“Come on, dudes. At least put your arms around one another,” he shouted at us over the sound of the surf crashing onto the beach a few feet away.
He took a couple of pictures, but remarked that we looked awfully stony and stiff. Just then a wave came ashore that got my feet wet. I had not expected to get my feet wet and was surprised by its coldness. Apparently I jumped and grabbed Bill a little tighter. As the pictures showed later, the expression on my face went from one of surprise and horror to delight. I laughed, Bill laughed. We had our arms around each other, and the Pacific Ocean was dancing at our feet. Our heads leaned toward each other and smiled and laughed at the camera.
For his part, the guy taking the pictures seemed to know what he was doing and took a bunch of pictures from several different angles. When he returned the camera to us, we thanked him profusely.
“First time?” he asked.
“First time. It is awesome!” Bill said.
“That it is, little dude, that it is.”
We got his name before he dashed off to continue his jog on the beach, and thanked him once again.
After walking and frolicking in the water for almost an hour, we headed home to shower off the sand and to unwind a little bit. We also had to provide for our own meals now, which meant giving a little thought to what we wanted ahead of sitting down at the table. It was all so much easier when my mom took care of all that and I simply ate and then left.
Also, since I was now one of the working class, I would have to go to bed really early tonight so that I could be up and at work at 6:00 a.m. I knew that Bill was no more of a morning person than I was, so I knew I would have to walk to work, which I figured would add twenty minutes to my estimate. All in all, we needed to head home and be adults.
After we had rinsed off the sand, the salt water, and the sweat from our earlier play, we decided on what we wanted for dinner and gave it a shot. While not flawless, it was certainly edible, and we both knew what to change the next time to make it better. Live and learn, as they always say. Bill cleaned up the dishes while I hooked up my digital camera to my laptop to download the photos from that afternoon.
As the photos started to pop up on my screen, I was wowed by the beauty, the intensity, the raw emotions that the guy on the beach had captured when he photographed the two of us. Rather than simply ask us to pose and then take a stiff picture, he consistently waited until circumstances caused us to react, and then he snapped the picture, in the process catching us more “real,” I guess you could say.
“Bill! You’ve got to come see these!”
“What?” he asked, wiping a dish as he walked over. Looking over my shoulder, he saw what I saw. “Those are really good! Look at the look on your face! You look so happy, so alive in that one!” he said, pointing to one picture where a wave had just splashed me.
“We look really good in these,” was my analysis.
“Oh, look at those,” Bill said, pointing to some of the photos I had taken of him. While I was not on par with the stranger on the beach, I had caught a couple of really good shots of Bill, with him shirtless, laughing, frolicking, and looking happy.
While Bill finished with the dishes, I resized a couple of the best photos and uploaded them to my mom so that she and Dad could see what we had been up to that day. I also made a point of telling her that we had been to the bank, had lined up our schedules for the fall, and had dealt with the financial aid office. Oh, and by the way, I got a job! I made sure to toss that fact in, but told her I would have to provide more information after tomorrow morning when I started said new job.
The sun was setting as another day slowly moved on. Bill had just finished the dishes and I had just finished sending my e-mail when we heard a knock at our door. Two days of residence and two visitors! This time, though, our visitor was Moira, our landlady, who gave us a smile until she caught herself expressing a positive emotion and tamped it down. She asked how we were doing at getting settled, so we updated her on what we’d been up to.
I told her I had gotten a job at Starbucks and started at six the next morning.
Her comment was short and simple. “Can’t stand the place, but a lot of people seem to love it. Whatever.” Looking at Bill, she asked, “And you, Bill? Did you get a job in record time as well?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I may be able to help you with that. Where I work, we get a lot of tourists and have a lot of tours constantly running. We are in our busy season and need an extra tour guide. You won’t get rich—it only pays ten dollars an hour—but it will give you some income.”
“That sounds wonderful!” he said excitedly.
“Good,” she said, handing him an inch-thick binder. “Read this. Learn it. You start tomorrow at nine. You’ll be paired with an old hand for your first day, and then you’ll be tossed into the deep end on your own for the second day. The address is on the front page inside the binder. Better be at the gate a half hour early to allow enough time to clear security and get to the appropriate office—it’s a big lot.” Seeing that Bill wanted to give her a hug, she said, “And don’t even think about giving me a hug. And remember: you screw up and I’ll come kick your butt from one end of the lot to the other… and then back again. That’s a promise.” Try as she might to be ferocious, at the end she smiled at us both and said good night before she walked back to her house.
We jumped up and down and hooted and hollered with joy. We were both now gainfully employed! We were officially a two-income family! Two days in California and we were marching through our checklist with ferocious speed. We knew that we couldn’t sustain such a pace, especially now that we were both about to start work.
