THE BIG SCORE : Many Have It in Mind, but It’s More Than Just Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

In Los Angeles, the big score happens often enough and randomly enough that you can’t help but think sometimes that it just might happen to you. A waiter at your favorite restaurant shows up as a psychotic killer in a network show and then wins a regular part in the series. A clever woman you kind of know, a former contractor of bimbos for heavy-metal videos, wins an Oscar for the very first screenplay she writes--then a multi-picture deal and the friendship of Barbra Streisand. The woman who works two cubicles over is working on her second mil in Valley condominium developments. The dude who sells you a cool leather concho belt on Melrose is, six months later, a genuine MTV star. Never has the line between schlub and success seemed so thin, or the sweat of hard work so much like chump change.

Sometimes when you are introduced to people at parties, they mumble that they are “just” a firefighter or “just” a kindergarten teacher in an inner-city school . . . that is, people whose wealth and fame is insufficient to win them a 10 p.m. table at Monkey Bar or their 3-year-old a slot at the Center for Early Education. I once even knew a guy, a friend of musicians and poets, who occasionally apologized for running an airport rather than drumming in a band.

“Going to school,” a well-known rapper told me a couple of months ago, “you go in as a freshman, and you see these people studying really hard for their master’s degrees. By the time you become a junior, the people with master’s degrees still don’t have jobs. Yo, what was I doing this for?” He dropped out of college as soon as the album he produced for his next-door neighbor went gold.

It’s not just the copy-shop guys playing in rock bands who worry about the big score. So do gossip columnists who yearn to be talk-show hosts, lawyers who want to direct and the many thousands of kids who imagine their future career possibilities to be limited to rock stardom or professional athletics.

“I’d like to dedicate this song to the band,” says an aging, New Jersey-bred singer to the sparse crowd at a Sunset Strip rock club, “because we’ve been around for five years, and we ain’t going freakin’ nowhere.”

When I was younger, I thought the idea of the big score was a good thing, that bit of John Cage randomness that upset the established order, but I’ve begun to see the big score as a cruel hoax on the unprepared. The big score is not as random as it seems.

The waiter who becomes a TV star has spent years taking Strasberg classes, acting in Equity-waiver productions and auditioning for commercials, while what you see is just an amicable guy with a bowl of risotto in his hand. The ‘80s robber barons worked 16-hour days. The teen-age rapper who comes out of nowhere to sell a million records has probably invested every moment of his young life into mastering the rudiments of rhyme and flow. The successful screenplay, or at least the one by the rock-video producer, is good . It can be helpful to look swell and be in the right place at the right time, but you sort of have to know what you’re doing when the moment comes.

But it is still dreams of the big score, I imagine, that prompt people to move here from Cleveland or Florida, to spend their mornings in motivational real estate seminars, their lunchtimes at Le Dome, their days in acting class or their evenings playing for pizza on Jam Nite at the Whisky. It has become a truism that every limo driver in Beverly Hills has an unproduced screenplay in his glove compartment, that everybody’s aunt works with a woman whose brother’s best friend has an in with Quincy Jones. But in Southern California sometimes, where the promise of the big score reeks like cheap perfume on the MTA, it’s not hard to become numbed to the basic nature of a longshot: Winning is a sometimes thing.