The Job Pirate

by Brandon Christopher

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. Then he looked at me and realized how serious I was about needing the money. He paid me the $21 in cash out of his pocket, and I left and never drove down that stretch of Sunset Boulevard again.

  THE BROKEN TOYS OF HOLLYWOOD

  JOB #53

  It starts with the dishes. When you’re always at home you’re always eating at home, which makes for a lot of dishes. Then the hardwood floors. The hardwood floors of this apartment blanket themselves in dust every chance they get. Had I known that four months ago, I never would have ripped up the carpet, especially not without the landlord’s consent. Now it’s just perpetually dusty wood. And then after you clean the floor you look around and see that the bookshelf could use some dusting, because your collection of three softcover Vonnegut novels doesn’t scream out like it used to. Then you move the lamp and end table closer to the cleaned bookshelf to show off your handiwork, and then, of course, you must move the small ornate rug closer to the end table, to help it all flow together. By then it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and you haven’t yet eaten breakfast, and you’re starting to get the shakes from too much coffee in a hypoglycemic stomach. And the laptop still sits on your desk idling, with its little spinning blue circle telling you that your $39-a-year antivirus program still hasn’t found that particular virus which prevents you from going online to send out resumes. But all that’s okay because you’ve been unemployed for four months and a few more days aren’t going to make much of a difference. And the apartment is now clean. Again. Third time this week.

  The job leading up to this odd period of orderly fixation was one of the better ones from my canon. Among all those retail gigs and cash-register careers, I had lucked out and scored a job as a manipulator of foreign television entertainment for a shoestring production company in Los Angeles—a scriptwriter, they called it. But being hired to “write” TV documentary scripts really didn’t involve the act of writing at all; at least not at Pungent Productions. Within that boxy two-story building, it was more a matter of perusing the film vault closet and sifting through a few hundred hours of handheld camera footage from Hollywood press junkets, movie premieres, red carpet footage, and celebrity interviews, and hopefully finding a couple hours’ worth that didn’t have a copyright attached, or at least didn’t have a recognizable TV interviewer on-camera. Sometimes Pungent Productions paid for the rights to use the footage, but most times they just illegally recorded large chunks of it and hoped for the best.

  Then it was time to piece together a decent 46 minutes’ worth to illustrate some semblance of a celebrity’s rise to stardom. And then the actual writing part came in, when you were able to compose little segue-sentences like, “But then tragedy struck the young actor …” You then tell the video editor to slide that foreboding segue-sentence in between footage of Keanu Reeves at the premier of his breakout role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the audio track of the 911 phone call of close friend and actor River Phoenix overdosing on Sunset Blvd. That’s the magic right there. That’s Scorsese style.

  Those TV documentaries we made were the cheapest products ever produced, with a good portion of them literally costing us $70 and an afternoon to make. But to basic cable stations in Canada, Yemen, and the Czech Republic, our programs were star-studded red carpets right into the glitzy celebrity world that was Hollywood. They were also the same shitty DVDs for sale on Amazon.com for $4.29, promising to reveal never-before-seen footage of Elvis Presley’s secret love life or Leonardo DiCaprio’s undiscovered early years. But they never do. They just showed the same old shit from every other TV documentary out there. And sometimes they actually were the same old shit from every other TV documentary out there—our boss was known to record programs right off his TV, from the History Channel and PBS, then have his graphics department add our own logo directly over the other station’s logo at the bottom corner of the screen. Then he, of course, would package and sell the show as his own. Seriously. If you’ve ever bought a celebrity biography or Beverly Hillbillies box set off the DVD rack at Ross Dress For Less, then you may have been duped by my old boss. And you’ll know one of our documentaries when you see it. Words are usually misspelled on the cover, proper apostrophe usage is rare, and the phrase “This DVD is neither endorsed nor authorized by the (fill in the name) Estate” always rests somewhere near the bottom of the plastic cover. Our shows had a constant one-star rating on Amazon.com, and “Biggest pile of sh@t ever!” was a recurring mantra in the customer reviews section.

