You see that guy? Him. That guy right there. Sitting at the very end of the bar. In fact, he’s not even sitting at the bar proper. He’s perched on one of the stools surrounding the high round table flanking the bar for friends who want to see each other while chatting and nursing their poisons. Ironic as hell that he’d sit there considering he came here alone, and didn’t have many friends he could’ve come with anyway. You must see him. He’s the only drinker sitting in the bar’s general vicinity. It’s okay if you do miss him, though. Most people did. As that man, ladies and gents, is the single loneliest man in the universe, hands down. I’m not kidding.
Mike Jellwag was the very definition of loneliness. At 31, he hadn’t had a single steady girlfriend since college. We’re talking a solid decade as a singleton, folks. Yeah sure, some people are single by choice because they relish the bachelor life. Not Jellwagger, though. He’d been trying to land a steady woman for ages. Isn’t that how it always works? Why is that? Why do those who want to end up with a spouse and family and picket fence always find themselves on their own, while those who couldn’t be bothered about a family in a million years find themselves with fuck buddies who want to take the relationship to the proverbial next level?
No matter, Jellwagger had stopped worrying about that long ago. He wasn’t big on self-pity, that Jellwagger. Nor was he big on wondering how it came to be that just about everyone on Earth called him Jellwagger and no one could ever simply call him Mike. Sure, his grandparents had called him Michael, but notice I said “had called” and not just “called.” The same verb tense could also be applied to his father, who had addressed his son as Mikey. That is, until the very end. Jellwagger wasn’t there when the old man dropped dead of a massive coronary, but his sister Jo was. According to her, she had just broken the news of Jellwagger’s having quit yet another job. Dad cried out: “Jellwagger!” That was the first, and last, time he ever referred to his son as Jellwagger. The second after, he collapsed. Again, I stress that this was Jo’s version of their father’s final moments on Earth. Jellwagger never admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t buy it.
So that left all of two people who called Jellwagger something else besides Jellwagger, and both were middle-aged women: His mother and his boss. His mother always called him Michael Johnson (Johnson being his middle name). When Jellwagger was a youngster and did something to upset the old woman, she’d screech something like: “Michael Johnson Jellwag! Put! The hamster! Down!” She hadn’t gotten that upset with him in ages, at least not since he’d reached legal drinking age. So it was strictly Michael Johnson from the old woman. As for his boss, she called him Michael, and that suited her. I’ll get to her in a future episode, but for now, suffice it to say that Betsy Seth was far too classy a gal to have a word like “Jellwagger” come out of her mouth.
Speaking of classy gals, that was exactly why Jellwagger was here tonight, at the Napa Valley Grille in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was here to introduce himself to a woman in the hopes of ending the relationship drought once and for all. What the poor sap didn’t know was that the gorgeous dame he was waiting for was, in fact, a high-class madam with a boat-load of her own troubles.
While he may have been the only one at the bar, behind him were small groups of friends who’d just gotten off work, mostly gorgeous, professional-looking women, sitting at small tables next to the floor-to-ceiling window pointed toward Westwood Village. Halfway through his second pint of Blue Moon, he finally had the courage to try to make eye contact with them, but no one acknowledged his existence.
It was just as well. If they had noticed him, they would’ve discerned in a heartbeat that he wasn’t from these parts courtesy of his clothes. There was no way Jellwagger could’ve masqueraded as an upper-middling in that cream-colored butterfly collar. Sure, the small hole just behind the collar, from simple wear and tear through the laundry over the last fifteen years, was impossible to see from further than a foot away. Yet somehow that didn’t matter. And those black jeans? In Christ’s name, those black jeans. The belt covered the logo patch above his left ass cheek so that from a distance it might look like slacks. Suffice it to say these jeans didn’t exactly aid in Jellwagger’s sartorial cause, or lack thereof. So thank God he was no more substantial to those hotties than the shadow of a ghost.
