SHOTGUN BLUES
Once We Were Landlords
Just a few short months after my girlfriend and I moved to Hollywood, we hit a pretty big financial snag: I paid a man $2000 to help us get work as extras (he insisted that we would recoup that money after two days' work, and after that the sky was the limit!), and for some reason he disappeared with the money. This was a significant financial setback for us. While I continued to pursue a career as a Hollywood Screenwriter by day, by night I was forced to accept the newly opened position of Night Manager at the Saharan Motor Hotel. We received free room and board and a weekly check for $200--who could ask for more?
This experience was very trying for us in a variety of ways. Below are several stories I compiled from this experience. I hope you can learn from them as I did.
SHOTGUN BLUES
The first night I managed, a gunshot rang out just shy of 2 a.m. I immediately sprang into action: leaped over the counter, across the underground driveway, heading for the source of the sound. It was hard to say which floor it was on until I heard the screaming: second floor. I scaled the stairs two at a time and ran along the narrow balcony-corridor until I reached a room with a door hanging open.
Inside, a woman around my age was the one doing the screaming. She had bleach-blonde hair and too-tan skin and sad, tormented eyes that seem far more common in Los Angeles than in other places. She stood over the body of a middle-aged man with graying hair, balding, dressed in what looked like a nice suit. A pool of black-red liquid spread out beneath him. His glassy eyes stared up at the water-damaged ceiling. Seeing this paralyzed me temporarily. When she saw me, the blonde girl shrieked, "He's dead! Do something! Call the police!" This snapped me out of it. Carefully maneuvering around the body, I sat on one of the beds (they had a king suite), lifted the rotary phone, and dialed 911. Just as I was connected with the dispatcher, I had a sudden strange sensation; to me, it was like the living equivalent of a brownout. You know, when the electricity goes out, but only for a moment, causing TVs to flicker and clocks to reset. My vision and hearing went out suddenly, then came back with a flicker and high-pitched hum. My head felt warm and somehow heavier than it should. I pressed my hand against it and felt sharp pain, like being hit with a bolt of lightning, and my hand felt something sticky and oozing. Almost in slow motion, I moved my fingers in front of my face. I could hear the distorted voice of the 911 dispatcher, demanding to know the nature of my emergency. I couldn't quite answer. When I saw my fingers dangling in front of my blurred vision, the tips were covered in a red substance--my own blood. Still in slow motion, I turned with just enough time to see the blonde woman looking very angry. Holding a .38 special by the barrel, she smashed the butt against my face. I felt another brownout, and when I recovered I was on the floor. I barely saw as the blonde girl, all shades of soupy gray, rush out of the room. That was the last thing I remembered seeing.
I awoke in an empty room. Dingy gray concrete floor, ceiling, walls. One long mirrored window. A splintery and chair in front of me. But I was alone. Handcuffed to another splintery chair. Over an intercom (sounded like it came from behind), a booming voice roared, "Mr. Witherspoon..." I nodded toward the mirror, assuming that was where the source of the voice actually came from. The voice continued, "You came from Shreveport, Louisiana." I nodded again. "Are you related at all to the actress Reese Witherspoon?"
I felt a little out of it, and an instinctive giggle escaped me. I said, "No, none whatsoever." Immediately a shadow fell over me. Before I could twist my head back and see, I felt a hard pinch in my back. That's the last thing I remember.
I woke up in a stretch of parking lot behind a Sav-On Drugs on 23rd Street in Santa Monica. By the time I made it back to the Saharan, I discovered I was missing three days. The coroner ruled the death of the middle-aged man a suicide. I never saw the blonde girl again. Strangely, having a death in the motel didn't affect business one way or the other. Lesson learned? In Hollywood, if someone asks you if you are related to a celebrity, you say yes.
SAPPHIRE
Three months later, I had (sadly) grown used to the number of prostitutes who frequented the Saharan. In fact, I found myself on a first-name basis with many of them. But one girl, Sapphire, was special. She really liked me, and this was without me even paying her. During off-hours, when she got a little tired of hiking up her skirt and drifting up and down Sunset to find a john, she'd often come to me. We spent hours talking, much to Dana's irritation. But she realized Sapphire and I were just friends, and Hollywood is the business of friends. But what happens when a friend wants to become more than that?
