Differentials

The delivery to The Montclair Group was going to be later than expected due to the delay caused by the multiple car accident on the freeway. Once I reached Laguna Beach I turned off at the nearest supermarket to do some major evacuation.

I’d been driving for four hours straight without using a restroom and my body was cramping badly. I needed to find a good restroom, and there are a few that are best for a driver to use. Department stores are too fussy and finding their restrooms can be a little too labyrinth-like to reach. Supermarkets are pretty good because they don’t place demands that you buy something in order to use their facilities.

The best are probably shopping malls because the bathrooms are large and plentiful, and always situated by the food court. The only minus are their gigantic parking structures, which sometimes demand you pay a small fee to park.

Some restrooms have keypads you need to punch a code in, but this time I got lucky. This was a multi-use walk-in restroom, so I walked right in and got to business. There were three stalls in the bathroom and the only open one was in the center.

The stall to the right of me was a little boy being instructed by his father how to use the toilet. They spoke very loudly.
“I don’t have to go anymore”.
“Are you sure? You said you really had to go”.
“I just had to peepee a little bit, but now I don’t need to”.
“Are you absolutely sure? We have to get back in the car pretty soon and then you’ll have to wait for awhile. Well, okay, pull up your pants”.
“Wait a minute! Now I have to go”.

In the stall on my left was a guy playing music videos on his cell phone and probably having a wank watching them. It didn’t sound like he was taking care of business in there.

I washed my hands, staring down at them as I lathered them up, refusing to look up in the mirror. I washed them very thoroughly and then, keeping my head down turned to grab a few paper towels. I wiped them very slowly and then finally gave in, looking up in the mirror at my face.

I looked younger than my years would admit, an almost childlike face in spite of the fact that I’d been through quite a lot in the past few decades. My hair was still in full growth, no baldness there and my eyes still looked bizarrely innocent, bizarre because they’d seen too much, but still full and colorful like it hadn’t seen enough springs and summers yet. There was a defiant, pouty little boy mouth, with the disturbing appearance of one who still expected a better tomorrow even though their world was falling apart in front of them. My body was still fit and trim because lunch breaks consisted of bottled water and tiny supermarket baguettes.

I finished up and walked over to the sink and saw a bum at the next sink giving himself an impromptu bath. He had his shirt off and took heaps of hand soap, lathering his arm pits with the stuff and washing it off with the endlessly running sink. He had a sunburnt face and neck while the rest of his body was lily white. Thankfully he kept his baggy pants on.

“Sup?” he asked while giving me a conspiratorial nod. I just smiled. He was definitely humming.

Once I was done freshening up I bought a bottle of water and a pack of chewing gum and proceeded to my delivery.

Two hours later I was back in Beverly Hills. My next pickup was at Roku Bank on Wilshire Boulevard. I picked up a packet of money, about $10,000 in cash, and assigned to deliver it to a Mr. Walter Webster in Malibu.

Of course, I had to show ID and sign a few papers before I was off and on my way to Pacific Coast Highway. Mister Webster was so far down Pacific Coast Highway that he went beyond Zuma Beach and was on the border to Ventura County.

Pacific Coast Highway was the main road running through Santa Monica Beach and Malibu. It ran even further than that, but for our purposes we were just going to go as far as the outer reaches of Malibu.

You coast down a busy road that opens up to the beach on one side and a sea wall on the other. Going south I had the beach with its pounding waves to my left and the high-cliffed sea wall to my right.

Although PCH was always busy with traffic everybody always left enough room so you never felt like anybody crowded you. You felt free even in busy traffic. It was funny like that.

After half an hour the GPS advised me to turn off a tiny rustic road that planed higher and higher up the hill to Mr. Webster’s home.
“You have arrived at your destination”, she chirped. “Your route guidance is now finished”.

I got out of the car with my sign-off sheet and the packet of cash. I opened a polished steel gate and walked through a faux Spanish villa front yard. I rang the bell and waited for my delivery.

A big, sandy-haired man in his fifties opened the door with a sandwich in his left hand, chomping away. He wore a stained polo shirt and tan Bermuda shorts with fat white sneakers that looked like baby shoes.
“Um, yeah?”
“Hi, Style Runners”, I smiled. “Your funds are here”.
“Oh, yeah”, he grunted, munching away on his ham and wheat.
“Please sign here”.
“Oh, um, huh!” he puffed away, signing with something that didn’t even look like a legitimate signature. He just wanted his dough and for me to fuck off.

