L.A. Success (11 page)

“And you're the guy who's going to give me this idea?” he asked, with one of his eyebrows arching up. “I'll tell you what. I'm headed out of here now—I need to get back before this gets cold. But some day, if I ever see you here again, I'll let you tell me about your idea the time it takes me to get through the line. And you'll buy the coffee.”

This wasn't what I wanted at all. I was hoping he'd like my bogus idea and take it directly to Spieldburt. Of course, what he'd really be taking him would be a pile of papers with a note from me inside, explaining how smoothly I was handling his case. This Grant guy was turning out to be more of an obstacle than anything else.

“Okay buddy. I got some ironing out to do on it, and then I'll come back and blow your mind,” I said. I was pretty sure I'd never see him again, and since he seemed to think he was better than me, I was happy about that. He got in his rusty hatchback and drove off. I had been right about him being a New Englander: the plates on his car were from Massachusetts. I got in the Charger, drank my coffee and listened to the radio for another half hour, then hit the highway.

Part 2

1

It was the day of the big open house, and I was feeling a little nervous. There were lots of things that I hadn't thought through enough, like what if I told Gertie I wanted to buy the house and, instead of calling her lover to celebrate, she called Spieldburt? Or what if she got so excited that she tried to do me instead of her lover? I really needed to get those pictures because after today she was never going to forget my face again. If I got caught following her after the open house, she'd probably come over and kick me in the kiwis.

I checked myself out in the mirror. Dennis' clothes looked great, and for some reason they fit me better than ever. The jacket I chose was perfect because it could be buttoned at the bottom. That way my usual amount of belly sticking out from underneath my Arnold would be covered up. Now that was class.

I leaned in close to the mirror, checking out all the little details of my face I'd never really looked at before. It was like looking at a butterfly. You look from a ways back and you see the nice wings, all colorful and flapping around. Then you get in close and you see those huge fly eyes, the antennae, the curly-snout thing that looks like it could suck your brains out, that hairy abdomen and those nasty insect legs. I started getting the creeps looking at myself. It looked like one third of my eyebrows had decided to grow out longer than the others and in new, exciting directions. My nostril hairs looked like tentacles that would latch on to passing prey and pull it in. I couldn't believe I'd been sticking my finger in there for so long and had never noticed. But the worst were the ears. They were like hairy tarantulas hanging out on the sides of my head. I hated spiders, so this was freaking me out royally. I was having a mini panic attack, imagining how people must have stared at me everywhere I had gone recently like I was a weirdo. My god, how had Helen put up with all this?

I had to get this taken care of before I talked to another human being. I thought the best thing would be to go to a beauty place where they didn't speak English so that I wouldn't have to listen to humiliating comments from the poor chick who was going to have to operate on me. I also knew that in Santa Monica I would have to pay too much, and they'd probably make me drink some kind of fruity root tea and listen to music designed to make you meditate, and all that would piss me off. So I gathered up my things, jumped in the Mercedes and headed for Korea Town.

2

I got off the 10 and drove up Vermont Avenue looking for a beauty place, but all the signs were in Korean, so from the road I couldn't tell what was what. Then I passed by what looked like someone's house. It had a sign in Korean, but it also had Mexican and English on it. It said "Beauty massage." I pulled in, put the roof up on the Mercedes, locked it, and walked in the front door.

A chick was sitting at a desk in what clearly used to be a living room. She looked up at me and smiled. Behind her in the kitchen I could see five beauty chairs in a row, and there were women back there getting their nails done. All the employees I could see were really hot, so I was thinking I'd made a good choice driving out to this place.

“Hi,” I said to the girl at reception. She smiled again and nodded, and by that I understood that she didn't speak American. “I want to take all this off. This stuff here,” I said, pointing at my newly discovered yetiness. She understood what I wanted and made a few scribbles on the agenda. Then she called for someone from the other room.

