L.A. Success (7 page)

I went downstairs and rifled through
the kitchen drawers for a telephone book. I got her office address from the
real-estate section and decided that the first thing I'd do was grab some
binoculars, go to her office and sit around waiting for her. Then I could tail
her and find out where she lived.

My dad walked in with the dog, and I
told him I was going out for a while. I had no idea when I'd be back, so I told
him if I didn't make it back in time for dinner, I'd have a pizza delivered.

17

I jumped in the Charger and started
driving over to Gertie's office in Culver City. I was excited because this was
going to be my first big stakeout. I imagined a street filled with big trees
that I'd park under. I'd be hidden by the shade and glued to my binoculars.
People would drive by me, and I'd duck down quick to avoid detection. I'd go
over the facts of the case again and again and make notes about everything, and
then when I finally caught a glimpse of her, I'd roll into action, following
her back to her place.

The address said Gertie Elliot's
office was on Overland Avenue. I thought I was in the wrong place at first
because when I got there, I found myself in a strip mall. The only trees around
were palm trees, and there weren't very many of them, so I just parked outside the
Starbucks nearby. That didn't seem too detective-like to me, but there was no
shade, so what could I do?

I got out of the car and looked
around a bit. On the other side of Overland and a couple of blocks to the south
was the entrance to Sony Studios. That made sense. Maybe this Gertie met all
sorts of movie types, since she did real estate right next to where they
worked. Her office was a few businesses up, sandwiched between a cell-phone
place and a fitness club. Otherwise, there was a mattress store and a pharmacy,
and behind the strip mall there was a huge electronics store and some fast food
joints. I went into the pharmacy, bought some paper and a pen, got back in the
car and drew a quick map of everything so I'd be able to show Spieldburt
exactly where I put in my hours.

I'd just about finished my map when
I saw a meter maid cruising through the parking lot. I hadn't seen any parking
meters here, so I wasn't worried, but the chick actually stopped at my car. She
tapped on my window.

“Yeah? What is it?” I asked.

“Sir, you're parked in a Berdly
Fitness spot. Are you a Berdly customer?”

“No, I am not a 'Berdly customer',”
I said, trying to imitate her official tone.

“Well, you're going to have to move
your car.”

“What if I don't want to?”

“Sir, we tow a lot of cars every
month. Your car looks really nice, and I'd hate to see it scratched up by the
tow company. They tend to be fairly jealous, so when they see a nice car like
this, they aren't very careful.”

I couldn't believe it. I wasn't being
very nice to this lady, and she was being nice to me because I had a nice car
and nice clothes. If I'd have been in my piece-of-junk car wearing my
flip-flops and stained shorts, she probably wouldn't even have given me the
warning. This was crazy.

“Thanks for letting me know. Sorry I
was being rude—I really need some caffeine. Where can I park?”

“Anywhere you don't see a Berdly
stop sign painted on the ground. Most of these are 15-minute spots, but over by
the electronics store there's unlimited parking.”

“Thanks,” I said. I started the car
up and drove over there. It was all wrong. I couldn't see anything anymore. I
grabbed my pen and paper, put the binoculars in my jacket pocket, and walked
back over to the strip-mall parking lot.

The first thing I did was pass
quickly by Gertie Elliot's door. I didn't even look in. That way if she saw me,
she'd think I was just some dude going somewhere in a hurry. That was pretty
sneaky, I thought. Then I went by a second time and pretended I was having a
conversation on my shit phone, all the while taking pictures through the
windows of her office. Then I had to find a place to look at the photos. I
couldn't just stand in the parking lot and do that because there was a security
guy walking around, and every time he saw some punk in a hooded sweatshirt, he
was on top of them telling them not to touch any cars. If I stood around long
enough, he'd probably come harass me, too. So I went over to the Starbucks,
because if there's one thing I'd learned, it's that nobody ever suspects you of
anything as long as you're drinking coffee. I went inside and waited in line.

“Hey, you got anything that someone
who normally doesn't come here would like?” I asked the teenager behind the
counter.

“Do you mean do we have anything
that people who don't
like
coming here would like? Because if they liked
coming here, they'd definitely like
something
, but if they don't like
coming here, it's because they don't like anything here,” he said. “And how
could we give someone who doesn't like coming here anything other than
something he doesn't like?”

This guy was trying to confuse me
with some sort of logic. I didn't have time for this crap.

“Here's what I mean smart guy. Can
you imagine Magnum P.I. coming in here and ordering something?”

“Yes, I can. We've got lots of
customers who wear Hawaiian shirts and drive Ferraris. We get people from Sony
Studios in here every day, so I've pretty much seen it all.”

“Well, imagine what you would give
those guys, and give me one of them. Make it really big.”

He went back and fooled around with
some gadgets. I thought he was screwing around back there, but it turns out
everything he was doing was for my coffee. He came back with a big cup and
handed it to me.

“Caramel Macchiato,” he said.

I paid the kid and went outside. I
sat down at one of the tables that had a sun umbrella and made sure I could see
the door to Gertie's office. This location seemed a little less cool than
waiting in a dark street in the Charger, but that's life I guess.

For a while I just let the coffee
sit there on the table. I'd never actually taken a sip of coffee from this
place before. Whenever I'd bought a cup of it in the past, I'd just waited for
it to get cold and thrown it away. I had never thought of myself as a coffee
guy, and since I had only needed it to blend in occasionally, there had never
been a reason to actually taste it. But now there I was with no booze around,
so I took the cup and gave it a try. Almost immediately, my heart rate
increased. I had the impression that my metabolism was speeding up, that I was
digesting faster, that if I wanted to, I could actually run for almost a
minute. The warmth that was normally just in my hand now spread out all over my
body. It was like someone had invented an anti-booze. I was thinking that now
I'd be able to get really wasted and then switch gears whenever I wanted. I
took some bigger swigs and almost burned my mouth, but I didn't care because I
was feeling ready for anything.

