Chore Whore (3 page)

Blaise used to be so well behaved, loving and a joy. He actually used to want to bring his teachers apples so he could be their “pet.”

I would buy all the apples in the world if we could return to those times.

I cautiously wind
my way up to Jock Straupman's putty-colored hillside home, high above the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where John Belushi spent his last moments indulging. The road is a long series of hairpin curves and blind spots that seem to spin wildly even though I'm creeping along at seven miles per hour.

Only yards away from the Sunset Strip, the main artery pulsing through West Hollywood, is a residential neighborhood where mange-infested coyotes walk casually down the street in midday. Homeless folks make campsites behind bushes that cascade down steep canyons full of five-million-dollar homes. Within earshot of “the Strip,” where horns blare and sirens scream, wild deer ravage residents' gardens, leaving only the lilies, oleander, garlic and mondo grasses alive. Even with this, the streets are lush and green all year around. Mediterranean-style abodes hug the hillside next to Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Directors live next to producers who live within spitting distance of someone who is, was, or will be famous.

For my clients, the price of living in the Hollywood Hills, one of L.A.'s most coveted neighborhoods, doesn't stop with the $40,000-per-month mortgage payment. They cope with frequent power outages, mud slides, rattlesnakes in the garage, rats invading the house, tarantulas in the potting sheds, scorpions behind the pool equipment and bears drinking from their pools.

Friday and Saturday nights, they have the added pleasure of dealing with the Sunset Strip nightclubs' valet parking companies who use the hills' narrow streets for their additional spaces. The bar hoppers who party past the time the valets pack up and go home are left on their own to find their cars. Inevitably, the drunken partygoers, having hiked the hills in search of their vehicles, feel free to quench their thirst and express their lust. The next morning, the streets are littered with beer bottles, condom wrappers and the occasional spent syringe or wayward brassiere.

Jock's neighbors pay an additional price for living here. It's an all too familiar spectacle witnessed by the gardeners, the florist, the National Enquirer and many an unsuspecting driver happening by—Jock Straupman, out on the street in broad daylight, locked in a lusty embrace, fondling the ass and kissing the neck of yet another blond-haired, blue-eyed, eighteen-year-old girl.

The neighbors shake their heads in disapproval and go back inside their houses. The gardeners' $1,500-a-month paycheck helps them avert their eyes and keep trimming the bougainvillea. The national rag magazines have photographed this scene so many times it has become routine. When other stars aren't living up to their quota of bad behavior, the rags fill their pages with Jock's sexploits.

Unsuspecting drivers invariably snap their heads back to see Jock, a very recognizable movie star, typically postcoital, dressed in only a skimpy pair of nylon shorts, the kind that were all the rage for runners back in the 1980s. This results in the same car doing a drive-by three or four times to get a peek at an actor's love scene without having to pay the ten-dollar price tag for a movie.

Ever since Lucy Bennett broke up their four-year romance, Jock hasn't had a relationship that has lasted longer than three days. Not one to let moss gather, this rolling stone was already getting busy on his couch with a young blonde as I was directing the Chipman United Van Lines moving crew around him to gather Lucy's possessions and load up the moving truck.

I say a quick prayer
to the parking gods that my favorite spot, across the street from Jock's house, is empty. With parking at a premium in the hills, I covet that space. On his side of the street, there are
NO PARKING AT ANY TIME
signs, and on the other side of the narrow lane, there are mostly red zones with an occasional spot that can fit two subcompact cars.

I maneuver my Toyota 4Runner, fondly named Black Betty, around the tight bends. As I lumber through the final blind curve, the driver of a spicy-red Porsche behind me decides he just can't wait. He passes on the left, in the path of oncoming traffic, and careens around the corner.

I hear the collision before I see it. Pulling around the corner, I see that the Porsche convertible, bent in all the promised “crumple zones,” and a once-white, older Ford F550 pickup truck, unscathed, have been brought together in a union that was never meant to be consummated.

A Latino gardening crew tumbles from the cab of the huge truck, its bed filled to the top with trimmed branches, leaves and foliage. Before the accident, a dead deer had been perched on the truck's load like a cherry on top of an ice-cream sundae. They drop dead frequently in the hills and gardening crews are usually called to rid the yards of their carcasses.

The impact of the crash shot the buck's body over the truck's cab, thus stabbing its generous set of antlers cleanly through the Porsche's windshield. The driver narrowly escaped being pinned to the back of his seat. The deer's body is spread-eagle across the recently polished, buckled hood. The gardening crew walks around the sports car, scratching their heads and whispering amongst themselves.

As the convertible driver punches numbers into his cell phone, he rants to no one in particular about drivers who don't live here and don't belong here. Head-on crashes in this neck of the hood are almost always between an overly confident tax-paying resident of the Hollywood Hills and a foreigner, i.e., someone who doesn't pay for a prime piece of Los Angeles real estate. The driver blows hot breath about uninsured motorists and illegal immigrants. He glares at me as I try to squeeze Betty by the mess and get the groceries to Jock.

“Just how the hell am I supposed to know who to call, Donna?” he screams into his cell phone. “You're my assistant, you fix it!” Silence. His lips purse tightly, readying for Scud missile strike number two. “No, Donna, they don't know who to call. If they can't figure out how to tie dinner onto the back of their truck properly, what makes you think they'd know who to call? Call Triple A or the police. Call the fucking Wildlife Waystation, I don't care, but figure it out and make it snappy. Then get your ass over here and get me to Universal by three, you hear?”

I should have known . . . a Hollywood high roller and his miserable assistant. For Donna's sake, I stop and call out to Mr. Happy. “Hey, guy, you want me to call the proper authorities?”

He opens his door and approaches me, looking desperate.

“Thank you, would you mind?”

