To Live and Love In L.A.

by Ben Peller

  “Well, yes, I did.” I sputtered. I didn’t admit that I’d already assumed it was possible I’d been hallucinating at the time, nor that I believed I might still be. “I’m sure you’ll do fine, Dalia.”

  Her hand, which had been caressing my leg, drew back as if from a piece of sludge. “It’s Dalilia.”

  “Right,” I said eagerly. Maybe if I mispronounced her name a couple more times this crazy girl, or hallucination, or whatever the hell she was, would leave me alone. “I don’t think I can help you, Dali…”

  She gripped my crotch with just enough force to be erotically threatening. “You can help me, all right,” she said. “I want to be performing on the Hammy Awards Show next year.”

  “But I’m just a temp!” I cried out. Her hand squeezed tighter on my testicles. I was thankful I wasn’t wearing the jeans Diana had threatened to fire me for wearing, or else my family jewels wouldn’t have had any protection at all from Dalilia’s vice-like grip. “Temp?” she shouted. “What the hell is a temp?”

  “A temporary worker,” I said.

  “So what is it you do here?”

  I started laughing. Every day I’d been at the Academy, I’d been dreading the day when someone in authority would see fit to ask me that very question. But it took a teenaged wannabe starlet clutching my balls in a bathroom stall to actually voice the query.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered.

  She released my crotch and straightened her skirt with an impressive amount of dignity, given the circumstances. “Brother,” she shook her head. “Don’t tell me I have to have sex with Jene.”

  I fumbled for the lock on the stall and opened it quickly. “You don’t have to have sex with anyone, Dalilia. I meant what I said. You’ve got a great voice, a great presence, you’re a natural born-“

  “Oh, fuck off,” she muttered, sweeping by me and pausing just a moment to snap her pigtails at the mirror before storming out of the bathroom.

  I carefully stepped out of the stall, feeling alarmingly sober. Staring in the mirror, I saw my hair was just that: hair. My face bore no trace of any letter or shape. I was back to being what I was: a temp.

  Dalilia, on the other hand, would go on to not only perform on the Hammys the next year, but win one for Best New Artist.

  It wasn’t until the night of the Hammy Awards that I encountered Dalilia again. I was at an after party in a posh downtown L.A. hotel, careening down a hallway after having freshly ingesting a couple smooth lines of cocaine off of what might have been either a vinyl record cover or a CD case, along with a few neat vodkas, when I came face to face with her. Here she was, cruising around a corner, still wearing the cut-off jeans and a black lace bra that showed off her taut stomach. Bountiful freshly reddened hair flowing free (pigtails long gone), fit and tanned legs, all encased in a white coat that gave her the look of an angel sent from one of those acid flashbacks I’d always been promised.

  “Remember me?” she cooed.

  “How could I forget,” I stated. “Dalilia.”

  She frowned and leaned into me. “It’s Deelia!” she whispered savagely. “We changed it. How could you not have heard that when my awards were announced?”

  The reason was that I’d been backstage, huddled behind some life-sized gold painted cardboard mock-ups of the awards being given out that night. My companion had been a country singer whose fondness for cannabis was legendary, and after passing a small crystal pipe back and forth, we’d succeeded admirably in going “on the road again.”

  “I guess I misunderstood,” I told Delilia, or Deelia, or Ditsy, or whatever the hell her name would be six months from now.

  “Figures,” she said. “Well, do you like my trophy?” She held up her Hammy Award, posing automatically. She looked damned good, I had to admit.

  “Great,” I replied. “So I was right. You’re a fucking star.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “But I feel so empty inside.”

  We both burst out laughing. Then she gave a pout that was tailor made for a young hot Best New Artist. “Come on, you,” she sang. “We have some unfinished business in the bathroom to take care of.”

  “You’re like… fifteen!” I protested.

  She threw back her head and laughed. “I’m nineteen, you goof!” she said. “We put out that fifteen year old bullshit to turn all the junior high schoolers on.”

