1:08 p.m. - 2005-06-04
Real Job Rant
Fall was approaching and, much as I loved Kittridge, I started to think of how nice it would be for my son to have a yard with real dirt to dig in rather than an ungated pool with a trike rusting at the bottom. As my personal checks were fast becoming notorious all over town and I could barely keep Keetah and Momo in fish food, it occurred to me that perhaps it was time for a real job, a full time job, a job with benefits. A job that even my parents might approve of. And so, borrowing my mother's conservative blue knit dress and an uncomfortable pair of pointy toed pumps, I was off to the Lynn Carol Employment Agency located above Manufacturer's Bank on Ventura Blvd. I had taken Beginning Typing as an elective in junior high and, although I now have a Master's Degree, I continue to say that nothing has ever put food on the table with the speed and consistency of Mr. White's typing course. Arriving on the eighth floor, a perky Lynn Carol employment counselor with newscaster hair clocked me at 60 wpm and sent me lickety split to Founder's Insurance in Century City. Never having been to Century City and since there are two Santa Monica Boulevards (Big and Little), naturally I got lost. I still remember the song that was playing on my Volkswagon radio, "Midnight Train To Georgia" when I stopped at a Mobil station and, wide eyed, asked for "1400 Avenue of the Stars". "Why?", the mechanic said in a fatherly tone, "Are you gonna be a star?" "Yeah. I think I am", I said. And I meant it. I was gonna be a star typist with my own desk and phone and lunch hour and even a pay check. Having been properly coached, I aced the interview and bagged a choice position in Customer Complaints. Perfect. If there was one thing besides typing that I knew how to do it was please and appease and get down on my knees to restore harmony. It was my childhood stock and trade. The interviewer must have recognized some remnant of that haunted, submissive look that eleven months on Kittridge had all but extinguished and snapped me right up. Century City was so sophisticated that the parking alone gobbled about a third of my salary besides which I had to walk two very long blocks to get to my car. I even enjoyed that part, though. Proudly, I would strut alongside the throng of secretaries in their up to the minute outfits and important, preoccupied expressions. Truly, I loved everything about that job. It was right across from the Century City Plaza, which had a store called Heaven with a soda fountain and lots of retro toys. I would eat hot dogs for lunch and later hit Judy's, where I spent the remainder of my paycheck on trendy office wear to keep up with my fellow typists. Bobbie Brooks suits with short, pleated skirts and strappy sandals with chunky heels. I met interesting girls with attitudes. If they found the customers rude, they would simply "zap them into the twylo", a phone technique I never quite mastered. With my first paycheck, I bought Elton John's "Yellow Brick Road" and rented a duplex on Oak Street in Burbank. It had a little fenced yard with lots of dirt ripe for the digging. I got my son a set of child-size gardening tools. The manager, who lived next door, had two little girls for my son to play with. They were a welcoming family and let me paint my his room whatever color he wanted and stick decals of Eeyore the Donkey over his bed. Unfortunately, Keetah and Momo hadn't survived the move, but my son named his new fish "Mashed Potatoes". I suspended his bowl from the living room ceiling with some macrame and beads. I hung a mirrored Betty Boop clock from the Whole Earth Marketplace and the Rossmoyne print I had admired at Judy's over the new sofa for which Wicke's had exhibited the poor judgment of extending me credit. I felt competent and responsible and appropriately in debt. My son and I planted sweet peas and grew mostly grass. I had my own Teflon cookware and yet we remained on a first name basis with the Jack in the Box clown. Still, I was at last an upstanding citizen. On weekends, I would go dancing in my rhinestone tanks and platform shoes. A new club had opened on Brand Blvd. in Glendale. It was on the ground floor of a tall cavernous building that, in a former life, had been a Mormon temple. It was called The Sopwith Camel and the ceiling produced a huge WWI airplane with Snoopy perennially waving in his Red Barron goggles at the glittery dancers below. The house band was called Live Jive and, if you closed your eyes, you'd swear they were black. They specialized in Spinners, Al Green and Kool & The Gang. If you opened your eyes, you couldn't help but notice what was rumored to be a rolled up pair of socks in the tight wide wale cords of the lead singer, Danny. The keyboardist was short and blond and looked alot like Woodstock the bird. The rest of them, I don't remember. One night, I went with Meridee, whose friend was buying rounds. So I tried a Tequila Sunrise, mostly out of curiosity because of the Eagle's song. I rather liked it and, as I wasn't paying, I proceded to order another each of the seven times the skinny, permed barmaid came around. Never having been a drinker, I thought you had to keep throwing them back in order not to lose that pleasant buzz. I doubt that there was a car unbarfed upon as I made my way out at 1:30 a.m. Meridee drove me home and stayed over to help as the world spun off its axis with great bravado the better part of the night. I remember my mother telling me the next day that "there is nothing worse than a drunk woman". And she indeed meant "nothing". My father uncharacteristically found it rather humorous, writing it off to some rite of passage to which I was now entitled, being a citizen and all. One Saturday night like any other I was there at the Sopwith Camel, busy accepting dances from a steady line of disco dandies when I noticed a guy in a red plaid western shirt apparently asleep at a dark corner table. He wore a gold Mezuzzah around his neck and had dark, tousled hair. But the thing I most noticed about him was that he was not noticing me. There he was asleep in a disco while I pranced in my finery mere feet away. What kind of a guy would be asleep in a disco? Of course, I had to know.
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