The Job Pirate Page 13

  5:58

  There was nothing so sweet as adding elements of confusion and arrogance to an act of retribution, so my wandering around the bullpen ended at Edgar’s office. He must have assumed I did it, but knowing I had proof of my innocence emboldened the hell out of me. And, more than anything, I wanted to know how he removed the ogre from his hood in such a hurry. Did he use the same Carl’s Jr. cup I did? Did one of my presentations become his shovel? Did he simply drive away and hope it rolled off on the freeway?

  But I could not and did not ask him about that. Nor did I ask him how it felt to fuck with the courier. His dour yet still-not-certain expression said enough. The only thing I said to him was, “Sorry about the miscommunication earlier.” And his only response was, “Glory is fleeting, courier.”

  THE THESPIAN LOSES HIS COAT

  JOB #11

  To grow up in Los Angeles is to grow up in The Industry, in one form or another. Perhaps as someone’s assistant inside one of the dozens of film studios; maybe working in a warehouse full of movie props and stage settings; or possibly driving a bus full of tourists around Beverly Hills while narrating into a microphone the film history of a certain celebrity whose mansion you happen to be driving by. There are hundreds of colorful career avenues to walk down when entertaining a life in the City of Angels, each with its own unique twinkle of that golden Hollywood magic. But no vocation is as revered, as cherished, as treasured, as that of the actor.

  Actor—the most coveted occupation in all of Tinsel Town. To act is to live. To perform on a film set surrounded by big hulking cameras, soundmen holding long fuzzy microphones, assistants with clipboards, and powerful stage lights—that’s what it is to be alive! And when the assistant director pats you on the back and tells you that you’re needed on set for your big scene working alongside the film’s star, then you know you’ve succeeded where hundreds of thousands of others have failed. Because to act is to live. To stand alongside the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton and Marlon Brando is to truly write your page in the cosmic book of history.

  And just beneath the actor lay the true silent heroes of film. The very fabric that weaves a movie together is not the recognizable person speaking in front of the camera nor is it the beautiful cinematography or CGI effects. The true cornerstone of a film—of every film—is the person walking by in the background. The cute but plain couple dining at a café table directly behind the movie star and the soon-to-be movie star. The shocked bystander walking out of a department store. The guy in the trench coat across the street hailing a taxi. These silent, forgettable, unnoticeable people are the true keystones to every movie ever made.

  That’s right, we’re the extras: the noiseless, action-less actors for hire at a daily rate. You can just call us “the background.” We were living props that painted the backdrops of scenes in public places. We spanned the spectrum of all walks of life and age, and we had mastered the art of the pretend conversation.

  While working with Marty on a gig that night, I realized I wanted to specialize in party and crowd scenes and only party and crowd scenes. Oh, look at me … calling him Marty, like you’d know who I’m referring to. In The Industry, we have darling little nicknames and abbreviated monikers for everyone. People probably call me Brandy, but I can’t say for sure. But I’m talking about Marty Short. You’d probably know him better as Martin Short, the little goofy actor from a bunch of mediocre shit in the 1980s. But I worked with him, so I refer to him as Marty.

  We were standing in the center of an enormous rented mansion in Malibu for a big dance scene, just Marty and me. Plus the sixty or so other extras around us and between us. But I was the closest to him. The scene called for Marty, who was playing a child and dressed in a little schoolboy uniform, to be dancing within an anonymous group of much taller people, to make him look even more like a child. And this went on for hours. And without any music. That’s one thing the average person doesn’t realize when watching a TV show or a movie: When all those people are dancing at a party or a concert, and the camera pans by them rocking out to the blaring music, shaking their heads and throwing their hands into the air, well, it’s really just silence minus the sounds of a few shoes scuffling. They add the music in later. And it’s really creepy dancing without music. It’s like being a ghost forced to relive some last morose moment of life over and over.

  But that’s what we were doing: not talking, but looking happy, and dancing to silence. Some much better than others, too. I couldn’t dance even if there were music playing, let alone to the sounds of shuffling feet. So I resorted to the crimped-arms-at-the-waist rocking action and only put some effort into the “happy face” when the camera rolled by. Little Marty was in the center of us throwing around some wildly goofy dance moves, most of which must have hurt his 40-something physique. But he was a born entertainer, that Marty. The lack of music didn’t slow him down one bit. He had danced himself clear on over to the other side of the room and stayed there. I considered nonchalantly following him over, but the shelter of the floor lamp beside me was one that I was not willing to give up.

  Midnight finally rolled around, which signaled the end of our eight-and-a-half-hour shift. That was one of the beautiful things I learned about working on a film set: Everything ends on time or they pay you time-and-a-half until it’s double time. We then stood in line to show our IDs and receive our checks for $98. Before I left the set I stole two plastic ice cubes from the kitchen scene. I just couldn’t believe the absurdity of creating completely realistic ice cubes that would never melt and always look like actual ice when real ice does the same thing, and real ice is basically free. It wasn’t like using a dozen trays of real ice for a single scene was going to add thousands of dollars to the budget. It wouldn’t even cost a quarter. But I’m pretty certain those plastic ice cubes cost about $30 apiece.