  This made sense. It made even more sense as she grabbed me in that familiar grip I’d first experienced at the Academy. As she led me to the women’s room I made a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but soon we were both inside. Given how much alcohol and assorted other substances I’d consumed I was, as they say in the world of professional wrestling when a worker shows up blitzed out of their mind, “in no condition to perform.” However, with the help of her Best New Artist trophy, we managed to get a good thing going. Midway through the ordeal I became aware of a searing pain in the skin of my elbow. But under the circumstances, chemicals swirling around in side me and having at it with a recently crowned Hammy Award Winner, I chose to ignore the pain, even when I happened to chance a look over and see that our motions had managed to press me against a loose nail on the corner of the toilet paper dispenser, and the feverish back and forth thrust was shredding the flesh just above my forearm.

  But by then I was feeling no pain, and the Best New Artist’s cries from her orgasms were more than enough to keep me charging away. Her hand found my crotch, and we climaxed in what I like to imagine would’ve been a definite contender for a Best Duet Award.

  After we left the stall, Dalilia kissed me. It was a tender kiss. No tongue; more of a prolonged bumping of lips. Ironically it felt more like a first kiss instead of one exchanged after a romp in a bathroom stall that involved props, dirty talk, and numerous calls to God.

  “Here,” she pressed her award into my hands. “You were the first person who told me I would be a star that seemed like they really meant it. For whatever it’s worth, I feel I owe you this.”

  She pecked me again on the cheek, then swirled away. Several women were in line for the stall we’d just vacated, and they were eyeing me with looks that sailed from astonishment to horror to annoyance to boredom.

  I fled to the bar and examined the award I’d just been handed. “BEST NEW ARTIST,” it read. I kind of understood why Dalilia had given it to me. She was no “new artist;” she was a pro. But I felt honored that she’d seen fit to give me an award. I drank a silent toast to her, cradling our Hammy and wincing every time I fingered the wound on my elbow.

  Six months later, she’d had three top-selling Itunes, gone though two high-profile romances, one of which ended in assault charges being filed by both her and her then boyfriend. The most recent news I read, before I stopped reading magazines altogether, was that she was “taking a break from the biz” after marrying a famous record producer twenty years her senior. However, she also mentioned in the same interview that she wasn’t ruling out a comeback album. This after putting out a total of eighteen songs in her fourteen month career.

  Though I put many an ointment on my elbow, the dagger shaped scar from our encounter in the bathroom stall remains alive and well. And I also have the Hammy she gave me. I haven’t washed it yet. After all, it’s been inside a fucking star.

  My time at the Academy came to an end as a result of my first visit to the Finance department, or as it was well known around the Academy, the “Bitch Den.”

  This office was armed with two women who seemed to have decided that any kind of pleasurable interaction, sex or otherwise, with human beings was completely out of the question. One was rail thin and wore a wig that was brittle and, for some reason, red. She looked like a demented scarecrow. The other had breasts that looked like they’d started sagging since her teens, along with what seemed to be the beginnings of a beard. Their names were Frankie and Frances, and they termed themselves as “the two Fs.” Nobody in the Foundation wanted to deal with them, so one Friday after the Award ceremony I volun
teered to go up and get things such as vouchers and expenses approved. After my experience with Dalilia I was riding high, figuring I could win any female over with my wily charm and enthusiasm.

  As far as females went, I was wrong. Again. The first thing Frankie did was shut the door. “You people at the Foundation have been filling out these expense request forms incorrectly,” she fumed.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “They’re not enough to add up to the Foundation’s monthly budget,” Frances slapped her hand on her desk. “How on earth are we supposed to balance our books correctly when you people don’t spend enough?”

  “So you’re saying we should spend more?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Frankie teased with a sociality that belonged in a soap opera scene. “If you all would just spend more, or turn in expense requests that spent more, we could all benefit just fine.”

  She had to be kidding. But when, after many silent moments, her expression remained serious, I shifted my gaze to Frances. She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “We’ll take care of you, Shawn,” Frances whispered.

  Everybody knew that the Foundation was the Academy’s black sheep, being that we barely did anything but make the Academy look good by having a “non-profit arm.” Rumor had it that the Academy’s President had been out to get rid of the Foundation for months. I was certain I was being set up.

