The Job Pirate Read online

  WAX IS THICKER THAN PRIDE

  JOB #27

  My elderly Cadillac Brougham muscled its way up the long, winding road to Universal Studios like a fatigued ox pulling up marshland. Clouds of exhaust bloomed from the rear of my V-8 as the transmission skipped and whined and tried its very best to complete the uphill task. After a rattling and somewhat religious quarter-mile, my rusty chariot and I both decided to settle on the first parking structure three-quarters to the top of the hill, where only employees were supposed to park. I let my tired Brougham rest in an empty spot and hoofed it to the top of the hill in my brother’s missing blazer and tie.

  The big studio’s outdoor promenade, the sightseeing extravaganza known as CityWalk, looked fantastic in the weekday brunch hour. The surrounding façade buildings leaned in comically overhead, giving each and every spectator a surreal worm’s-eye view of a fictitious life—a true cartoon environment. The dozen or so movie theaters, which all of this was originally built around some years back, still clung to the rear of this tourist trap like an emperor’s castle besieged by a hundred years of defeat, deforestation, and magnificent repopulation. But the true heart and lungs of this consumer-adoring beast were the souvenir shops, celebrity-endorsed bars, and fancy restaurants, which stretched on for as far as the eye could see.

  About five thousand tourists from every part of the world packed this enormous, winding boulevard—shopping bags in hand, visors on foreheads, and cameras brushing softly against eyelashes. Wheeled food carts sold $4 sodas and $7 hot dogs to the Asians; gift shops peddled Woody Woodpecker dolls and Frankenstein magnets to the Europeans and Southerners; and the Mexicans walked around with trash bags and brooms, themselves being the caretakers of this cathedral of Americana.

  Any place that had tourists also had job openings. That was the theory, at least—a theory conceived during a red wine conversation with a neighbor who once dissected his own poop with a plastic knife in a search for internal bleeding. So here I was, wandering around this massive casino of retail employment after taking job-hunting advice from a grown man who I won’t ever have dinner with again.

  My search began at an upscale coffee shop near CityWalk’s entrance. The way I figured it, I knew how to make a mean-ass café latte from a previous three-week stint as a coffeehouse waiter, not to mention my many-years patronage of any and every local Starbucks in the Los Angeles vicinity. So I walked in and filled out an application, then asked to speak with the manager.

  The Barista Chief stepped out from the back room and plucked the paper from my hand. His eyes drifted down my neatly printed, written-in-all-caps application before saying, “Okay, looks pretty good. We’ll call you if we need someone.” I decided not to shake his hand before leaving.

  I walked back into the mash of tourists outside and lit a Camel. I should have gotten a coffee, I thought to myself. That would have been so nice. Nothing’s better than sipping a coffee, smoking a cigarette, and watching strangers: a voyeur with his friends.

  Because I had nothing but time on my side, I reflected on the last time I was up here at CityWalk. It must have been three years before, still in the armor of my early 20s, when I pulled a six-day stint inside the great Universal Studios theme park working as something called a “Character Escort.” Because of my height advantage, the position seemed ideal, they said. Basically, as a Character Escort, I spent my days—my six days—protecting a midget inside a 50-pound Woody Woodpecker costume from a swarm of children with knees made for testicles and hands primed to pull on loosely sewn tails. The cast of other wandering characters included a seven-foot Frankenstein, a six-foot Chilly Willy, an average-sized Charlie Chaplin impersonator, but yet I always got the duty of protecting that fucking three-foot prick from children and teenagers twice his size. By day five I had given up and resorted to garishly waving my index finger in lieu of pulling little redneck kids off the back of the little man in the red bird costume. He complained, I got fired, end of reflection.

