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I
t took three full carloads in my Pontiac to get my books and my computer and TV and boxed-up belongings from Uncle Bill’s house on Twenty-seventh Place in Venice to Dav-Ko’s new home on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. But I’d gone the entire day without a pill or a drink. Not easy because as it turned out eighty-year-old Uncle-fuckin’-Bill had a curveball to throw my way.

I was passing the living room hauling a heavy box of books out to my car on my shoulder when Uncle Bill clicked the sound down on his TV remote and stopped me by using a cop-like hand signal. He motioned for me to set my box down. “Step in here for half a second, will ya, busta?” he hissed. I set the box down.

Uncle Bill is a fat, wrinkled old shit with an arthritic back. Uncle Bill has elected to spend his golden years in a filthy, battered recliner watching cop show reruns. And judging from his odor, apparently the use of soap and water is an alien idea to Uncle Bill.

So I waited and watched while he finished chewing his last bite of Pop-Tart and wiped his mouth with a rancid, overused paper towel from his shirt pocket. Then Bill looked at me and grinned. “You’re aware that I’m withholding your security deposit until further notice,” he said flatly.

“No Bill,” says I. “I had no idea you were doing that.”

“You’re a smoker, busta. That bedroom’ll need fumigation and a double coat of repaint. And me and Pauline gotta check for damage and excessive use.”

“Excessive use, Bill? Is that a technical legal landlord term?”

“I’m talking about wear and tear, busta. Repairs. That kinda thing.”

“So when will I get my deposit back?”

“How should I know?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“You can call me…first of next week,” the old prick snorted. “I’ll have Pauline cut you a check—less damages and wear and tear.”

“Look Bill,” I said. “I’ve been here eighteen months. I paid a five-hundred-dollar deposit. In cash. I want my money back. Go check the room out for yourself. Right now. There are no
damages.”

Bill tore open the wrapper on a fresh Pop-Tart. Flakes of the hard sugar coating from the last two he’d eaten were still clinging to the front of his zip-up sweatshirt. “By law I have thirty days to return your deposit,” he grinned. “I’m just makin’ sure that I get a hundred percent what’s coming to me, is all.”

“If you got what’s coming to you, Bill, that recliner you’re sitting in would be resting in the center of a smoking crater half a mile wide.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it.”

The building at 6736 Selma Avenue was what I’d expected—a semi-dump. As I pulled the Lincoln Town Car into the driveway what I saw before me was a re-stuccoed, renovated, ninety-year-old shithole in the armpit of Hollywood. No wonder the doctor had closed his office and moved out. The only redeeming aspect to the location was the ten-foot-high security fence surrounding it.

Selma Avenue is the male hustler capital of the area and it was a warm day so the gay boys were out in force, populating the sidewalk. Crackhead skinny is a sexual fashion statement in Hollywood. Most of the hustlers still looked like teenagers and wore the uniform of the day, T-shirts and jeans. A few rode skateboards along the sidewalk while others—the fems in tight pants and eye makeup—hung together, leaning against parked cars, smoking cigarettes, posing for the passing traffic. But they all had that edgy, I’m-workin’-the-street look in their eyes.

It took four guys and a truck with a crane to install Dav-Ko’s yellow and blue sign outside my bedroom above the second-floor balcony. That afternoon the male hustlers on Selma Avenue watched with fascination as workmen and moving trucks came and went.

In less than a week David Koffman and Francisco and a swish decorator friend who called himself Benecio had furnished both floors of the building with high-end used stuff from the second-hand shops on Western Avenue and Robert
son Boulevard. Beds, desks, chairs, filing cabinets, paintings, a rebuilt stove, and a washer and dryer. The whole deal.

Upstairs in my room I took most of the afternoon to arrange my books by category and author on the freshly painted shelves, then I set up my desk. I had written my one page a day almost since I’d left my phone room burglar alarm gig with Kassim and I wanted to keep going. Now, in a new place, working a new job, I was sure I’d be able to continue. My life plan was simple: I would drive and write. Sleep and work. Make money. I’d give Dav-Ko my best shot. Just like I’d done with my short stories, through will power, I’d force myself to cut back on the booze and the vikes and do my best to hold my rages and mind stuff under control. I’d watch my mouth with my boss and his boyfriend and ride the horse in the direction he was going.