I got my signature and left as he slammed his door, back to his sandwich and money. He certainly didn’t look like a rich man, bit he had the house and it was none of my business.

“Okay, 757, come back to the Westside”, my dispatcher said after I reported the delivery made. I drove by more vistas of crystal blue skies, crashing waves against perfectly sculpted rocks and pretty girls peeling out of west suits in their bikinis. People were having fun but I had money to make.

“757, head over to Barney’s New York on Wilshire”, the dispatcher called.
“10-4”.
I headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard until the two right lanes were blocked off for construction.
“ROAD WORK AHEAD”, a sign flashed.

Traffic slowed down and people tried cutting each other off to get ahead of each other. Horns blared angrily and road construction workers nonchalantly walked in front of oncoming traffic just to shorten everyone’s temper even more.

I decided to cut down Olympic Boulevard to avoid the jam but it was even worse down there. There was road work also on Olympic Boulevard (repaved road), finally reaching a full-stop where everyone had to detour further south to Pico Boulevard. I was now miles off-course because of my poor decision making.

I sat in traffic with the rest of everyone else, my mind drifting towards things in general. I began thinking about Karol and the changes in our relationship before things went bad. She started taking herself seriously, too seriously.

I once went shopping with her one afternoon in the Wilshire District. Karol took great pride in everyone in the store calling her on a first name basis; it was a frighteningly big deal to her. Bored with her making a big show of how popular she was in the store, I walked out to the sidewalk to check on my car.
A car loaded with black teenagers drove slowly by me.
'YO, OZZY OSWALD!" "SUP, OZZY OSWALD?" They yelled at me from the car, laughing. I laughed right back.
Now there's a great hip-hop name, Ozzy Oswald. Make me a cross between Ozzy Osbourne, revered metal singer of Black Sabbath with Lee Harvey Oswald, notorious killer of the great President John F. Kennedy. Those kids had spunk. Those kids had genius.

I stood around five minutes more and then a car of white teenage girls pulled up asking me all kinds of questions. Talking to teenage girls is a lot like being abducted by aliens: once it's over you have no recollection of what just happened. I think they were asking me about my 7-star tattoo sleeve, but then again I might have imagined that as the topic.

Karol came out of the store and asked me where I went.
"Oh, a couple of cars full of kids pulled up to talk to me".
"TALK TO YOU? WHY WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO TALK TO YOU? YOU'RE NOT FAMOUS!"
"I used to be famous".
'NO, I'M FAMOUS!!! I HAVE OVER 700 FOLLOWERS ON FACEBOOK!"
I smiled and said, "But this isn't Facebook, this is real life".

Well, it didn’t seem like much but it was fairly symptomatic of her rampant egomania getting out of control, with my head on the chopping block because she had to be the alpha queen of it all. Shucks. I just couldn’t comply with her megalomania.

I continued to meditate on that in a daze, until the spell was broken by an angry car horn growling behind me. I jumped a little bit and pumped the accelerator. I moved up in line and after snaking through many detours and cut-off lanes finally snaked behind Wilshire Boulevard to Barney’s.

I grabbed the Dolce & Gabbana and avoided all the detours to make the delivery to Century City. Century City earned its name from being a former backlot of 20th Century Fox, who had to sell off some of their land to developers to keep their studio from going under.

Since all this deal making was done in the late Sixties during the height of the Space Race many streets were named after celestial bodies, like Galaxy Way, Constellation Boulevard and the like. Bored from the constant task of driving all day, I started singing a song in praise of all the streets of Century City.

There was no intelligible melody in all this, but I began crooning, “Century Park East… Avenue of the Stars…Solar Way…Constellation Boulevard…Galaxy Way…Century Park West…Avenue of The Stah-hah-hars….”

I just went on and on, singing these silly street names to myself over and over again until they actually sounded like something musical.

“Solar Way…Con-stell-ay-shun Boo-leh-vard…”, I crooned like a fool. Was the loneliness overtaking me? I wondered.

