Point Doom (2 page)

I have to stand to let the Glenn Close look-alike squeeze by me. But when I do, somehow the butt of my Charter Arms .44 snub-nose—a remnant of my New York City days—gets hooked on the backrest of my metal chair. The prick then tumbles out, clatters onto the seat, and falls to the floor.

I pick the gun up and tuck it back into the rear of my jeans, then sit down again.

Looking up I see that a dozen pairs of eyes are on me. The three girls in the baseball caps gawk but Claude’s expression is one of alarm. He grabs Meggie (in the pink thong) by the arm. “Vee must mooff from ere,” Claude hisses loudly, still glaring in my direction, “to anozer zeat.”

Meggie snatches up her tote bag, then turns back to me. “That’s pretty scary shit, JD,” she hisses. “A fucking gun at an AA meeting.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, “shit happens. Have a nice day.”

The two of them walk to the back of the full room and stand near the coffee table for the rest of the meeting.

THESE DAYS I
attribute my black moods and my unpleasant evaluation of all humanity to my long absence from alcohol. Sleeping at night has become impossible because of the off-and-on headaches and the dreams of blood and massacres, so I mostly busy myself by surfing porn sites, reading every book I can get my hands on, and then nodding off when I can. But I am usually awake until the sun comes up.

Since the age of twelve I have been into different forms of martial arts. Lately I’ve continued to work out and have walked the local beaches for hours. I have drunk coffee at every Malibu café within fifteen miles and “talked” recovery until I feel the onset of rectal cancer. I am unwillingly familiar with every snot-filled hard-luck story of every celebrity tabloid knucklehead at every AA meeting.

I am not a “winner” in sobriety. I do not kid myself. I now understand that booze is the great equalizer. I am the same as everybody else at the Malibu meetings—in the same fix. Beneath the cologne and Botox they are all holding on to their ass for dear life, just like me. They sit in these meetings in their sunglasses and Malibu Colony tans and whine about their canceled TV series or getting shafted in their divorce. Their kids hate them and are in jail or have wound up in rehab themselves. These people have what everyone in America thinks they want. If money and fame could fix it, they’d all be fixed. But they’re not. Not by a long shot. They suck air and shit once a day like everybody else. We’re all the same. Nowhere.

AT MOM’S HOUSE
that afternoon, with nothing to do, and no interest in visiting the sex chat rooms, I sat down at Jimmy Fiorella’s old typewriter and began to type. The idea of writing something on Pop’s antique machine had suddenly appealed to me and I decided to write like he had written. Before computers. So I began typing.

An hour later I looked at the clock. I had written two new poems.

Lighting a cigarette I leaned back and read what was in the machine and now on the desk in front of me. It wasn’t very good but I decided not to throw out the page.

TWO

T
he car sales job interview I got came through an AA pal, Bob O’Rourke, who everyone calls Woody. Woody had been selling used iron at a Toyota dealership in Santa Monica and, after six months, was the top guy on the totals board, making six to seven grand a month. I’d met Woody and his annoying big-toothed smile at the Malibu AA meetings. What we had in common was that we were both sober and drove old red Hondas.

Woody was five years off booze. Older than me. Probably close to fifty. What in AA they call a winner. He didn’t live anywhere near Point Dume but drove the twenty-two miles from Santa Monica two days a week to attend the meetings and network with movie people. He’s written three Mafia-themed screenplays and is a starstruck screenwriter-wannabe after twenty years in the car business in Massachusetts. One bleak East Coast morning he dumped his condo, packed up his Honda, and rumbled west to chase his L.A. fame fantasy.

When we’d first met and he found out my last name, he was immediately up my ass because of my father’s after-death literary fame. (Two of Jimmy Fiorella’s forty-year-old novels had been republished and become successful.)

Woody liked to pump me with questions about writing screenplays with my dad. His idea was that we were both sober and had a lot in common because of our screenplay work, and should be friends.

At first I kept trying to blow off the association, and in the beginning I even tried avoiding him. The guy was way too friendly for my taste—way too slick and well-spoken and recovered for me. But in AA, dodging someone is tough to do if you attend the same meetings.