  Beyond that, the idea of stealing money from a non-profit entity just didn’t sit well with me. Sure, I could justify some pens, paper, plus the occasional appliance such as a stapler or a chair cushion. These were objects that could be returned or replaced at any time. As far as the music I downloaded every day, well, in my mind all musicians were rich anyway. So what did one song or two matter in the scheme of their careers? Besides, once my first novel was published I planned to give it away to libraries across the nation, so I figured my artistic karma was solid.

  But as the representative, albeit a temporary one, of a non-profit organization, I hesitated to embezzle funds that had been designated to send some inner-city kids to music school.

  Frances rose from her desk and sidled up to me. From behind I could hear Frankie’s breath, hot on the back of my ear, which has always been one of my weak spots.

  “We’ll both take care of you,” Frankie whispered.

  The idea of these two women performing any kind of sexual act on me was almost as disturbing as stealing money from underprivileged youth.

  “Ladies,” I stepped out from between them with determination. “I’m here on official business. Let’s keep it that way.”

  The two of them swung toward me as one. They began to speak at the same time. While Frances accused the Foundation of “not meaning a goddamn thing to the survival of the Academy,” Frankie harangued me with terms like “inept management skills,” “stupid dispersion of funds,” and a few other designations I swore to myself as a wide-eyed Radio Television and Film major I swore I would never have to endure.

  “Look, these request forms are to pay for airline tickets,” I said, growing angry. “They’re for fourteen year old musicians to go to the Kennedy Center to perform.”

  “Oh, really?” Frankie shook her head with such force I thought her wig might fling off. I halfway hoped it would; it would’ve made it easier for me to get an easier bead on the center of her skull as I caved one of the “Employee of the Month” framed decrees that were hanging on the wall down into her head.

  “You need to put them in the proper bin,” Frances snapped. “For approval.”

  I looked at their desks. Both seemed identically furnished. I couldn’t help but think of how serial killers sometimes “twinned” one another, competing for victims. Along with statues of wooden cats and brass lamps with green glass encasements, each desk had a metal squared paper holder.

  “One of these?” I gestured at the holders. “Which one?”

  “Oh, should we put a sign out for you?” Frankie sneered. “Would that make it easier for you, Shawnee?”

  Now I’m not against nicknames. I’ve had several throughout my life: geek, weirdy, bigtime, bad boy, poppa pump, fuck-doll… Each defined a time in my life when people sought to single me out as special, even if in not always in a complimentary way. Which was fine. Nicknames, even insulting ones, can be fun as a kid. But then one’s hormones begin to rage, and there’s the cruel coincidence that the dawning of adulthood coincides with reaching an age when obtaining weapons becomes a definitive possibility, and at this stage nicknames can lead to murder.

  Now here was a woman who I’d never said a cross word to calling me Shawnee. Back when I’d been a child this moniker had been what had passed for my name. There had been no condescension intended; being a scrawny goofy looking kid, it had simply fit. But I’d abandoned it by the sixth grade, and now, as a man, no one but my real father was permitted to address me as such. Certainly not some brittle faced troll who looked like she hadn’t had a good lay in roughly five decades.

  “Shawnee,” I repeated her. “Is that what you just called me, Frankie? Is that some kind of attempt to bond us?”

  “No,” she spat. “Why the hell would you ask such a stupid question?”

  I chuckled. “Because,” I said in a voice that I didn’t quite recognize as my own. “When I come up here tomorrow with a fucking shotgun and blow your brains out, I want to know I didn’t misunderstand my reasons for doing so!”

  Her face lost a bit of its masked fury. This was my cue to laugh and say I was just joking, but the scary thing was I wasn’t. “Don’t worry,” I laughed maniacally. “I’ll give you the choice of either barrel!”

  By this point I saw Frances desperately pushing buttons on her phone. All bets were off. “Will that make it easier for you… Frankie?!” I shouted, surprised that I was actually poised to lunge.

  “Hi there!” a chirpy voice sounded from behind.

  I turned and found Diana, our Human Relations Coordinator, standing in the door looking exceptionally plastic in a red dress that matched the ruby lipstick that housed her fake smile. “Everything okay in here?” she asked ridiculously. Anyone within a hundred yards of the office with a pair of halfway functioning eardrums had just heard me threaten to commit murder.

