Earlier this week, despite my busy schedule, I began writing my first novel. I am now 20+ pages into it. Here is the first chapter for your reading pleasure…
It was a nice day in Venice, which was good, because the last few had been unusually overcast for late April in Southern California and I don’t pay inflated rent here to sit around in cold weather. There was a breeze out and plenty of freaks walking the boardwalk. I’d normally say I wasn’t one of them but I was dragging my right foot behind me slightly thanks to some gum on my shoe, which pretty much made me fit right in. Overall, it was an average day except for the gum. Although, I supposed you could say that stepping in gum is a pretty average thing to do. At any rate, you shouldn’t let me wander or we’ll never get to the good stuff.
To call me a detective would be putting it nicely. I’m sure any real detective you asked would put me more in the “peeping Tom with an eye for things that are out of place” category. I certainly don’t have any credentials and the last thing I want is an office. I might love it if I had one of those frosted glass, red dressed lady walks in and weeps at my feet while I smoke a cigar kind of incidences. But, I suppose I’ll pass on that if it means paying thousands in rent for a 10×10 room somewhere in Santa Monica. I could afford Culver City but I don’t think red dressed girls walk into the offices of Culver City detectives and get all misty eyed.
My career as a “Dick” all started when I found an ex-girlfriend of mine cheating with some lowlife waiter from a high-end restaurant in Hollywood. Believe me, finding your girlfriend cheating is a sure fire way to turn you into a dick. It wasn’t one of those, walk in and catch her in the act kind of things. It was more the way I caught her that earned me a little respect. I would get into the details and do some character building but, quite frankly, the incident is a little embarrassing. Anyway, a buddy of mine heard about my underhanded little “gotcha”, had his own (humiliating) issues, and asked me to do some digging. One referral led to the next and now it’s pretty safe to say I’m in some weird shit.
My most recent employer – they like it when I call them that – was a friend of a friend who was pretty sure a competing technology company stole an idea from him and wanted me to check into it. Worst case scenario, he was sure I’d find some dirt, although I have no idea what he would do with it once I did.
I’m not real big on breaking into buildings, so part of my talent I guess you could say is getting in good with the enemy - a rather unpleasant task when said enemy is one lame Hollywood waiter (who you slowly find out is fucking your hot Asian girlfriend). However, when said enemy is an ex-CEO of an acquired startup trying to impress potential investors for his next “big idea”, getting in good can be a little amusing, to say the least.
I first met Mark at a networking event for tech companies. This is basically one step up from a Star Trek convention, which is about fifteen steps down from a night watching internet porn and eating Kettle Korn. (Please don’t ask me why I group the two. It’s not because they rhyme.) At any one of these events, there are basically five hundred programmers who talked their bosses into letting them represent the company for a night, thirty bosses who were smart enough to say no to their programmers, and four real investors. The first five hundred and thirty people spend all night trying to find and corner the last four, and those four spend all night trying to meet up with the one person they scheduled a meeting with whose idea isn’t a total piece of shit. I was pretending to be one of the four guys.
Fifteen minutes of throwing around industry buzzwords and Mark was pretty sure I was his next big investor. Truth be told, I might have been had I had a little money. The company seemed solid and so did Mark. But, seeing as Mark was my mark, I made sure not to like the guy too much. Despite his charm, this was still pretty easy.
That was about two months ago. Since then, I had “coincidentally” met Mark once in Vegas, blown all his coke up my nose and stared endlessly at the ass of the girl he was with; among other let’s get to know each other scenarios involving him, his blow, and whatever dimwitted model he was dating at the time. This might be a good time to mention that my client throughout all of this is getting a little antsy, wondering when the flights to Vegas and the designer suit he bought me are going to pay off in the form of a manila envelope with lots of secrets in it. It sounds cliché, but again, clients love that shit. Oh, and I have plenty of suits but it’s easy to convince these clowns that I need one given how I usually dress.
You really need to keep me on track.
So, I am on Venice Boardwalk, dragging my foot like a jackass, half-stoned and coming down fast, when I run into Candace, one of Mark’s “Weekend Wenches”, as he likes to call them. Like I said before, he’s not that difficult to dislike.
“Jimmy!” she says as she comes up to give me one of those nice, big, fake L.A. hugs that hot imports from Iowa, or any Midwestern state for that matter, like so much. “What are you doing up here?”
