To Live and Love In L.A.

by Ben Peller

  “You know…” I shrugged, hoping that by speaking her native language she wouldn’t report me for drinking on duty.

  She took a swig and her eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen them. A husky brown. She took another drink, deftly slid her red panties down from her mini-skirt, and while twirling them effortlessly reclined against a stack of boxes filled with old loan applications. As she pulled me to her I swore I caught a whiff of our Chief Marketing Agent’s cologne.

  “But…” I managed. “Won’t Barry get jealous?”

  “Oh him,” she laughed. “I only jack him off. You I want to fuck.”

  Worked for me.

  It was a pleasant romp, marred only that as she came she kept yelling “Whatever, whatever!”

  My next carnal knowledge of Mortgage Capitol’s roster came with Yvonne, one of our funders. She was 6’3”, and had a rear end that resembled a pair of bowling balls. She took to calling me “lush” after I’d been in semi-close quarters with her en route to the community kitchen (with Lara gone, I felt it was okay to drink the coffee, provided there was a shot of Vodkarade in it ((artificially sweetened sports drink + vodka + caffeine = bliss)).

  After the fourth time of being called a lush by this gorgeous looking woman who looked like she could stun a railroad car operator in his tracks and make him call in sick for three days straight, I felt the need to respond. “Thanks, legs.” I offered in my best film noir impression.

  “Now, now,” she pouted. “I’m sensitive about my height.”

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  “I mean,” she ran her hands down along her striped slacks. “Do you know how hard it is to have legs these long and no one to wrap them around?”

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  “Well,” she threw back her head. “Think about it.”

  I thought about it, yes I did. After spending that week pleasuring myself to all kinds of scenarios involving Yvonne I came into work at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Dave was adamant that the phones be answered seven days a week by a live person even if there were no loan officers physically present to handle loans, and since I was the only switchboard operator who’d lasted more than two weeks since Luisa, I was the chosen one. It was all right for several reasons. One was that, being the only person in the office, I was free to swig away from my Vodkarade with more freedom than was afforded during weekdays. Two, I was getting paid overtime (Thirty-six dollars an hour to answer phones only to inform those calling that there were no loan officers available on the weekend but if they left their name and number, someone would get back to them first thing Monday morning, etc… God Bless America!) The third and most rascally reason was that with nobody else around I could greet callers with comments such as “Mortgage Capitol… how may we screw – I mean help you?” For I had started to realize that this game was rigged; loans were being given to people who had no business getting loans. Hidden costs lay in wait everywhere. People would call and ask for a loan for thirty thousand dollars, and when I politely told them our minimum loan amount was a hundred thousand dollars they’d whoop as though they’d just won the lottery and say, “Hell, let’s go for a hundred then!” On a weekday, aware that I was within earshot of co-workers, not to mention that Dave Stein could be lurking anywhere, I would quietly try to reason with these people that borrowing this much money might not be wise. During the weekends, left to my own devices, upon receiving one of these calls I would bellow something like: “Are you out of your freaking mind? You aren’t qualified for that kind of loan! One of our loan officers will assure you that you are, of course, being that they get a commission! But you’re gonna be committing to a loan that, after all is said and done is going to make you feel like you’ve gotten fucked with your pants still on!” I would then, as a tribute to my old pro wrestling days, twirl my finger with a flourish before hitting the RELEASE button, thus terminating the call and saving someone from becoming a victim of the mortgage bubble.

  It was my fifth Saturday, and I had just victoriously hit the RELEASE button after one of these calls, when I heard Yvonne behind me, “You’re right, you know.”

  I jolted around and found Yvonne staring at me. Her long legs were gracefully filling out red jeans and cowboy boots.

  “I am?” I asked.

  “These loans are bullshit,” she nodded. “A lot of them are anyway. With the ‘adjustable rates’ and all that, people have no idea what kind of shitstorm they’re in for.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s why I rent.”

  That, and I had a credit score so tremendously pathetic that even the magicians at Mortgage Capitol would’ve been unable to qualify me for a home loan of any kind.

  “So why do you work here?” I asked her.

  “I’ve got two kids to support and an ex-husband that disappeared to become a born-again Christian and now apparently thinks paying child support is a sin.” Yvonne exhaled. “So here I am. Doing what I have to do.”

  “How does a woman as beautiful as you have an ex-husband?” I asked, taking a sip of Vodkarade. Casanova, eat your heart out.

  “He was a fucking moron, that’s how,” Yvonne answered without missing a beat. “Follow me. I want to show you something.”

  I trailed her wonderful rear end to a room in back, well separated from the general clamor of the office. It was the room where Dave Stein held weekly meetings with Mortgage Capitol’s top executives every Friday afternoon. These were strictly closed door gatherings. We switchboard operators were told not to interrupt them unless it was a spouse or the F.B.I. calling. The couple hours these meetings lasted would be punctuated by laughter and a lot of hollering. One time, walking by, I could’ve sworn I heard Michael shout, “Spank that rear end, baby!” It was worth noting that Katherine, a mid-level loan officer who was rapidly climbing the ranks in the company from “puppy” to a loan officer taking on high six figure loans, was walking rather gingerly after the meeting broke.

