The Job Pirate Page 16
We did that thing that animals do, where you stare at each other until either a fight erupts or someone acquiesces. But in this case, one of the ladies threw up into her hand and ran it to the bathroom. So R.I.P. grabbed the other lady’s hand and walked her to the door while Ol’ Dirty Prick shook his head at me, retrieved his sick gal from around the shitter, and finally left.
I tried to settle back into bed but my veins were pumping with adrenaline and my pillows smelled like perm chemicals and grape smoke. But they had left, and the room was again mine; to the victor go the spoils. Although they had kept me up past 4:00 in the morning, I could still get a solid eight hours of sleep in and some time at the craps tables before we had to return back to Los Angeles. The Vegas trip wasn’t completely lost. I flipped through the channels until finding a decent horror film on TNT, and when I went to return the remote control to the bedside table I found the stubbed-out roach from their joint. It was like my severance pay. Thanks, Ol’ Dirty Prick. I lit it up and, for a nubby little roach, it offered me many, many good hits. I puffed away at it until it warmed my thumb and index finger then I stubbed it out in the same spot my predecessor did. When I tuned back to the movie, I was as stoned as a caveman fight in a gulley of hand-sized rocks. The gentle tug of honest fatigue finally began to overtake me, and I felt my eyes softly fight to stay open before succumbing to the warm, welcoming pool of intoxicated hotel slumber.
BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM rattled the door. My eyes flew open and my heart pounded in my chest—the kind of palpitation that only happens when being startled awake in the middle of a short nap. The sun was just barely beginning to rise through the window—it was still dark in the room aside from the TV’s glow. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM at the door again. No, no, no, not this time, Ol’ Dirty Prick. You can go fuck your drunk lady in your own room. I wouldn’t be falling for that shit again. I smothered my head under the pillow and drifted back to sleep. I vaguely recall hearing some more muted knocks at the door, but it wasn’t until someone wiggled my bare foot that I awoke. I tore the pillow from my face and shot upright to find the hotel manager and all four of the Woo-Ting Clan standing at the foot of my bed. The reality of the situation didn’t register right away, and I glanced at each and every face surrounding me trying to find an answer to a question that I couldn’t put into words. “Is it?” was all that I could ask.
“Sir, Mr. Reinhold, I apologize for entering your room like this,” the suited manager said apologetically, “but they said you were their chauffeur, and they couldn’t get a hold of you.”
“We’re leaving!” R.I.P shouted at me from behind the manager. “Grab your shit and let’s go!”
“Music TV might have paid for this shit, Reinhold,” Ol’ Dirty Prick then said, “but I say when we leave! So go bring the limo around and meet us downstairs in 10 minutes. You’re driving us home now, Miss Daisy.”
“Yeah, it’s too hard to sleep in this hotel!” one of them added with a sneer.
They left in a herd of laughter accented by an apologetic smile from the hotel manager. Touché, Ol’ Dirty Prick, touché—didn’t see that one coming. I brewed a minipot of coffee, splashed my face, and packed up my belongings in 7 minutes, then retrieved the limo and pulled it around to the front of the hotel in just under 12 minutes. The Clan came out 20 minutes later and, after I loaded their luggage into the trunk and held the back door open for them, I leaned into the cabin and informed them, “You all might want to wear your seatbelts for this ride.”
I got in front and raised the partition between us and didn’t lower it again until it was time to say, “We’re home.” As all four slowly wriggled awake on the long leather seats in the cabin, I pulled their luggage from the trunk and sat it onto the curb by the back bumper. I then opened their backdoor and returned to my driver’s seat and smoked a cigarette until the last member vacated the limo. All four stood beside their luggage on the curb, and I think they were waiting for me to carry their suitcases into the hotel lobby for them. But that wasn’t going to work for me. I tapped on the gas pedal just enough to jolt the car forward, which slammed the back door shut. Then I drove off and left them standing there with raised arms and colorful insults.
