Magnificent Vibration (20 page)

Dumb-asses!

“H
oratio? I’m selling the house.”

Mom has met me at the front door as I return from the hunt. I’ve been out on safari, exploring the wilds in search of the extremely rare and highly endangered American Job.

Like a couple in a bad marriage, my mother and I have been drifting apart and doing nothing to rectify it, so this thing about the house is not a completely unforeseen event.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’m moving into a condominium in Sherman Oaks.” It’s clear she doesn’t plan on having me join her.

“What’ll I do with all my stuff?” I sound like a lost, loser of a kid all of a sudden.

“I expect you could throw half of it out and wouldn’t miss it. All those silly plastic monster figurines (figurines?), and you don’t even wear most of the clothes in your closet. The furniture is mine, but I need a fresh start so I’m going to have a garage sale and sell everything.” She seems to have been thinking this through for some time now. I’m starting to feel a little blindsided the more she talks at me, even though she’s hinted at this sort of me-less future before.

“You’ll have to find yourself an apartment somewhere. And get a job.”

“What about Josie’s ashes?” I ask. They still sit on the dining room table where I first set them down, over a month ago.

“I don’t want those. That’s not my daughter in that box,” she answers.

“I’ll take them,” I say, and I realize, apart from the two outfits I always wear, some underwear, socks, and a few toiletry items, the only thing of meaning and value I will take from my twenty years in this house is that black plastic box. All that’s left of my sister’s earthly form.

I am given twenty-eight days to get my shit together and vacate the premises.

And miracles of miracles, three months later I get a job delivering pizza and my financial security is assured. Except that I don’t have a car. And I still don’t have a license. And I haven’t told Ernie’s Pizza that I don’t have a car or a license.

Mother has caved and let me sleep on the couch in her new condo after the sale of the house and the expiration of my mandatory twenty-eight-day “get-your-own-apartment” time limit. But now that I have a job and am flush with cash, I’m instructed to get the hell out and find
my own damn place. So I have the damn job, now to find the damn place. And the damn car and the damn driver’s license. I settle for a damn motor scooter. I skip the damn license for now and figure I’ll get it when I’m damn ready. I have to borrow money from my mother to get the apartment thing going, but I suspect she’s only too happy to lend it to me and to finally see the last of my heathen, nihilistic, licentious male Cotton backside as I exit her life forever.

I move into a closet masquerading as an apartment in Burbank and begin to hit the nine-to-five (although in reality it’s more like eight a.m. to midnight) delivering pizza for the renowned Ernie’s Pizza Di Napoli. Who knew “Ernie” was Italian? And from Napoli, no less. Because he sounds like he’s from Redondo Beach. I begin my illustrious career as a courier of the heart attack-inducing halos of white flour, cheese, monkey-meat and tomato paste from Ernie’s of Napoli, via SoCal.

Everything goes swimmingly until a dissatisfied customer calls Ernie and complains about one of my deliveries. They want to know if the little pieces of freeway gravel are an extra topping or just part of the unique ingredients in Ernie’s extra-large cheese and pepperoni. Have you ever tried to balance an oversized and extremely hot pizza on a scooter’s handlebars while zooming along the freeway at forty-five MPH with trucks and cars whizzing dangerously close making wild wind vortexes that shake and wobble the crap out of you and your little bike, too? The pizzas fall off occasionally, and I do my best to pick the road-kill out of them if I’m unlucky enough that the box opens up on impact, but so far there hasn’t been a problem. The people who’ve called to complain about the added pebbly roughage in their order say they thought they heard the sound of a small motorbike pulling away from their house post-delivery. So Ernie wants to see my car. I show him my scooter instead. He takes a swing at me but my reactions have been honed from dodging
my mother’s flailing fists through the years, and he misses by a mile. Correctly assuming I am fired, I jump on my scooter, flip Ernie off, and ride away with my dignity intact, as Ernie hurls unkind epithet after unkind epithet at yours unemployedly’s retreating ass-end. My dreams of a pizza delivery monopoly are shot to hell, however.

I’m only on my second girlfriend (unfortunately this tally includes the Reverend’s wife), so obviously the gigolo career isn’t going to happen either, damnit. My second girlfriend gives me the boot once the weather starts to turn colder and she gets fed up arriving at our destinations with her eyes tearing, her nose red and dripping, and an ill-behaved case of helmet hair. I get it, though, and am now seriously motivated to purchase a car (with the all-important backseat, wink, wink). Honestly, what a clueless goober I was.

But first I have to find another job so I can actually afford the car. And somewhere along the way I’ll need a driver’s license.

A year or two into the serious job search, with more pizza delivering (still on the scooter, I’m afraid), busboying, and Starbucks
trashemptying to help pay the rent and feed myself, I actually land a real adult job! I walk out of the interview at Apex Audio/Video Dubbing Sound Stages with the news that I start the following Monday still spinning around in my head. How did I fool them so completely? Why can’t I do that all the time? I am absolutely giddy with success. And also extremely concerned that they’ll find out I’m just a kid, even though my license, yes, license, says I am now twenty-three. When does the “man” thing kick in, I wonder? I thought it was at twenty-one, but nothing happened inside me at twenty-one. Perhaps I’m a late bloomer and I just have to handle the kid business longer than most. I do miss my monster “figurines,” though. They would have looked super-cool in my cupboard/apartment.