Though she was a sweetheart, I couldn't claim to be attracted in any way to Sapphire. She was a white girl who had attempted to jheri-curl her hair and then shape the mass into corn-rows. The result was unflattering, to say the least. She was also a little dumpy, which I ordinarily wouldn't mind but the clothes she wore--I don't have a problem with overweight people if they have the courtesy to find flattering clothes. It's the ones who squeeze into clothes that are too tight, squeezing out thickets of pudge that shouldn't be seen by anyone except God and husband. Sapphire was definitely one of these, often courting bare midriffs that squeezed out a layer of belly-fat like toothpaste from a tube. She also seemed to have issues with body odor. Sometimes her body smelled clean but her breath stank of human flesh and (I assume) semen. More often, her body reeked but her breath smiled a little too strongly of peppermint. I say that I was not attracted to her to preface what happens next.
Around 3:30 one night, Sapphire came into the office and sat down to talk to me. I had just set up the continental breakfast we serve between 3:30 and 4. She seemed down, so I let her take both the bagel and the danish. As she chomped on it, I tried not to look directly at her as I asked, "Whatsamatter? You seem a little down in the mouth."
She smiled, apparently pleased that I took notice, and she turned to me and said, "Have you ever fallen for a guy who's just, like, so sweet, but you can't do anything about it without Vic coming and slapping your ass or worse?" Vic was her pimp. Believe it or not, he seemed like a very pleasant fellow, but Sapphire told me stories that made me think there was more than meets the eye.
I said, "I've never been in that exact situation, but in high school there was this girl, Shanna--"
"You wanna come upstairs with me?" she interrupted.
I checked the row of keys and said, "There are no vacancies on the second--"
"You know what I mean."
I didn't until she said just that. "Sapphire!" I scolded. "I'm an involved man. And besides, I don't have any money for--"
"This ain't a trick," Sapphire said, "and you ain't a john. You're the guy I says I was in love with."
"Me?" I swallowed hard, as she herself had on many occasions.
She spoke in a little babytalk voice when she said, "Pweez," and began unzipping the too-tight leather vest she wore around her rotund frame. As my initial eyeful of that wonderful cleavage expanded with each inch unzipped, I felt my loins stir uncomfortably. I tried to beat them back down by thinking of Dana, but it was to no avail.
I stared at her bare breasts and they fell out of the unzipped vest. Because she was so overweight, her breasts were consequently huge, with tiny little nipples that seemed somehow appropriate. She came closer to me, her vege-broth musk wafting with each movement. It intoxicated me. Sapphire leaned over the counter, her balloon-like breasts flopping around haphazardly. She took the back of my head in her hand and gazed right into my eyes, her minty breath hot in my face. She whispered, "I've always wanted you," as she plunged my face forward into her chest. I found myself involuntarily suckling. Freud would say I have not only an oral fixation (denoting repressed homosexuality) and an untethered Oedipal complex. But as he himself says, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: I just like sucking tits. Especially when the girl has small, perfectly round nipples.
Before I knew it, we were in a room on the first floor and she was on me, writhing and gyrating while I tried my hardest not to deliver my payload of manseed too early. I tried to think of Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I memorized in junior year of high school. It lasted about 20 minutes, much longer than usual, and when it was over we lay next to each other, spent. I felt a little relieved that a life of prostitution had conditioned her to not expect cunnilingus. I found few activities in life more tedious than trying to orally please a difficult woman.
But our post-coital glow was short-lived. I heard a loud slam at the motel room door. The door splintered a bit, but the deadbolt kept it--
Another kick, and the deadbolt exploded in a puff of tin-foil. The door slammed open so hard that it hit the wall and bounced closed again. Whoever had kicked it opened it very slowly and carefully, then stormed in. It was Vic, all five feet and eight inches of him, a solid wall of muscle and fat in a shining white suit and fedora. He held an aluminum baseball bat and breathed heavily.
