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The guy looked shocked. He grabbed his face then fell against Che-Che as his camera hit the ground and broke.

I opened the back door and hustled J.C.’s granddaughter
into my limo. As we pulled away, “Laker Cap” was still standing on the sidewalk holding his face.

J.C.’s hand was on my arm. “Thank you, Bruno.”

“No big deal,” I said. “I don’t like being strong-armed. The guy was out of line.”

“I won’t forget today,” she whispered. “That was very gallant.” Then she turned to her granddaughter. “Are you all right, Marcella?”

“The cocksucker deserved it. What a
cazzo.
Nice hook, Bruno. That’s your name, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Bruno.”

“That motherfucker’s been in my shit for three days. Ever since I got to L.A.”

“Marcella, do you mind? I’m in the car too. That language is simply uncalled for—I know, how about lunch, dear? Let’s put this unpleasantness behind us.”

“Sure, Nana. That’s a good idea. Anyplace where I can get a drink is fine with me.”

Then Che-Che lit a cigarette. She was rattled and pissed off. “You know, that blowjob Morty Shiff isn’t paying me enough to go on TV and front his line of goop and powder. I don’t need this crap. I should’ve asked for more money. A lot more money.”

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,”
J.C. whispered. “Please dear, you’re upsetting me. That’s quite enough.” Grandma was now attempting to comfort wide-awake, jumpy, fat Tahuti. “And please, do you mind not smoking in an enclosed car.”

“Okay, Nana, you’re right. I’m sorry,” she said, then tossed her butt out the window. “But between fuckin’ La Natura Cos
metics and that coke-slamming guitar player ex of mine, my goddamn life is a zoo. I’m really sick of this shit.”

As it turned out our problem wasn’t over. A few blocks later I saw two cars following us: a green two-door and an open, yellow sports car. I recognized both the guys riding in the passenger seats from outside the department store.

Che-Che noticed me checking my mirror then looked back and saw them too. “Now what?” she snarled. “These dickheads won’t leave me alone.
Menica!”

“I think we’ll be okay,” I said. “My company does a lot of concerts. I’ve been through this before.”

With that I punched the gas pedal, crossing the double line on Wilshire and speeding past the three stopped cars ahead of me waiting for the light. Then I swung a quick right on a side street. Reeves Drive.

I pulled over in front of a little residential hotel that was just off the corner—a hangout I knew about that catered to out-of-work studio musicians—called the Saint Paul.

“Look, Che-Che,” I said, pointing at the hotel, “I’ve got an idea. I know this place. There’s a lobby inside. If you get out here and give me about half an hour to get rid of these guys, we can swing back to pick you up.”

The beautiful girl sighed. “Sure. Whatever. Fuck it. Just be back here in half an hour.”

When the two cars finally caught up with my stretch Che-Che was safe in the hotel and J.C. and I were two blocks away.

On Roxbury Drive off Olympic I pulled over at the big park, slid all the limo’s tinted windows down, then parked in a blue handicapped space.

Getting out, I opened the door for Grandma and Tahuti. The guys in the two cars slowed down and drove past. They could see that Che-Che was not in the car. After a few minutes of J.C. sunning herself on a bench with black fatso, the paparazzi lost interest and drove off.

When we eventually got back to J.C.’s bungalow on Crescent Heights, it was four o’clock. Grandma and Che-Che had eaten lunch at Jimmy’s in Century City while I’d watched Tahuti snore and read two chapters from my book. Then we dropped the beautiful model at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

This time my customer allowed me to open the car door for her and help out by carrying her handbag up the walkway.

At the bungalow entrance the old lady was smiling. “Well, it’s been quite a day,” she said. “Honestly, I’m exhausted.”

“You’re home and everything’s okay,” I said. “I hope you’ll call us again—when you need a ride in an
old Pontiac.”

J.C. wasn’t used to giving compliments. She had to look down at Tahuti for inspiration before she could squeeze one out. “You’re a decent man, Bruno. A good man. Marcella and I are both grateful,” she whispered.

“Ten-four,
J.C.,” I said.

“And I’d work on my excessive misuse of your native tongue if I were you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

Then she unlocked her door and set her cat inside. After turning back she opened her purse and handed me four one hundred dollar bills. “Here. This is for you—for your trouble.”

I looked at the money. “That’s a big tip.”

“Ten-four,”
she said, grinning. “And as my stunning granddaughter might say, ‘You earned it. Big-time.’”

I began to turn away but I wanted to ask a favor—so I faced her again. I wasn’t sure how to do it. The words refused form in my mouth. “I…I,” I said. “Would you mind…if…very much…”

The blue-gray eyes fixed on me. “Speak up, Dante, for the love of God. I’m eighty-seven. I haven’t got that much time left on the planet.”