  Once you left Universal Studios, there was no going back. By the late ’90s, Universal had a very thorough computer database of information, and they kept a very tight, comprehensive list of past employees and why they were “past.” But CityWalk was a different story; it was still part of Universal but it was mostly franchise restaurants and independently owned stores. And the places that were semi-affiliated with the studios didn’t have the same computer databases of past employees readily accessible to their judgy fingertips like they had inside the studios. Luck was on my side out here. Out here in CityWalk, I was beyond the perimeter of suspicion.

  So, I flicked my cigarette butt onto the cobbled ground and decided to check out a nearby toy store—partly to apply for a job but mostly to see some toys. Three attractive teenage girls in matching ugly green T-shirts paraded through the store, adjusting items on shelves and smiling to customers with prices on the tips of their tongues. They were all about 17 years old, Hispanic at first glance, with straight brown hair and large curving bangs at the eyes. They had each painted a light foundation of makeup across their foreheads, eyebrows, and cheeks, revealing just a hint of the heavy cake that would be applied after quitting time.

  “Como está?” I said to the cute one with the green, angled eyebrows. The eyebrows then lowered, and not in my favor. “Are you guys hiring?” I tried more humbly.

  She gave me an application, and, after borrowing a pen, I walked back out to my bench in the courtyard, lit another cigarette, and filled out the paperwork. This application was easier than most others: a mere one-pager with condensed Job Experience and Education History segments. Being a professional job hunter makes it mandatory to always have a rich plethora of job skills at my beck and call. Even if those job skills were mostly fabricated and loosely reinforced by a list of job contacts consisting of out-of-service phone numbers, “because it was years ago,” and phone numbers that are coincidentally the same as a friend’s. On the application, I had decided to try out the past “hot dog vendor” position (for the money-handling aspect), the “thrift store clerk” position (for the customer aspect), and, just for the hell of it, I tossed in the liquor store job.

  Three prior jobs were all you really needed for retail. And as long as you were Caucasian and looked semipresentable, no one would ever try and verify more than one from the list provided, which was almost always the most recent.

  I returned to the toy store and was quickly approached by the 40-something store manager, who was also wearing the same green T-shirt worn by the teenagers. Three seconds of watching him saunter over and it was obvious that this guy really loved his job—the confident walk, the moustache, the complete removal of sideburns. He took some kind of pleasure in having a dictatorial role, even if it was just as the manager of a toy store. I was positive he would perform his duties to the best of his abilities.

  He took my application and looked it over, which gave me enough time to more closely look him over: shined brown loafers, white socks, cream-colored khakis, that fucking green shirt, and a sterile side-part of brown hair. His closer scrutiny of my application revealed both farsightedness and a wedding ring. Poor gal. Probably named Tamy or Vicky; now she never leaves the house. I bet she was cute in her 20s in a Bakersfield sort of way, but she plumped up by 40. They probably have three kids—two girls and a boy—maybe six, eight, and twelve years old by now. The two had been high school lovers, moved here to Hollywood to pursue her career in film and his in screenwri—

  “Says here you worked at a hot dog restaurant,” he paused and stared at me. “What happened with that?”

  I had to nod a few times before getting my bearings back. “Yes, the hot dog job. I decided to go back to college to finish my degree. The hours there weren’t flexible, so I had to find employment elsewhere.” To be honest, I got fired because I got caught stealing cheese. But this manager only needed the abridged, made-for-TV edition of my termination story.

  “Have you ever worked up here at Universal before?”

&n
bsp; “No, but I’m excited about the opportunity to.”

  “What was your major? What did you study?”

  “Journalism,” I answered. “I’m a newsman.”

  “Are you still going to college?”

  “Oh, no, no. I’m all good now.”

  “So you got your degree in journalism then?”

  “Oh yeah,” I answered, my degree actually being a three-year Frankenstein’s monster of journalism, English, cinema, and art semesters.

  “I just … I can’t wrap my head around this, Brandon. You have this degree in journalism yet you’re applying for a $7-an-hour job at a toy store? Why is that?”

  “I’ve seen too many ugly things in this life,” I answered. “I just wanted … to be around something that was good.”

