Tricks Of The Trade

by Ben Tyler

  Jim cracked open his cookie and munched on part of it. He took out the small slip of paper with red lettering. Through double vision he read: “‘From a past misfortune, good luck will come to you…’”

  “‘In bed.’” Michael completed the sentence.

  Jim looked askance at Michael. Even halfway to being drunk, Jim could see he had a butthead for an agent.

  Then, as a coda, Michael said, “By the way, how’s the tell-all book coming along?”

  Jim turned ashen.

  Chapter Three

  After scurrying back to his office, Bart told his secretary, Chita Contessa Van Nuys—or Cheets, as he called her for short—that he was on deadline and would be behind closed doors until he’d completed yet another rewrite of Shari’s press release.

  Cheets was a schizophrenic actress with equal parts talent and deep-rooted issues of resentment and hostility toward her boss in particular and mostly everyone in general. Many years ago she had won a Silver Pin Award from some storefront acting academy in East Lansing, Michigan. She subsequently got a job in a Dentyne chewing-gum commercial for television and was on her way—as it turned out, to oblivion. Lately she’d been reduced to playing the Monty Woolley role in a basement production of The Man Who Came To Dinner with the Los Angeles Rainbow Theatre Experience.

  Cheets divided her time between crying over her bitterness that she had to work as a secretary rather than as a star and attending a dozen different twelve-step programs, including Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Over Spenders Anonymous, and Alien Abductees Anonymous. Bart wished there were a program called Oversleepers Anonymous, because Cheets couldn’t be on time if a curtain call depended on it.

  Simply overhearing a Monday-morning chat between her boss and Mitch, standing at the coffeemaker, talking about how great Bette Midler’s concert was at the Universal Amphitheater on Saturday night, could ignite a tirade from Cheets about how much better she could have been than Bette. Bette just got all the breaks. “Honey,” said Mitch Wood, “to paraphrase Mama Rose, ‘If you coulda been…you woulda been.’ I’ll take ‘Get Off the Cross for two hundred dollars, Alex,’” he said, pouring a mug of coffee and leaving Cheets in tears.

  To Bart, Cheets’s most annoying habit involved her personal telephone calls. Trained to enunciate and project, she unwittingly subjected him to every syllable uttered into her phone in her cubicle outside his office. All the whining and crying and personal conversations with her ex-lover, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Rainbow Theatre Experience, grated on Bart.

  Her saving grace was that she was good at her job, and she saved Bart much time by fielding unsolicited telephone calls. Bart couldn’t risk losing her. Moreover, any other assistant may have ratted to accounting that Bart’s expense reports didn’t always truthfully reflect whom he dined with at expensive restaurants. Cheets was loyal. Plus, she knew more about Bart’s intimate life and the personal writing projects he worked on during company time. As much as Bart tried to keep his private affairs private, she always knew which of his “business” callers were actually dates.

  Now, with his office door closed, Bart sat down at his desk and stared at the screen of his computer monitor. Tears of frustration began to blur his vision. The first draft of the press release was as good as any he’d ever written. The second draft was merely a variation on the same theme. The third draft was yet another variation. Bart realized he was simply retyping the same material, barely using different words.

  He decided that Shari was toying with him, testing how far she could push before he said or did something that would give her a reason to fire him. To challenge this theory, he went back to the first draft and retitled it “Fourth Draft.” He would print it out, waiting until it was nearly past deadline at Daily Variety before taking it back to his boss. With the trade publication about to go to bed, Shari would have to approve the release as it was or rewrite it herself.

  In the interim, Bart decided to waste time and access America Online and find a chat room to take his mind off his problems. He guided his mouse to the AOL icon.

  “You’ve got mail!” chirped a happy, mechanical voice.

  Bart always found the voice rather sexy. It told him something potentially exciting was just a click away.

  But this time when he logged on, Bart ignored the mail. Instead, he went to LAM4MNOW. Over the past months he’d discovered this chat room was the best place to troll for cybersex—or at least a lewd interactive interlude. He’d punch in a few member profiles and see what each had to reveal, and he rarely had to wait long before he received an Instant Message from someone who had viewed his profile.