Marv called minutes later, just after I had parked the limo back inside its garage, and asked if I had the energy to do another job that afternoon. I explained an abridged version of my night with the Woo-Ting Clan to him, and he explained to me that this next gig would pay $145 and it didn’t involve leaving Hollywood. So I agreed. I switched into my Lincoln Town Car and drove back to my apartment, tried to take a nap but couldn’t, and instead took two showers, ate a TV dinner, and brewed a half-pot of Starbuck’s French Roast. When I returned to the parking garage later that afternoon to retrieve the limo, the Vegas weekend finally began to take its toll on me. I could feel my motor skills hampered by fatigue; I began yawning uncontrollably and my eyes wouldn’t stop tearing up. Not normally two points that I would mention as vital to a story, but it does lend itself to the reason I didn’t see the large concrete pillar at the passenger side of the limo. It was a horrifying sound as large ribbons of navy blue steel tore off from the back door and coiled in jagged wave-like peels near the wheel well. And even more horrifying than the sound of that steel shredding was the sound of Marv taking the news. He began yelling into the cell phone as soon as I said it and didn’t stop for 10 minutes.
Marv said he had rented out all of his other limos for the night, and this next fare—the up-and-coming Caucasian hip-hop star Johnnie G—was supposed to have been a big favor for a big client at Capitol Records. So I lied a little and told Marv the damage on the limo wasn’t all that bad and wouldn’t be very noticeable at night. And he believed me enough to let me finish the job. I was able to conceal the damaged back door from Johnnie G and his publicist and manager when I picked them up from a home in Encino, but arriving at the Grammys was an entirely different affair.
There was only one way up to that giant red carpet, and that was straight through the flashing, cheering madness of a very well-lit welcoming committee of television crews, international press agents, reporters, cameramen, fans, and security personnel. Before I could yell into the back to tell Johnnie G that the back door facing all those flashing bulbs and adoring fans wasn’t going to open no matter how hard he tried, he continued trying nonetheless. So I opened my own door and hustled the few feet to the driver’s side backdoor—the door facing away from the crowd—and opened it for them. Johnnie G crawled out with a confused expression followed by his equally confused manager and publicist. The cameras began flashing madly as they circled behind the limo to get to the red carpet, where a barrage of laughter and finger pointing greeted them. It was at that point that Johnnie G noticed the obliterated back door with its trestles of ripped blue steel forming what looked to be a giant three-fingered fist. Then Marv noticed the same thing as he watched it all on live TV coverage from his home, and he called me minutes later to fire me.
That next day, I drove my Lincoln Town Car back up to Marv’s house in the hills, and I parked it back in the driveway just where I had found it. I ran my palm over that glossy black steering wheel one last time before walking down to Sunset Blvd. and hopping on the bus in my black suit and mirrored sunglasses.
When I got home a little later, my dusty Celica was still parked in the same spot as when the horn had bellowed out so violently two weeks before. I guess I hadn’t even touched it since becoming a chauffeur. I suppose it’s like returning to an old, fat wife after carrying on a lurid affair with a beautiful woman half her age—it just wasn’t the same, and could never ever be the same again. But she was still my wife, so I sat down behind her wheel and started her up. It wasn’t that I hated my Celica now, but I blamed her for all that had happened, and all I could now see were her faults: both bumpers were missing, the vinyl seats were ripped to hell, the windshield was cracked, the dashboard was blue and plastic and tattered from the sun, that stupid The Club was still on its steering wheel, and
it reeked of gasoline at every rev.
After the Celica had a few minutes to warm up, she must have noticed the sad expression I now carried. In a soft, forgiving tone she said, “You are one of us, lover. We’re not the flashy type. We are the same, you and me.”
“Never,” I whispered back.
“Did you have a good time? How was she? Did you like how she handled?” she began to ridicule me.
“You haven’t earned the right to call her ‘she,’” I roared at the Celica.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back, regardless,” she added very sweetly. “We’ll always have the horn night.”
I turned off the ignition and whispered, “Yeah, we’ll always have that, honey.” Then I removed The Club from her steering wheel, unlocked all the doors, and went up to my apartment. My days as a swinging chauffeur had officially ended.
