….
The Los Angeles sun poured down with a cruel, unsparing brilliance, drenching every inch of the city—from the gated mansions of Beverly Hills to the sun-bleached pavement of Santa Monica Beach, and into every grime-stained back alley in between.
They say if you love someone, send them to New York; if you hate them, send them there too, because it’s both heaven and hell.
Los Angeles was no different.
But where New York was blunt about its ambition, L.A.
wrapped its ruthlessness in a slick, sun-drenched package of polite hypocrisy.
Everyone here was playing a character, shifting between masks depending on who they were talking to at a party, an audition, or a deal.
It had been several days since Meg Ryan left the apartment.
She hadn’t returned, nor had she called.
For Alex, that silence was a gift.
He needed space to process the reality of his situation—to adapt to this nineteen-year-old body, align two merged lifetimes, and figure out how to survive in 1991 Hollywood.
His first stop was returning to the ratty motel room down on 5th Street.
The place was a time capsule of Alex Shawn’s failed beginnings, smelling faintly of stale tobacco and cheap beer.
He packed what little he owned: a few faded T-shirts, a pair of worn jeans, and a second-hand acoustic guitar with a nicked neck.
That guitar had been the kid’s prized possession, but now it felt like a relic from a life he had outgrown.
He scraped his remaining change out of the nightstand drawer—barely enough to settle the balance with the front desk—and turned the key in.
Stepping out into the sunlight, he severed the last lingering tie to his past.
The cash Meg had left on the table became his startup capital.
He intended to spend it carefully, but decisively.
His first real purchase was a trip to a tailor shop off Wilshire Boulevard.
In 1991, twelve hundred bucks could buy four off-the-rack suits at a department store.
But Alex knew better.
Back in his previous life as a stuntman, Levi had worn a cheap, boxy suit to a friend’s wedding and spent the whole night getting mistaken for a real estate agent.
In a business built entirely on first impressions, an ill-fitting suit branded you instantly as an outsider—a hungry extra, an insurance salesman, or a desperate nobody trying to crash a party.
Alex had the frame to carry clothes well: broad shoulders, a lean waist, and an athletic posture honed by years of stunt training.
The fitted dark wool suit sat on him like armor, giving him an air of quiet maturity that masked his nineteen years.
Armor secured, he needed a battlefield.
Meg had promised to ask around for casting leads, but Levi’s practical nature made him hesitant to bank his entire future on a casual favor.
He needed his own foothold.
Inventorying his assets, the original Alex Shawn brought musical ability—guitar, piano, and a solid vocal range.
Levi brought decades of future pop-culture knowledge, technical stunt training, and combat coordination.
With action cinema booming in the early ’90s, his physical background was a massive asset.
His actual acting experience, however, was virtually zero—just dive-bar gigs and years of standing in the background of movie sets.
He had briefly considered other avenues.
What about heading up to Silicon Valley to invest in tech gstartups?
Stories of early-stage tech legends were famous enough.
But cold reality shut that down fast.
Levi knew nothing about computer engineering, and Alex Shawn was just a rock kid from Manchester.
The famous “self-made” tech titans usually had family connections and institutional capital behind them long before their first round of funding. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Without capital or technical expertise, jumping blindly into tech was a fantasy.
If he wanted to make real money, he had to build a reputation in the industry he actually understood first.
Once he had capital and leverage, he could worry about angel investing.
For now, returning to bar gigs was out of the question.
The threat of the local Bloods crew lingering near West Hollywood meant staying away from The Poison Tongue.
Hand-to-hand skill didn’t mean much against a gang with firearms.
That left acting as his clearest path forward.
How did an unknown, unrepresented actor get work in L.A.
in 1991?
Alex sorted through the industry knowledge stored in his head.
The most official route was joining the Screen Actors Guild.
SAG members got access to official casting breakdown sheets and union-backed auditions.
The catch?
You needed an accredited union job just to join, along with an initiation fee that would wipe out the rest of his cash.
On top of that, SAG rules strictly barred members from taking non-union gigs—effectively cutting off the low-budget indie work a newcomer needed to build a reel.
That left the most brutal, grassroots channel in town: the breakdown boards.
Clustered around Sunset Boulevard were dozens of small casting offices and independent talent agencies.
Every morning, these offices posted daily casting notices on public bulletin boards outside their doors—looking for background extras, body doubles, and small featured roles with a line or two.
It was the bottom rung of the ladder, and for an actor without an agent, it was the only game in town.
As dawn broke over West Hollywood, Alex dressed in a simple, fitted shirt, grabbed a folder containing his printed résumés and a couple of black-and-white headshots taken at a local photo booth, and headed down toward Sunset.
….
-Krazybro