"Whattaya want, Vic?" said Sapphire.
Vic didn't take his eyes off me. "Pay up, Charlie."
"My name's Colby," I said meekly.
Vic smashed a lamp with the baseball bat. It didn't have much of a dramatic effect since the lamp wasn't on at the time.
"This ain't a john," Sapphire said. "You told us we was allowed to have boyfriends."
"Yeah!" Vic roared. "Me!"
He dropped the baseball bat and lunged at me. I rolled off the bed and out of the way, then got up and ran out of the room. As soon as that calm night air hit my body, I realized I was completely nude. Fortunately, the only people milling about were more hookers and their clients, so they were used to the sight of a terrified naked man running through the motel courtyard. I ran back into the office, where I knew we kept a small gun for security reasons. I dove over the counter, yanked open the cabinet, grabbed the gun, and as I stood up aiming it with both of my hands, Vic stood there, baseball bat in hand, looking pissed as hell.
"Drop it," I said stiffly.
Vic's angry expression turned into an unpleasant but amused sneer. He chuckled acidly and muttered, "That's a flare gun."
I hadn't had much experience with guns before, so I didn't know one way or the other. But Vic lunged forward once again, and I had no choice--I fired. A bright red light exploded from the gun like a firecracker. The fireball slammed against Vic's chest, sending him so far back he hit the glass wall behind him. He screamed wildly, dropped the baseball bat. His chest sizzled, and I watched it blacken right in front of me. I stared into Vic's eyes and watched his anger and confusion turn into--nothing. I literally watched the life leave his eyes. He stopped screaming and flailing and just slumped onto his knees, then collapsed face-first onto the tile floor. Lesson learned? Flare guns are just as bad as real guns.
Incidentally, I told Dana about the incident with Sapphire. She also chased me around the motel with a baseball bat, but I was able to calm her down. After a month, she forgave me. She still brings it up sometimes, though, usually when we get in a fight.
RATTLESNAKE SUITCASE
Several weeks later, a nervous-seeming fellow checked out of the motel but left a rather large suitcase just sitting on a chair in the office/lobby. He had mentioned loudly and more than once that he was on his way to Burbank Airport, so once I realized the mistake I decided to drive down there, hoping I could catch the fellow before his flight.
As I broke left and slipped up the Cahuenga Pass, I noticed a black Ford slice across four lanes of traffic to follow me. It kept a safe distance, but I could tell it was following me. Mostly because at the stoplight at Mulholland, the car stopped dead about 500 yards back. I had no idea what the vehicle wanted, but I kept going up to Barham, then on towards Burbank.
At the intersection at Forest Lawn, three similar black Fords were parked across both lanes of the street. As I approached them, the one that tailed me zoomed up and nosed me off to the side of the road. Men in black suits and sunglasses leaped from their vehicles. Terrified, I rested my hands on the steering wheel and made no motion. Two of them threw open my door and shoved me from the car. They slammed me hard against the hood of my car and cuffed me. Another man pulled my keys from the ignition and opened my truck. He grabbed the suitcase, yanked it open, and inside I saw half of it contained packs of cash, and the other half contained some kind of brownish-gray powder. As soon as the man in the suit opened the case, what I can only assume was a dye-pack of money went off in his face, exploding him in a sea of turquoise paint. He muttered a variety of profanities, then pointed at me and screamed, "Bring this donkey in!"
They spent hours questioning and demanding to know who I was working for. Eventually, two more men came in and announced that the suitcase I had was a decoy: stage money (plus the dye-pack) and bags filled with street-chalk colored to resemble heroin. Finally, they asked me the most sensible question of all: "Where did you get that suitcase?"
"Well," I explained, "I'm the night manager at the Saharan Motor Hotel--"
"That's on Sunset, right? In Hollywood?"
I nodded.
The four agents glanced back and forth until finally one sighed and muttered, "You're free to go." And let me tell you: freedom never smelled so sweet. Lesson learned? Never help people.
Last revised: January 29, 2007
