With The Legal Alien – Monthly Musings from an Englishman in LA
By Darren Darnborough
I was the kid that always declined the “Double 99” in my playground ice-cream.
Whether it was my early entrepreneurial skills coming through, masked as frugality; a desire to not be confronted by the “chocolate or die” bully; or perhaps anticipating a fear of future weight gain and root canal surgery, I shall never know.
What I can be sure of is that, like the “other socks” that rear their ugly heads from behind the sofa after you’ve bought new pairs, all of my 99 Flakes that I rejected have now joined together to seek revenge in LA.
When I first began this column I remember writing about the idea of “flakes” in LA, and how I thought it wasn’t apparent. It just didn’t seem to happen to me. An urban dictionary on the web defines “flakey” to be an adjective, meaning “to be unreliable, and/ or absent-minded, flighty, fickle. Generally irresponsible.”
Fast forward to the present day, and I am encountering more daily flakes than an obese and overfed goldfish.
Consider the following: In the space of one weekend, Oerson A planned to go to the movies, I bought us tickets, she flaked.
Person B texted me asking to hang out, I immediately text “yes”, she immediately texts back “sorry busy”.
Eh?
Person C repeatedly enquired about my availability, made plans, then cancelled each.
Person D’s brunch date flakes on her, then she flakes on plans with me, to make plans with her other friend, but invites me too, but then flakes on that.
Person E asks me for help on her audition, I agree, put time aside, she flakes.
Person F wants to hike in the afternoon, I do too, then she flakes.
I end the weekend calling my Monday night party date to confirm a pick up time, and surprise surprise. Her excuse was fair – she had booked a part in a movie. But she confirmed that three days before, yet didn’t bother to call me.
The 4th of July weekend was the final straw.
Eight friends had agreed to party together, and we booked a hotel. On the day, only four of us show, and three leave soon after to go to a potentially better party, wasting the hotel room. Am I too much of a pushover? Am I the second-best option? Is this just LA? I begin by chastising my UK friends for behaving this way. They blame LA, but they’ve only just moved here, so there’s no excuse. I began theorising why it didn’t seem so flaky when I first arrived, and a simple study and flick of the rolodex provided me the answer. The people I identified are generally egotistical and like to look good. When you’re fresh off the proverbial boat, everyone wants to impress you, look hooked up, and hook up the new guy.
Meanwhile, even flakes don’t like being flaked on, hence why the newbie is an easy mark. They’ll always say yes to an invite (they have no better options), they’ll never let you down (they have no better options), and they won’t get angry if you do (they don’t want to upset anyone in their new ‘hood.)
Recently though, so many flakes were coming out of the woodwork. Well they would be, except they were even flaking on that. I had to take action, so I began strategising my defence. I discovered you can’t win. If you only make plans last minute, you look desperate and billy-no-mates. If you make plans with people in advance, they either forget, don’t trust you, or expect you to flake.
The only rule that provides some degree of damage limitation is to always go everywhere with someone from home by default, because whoever you are planning to meet will flake. I experimented by calling no-one for a week. I only replied to genuine, solid, specific offers to meet up. Any selfish requests for a favour or assistance were scrutinised with memory recall – those that used this as their theme received a simple “sorry busy” text. My phone book became amazingly filtered, and I discovered that the flaky behaviour we experience is probably a result of the “friend launderette” – a process of natural selection, as the majority of people that I first became friends with in LA, just simply were not here any more! They had moved back home, or somewhere else, for a variety of reasons, spanning from expired visas, to relationship break-ups, to either an excellent career promotion or an equally fantastic rejection rate.
And herein lies the problem. In a town where friend turnover is higher than Paris Hilton’s social blunders, it’s no wonder we don’t know where our next friend is coming from.
Darren Darnborough is a British expat and journalist living in Los Angeles. www.DarrenD.co.uk
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