What finally made us closer was when I saw for myself that Woody was a for-real badass, an authentic tough guy. Behind his Turtle-Waxed salesman’s grin and his Hollywood chitchat and perpetual cheeriness was the real deal. That, I liked.

And Woody was also a hope-to-die ladies’ man, one of those guys who, just by walking into a room, attracts women. Whether it was by his looks or personal style, I could never figure out. The guy was just good with women. Real good. He was usually dating two at a time.

Our friendship began for real at the Point Dume meeting two months before. Some guy—some Hollywood stalker knucklehead with stainless-steel piercings up and down both ears, and tattooed arms—had tracked his skinny model ex-girlfriend to the noon meeting. Tanya was tall and humorless, a way-too-beautiful dazed-looking ex-crackhead and Victoria’s Secret model who sipped one coffee after another through the hollowed stir-sticks off the tables.

When I first saw her, a couple of weeks before, she made a sort of half-assed move on Woody at the coffee counter, what in AA they call the Thirteenth Step. And, like I said, Woody’s a charmer, so he blew her off in a nice way.

Now she was standing outside before the meeting, making chitchat with her girlfriend, when the ex, a guy who used to be in some famous rock band, comes up and starts a rant about her not returning his calls and how she’d ruined his life and fucked him over and how he was here to show her that she should be careful who she is dissing.

The yelling and the back-and-forth soon got intense. Woody and me and another guy named Manny, a pal of Woody’s, who also sold cars, were drinking our coffees at our seats, just inside the AA room, waiting for the start of the meeting, when the ex grabs Miss Skinny and she begins pushing back and yelling.

The three of us step outside for a look-see. Captain Tattoo now has Skinny in a sort-of headlock and is screaming at her. She is attempting to fight him off by grabbing at his hair, with no success.

Enough becomes enough when we see the ex slide his hand into his jacket pocket, apparently for something sharp or with bullets in it. I did not see this part but Woody did, and for a change he wasn’t smiling. The asshole turns on him, snarling that he should mind his own business, then gives Woody a shove. Mistake no. 1. A second later what was in the guy’s pocket is now in his hand: a sharpened box-cutter shank. Mistake no. 2: Woody uses two or three nice moves, five seconds pass, and Tattoo is on the concrete, holding his nose.

From then on me and Woody were better pals. Later that day, we are drinking more coffee after the AA meeting with Manny at the Dume Café, and to my great annoyance, Woody offers me a fifty-fifty split if I’ll help him rewrite his latest Mafia screenplay so he can send it to his newest agent. I try to be cheerful. I even try to change the subject, but finally I have to tell him flatly that the idea is a loser and out of the question.

After that, thankfully, the conversation was dropped. To move on to something that does not piss me off, I ask Woody how he got the nickname Woody.

“Well,” he says, “years ago I used to play semipro baseball in Florida. I was a decent outfielder and I could usually hit home plate on one bounce from dead center field. I had a pretty strong arm.”

“Hey,” Manny says, “you must’ve been a helluva hitter, too, to pick up a nickname like Woody.”

“I batted .204 in my first season,” says Woody.

“Okay,” I say, looking at Manny, who’s also confused and shaking his head, “we don’t get it. Were they making fun of you because of your lousy hitting? Was calling you Woody some kind of a put-down?”

“It wasn’t my batting average they were talking about. The first week I was with the team, after practice, one day I was getting out of the shower. One of the guys saw my johnson, and the name got tagged on me.”

“So you’re hung like a bull elephant,” says Manny. “Is that it?”

Woody shakes his head. “Let’s just say that some of us are more gifted than others.”

“Great,” I say. “And the fact that you’ve got women crawling all over you makes it even worse—a brutal curse, no kidding.”

“Pal,” Woody says, shaking his head, “it’s a fifty–fifty deal. A poosh. I’ll just say this: It never kept me sober. In fact I’ve been in more than one jackpot because of women. Like today, only worse. As they say around AA, I was born with a bad picker.”

THREE

T
he job interview at the used-car lot was with Owen (Max) Maxwell, the used-car manager at Len Sherman Toyota. Max was Woody’s current boss and Woody had put in a good word for me.