“Well, would you mind reading some of my stuff—a few stories?” I blurted. “I know it’s a big favor to ask, but…”

J.C. was beaming.
“A man was starving in Capri,”
she quoted.
“He moved his eyes and looked at me…”

“I know that one too,” I shot back, amazed at myself.
“I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, and knew his hunger as my own.”

“Not bad, Mr. Dante. You’ve read Millay. You may send me your work, or bring it. I will read what you’ve written…and give you an honest literary assessment.”

“I’ll drop it by tomorrow. Thanks, J.C.”

No reply. The door slammed and she was gone. Inside to the darkness with her mystic Tahuti. This ancient publisher and poet with a great mind and a short fuse.

I
hate banks. And lines. I get uncomfortable and impatient anywhere there’s a queue and not enough help behind the counter, especially at the bank.

It had been an okay morning so far and on my drive down Sunset Boulevard I’d been thinking about my new customer, J. C. Smart, and our meeting and also about her beautiful granddaughter, Che-Che. The idea came: Maybe I’d try writing some poetry again. It had always been a welcome distraction. For years in New York I’d carried a notebook and a pen around with me and jotted down lines that might later become a poem. Maybe I’d try doing that again.

For some reason most L.A. banks never have enough tellers and no matter how long the line gets, or who’s running the branch, the suits behind the rail, sitting at the desks, apparently never look up or give a rat’s ass how long their customers are logjammed.

Wells Fargo Bank is at Sunset and Vine streets in Holly
wood. My habit, on instructions from David Koffman, was to deposit all the checks and cash from the previous weekend’s work on Monday morning. Sometimes, some days, I’d need to go twice after the mail arrived in the afternoon if we were short on payroll. I’d come to hate the process.

This particular Monday I also needed to cash my check to pay back the advance I’d taken from the cash box.

As I entered the moneyshrine there were eleven people in the line in front of me with only three tellers to service them. Then one of the tellers mysteriously—spontaneously—slapped her “Next Teller Please” sign up and went away. Nine-fifteen on Monday fucking morning and the guy awards himself with a break while a line full of people are kept waiting. My brain went crazy.

Jimmy
suggested that I tell these flimflam cocksuckers, in the loudest voice possible, about how arrogant this abortion clinic they called a bank was. His voice was so loud that I had to tell him audibly to shut-the-fuck-up. The guy in front of me turned and shot me a look, then saw my eyes and wisely began to mind his own business.

My deposit and check-cashing took a total of thirty-one minutes. My sanity was gone.

On the way back to the office I got into a yelling beef with a motorcycle needlehead on a Harley who’d cut me off in front of Hollywood High, so to soothe myself a stop at the Liquor Mart on La Brea Avenue was inevitable.

I picked up six cheapo champagne bottles to replenish the office fridge and also purchased three pints of Hiram Walker for my personal relief and comfort.

By the time I reached the office I was four fingers down on pint one and had dropped two vikes to further take the edge off. My sanity was returning.

Three drivers were in the chauffeur’s room reading news
papers and watching Dr. Phil while Portia yapped away on the phone with another driver, oozing hyper-anxiety.

I went upstairs, closed the door, and turned on my computer. I was still fuming about the bank. I needed to write something. It didn’t matter what. Then the idea came: a love note to Wells Fargo Bank. Here it is:

T
he sex thing with Portia continued and I was becoming more crazy and edgy and angry with myself. The brutal mind attacks and the messages of stupidity and self-judgment were relentless. It was far worse in the morning after a night of booze.
Jimmy’
s voice screaming at me:
“Coward! Fool! You screwed that skinny, crippled bitch again! You’re using her. You’re a pussy. A needy cheesedick. You can’t manage this company. Koffman knows it and Portia will know it soon too and even your drivers think you’re a nutjob. Just wait. This’ll cost you. I promise. You’re on your way over the fucking edge!”

We were having sex three or four nights a week but I had to be buzzed to do it so the drinking and madness had risen back to an unmanageable level. Though the woman grated on me with her high-flung, know-it-all snootiness and nonstop mouth, like an addicted fool I continued the affair, getting drunk and pulling her into the chauffeur’s room or up to my bed, or leaning her over an office chair to hammer her from behind, or demanding that she suck me off.

The only thing that made it bearable was that when Portia got drunk too she could be funny, imitating different English accents and telling me crazy tales about the paramedic company in New York and plastic surgery doctors and her philandering cop ex-husband and his friends harassing the transvestite hookers in SoHo.

