It truly was a bad-looking room, but we were both drunk, and I was too confident to know how insecure I was. I lived in a cement basement that, for some reason, I had painted yellow. We hooked up for the first time at a huge house party I had that was filled with other early- to mid-20s people. I was 21 and vaguely dating a 50-year-old guy I had met through friends. I didn’t say “hi” to her, but now I think I would have. I never would have gotten to follow Laura Dern around a garden tour of Los Angeles's Venice neighborhood if I hadn’t dated older men.