I get out my trusty cell phone and a computerized voice speaks to me. “Name, please!”

“Dead animal pickup.”

In my daily travels I report so many dead animals on the side of the road that I had to preprogram it.

My phone repeats, “Calling ‘Dead animal pickup.' ” I describe the incident and the location to the dispatcher and tell Mr. Hollywood help is on the way. For a moment I feel like Superwoman in that I helped a fellow assistant from potentially getting canned or, more likely, being screamed at and berated for the rest of the day.

Moving on down the road, I see that my treasured parking place is taken by Tito's truck—another Ford F550, the preferred choice of transportation for landscaping crews. Tito and his gang of gardeners, who descend upon Jock's house every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, always get the prime spot. I marvel at Tito's consistency. He has four orange cones—two in the back, two in the front—warning other drivers to give him a wide berth.

There's not another “legal” space to be found. I sit for a moment in the middle of the road, wondering whether to chance parking in the red zone across from Jock's house and get a whopping big ticket or in front of his garage and risk having the garage door open and dent my Betty's body.

Suddenly, I'm blasted with a horn. The driver behind me doesn't appreciate my current dilemma. I start to park in the red zone and glance back to see my client, actress Daisy Colette, behind the wheel of her BMW, trying to maneuver around me. She pounds on the horn and motions for me to get the hell out of her way. She obviously doesn't realize it's me—her assistant. As she passes, I call, “Slow down, Daisy. Cool off!”

“Fuck you!” she screams, roaring past me, around the corner and down the hill.

Betty's dashboard clock reads 2:06
P.M
. I'm six minutes late. I pull four very heavy bags of groceries from the backseat, trot across the street and set them down in front of the gate.

Jock's abode is more a fortress than a home. Years ago a drunk threw an unopened champagne bottle through his front window. The next week a wall was constructed. A week later a fence was added along with landscaping filled with thorny, prickly bushes. Then came the “cage,” an impenetrable, unclimbable metal security enclosure with a magnetized lock surrounding the original entrance to Jock's home. Now security cameras record every move. Anyone coming to the house either has their own access code or they have to announce themselves through the intercom to be admitted.

I punch my access code into the “Door King.” Once past the security door, the true adventure begins. Beyond the metal gate is a thick, worm-eaten wood door with another magna-lock and chunky, rusted-metal hardware. It guards the ascent to Jock's house, a mossy and often wet brick staircase perched at a forty-five-degree angle. Even with the handrail in place, I had eleven years' worth of scraped hands and knees from occasionally falling up or down these stairs.

Then, four years ago, Jock requested the safety handrail be removed . . . for aesthetic reasons. I fantasize about asking for hazardous-condition pay. Combat pay. I'm sure the gardeners have had more than their fair share of laughs at me grabbing the vines on the walls in order to regain my balance rather than making a free fall to the bottom.

The last time I had the intercom replaced and the communication system updated, I decided to give individual codes to the gardener and florist. The pool guy, the water delivery guy and the gas meter reader received another code. Jock and I would share one. Jock's housekeeper, Concepcion, and her triplets, Hubert, Rupert and Wilbert, age twenty-two, would share one. After school, Concepcion's sons visit their mom and help out around the place. They move the furniture for her to vacuum under, rearrange rooms per Jock's request, and now and again move the piano from one room to another.

As I cautiously ascend the staircase, I pass Tito flying down the slippery stairs with such incredible balance I'm convinced he has suction cups imbedded in the bottoms of his work boots.

“Hi, Miss Corki.”

“Hey, Tito.”

Tito, the quintessential gentleman, sweeps the four bags from my hands and carries them the rest of the way.

“Did you see the accident?” I ask.

“No. One of my compadres told me about it. I wanted to go down there 'cause it sounded like something I would want to see, but I have too much work. I wouldn't want Mr. Jock to think I was slacking off.”

Tito can't stand still. As we speak, he starts picking dead flowers off bushes. I dig around in my purse for the door keys.

“No one's going to think you're slacking off. The garden looks fantastic and I appreciate you helping me. Is Jock home?” I whisper.

Tito nods toward the living room window. I peer through it and see the back of Jock's brown curly-haired head resting against the leather couch. Suddenly, a blond ponytail rises up from what I assume is Jock's lap. His company.

“He's consistent,” I say to myself.

I ring the front doorbell, announcing my arrival, then glance down to the grocery bags at my feet.

For a man with such variety in his sex life, Jock's choice in food is downright boring. Week in and week out I shop for the same foods. I don't even need a grocery list anymore. Jock eats four tubs of cottage cheese per week and three gallons of Silk brand soymilk. Only “Original” flavor, because that has the lowest fat and the lowest sugar content of any soymilk on the planet unless he personally squeezes the edamame beans.

Then there is his tuna. He bases the entire balance of his diet around his consumption of hermetically sealed foil pouches of tuna. When I hit the grocery stores for a “Jock run” and clean out the entire tuna supply, other shoppers stare.

I ring the doorbell again just to make sure he knows I'm here. No one answers. He is, after all, busy. I slowly count to ten and then open the door. He's on the living room couch with a young Icelandic-looking woman draped across his lap. I keep an expressionless face as I remember my grandmother putting me across her lap and giving me a hard spanking for not minding her.

“Hi, Corki!” Jock smiles.

“Oh, hi!” I say without blinking.

I pass by his living room “art” collection, consisting of children's stuffed animals with all their limbs and tails severed and resewn on in improper places. Donald Duck has a monkey's mouth sewn on his crotch. Woody Woodpecker has a huge pecker indeed, with Pluto's tail sewn in place of his private parts. A matching pair, Tom and Jerry, have cloth penises so long they twist and turn, are intertwined, plaited, then go up the back and end up as toupees on their heads.