  I’d never actually been inside this room, which was surrounded by tinted glass and provided a great tableau of Marina Del Rey across Santa Monica and up towards the Pacific Palisades. A few other variables made the setup noteworthy. In the center of the den was a large crystal table that had ingrained in its winking surface vines and various fruits that gave off a shine due to the vision from the window’s tinted glare. Surrounding this crystallized garden were chairs that boasted handles shaped in the form of lion paws.

  “Nice view,” I said, both to the generous scope of the Westside of Los Angeles and to Yvonne, who was arching backwards on the table while caressing one of its chairs’ paws.

  “I’ve always fantasized of having sex in here,” she wiggled her body. “And right in the middle of it having someone come in and catch me in the act. Isn’t that naughty?”

  “Very,” I agreed. “Except I think we’re the only ones here today-“

  “You never know,” she wagged her finger at me. “That’s what makes it so much fun.”

  With the fantastic panoramic perspective of buildings and an ocean beyond, I was proud and grateful to make at least one of Yvonne’s wishes come true. She even brought back a memory as she cried, “Spank that rear end, baby!” I like to think Barry would’ve been proud.

  That Monday, Dave Stein passed me as I was answering phones. “So you worked on Saturday, right?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said. Oh, how I had worked.

  “Who else was here?” he asked.

  Yikes. “Um… nobody.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “When I went in to the conference room to eat lunch today that damn table was stickier than hell.”

  I nodded a bit. “I don’t know anything about-“

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t lie to me! I fucking hate liars, unless I’m the one doing the lying!”

  “Okay,” I said. “I presume I’m terminated.”

  Dave stared at me as though I’d sprouted a new head. “Why the hell would you think that?” he said, then leaned in and wh
ispered to me so our latest temp, Ginger, wouldn’t hear: “All I’m saying is next time don’t come all over the table. Okay?”

  “Sounds reasonable.” I said, mustering a bit of wit.

  Dave nodded and slapped me on the shoulder. It stung, as a matter of fact. “Gotta say, I’m impressed,” he whispered, as his demeanor hovered between a proud papa and a fellow sex-fiend. “She’s got a fantastic tush.”

  He strolled away, and Ginger peered over at me. “What were you two just talking about?”

  “Interest rate capitalization rates and their ratio to home estimates.” I said. Total bullshit, but it had sounded impressive enough when I’d overheard loan officers, their headphones strapped on like fighter pilots, spewing it out to hapless customers the week before.

  “Right,” Ginger grinned. “You were talking about sex.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Guys are pretty easy to read,” she shrugged. “Besides…” she looked around and then tilted closer to me. “I’ve done porn, and I know the look guys get on their faces when they’re talking about sex.” “Done porn?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “Amateur stuff mostly. For websites. My hair was blonde, and I had way bigger breasts then.”

  All men I’ve known, myself included, have fantasized about meeting a porn star one day in “real life.” Not at some convention where they’re charging twenty dollars for a picture, but at say, the grocery store or a car wash. It ranks up there with meeting a superhero. Here are these creatures who seem too good to be true; beautiful women who don’t play hard to get but who willingly give themselves to frustrated plumbers and confused college students. They’re also to be applauded for not only flaunting puritanical mores, but also for their sharp common sense. It’s no secret that porn actresses occupy the same position as most hot female conservative pundits, being that they’re in a career, one of few, which pays women a great deal more than their male counterparts.

  Ginger and I wound up getting several drinks after work. It turned out Ginger was, in addition to being a former pornstar, also a short story writer who’d graduated with a degree in Literature from a Junior College in the San Fernando Valley. She was saving up money to head to Ireland to study at some writer’s conference.

  She vanished within a month. Two months later she sent me an email with the subject heading: Licking Asses To Get Published.

  Within eight months she had a book of her short stories put out in hardcover by a large New York Publishing House, the same kind of “reputable” publishing company that had pushed J.T. Leroy’s bullshit down readers’ throats, claiming Leroy was a sexually ambiguous teenager living in San Francisco when in fact the books were written by a fortysomething housewife from New Jersey. Be that as it may, I was generally impressed with Ginger’s perseverance and dedication to her trade, not to mention that her stories were a hell of a lot better than J.T. Leroy’s.

  While Ginger was busy licking her way to the top of the literary world, I was still reciting “Mortgage Capitol, may we help you?” and taking heaps of shit from would-be borrowers who wanted to borrow way more than their current position entitled them to. Okay. Fine. The American Dream in action.

  I kept hinting, and sometimes outright saying to these people on the other end of the line that this ride of borrowing money based on their homes was surely going to end. There was just too much frenzy, too much passion; we were all being sucked into the vortex. The housing bubble was like the promise of an eternal erection; sooner or later it had to go down. Just a walk through the loan officers’ section of the office was an eye-opener. At any given time, four out of five had on their computer screens, not graphs of charts relating to mortgage rates or current home prices, but online porn.