While we hadn’t really talked about it explicitly, I think we both were surprised at how quickly we found jobs and were starting work. Don’t get me wrong! I was super pleased by both of us finding something so quickly, and we certainly needed the money for school, but at the same time it would have been nice to have some time to be beach bums for a few days, to mellow out and explore the LA area, maybe visit a few of the attractions in our new backyard. But there would be time in the years ahead to do those things. That, plus weekends.
That evening Bill started devouring the manual the landlady had left him, trying to learn everything about his new job. The manual covered everything from studio history to facts and figures about acreage, number of films in production at any one time, number of employees, and the logistics involved in making a movie. He had to learn which big name movie was filmed on which lot so that during the tour he could spit those facts back at the tourists in his group.
While he wasn’t given a script, it was only one step short of that. The manual covered what he should say to each group, how long to stay at each spot along the tour, in addition to what to do in the event of several occurrences, such as an earthquake (oh, right, we were in California now), a sick tourist, the unexpected appearance of a well-recognized actor. Bill read quickly, which was good because the book was huge and packed with more details than any one person could hope to assimilate in one quick read.
By nine o’clock, though I hated to admit it, I knew that I needed to get to bed. Though he still had a lot of reading to do yet, Bill joined me in bed. While I had to go to sleep, at least I could do it with Bill reading in bed next to me. It was always nice to lie in bed naked together with my boyfriend and drift off to sleep with the vision of him studying next to me.
Chapter 7
First Day on the Job
AND so began our very first summer in California. The next morning we both headed off to work, me a number of hours before Bill, but I would be home a long time before him as well. While it would be nice to be home while there was still daylight left, it was a bummer not to have him there to spend that time together. If this is what being an adult was like, it sucked.
It was tough to get up and get going so early. I tried to be quiet when I got out of bed, showered, and dressed. I was shocked to come out of the
shower and find Bill up, getting dressed.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“I’m going to drive you to work.”
“No! Go back to bed and sleep. You were up late reading.”
“Not listening,” he said as he walked into the living room.
Rather than argue with him, I simply walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around him. “Thank you,” I said quietly. “I love you.”
Bill drove me to my first day of work. It was tough to wave good-bye and see him drive away, but I had to get to work. And what a day it was. I worked hard and certainly earned my money, even though I wouldn’t see the cash for another week or two. At least there were a few dollars of tips that we all split at the end of the day.
It was hard to believe how many people came into a Starbucks in the course of a day. And while some had very simple requests, a lot of people had complicated orders. Okay, I’ll admit it—I screwed up a couple of times. But I got a lot more of them right than wrong, which made me feel pretty good. And I smiled at everyone and greeted them in a friendly manner, even one incredibly rude hyper-bitch who seemed intent on crushing everyone. But she hadn’t been raised by my mother and father, who felt that such people “weren’t worth a warm bucket of spit.” Now, why anyone would have a bucket of spit I don’t know, but I got the impression that it wasn’t anything of any value. And that was exactly where I ranked the woman. The more she groused, the more I smiled and didn’t care. The more she tried to engage me and pick a fight, the more I resisted and simply smiled. After she left in a huff—with everything she asked for, by the way—all of us “hired help” behind the counter high-fived one another. And of course she didn’t leave a penny in tip. I had a particularly nice nasty thought—I’d love to see my landlady take her down a peg or two. I bet that that would be a fun boxing match to watch.
After the morning rush I got a thirty-minute break and finally had a chance to grab a bagel. I had not had anything to eat for breakfast, and I was hungry. Never before had a simple bagel tasted so good. All too soon it was time to get back to work and prepare for the lunch rush onslaught. At two o’clock I gratefully left and walked home, tired but content that I had done a pretty good job. After a quick shower I put on some shorts, skipped a shirt, and went out to an umbrella-covered table by the pool to sit and read for an hour or so.
Since I was home first and Bill wouldn’t be home for a while yet, I thought that I should do something about dinner. Grabbing my wallet, a shirt, and some shoes, I walked three blocks to the closest grocery store, picked up a couple of things, and came back home to get dinner started. I didn’t do anything very ambitious, but it certainly smelled good while it cooked in the oven.
When Bill appeared in the door about an hour later, greeting me, “Honey, I’m home!” I practically bounced across the room to throw my arms around him and welcome him home. “What smells so good in here?” he asked, sniffing the air even before he hugged me.
“Lasagna. Soon to be joined by garlic toast. There’s also a salad, but that won’t be going into the oven.”
“Probably a reasonable decision. Did you make the lasagna?”
“I made it all the way over to the store to buy it frozen. I worked my fingers to the bone opening the package and reading the directions on the box, not to mention turning on the oven and putting it into the oven.”
“I see. Home cooked.”
“Yes. I’m cooking it at home.”
While Bill took a shower and changed into some shorts, I made him an iced tea. We sat out by the pool to debrief, to share details about our first day at our respective jobs. It turned out that I was not the only one who had to contend with difficult customers, but we did seem to have a similar approach in refusing to let them ruffle our feathers.