THE BLESSED DO-OVER
JOB #74
Oh, Jesus. Thirty-seven years old. Thirty-seven years old and unemployed. Again. Not the 37 part but the unemployed part. Between jobs, we say. We don’t say we’re unemployed or out of work, and we definitely don’t say that we got fired. If we got laid off, we’ll sometimes say that. But, for the most part, we say we’re between positions, between jobs, between things. We, the people in our apartments during the daytime, that is. We, the neighbors that stream Netflix movies on our laptops at all hours of the night. We, the people who not only look forward to wine stores that offer free wine tastings but require it to occasionally leave the apartment to socialize. We are the citizens in the windows; the ghosts of the waking hours. We are the ones who have the time to watch the crows bathe in puddles of roof water, to watch the garbageman perform his entire task, to watch the old shopkeeper sweep cigarette butts from the sidewalk in front of his store every afternoon. We are the people who have the time.
But to say we’re “between” things implied there were things at both sides—both behind and ahead, past and future. It was optimistic on the part of the speaker to assume that there would be some form of a job for them at some point in their future. Behind, most definitely, but ahead, that was pure speculation. Odds were, there would be something coming up. It might not be the coolest job in the annals of employment, but it would keep a roof overhead and the belly from grumbling. But still, it was an assumption to think that a job would most definitely be in the future. It was wishful thinking. Pure speculation.
This would be my 74th wishful thought. Seventy-three prior bouts of wishful thinking had kept me afloat and entertained for the better part of the past 18 years. But this upcoming 74th job—this thing at the far end of my “between things”—would be different from the others. It would be my first job as a resident of Seattle. Although it took me 36.9 years to do it, I had finally figured out how to unfasten the glimmering shackles of the Golden State. And I moved 1,100 miles north before it noticed that I was gone.
“From where?” always seemed to follow that disclosure.
“Los Angeles,” my reply.
And then, without hesitation or prejudice to the person speaking, followed the age-old question: “Ummm … why?”
My first few weeks here in Seattle prompted my explanation of “wanting a do-over.” I would describe in great detail how I had grown to abhor my hometown of Los Angeles; that I had to get out before it was too late. So I proudly explained to my new neighbors and inquisitive people in bars and bookstores that in a two-week period I had made the decision to move, quit my job, sold my pre-owned luxury car back to CarMax for a lot less than I bought it for, sold all my furniture at a garage sale, found an apartment in Seattle online, mailed a deposit check, and then split. I packed the remainder of my clothes, my fishing poles, a rug, my TV, my Ruger 357 Magnum, and my laptop into a rental car, strapped my new mattress and box spring to the roof, drove the 20 hours up to the Emerald City, and arrived the day before my 37th birthday. The do-over. Life reinvented in 14 days. Adulthood refurbished.
Then, at about the one-month mark of this same question, I realized that their “why?” didn’t really pertain to why I wanted a life do-over, but why I chose Seattle to do it over in—Seattle instead of anywhere else in the continental United States. The rain, they say. It’s always raining here. Why would you choose to leave a place that’s always sunny for a place that’s always gray and raining? I never had a good answer for that. I had my reasons—my many reasons why I chose Seattle—but these new people in my life hadn’t earned the right to know me that well. Maybe if we’re still friends after a few more months, then maybe I’ll tell them that Los Angeles had been ripping my heart out for years; that Los Angeles had slowly been shaving off pieces of my soul and replacing the bare patches with celebrity endorsements and pre-owned Lexuses and more internal conversations than external ones. Maybe at that few-month mark of friendship I’ll also tell them that I needed to scare the shit out of myself; that I had grown too complacent with my existence and needed to shake things up by moving to a state where I didn’t know a single person and had no job lined up—and with just under $3,800 in my savings account. I wanted to test myself, see if I could do it; see if I could just pack up and start over someplace new. I wanted to redecorate my existence. If I had revealed that much to these friends who had made it to the few-month mark then I would also tell them that I chose to quit a $75,000-a-year job in a terrible recession just to make the Seattle move possible. I would, of course, omit the fact about the Human Resources department discovering my bachelor’s degree in communications was just four nicely typed words on a resume. And I would also probably leave out the part about that company urging me to quit on my own accord before they fired and most likely brought me up on criminal charges for false representation. That bit of knowledge would be reserved for the one-year friends. The corporate world is a sham anyways. No one wants to tuck in their shirts.
