Welcome tour our stop on
Last Seen Leaving for author Caleb Roehrig. This tour is hosted by
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Last Seen Leaving
Author: Caleb Roehrig
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Release Date: October 4th 2016
Review Source: Feiwel & Friends
Flynn's girlfriend has disappeared. How can he uncover her secrets without revealing his own?
Flynn's girlfriend, January, is missing. The cops are asking questions he can't answer, and her friends are telling stories that don't add up. All eyes are on Flynn—as January's boyfriend, he must know something.
But Flynn has a secret of his own. And as he struggles to uncover the truth about January's disappearance, he must also face the truth about himself.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF CALEB ROEHRIG
The unfortunate truth is that a usual Day In My Life is fairly boring. I’m a creature of habit, so I typically get up at around the same time every morning (8:30 or 9am, depending on how cranky my husband wants me,) drink several gigantic mugs of coffee (my day has not truly started until my limbs are jittering from caffeine overload,) listen to thirty minutes of Swedish radio (I’m trying to learn Swedish!), work out (blah blah blah), and then the rest of the day is given over to various writing-type projects.
Because none of that is terribly interesting, I shall instead tell you about a specific day in my life:
The Day Caleb and Mary Partied With Underwear Models.
THIS IS ALL TRUE, although names have been changed to protect the innocent.
It all started—quite respectably!—at an art gallery in Santa Monica. My friend Mary (you guys haven’t met her yet, but she’s great) invited me to join her at a show a friend of hers was curating, to be followed by drinks at a Nice Restaurant with her boss. The show was lovely; we ate canapés and drank wine and made sophisticated comments like, “This work is clearly influenced by the fauvists” (her) and, “I love the colorful squiggly things on that big one over there” (Me). When the show concluded, we traipsed on down to The Ivy for martinis and genteel conversation, feeling grand.
It was then that things began to get weird.
“My friend Jason just got a job working for a PR company,” Mary told me. “They’re hosting a party at a club up in Hollywood to promote a new brand of vodka, and he said we could get in for free, if you’re interested?” I was interested, and so we piled into a cab and made the forty-five minute trip from Santa Monica to the nether reaches of Hollywood, where we swanned past a velvet rope and into the club, with free drink tickets spilling out of our pockets.
The club was…not great. Dank and stuffy inside, the only thing worse than the boring music was the taste of the crappy new vodka (and the pre-mixed drinks—you could pick from one of two flavors: neon blue or neon yellow) and the crowd was the same desperate mix of try-hard bros and girls who “just don’t have any other female friends for some reason [shrug emoji]” that populate every other Hollywood club; so we were only there for about ten minutes before we were ready to leave (or die trying). But! It also only took about ten minutes for us to run into three roguish Italian lads that Mary knew from the neighborhood.
Paolo, Luca, and Gabriele (all of whom were at least as attractive as you’re imagining based on the descriptive “roguish Italian lads”) were classing up the joint, but they were also just as ready to leave as we were. “There’s an A-list party happening in the Hills tonight,” Paolo confided to us at the top of his lungs (the boring music was SO LOUD, you guys). “You can come with us, if you want. Meet us out front in ten minutes!”
A short time later, Mary and I were darting into the back of a waiting SUV—where we first encountered a girl named Sienna. A friend of the Italians’, Sienna was…how do I put this kindly? The Worst. Sienna was The Absolute Worst. Sienna also “didn’t have any female friends,” (and, judging by the openly hostile way she treated Mary, didn’t seem to want any, either,) was twice as loud as the bad music in the club, and did not stop talking for the thirty minutes we drove back and forth through the foothills of Hollywood as the Italians argued about where we were supposed to be headed. Eventually, Mary and I fell asleep.
When we woke again, we found ourselves in the parking lot of a monastery, at midnight. (No lie! There are monasteries in the Hollywood Hills! Who knew?) There, a rather large gentleman (not quite the size of Mount Whitney) stood checking names against a list. Whatever magic words Paolo told him, it gained all six of us the stamp of approval; Mt. Whitney nodded, stepped aside, and ushered us into the scariest-looking van I have ever seen IN MY LIFE. I am not kidding: no windows, no markings, no seatbelts.
The van lurched out of the parking lot and started the winding climb up into the Hollywood Hills, and I watched as service on my phone dropped from four bars to three, to two, to zip; slowly, I became convinced we were all about to be sold off in some sex trafficker’s dungeon. And then the van came to a stop, the door slid open, and I stepped out onto a red carpet.
Cameras flashed, music throbbed, and a girl in lacy underthings proffered a selection of Technicolor Jell-o shots and “wearable candy” as Mary and I stepped awkwardly past photographers and shiny-faced partygoers on our way to the door of a bona fide Hollywood Hills Mansion. There were, I began to notice, quite a lot of girls in lacy underthings at this party—and just as many dudes circling them like flies. “This,” Paolo exulted, like a king throwing open the doors to his treasury, “is the Lingerie Bowl launch party!”
And, boy, was it. I’ve got no idea how long we were there, partaking of an open bar whilst rubbing elbows with underwear models and their various hangers-on. I remember a woman in a very complicated bra eating from my candy necklace; I remember a gay man throwing his drink at Mary because he thought she was flirting with his boyfriend; I remember a girl asking me if I was “dressed like that” because it was an 80s theme party (I was thisclose to throwing my drink at her, you guys); and I remember Sienna—a person I had literally just met two hours earlier—hauling me into the bathroom on three separate occasions so I could hold her hair back while she hurled.
When the party ended, we all went to a(n overpriced) 24-hour diner (stopping twice en route so Sienna could hurl some more), ate terrible food, and agreed to never speak of it all again.
UNTIL NOW.
And THAT is How Caleb and Mary Partied With Underwear Models.
Caleb Roehrig is a writer and television producer originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Having also lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Helsinki, Finland, he has a chronic case of wanderlust, and can recommend the best sights to see on a shoestring budget in over thirty countries. A former actor, Roehrig has experience on both sides of the camera, with a résumé that includes appearances on film and TV—as well as seven years in the stranger-than-fiction salt mines of reality television. In the name of earning a paycheck, he has: hung around a frozen cornfield in his underwear, partied with an actual rock-star, chatted with a scandal-plagued politician, and been menaced by a disgruntled ostrich.
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