Pimping My Ride - Part 9

One of the whores, a rotund white one with incongruously thin legs, had a name so convoluted and full of apostrophes that I’d made it my practice to address her first as babe, and then, as I became better versed in the vernacular of the profession, either Miss Thing or girlfriend. While we chatted at Carney’s, I noticed that she was very fastidious in her eating. She never actually put her hot dog down. After every bite, she would carefully rotate it about 30 degrees clockwise. After every spoonful of chili, she would carefully pat down to flatness what was left in the bowl. In this, she reminded me of my dad, who, after every forkful of food, would very carefully nudge everything on his plate back into its respective sector. If it gave him some sort of comfort, it was fine with me, but I don’t think I can remember a single dinner of my childhood during which my mother didn’t holler at him at least once for making so much noise. It was very much a case of the pot accusing the pot of blackness, as she indulged in multiple obsessive behaviors of her own. Though I am, in the words of Lester Bangs biographer Jim (Backstabbing Little Scumbag) de Rogatis, “a jittery neurotic,” I can honestly tell you that I am OCD-free, though I do occasionally wonder, as I drive toward the gym, if I remembered to turn the burners on the stove all the way off. I think the whores liked this about me.

We finally finished our meal and headed back to our corner, the one at the top of the La Cienega hill, at Sunset Blvd. It appeared to me as though a small crowd of prospective “johns” had congregated there in anticipation of the girls’ return, but Miss Thing — whose whore name made Sha’quaw’naa seem like Sue in comparison — found them very much more sinister, and her apprehension spread like wildfire to the others. On seeing the big goofy grin with which I have customarily expressed perplexity nonverbally, Sha’quaw’naa — speak of the devil! — snarled, “Ain’t you know nothin’, fool?”

I could see now as we grew nearer that the fellows on the corner all carried clipboards. Roselle explained that they were identity thieves. When a passer-by approached, hopeful of passing by, they would descend on him en masse, pretending to be market researchers, saying that they had “just a few questions”, his answers to which would make him eligible to win an unspecified Valuable Prize. From those answers, which they would extract in an order designed to arouse minimal suspicion, they would be able to empty the poor guy’s bank account and even, if they were feeling especially vindictive, annul his marriage and have his spouse deported. And they were vicious. One time several months before, when they’d co-opted the corner, a group of might-have-been NFL offensive linemen thugs hired by a coalition of pimps had descended on them, intent on dispelling them. Wielding their clipboards and pencils as a North Korean martial arts wizard had taught them to do, they’d instead routed the thugs, one of whom remained in a vegetative (broccoli, one of the girls asserted) state months after the battle. I was to understand that several of the thugs had wept like little bitches.

I did what I felt I had to do — told the girls to wait while I, unknown to them as a pimp, distracted the identity thieves, and lured them off the corner. Several of the girls expressed the view that this was the most selfless thing they’d ever heard of a pimp doing, at least since I’d allowed myself to be serially sodomized at the police and firemen’s orgy two evenings before.

The identity thieves (hereinafter ITs, not to be confused with information technologists, but the distinction should be easy enough to make, as information technologists are either Indian, Sri Lankan, or Pakistani, in many cases identifiable by surnames that take as long to say as the alphabet) reminded me, with their suffocating friendliness, of Mormons or Scientologists.

What had I gotten myself into?

Shopping With the Poor

I went to the gym slightly earlier today because I’d finished the design project I’d been working on down here in the basement, where it’s dark and gloomy and 15 degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house, and a swell place to hide from the punishing heat-‘n’-humidity.

When I arrived, I had a brief interaction with the tired-looking blonde woman behind the desk who held up the scanner thing for me. She mumbled, “How you doing?” and I mumbled back, “OK.” It wasn’t two o’clock yet and already I’d interacted with a fellow human! When the software recognized the bar code on the little plastic tag on my keychain, the female robot cooed, “Welcome!” in that weirdly hearty way of hers, but I’m not counting that as an interaction.

I spent my traditional 30 minutes on the stationary bicycle, with the resistance set pretty high, while continuing to enjoy David Finkel’s harrowing book about Iraq, The Good Soldiers, if enjoy is the right word. If what I’m reading is difficult or boring, it seems as though I must pedal for hours, but I was past 24 minutes today before even thinking to see how much longer I had to go.

Many of the people at Planet Fitness pretend to be obsessive-compulsive when they finish with a particular machine. They grab a spray bottle and paper towels and scrub away as though surgery’s going to be performed on it. The only part of the stationary bike I touch is the seat (oh, all right, and a couple of the buttons on the keypad). My own neuroses don’t include OCD, so I neither spray nor wipe. Now it can be told.

I proceeded over to one of the pecs machines, which is painful for me because of my titanium right shoulder, and did only two sets of 16 reps rather than my traditional three because my shoulder hated it even more than usual. I went over to Dollar Tree, which I enjoy thinking of as Idolatry, and headed for the book section because last week I there found Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, which absolutely took my breath away, and all for a buck. I dropped three interesting-looking novels that had originally sold for no less than $23.95 each into my green plastic basket, which also came to contain a can of Del Monte’s delicious (if sweetened) mushroom spaghetti sauce, orange juice, and a spray bottle of orange degreaser.

Every day when I go into the kitchen to cook, I remember my second girlfriend, Marie, telling me that only a brief visit to my kitchen high above Sunset Blvd. made clear that I wasn’t able to adequately look after myself. Grease, you see. I am mortified by how greasy my microwave and stovetop are, and have had at ‘em with detergent, ammonia, and vinegar, all to no avail. Hence the orange degreaser, you see.

The cashier, another fellow human with whom I interacted, and all in the course of less than an hour, rang up my purchases and said I owed her $8.49. As Idolatry prides itself on selling everything for a dollar, and I’d bought six items, I thought something was fishy. It turned out I’d been charged $3 for one of the books. She solicited the help of her supervisor, and rang up two more bargain-hunters’ extensive purchases while I waited and waited.

Her supervisor was the ugliest woman in New York, with a personality to match. Do you suppose she smiled at me or uttered even a syllable of apology? Seeing that I’d put my purchase on my debit card, all she said was “shit!” I suppose if you're going to shop where the poor shop, you should expect to be treated with contempt. Her cell phone rang while she was pounding angrily on the keyboard, and she wound up handing me the two bucks and change I was owed without a syllable of apology, vividly reminding me of Ms. Patricia Carwell, the X-ray scanner attendant at Chicago’s Midway Airport whose fervent surliness inspired me to write a letter of complaint in 2008 to both Mayor Daley and the Transportation Security Administration.

I’m back home and in front of my computer now, and anticipate no further tastes of the milk of human kindness this afternoon. But there’s a Netflix DVD in the mailbox with three new (to me) episodes of the sublime Friday Night Lights, so I'll probably live through it, albeit not indefinitely.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]