  While trying to find the freeway entrance out of Malibu, I ended up driving into a part of Los Angeles that was not intended for Caucasians. At least I thought it was still L.A., but it could have been Long Beach by that point. Or Tijuana. I pulled over at a well-lit gas station, got directions back to the freeway, but made the mistake of using the shitter before getting back on the road. I had hoped the flimsy door of the stall I was sitting in would offer some protection in case anything happened, but the latch was missing and the only thing keeping it shut was my thumb. That’s when a pair of feet walked in and their owner knocked at my stall.

  “Hey, bro!” the raspy voice said with a jail languor. “My friend likes your jacket. He’s crazy, bro. You better just give it to him. I can’t stop him. I said I’d ask you for it nicely before he went crazy on you. Why don’t you just give me your jacket, and I’ll give it to him?”

  I stayed quiet for a few seconds hoping he would take that as a no. But he didn’t. He washed his hands and kept talking about how crazy his friend was, and how much he liked my jacket. But I liked it too. It was black leather and had the metal tops of two dozen Bic lighters pressed around the collar. It was my first real leather jacket, and it always gave me a Fonz moment whenever I slid it on. The Fonz wouldn’t put up with this shit—he wouldn’t give up his jacket for anybody, let alone some gangster thug throwing around ambiguous threats in a gas station shitter. I really wished there was a latch on the stall door, though; that would make all the difference in the world. A simple latch. Where did it go?

  “You’re fuckin’ pissing him off, bro!” he slammed on the door this time, and it briefly opened enough for him to see me with my pants down and me to see him with his tattoos and shaved head. Then something metal and pointed tapped on the hollow metal door. “You know what this is? I didn’t want to pull this out, but it’s out now. Just give me the fucking jacket, bro.”

  I was rational enough to pull out my cigarettes and lighter before tossing the jacket over the stall door to him. He ran out and I heard him laughing and shouting that he got the jacket, then a motor accelerated before disappearing into the night. I s
at there on the toilet and pondered the whole idea of getting robbed without even really being robbed, because that’s basically what happened. What he said to me was both a threat as well as a warning for my own safety. His friend was crazy, after all; the guy in the bathroom was just the liaison. And what I thought was a big sharp knife tapping on the stall door could have very easily been a car key or a penny. It was a reflection of a robbery that could have been, and yet it was that robbery. It was a suggestive stick-up. The more I thought about it the more I realized what a perfect crime it was. Maybe there was a crazy friend waiting outside and maybe there wasn’t, but all he did was suggest that I hand over my jacket to save myself some possible misfortune. He was offering insurance, in a way: Pay me and I’ll protect you from the real bully. Illegal, no, not really. Unethical, very. Uncool, hell yes. But illegal, I don’t think so. It was committing a crime that wasn’t against the law—the uncrime.

  Then I pulled out the two plastic ice cubes from my pocket and fumbled them around in my palm. A crime that wasn’t a crime and ice that wasn’t really ice. I found no irony in that fact, nor the fact that something had been stolen from me on the very same night I had stolen something myself. But the events and the plastic ice did help me discover that there were some strange similarities between the façade of filmmaking and the guise of criminality. It’s not that it’s all fake, but that you, the viewer, have to help the suspension of disbelief move along as much as the perpetrator of the crime or film has to. A movie doesn’t work if you, the viewer, don’t let yourself believe it—it’s just images being flashed across a screen at twenty-four frames per second. But if you let yourself believe it, that same film can become as authentic and genuine as any real-life scenario. And the same can be said for crime—I could have mumbled a foreign language or laughed maniacally from within the stall, and probably thwarted the stick-up and kept my jacket. But I didn’t. I went along with the story; I let myself suspend my disbelief. I handed over my coat and enjoyed the rest of the movie. I was now an extra, after all. It was my duty as a performer to be robbed as authentically as possible.

  THE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL

  JOB #37

  It was a little after one in the morning when the car horn went off. I had just settled into bed in the thick of the warm summer night when the howl of the honk tore through my apartment like a crowbar slowly forcing open the lid from a wooden crate. My apartment windows, like most of my neighbors,’ were wide open and eager for a cool breeze. But nobody on Huston Street got their chilly gust of wind to fall asleep to that night. Instead, every resident in a three-block radius got the endless hoooooooooooooooooooooooonk of some asshole’s car to cool us down.

  As I lay there in bed and waited for the car’s owner to arrive and fumble out his keys to finally mute this heavy, hollow screech, I deliberated whether hearing the more melodic sound of a traditional car alarm, with its varying themes and doo-doo-wha-wha diddies, would be more or less unenjoyable than this unwavering blast of a monotone horn. Both were terrible; but would one be less terrible than the other? And since we’re on the subject, why would any car alarm maker even offer the option of a straight, endless, unbroken beam of a honk over the more traditional short, rapid bursts of honks? What car was so damn valuable that it required a steady palm-on-the-button horn for an alarm?