Candace thinks I live in Manhattan Beach because that’s my cover for this particular job. Suffice it to say, she also thinks my name is Jimmy, which is lame, but I’m kind of running out of names at this point.
“Not a whole lot,” I replied, “What are you doing out here?” Candace lives in Hollywood – big surprise.
“Oh, my friend really wants this t-shirt she saw out here and I, like, totally can’t think of anything to get her for her birthday, so I am trying to find it. I don’t suppose you know where to find a shop with t-shirts with slogans on them around here?” She bounced with that L.A. girl bounce that I pretend to despise but secretly love.
Okay, so if you have been to Venice Beach, you will know that every other store is a t-shirt shop full of the same t-shirts as the next one, all of them with slogans on them from the previous decade. Most of them are funny the first time you’ve seen them, except the one with the picture of the ATM on it with a half fake dollar glued to it, so as to be sticking out of it, that says “How My Kids See Me”. That shit was never funny.
This is my idea of character development - Candace was this dense. You can’t make it ten yards on Venice Boardwalk without passing one of these shops. In fact, we were standing in front of one. But, considering that, to me, this was no coincidental meet-up either, helping her find one of these shirt-holes was my ticket in.
“Yeah, I think there is one up here,” I said, ignoring the store we were standing in front of and pointing down the Boardwalk. “Can we get some coffee first?”
“Totally!” she said.
We wandered into a relatively quaint coffee shop on the corner of Windward and Pacific. I like to drop little details like “Windward and Pacific” so that people who have been there think I actually know what I’m talking about. I find that, if you mention a few real places in a story, nobody who’s been there doubts the gross exaggerations you plan to make later. The place smelled like it had just been mopped with dirty dishwater and there was a lady standing at the counter that looked like she had used the same water to shower, probably not today. I considered telling her this but I rather prefer my coffee without any human bi-products in it – except for maybe Candace’s.
I digress.
I ordered my usual and I assume Candace ordered what she always does. She said it easily enough and that’s pretty impressive considering it didn’t have the words “totally”, “like” or “no way” in it. We grabbed a table next to the going-out-of-business local publications and snacked on the oversized chocolate muffin the weed told me to buy.
“So, you came all the way out here for a t-shirt, huh? Must be a pretty cool shirt.”
“Yeah, my friend thinks it’s hilarious.” She said. “It’s actually not for her. It’s for her dad. It’s got this picture of an ATM on it, and…”
I zoned out.
To be frank, there were two reasons I was talking to this chick. The first was because Candace was one of the few WW’s that I had seen Mark hang out with more than once and everyone knows that hot girls can get things out of people that dudes cannot. The second, of course, is because I wanted to see her naked. I can’t even say that they were in that order but I can tell you right now that the ATM t-shirt thing was quickly killing my second motive.
It took all of a few minutes for me to guide the conversation and find out a few things I didn’t know. A) Mark had a second home in San Diego; B) he goes there every 3rd Tuesday of the month; C) Candace likes puppies. None of this information was useful. I already knew where Mark was most of the time even though I had never followed him on Tuesdays because that’s the day that Mr Soda delivers Kettle Korn to my house. Really, I didn’t need any of the information that Candace had now. I needed to plant some seeds – (Dear God, how will they grow in there?) - and hope that she came back with something useful next time.
“So, the dog’s pretty cute?” I continued. Apparently, Mark had a puppy.
“Totally,” she said, “super cute.”
This was killing me. “What’s his name?”
“Flux!” she said.
Suddenly, things got interesting. “Flux?” I repeated.
“Yeah, Flux! I told him it was silly when he named him that but now I think it’s pretty cute.”
“How long ago did he get Flux?” I asked.
“I dunno, four or five months ago.” This is usually the part where a normal person would say, “Why?” But, girls like Candace, they don’t ask why. You just keep the questions coming and, for the most part, they will just keep on going. They’re like the Energizer bunny but with great tits and too much eye makeup. Especially after a “Totally Like No Way Latte”, or whatever the fuck that caffeinated soy milkshake was she was drinking.
I downed the rest of my “I’m One of the Last Real Men In Los Angeles” cup of black coffee and stood up. “Let’s go find that shirt.”