My daily writing became my only escape from
Jimmy’
s voice in my mind. I was now writing first thing in the morning at six a.m. no matter what—an hour to two hours—and had managed to produce ten decent stories. None of which I showed to Portia. In my experience the best time for a writer to write is when he is completely fresh with no distractions. I’d tried it again and again and there was no possible way I could concentrate later in the day if I’d been drinking. This nonsense about writers who are boozers and conceive their best work while half-jacked is simply crap. No writer can write drunk. It’s impossible.

Finally, one night alone in my room, after sex with Portia downstairs, I did something insane. I’d decided that I wanted to clean my gun. The thing had belonged to my father and I kept it in a shoe box in my drawer, an old S&W .38 Police Special he’d had for twenty-five years. Pop had taken it in lieu of a poker debt.

I knew it was loaded because I always kept it loaded. I’m not sure what possessed me but I fired it at my bedroom mirror. Twice. The bullets passed through the wall and one ended up in my bathroom sink and the other lodged in a can of shaving cream on the shelf. The noise of the explosions rendered me immediately sober.

A minute later Portia was up the stairs and banging on my door in a panic. I lied and said that the gun had gone off by mistake. She knew this was crap and it took me over an
hour to calm her down until finally I opened her shirt and began rubbing her tits, telling her how smart she was and how much I trusted her. She demanded that I give her the gun to throw away.

“You know you can be a very frightening person when you drink,” she whispered. “You’re a dangerous man. I see a kind of madness in your eyes.”

“That was my father’s gun. It’s a memento.”

“Was he like you when he drank? Was he this way?”

“Not really. But he was no pushover. He was filled with rage and long periods of silence. But when he drank too much he usually got mellow.”

“Did you love him?”

“No, I worshipped him. Look, I said I was sorry.”

“You should seek help.”

“I’ve tried—nothing works. I’m afraid that I’m crazy. I’m afraid I might just kill myself some night.”

“Commit yourself to therapy. You can go to a clinic. Hollywood is rife with free programs and therapeutic facilities. I overcame my issue with bulimia. If I can do it you can too.”

“Great. What about the hundred pieces of nicotine gum you chew every day? You’re a crackhead for that shit.”

“Think progress—not perfection. I’m in deadly earnest. You need help.”

“I hate those brain-sucking assholes. They’re crazier than their patients. Read the statistics some time. I hate that shit.”

“Promise me. Give me your word that you’ll at least consider it.”

“Okay. I’ll give it some thought.”

Then we screwed—her on top, moaning, pounding up and down, her ass bones digging into my thighs. After that we fell asleep. By noon the next day the incident was put to rest.

A couple of days later I made the decision to turn the day-today management of Dav-Ko over to Portia, giving her the title of office manager. She liked the business end and her new authority and I knew she’d be good at it. I had arrived at the point that I didn’t care about my job and dreaded being stuck alone in the office with her all day.

In the last month we’d added three more cars and two more drivers so I assigned myself the task of training the guys and buying their chauffeur uniforms and showing them the best routes to the airport and downtown. Busy work.

When the one-week training period was over I decided to begin driving more of our clients in the afternoon and evening, forcing sobriety on myself, absenting myself from the office.

In response, because she sensed me pulling away, Portia made the decision to hire a new night dispatcher: tit for tat. The kid was Joshua Wright, a twenty-nine-year-old black guy, a part-time actor and an ex-corporate bookkeeper with a master’s degree in theater. Portia interviewed Joshua twice then wanted me to talk to him too. I approved him right away because he was smart and had showed up to both meetings dressed in spiffy sports jackets with a shirt and tie and because he sounded like the Channel 4 guy on the TV news when he talked. Her plan was to have Joshua dispatch and do our company books in his evening downtime. Over the phone to New York David Koffman rubber-stamped the hire because we were saving money, covering two gigs with one employee.

On his first night of work Joshua arrived driven by his fiancée, a pretty, sexy college girl from USC dental school, Katie Sanders. A white girl. He introduced us and then announced that they would be married the next spring. I was
hoping that now I’d be off the hook and for once everything might be okay at Dav-Ko.

One of the clients whom I began driving regularly was Ronny Stedman, a film producer and a true Hollywood asshole. Ronny was originally from Australia but had been raised in L.A. from the age of ten. Now, at twenty-eight, he had made three films and had recently formed his own movie production company. His famous gay uncle Robert owned Adelaide Records and Adelaide Films. He’d passed on a few mil to Ronny to give the kid a running start in L.A. Ronny loved our stocked-bar limos and made up excuses to rent our cars two or three nights a week to hang out with his pretty singer-actress girlfriend, Carol.

