WEEK 1
So after nearly two months of hiatus, the Roadtrip Journal has returned. Except it’s not so much the Roadtrip anymore… the Spacemobile is here but mostly just sits outside on the curb wondering forlornly what it did to get Shanghaied to LA. Broke down five times in two weeks, that’s what ya did ya blue moron. Aw I’m just kidding, c’mon, I could never be mad at you…
Also it’s not really a journal – reporting upon the daily grind of my new life would get tired, I think – besides I’d rather just make fun of things when they come to me. I am still going to try and update every week, though – interesting stuff does happen at least that often, and people need their stability. And so, back by popular demand, I give you the Sunday night postings of the Post-Roadtrip Era (P.R.E.), aka California Ponderings. And by popular demand I mean two or three people emailed me wondering if I was dead.
We pick up where the Roadtrip left off. I officially moved to California on a Saturday night in mid-September and proceeded to get very very intoxicated and trash our living room. I guess in celebration. Or latent vengeance. I woke up the next morning in an empty room, alone and with a brand new start, just the way I had always planned it. Except that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, and my head hurt like it had just been squeezed through a birthing canal. Nobody said rebirth wasn't messy.
I live in a beach house. By ‘beach house’, though, I mean the style, not that we’re actually on the beach. The actual ocean is about .7 miles away, too far to visit every day, even if I was really into surfing like the rest of the people in the South Bay area.
I have three roommates. Sam is a stand-up comedian making bacon from the dot-com empire during the day (yes, apparently there’s still some life in it). Gabe teaches middle school in Watts, arguably the worst possible teaching assignment there is, courtesy of Teach For America. JD is unemployed. But we love him anyway.
This will be the adventure of four wayward friends in Los Angeles, attempting to make a good life for themselves/find happiness/insert motivational cliché here. Perhaps there will be profound lessons along the way, but mostly I just expect lots of wacky misbehavior from us. One problem I notice already with our house is that there’s no “nay-sayer” – that is, the responsible person who speaks up that maybe it isn’t a good idea to, say, sled down the stairs into the cabinetry on a lubricated box.
But amidst all the chicanery and shenanigans, it’s also time for me to start moving ahead towards that illustrious goal of getting paid for writing. But first I need to get my shit together. I need to get back in shape after seven weeks of atrophying in a car. I need to settle into this new place and figure out where the hell I guy can buy food and haircuts around here. And a bed. I need a bed. But before all this, I need to get a job. So it's back to the pavement I go.
WEEK 2
So I got a job. I know, that didn’t take very long.
My job is of utmost public importance and never ceases to challenge my intellectual capacity. Yes, I work at a health club. To tell you the truth it was set up long before I ever got here, but I currently work the very plush Aura Gym* about five miles from my house. It’s a top-of-the-line facility at middle-of-the-line wages, but hey, it’s a job. And I was able to start making money again Day 2 of being here. So take that.
Also, working at a gym means that I and basically everyone I know gets a free membership. I have this thing about jobs at this point in my life. Assuming that I’m going to inevitably do a few different things on the way to get where I’m going, and that I'm at least moderately well-qualified to do most entry-level positions out there (what with a college degree and all), I’ve decided that I’m only going to work jobs that have some side-benefit to them. This benefit could be anything: the job could be a lot of fun, it could teach me a needed skill, it could pay an obscene amount of money (right), or it could give me time to write/sleep while at work, such as the security job I’m currently trying to track down. Or it could get me money coming in right away with the benefit of letting me get in really good shape, for free.
Aura Gym meets these latter two benefits to a tee. It would normally cost like 90 bucks a month to work out there, a completely unfathomable price for a guy content to work out by lifting car parts and grunting. But I can see why Aura costs so much... it’s worth it. Besides having every kind of machine known to man in a gigantor club, they’ve got fifty million classes, two basketball courts (one of which is utilized by the LA Clippers several times a week), racquetball, jacuzzis, steam rooms, a spa, and a bar. They even have those colorful workout balls, and really pretentious members. Any club that has colorful workout balls and pretentious members must be a good one.
The names of things will be changed from time to time throughout this journal, not the least of which will be the places I work at. It’s just safer this way, as I intend to be very candid about things. And making fun of them at every opportunity.
WEEK 3
Here are a few basic rules about Los Angeles traffic.
- First of all, there’s rush hour. Rush hour occupies nearly a third of each weekday plus Saturdays and is the worst, most crowded thing you’ve ever seen. It must be planned around. I’m establishing a rule right now that I will never leave the South Bay area by car between the hours of 7am-9am or 3pm-7pm, no matter what the circumstances.
