If it's broken I can fix it. Call me now. Ten dollars per hour.
This was before the internet. you had to run an ad in the paper to do odd jobs for people. I was lucky. I really could fix anything. I must have been the only 18 year old who ever moved to hollywood with no intention of becoming an actor, singer, or porn fluffer. I showed up for other reasons. Can't remember what they were now.
I started unclogging the sink and replacing all the doorknobs at some home office owned by some freako psychologist in the valley. He didn't really need stuff fixed, he just liked having young boys around for the clientele to gaze at. I was too young and stupid to know. He referred me around to his clients. Actors, producers, writers, anyone who's money had got the better of them. Do you know electrical? Sure. Can you clean the driveway? Yeah. Remember to move the Porche first. No problem.
There seemed to be a linear progression. Start out at the bottom. All the houses down there are cheaper, but well built. Inhabited by halfway normal people. Guys on the camera crew and wives etc. Yoga instructors. Hubby really was on location, the garager door opener really was busted, and the wife was still three years away from getting up the courage to suck off the poolboy.
But move up the hill. Every house was custom built by some gay French designer who mined the construction budget to by a sailboat, and these places started to fall apart after six months when the stucco flaked off and the nails rusted. So I was busy. Nutjobs. The higher up they live, the nuttier they got. Champange at eleven in the morning. Tarot cards spilled on the bathroom floor. Fetch me a tissue sweety, my nose is bleeding again. Damn the dry air on the plane. Can you fetch me a Freska out to the pool? my daughter arrives tomorrow and she's a little well... just make sure the door to her bedroom can't be locked anymore. Breaking things. I can do that.
She must have been 21. I thought she was older. she didn't look older, but she was married. he was fifty and something, and British, and a screenwriter. Their house was right near the hollywood sign. She was Japanese. he was disracted. Writing. If that's what you call it. I call it walking around in a bathrobe too loose to contain your small uncut English cock while drinking orange juice and rum. He was an idea man. Here's an idea, I want some kind of muslin fabric draped from the ceiling in the bedroom.
I spent a week doing that until it was just right. Then a call came in the middle of the night. The color was wrong. I can't possibly sleep looking up at that color. Come back, let's change it all. Sure, that's money.
She was busy trying to look busy. She liked to read. Magazines. She liked Cherry Soda. How is everything going? Fine. Do you need any help? Nope.
My electric drill broke. She was going to drive me to get a new one. It's no trouble really. I have this brand new white Saab convertible that I need to practise shifting. Let's stop and get the mail. Let me reach across you. I'm sorry I forgot to put on a bra today. It's ok, he does'nt care. We've been together since I was 13. He made an arrangement with my father.
Juliet was Chinese. Chinese American. She never said, but then I, unlike you, can tell the difference between Asians, having grown up there. "Do they wink at you?". "What the fuck does that mean?", she wanted to know. We were in a bar. Both drunk. She had somehow confessed to me that she thought nipples were disgusting. Revolting really. She had always thought so. She did'nt know why. She had hers removed. She waited. I did'nt say anything. She was waiting for the expected response. Non-belief, or a request to see the proof, or some far more stupid thing that would come tumbling out of the poor victim she had cornered with her much planned confession. I let it pass.
Finally she could'nt take it anymore and continued on to the next line of her script without me, like we were acting in a cheap play and I had forgotten the dialog. Her plastic surgeon was great and her scars were really small. That's when I asked her about the winking. Did the doc have a sense of humor? If it was me I would have made one of the scars horizonital and the other vertical. She did'nt find that funny. She did'nt find anything funny. Who the hell says shit like that she wanted to know. I do. I say shit like that all the time, and moreover this is your bizzaro '90s freak fantasy movie you are trying to play out not mine.
She was not going to show me, that was for sure. Me not asking to see it not withstanding. She was not going to fuck me either, me having zero interest in that also not withstanding. I was an asshole because lots of guys want to fuck me she said.