  You see, Donatello, the president of Pungent Productions, was a con man who was once chased out of Brooklyn with just a suitcase—at least that’s how the story went. He was a swindler, a grifter, and the self-appointed Executive Producer for every single show we made, whether or not he even knew we were making it. He didn’t care too much for all the bad reviews, or for little things like legalities. He knew his shows would rarely be seen by American audiences, so issues like copyrights and trademarks and logos were of little concern to him. And these shrewd filmmaking practices were also a major part of the rest of his business structure, especially the hiring process. Donatello knew that if he only hired the dregs of Hollywood—the alcoholic editors, the drugged-out writers, the Spanish-speaking-only producers, and the still-in-college legal team—he could both save a fortune with shitty take-it-or-leave-it salaries and employ workers that would never question his copyright ethics. We were the unemployable outcasts and pariahs of the entertainment industry—a few of us on the way up, but most on the way down. Cigarettes, porn, and poor work ethics filled our days, and cocktails and karaoke filled our nights. We were the Bad News Bears without the Walter Matthau, and much older.

  As piss-poor as Donatello’s approach to filmmaking was, it also had its perks for us, the people who made the documentaries. The shows were pieced together at such a rapid rate that they were rarely proofed or checked over by anyone other than the aforementioned alcoholic editors or drugged-out writers. We had complete autonomy in content and direction, and we could shape the show any way we pleased, whether factually or fantastically. If someone brought some good pot or decent cocaine into the editing bay, then you could be damn sure that a Beach Boys show would have a strange four-minute freak-out montage, or a narration diatribe comparing Keanu Reeves’s film career to Jesus’ resurrection from the cross, or possibly even a shoddy reenactment of Elvis dying on the toilet.

  A perfect example of this would be the once-serious documentary African-Americans in Cinema. I use the term “once-serious” because it was the first time that Donatello had actually paid a genuine TV writer/producer to make a substantial show about the rise of the black actor throughout Hollywood’s history. Three weeks later, that genuine TV writer/producer abruptly quit because all of Donatello’s checks bounced. The half-finished script for African-Americans in Cinema then landed on my desk, attached to a Post-It note saying, “Make this work fast, kid.” All of the semicelebrities and film historians had already been interviewed on-camera, and most of the needed film clips had been procured; it was just the narrator’s dialog that was only halfway written. So all I had to do was write up a dozen or so little cinematically historical segue-sentences about particular black actors from the 1930s on up to 1989.

  We stopped at 1989 not because it was some centennial year in filmmaking, but because there was a stricter copyright involved with movie trailers made after that year—at least that’s what our college sophomore legal adviser explained. The past 12 years of Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, all erased from the glory that was African-Americans in Cinema because Donatello didn’t want to spend a few bucks. Regardless, as I was writing up my little segue-sentences I realized that my name would never be in the film’s credits. The previous writer, the genuine TV writer/producer that quit, would get full billing. This left me with a whole new world of freedom in which to change the plight of African-Americans in cinema forever.

  The script wasn’t too bad in its cur
rent form; but that last third—after I got through with it—was where it got weird. Seven solid minutes of that 52-minute program now celebrated James Earl Jones being the voice of Darth Vader, including as many film snippets, movie stills, and poster zoom-ins that I could convince the editor to throw in. Then I focused the last few minutes of the documentary on the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, mostly because all those film trailers were in the public domain and free to use. And they showed tits too. But that was that—no Spike Lee, no Morgan Freeman, no 1990s, not even much of the 1980s other than an Apollo Creed reference and a film snippet of the Russian boxer killing him in Rocky III. If you should happen to watch a documentary about the history of black actors and wonder if it’s the one I wrote, simply look on the menu screen for the show’s fourth chapter. If it’s titled Chocolate Dreams then you’re in for a James Earl Jones treat.

