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  “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 almo
st 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.

  Now, here I was, at forty-four years old, back exactly where I’d begun.

  FOUR

  As I was returning to Mom’s place in Malibu after the interview, driving up the Coast Highway, the northbound traffic was thick but moving pretty well and my head-thumping was only moderate. I was sipping from my third Starbucks double latte of the day, holding the cardboard cup between my legs as I alternately sipped and smoked, congratulating myself on getting a new job and a fresh start. I was determined to do well.

  On the cassette player in Mom’s car I was listening to one of my favorite blues songs, an old Jimmy Reed number, “Me and My Baby in a ’60 Ford.”

  If I did okay at the car sales job, if things worked out okay, in a few weeks I might be able to afford to rent my own apartment on the West Side of L.A. and attend normal, non-movie-star, non-Malibu-celebrity AA meetings.

  In the Big Rock area, where the Coast Highway runs just above the ocean, a new yellow Porsche convertible with its top down cut in front of me so quickly that I was forced to hit my brakes and then swerve to avoid smacking the rear of the car the prick Porsche driver had just passed.

  The act of slamming on my brakes caused my Starbucks latte’s top to pop open and its contents to spill out on my only pair of dress pants, soaking the crotch, the bottom of my white dress shirt, and the cloth seat under me.

  I was immediately pissed off. I honked several times, then punched my gas pedal to catch up with the Porsche prick, but Mom’s three-cylinder turd reacted only by coughing and sputtering. The Porsche guy, wearing a black baseball cap and a black hoodie and sunglasses, was now a full car length ahead of me, still weaving in and out of traffic.

  When I finally caught up and got his attention by honking, he sneered, then flashed me the one-finger salute, mouthing the words Fuck you as he cut off another car and changed lanes, moving ahead.

  L.A. is notorious for road rage and I’d read somewhere that its citizens had been rated the most bad-tempered in America. People get aggressive in their cars all the time and wind up getting shot for their trouble. It wasn’t in my mind to hurt the guy, at least not at first. I just wanted to catch up and tell him to take it easy.

  The sun was out and the northbound two-lane beach traffic was thick enough for me to keep the convertible in view. A mile or two farther up the highway, I finally caught up to the Porsche.

  I honked several times and then, through my passenger window, yelled, “Hey, you almost caused an accident back there! Take it easy, for chrissake!”

  The next thing I knew, a heavy aluminum traveling coffee mug was heaved at me and bounced off the side of my passenger door, just below my open window. Again, the one-finger salute and the mouthed words, Fuck you, motherfucker!

  I had to hit my brakes and slow down. This jerk was now over the line. Now he was intentionally trying to cause an accident!

  Minutes later, when I passed Malibu Pier, the yellow Porsche was still in my sight, eight or ten cars ahead. It had just turned twelve o’clock on Mom’s Honda’s dash clock.

  Half a mile later, at Cross Creek Road, I saw the convertible make a quick and dangerous right turn into a shopping mall, rolling through the red light. By the time I reached the intersection, the light had changed to red again. The Porsche was gone.

  While I was waiting for the light to turn back to green I noticed that my hands were shaking from rage. Something inside me, some cog in my brain, had just snapped. It was like the old days in New York. It was him or me. I didn’t care how long it took or what I had to do, me and this asshole were going to settle this—face-to-face.

  Finally, the light was green again and I hung a right also, turning into the U–shaped Cross Creek shopping mall, hoping—suspecting—that the convertible’s destination was a noon lunch appointment at one of the high-end eateries in the mall.

  The Cross Creek Plaza isn’t that big: a movie theater, a Starbucks, and several swank designer shops and restaurants. I knew the area pretty well because I often stopped at Diesel Books to check out the new arrivals.

  I maneuvered the Honda through the L–shaped blacktop lot, looking up and down the rows of cars. The yellow Porsche was nowhere in sight. My brain was now hammering itself against the inside of my skull and I was still buzzed with adrenaline rage, but I could sense myself gradually becoming calmer. Reason was slowly replacing anger. It’s just some spoiled L.A. asshole in a high-end ride, I told myself. You don’t need to bust someone up over this nonsense, car dent or no car dent. Jesus, JD, cut the guy a break, for chrissake! Use the Twelve Steps. Live and let live.

  I pulled into a parking space
and stopped the car and began to take deep breaths. A couple of minutes later I was better.

  I decided to pack it in and was about to back out and turn for home when, just for the hell of it, I told myself to take one more shot and try Guido’s Restaurant on the other side of the plaza. The outside entrance to the restaurant is between the buildings but its parking lot is in back, behind the shopping center. Movie people and celebrities from the Malibu Colony come to Guido’s for lunch.

  Pulling behind the plaza and seeing Guido’s in front of me, I spotted the yellow convertible again and congratulated myself for thinking that the Porsche guy must’ve been rushing to make a noon lunch appointment.

  I watched as two busy kids in red jackets tucked spiffy cars into the valet park area.

  The convertible’s top was still down and it was parked ten slots away from the restaurant’s front door.

  I could feel anger returning. Screw it! This jerk has it coming. It was time to get even.

  Since I knew where the Porsche prick was, I decided to give myself plenty of time to form a plan of attack. I pulled Mom’s Honda into a spot several rows away from the restaurant entrance, in the public parking area. This punk was going to get a nice surprise for almost causing a wreck, ruining my only decent pair of work pants, and denting my mother’s car with his metal coffee mug.

  When I was sure no one was looking, I opened my trunk and removed one of the three quarts of 40-weight oil I kept in a cardboard box as backup. Mom’s shitwagon regularly used a quart every two days. Then, from my toolbox, I grabbed the silver metal oil funnel that I kept wrapped in a rag and jammed it into a new quart. After that, from the box, I located a folding tool with a leather punch. Then I tore off a handful of paper towels from a roll I also kept in the trunk.

  I carried the oil can wrapped in the paper towels behind my back, out of view, as I walked down the row of high-end rides toward Guido’s entrance. The valet guys were busy working, parking a line of new arrivals, and didn’t notice me.