This is where she got pissed off. I really did'nt want to fuck her. That was fine as she was not interested either but she did get off turning men down, especially after she had gone to such lengths to entice them with the nippleectomoy bullshit. She still had great tits. I like big tits and I could live without the nipples, not a problem. I did'nt want to fuck her because she was Asian. I told her so. That was the kicker. What kind of a racist asshole was I?
We could be friends. Wanna hang out? I might of had a job for her, she seemed smart, hardworking, etc. Sorry though, Asian chicks don't make my dick hard. I like exotic women. What? That makes no sense, what's more exotic than Asian? I grew up in Asia, so you're all like whitebread to me. You got any hot friends who look Italian or Greek? Don't take it personally. She took everything personally.
A Monkey Pod tree. Huge. Covered the whole yard, house and all. Ever seen one of those? No she had not. She had never been to Asia. You have to imagine as a child living in the jungle and a tree so big you could walk down the branches over the roof of the house and step off into the neighbors yard and stand there above ground peering into the girl's bedroom window. She never told her parents. But she would wait for me to show up most nights.
Eventually she would be naked when I got there.So that's it. Yup. We're drunk. My mind jumps around. Telling me you had your nipples cut off kinda just gives me carte blanche to say any fucking thing I want to.
It was the worst sex I've ever had.
Word was, he was a mamma's boy. So she said. She had met him at a party in Hawaii, in the '60s. She used to be very beautiful you know. Or so she often said. There were old black & white pictures to prove that. I saw them. It was true. She really was beautiful. Big tits, great smile, long flowing black hair. Tall too, at least by the standards of the time. Go to a college bar now a days, everyone is tall now. Fucking enormous people with little tiny souls.
So they had talked? I asked her that a few times over the years. She always had a different answer. Sure, they had talked, he tried to pick her up. She wasn't interested. Famous people are never as good looking in person you know. Fuck no, she would never speak to a guy like that. With all the girls he had, who wants to be treated like that. Besides, he wa a momma's boy remember.
My uncle was a Jehovia's Witness. His wife looked around for a religion. She found that. He was an all or nothing kind of man, so Jehovia it was. The kids, my cousins, they never had a chance. Gotta witness that shit. a little advice I picked up, never tell one of those fuckers anthing. They don't have secrets. Whatever it is, it's gonna get discussed at group. So it all comes back. Wanna know something about someone, just ask. Bob used to be a drunk? No shit. Helen once got so angry with her husband she killed a chicken with her bare hands. Hard to believe. Your mother used to be married to some very famous actor when she was just 17? Do tell.
What was his name? Oh now you're not supposed to say. Perhaps it does'nt matter. So what happened? She left him. Hmmm. Why? He hit her. Ahh. You know she used to be very beautiful. When she was younger. Yeah I've seen the pictures.
I remember her at 45. Garden parties. Sweaty neighbors. U.S. Marines. Box wine. Screen doors and cermaic tile floors. Tall boyfriends, always younger than her. Always dumber. Tipsy PTA meetings in the hot sun. Strangers locking themselves in the bathroom. Whispers. Kids don't understand. Don't worry about it, back to the party monkey head. Nuthin to see here.
Jack's dad was an airline pilot. His mother was a professional wife. Now there was a real beauty. Coulda been on TV. Musta killed him that they could tell even at 15 that Jack was a homo. We all knew. Everyone except Jack of course.
Kids are cruel. Especially me. "Jack you're a fag. Everyone knows.". "Your mom gave blowjobs to Elvis and everyone in his band, my parents said so." Jack was beautiful too. I would have killed to look like Jack, might have been worth being gay. Jack tried to be cruel back, but his heart just wasn't it. "You're illegitimate. Elvis's bad seed.".
Not likely, the timeline is all wrong.
Evie Kendrick was a 47 year old soccer mom from Peoria Illinois. She hated her mother for being just like her. She hated her youngest child for not being born first. She hated strawberry ice cream. Was allergic to condoms, and felt guilty on Wedenesday afternoons when she went to the movie theater alone to see chick flicks but could never cry.