The new gig has me starting in the “mail room,” of course, and though I’m not actually delivering mail, I am sweeping floors, fetching coffee, and generally bearing the brunt of the working stiffs’ frustrations in this video-dubbing house in North Hollywood. It’s the very same workplace I’ve mentioned earlier that has, for some ungodly reason, decided that its best chance of survival in the cutthroat world of audio/video dubbing is to corner the much-maligned (mainly by me) Cambodian gangster-movie market, because someone somewhere wants to see these dreadful films in English! The way the work is described to me when I first apply for the job makes it sound waaaaay cooler than it really is, and I imagine myself eventually working on major motion pictures and rubbing elbows with Leonardo and Harrison, Scarlett and Meryl. But as it turns out, I will at best be working on movies starring Pheakdel and Samnang, Kola and Darareaksmay. This video house is many, many light years from the Hollywood silver screen. But I am on board and locked in. Starting at the bottom. Actually, come to think of it, I was much happier running out for Starbucks and emptying trash bins than I ever have been sitting in front of a video monitor watching
the same ass-sucking scene over and over to make sure the English-speaking voice-over actors (most of whom sound like William Shatner if he’d never taken an acting lesson or Paris Hilton if she had) dub their lines in relative synch with the Cambodian dudes and babes on the screen.

And this is all before the Right Whale joins the festivities. It’s still a couple of years before he belly-flops into my working life and turns it from dreary ennui to a complete and utter living hell. But right now everything is comparatively copacetic.

There’s a saying the Buddhists have that’s something along the lines of, “With every terrible event comes the seed of something wonderful: and vice versa.”

One morning the “vice versa” of that noble saying walks her perky ass into my place of employ. My future ex-wife has just careened into my life. She’s pretty and mouthy and has a sense of humor that sets her apart from most of the dour folks working in this place. She tells me she’s going to be answering phones and getting coffee. These video-editing people drink more coffee than dance marathoners and long-haul truckers combined. Her name is Charlotte and she seems to like me right away (?) and I her. Since I have been working at Apex Audio/Video Dubbing Sound Stages for a while now, I offer to show her around. She says she’s excited to be working in the movie business and wants to see all these “sound stages.” Like me, she’s made the mistake of thinking that this place is somehow connected to the exciting and glamorous world of Hollywood. I guide her to the tiny dubbing rooms, the barren, sterile office cubicles, and break the bad news to her that
Chet Chong Cham
is about as close as she’ll ever get to
Gone with the Wind.

So we begin dating, and she becomes the fourth person I have ever had sex with. (And I am including my faithful right hand in that count
of four.) Reflecting on this fact, I conclude that living with my mother for so long was a bad idea all round. Now that I have my very own “shaggin’ shack,” I anticipate a lot more action from the many, many, many, many,
many
hot women I see every day on the street.

But Charlotte has other plans for Woody, and she keeps him pretty busy and fairly sapped of his life-giving cocktails, if I may use that phrase in the context of discussing my penis.

Matt, a guy I have befriended at work, has an odd reaction when I tell him that Charlotte and I are an item.

“Ooh, dude. Bad idea, dating someone from work. Could get ugly.”

“Poppycock,” I say and wish I hadn’t. Sometimes my mother just leaps right out of my mouth at the most inopportune moments. “I don’t see a problem with it,” I continue, not really understanding what this simple phrase portends.

Another workmate named Ned, who considers himself the resident Lothario but who I would only charitably describe as moderately good-looking and pleasantly plump, says he thinks Charlotte is “a damn fine chick.” I don’t really take offense because Ned is one of those guys who always has his sleeves rolled up and his shirt front undone to display the flab he sadly misreads as well-toned muscle. He also considers his beer belly
muy macho
. I tell Charlotte to steer clear of Ned because he thinks she’s a “damn fine chick,” and I laugh. She wants to know which one is Ned, I assume so she can avoid the poor guy. Sorry, Ned.

I move in with Charlotte—into her apartment, because there just isn’t physically any room for two people to both lie down at the same time in mine. I am actually living with a woman who is not my mother! It’s kind of grown-up, kind of fun, kind of weird. She cooks real food, we watch movies together, we have regular sex in our own bed, and when I wake up in the morning I don’t have to get dressed and go home or feel
shame from porking a theologian’s missus. We even have our own computers in the kitchen just like a real couple. She’s on hers a lot.

One day she tells me she’s Catholic and we should have a Catholic wedding!! “Whoa, wait, what? Slow down, babe! Who said anything about marriage?” is what I want to say but I don’t and instead mutter, “Hmm,” thoughtfully, hoping it sounds fairly noncommittal. But she has made up her mind that it’s time. Isn’t that what they say in the movies to the guy on death row just before he’s led to Old Sparky and cooked to perfection? “It’s time?”

“Okay, Louie, it’s time.”

Well, it’s time, Horatio. And without further ado I say, “I do.”

My mother doesn’t show up for the ceremony because when I call and tell her, she says “She’s a Catholic, this girl you’re marrying,” like I’d somehow missed this point during the mass and all the frigging Latin that goes on forever and ever at the couple of Eucharists she’s dragged me to in preparation for our upcoming wedding.