But the rain. The rain. The question left unanswered. I moved to the rainiest city in the States simply because I came from a city that never saw rain. That’s why. There was nothing symbolic behind it. I wanted to be an umbrella type of guy. I wanted to wear scarves with my coats. I wanted all four seasons. So I traded in my sunglasses and T-shirts for fingerless gloves, thermal underwear, and a sinus infection. But I was glad to make the leap. Life is short and, in Los Angeles, summer is long.
The seasons, all four of them—a concept I had never known outside of film and television settings. Back in L.A., the winters were a lot like the springs and falls and autumns: sunny and mostly temperate. On the other hand, the winters of Seattle were like the winters of some Nordic Thor-laden fable, especially to a grown man whose only experience with snow was the fluffy white flocking we put on our artificial Christmas trees as kids (which we also learned some years later caused cancer). That first winter in Seattle was a real eye-opener to the reality of cold. The air outside would turn to ice by 2:00 in the afternoon, and the 90-year-old radiator in my studio apartment gave off as much heat as the stack of books next to it. But where the radiator failed the lack of bed bugs made up for—I’d rather stay cold and unbitten than warm and harvested any day.
For the most part, I guess you could say that I got lucky by moving into the Consultay Apartments in Capitol Hill. Finding that place online was just pure blind luck, too—which, in Christopher-talk, meant it was the second-to-cheapest apartment in the weird part of town. The building was three stories and constructed in the 1920s. It rented mostly to students from one of the nearby colleges. The average age of tenant was 22. Aside from the bearded divorced guy on the first floor and the milfy alcoholic woman who lived in the basement apartment, I was the oldest tenant roaming the halls of that forty-unit complex. The types of guys I knew back in Los Angeles would probably have paid an extra $250 in rent just to live next door to a bunch of cute college girls nearly half their age. But I wasn’t one of them. These girls only made me feel older. And lonelier. The young ladies of this peculiar Millennial Generation were just like the throngs of aspiring Hollywood celebrities tha
t I thought I had left behind—with their loud, loud, cackling conversations inside small cafés, graciously allowing everyone in the room the pleasure of hearing an audible version of their Facebook status updates. I came from the older generation of Gen X—the early model of what they’re based on now. Sure, we may have slacked and whined a bit during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but we got our shit done when it needed to be done. We knew we had to fight to survive, and we did. We were the last real generation to remember a childhood without cell phones and computers, and it showed. We were cut from different casts, our two worlds. The Millennials and the Gen Xers had nothing in common, and neither of us wanted anything to do with one another. We were like werewolves and vampires or the Sharks and the Jets.
But it was a simple glass of Pinot Noir in the apartment courtyard that turned the whole situation around for me. While wallowing at the plastic patio table surrounded by nothing but brick and window, I struck up a conversation about zombie escape plans with a neighbor named Bryan. Bryan then turned me on to our adorable neighbor Mary Beth, who was a student and dead-ringer for Shirley from Laverne & Shirley. The three of us started to meet at the patio table for wine, cigarettes, and conversation a few times a week around twilight. Then Mindy, our eccentric neighbor with a flair for camouflaging her weight and insecurities behind gaudy outfits and peacock feathers, started hanging around the courtyard with us. Seth, the apartment manager, started showing up with a six-pack. Steven was a once-in-awhile. And, finally, 20-year-old linguistics major Regan, whom we called “the moocher” for his perfectly timed arrivals at the rolling of the joint, rounded out our cast.
Within a month, the courtyard patio became the communal meeting ground for our every-other-day “jazz, grass, and wine evenings,” where age ceased to matter once Stan Getz was on the iPod. We cast out our age prejudices and created a brand new generation at the Consultay Apartments. We created our own temporary generation—an indeterminate layover period where we all chose to dwell in the bedrooms of our lives. It felt like we had all decided to pause time, pause our potential, pause our futures—together. It was a period of life that could have been scribed by Armistead Maupin, where it was just as easy to get high with a neighbor as it was to say hi. It was the college experience that I had never experienced. The apartment became my dormitory, and the city my new campus. Instead of condemning that younger generation I detested so much, I simply adapted to them like a wolf with housedogs. I was growing backwards, shaving off maturity one month at a time. Those pre-owned cars and 401(k) concerns were drifting further and further away, month after month. I was no longer nearing 40 … I was nearing fuck yeah.