The funny thing is, though, right? It wouldn’t have been hard at all for him to show up looking professional. He did work in a law firm after all. A huge firm, in fact, in downtown Los Angeles, where the dress code from the highest-ranking partner to the lowliest temp was business formal. Even—the horror!—on Fridays. If the genius had just gone straight to the restaurant from work, he would’ve shown up in his burgundy button shirt with black tie and real, honest-to-God black slacks. Granted, he still would have had to get to his car, which meant hopping on the Red Line to North Hollywood, then driving back down over the Hill into West L.A. Instead, he zoomed the five miles from the North Hollywood subway stop to his apartment in Van Nuys, slapped on his current casual wear, and slogged his way down the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass, the most notorious traffic choker in the Milky Way.
He’d left his apartment at six-thirty and reached the Napa Valley Grille at seven-forty. It took him over an hour, in other words, to drive fifteen miles. Still, Jellwagger was early. The gal he was expecting wasn’t due until eight o’… Oh wait. No. Here she was now. God, she was gorgeous. Look at how she stepped up to the hostess with a steady, deliberate gait, standing out immediately amongst the speed-walking waiters blurring by. She smiled down at the hostess with perfect teeth and genuine cordiality. Did they know each other? Hard to say. Oh what in hell did it matter? How in hell was Jellwagger, the slob sitting friendless at the friends table down yonder, supposed to approach her? She may have been only a year older than him, but she was light years beyond his league. Imagine, right? Just imagine this same scene had Jellwagger and Carla Houde come in as a couple. There’s Jellwagger, looking the way I’ve made you painfully aware of. And there’s Carla. Actually, the hottie’s outfit was simple. Just a black one-piece affair beginning with thin straps draped on her shoulders and ending with a thigh-hugging skirt. Standing in front of the hostess put her next to the other end of the bar, where the diffuse lighting beneath the bar top made her red hair glow orange. And that skin. So pale and soft you felt you could have gone to sleep on her right now and gotten the deepest, most satisfying slumber mankind has ever known. You’d have to remove that silver pendant around her neck, though.
By now you must be asking yourself why Jellwagger was waiting for a gorgeous babe he didn’t know. A babe who had, in fact, an entire stable of call girls to administer. No, he wasn’t a stalker. Let me nip that in the bud right now. A stalker pursues a woman even after she’s made it clear as crystal that she’s not interested. Just as Jellwagger was too practical to feel sorry for himself, he would never pursue a woman who told him she wasn’t interested. It wouldn’t exactly leave him feeling like a million bucks, but at least he’d have the wherewithal to pull up the line and find another pond. In this instance, he still had his rod dipped into the pond of Carla, and he was determined to see if she’d take a nibble.
That meant having to introduce himself. As you can see, Carla and her female friend, the blonde who looked barely old enough to drink (yes, one of her call girls, a newbie in fact), didn’t make any acknowledgement that anyone else was sharing the bar as they took the two pedestals at the opposite end.
So if Jellwagger didn’t know her, why was he here? For that, we need to go back in time a wee bit.
Remember the law firm I mentioned? That’s where we’re going, to the law firm of Powell and Powler, LLP, located in the Sanwa Bank building in downtown Los Angeles, one week ago today.
For the past four years, Jellwagger has worked at Powell and Powler as a data entry clerk in the marketing department. With over three hundred attorneys, the powers that be at Powell and Powler had decided long ago to have a fully dedicated marketing department to keep the client stream steady. Today that department had a staff of two dozen. By the way, the powers that be in this instance do not include Powell and Powler themselves. Mr. Powell had passed away years ago while Ms. Powler—with whom Mr. Powell had founded the firm while they’d still been married, originally calling the firm, therefore, Powell and Powell—was in her eighties and looked ready to drop dead any second now. Yet she didn’t. She came in at seven o’clock in the morning every morning as she’d done, sans a single sick day, every day for the past Christ-knows-how-many decades.
As a data entry clerk, Jellwagger’s job was simple. All he had to do was sit at his computer all day and type into the firm’s database the names and contact information of new clients, prospects, and referrals. That’s it. That’s all he did for eight hours a day, five days a week. Typing in names and addresses. The one and only thing that made the minutes go by with any appreciable pace was the audio book for Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, narrated by Bruce Willis. The main reason he listened to it was not because he had any interest in psychology but because, for as long as he could remember, Jellwagger had been a major Bruce Willis buff. I’ll get to this more in a later episode, but one of his main goals in life, when he wasn’t typing in addresses or hitting on madams, was to complete a spec script for an action adventure epic entitled Exit the Danish, which would star Bruce Willis or bust.