I was hoping one of the beautiful chicks would be working on me. In the few seconds it took for someone to arrive, I imagined meeting a gorgeous woman who'd communicate with me only through meaningful gestures. I'd become a regular client, each time becoming more and more friendly until one day I'd find her in the back room crying her eyes out. I'd take her in my arms and ask her what was wrong, and she'd tell me that her Korean gangster boyfriend was threatening to have her deported if she didn't start making dirty movies. She'd refuse to tell me where I could find him, but I'd eventually get it out of her and then head over there with a baseball bat and start breaking shit. Then we'd get married, and as soon as she had the green card, she'd stick me with a baby and take off. Damn, what was I getting myself into here?

An older lady, a kind of Korean Gertie—cigarette, whiskers and all—came up to me and led me back to the kitchen. She sat me down in one of the chairs and had a good look at me. My plan kind of backfired because she started speaking to everyone else in the room, and since I couldn't speak Korean, I was the only one who couldn't understand what she was saying. I knew she was talking about me because she would say something new and grimace every time she checked out one of my hairy spots. It didn't take me long before I could pretty much translate everything.

“My god, look at this big hedgehog,” said Korean Gertie. “How do you think he hears or smells anything with so much hair growing out of his holes?”

“Who cares? With all that hair, he must be very virile,” said an oldster next to me. “Perhaps he would be like an animal in the sack.”

“I would have to be careful and ride on top of him. Otherwise he would squash me like a grape!” said Korean Gertie. All the other women laughed and looked over at me. I smiled like a dickhead.

She took out some tweezers and went to work on my brows. It felt like she was trying to kill me, but she had a smile on her face and giggled occasionally. Once she got all the stray ones, she took out a comb and a pair of scissors and cut the long ones down to normal size.

While she was looking over my ears, two girls came up and started working on my hands and feet. I didn't think I'd asked for this, but then who knows what I’d asked for. Anyway, it felt good and couldn't hurt anything.

Korean Gertie plucked one of my ear hairs, and I howled louder than I had ever howled in my life.

“That's a bad hedgehog man!” she said and shook her head. She put down the tweezers, and I was extremely happy about that. She went upstairs and came back five minutes later with a tin can. She took a tongue depressor, dipped it in the can, and then applied the warm, soothing stuff all over my ears. It felt so good that I imagined this was her way of apologizing for having tweezed that hair out of me. Then she took two strips of cotton and pressed them against my ears. She waited for the girls to finish with my feet and hands, and then had them stand on either side of me. She got right in front of me and started talking again.

“Yes, very sorry hedgehog man. We always try to use the cheap way first to save money, but since you are soooo nice, I broke out the liquid that instantly dissolves hair and makes you handsome. Now we'll gently take it off. Then....all....done!” she said loudly, and the two chicks to the left and right of me ripped the cotton off my ears. I believe I passed out for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, Korean Gertie was right up in my face and I could smell her foul breath. I could feel my heart beating in my ears. The two cute Koreans were holding what looked like large spiders in their hands, showing me all the hair they'd just ripped off.

She grabbed a mirror and held it up for me to look in. My ears were the color of beets, and if I'd actually touched one of them I would have died, but I had to say I was looking pretty good. Korean Gertie looked at me confidently, as if she were saying that she could turn anything into something respectable to look at. I gave her an appreciative smile.

For the nose, she was a lot nicer. She had a round electric trimmer that she stuck up there and wiggled around, and that shaved everything off.