  Then like any good thing in life, it had to end. The poor quality of our products as well as the multiple cease-and-desist lawsuits from the Elvis Presley Estate, the Sinatra Estate, KISS Music Licensing, and a few others finally caught up with us. In one big sweeping week, 70 percent of the company was laid off with promises to be rehired once “that lawsuit thing” was resolved. That was four months ago—when I had carpet.

  I have now spent spring and much of summer within the confines of my apartment complex, spying on neighbors and watching the bougainvillea on my balcony come to full bloom. Judge Judy and Judge Alex, and even Judge Millan from People’s Court, have given me so many valuable insights into our judicial system that I feel adequate enough to represent myself if those documentary lawsuits should ever find their way to my front door. But I’ve been cooped up here for so long that I’m starting to feel like Martin Sheen from the beginning of Apocalypse Now, when he’s stuck in the hotel room and falling deeper and deeper into insanity until finally breaking the full-length mirror while drunk and naked. I’ve been waiting too long for my next mission; my mirror moment is coming, I can feel it. I even started waking up in the mornings muttering, “Saigon … shit.”

  But the apartment is clean now, and the bougainvillea blooms an electric pink at sunset, and the world will forever have a permanent reminder that Keanu Reeves’s film career is as glorious and monumental as J.C. getting the cross job. All thanks to a con man from Brooklyn hiring a drugged-out writer from North Hollywood, and the butterfly flapping its wings.

  THE ELECTRIFYING CASE OF THE BROKEN WINDSHIELD

  JOB #44

  Only an American woman—a salon blonde in her straight vodka 50s—would correct a vacationing Frenchman on the proper pronunciation of his own French language. Her crisp, new blue L.A. Dodgers shirt and matching windbreaker jacket were a dead giveaway of her own holiday status and vacation highlights—no detectable accent, though, but hearing her every word from clear across the bar was indication enough that she was from the East Coast somewhere. But that’s the beauty of drinking in a hotel bar in Los Angeles: You imbibe beside all types of people, from all over the planet. Put a few overpriced Blood Marys in them on a Friday afternoon, and each one is buddying up to any asshole within two barstools or earshot.

  As I watched all this from my own barstool, I was thinking about Natalie and the offer she had proposed to me earlier in the day. Nat was a cute English bird that had an accent like calligraphy on silk, and when she asked me to join in a threesome with her and whatever lesbian we could drunkenly dig up on a Saturday night, it was as if I was being bathed in that silk. It would be my first time being invited into a threesome, although I think Nat just wanted to get laid and having me as a wingman increased her chances of something happening.

  Penis had always been off Natalie’s agenda due to some weird events from her childhood, but she’d led a colorful and full life in spite of never coming into contact with one. She had spent a few years as a personal assistant to Cher before coming to the States. The aging Bono-less singer then brought Nat to L.A. on a work visa just months before the job went south and she got kicked out on her ass in Malibu. Nat bounced back by meeting the nearing-40 granddaughter of the legendary Liberace and moving in with her. The two had only been dating for a few short months when the granddaughter suggested Nat marry her brother—the drugged-out, still-living-at-home grandson of the great Liberace—to get a greencard. Nat did just that, then grew to despise the pair of them and moved out on her own some months later. Invigorated with her newfound citizenship and bachelorhood, she found a cheap studio apartment (a “flat,” she called it) in Sherman Oaks and her first official American retail job. That’s how I met her. We were coworkers—floral arrangers—at a very posh flower store in The Valley. And the reason I knew all of this personal past history about her after only two months was because she talked a lot.

  But this leads me to why I’m drinking a German beer in a hotel bar in downtown Los Angeles during business hours. When I wasn’t assembling floral bouquets and taking phone orders at the store, I was out making deliveries of lavish $400 flower baskets and $600 tulip-filled vases to various film producers’ offices, Beverly Hills mansions, and the occasional hotel lobby. The Dodgers lady then began squeezing the mouth of the Frenchman in order to correct his pronunciation of oui to more of a wah, and I knew that was my cue to get the hell out of there and back to work.