With a planetful of attorneys, Powell and Powler tackled all kinds of practice areas, one of them being divorce law. About a month ago, the morning after yet another speed-dating debacle during which one woman said Jellwagger reminded her of her childhood poodle Sissie, who had been crushed by the garage door, Jellwagger hit on the ingenious (he thought) idea of using the data he entered from the divorce side of the firm to find available women. Sound desperate? Really, what did Jellwagger have to lose? What would you have done in his moccasins?
Because the data he was given didn’t include date of birth, Jellwagger simply saved the raw data of all the female names after entering them into the database. Then, when his shift was up, he’d linger at his desk until most of the joint was empty so that he could take the raw data sheets to the area of the firm where the divorce attorneys worked and go through the filing cabinets next to the secretaries’ desks until he found the names he was looking for. As he expected, most of the women he looked up were much older than him, by a margin of ten years if not more. Still, it only took Jellwagger three nights of hanging out after work before he landed on Carla Houde. Not only did her file tell him she was just a year older, but it also included a photo. It was just a simple head shot, but it made Jellwagger’s mouth fall open. It seemed too good to be true that he’d find a woman like this so quickly. And it almost was.
Jellwagger was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the divorce department corridor at eight o’clock at night, Carla’s file opened on his lap, when he heard an all-too-familiar gait from his right, followed by an all-too-familiar voice: “All right, Jellwagger!”
It was Grant Prossich, senior data entry analyst and Jellwagger’s immediate supervisor. Grant was a good ten years or so older than Jellwagger, and his salt and pepper hair and mustache showed it. The reason I called his gait all-too-familiar was because no one else walked around the office like Grant. He didn’t so much walk as march, his feet pounding that poor colorless carpet with a measured mercilessness while his fists and jaw remained clenched. Grant didn’t do this because he wanted to intimidate people. His sandpaper demeanor was more of a natural thing, and after four years, Jellwagger was convinced Grant had no idea of the rough-edged image he projected to those corners of the firm who weren’t familiar with him. Another of Grant’s traits that further complicated interpersonal relations was his penchant for walking up to within an inch of you and staring at you for an interminable five or so seconds before he finally said anything. Because Grant was gay, Jellwagger at first thought this whole staring thing meant Grant was checking him out. But no. Grant did that to everyone regardless of gender or sexual preference. Speaking of talking, Grant never said hello. It was always “All right, So-and-So!” And one more thing about talking. Besides the marching and clenching, another attribute that separated Grant from the rest of the herd was his having the deepest voice in the firm. He was always the female in the male-male relationship, but you’d never know that talking to him. Jellwagger had already been working with him for a month when, during a Friday team meeting, Grant dropped the phrase “and my better half Zach” in the middle of sharing his weekend plans. When Jellwagger finally met Zach at a holiday party, he was reminded of Chewbacca.
Grant’s basso profundo carried further than a space shuttle, so on this night, when the firm was quiet as the vacuum of space, his “All right, Jellwagger!” jolted Jellwagger as if electricity shot up his colon. The tips of Grant’s black shoes stopped a millimeter short of Jellwagger’s khaki pants, and his face pointed straight down at him. Wow, Jellwagger had never experienced the Grant Gaze from directly above. The way Grant didn’t blink and left his lips—but not his teeth—slightly ajar sent yet another current through Jellwagger’s innards.
“Whatchya doin’?” he finally said.
“Research.”
“Oh I see. Uncle Jellwagger’s doing some research.”
“I was missing some information about this one client. She just got a divorce. The sheet you gave me didn’t have her contact info.”
“Yeah.” A pause. More staring. “Yeah.” Grant’s “yeah” was almost under his breath, not a whisper, but still a notch lower in tone than you thought he could go. And he stretched the word out in the back of his throat, as if his larynx were a rubber band. Anyway, the bottom line, right? About Grant? Is that you simply had to know him. If you didn’t know him, and were exposed to all his mannerisms at once, he’d just freak you the hell out in every way. Right now even, with Grant towering above him, Jellwagger was thanking his lucky stars he knew Grant, or else he’d’ve probably been shitting his britches this very moment.