I'd always heard the jokes about getting a happy ending at places like these, but how were you supposed to go about asking for one? I didn't want to do anything stupid and not be able to come back, so I looked at Korean Gertie and made downward glances with my eyes so she could catch my drift. I figured that would give her the opportunity to show me either that she didn't know what I was talking about or that she was game, without me looking like a big pervert. She followed my eyes down and then looked back up at me. Then she pointed to the staircase. I got up, and she led me upstairs to a former bedroom that had a massage table in it. She pointed to the table and I got up on it. She moved behind me to the counter and must have been fiddling around with massage stuff, because I started smelling something good. Maybe she was going to heat up some oil or something. Then she crossed by me and walked over to the stereo. She put a CD in, and I was about to tell her I didn't want to listen to any new-age crap when I heard nature sounds coming out of the speakers. I could hear a gently running stream, an occasional owl, crickets, and then a sound I could barely hear at first that got clearer and clearer, so that eventually I couldn't hear anything else but this: frog barking. I fought against it for a minute, but I suddenly had an overwhelming need to take a nap. Maybe it would make my ears feel a little better anyway, a nice, quick nap. And then Korean Gertie could make with the hand doing.

I closed my eyes, fell asleep and started dreaming. In my dream, I floated around in a warm, peaceful river, and then swam over to a little cove filled with lily pads. The weather was beautiful and the air was fresher than it ever was in L.A. All the frogs were looking at me in a friendly way, inviting me to move in closer. There were three of them looking right at me, and they seemed to want to tell me something. I swam over closer and looked at their froggy mouths as they opened and said something I didn't understand in Korean. All of a sudden, I noticed that the frogs were now very large and were standing over me with their hands near my nether regions, and I was no longer in the stream. Then I noticed these weren't frogs anymore. I was awake back on the massage table, and all three of these chicks must have been working on me for some time. My unit felt all warm. Korean Gertie looked at me and said something familiar. I had just enough time to look down and see my newly-trimmed bush and to notice the sheets of cotton and wax they had applied to my hairy shaft before they ripped them off in a
tour de force
of coordination and pain.

I was going to howl worse than before. I was going to start breaking shit and going crazy like a tornado, but when I looked down at my manliness, it now seemed, without the hair, twice as big as before. I'd have put up with a lot worse to have a bigger-looking unit. The waxing really hadn't been that bad when I thought about it from that perspective.

I stifled all the screams and tears I would normally have let out and put my pants back on. I said thank you several times, and that reassured them. Korean Gertie helped me down the stairs and took me over to reception. I paid her, left tips for the other girls and put a business card in my wallet. She smiled like the wise old wizard who sends the apprentice off to kill monsters.

“Goodbye, hedgehog man,” she said, I think.

3

I headed back west. The pain slowly faded away, leaving me with all sorts of new, sensitive hairless areas shifting around in my pants. This was another one of those things I wasn't going to be able to tell anyone about, unless...

I dialed Helen up on my shit phone.

“Hi Lonnie,” she said.

“Helen! How's it going?”

“Better. I called your house the other day, but some guy who didn't speak English answered.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That was my new roomy. Hey listen, do you want to have lunch Monday?”

“I don't know...”

“Come on. It's just lunch. I got a lot of stuff to tell you about,” I said, and I knew that would work because she had to be dying to know why I had been driving a Mercedes last time she saw me.

“Okay. But just lunch. Where do you want to go?”

“La Serenata, on Pico.”

“All right. That sounds good. See you there,” she said.

4

When I made it out west, I took the 405 south and then turned west on Manhattan Beach Boulevard. I followed the directions on Gertie's open house flyer all the way to a beautiful, three-story house on Ocean Drive. It reminded me of a shotgun-style house because it was crammed between two apartment buildings. It was definitely a luxury home, with huge windows and a nice balcony facing the ocean. I was sure you could spy on a lot of bikini-clad chicks from up there.

The door was open so I walked in. I didn't see anyone at first, so I checked the place out. The living room was separated from the kitchen by a dark, granite-covered bar, and all the appliances were stainless steel and looked professional. The woodwork and tile flooring looked brand new. I leaned over a little to get a closer look.

“That tiling was brought over from Europe,” I heard Gertie say. I looked up and saw her in front of me. She was looking at a portable, touch-screen computer, swiping her finger over it. She looked up. “Sorry, just had to finish a little business there. I'm Gertie Elliot. Welcome.”

“Hi, I'm—” and her phone cut me off.