  I returned to Mark’s Garden to find Nat talking to a customer and Joel, our third and final front-counter coworker, smiling at me from behind the cash register—his bleached yellow hair violently gelled into a raspy pompadour. He resembled a futuristic and very pornish Roy Orbison, with his thick black wayfarer glasses, leather pants, and sleeveless button-up shirt. And it was hard to fathom, but that was his daytime disguise—the incognito workday outfit. Because the nights and the gothic clubs knew Joel as Fate Fatal, the not-quite-yet-legendary singer of the band The Deep Eynde, who crooned onstage in skintight outfits and chains.

  At the back of the store were a dozen anonymous European designers, each with their own floral skillset and colorful accent. But up front at the counter it was just the three of us. Our two work-worlds were separated by at least a hundred bins of various fresh-cut flowers kept in a chilly, rustic, almost fairy-tale environment—canvas-less antique picture frames hung nakedly from walls, wrought iron shelves and tables supported flowering orchid plants and topiaries, and stacks of different-sized terra cotta pots peppered the floor. And each colorful aisle of tulips, roses, freesia, and lilies had its own candy fragrance wafting around in the air conditioning current above it. And tethering this entire mystical environment together was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing on endless repeat. It was truly a magical place to work. It was our little rabbit hole of employment; our job behind the looking glass.

  “I heard you and Nat are going to have a big night tomorrow,” Joel said with a proud grin when I tucked my delivery receipts beside the register.

  “She told you?”

  “Of course! Why wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. It just seemed like something you’d keep between the parties involved. Until after.

  Joel glanced around then leaned in closer to me. “You have to be cool, let them do their thing for awhile. Help out, but pace yourself. Pace yourself. It’s more of a viewing spectacle than a sex act for you. OK, I’ve said my peace, I’ve gotta split. I’ve got a show tonight. You guys coming? We’re playing at the Mint at 11:45.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I answered, but we both knew what that meant.

  For all intents and purposes Joel was our manager, though he never acted like it. He really loved working at Mark’s Garden, and he put his heart into every bouquet he made. Nat and I loved the place too, but in a slightly different, more-realistic way. As soon as Joel went out the back door I sidled up to Nat and waited for the wink. Once she finished the worst looking bouquet ever made in that store, she glanced over and flashed me the eye. Then a little smile. I tapped a few functionless keys on the cash register, which made a series of beep sounds but little more.
The wink was our signal for a cash-paying customer.

  “I’ll just ring you up for that, sir, since Natalie has her hands full,” I said to the older man who boasted a bewildered expression at the sight of the two dozen tulips peppered with baby’s breath and sunflowers, which he was about to purchase. “Say, that’s beautiful, Natalie. The Tuscan Sunrise is really quite a masterful creation. Natalie is one of our finest florists.”

  “It’s like my fingers are dancing when I make it,” she replied in that chirpy accent.

  Two more taps on the functionless keys then, “Oh, darn. This thing is jammed again.” Natalie wrapped the bouquet up and I flashed a quick peripheral scan of the store for any other coworkers in view. “Well, it’s about $65 with tax … but let’s call it $60 for the hassle.”

  He begrudgingly handed over three $20 bills and Nat gave him the aborted fetus of Mother Nature’s offspring. He’d never come back again; all three of us knew it. As soon as he left I opened the cash register and exchanged one of the $20s for two $10 bills then divvied up the loot between the two of us. We chalked it up to our cost-of-living increase and lack of paid overtime.

  “We can get a little charlie with this and have a real good time tomorrow night,” she said tucking the money into her pocket. I learned a few weeks back that “charlie” was an English euphemism for cocaine. Not sure what kind of aphrodisiac it would make, though. “You still in for tomorrow night? Did you think yourself out of it? I’ll understand if—”