That morning, after waking up again with my head pounding and the sweats from another nightmare about blood and dead people, I’d showered and dressed in my only pair of slacks with a shirt and tie. It took me almost ninety minutes in rush-hour traffic to drive from Point Dume to the dealership in Santa Monica.

I arrived early for the interview and parked down the block. I own a fake, blue Handicapped placard, so I zipped into a fifteen-minute meter space, reached up behind my sun visor, and pulled it down, then hung the thing on the rearview mirror. A month before, I’d borrowed Mom’s legal handicapped placard one day from where it hung from her Escalade’s rearview mirror, then had it color photocopied. I’d then trimmed it down with a scissors and glued both sides of the thing back together. A perfect forgery. So now I enjoyed the privilege of parking for free at Santa Monica meters and outside businesses, or in the blue Handicapped zones.

While I waited to go into the job interview I performed my daily ritual of calling my sponsor, Southbay Bill, on my cell. Bill has a reputation for being strict about having his sponsees call him every day. Bill goes to at least six AA meetings a week and has for twenty-five years or more. He’s a pretty chatty guy and dispenses a lot of AA snot advice. Conversely, I am not a loquacious person and had I known about Bill in advance I wouldn’t have hooked up with him. I’d seen him at a few Santa Monica meetings and everyone apparently considered him a pretty seasoned, easygoing cat. But when he started sponsoring me I discovered a problem that wouldn’t go away: Bill is a goose-stepping blabbermouth AA robot.

“Hey Bill,” I say into my cell phone, “I’m getting ready to go for that car sales job interview.”

“Good,” says Bill, “remember, tell the truth. And take God in there with you, and no smartass comments.”

“Good advice. Thanks.”

“And try a little humility, JD. You just might have good results.”

“Okay, I’ll remember that.”

“Call me when it’s over,” Bills barks. “I’ve got someone on the other line. I gotta go. Let me know how the interview went.”

I’d gotten lucky. No lengthy AA sermon today. “Okay Bill,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

THE USED-CAR SHOWROOM
was a large, one-story glassed-in rectangle with three spiffy, freshly detailed cars on the floor and brochure stands everywhere. There were half a dozen partitioned cubicles for the salespeople. Each of these was just large enough to contain a desk with a computer and two opposing chairs. I asked where Max’s office was and was told by one of the salesmen, who didn’t look up, that it was in the corner. Its windows looked out on the showroom and the big car lot beyond.

Max was tall with wavy gray hair and looked more like a golf pro than a car man. He was in his midfifties and wore an expensive sports jacket and pressed slacks. He had a couple of rings on each hand and a fancy, thick gold watch with little dials on the sides.

“Hiya,” he said, pumping my hand, a habit that appeared to be universal among used-car salesmen throughout Los Angeles. “Have a seat, James. It’s James, right?”

“Right. James Fiorella Jr. But I go by JD.”

Max tucked himself into a big brown leather office chair. His eyeglasses, which had been sunglasses when he came into the room, were now losing their tint. I hated glasses that did that. I handed Max my typed-out résumé.

“Woody says you’re an ace at sales and that I should give you a job.”

“Well,” I said, “if you hire me I’ll do my best. I’m serious about selling and I’ll give you a hundred percent of a hundred percent.”

Max eyed my résumé. “Ever sell iron? Used cars.”

“No. For the last couple of years I owned part of a high-end car rental company. You know, Hummers and Ferraris, that kind of thing. Before that I did telemarketing. I was a phone guy. I also published a book of poetry and I was also a detective in New York City. It’s all there on my résumé.”

Max kept going. “Woody told me about the Hummer company stuff and the phone rooms. How’d that go? What did you sell on the phone?”

“Printer toner, mostly. The company had a business restuffing toner cartridges in China. I did pretty well at it for a few years, then I got sick of scamming people. I took the money I made from the phone room and started the upscale car rental deal.”

Max smiled, then scratched his chin with a knuckle that held someone’s Super Bowl ring. “You’d better explain that,” he said. “Are you saying that when you worked at the telemarketing job you had to exaggerate to make your sales? I mean, I’ll be straight with you here, in the used-car business exaggerating is pretty much a part of the job description.”