I started going through the pictures
I'd taken of the real-estate office. Most of my photos were blurry versions of
the photos of houses and condos that were posted up on the window. But
occasionally I could see behind them into the office. No one was there. It was
a small room with a desk and a couple of chairs for the customers. She had a
big computer monitor on her desk, but not much else. In the back of the room
there were some filing cabinets and shelves.

It was a little after four o'clock,
and I was starting to get bored. Normally when you're on a stakeout, you're in
a car and you have a partner who is in love with you who starts telling you all
sorts of secret love-confession stuff while you're looking at something
important in your binoculars. And then you answer something like, “hey, you
know when we made sweet love that last time I was separated from my wife, but
now we're back together so we can't do it anymore.” And she answers that she
doesn't care, that you were great together and she had never felt as safe and
alive as she had when she was in your arms and stuff. And then through the
binoculars you see the perp whack someone over the head with a wrench, and so
you get out of the car, pull out your gun and start running after the bad guy,
guns a' blazin'. Maybe I'd bring Ballsack next time.

Okay, things were getting weird
because of the coffee. I was thinking a mile a minute, imagining all sorts of
shit. I suddenly had the desire to write down every thought that came into my
head, so I took the pen and my little stack of paper and started going crazy. I
was lost in my own little world of caffed-up writing and didn't see anything
going on around me. My pen was starting to make so much noise that when I
finally looked up I noticed everyone was looking at me. Four or five
ugly-looking dorks with laptops had joined me at the outdoor tables, and they
all had huge cups of coffee. I was about to yell at them and tell them I'd make
as much noise as I wanted when the skinniest dork—a bald guy wearing jeans and
a USC sweatshirt—started talking.

“Damn, the muse is with you today. I
tried writing on paper for a while, but I couldn't stand the sight of my own
handwriting. No matter what I wrote, it seemed like a bad idea. I would type my
work up later, and it would need so much editing that I went back to typing
directly.”

Then I saw that all the other dorks
were also looking at me in admiration. They weren't pissed off about the noise.
They were impressed.

“Well...I can't type very well.
Plus, I got a thing with computers. You know—a naked-chick thing. Turns me into
a drooling zombie for a while,” I said before I could stop myself. This
caffeine was making my mouth go faster than my brain. One of the other dorks at
his laptop nodded his head yes all serious.

“Same thing used to happen to me,”
he said. “I had to have the wireless feature disabled. You remember that Nick
Cage film where he keeps telling the bad guys to put the stuffed bunny down?
Well, I wrote that whole movie as fast as I could while signed into a live porn
site. Half of the lines in that movie I meant to type in the sex-chat window.
That was when I knew I had hit bottom and had to do something about it.”

They all went back to typing. I
looked at the pile of paper in front of me and saw that I had written about
forty pages of god knows what. Several pages of it appeared to be drawings of
me in super-hero costumes doing it with stick-figure chicks. I also noticed
that it was now almost seven o'clock. If Gertie had come by here, I hadn't
noticed. Damn, I had a new drinking problem.

“You guys here every day?” I asked.

“Whenever there's work to be done,”
said the bald guy.

“Well then, I'll see you again
soon,” I said and gathered up my things.

18

I drove back home. All the
west-bound lanes moved along perfectly. In the other direction, the people who had
to drive home to the east side sat blocked in mile after mile of traffic jams.
I almost felt sorry for them, except that if they weren't there suffering, I
wouldn't have fully appreciated what a lucky guy I was to have a house out
west. Someone's always gotta pay.

As I entered Dennis' neighborhood, I
saw my dad out walking the big poodle. I couldn't believe that he had decided
to take him out all on his own.

I pulled in and got out of the car.
When my dad made it over, we went inside. I could tell that he had been
sculpting again because there were wrappers from the blocks of chocolate lying
around. Ballsack licked at them a little, so I guessed he was hungry, too. I
picked all that up, gave the big poodle some food, and turned on the tube for
dad. I ordered a couple of delivery pizzas and then sat down on the couch. My
body was aching from the caffeine ride it had been through. I really needed
some food and a good night's sleep.

After dinner I walked home with
Ballsack. Tommy said something like “I 'ave I-runned you cloziz” to me when I
passed through the living room, but I was so tired that whatever he meant
didn't register. I only grunted and kept going.

That night I dreamed all sorts of
weirdness. I think the caffeine in my body was making my brain remember stuff.
I dreamed about my meeting with Spieldburt the other day, but this time, since
I wasn't wasted, all sorts of details I had missed the first time were coming
back to me. I now remembered, for example, something I had asked him. This is
how I remembered it in the dream:

“So Spieldburt, when you did that
E.T. movie, did you ever think about how ridiculous a similar but reversed
situation would be? Like, if a human scientist went to another planet and got
stranded, would he be standing there going 'hmm...I have to improvise a complex
intergalactic-communication device so that I can contact my scientist
colleagues who left me here by accident—oh look! There's candy on the ground! I
love candy! I should pick up the pieces slowly and pay no attention at all to
where I'm going.' I mean, come on, was this the dumbest E.T. on the ship or
what?”

“You have a sound point,” Spieldburt
answered, stroking his beard. “I really could have used someone like you to
point out these glaring contradictions in my film. Perhaps after you find out
whether my lover is cheating on me you could read through some of my newest
projects?”