  “All right. I see,” he replied. “Now why are you really applying at my toy store?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Is it?”

  “No, no, I suppose it’s not. It’s the same story. I just really need a job.”

  “Why don’t you get a job on a newspaper?”

  “Have you seen that Internet? Just giving the news away for free. It’s a new world out there. Dying breed, they’re saying. A dying breed of good brick-and-mortar newsmen.”

  “Is that so?” he said before pausing, sizing me up. “So if I hire you here and this dying breed of journalism picks back up, you’d quit the toy store, right?”

  “I’ll shoot you straight on this one: I’d be tempted to, yes. But would I? I don’t really know. I don’t really know. I’m a loyal man … I am. From hard-working German blood. Would I leave …? No. No, I would not leave. I would not leave this toy store if you hired me.”

  “I believe you about 10 percent.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I’m not going to hire you for the store,” he said with a suspicious glare, “but I do have something else for you. Why don’t you follow me, Brandon. This might be more your speed.”

  The manager waved to the teenager at the counter and signaled “two minutes” with his fingers. We then exited the store and I followed him into the CityWalk crowd heading east. I wondered where he was taking me; if there was perhaps some amazing position as a reporter for the CityWalk Gazette hidden deep at the back of the crowd. We passed the security offices and information desk and through the large circular courtyard where the restaurants dwelled like pillared walls around a Roman coliseum. We passed the waterfall ballet, which erupted from the ground in spontaneous vertical intervals. We finally stopped behind a horde of nearly twenty people, and I then realized that there was no cool office or cubicle’d desk waiting for me there. The manager looked over at me and smiled, and I knew that whatever it was within this assembly of T-shirted tourists would be my new job.

  “Well, here it is,” he said proudly.

  “I’m not going to be shaping balloons or anything, am I?”

  “No, nothing like that. Nothing like that at all,” he replied.

  I felt some relief knowing balloons wouldn’t be involved—I had never done that before, and didn’t relish the idea of it being on any of my resumes. So I followed him deeper into the crowd and heard an astonished German sigh noisily to my left and some form of exclamation in Japanese or Korean to my right. I was intrigued. What was causing such shock and awe within this gathering? What could elicit such alarm as to make a heavy German man sigh noisily and an Asian woman exclaim something I didn’t understand?

  The manager then clutched my elbow and pulled me to the right of the crowd, circumventing the tightly knit wad of shorts, flip-flops, and baseball hats. And seconds later, we were standing right beside the object of all the commotion: It was the goddamned Wacky Wax Cart.

  “Good God,” I whispered a little too loudly.

  Standing six feet high and five feet wide, the Wacky Wax Cart looked like a wood-paneled brick of shit left on a cobbled road to dry under the sun. It sat before the crowd of onlookers like a pudgy Christian facing Romans. There were no toys or dolls or digital cameras turning pictures of happy couples into emblazoned coffee cups or one-of-a-kind mouse pads. No, the Wacky Wax Cart had its own unique brand of shame to offer, especially for its newest employee: four bubbling 5-gallon tubs of colored wax circling an even bigger tub of bubbling white wax. Above these five tubs were three glass shelves full of hardened wax hands, each in a different position and color. One wax hand was obviously a teenager’s, showcasing the middle finger in red, white, and blue stripes. Another was the two-fingered peace sign, and yet another was the all-too-trite thumbs-up. A dozen or so solidified hand gestures conveyed countless finger statements, giving this cart of gaudy limbs the impression of either being a miniature sign-language school for deaf kids who really liked colors or some bizarre torture chamber.

  A petite girl on the soft side of 20, who also wore one of the green T-shirts from the toy store, repeatedly dunked her dainty hand into the tub of white liquid wax, giving each coat a second to cool and harden between dunks. She pulled her pale, glistening limb out for the sixth time and finally revealed it to the crowd, eliciting a loud wave of oohs and aahs. As her hand hardened into its permanent outstretched-fingers position, she asked an English couple beside her, “Okay, what color should we make it?”

