Promote Yourself
I applied for an interview via text message after reading a particularly anonymous Craigslist posting about promoting LA’s hottest parties. “This is Anthony Rayes from ipromoteclubs.com,” the reply said. “Can you come to our offices at 1:30 tomorrow?”
The lobby and every inch of the elevator was gleaming black and chrome. Welcome to Beverly Hills. Three house plants thrived inexplicably in a windowless tan waiting room on the fifth floor. When I got there, a Uruguayan woman with cork heels and a bleached white dress was talking trash about Los Angeles manners, holding her phone contempuously in one hand. The receptionist greeted me through a large rectangle cut out of the wall and I took my place among the six twenty-somethings perched on a pair of couches in various interpretations of dress-to-impress.
“I mean, sure, there’s a big name behind the phone, but who the hell are you? I’m from South America; it’s different there.” The sound of sucking teeth and mmhmms responded from all sides.
One young man in shiny clothes remained aloof in his armchair, hair slicked back, left fist folded into his right palm. He’d been waiting nearly an hour.
An earlier group of interviewees came out and moved towards the elevator. “Was it hard?” someone asked.
“Of course not! All you have to do is listen to her yap…”
Seconds later, she emerged from the bowels of the suite to interview half of us. We three remaining took out our cell phones as if by magnetic force and proceeded to text.
Kashawn looked up thoughtfully. “What would we be without our cell phones? Text messages, MMS, photos, instant messages…”
“Remember car phones?” I said.
“Yeah. Wasn’t nobody worried about an instant message then. I mean, what was an instant message then?”
His friend Kierra sat between us, a stripe of red hair and the glint of a gold beauty-mark piercing hovering above her furiously-typing thumbs.
“Nowadays, a cell phone is like an office,” I thought aloud.
“It really is. Your whole life revolves around your cell phone. Especially if you have one of these,” Kashawn added, holding up his Sidekick. “It’s some kind of crazy alternative universe we live in.”
Another promotions manager now came into the waiting room and cut our philosophizing short. “I’ll bring you in first,” she said, pointing at me.
“So, tell me about yourself,” the interview began.
When I let loose that I had just moved to LA, a look of concern came over Candace’s face.
“If you just moved here, what is your social network like?”
I backtracked. “I mean, I have a bunch of friends from school out here.”
Candace proceeded with her advertisement cum interview, showing me the website and the companion contract. Other kids in the waiting room had described the work as ‘self-paid.’ From the employer’s perspective, this is simply hiring without risk and without commitment.
Here is how it works: after submitting a guest list online, if you get more than thirty of your guests through the door, you will make four dollars for each person who pays ten, and eight for each guest who pays twenty—you make your first dollar after helping the event organizers to make 300.
“So, do you think you could get thirty people out to this event on Monday?” Candace held out a handbill for the BET Awards Official Afterparty. Monday seemed too soon. ”What about our other events?”
“I guess that depends on what part of town they’re in, what kind of crowd you’re looking for.”
“Well, these are upscale, celebrity-driven, red-carpet events,” Candace said, pausing heavily on each comma. “So you definitely want to bring an upscale crowd.” There was a lot of footwork on the front end, she said, but if people come once, the events will sell themselves. “I mean, these are A-list events—everyone wants to go to A-list events, right?”
Her colleague leaned over to encourage me further. “Come on! When I moved out here from Florida, I didn’t know anyone either. They said, ‘who are you going to invite? you don’t know anyone!’ and I was like ‘come on! Just give me a job.’ So they made me a bottle host. In three events, I was a promotions manager.”
On my way out, I received a goodie bag full of “VIP invites” to the BET afterparty. The Uruguayan woman from the last volley of interviews was looking frantically for the staircase after getting trapped in the elevator on her way downstairs. This was a job for the upwardly mobile.
