The Passion Agency

Rebecca Lee

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Chapter 1--Donnatella

“Hi, I am Donna. My real name is Donnatella. So you
can can call me Donnatella. Ha, ha,” the brunette woman either side
of 40 (she wasn’t ever going to admit which it was to anybody but
the Department of Motor Vehicles.)

She shook her head and tried to get going again.

“Hey, my name is Donnatella. My friends call me
“Passion” for a nickname believe it or not. Ha, ha.”

“No. No. No more laughing at your own stuff unless
they laugh first. Even then. It makes you look like a total goober
from the hood,” she said to herself out loud. “Fuck it, let’s go to
the meat and potatoes of the presentation.”

She took a deep breath, sucked in her mid-section
which was smaller years ago before a child and grinding around
chasing money to survive came into her life.

Why are the people with the most money usually in
better shape?

Donnatella “Passion” Casteel could tell you the
answer simply enough: more time, less stress trying to just got by,
and more access to better foods.

But she could list a million of them if you gave her
all day and maybe some Oak Leaf Pinot from Walmart (or maybe some
good bud.) She quit that stuff, but she didn’t. Sort of like how
she quit men, but she didn’t.

Couldn’t find one whom she was really attracted to
who wasn’t ultimately attracted to someone younger, like her
teenage daughter.

Live and let live. Turn the other cheek. Get over
it.

She’d done all those things. But when you are a woman
of a certain age, the value you placed in yourself is put to the
sternest test, because the value society places in you
plummets.

“Because fixated on female youth and beauty. That’s
fucking why,” she snarled into the mirror.

“Wait, that isn’t the speech. You aren’t ever going
to get hired that way and you need this job,” Donnatella, Donna for
short, said to herself as she straightened her dark suit coat and
debated on how low to unbutton her shirt.

“I am Donnatella Casteel,” she said. “I have the
exact background and desire to succeed you’ll find in your best
legal assistants all around Los Angeles…..”

“Shit, no,” she stopped herself again. “How would I
know that? I mean really, that sounds like a desperate thing to
say.”

“I am Donnatella Casteel,” she said. “I have always
loved the law and the energy of working for a firm. I am anxious to
get back into the game after years working clerical for the City of
Inglewood. I am a self-starter. I do the work without having to be
asked and I do it according to the specifications of my superiors.
You ask me to do something? It’s done….”

She sighed as her big fluffy hair monster of a white
cat Fox (named after Los Angeles Laker Rick Fox) came bounding up
onto the wood chest in front of the mirror. Fox' back was arched
and her meow made it clear she wanted her Donna for a petting
session. Like right now.

“Forget it,” she said aloud again to herself. “No one
is going to care. It will come down to how much they really need
me, how quickly, and whether there is some younger hotter girl
there trying for the job. They can look at her all day and figure
it would be better than looking at me.”

Donna Casteel. In her mind, a past-her-prime ex-sexy
thing now with a pouchy front gut, thighs of cellulite, and saggy
breasts.

But she did have a very rare ability honed to
perfection. It was an ability she was unaware of but was on full
display in everything she did.

It was the uncanny ability to defeat herself before
she even started.

It was not something she even fully grasped in
herself as a skill. Because everyone she was around, from her
friends, to her mom who lived halfway across the country, to her
two living siblings, were all mired deeper in that slump than she
was.

The nickname “Passion”, as her friends once called
her (and many still did out of habit) was more crude parody and
cruel joke, than anything that actually fit

She made her way to a full-length mirror in the
little bathroom of her 2 bedroom, 1 bath prairie style home in
Inglewood off Manchester somewhere near the LA Forum.

It was a typical decent neighborhood with occasional
break-ins or domestic disputes. A shooting every year over drugs
maybe. Some years none. The kind of neighborhood where you chose to
live because you likely got a deal on the house as a hand-me-down,
or you got it outright free.

It was an old house with old house problems. The
drier climate and mild winters of southern California hid a lot of
ills in a house that would be big trouble in say Cleveland, Ohio
with the freezing nights and howling winds. All in all Donna and
her daughter were happy enough there.

Her daughter was a strange one and she loved her. But
it didn’t look or feel like Donna envisioned it when she was a
little girl. They had an uneasy but comfortable peace. When it came
right down to it, neither of them wanted the stress or drama of
doing anything to make it better by actually talking.

That was kind of the theme for Donna Casteel in the
year 2012. There wasn't much meaningful happening in her life.
Things were just happening to her. She wasn't choosing and she
wasn't acting.

Life was just things she had to do to keep a roof
over her head.

She had to go grab this legal assistant’s job she
didn’t want for starters.

She couldn’t have felt more ambivalent or uninspired
by it all. But that state was so normal at this point in her life,
she just went with it. She plopped down on her couch in the living
area which connected with the dining area which connected with the
kitchen. With so much of this and that piled up on the table, next
to the couch, and near the two openings to the kitchen, there was
no real way to know where one room ended and one began.