  “Red!” the Brit screamed.

  “Blue!” someone from the crowd then shouted.

  “How about red, white, and blue?” a patriot in a wheelchair barked.

  “Okay,” the Wacky Wax technician replied, “red, white, and blue coming up!” She dipped the bottom of her coagulated hand an inch into the vat of red wax twice then she turned her hand over (thumb-side down) and dunked that side into the vat of blue wax twice. And when she lifted her hand to the crowd, a red-white-and-blue-striped appendage saluted them.

  The manager nudged me on the shoulder and nodded to the girl with the patriotic hand at the cart. I could have walked away right then. I considered it deeply. I could have feigned a case of the trots and hustled to the public bathroom to plan my escape. I could have laughed, shook my head, and walked back to my car. I could have done any number of things to get out of that particular predicament. But I needed a job badly. So, I nodded my head several times as if to say, “Wow, what a job she’s doing! I’d like to be a part of this action,” and continued to watch the show.

  “That’s Becky,” the manager leaned in to me and said. “You’re going to be working with her. She’s a pro at this.” And the job just got more appealing.

  We both watched Becky as she elegantly pulled off the wax glove by sliding what looked to be an oiled tongue depressor between the wax and her palm. By contorting her fingers and thumb into a cone position, the wax hand gingerly slid off while keeping most of its shape intact. The crowd cheered again, even louder than before. Becky then turned the hand simile upside down and filled it with tiny granules of wax, inserted a wick into the knuckle of the index finger, sealed the vacant wrist with a quick dunk in the white wax, and again showed the crowd her finished hand candle—her finished Wacky Wax hand candle.

  “Okay, who’s first?” Becky asked the crowd. “Who wants a wax sculpture of their hand?” Half of the crowd then immediately dispersed while the other half looked among themselves for the first to come forward. A large fireworks explosion then crackled overhead and the sunny sky lit up into hues of pink and blue. It was Universal’s Miami Vice stage show, and the crowd then realized that the studios were officially open for the day. The remaining onlookers shuffled off in one fantastic herd, leaving just Becky, the manager, and me standing there at the cart.

  The manager approached the cart and opened the cash register. He flipped through thin stacks of 1s, 5s and 10s and frowned. “Becky, this is Brandon,” he informed her. “He’s going to be starting tomorrow.”

  “Great!” she replied.

  We shook hands and smiled at one another. She was cute, rather elfish looking, with a haircut like Mia Farrow or Peter Pan.

  “Still sound good, Br
andon?” the manager asked.

  There were about forty people that I knew who worked at offices inside Universal Studios, some even nearing executive status by now. My own mother worked there, people I went to high school with, ladies I had dated, ex-coworkers I had known had moved on from old jobs to work there—and here I was, at the far end of my 20s, readying to accept this offer. How much self-respect would I squander by taking this job? How much dignity would I lose when someone I knew saw me making candle fists in an amusement park for $7 an hour? And that fucking green T-shirt …

  It was right then and there, during his offer to take the job, when I really wanted to leave. Fuck being employed; fuck making rent; fuck being a tax-paying citizen—I wanted to laugh as hard as I could and run away into the crowd. I wanted to fire up my Cadillac and drive to Europe and never look back. I had already started deducing the best possible route through the boulevard of tourists when my stomach suddenly shut down, which then sent a collapsing feeling through my abdomen and chest. I was starving, and the four cups of coffee and six cigarettes I had for breakfast quickly mixed with my naked stomach acids to form a stew of pain and fire. I was so hungry that I felt like vomiting—I was so hungry that I felt like I had just vomited, swallowed it back down, and needed to vomit again.

  Making candle hands for tourists. It could have been worse. Shit, it had been worse. The summer of 1994, that was bad. Most of ’96, that was bad, too. End of reflection.