nice chunk of change, while spending the summer partying. Chicks, clubs, ka-ching -- for a twenty-one-year-old free spirit, it doesn't get any better than that! Especially because his father would never find out. Ah, freedom: It's what this great country was built on. Flipping his Oliver Peoples aviator shades atop his stylishly short hair, he glanced over at the familiar front door and grinned. Painted a garishly loud royal blue, it stood a few feet behind a leaf-and-vine-covered gate. Shoulder-high hedges encircled the house. It was so L.A., he thought. In this town, good shrubbery makes good (i.e, envious) neighbors. When you build a tall, dense fence around your crib, you force passersby to wonder: What's on the other side? Some crazy-amazing mansion? Who lives there? A star? Jared chuckled as he started down the path of terracotta stepping-stones leading to the backyard. Amazing? This place? In the eyes of a stoner, maybe. The blinding blue front door was only one of the odd color choices -- the entire exterior had been painted a screaming pumpkin-orange color. Good thing this area of L.A. was considered artsy. The neighborhood, officially Lake Hollywood, was a maze of eclectic houses on steep narrow streets that zigged and zagged so randomly, the only things you could be sure of were hairpin turns and blind driveways. A bitch to drive around, especially at night. The part about a star living in the orange and blue monstrosity, however, was sort of true. A quasi-celebrity owned this house, an actor audiences knew by sight, never by name. Jared knew him as Uncle Robert, a character actor in his forties who had, as one critic viciously sniped, "a great future behind him." Ouch. That'd hurt. Jared's uncle, the only relative he actually liked being around, had weathered a long dry spell, career-wise. He'd taken roles in straight-to-DVD junk movies to pay the bills. But Rob's desert days were done, as over as yesterday's sushi craze. Robert Larson was currently making a killer comeback, in a career-defining movie. Already, there was buzz about a best supporting Oscar nomination for him. The movie was filming in Prague. When Uncle Rob packed up and left, Jared moved in. So what if the bizarrely painted cottage wasn't like the spacious mansion Jared had grown up in? It was funky. "Rustic, cozy, tucked away, perched above the Sunset Strip" was the description Jared had put in the Roommates Wanted ad on Craigslist. From that posting he'd already netted a trio of roomies. Two guys, Nick and Eliot, were coming in later today from Michigan; tomorrow, a chick named Sara from Texas would arrive. The guys didn't know the chick, and he knew none of them. That was cool with Jared -- as long as they knew how to pay the rent! Seriously, Jared was positive the two guys and the girl would work out -- he needed just one more summer-share tenant to fill that last bedroom. He was confident he'd snag one by week's end, if not sooner. After all, he was charging what was, for this area, a bargain-basement rent for an amazing location. He could afford to because he had no overhead; their rent was his profit. So his dad had cut off his credit cards? Yo, every establishment he knew took cash. It was all good. Jared was born without a self-doubt gene. He didn't need it. His father had enough doubt in Jared for both of them. "Shabby" was the word Rusty Larson used to condescendingly describe this "shack" on "the wrong side of the hills." Why his ne'er-do-well-enough brother insisted onReisfeld, Randi is the author of 'La (Los Angeles) ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416900375 and ISBN 1416900373.