  This time was no different. Bart had just finished reading the profile of POWERman2 when he heard a trill. In the upper-left-hand corner of his computer screen a box appeared with “Rotoroot4U” in bold letters. The message was simple: “Liked your profile. How’s it hanging?”

  Bart’s fingers dashed across the keyboard to access Rotoroot4U’s profile. Within seconds it appeared:

  Member name: Don’t ask. Won’t tell.

  Location: Send pic, then ask…

  Birthdate: All candles still fit on one cake.

  Marital status: No ring.

  Hobbies: Men. Men. Men. Did I mention Men?

  Computer: Yes, I have a BIG one.

  Occupation: It pays my AOL access fee.

  Personal quote: My brain is in my pants…Blow my mind. It’s a terrible thing to waste.

  Bart responded with: “Heavy and horny. U?”

  Again the trill. “Where are U?”

  “The office. Burbank. U?”

  “West Hollywood. When do you get off?”

  “Depends.”

  “Send a pic.”

  Bart wasn’t wild about attaching a photo of himself and sending it to an anonymous E-mailer. Not that he had anything to be ashamed of. In fact, Bart was attractive, intelligent, and talented, had a good-paying job, and never had a complaint about his accoutrement. He knew that he was, in the vernacular, a catch.

  He responded to Rotoroot4U, saying, “Let’s ‘trade’ pics.” No way would he make a date with a guy who could be a pasty-faced geezer with old-age freezer burn on his face or a gut out to there.

  Rotoroot4U agreed to send his picture simultaneously.

  The downloading time seemed interminable, and Bart was anxious because at any moment Shari could be knocking on his office door, demanding the revised press release. Two minutes was an eternity, but at last the download was completed.

  Bart emitted an involuntary gasp at the image on his computer screen. If he were a cartoon, his eyes would have popped out of their sockets on springs. Rotoroot4U was physically unlike the usual guys Bart dated; the accountants and doctors whom Bart imagined he’d eventually marry. No, this was definitely a sex-toy fantasy: a swarthy young Latino.

  Rotoroot4U’s photo image was cropped just above his pubic hairline. His body was lean and dark and hard-muscled—a combination of Brendan Fraser and Jason Lee’s. His stomach was rippled. His shoulders were strong and wide. His chest and pecs glistened either from oil or perspiration. His dark eyes were piercing. His face wore a scowl, almost menacing. He had long sideburns, a goatee, and a tattoo that looked like gang insignia on his left bicep. He was the sexiest man Bart had ever seen—and the most dangerous looking. The combination was exhilarating.

  Bart dashed off a quick message. “You’re a stud! I don’t ever do this, but…let’s meet. I’ll bring the wine.”

  When there was no immediate response to his message, Bart panicked. Didn’t his own picture measure up? It was the one of him in the woods in a hiking outfit: boots, short shorts, a white tank top slung over his shoulder, revealing his own lean, well-defined, hairless torso.

  Bart waited anxiously, his eyes glued to the Instant Message box and at the same time to the clock on his screen. At this very moment Elvira Gultch was likely bicycling down the hall to his office. But Bart was frozen
in his chair. He couldn’t move from his desk for fear he’d miss the hoped-for response from Rotoroot4U.

  Bart waited. Nothing.

  Anxiously, he typed: “Still there?”

  Nothing.

  Finally, the announcement trill came. “Forget the wine. Get your faggot ass over here. NOW!”

  Just then, Bart’s door burst open. Shari, hands on hips, stood in the portal. She was barefoot, with red toenails. “Bart, I’ve had it with you! I swear I’ve never had more problems with a fucking writer! Where’s that fucking release?”

  “Hot out of the printer, Shari,” Bart managed. He was red-faced and fearful that she would catch him playing around on the Internet and see the beautiful naked man on his computer screen. He diverted her attention from the monitor by getting up from his desk and handing three pages of text to his boss. She grabbed the press release, turned around, and stormed out without closing the door. “I hate my quote!” she bellowed over her shoulder as she padded back toward her office. “I don’t talk like that!”