Even with proper planning, however, a perhaps even more annoying thing about LA driving is the phenomenon known as “Wildcard Rush Hour”. This unfortunate theory states that while there are times of day that guarantee mind-boggling traffic, there is never a time a day when it can't be rush hour. You could leave your house at 3am on a Tuesday and there’s at least some chance the freeway could be slammed. This is really frustrating because you can never totally plan on getting somewhere reasonably fast, which would be helpful in a city that’s roughly 200 miles across. There’s just too many people here, and all of them have cars. If there’s any reason at all for more than 10% of them to be going somewhere at once, bam. Bumper to bumper.
- Contrary to common belief, though, LA has very good drivers. They have to be, in order to go 80 miles-per-hour about three feet away from the person in front of them. Everything they taught you in Driver’s Ed is wrong here. There is no 2-second rule; if you can even see pavement in between you and the car in front of you, you’re too far back. Honestly I’m not sure why the Transit Department doesn’t just give everybody bumper hitches to latch to other cars and call it a train. Perhaps because of Los Angeles’ ordinance against public transportation.
- In congruity with common belief, though, LA also has very stupid drivers. Though they may have the skill to avoid accidents at high speeds on crowded freeways, many people choose not to. Sam has a rule that to get by driving in LA you must be incredibly aggressive yet assume at every moment that everyone around you is about to do something incredibly stupid. So the idea is to be extremely pugnacious yet extremely defensive, somehow at the same time. Not unlike America’s current foreign policy.
In other news, I spent some time visiting hospitals this week to see a friend, and had the pleasant surprise of finding an Urgent Care center roughly 1.5 blocks from our house (for future stair-sledding accidents). I also had the fun of visiting a slightly more “cultural” hospital over in Torrence, which came complete with a tweaked-out crack addicts yelling gibberish outside our door as cops watched her until she sobered up enough to remember her name. They also ran out of wheelchairs so this poor chemo kid got pushed to his treatment in a swivel chair, though he seemed to greatly enjoy it. It seems HMOs only get you so far these days.
WEEK 4
The health club continues to be funny. This week we got a complaint from a member who walked into the steam room and found two dudes “going at it”, in the “one guy on his knees, the other guy standing” kind of way. Apparently the guy on his knees immediately got up and bolted, while the other guy just kind of stood there with a grin. Needless to say the member was traumatized, and he demanded that our manager do something about it, though what he expected us to do I’m not quite sure. A “No Fellatio” sign would probably a little much, and expensive as well because we’d have to get it custom-built. I wanted to ask the guy if he got a good look at either of the two culprits, but I figured any memory of his not obscured by the steam was probably already being repressed.
Aura is a place of contrasts. I work the morning shift with an extremely entertaining girl from Nebraska who now lives in the ghetto. She had to take a couple days off this week because a friend of hers was gunned down in a drive-by that happened ten feet from where she was standing, and two days later the retaliation drive-by went down about twenty feet from her, thought it missed all the targets it was after. She told me all this while ringing up an invoice for 30 personal training sessions bought by a rich woman from Palos Verdes for 1500 dollars. And then the next day she went to go get a free Smoothie promised to her by the owner of the Aura Café (yes, we have a café), only to find she could not redeem because the owner had died the previous night in some kind of freak accident. This girl seems to have a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like South Central when you’re from Nebraska.
WEEK 5
This week I got so bored working at the health club that I manually went through all 10,000 combinations on a 4-digit combo lock until I found the right one and was able to open it. Also the computers crashed so I made fun of the situation by telling all the people forced to manually sign in on paper that this was just a Carpal Tunnel test to make sure they were healthy before they could come into the club. This was all well until one guy actually did have Carpal Tunnel and got real mad.
Sadly for everyone involved, however, this week marks one of the last of my working only one job. I’ve been in the process (for some time, actually), of lining up a job in late-night security, because in these troubled times of civil unrest and fear for safety, I want to give something back. And by that I mean I’d like to get paid to sit behind a desk somewhere for eight hours and write. This being said, however, the security industry makes a big deal out of who exactly it selects to hire to sit for eight hours and write, and the result is a ridiculous red-tapey mess of background checks and honesty tests and drug screenings and lots of waiting around. You’ll remember I went through all this in Chicago last spring.
I’d planned on just being able to transfer over from Illinois within the same security company I’d worked with before, since they have offices all over the world. Several people on both ends of the company had told me this could be easily done. That is, of course, until Bureaucrasaurus reared his mighty head. Apparently someone in Chicago had accidentally deleted my name out of their computer, so regardless of the fact that they knew full-well I’d already worked for them just a few months before, the LA office had to do a complete re-hire. Clearly working around the system was out the question. If I’m not in the computer, I must not exist. It was like playing Peek-A-Boo with an object-permanence-lacking two-month old.
In any case what this boiled down to was another month of hoops for me to jump through. I think I drove to their office to fill out paper work at least 9 times during this month. There was one time that I had to sign and date my name no less that 37 times on this one stack of forms. I shit you not. I counted.