Damien Herzel was the female version of her. The perfect match. She was convinced of this after the first date. Truth be told Damien was nothing like her at all. In fact all women he went on dates with had the exact same impression of him. He was the perfect match. Lucky girls, all of them. Damien was a nothing man. A life actor. He did'nt believe anything at all, which made it easier to believe that he could possibly be anything or like or hate anything. lately he was starting to believe it was his one true talent.
None of this mattered, as Damien could never be found for a second date.
Evie thereafter hated Damien with the same intensity she reserved for hating herself. She would go back to pining away for her dead husband, who she loved with the reckless abandon which can only be applied to a memory.
Evie liked porn. Not the kind you find on the internet. She did'nt browse. She did'nt go to adult bookstores, or hideout in the dark of nudie theaters positioned too close to interestate rest stops. Evie was an avid garage saler. Specifically she was searching out estate sales. She would spend hours in the attics of old houses going through book cases and cardboard boxes. There was usually porn. Magazines that is. From the 70s and 80s.
She did'nt have any pubic hair herself, as her dead husband insisted she remove it and she could'nt bring herself to stop no matter how much she hated the shaving, but something about the big hairy 70s bushes on those crumpled yellowing stuck together pages drove her wild.
There was also the thrill. Spending three hours looking in every single nook and cranny of old victorian houses only to appear at the sales table with a stack of old girly mags and get that terribly dissaproving look from the church marm who made change for her. They always tried to find her a brown paper bag to put the porn in. Or lay it upside down on the table hoping that Evie would get the message and try to hide it on the way out the front door. Evie never did that. She displayed it. Locked eyes with strangers walking in as she walked out porn mags held across her chest arms folded, big nervous smile. Wet at last.
She never took it home though. Nearest public trash dumpster out of view of of the estate sale, she tossed it from her car window and drove off.
She also hated brussel sprouts, but loved horses.
She said "I'm leaving now to the sea, or the mountains maybe" She said "I'm taking the boy, and the money. And the gun" "But you're a dangerous man I've seen. You'll be fine." "A very dangerous man, that I have seen. So you'll be fine"
I thought about protesting. Telling her to wait til the morning. But then she's a dangerous woman. She'll be fine. A most dangerous woman indeed.
I waited an hour, then slipped out the back. There was an old petrol can in the shed. I could see the roof buring as I climbed the hill. I thought I heard screams from inside the house, but that was impossible. Flames can play tricks on you at night.
I came across a man in a field just before dawn. He must have been a sheppard or a woodsman on his way to work. He did'nt see me. Lucky him. The small set of footprints dissapeared and her larger pair got deeper. He must have fallen asleep and she began to carry him. After awhile her prints became closer together. I slowed my pace.
Over the rise the sound of a car slowing to a stop. A gunshot. The car driving away.
I found the driver in the ditch below the roadside. I covered his body with branches. The road was long and straight. In the distance I could see the car on the horison. I walked the other direction.
Maximillian Hedland was not a genius. But he desperately wanted to be, and lied about it often. His actual IQ was 127, and after all, what's three little points among enemies, bystanders, and the hopelessly un- invited? Max was a sometimes overachiever, often miscast, bit player in life, and when attractive women, whom were far less genius than he, would sometimes say "genius" in passing reference to something he had done, or even been peripherally involved in, he would duly tack on those three little points and casually say "Well, I mean, technically..."
He was without doubt emboldened with the fact that this seemed to work rather well for him as he had over the course of his mediocre life manageed to fuck a bevy of beautiful young women, albiet none of them ever really gave a shit about any of the thinking he did, nor did they spend any time pondering the veracity of the flow of inane bullshit that came forth from his sound hole.
Women fucked Max because he was tall. Along with tall he had a normal sized cock. Normal sized for a big tall dude. Which means he had a big dude cock.