GLEEPGLEEP!
“757, what is your ETA?”
“Twenty minutes”, I responded. I always said twenty minutes no matter how far I was from my destination. It was the safest answer.
“10-4”.

The roads looked grayer and my vision felt blurrier but I kept my mind occupied with my stupid song.

“Century Park East… Avenue of the Stars…Solar Way…Constellation Boulevard…Galaxy Way…Century Park West…Avenue of The Stah-hah-hars….”

I drove slower and let everyone pass me, the transit buses, endless growling motorcycles, the taxicabs, the tourist buses, aggressively macho convertibles, even the bicyclists. It was their road and I didn’t feel like fighting over it. I didn’t care. With a song in my heart, I sang…
“Century Park East… Avenue of the Stars…Solar Way…Constellation Boulevard…Galaxy Way…Century Park West…Avenue of The Stah-hah-hars….”

I pulled up to the townhouse, which had its own private yard. I walked through the wooden gate, and in the yard was a gray pot-bellied pig, rooting around the lawn. I was taken aback because I was used to dogs, cats and birds, but not a large pig hobbling around the front lawn. It grunted at me a few times.

The lawn was surprisingly clean and I didn’t smell any scat, so this was a well-kept city pig. It just kept grunting over and over like a sick ARP synthesizer.

I walked around the pig and knocked on the delivery’s door. A pretty young girl answered.

“Hi, Style Runners. Your Dolce’s here. Please sign here”, I handed her my pen and clipboard. She noticed my unease.
“Don’t let my pig bother you”, the woman smiled. “She attaches herself to everybody”.
“Oh, I get that sometimes. She doesn’t bite, does she?”

“Oh, no”, the woman laughed as I handed her the garment bag. “You won’t have anything to worry about. Thank you!”
She closed the door and I turned to leave, but….

The pig positioned herself right in front of me and refused to budge. I tried to walk around her and she moved towards me. Her head half lowered to the ground and half looking at me from below, She was a strange one.
“Come on, kid. I got to go”.

The pig wouldn’t move over, so I started charging at her. Instead of attacking back she started squealing and squealing to beat the band.
“Shut up, you dumb bitch. I’ve got to go”. I shoved her gray ass over with my foot with her still squealing her head off.

I got back in my car and forgot the words to my stupid song. That fucking pig ruined my space age mantra.

Gridlock

Tourists, tourists, tourists. I'm making a drop-off up in the Hollywood Hills and I'm really flustered getting the gown out of my car and all, my ass is hanging out of my pants and my clipboard is falling down, and I turn around and there's this TMZ tour bus with these apple knockers with their fucking cameras and mobile phones taking pics of me pulling out a gown with my dick falling out my pants and I got THIS close to screaming, "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?"

But I didn’t.

I threw my back out towards the rubberneckers and kept it there until the tour bus finally trotted off, disappointed that I wasn’t about to march over to some celebrity’s doorstep with their clothes.

Truth be told, the delivery wasn’t even famous. Just a barely known film producer’s wife getting her gown for the night’s festivities. People make a big fuss about nothing, even my pants sliding down my hips. Tourists are funny; so many of them behave like boobs who paid their money see a freak show at the carnival.

Sometimes I feel bad about my job and how it looks to “normal” people, and other times I tell myself “this is where I belong” and believe it. I’ve been holding down this gig for about a year and a half already but it felt much, much longer than that.

It wasn’t hard work, it was pretty easy, but it was very exhausting running around and picking things up and then sitting in traffic all day getting to the delivery and dropping it off, repeating the cycle for ten hours straight without breaks. The repetition of it all is what killed you.

When I think back on my first day on the job it all seems pretty ironic. I was heartbroken at the prospect of finally succumbing to become a delivery person. I always thought it was the last resort for dysfunctional idiots who couldn’t do anything else. I was totally broke, flat busted. I didn’t have enough money to buy a loaf of bread and Karol was getting tired of it. She still lived with me.

Whoever tells you money can’t buy you love doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The money was gone and so was her love for me. Every day she yelled at me more and more. Sick and tired of being broke, I finally caved in and answered an ad for a delivery company. I sank to the bottom of the labor food chain. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

Karol didn’t really appreciate my effort taken in relieving my sad financial state. She simply told her friends, “My boyfriend’s a delivery boy”.