It was after sunset as I sat in the near darkness that first night, observing the male hustler action on Selma Avenue outside my window; the johns in their flash L.A. cars, the Benzs and BMWs and Porsches, pulling over to chat up the fresh curbside meat while a block away the bright street lights from Hollywood Boulevard began burning through the evening freeway smog.

I was a hundred yards walking distance from Musso and Frank Grill, where sixty years before my father would get drunk on a daily basis with his mean-spirited Hollywood screenwriter buddies. Everything in Los Angeles had changed but nothing was different. L.A. had become a perfect example of twenty-first-century America. A city of pay and play.

I lit a fresh Marlboro Light and in the fading light watched while a black kid down the block unzipped has pants to flash the merchandise for a guy in a red convertible.

Disgusted, I turned away and clicked on my computer to find my stories. I’m Bruno Dante, I thought, a writer of short fiction, a guy with a failed book, and a twelve-year-old Pontiac to his name. A forty-two-year-old wannabe. Swimming against the tide. Starting over one more time.

On the roof Dav-Ko’s new neon sign clicked on. It began flashing every three seconds, alternately flooding my room with light, then blackening it. I was home.

I
was beginning to see dead people. They were not really dead. They were people who I’d meet who looked like people I had known who were
now
dead. It seemed to be happening more and more. In bookstores or supermarkets or liquor stores or bars. People who look like guys I used to know. For instance I saw Timmy Healy a month or so ago. The guy was a ringer for Timmy—except twenty years younger than the dead one. Then there was Bryan Mann. Bryan played jazz flute around town for years then got liver cancer—and ba-boom, he was dead in two months. And last week I saw KK Colberg. Bigger than shit. The KK look-alike sold me a pack of smokes at a liquor store. He reminded me exactly of him. I’d begun to think it might be an omen of my own death. A sign perhaps. And it happened enough that it was beginning to scare me.

But then the night after I saw the KK guy who sold me the cigarettes, I bet another guy—a baseball fan—twenty bucks at the Warm-Up Room bar. I’d bet him that Barry Bonds would homer for the Giants by the seventh inning.
Bonds cracked one in the fifth so I decided to set aside the omen curse idea.

Two of the first four limos arrived at the local Lincoln dealer in Hollywood several days after we moved in. These were new ones. Custom-built stretch limos. Both with tinted windows and chrome wheels. Black and sleek and elegant.

Our next two cars were trucked directly to Dav-Ko Hollywood from New York. These were David Koffman’s pride and joy. Both only a few months old. Francisco had already christened the white one “Pearl” and the brown one “Cocoa.”

While Cocoa was a state-of-the-art stretch limo, it was Pearl that was our company’s most requested car in New York. Over-the-top glitz and piss elegance. Pearl actually had eight pounds of crushed pearl in the paint and a forty-eight-inch extension body panel in the center between the front and rear doors. The windows were smoked gray. It had a silk headliner, a stocked bar, a moonroof, two color TVs, and two phones. Pearl’s inside trim was gaudy, gleaming burl wood and her seats were covered in maroon calfskin. Fabulous.

Because he’d chosen to move our office to Selma Avenue I’d pegged David Koffman as a business cheapskate. But I was wrong. When it came to publicity he spared no expense to jump-start Dav-Ko Hollywood, even hiring a top-shelf L.A. PR firm.

Unger & Lilly invaded our office. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday of the first week they’d begun making up fluff news stories and calling local celebrity TV gossip shows. Patricia Unger herself spent all day on the phone framing press releases about Dav-Ko Hollywood. Her staff photographer took a hundred photos of Buffalo Bill in his white linen suit getting in and out of Pearl and by week’s end Unger had
managed to get a local TV news program involved in doing a feature on Pearl’s supposed one-year birthday.

Her brainstorm was to give a street party and parade for the limo to kick off the new office. By that weekend two local high school marching bands were recruited and a three-block stretch of Grand Avenue near the L.A. Music Center was closed off for the event. David Koffman contributed to the festivities by hiring three big-titted strippers in bikinis to ride on Pearl’s roof and throw rose petals as the cameras rolled. Pure Hollywood. It took me five Vicodin—three before and two during the event—to get me through.

But Unger’s gimmick worked and our phones began ringing. A record label booked two cars a day for a week to take an English rock band back and forth to their Staples Center concert gigs. Me and Francisco and Koffman himself did the driving.