When I drove them together they’d hit the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel or Sammy’s in Century City or Matteo’s in Westwood. Carol was a big baseball fan and when the Dodgers were in town the couple never missed a game. She was a former Texas beauty queen and a hot number, ten years older than Ronny. If they’d been partying late and had visited her coke dealer in Westwood on the way home to his Los Feliz condo, the center passenger partition would go up and she’d jump him right in the car. I like that. I liked her. She was funny and pushy and oversexed and refused to take any shit from her asshole boyfriend.

There were some nights when Ronny would go gambling alone at Hollywood Park Casino or one of the clubs in Gardena. I’d sit in the parking lot smoking cigarettes, reading a book, or jotting short story notes in my binder. Portia had instructions from me to only ring my cell phone in an emergency. Stedman didn’t know that I was Dav-Ko’s main guy in L.A. and I wanted to keep it that way.

He continued to request me to drive him primarily because I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t a wannabe anything, not an actor and not an aspiring director and I didn’t need a job in film production and I wasn’t one of the hundred people a day trying to get over on him or his uncle.

When, a couple of weeks later, he began a new film, I became his driver on a twelve-hour-per-day basis, shuttling assistants back and forth from the production office and running local errands. I was determined to stay busy and stay away from Portia and my boozing. I drank only a pint of Jim Beam while I worked, stretching the jug out as long as I could, plus a few wine coolers mixed in with my normal Xanax and Vicodin regimen to keep the edge off. I put in three days straight and had logged thirty-two hours behind the wheel.

The first day of actual shooting on
It Creeps
was a location at Santa Monica Beach beneath the Palisades, a quarter mile away from where a hundred
Baywatch
episodes had been filmed. It was a summer night-swimming scene where two girls are in the water nearly nude and their stalker, a tattooed serial killer called Kozmo in the script, wades in to slash them both up with his barber’s razor.

I drove Ronny and his secretary Kimberly around L.A. all that day running errands and then to the location during the setup at sundown. Ronny was edgy—barking orders—and constantly on his cell phone. We’d been fighting the home-ward-bound rush-hour traffic that feeds north on the Pacific Coast Highway from the 10 freeway.

As we pulled into the parking lot young Ronny became unglued. Some unsuspecting human shitball that was working on the film had been in a hurry and parked his Toyota sedan in the spot marked “X-Producer.”

Stedman threw his cell phone across the car, smashing it against the wooden console. Then he got out and slammed his two-thousand-dollar briefcase on the roof of the limo. Then he stomped over to where the director and the cast were running lines in preparation for the scene.

Kimberly had been putting up with his crap all day. She sighed deeply then jumped out too, hustling after him carrying the briefcase.

Standing there by Pearl, waiting for the shit to fly, was one of the grips, who came over to check out the stretch. He said his name was Chico but he wasn’t Mexican. Chico asked to look inside the limo and ogled the red leather and the woodwork and the TV and stocked bar. “Nice ride, my brother.”

“Thanks,” I said back. “Holllleeeewood. You know.”

“So how long have you been driving Mr. Big?” he asked.

“Not that long, but he’s become a damn good customer.”

“This is my third film with him. Ever been to his office at 9200 Sunset?”

“No,” I said.

“So you’ve never seen
The Orchid?”

“The Orchid?”

“Yeah, he has an orchid in a big pot behind his desk on the cabinet. Ronny’s famous for that orchid.”

“Okay,” I said. “How come?”

“Well, you know that Mr. Big almost never leaves his office during the day. He never goes out. During business hours when he gets busy on the phone and that stuff, when Mr. Big has to take a squirt, what do you think he does?”

“He pisses in
The Orchid?”

“Yup.”

“Isn’t it dead by now?”

“It’s a fake orchid. The thing’s plastic. He sprays air stuff around the office but it doesn’t matter. You can always smell
the stink.
The Orchid
and the piss smell are Ronny’s claim to fame in this town. His trademarks.”

I nodded. “He’s a pretty intense guy,” I said.

“His receptionists get the pleasure of emptying the planter every couple of days. That’s why he never keeps one for very long.”

“C’mon. Straight dope?”

Chico was grinning. “Straight dope, my man. Hey, anyway, gotta go. Nice ride.”

“Okay, see you.”

I looked over at the group standing by the director’s chairs. There was young Ronny. He’d found the culprit, an assistant director kid named Matt. Thirty feet away from my limo with two dozen crew members watching, Stedman was yelling and lambasting the guy for his stupidity and unprofessional conduct.

Matt was sorry, he’d been in a hurry delivering extra copies of the last-minute scene notes for the actors. But
sorry
ain’t shit.
Sorry
just didn’t cut it. Ronny Stedman was boss and he took this five-minute opportunity to make sure everyone present could completely comprehended how a true Hollywood jerkoff actually conducts himself.