“Well, there’s a difference,” I said. “In car sales the customer gets what he paid for. What I did with my phone room clients was different. What I did was bribe people all day long. Half my time was spent sending out color TVs and laptops to IT managers’ homes as incentives and buying Xboxes and football jerseys for their kids. They got all-expenses-paid vacations to Las Vegas and Hawaii and Disney World. We even sent them sets of golf clubs and tickets to the baseball and basketball playoffs and the World Series. Stuff like that. See the difference?”

“Sounds like big business,” Max said.

“Yeah, it was. I had two hundred corporate accounts. When I didn’t sell them re-furbed toner cartridges I was pitching our other stuff: copiers and printers and memory products. Fifteen of my customers were Fortune 500 companies.”

“Geez, sounds like you really hit the big bucks.”

“My last two years there I averaged five sales a day and a thousand dollars a sale.”

“And you got tired of that?”

“I wasn’t selling anymore. I was bribing. I was doing what the medical companies and banks and insurance companies do in Washington with the geniuses who run this country, the congressmen and senators. I was in the kickback business. After a while it disgusted me. I had to pack it in.”

“So how long were you in that business?”

“The dates are on my résumé. Too long.”

Max was still smiling. “So what was this toner pitch like? Give me an example of your presentation.”

For some reason I was now on my feet, gesturing. “Look at it this way,” I said. “If you were the customer on the other end of the phone, between me and my thousand-dollar commission for that call, what do you think I’d say?”

“I don’t know. What did you say?”

“Anything. Anything at all.”

Then I sat down.

Max laughed. “You seem like a pretty intense guy, JD.”

Then Max glanced down again at my résumé. “And you used to be a private detective?” he said with an amused smile. “In Manhattan?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I did that too.”

“A private dick? I’ve never met an actual private detective before. You know, you don’t exactly look the part. I mean you’re on the short side. You’re thick but you’re small.”

“That’s part of the reason I was good at it. People never look twice at me. I spent a lot of time in hard hats and polo shirts and overalls—blending in.”

“Ever carry a gun?”

“Yes, I did. My boss was ex-FBI—and a bad drunk—but through him I got my carry permit.”

“Ever use the gun?”

“Sorry, that’s confidential. I don’t discuss that.”

Max rolled his eyes. “Well, then, any interesting cases?”

“I’ll put it this way: I learned a few things.”

“Such as?”

“On the whole, the human race is pretty much in the crapper.”

Max lit a skinny cigar and returned to studying my résumé. “Okay,” he said finally, blowing out smoke and looking up at me. “I’m reading here under Additional Training. You’re also an MMA black belt?”

“I know self-defense. That’s correct.”

Another puff. Another cloud of smoke in my face. “And you went from L.A. to New York City and became a detective for five years. Is that how it went?”

“Right.”

“After the detective business and the poetry you returned to Los Angeles and became a telemarketer. And then you took the money from phone sales and opened a car rental agency?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

More smoke in my face.

“So, look, Max,” I said, fanning the shit away, “can I ask you something? Can we cut to the chase here? I need this job. I’m a motivated guy and I want to let you know that I’ve got the chops you’re looking for. Bottom line, I can sell.”

“I hear that, but I need you to be straight with me, JD. Woody mentioned that you guys go to AA together. Was your drinking why you changed jobs and blew off a couple of good careers? Was that it?”

“The answer is yes.”

“So you’ve flamed out?”

“I’m in recovery. It isn’t easy for me to talk about this stuff. I’m a good salesman and I need a decent job to support myself.”

“And now you’re drug-free? No booze? No bad habits?”

“For over a year.”

“So you burned your life down and now you’re looking for a way up and out. You want a shot at the car business?”

The conversation had just become too personal. This guy had climbed too far up my ass and I didn’t like it. I was being “honest” for the first time in my life in a job interview and it was being used against me. I had a strong desire to lean across his desk, knock the skinny cigar out of Max’s mouth, then grab him by his faggot paisley tie and punch him until I could see blood—a lot of blood.

“Okay, look,” I said, “Do you mind if we bottom-line this conversation? I can sell. I can sell anything. I can sell horseshit to quarter horses. You give me a shot at this deal and I’ll prove it to you. I’m a natural.”