She put her head back and let her mind drift while
she petted Fox the big and lazy, but lovable ball of fur.

She thought often of how life was seemingly so
promising all those years ago.

She had a man whom she believed loved her. He had an
entry level job out at the airport. Baggage and stuff. Right out of
high school. She was beautiful, young, and very pregnant.

By miracle they even had their own little apartment
closer inside the City. A bunch of blocks south of the University,
but on the East side of the 110 freeway. It was a start. She could
have had any man she wanted back in those days. A daring seductive
mix of Italian, Black and Filipino in a five and a half foot frame.
She was no athlete but didn’t need to be. Likewise, she was no
great scholar, but it never mattered.

She had Darry (short for Darrigan Casteel) and he had
her.

The first time he laid eyes on her at the very
beginning of Junior year, she knew. She was sitting outside in a
group of her friends and in he walked into that little hornet's
nest like he was the king of the school yard. He talked only to her
and didn’t care if it offended them.

He was tall, sort of lanky, and looked Hispanic, but
it could have been Asian.

He was no pin-up model but he had presence. He looked
into Donnatella’s eyes and she melted. Deep down she was sold. All
he had to do to cause her to fall harder and deeper for him was to
keep whatever he was doing.

Life was deceptively simple in those days. It’s that
way for most young people in love. You were together and you loved
it, so you just began to be together more and more.

Donna got tons of sexual experience but scant life
experience. She never realized that it was even remotely possible
that the man she fell for when she was seventeen, would be gone and
out of her life when she wasn’t even twenty.

He was on to the next girl.

Now she daydreamed about that first meeting often.
Not because she had a deep longing for Darry, but because she
wondered why she made the choices she did.

She had that one saving grace of emotional
intelligence going for her.

It was no small gift.

She actively wondered how her different choices could
have caused things to turn out differently. She at least believed
things could have been different and it was her fault that she
wasn't happy.

She didn’t know it at the time while sat there
dreading another interview for another crappy job. But this mental
habit would stand to give her opportunities to experience things
her lack of formal education, state of financial “brokeness”, and
general attitude of malaise, should have never allowed her to
experience.

The future was potentially very bright but she had no
way of knowing it.

What she knew as she emerged from her daydream, is
she would never make it to Carson for her interview on time. plus
the damn cat had left white hair all over her black skirt and suit
coat.

Deep down she just wanted to go back to sleep and
blow off this interview.

Chapter 2--Love, Sex, Sadness

Across from the Los Angeles Forum, basketball arena
for the Lakers back in the late 90s, there was a restaurant that
could best be described as one part Waffle House, one part Dennys,
and one part health code violation waiting to happen.

Breakfast was served around the clock and everything
was heart-cloggingly greasy off the griddle, no matter what was
ordered. It was called “All Night Cafe”

It attracted mostly locals but since the Lakers would
practice sometimes at the Forum rather than their training complex
in nearby El Segundo, you’d get a special very rich visitor or two.
Professional basketball players. The catch of all catches for poor
women in Los Angeles or similar big cities.

Seems even your most well-off athletes wanted a taste
of home. For a woman working the second of her three jobs like
Donnatella Casteel, the brushes with celebdom did a lot to break up
the monotony of mostly oddball and poor tipping Inglewood
locals.

Inglewood was and remains a city which had passed
it’s prime many years ago as a destination suburb for the well-off
middle and upper class in Los Angeles. Situated strategically
between the central city of Los Angeles and the more well off
communities to the South and West such as Hermosa Beach and Palos
Verdes, Inglewood had slid slowly into a place for people looking
for nothing in particular except to get by and get by safely.

The population was either older, retired, and getting
by, or young and struggling. Over time, it had acquired a
reputation as a spillover community from the urban roughness of
South Central Los Angeles.

Thanks to the generosity of her mother who had moved
out and let Donna and and her little daughter Brea have her small
two bedroom dwelling, Inglewood was home.

The “All Night Cafe”, wasn't a bad place to
supplement Donna Casteel’s income. She worked weekly as a clerk
with the City Water department collecting payments, and handling
incoming calls from people explaining why they couldn’t pay a
bill.

She worked nights as a babysitter/nanny for a family
out by the beach.

In between. she held the mostly uneventful drudgery
existence of a short-order waitress to low-income clientele. But at
least it was clost to her house.

The boredom all changed one Saturday morning when two
tall white men wearing matching warm-up outfits came rolling up in
a dark Ford Bronco and entered the restaurant looking for some
breakfast.

Donna took the order and although she was a fair
sports fan, she didn’t know the identity of either man. She assumed
they were basketball players because of their height and their nice
car. She did her usual decent and pleasant job taking their order
from a corner booth. One of the players, was named Mikel Torexion
and he was just there for a tryout. The other was was a little more
well known.