Behind Max's back, his friends called him "The Catalyst" and would refer to him at parties as such. Never to his face though, as the days of actual friends is long over. Most of Max's friends were platonic female friends. None of them had started out as platonic though, but Judy said she had depression issues, Ashley was concerned that her family was too Jewish, Linda has a latex rash, can't take birth control, and doesnt feel it's fair to men to cry after sex. When Max walks up unannounced and people are talking about him and his tallness und his cockness, the conversation is quickly turned to other important life thingys like "Have you heard black pepper is the new salt?". No, Max had not heard that but it does remind him of an article he read on Facebook and would you all now kindly pay rapt attention while the tall, subgenius penis orates to the crowd of waiting, smiling, dying vaginas.
Lidia's boyfriend won't commit to a serious relationship and is quite convincing that it's really better for her emotional development as an adult woman in this modern age to adopt a less traditional approach to dating than serial monogamy affords. She agrees with him before and after he cums all over her tits every Tuesday afternoon between 3 and 3:04pm, but secretly she's furious and takes it out on him by using far too much teeth on Wednesday nights. Rachel had the solution as Rachel always does, which would be for Lidia to go out with Max. The positive points are obvious, Max is tall, Max has tall man dude cock, Max is not embarassing, but still easily ignored. Also Max is "The Catalyst" and after a hastily planned sexcapade which somehow had Max leaving Lidia's apartment at 2am and her non committal boyfriend showing up at 2:15 and noticing some unexplained pussy looseness, followed by 2 days later running into Lidia and Max on a date at her boyfriend's favorite bar, well her boyfriend did the obvious math and decided the only way cut was a small private loan from his mother to buy Lidia a diamond ring.
Being three points shy must in fact be just as good as being a real genius. Max has always gotten the job, the pussy, the car, the first and last servings at the table of life that big tall boys so rightly deserve. His competence has never once been mentioned. He himself, has never once considered it.
Don didn't like the name Greg. He named his son Greg, but it was after all a compromise. What Don really hated, and absoutely fucking refused to stand for was "ee", Or in Don's case "ny". As in "Donny". Because Donny is a name for a little fucking kid, and his own childhood rather sucked as it were. Cherry Ball was Don's wife. Don and Cherry Ball. Cherry's maiden name was Hubb, and the thought of hyphenating it like all her friends had done rather horrified her as she had a bad nightmare where she was in the airport dressed only in paper bag and she was being paged on the intercom loudly over and over "Cherry Hubb Ball" and crowds of weary travelers were staring at her trying to figure out which part of her anatomy was the "hubball". So she dropped the Hubb, along with 350 proud years of white history which had seen the Hubbs from slave owners to trailer park managers.
Cherry's grandfather was named Gregory. Cherry had a slew of other boys names in the hat to choose from but none of them fit Don's criteria of not possibly having a "ee" diminutive. James, John, Robert, Richard, William, Joseph, Donald, Timothy, Frank, would all eventually become ‘Jimmy, Jonny, Bobby, Ricky, Billy, Joey, Donny, Timmy, Franky, and Don was not having that.
Don said to her over the dinner table when she was 7 months pregnant and still able to whip up a mean meatloaf, "ok, drop the "ory" and go with plain ol "Greg" and we have a deal." "What?" Cherry said. "Nobody says 'Gregey'. It just doesn't roll off the tongue. It can't stick. That's the deal, take it or leave it." Don was a deal man always had been. He got it from his father Frank. Frank had to fist fight his way out of Franky when he joined the Navy in 1941, and so when little Donny was 12 and wanted to stop being called Donny, well Frank did what good Franks do and frog marched little Donny out into the back yard, put a football helmet on him, and told him "You wanna be called Don? Well kiddo, Don is a goddamn man's name and I'm the only man around here so you're gonna have to fight me fer it." Then he gave Donny a quick love tap with his 50 year old right arm to the side of the head. To Donny's Credit it didn't take him down immediately so Frank kicked him in the chest, which did the trick. Donny went down hard. He came back up angry.