By the third week our business had picked up to the point where David Koffman ran a new ad in the
L.A. Times. “DRIVE THE STARS!!! Elite limo cmpny seeks drvrs and day-line dsptchr. Drvrs ern $20 p.h. while wrkg. Gd DMV recrd req’d. Mst be cln cut and kno L.A. streets.”

The line of applicants went from our office door to around the corner on Highland Avenue. Even a couple of the local street hustlers, after quizzing the guys in the queue and finding out the pay rate, buttoned up their shirts, tucked them in, and invaded our waiting room wanting to fill out a job application.

Me and Koffman did the interviewing. It took most of the day but between us we hired four new drivers. All men. David wasn’t looking for real chauffeurs. Dav-Ko didn’t want middle-aged, cigar-smoking, fat-bellied, ex-cab-driver airport hustlers.

We ended up with a staff straight from central casting. All our guys were clean-cut L.A. locals—perfect for a young Hol
lywood rock ’n’ roll limo company. None had experience and not one arrived wearing a tie. All were twenty-five to thirty years old and needed a haircut.

These are the guys we hired:
Marty Humphrey,
a former rock band backup singer living on his girlfriend’s couch.
Cal Berwick,
a skinny vegetarian from Whittier.
Robert Roller,
a shaved-headed 250-pound former security guard monster who had recently managed a Pizza Hut. And
Frank Tropper,
who, I later discovered through one of his ex-girlfriends, had once been a Hollywood escort.

My assignment was to take these guys to the Manhattan Tie Shop over on Cahuenga Boulevard and then to the ten-dollar Supercuts barbershop on La Brea. By mid-afternoon the next day Koffman’s gay pal Octavio had outfitted all four of our new employees with vested blue polyester three-piece suits: $179.00 each. Two one-hundred-percent-synthetic drip-dry white long-sleeved dress shirts: $11.00 each. A Greek seaman’s cap: $29.00. One black clip-on necktie: $8.00. And one red pocket hankie: $8.95. The hardest guy to fit was Robert Roller. Sixty-five bucks worth of alterations were required to get his bulging body to fit a suit.

My boss’s plan was to keep the new company running for thirty days, then return to New York City. At that time he would turn the day-to-day running of Dav-Ko Hollywood over to me as resident manager.

When I began training the new drivers I was upgraded to the title of manager/chauffeur supervisor and given a weekly salary to augment my driving income.

Every day for a week the new guys took a turn at the wheel with me calling the shots from the backseat as we toured the L.A. streets, driving the half dozen best routes to the airports
from the most popular West Side and Beverly Hills hotels. The freeway system in L.A. had become gridlock. From six in the morning until after ten at night most of them were impassable. Knowing the fastest ways to navigate the city streets was essential.

I continually emphasized to the guys how to anticipate the needs of our customers and I showed them how to behave like their professional New York City counterparts. I taught them little chauffeur tricks too, like how to wash out a shirt and leave it wrinkleless on a hanger after consecutive daily ten-hour gigs, and how to scrub stains off a polyester suit with just soap and a damp sponge. Also, because we lived in rainless Southern California, it was pretty much unnecessary to wash a car more than once per week, so I instructed my guys on how to clean the windows and exterior on a daily basis with just one damp terry-cloth towel straight from the spin cycle of our washing machine.

Koffman gave each of our new guys his own credit card. He also supplied them with a company cell phone, with strict instructions about personal use. But, after thinking about it, I decided to buy my own. I didn’t want David up my ass and I wanted to keep my privacy.

Then one morning my boss had a brainstorm. Because limo parking in L.A. can sometimes be impossible, he came up with a scheme to make the rounds of the local old-age homes, offering free afternoon transportation to their clientele, to and from their doctor appointments. Mid-afternoons were always slow in the limo industry and this act of limited and manipulative charity allowed Dav-Ko to obtain half a dozen handicapped parking plaques from the State of California.
With these blue beauties hanging from the rearview mirrors of our cars we’d be able to park almost anywhere, anytime. Smart. Very smart.

Dav-Ko was ready to roll.

But the dispatcher we hired was a different story. A woman. To my annoyance I came to discover that David Koffman had developed an affinity for snotty British accents. I’d known him to be overly impressed by status and money and New York fashion but it had never clouded his good judgment before.

Her New York driver’s license said that her name was Pat Waltz but on her job application she claimed to be Portia Darforth-Keats, and she confided that she was a distant relative of the British poet John Keats.