  Desperately hoping Rotoroot4U was still on-line, Bart returned to his desk and quickly typed: “Sorry. Office emergency. Still there? Address?”

  The reply came quickly: “427 Heather View Drive. Go around to the back of the house to the sliding-glass doors. My room. By the way, I charge.”

  “$$$???”

  “Fifty dollars. And don’t waste my time if you’re not legit.”

  “ASAP. Wait for me.”

  Logging off, Bart shouted to Cheets, “It’s six o’clock. I’m outta here!” He smiled to himself and said under his breath, “And I’m going to get laid.”

  Chapter Four

  Rodrigo Dominguez, a.k.a. Rotoroot4U, wasn’t what he appeared to be. If you happened to look over your shoulder and register this buzz-cut, goateed guy in a dingy tank top that revealed tattoos and muscles as he was walking down the street behind you—day or night—you’d quickly look for sanctuary. Rod (as his friends called him) appeared as though he should be mugging old ladies for their Social Security checks or Jehovah’s Witnesses—just because. Jessica Rabbit said it best, “I’m not bad…I’m just drawn that way,” and Rod had sketched his barrio-clone persona to attract a certain kind of guy and to repel every other type of human being.

  In the privacy of his own space, however, he was a quiet twenty-one-year-old who worked his ass off, eighteen hours a day, doing whatever was required to support his three passions: the gym, sex, and writing screenplays—not necessarily in that order. At his tender age, he already had six feature-film scripts completed on spec—romantic comedies in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch—stacked on the desk beside his computer in the small room he rented in a house owned by a former bit player who needed a boarder like Rod to make ends meet.

  But hustling was in his genes. Before he was kicked out of his house at age sixteen, he’d learned all he needed to know about self-awareness and street smarts from the people who raised him. He learned that he had to seize opportunities and rely on his instincts, as well as his sex, to get what he wanted from life—and from the people who wanted him. Rod felt it was a fair exchange: money for sex-starved males or females; dancing at wet-underpants parties at the secluded mansions of wealthy old movie stars; modeling naked for horny photographers. His repertoire was vast.

  At the moment, Rod was steadily employed three nights a week as a bartender at the Trap, a popular S/M bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where he worked shirtless, in jeans that were a size too large at the waist, which guaranteed they’d ease down his hips enough for drooling customers to see where his pubic hair began (and prove he wasn’t wearing underwear). He served beers and shots of tequila, handpicking the covetous assholes who packed the place on Friday and Saturday nights looking to blow him, in the stockroom, leaning up against cases of Budweiser. For twenty dollars. “One does what one has to do to survive in this world” was Rod’s mantra, handed down by his gang-banger dad, who was still a kid himself when Rod was born. Two other nights a week he bused tables at the Cobalt Cantina on Robertson from 4 P.M. until midnight. On his leftover nights, he solicited in chat rooms and fucked strangers for cash.

  He may not have always enjoyed the circumstances in which he found himself, but Rod considered it honest, if not altogether legal, work. More important, it kept his days free to work out at the gym and write. To Rod the gym=sex, and the sex=cash. But his primary focus was on his writing.

  Every morning, he woke up believing success was just around the corner. He knew that in Hollywood lives changed with the blink of an eye. He remained confident that he would eventually meet an industry-connected guy who could get one of his scripts made into a film or offer him a job as a staff writer in episodic television. True, it wasn’t likely that he’d run into David E. Kelley or Steven Bochco at the Trap, but perhaps the keys to the door of success would appear in the guise of an equally successful but less well known player who would come for a fuck and leave eager to agree to read his work, recognize his talent, and offer to mentor him.

  The house in which Rod rented a room by the week was a one-story shingle-and-stucco job, circa World War II, dirty white in color. It had a peculiar, if valuable, feature: The sliding glass door in the back that led to his room was laminated with a reflective Mylar tinting. It enabled Rod to see outside, but nobody could see inside. This gave Rod an opportunity to size up any trick he’d trolled for in a chat room and decide if he was worth the time and fifty bucks or whether he should jack it up to two hundred dollars just to get rid of the creep.