Without looking like I was moping too hard I went to the office of Style Runners and filled out all the paperwork. I showed my driver’s license, proof of auto insurance and my DMV driving record of the past five years, all necessary to qualify for the job. After doing so I was told to sit and wait.

I sat there in the waiting room feeling like a total loser, hating my miserable life and the shitty hand Fate had dealt me. My eyes burning a hole down at the carpet feeling shame, it was interrupted by the manager walking up to me with a very large black man in a Style Runners uniform.

“Okay, Tracy, everything seems to be in order. This is Cabernet, one of our best drivers. He’s going to show you the ropes and give you orientation of what we do here. So, off you go and good luck!”

Cabernet shook my hand as I got up. “How you doin’, man?”
“Fine”, I lied.
“You ever driven before?”
“Yeah, I did some drug store deliveries years ago. I kind of have an idea of what I need to do”.
“Good, this shouldn’t take too long, then. Let’s bounce”.

We got in a small car and he immediately radioed in. “Driver 124, standing by in West Los Angeles”, he turned to me and said, “That’s how you tell the dispatchers you’re sitting around waiting for something to do. You never say ‘give me stuff to pick up’, you say ‘Standing by and you give them your location’”.

The dispatcher radioed back in three minutes and he quietly wrote down several locations for pickups. He put the car in gear and began driving west. I thought we were headed to a dumpy area and pick up a bunch of crummy Italian food.

He made a few turns while interjecting a few boring pleasantries.
“Got any kids? Got a girl? My Lakers are letting me down…”

The scenery changed and it changed radically. We moved into Beverly Hills and went up Rodeo Drive. What gives? I thought. Is this a joke?

“Okay, first we’re going to Burberry and then we’re heading over to Cartier to pick up a delivery”. My face lit up and forgot about my self-pity.
He pulled into the Rodeo Drive alley and swung the car into the Burberry parking lot.

We walked down a clean, well-lit staircase to the basement where an attendant stood by a bank of closed circuit cameras and a few rails of garment bags all bearing the Burberry symbol.
“Cabernet!”
“Marcel, picking up a bag and training this new guy here”. Marcel appraised me as if I were some new species let loose upon the world.
“Ah, good luck, my friend”.
“Grab the bag, dude”, Cabernet instructed. I picked it up aggressively.

We got back in the car and Cabernet told me, “Okay, now record the time you picked up the bag on your trip sheet. That’s it, now let’s head over to Cartier”.
We went over to Cartier, where we had to show ID and sign a few papers. Security was pretty tight there and after a few more hoops jumped through we were finally given the bag with the jewels.

“We’ll have to drop off the jewels first”, Cabernet said once we got back to the car.
“Get your belt on, here we go”. We headed over to Coldwater Canyon and pulled up to a high walled estate. Cabernet got out of the car and walked up to the intercom by the tall gate.

“Style Runners delivering the Cartier”, he spoke into the little talk box. A moment later the gate slid open a few feet and a big man in a suit, dark glasses and an earpiece stepped out and took the bag. He quickly jotted his initials on the trip sheet and Cabernet returned to the car.

“Okay, that’s done. Now we gotta go to Jimmy Choo’s”. On and on it went like that all day, my mood elevating from despair to elation at the romantic delivery jobs assigned to us all day in Beverly Hills.

Burberry, Cartier, Jimmy Choo continued on to Hermes, Neiman Marcus and Yves St. Laurent, picking up from glamorous designers and dropping them off at homes in Bel Air, Malibu and Benedict Canyon. Delivery work, yes, but pretty lofty delivery.

When I got home that night I tried to tell Karol about my new job, but she just goofed around on her cell phone talking to her friends. It was strange; we got along fine for years but overnight she hated me and treated me terribly. There was no explanation or reason why she decided to turn on me; she simply decided she hated me now.

I was happy that the delivery job turned out to be pretty good, but she seriously didn’t give a damn. She was non-plussed by everything I told her and communicating with her became impossible. I truly felt alone. One month later she left ne and moved back to her mother in Canada.

I continued to drive on weekends after that and it turned out pretty well. I made the rent every month and ate alright, so the poverty scene was forestalled again. Delivering cool fashion prevented me from feeling any shame at being a delivery person. I never did shame very well, anyway. I always liked myself in spite of the hate coming out of other people. It never really affected me.