  Six minutes was well past the maximum amount of time that an owner of a car was allowed to not recognize his own alarm—especially when one was as distinctively annoying as this one. I jumped out of bed and walked across the hardwood floor of my studio apartment to the wall of windows and pulled back the drapes. I searched the street below for the telltale blinking headlights or flashing brake lights, but the street was dark and showed no signs of unrest. It was actually serene down there, almost picture-perfect. The blaring horn was the only evidence of something not right—as if the wrong audio track had been mistakenly used with the scene. I tried turning my head from side to side in an attempt to pinpoint the direction of the noise, but both sides sounded equally loud from the window. That would mean that either I was directionally deaf or the loud car sat directly below my window, with only a thin layer of blooming magnolia trees as a buffer between us. That’s just perfect, I mouthed to the drapes. Just perfect. Right under my window.

  By minute fifteen, neighbors had started coming out to the street in their bathrobes and sleeping shorts. Angry tenants from my apartment complex as well as from the fancier complex across the street stood united in their hatred for this car making all that noise. They clung in little packs before merging into one big mob at the center of the street. Shaking heads and waving fists quickly became pointed fingers at the car hidden under the trees right below me—I knew it! Then two people from the crowd of a dozen noticed me watching from my window and pointed up at me, and I showed my solidarity to their cause by glancing at my naked wrist, shaking my head, and, finally, crossing my arms. It wasn’t quite windtalker code but it did convey that I was equally as pissed as them, and it wasn’t me they should want to kill.

  It was now a quarter to two in the morning—Tuesday morning—and the steady honk still flowed. It had grown maddening. There was a point around minute 26 where my brain somehow muted out the noise for several seconds by awakening some type of auditory self-defense mechanism, but it was quickly overcome and incapacitated by minute 27. The mob on the street had grown to 20, and just about every apartment window in sight was now lit up. People had gathered around the blameworthy car underneath my window, and they were beginning to pound their fists against its hood and kick at the doors. Good for them! Whoever this ignorant asshole was, he had to pay for what his car had done to us. I imagined all of us out there with pitchforks and burning torches, ready to castrate the bastard as soon as he ran out with his keys jingling in his hand and an apology on his lips. The crowd below had grown furious, so much so that you could hear them cussing over the horn. One gentleman even picked up a good-size rock and hurled it at the car, but it did nothing to make it quiet again.

  But the flung rock did get me to remember that my car was parked somewhere down there, probably not too far from the loud car being attacked by the neighbors. What if they grew so angry that they began destroying any car near the car with the alarm? What if my car—my car that I had just bought the day before—was being sat on or molested in some way by these irrational, pissed-off neighbors going berserk below? Sure, she was just a shitty 13-year-old Celica with more rust than white paint, but she was my shitty Celica—my new shitty Celica. Then the possibility suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps it was my own Celica’s car alarm going off; but then that notion left just as quickly as it came once I remembered that its alarm, stereo, and battery had been stolen prior to buying it—making the Celica’s $600 price tag ideal. But then that realization prompted even more speculation.

  Although the lack of a car alarm eliminated the possibility of that 30-minute honk being my car alarm, it did pose the question of it still being my horn. You see, I could afford to replace the car battery, which I did earlier that afternoon, but I couldn’t afford to replace the stereo or the alarm. So, in place of the stereo I used a portable CD player and headphones. And in place of an alarm, I secured the steering wheel firmly in place using The Club steering wheel lock, which I had found lodged between the backseat and hatchback. I remembered the event very clearly; I remembered fiddling with the key to make sure the steel mechanism still locked and unlocked properly, then I remembered forcing the rubber-gripped talons of The Club across both sides of the oddly shaped steering wheel until it firmly and unquestionably locked the entire steering column in place. I remembered the event so vividly because I tried to unlock it a few seconds after locking it just to see if I had attached it correctly in the first place. And it wouldn’t budge—it was locked so firmly in place that it was stuck. And every additional time I tried to yank The Club loose from the steering wheel it somehow pushed against the horn button, startling me as well as several dog-walkers each
time. So I left it, figuring if I couldn’t remove it then a car thief couldn’t remove it either.

  Upon this recollection-turned-self-indictment, my face went numb seconds before turning as red as the color of guilt. I flung the drape closed, dropped to my knees, and backed up against the wall. The honk seemed much louder now knowing it was most likely mine. Every time I peeked out from behind my drapes, more neighbors seemed to be pointing up at my window. I had to somehow put a stop to this—there was a brand-new battery under that hood, which meant the horn could go on for several more hours. But I couldn’t go down there, especially after letting this go on for the last 40 minutes. The mob had already seen me standing in my window directly above the guilty car, and I had crossed my arms, checked my invisible watch, and shook my head at them out of solidarity. But if I walked down there now, all the crossed arms and head-shaking theatrics would look like I had done all of this out of spite. Pure malice. Why did I have to cross my arms so fervently? Why did I pretend to check a wristwatch that wasn’t there? My showboating was going to be my downfall.

  As I slouched there under the window, I deduced all of my options and came to only one conclusion: wait it out until dawn. The sounds of the waking city might drown out the horn or, at the very least, most of these neighbors would eventually have to leave for work. So I was prepared to crouch there under that window for the next four hours like a marine under duress, but luck soon intervened. And it did so by way of a shitty new car battery that was on sale. I will never question my own frugality again.