Waltz was thirty-two years old but her physical appearance was that of unearthed, well-scrubbed zombie with a pretty face. She was an ex-smoker turned nicotine gum chewer. Her constant chomping was endless and annoying and apparently unconscious.

Portia was my height, five foot six or seven, but weighed no more than a hundred pounds. She wore black horn-rimmed Gucci glasses and her boy’s haircut was dyed Madonna white blond. Somewhere along the line she had surgically endowed herself with what appeared to be two NFL footballs for breasts. These two incongruous protrusions would arrive in a room long before the skeleton attached to them. When she sat down I noted that it would take three of her to fill one of our office swivel chairs—excluding her tits.

According to Ms. Darforth-Keats she was educated at Grafton College in London and during our interview she
confided two things that told me all I needed to know about her lopsided personality: (a) As a teenager she’d developed an eating disorder (she said she was a recovering bulimic), and (b) she had a strong personal affinity for gay men. Her lifelong best friends were all gay. Swell.

I learned that she’d obtained her green card and U.S. residency by marrying a New York City Times Square beat cop, Bernard Waltz. Her letters of reference testified that she was good with computers and had been a part-time nanny for ten years and then a dispatcher-bookkeeper for a Manhattan ambulance company. She’d recently slapped her ex Bernie with a restraining order then headed west on American Airlines.

Waltz’s vocal manner made her sound more like Queen Elizabeth’s personal assistant than a half-alive Biafra survivor. The woman was a yakky know-it-all and a snob and clearly held herself above all lesser humans. Looking across my desk at her the thought of having sex with this skeletal, nicotine-sucking phony made me want to reconsider my own sexual orientation. I immediately concluded that it would be impossible for someone with her uptight wiring to deal with our staff of homegrown L.A. beach-boy chauffeurs. Weekends in the limo business are made up of brutal hours and handling overworked drivers during the grind of back-to-back ten-hour shifts would take its toll. Her uptight attitude would do her in and the shit would fly. Bottom line: The woman was wrong for the job. And the notion that I’d have to spend some of my days at Dav-Ko cooped up in an office with her set me craving a handful of painkillers.

But David Koffman was the boss and his reality block was impossible to overcome. He’d wanted class for Dav-Ko and had somehow decided that Portia was it. He had interviewed her separately the day after I began training the drivers, then
hired her on the spot. As it turned out my interview with Portia was a formality.

When Koffman arrived back at our office with Francisco I pulled him aside into our dispatch room and imparted my personal assessment of Pat Waltz. “Look, David, she’s a puker and a whackjob,” I said. “I don’t like her. She’s wrapped way too tight to deal with a staff of young drivers. And as far as I’m concerned that accent of hers is a ding—no plus whatever.”

“Portia’s hired, Bruno. That’s that,” he hissed, balancing his gargantuan frame on the edge of the dispatch desk after pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Ouch! Thanks for not telling me.”

“I think she’s fabulous. I made a spontaneous decision.”

“Well, it’s a mistake, David. The woman’s got emotional baggage up the wazoo. She looks like she hasn’t taken solid nourishment in ten years. Bottom line, she doesn’t know how to talk to people.”

Koffman was now sorting through the day’s mail. “That’s your opinion,” he said distractedly.

“It sure is. Apparently she’s addicted to nicotine gum too.”

“So…you’re saying that I should steer clear of hiring a person because of how they look?”

“She says that all her best friends are pole smokers. She loves gay men.”

“Does being around someone who likes gay men represent a problem for you?”

“Let’s just say that I don’t expect us to ever exchange Valentine’s cards. Her only plus I can see is her knowledge of computers. Did you at least check her references?”

“I did not.”

“Then I rest my case.”

“I found her utterly charming,” he sniffed. “She’ll bring class to our company. And I see no reason why how she looks or her physical problems should disqualify her.”

“Fine. Set that aside. How about that she’s a pretentious, condescending asshole?”

“Now there’s a solid professional assessment?”

“Just let me talk to her last employer—do some phone calling and some checking.”

“Should I call your last employer?”

“Why would you?”

“The point is, I took a chance on you?”

“That’s one hundred percent pigsnot. You and I worked together in New York. I proved myself. You know all about me.”

“Correct. And I hired you again anyway.”

“I think you’ll be sorry.”

“It’s my decision. I’ll live with it.”

“You’re the boss.”

“How kind of you to concede that point.”

Big Koffman began leafing through one of the two thick men’s magazines that had arrived that morning and I went upstairs to shoot myself in the head.