While it was too soon to have any firm opinions on our coworkers, we each had some initial impressions. Of our two workplaces, it was likely that Bill’s would stick around a little longer than mine would. The workforce in a lot of places was fairly fluid, but at least in Bill’s job, a certain level of information or knowledge was required that made people a bit more likely to remain once they got there.
After a half hour of catching up—it was, after all, our first separation in the last several weeks—we moved back inside so that I could make the salad and pop the garlic bread into the oven. Ten minutes later we sat down at the table for our meal, which tasted wonderful. After we finished, we remained at the table talking a bit more.
Our conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. We weren’t surprised to see our landlady at the door—she was about the only person we knew who knew we were there.
In her usual direct-to-business style, she asked Bill, “So, how was the first day?”
While she and Bill talked, I handed her a glass of iced tea—I hadn’t bothered to ask if she wanted any—and freshened his glass before coming back to rejoin them.
“Good tea,” she observed, “and I’m fussy about my tea. I like the taste. What brand?”
“Luzianne. It makes a nice robust, refreshing glass of tea when iced.”
“Hm,” she said, “I’ll have to put it on the shopping list for the next time I have to go to the grocery store. I hate grocery shopping and try very hard to go as infrequently as humanly possible.”
I don’t think she expected it, but I offered, “I’d be glad to pick some up for you tomorrow if you like.”
“Careful there, sonny—I might just take you up on that.”
“I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t mean it.”
“I’ll be right back,” she said before jumping up from her chair.
A few minutes later she was back with her wallet. Pulling out a twenty-dollar bill, she handed it to me and said, “Get whatever that will buy me.”
“While I’m going, is there anything else you want or need? I don’t mind shopping, so it’s not a problem.”
“Offhand, I can’t think of anything else I need at the moment. I just dragged myself there last weekend and nearly bought the place out. But I’ll start a list, and as I find things I need I’ll add them to the list, and I might take you up on your offer occasionally.”
“Please do,” I said. “We have to eat. I like grocery shopping.”
“Why in the name of all that is holy do you like grocery shopping?”
“To me it feels like a vital part of the creative process. Cooking is creativity. It’s like painting a picture—you can’t make art without paints to work with first. My mom loves to cook and is an amazing cook. She can take some of the simplest ingredients and create a feast.”
Bill interrupted me with a question for our landlady. “Do you like cinnamon?”
“Yes, I do,” she said.
“Are you one of those people who doesn’t eat carbs?”
“Hell no.”
He looked at me, batted his eyelashes, and asked, “Have you ever made your mom’s cinnamon rolls?”
“I’ve helped her with them a few hundred times.”
“Do you think you might consider making them for us this weekend?”
“I might. If you make it worth my while.”
“That’s between the two of you. But I wouldn’t be opposed to trying one if I was forced.”
Bill waxed poetic. “They are some of the most beautiful, delicious things that ever graced this earth.”
“Careful there, boy, you’re drooling,” she warned Bill. “That good, huh?”
“That good.”
“What makes them so good?”
“Loaded with cinnamon, feathery light….”
“Okay. I’m convinced. This weekend, huh?”
“Or whenever I get a day off from work. They take half a day to make.”
“Half a day?” she asked, incredulous. “Okay. You’re making me hungry, and I haven’t eaten yet, so I’d better go.”
“You want some lasagna?” I asked. I could tell she did, so I didn’t wait but simply dished some up for her. Whi
le that reheated, I cut some more bread to make some more garlic toast. In five minutes it was in front of her, along with silverware and our fancy napkins—Bounty paper towels.
Chapter 8
First Week in California
AND so developed the pattern for our summer. Both Bill and I worked all week. In my case, there were a lot of people who wanted to work weekends and could only work on weekends, so there was a lot of competition for those slots. I was perfectly happy to let others have them. Bill’s job, unfortunately, was not so accommodating. The studio where he worked was open and operational seven days a week, 365 days a year, even though some of those days the operations were pretty minimal. They offered tours Monday through Saturday, but were fortunately closed to the public on Sundays. So while I fairly predictably had my weekends off, Bill sometimes had to work on a Saturday.
Those times were bummers, since I wanted nothing more than to wake up casually and comfortably in bed with him, cuddle with him, lounge around the house together for a while, do a few errands, and then go do something fun. There was a great big city at our feet that was just waiting to be explored, and I wanted to see it all. But with him working every other weekend our explorations would have to wait a bit.
Fairly quickly we settled into a pattern that worked for our schedules and our personal characteristics. Household chores were allocated and tended to, and we agreed on the things we were going to do together, exploration being high on that list.
The end of our first full week of work came with Bill unfortunately having to work the next day, Saturday. We both knew that it was coming, but we both hated it nonetheless. Since I had the day off, I had some errands I could do that he couldn’t. Plus I didn’t want him to waste his precious and very limited free time doing stuff that I could do more easily on one of my two days off. So that morning I got up and drove Bill to work so that I could have the car to do things like grocery shopping.
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