Now, I stand by my policy of not digging dirt on places I work, deserve it though they might. “Security” reasons, you know, plus at this point I have no dirt on this job since I haven't actually started working yet, other than on their asinine hiring procedures. I am, however, feeling pretty bellicose toward this particular company right now, so I will at least share some stories from my last security job, stories that to this point haven’t yet seen the light of day. I can only imagine this new opportunity will provide me with more of the same.
Working weekend security at a bank building in the Chicago Loop was possibly the sweetest gig ever. For 10 bucks an hour I’d show up, sign in, then go upstairs with my laptop to an abandoned floor and write/sleep for a while until it was time for my lunch break, where I’d write/sleep in the break room. Then it was back up to grindstone on the abandoned floor.
The only problem was sometimes they’d have me fill in for non-weekend, daytime shifts when there were actually people around. These shifts involved actual work, such as dealing with deliveries and messengers, or worse yet just standing there looking ominous in the lobby, doing absolutely nothing at all. This was torture. There were a couple of other days where I filled in for a guy as the freight elevator operator, riding up and down in a metal box for six hours taking people and things to different floors. I could read while doing this, at least, but I went home at night feeling like I’d just gotten off a roller coaster. Now you may be wondering, couldn’t this job have been done just as well by a machine? Certainly there are old-timey manual elevators like the one Droopy Dog drives in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, but I heard these days they make new-fangled elevators where a passenger can just push a button and the elevator knows where to go. The sad thing was that my elevator had this. Several years before they’d updated the control system so it no longer required an attendant, but I guess they didn’t have the heart to fire the guy who’d been there for fifty years. So they let him stay. And filled in for him when he was sick. So there I was. Not only could my job have been done by a machine, it was being done by a machine. I just went along for the ride.
But ducats is ducats. And the job was a dream for the most part – nice and easy, no responsibility, lots of time for productivity in other areas. You know a job is going to be good when you have down-time even when they’re teaching you the job. The following things were done by me during my rigorous, two-day 'training' to become a bank building security guard. Yes, I said training.
- Talked on my cell phone for half an hour to a friend while I was "learning how to make rounds".
- Watched an entire episode of 'Law and Order' while "learning freight-elevator detail".
- Watched WWF Smackdown. By this point I think they were out of things they could think of for me to "learn".
- Read 100 pages of 'Harry Potter: The Sorcerer's Stone' while skipping aimlessly from floor to floor, finally finishing it on the toilet of the sub-sub-basement's bathroom; all while "developing my now-keen round-making skills".
People of the world, sleep well. Your security is in good hands.
WEEK 6
This week’s news in Los Angeles: both the transit workers and supermarket workers are on strike, so even if you could get to the store you can’t buy any food. Also Arnold Schwarzeneggar has been elected governor. Where am I?
More hoops to jump through in the Security conquest... maybe they should just call up the payroll guy in Chicago who I’ve been calling for two months now to try and get him to send me my last check. He could straighten it all out for them. At least it seems they’ve officially hired me though – I spent 2.5 hours Monday completing their 8-hour training program, which was very similar to the one I completed five months ago. Except there were more typos in the manual, and there was actually a question in the drivers’ safety section that said “True of False? The traits “reckless” and “careful” mean the same thing.” Um, false? No wonder it took me 2.5 hours to complete it.
I don’t know where they’ll place me yet, but once I begin working overnights I'll be up damn near 100 hour a week, at least until I scale back the health club thing or stop taking every free-lance job that comes along. My friend once told me of a man he'd heard of named George Behrman who found a way to hold 3 simultaneous full-time jobs. Apparently he was able to pull this off by having one job he could sleep/shower at, one job that was actually personally fulfilling (and made it all worthwhile), and one job where he could interact with people/have a good time. All in all he was only making 30 thousand bucks at each job, but added together he did pretty well for himself for a couple years. Throw in not needing a place to live or having any time to spend all this money... George made some investments and retired at 38. I don't think I'm quite to that extreme, but I'm sure I'm probably one of the few people whose reaction to this story is less "That's freakin' insane" and more "I bet I could do that."
In the meantime though, I was able to get out of California this weekendand see my brothers play football with my family on the East Coast. I also ran the Providence Marathon and finished in 3.5 hours, which I guess is pretty good.
I returned to LA to find JD with a girlfriend, Sam with a new job and Gabe with a recently-developed nasty habit of playing pranks on people involving packing peanuts stuffed in every corner of their room. Sam is also very mad at everyone, mostly because of the packing peanuts. I also took LA driving to a new level with a commute from Woodland Hills in the northwest to Irvine in the south, two different areas of the same city that it apparently takes 2.5 hours to drive between on a Friday night. And finally, there’s a huge sun surge that is supposed to fire a giant wave of radiation at the earth this week, interfering with satellite signals and intensifying the Santa Ana winds, this annual storm of really hot air that blows through Los Angeles and melts stuff every October.
Seriously, where am I?