I got the radio call to go to The Montclair Group, a modeling agency near the Laurel Canyon area. They were doing business out of a mid-century modern house in the rustic hills. My GPS compassed me to the house, the upper floor stuck out above a cluster of bushes. I pulled over to the side of the driveway and walked up to the entrance, hit the buzzer and identified myself.

“Come in. I have a few bags for you to deliver to a client in Laguna Beach”, a strikingly beautiful girl with big red hair in skin tight black pants ran around the room, all business, no smiles, nothing.

As I followed her to the studio I saw a dozen thin, stunning girls all dashing about every which way, buzzing around like fireflies. Some of the girls were blond, some were brunette, some black, some Asian, and they were all gorgeous. Thin. Ravishing. Like my hostess they were all very serious and stressed.

“Casey, what time is the photographer coming by with the proofs?”
“Excuse me! Are you delivering the Continental breakfast we ordered 45 minutes ago?”
Severe eyebrows pointed at me.

“No, I’m here to pick up some bags”.
“Tch!!”
“Bailey, did you call Armando?”
“No, Ashley, was I supposed to?”
“Call Armando. Like now. You were supposed to call him like a million years ago”.

As I stood around waiting for the bags more beautiful girls ran in and out of the room, making me feel like I was in a Room of Mirrors at the Fun House with ravishing women all around me. There were no men present at all.

“Are you from Geek Squad?” More severe eyebrows pointed at me. “I need to have my laptop defragged”.
“You don’t know how to defra-“
“Tch! He’s not from Geek Squad”, the Redhead heaved three bags at me. “Okay, here’s the bags. How soon can she get them?”
“Well, Laguna Beach is in Orange County so I’d say about an hour from now, at least, so-“
“GOOD ENOUGH! THANK YOOOOOUUU!”

She practically slammed the door behind me, but it was alright. As beautiful as the girls were, there was something demonically claustrophobic about being in that house. Besides, a beautiful girl that never smiles is as appealing as an ice cream cone with salt and pepper all over it.

“757, holding The Montclair order to Laguna Beach”, I radioed in.
“Ten-four, call clear, 757”, the dispatcher returned back.

I turned up the air conditioning and pulled out some gum and chewed away, slowly crawling up the ramp to the 405 Freeway. My mp3 player was playing the William Tell Overture by Wendy Carlos and I chuckled at the perky synthesizer music.

Traffic moved fairly smoothly up the 405, better than usual. As I went by I occasionally looked over at the shoulder on the freeway, noticing forgotten shirts and pants lying in a heap. A few miles later there was the torn off bumper, the decapitated fender, and the usual spray of broken glass.

As I drove further down I noticed deep, dark grooves burned into the asphalt by squealed tires, indicating sudden braking or wild last-minute swerves. At first I only noted one every few feet, but then there appeared to be more and more.

Traffic gradually slowed down more and more. The other side of the freeway was grooving at a pretty swift pace, but our side started creeping like a fly in molasses. It was hard to see what the cause of the slowdown was, but it didn’t feel right.

I heard a few sirens blasting behind me, faintly, then progressively louder and louder. Then an EMS truck ran down the shoulder I’d just stared at, followed by two police cars and a fire truck blasting its trombone horn to hell.

We crawled further and had to move two lanes to the left, but I got a good view. It was an accident, and it was a good one. There were four cars slammed into each other, radiator steam billowing out, as well as clouds of black smoke from burning oil. One had spun in the opposite direction, another had its front end completely crushed in, the third had the entire left side bashed in with a driver still stuck inside, and the fourth had its rear fender and bumper town off completely.

The fourth car’s owner was a fat, homely man sitting on the ground crying like a child over his car being destroyed. The car with the front end crushed in was a woman comforting her young daughter, a blanket thrown around the little girl’s shoulders. The man in the car spun around was unconscious behind the wheel. He may have been dead, but I didn’t care. I had a delivery to make.

We trudged further up the freeway through the smoke and steam and burned rubber odors. I hated to break it to The Beautiful Redhead, but I probably wasn’t going to deliver the fashion on time. There are times when Death trumps Beauty.