"There it is. That's what I'm lookin' for! Ya wanna kill me new don't cha? Ya better keep that head on a swivel if you wanna be a man." Donny started swinging, Frank was bobin' and weavin' his way out of 'em and he was laughin' at his little son Donny. Donny was red faced and crying, couldn't see shit, ripped off the football helmet violently and got lucky to accidently hit ol Frank in the nose with it. Frank was bleedin' like a stuck pig from his face as he told his wife "shut up woman, it ain't the first busted nose I've had." but on the inside he was beaming with pride as he was 100% certain that was young Don's plan all along and not just a lucky accident. On the way back from the emergency room Frank's wife casually referred to little Donny and Frank had to stop the car and tell her in no uncertain terms that "Little Donny" had just successfully defended himself in a fight with a grown damn man and was never to be called "Donny" again. Not goddamn ever, and this was not a discussion, and did she get that?
Greg Franklin Ball was born at 7:02am on a sunny Tuesday in October and lived 27 years without once ever being called "Gregy" until that night when Greg brought his new girlfriend home to meet his parents for the first time and during dinner she casually referred to him as "My Gregy" at which point Don dropped his fork, got up from the table and went out into the garage to look for a football helmet.
Josie had purple hair and horned rimmed glasses. The glasses weren't prescription, they were a prop, part of the daily costume, along with the purple hair, the nipple ring he could see through her far too thin top, the Chinese Doc Martin's, and her name, which was really Ivelina, like all other girls around there.
She was on her way from one side of the country to the other to go to a cos-play convention. They have cos-play here? He asked. YESS we have it and isn't that great? He wanted to know how her English was so perfectly American, she blushed through yellow eyeshadow and said "friends". "Oh you have American friends that help you with English?". "No silly, 'Friends!' with Monica and Rachel and Smelly Cat". "I see", he said, and then casually but with much disdain, "I thought all we exported was Mickey D's, gangster rap, and monster truck."
She just KNEW he was American. She could tell. She was smart like that, she said. He fought the urge to ask how old she was, firstly because he wanted not to feel guilty about what he was thinking in relation to her all too adult substructure, and secondly because that question always instigates itself in reverse and the last thing he wanted her to know was how desperately old he actually was.
"37. I think you're 37. But like a good 37." He had not instigated, but she was precocious. "That's a really great guess." He said, trying not to laugh and smiling inside with the hope of the damned. "My best friend has a secret boyfriend and he is German and he is 36 and sometimes he comes to my apartment to wait for her so they can use my room to have sex without her parents finding out because he's a secret oh yeah I told you that but anyway you look better than him but I'm adding a year because he smokes all the time and has bad skin and you don't have bad skin and you're American and I think Americans are better than Germans because of the Auschwitz thing but I dunno I think you are 37."
He asked if those Friends reruns were subtitled and she said the ones on the TV are dubbed but those are for little kids and she downloaded the real ones off the torrents. He asked if she wanted to be a woman or a girl. She was having fun being a girl she said for now but what was the difference? He issued a short but teasingly firm lecture on the appropriate use of run-on sentences and proper punctuation, to which she listened with rapt attention and absorbed 0.006% of. He wanted to know how she was old enough to have her own apartment. She was 18, her parents were both working in the UK and she was very mature so it was not a problem. They paid for the apartment but would not buy her a car, which is why she was on this old rusty Communist train at the moment. Trains were more fun than the bus and she had space and time to work on her cos-play costume which still needed some spray painting of the styrofoam wings so they looked like silver and did he want to see? Of course he did. "Why are you on the train?" She wanted to know. "To meet you of course." It was a perfectly stupid cheezy thing to say, and it never failed.
Her silver winges were the sexyiest thing he had ever seen and he told her so with a big slow wink and a dirty chuckle. "Do you have Facebook?" She wanted to know. Of course he did. What did he do? She was dying to find out. Well, he was an actor, just sorta.
"I think it would be fun to have a secret boyfriend." she said.