I got up from my chair again and held out my hand in my best imitation of Woody O’Rourke. “So how about it, Max? Do we have a deal?”

Max got to his feet, too, but he didn’t shake. “Okay, here’s how I see it: you’re a friend of Woody’s. He’s been our top guy for months. Basically you have a good background in selling and if Woody says you’re okay, then that’s good enough for me. I’ll give you a shot.”

But Max still didn’t shake my hand. Instead, his attention wandered to a notebook on his desk. He flipped it open and looked down at a list of what looked like upside-down license plate numbers. “Sherman Toyota supplies a demo car to all our salesmen. You’ll get yours tomorrow. We pay straight commission every two weeks.”

“Woody told me about the demo car and I know there’s no guarantee,” I said.

“How’s your driving record and arrest record?” Max asked. “Sherman does a background check.”

I’d been worried that the question would come up and my head began to pound. I had to lie. It was my first and only lie in the interview. My DUIs would surely disqualify me from the job, although one was old enough to have come off my driving record. The last one had been reduced from a felony DUI. There were other things too: I had a jacket with the NYPD, but that wouldn’t come up in any California DMV search. My pal Woody had assured me that Sherman Toyota almost never does a background check for the first three months. By then, if I was selling well at the dealership, I might even be able to buy my own car and the problem would be moot. I wouldn’t need their demo car.

“It’s fine,” I told Max.

Of course the demo car was the reason I wanted the job in the first place—otherwise I’d be stuck in Malibu forever with Mom and Coco and their goddamn cats, motoring the earth in my mother’s worthless red Honda shitbox. Getting away from Point Dume was my only priority. The car job was my way out.

“Okay, JD,” Max said, “be here tomorrow at seven forty-five
A.M
. The Saturday sales meeting starts at eight o’clock. Rhett Butler is our new GM as of yesterday. You’ll meet him tomorrow morning. Rhett has to okay you and then you’re hired, but that’s only a formality. All the sales people are usually hired by me.”

“Rhett Butler?” I asked. “As in
Gone With the Wind
Rhett Butler?”

Max was grinning. “Not exactly. You’ll see tomorrow.”

WHAT I WOULD
learn the following morning was that Len Sherman Toyota was in the middle of an upper-management housecleaning. This was something my AA pal Woody had neglected to tell me, probably because it had just happened the day before. The old co-manager of Sherman—Arthur Sherman, the nephew of the guy who started the company—and the finance guy and the former GM had been summarily dumped two days earlier.

Max had worked for Rhett Butler at another dealership, so he was not axed with the others. Apparently, abrupt purges of this kind were fairly common in the car business in Santa Monica. Heads rolled regularly up and down the boulevard and whole staffs were often replaced over a weekend. Rhett Butler and his ninja team of management hard-asses had gotten a reputation for traveling from dealership to dealership over the last several years, increasing sales by twenty-five to fifty percent wherever they went. To me, this stuff was right out of a Louis L’Amour cowboy novel: the new sheriff is brought to town to root out the deadbeats and restore order and big bucks to the dealership. Me and the rest of the used-car sales staff would find out about Rhett Butler the following morning—the hard way.

After filling out employment forms, I spent the next hour with Max. He showed me their eighty-car inventory of used vehicles and described the commission structure. There was no medical insurance and no paid vacations. This was the L.A. car business.

For me the odd, coincidental part about working a sales job at Sherman Toyota in Santa Monica turned out to be the car dealership’s proximity to St. Monica Catholic High School, near Reed Park. My old high school was only a couple of blocks away. I was back where I’d left off twenty-five years before. At St. Mo’s I had spent my high school life being disciplined and harassed by the diabolical and violent Brothers of Saint Patrick, the meanest sons of bitches to ever put on black robes and attain green-card status.

I knew the entire neighborhood like the back of my hand: the flooring shops and the bathroom wholesalers on Lincoln Boulevard, the massage parlors, the fast-food restaurants, even Reed Park itself, where as a ninth grader I had ditched wood shop at eleven
A.M
. every day with my pal Bobby Waco to smoke in the grandstand of the tennis courts. It was there that me and Bobby had received our first blow jobs for five bucks each from one of the drunken transient women who slept in the park every night.