  He also liked to watch guys preening at their own mirror images in preparation for meeting him. Most of the guys were too stupid to know it was a two-way mirror. They would check out their hair, their teeth, look up their nostrils, stick out their tongues, and adjust their clothes. They’d tuft the chest hair out of the top of their shirts or flip open the top button of their 501s, reach inside, and give themselves a quick pump in order to show off how much they were packing. This amused Rod, who was completely confident about what he himself had to sell. Anyone who had experienced his sexual apparatus would agree that the service was cheap at twice the price.

  Since it was Monday night, one of the two nights a week Rod had off, he was free to fuck. Although he’d rather spend the time writing, it was the sex work that allowed him to keep his days free—and also provided unlimited character studies. Old Mrs. Carter, who owned the house and was once married to a movie star who, after fifteen years of marriage, traded her in for a human Barbie doll, seldom came all the way to the back of her home, where Rod’s room was located. She usually stopped midway down the hall at their shared bathroom.

  But although she was generally unobtrusive in Rod’s life, Mrs. Carter wasn’t an idiot, so she probably knew what was going on under her roof. Especially since her tenant’s tricks usually had to use the one bathroom, which was directly in view from where she sat in the living room, reclining in her Lazyboy with her cat, Marcel. It was a blessing to Rod that Mrs. Carter was practically deaf. She kept to herself, watching television day and night, with the volume cranked up so loud it could be heard clear down to Rod’s room. Thankfully, the sound of the TV also covered the often-animalistic noises emanating from his bedroom.

  For Bart, this night’s drive from Burbank to West Hollywood took an inordinately longer time than usual. He began to be afraid that Rotoroot4U might not wait. An accident had taken out the traffic lights at the intersection of Barham and Cahuenga, so the usual ten-minute ride from Sterling to the Cahuenga Pass took a grueling forty minutes.

  Once he finally passed over the 101 Freeway, Bart turned left and drove down past the Hollywood Bowl and the American Legion Post, which looked like an Egyptian temple, to Franklin Avenue. There he turned right, passing the big Methodist Church, with its huge red AIDS ribbon illuminated by a bright spotlight, the way the gargoyles on Notre Dame de Paris were blasted by halogens at night.

  Bart passed the Magic Castle and then the Highland
Gardens motel, where Janis Joplin overdosed on drugs and died thirty years ago. When he hit La Brea Avenue, he turned left. Just a few blocks farther down was the former Charlie Chaplin Film Studios, which were now the former A&M Records Studios, which was where the now-dead Karen Carpenter recorded her biggest hits. Once when he passed this way Bart found himself listening to a cassette tape by the seventies pop duo the Carpenters and feeling almost overwhelmed by sadness because the vel-vet-voiced Karen had “bought the farm and moved to Paris,” like Janis Joplin just a few blocks back—both of them obviously self-destructive in their own ways.

  At Hollywood Boulevard, Bart turned right. The other direction would have taken him to all the famous landmarks: the Chinese Theatre, the renovated and restored El Capitan and Egyptian Theatres, and of course, the Walk of Fame, where hundreds of household names and has-beens were embedded in the sidewalks. Nearly every star from the Golden Era of Hollywood was represented, unconsciously spat upon by inconsiderate tourists or urinated on by shopping-cart transients. Neil Armstrong and his Apollo XI crew, Aldrin and Collins, had their star right at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and they weren’t spared fewer indignities than Lassie. The newer celebrities who received recognition on the Walk of Fame were now mostly inaugurated for publicity purposes—the pomp and circumstance paid for by studios to promote a new film. Therefore, a few mistakes were made in the hallowed pavement, such as adding Charlie Sheen to the mix. Cough up enough money and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce could vote you a spot in front of the Hollywood Palace Theatre, Amir’s Discount Souvenirs and T-shirts shop, or the Allied Parking lot. So far the chamber had managed to evade Courteney Cox-Arquette, probably because the Arquette part would eventually have to be replaced. Whenever an actress hyphenated her name with her new husband’s, it was a bad omen. Check out Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Meredith Baxter-Birney, Pamela Anderson-Lee, and so forth.