  “Hunky dory,” I grunted. Then I left the office with my head held high. Another temp job down the drain, I reasoned. Fuck it. At least I’d gotten stoned with Willie.

  Determined to go out with a bang, I tromped back into the Foundation and announced to all within earshot that the next time “those two wicked witches of the west, east, south, and north want a fucking expense request form, I’ll bring them one – one for both of their goddamn funerals when I send them to hell where I’ll fucking kill them again!”

  Everyone had paused and was regarding me with an interest that was, well, disconcerting. Norma, who’d been traipsing about muttering as usual, was staring at me like I was a lunatic. Our Directors of Whatever the Hell they were Supposed to be Director of were wide eyed. Only Jene was wearing his usual expression; a calculatingly bland one.

  I marched self-righteously into my office and spent the rest of my workday emailing any downloaded music files I hadn’t yet had a chance to burn to a CD (a practice which the Academy President had decried at the previous Awards show just months ago) to one of my personal email addresses. I had the feeling I wouldn’t be allowed in the building the next day.

  That night I got stoke drunk and toasted my time at the Academy. At least I still had my Hammy Award. The next day I waited for the call from OrangeGrove, the temp agency, and it came at 10:30 in the morning, two and a half hours after my usual reporting time to work.

  “Shawn!” Quinnifer’s voice sounded lush and sad; a plant determined to grow through storms and droughts both. “I regret to say that the Academy has terminated your temporary employment.”

  I nodded, “Yeah, of course they have.”

  “I feel bad. It wasn’t like it was your fault.”

  This was a shock
er. After all, I had used profanity while promising to shotgun a few of my fellow Academy “family members” to death. “Really?” I asked.

  “Of course not! Haven’t you read it on the Internet yet? Jonathan Blue, the Academy’s Vice-President, has been accused by the Human Relations Coordinator of sexual assault. Apparently there was an altercation in a stairwell. They’d been having an affair for months!” Quinnifer sounded so excited you would’ve thought she’d been the one having an affair. “He wouldn’t leave his wife for her, so she threatened to go to the press. He beat the heck out of her!”

  “Heavens,” I murmured. “So why am I being terminated?”

  “His temporary replacement wants to cut costs, so the Academy is as of today eliminating all temp workers.” Quinnifer explained. “I’m really sorry about this, Shawn.”

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I had a good time there.”

  “Well, you’re probably going to have an even better time at your next assignment. It starts in two days, and pays four dollars an hour more than the Academy assignment. That all right with you?”

  It was great with me. I spent the rest of the day lounging in bed, putting away the better part of a fifth of Pierre, and scrawling out poems for my Foundation mates. The next day I woke up leisurely at ten in the morning, went to the Academy for the last time and distributed poems to all my former Foundation members. We exchanged hugs, and promised to keep in touch. Though I had the feeling we wouldn’t, just the promises felt good. Sometimes, in temp jobs and even in love, promises are enough.

  My last stop before I left the Academy was the Finance offices. Both “Fs” were there, and for some reason they looked a bit panicked when I stepped into their office. Their eyes darted around with alarm and their mouths gaped.

  “Just wanted to drop off a couple things,” I said, whipping out two poems and slapping them down into their respective metal bins. They were rhyming poems, and though I’ve forgotten their exact content (I was drunk when I wrote them), I do recall the principal word rhymed with itch.

  Strolling out of the Academy I felt fantastic. True, the music industry was in its own ways a fixed game. Record labels ripped off artists all the time with terms such as “recoupable” and “production costs.” Places such as the Academy were rife with accounting fraud, sexual harassment, and ironically, music theft from the Internet. But as I stood staring back at doors I would never walk through again, I felt as though I’d emerged as a piece of metal tested by fire. I was ready for my next gig, which Quinnifer had informed me was being a switchboard operator at a mortgage company. Houses and property all across America were being bought and sold at a rapid rate, and as everyone knew at the time, this was a bubble that would never burst. Unlike the music industry, the mortgage industry didn’t intend to deceive as a result of greed, trumped up charges, and mismanaged figures.