  And people wonder why the housing bubble burst.

  Sex and money. There ought to be a roller coaster named after that combination.

  Then came the day when my particular ride came to a sudden, and most certainly inevitable, end. A new temp, probably the twentieth different one I’d worked with, had started two days prior. She said her given name was Martha, but as she lowered herself into the seat beside me and strapped on her headphones with a sense of purpose lost between definitive and wonderment, she told me to call her Trina. “I just like that name,” she explained carelessly. “All my friends call me Trina,” she said

  Trina had a playful demeanor about her, and was the first fellow temp that seemed to really want to help the mob of people that called us demanding more money. The way she cheerily answered the phone and then the earnest manner in which she pleaded with the loan officers to please take calls and do the jobs for which they’d been hired to do struck a nervous chord. Trina reminded me of me on my first day. As we passed the morning answering phones and getting to know one another her auburn eyes sharpened hopefully when she spoke about her desire to become a teacher for grade-school kids. She was taking classes and hoped to graduate with her teaching credentials within the year. No other woman I’d ever met had managed to look so purposeful while doing something so seemingly purposeless as swaying their head, as though trying to nick a stray thought.

  When I mentioned I was a writer she seemed impressed. “Why did you decide to become a writer?” she asked.

  “Because if I didn’t write,” I replied. “I’d probably be a serial killer.”

  This line was one I’d just recently come up with. I’d never used it before, for fear that any woman who heard it would nod warily and quickly dismiss me from their life.

  Trina laughed heartily and tapped my wrist, right near my pulse, “That’s the most original answer I’ve heard from a writer when they’re asked why they write.”

  That did it. I was in love.

  Later in the afternoon, after I’d learned her favorite meal was pizza rummaged from the fridge along with chocolate ice cream at two in the morning, her favorite color was ruby red, and that she and I had three top favorite bands – Buckcherry, Abba, and Gloriana – in common, a woman charged in from the outside world bearing a feverish expression; her loan hadn’t gone through. She was wearing torn jeans, a wife beater, and glasses with one of their frames cracked. She smelled like at least a half a dozen different cats.

  “Morton told me my loan was going to close!” she shouted. “Why hasn’t it closed?”

  Morton. That asshole. He’d work religiously all morning. But then for lunch he’d pop off down the block to a strip joint where he’d get the buffet, not to mention numerous drinks and table dances. Arriving back at the office two hours later, he’d spend the afternoon in a semi-stupor, idly playing solitaire on his computer and ignoring every call I tried to put through to him from his clients.

  Unfortunately for this refugee from a bad Saturday Night Live skit, it was currently half past three in the afternoon. She’d have a better chance of having her loan closed by a fire hydrant.

  I performed the usual routine of getting the woman’s name, which according to her was Ms. Irlene Tucker, and then calling Morton’s extension, only to be greeted with his typical response whenever a customer requested his attention at this hour of the working day. “Tell ‘em to screw off,” he said. “Her loan’ll close when it closes. I’m not here.”

  I set the phone down and glared at it. A good part of me wanted to tell Mrs. Tucker that not only was Morton here, but direct her to exactly where his office could be found. However, when I raised my eyes these considerations were all rendered moot. Irlene Tucker had a knife in hand and was glaring at me with another look I knew all too well. I’d held it myself while staring in the mirror at two in the morning or so after a rampant drinking binge. It was a gaze that one shot off when they had absolutely nothing to lose, when it seemed like the death dogs were closing in, when heaven and hell were myths, and as a result it didn’t really matter what acts one committed.

  “Wait a minute, Ms. Tucker,” I began, hoping that my remembering her last name after hearing hundreds throughout the day would someho
w calm her down. “Morton is… well, he’s working hard on your loan…”

  “He promised me today!” she screamed. “Today!”

  “Ma’am,” Trina’s voice, firm but caring, came just inches from my left ear. I chanced a moment to glance away from the mortgage obsessed psychopath in front of me and found Trina by my side. She gave me a smile that would’ve been heartbreaking had it not been defending a fat piece of garbage loan officer who ripped people off every day without giving a damn as long as he got his three pitchers of beer and innumerable table dances at lunch. “I’m sure these people here at Mortgage Capitol are doing everything they can to secure your loan,” Trina continued, in a perfectly pitched flow of reassurance. It was hard to believe she hadn’t been doing this all her life. “Now if maybe you just take a seat and wait a minute—“

  “That son of a bitch said TODAY!” Ms. Tucker screamed, and bolted across the opening that separated us from the foyer. It was a narrow square, but not too narrow for a woman who’s seeming existence depended on mortgaging her life away for the lowest possible rate.

  The knife flashed out at Trina, and I instinctively threw myself in front of it. The rest is a blur. I recall a sharp pain in my arm, several shrieks and a general clamor as I stared at a knife sticking in my bicep while thinking, And I gave up professional wrestling for this shit?