“Why are you here?” Jellwagger finally thought to say.
“I was just going to ask Uncle Jellwagger the very same thing.”
“I told you.”
“The research couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
“I wanted to get some OT.”
“But I didn’t offer any OT.”
“I thought you sent an e-mail last week saying OT was available.”
“Did I?”
No, he didn’t, and Jellwagger damn well knew it. However, it was impossible to tell if Grant was really thinking about it or was just being facetious. Grant had been a serious drug and booze abuser for years, so much so that his artist friends called him the Anonymous Man for all of the various programs and twelve-steps he had to subscribe to in order to kick his various habits. Excepting the occasional joint, Grant had been clean of the major stuff for years, but the long-term mental effect sometimes manifested itself with the occasional senior moment.
“I thought you had,” Jellwagger said. Maybe Grant’s brain really had gone off-course for a moment. “I thought you had” would only slow him up some more.
“Yeah.” A pause. Staring into space. “Yeah.”
“Grant, what the hell? Why are you here?”
He stared at nothing in particular for a few more seconds before he said: “Yeah. I’m trying to get ideas for my new sculpture. There’s a particularly gorgeous filing cabinet in alternative litigation. It’s a slightly different shade of cream than the rest. I’m not going to sculpt a filing cabinet, but sometimes I like to start with color before I actually set chisel to plaster. Shades of cream. Maybe that’s what I’ll call it. Yeah. Hey. I should go home and get started on Shades of Cream.”
Grant marched away to the elevators (alternative litigation was upstairs). Jellwagger, meanwhile, didn’t miss a beat with Carla Houde’s information. He hurried back to his desk, looked up her address on Yahoo! Maps, and saw that she lived in a Brentwood neighborhood not too far from the part of Wilshire Blvd. along which Jellwagger would drive to and from the beach. He drove to her house that night and pulled up just in time to see her coming out and getting into her Mercedes Z4 convertible. This Carla was a speed demon. Residential streets did nothing to discourage her from going over sixty. At one point, to keep from losing her behind a red light, Jellwagger floored it and nearly rear-ended her during the left turn onto Wilshire. By now he figured he’d blown it. She was probably frowning at him in her rearview mirror, wondering what sort of psycho would drive into Brentwood in a beat-up Mazda and then tail her. Still, unless she drove like this all the time, good ole Carla was in a hurry, which meant there was a small possibility she was too distracted to notice Jellwagger. Regardless, he didn’t want to risk losing her, and he couldn’t risk running a red light either, not in this part of town. Brentwood, like Beverly Hills, had cameras in the intersections that would snap your photo with a blinding flash and an unmistakable click, sending your photo to the police, who would then graciously forward it to you with a ticket and a fine.
He didn’t have to follow her long. Westwood Village was only five minutes away. When he saw her pull over to a valet attendant, Jellwagger slowed a bit to read the Napa Valley Grille sign, then continued on. Carla never even glanced in his car’s direction.
And so every night after work for the next week, Jellwagger drove to Carla’s and waited for her to come out. On some nights she’d never come out. The way he timed it was by watching one of the Die Hard movies on his portable DVD player. If the entire movie played, and Carla still hadn’t come out, Jellwagger would give up. On one night she came out to run errands to the grocery store and dry cleaners. On several nights she went to the Napa Valley Grille sometime between eight o’clock and eight-thirty.
Okay, I know Jellwagger is looking awfully weird right now. Let’s just say it: He’s stalking Carla. If all he wants is a date, why not just try a bar or a club? And of course, there’s always online dating and speed dating. The truth is, Jellwagger has tried all of those things. He still does now and again, but the bottom line, right? Is that here he is, thirty-one years old, healthy, trim, sober, working steadily…and completely alone. What did he have to lose? The only discouraging aspect of this new venture was that, if Carla wasn’t interested in him, he’d have to go back to the drawing board and start tailing someone else. And as you might have guessed, turning him down was exactly what she was about to do, and then some.
That’s why it wouldn’t be quite right to label Jellwagger a real stalker. For if he was, then Carla’s turning him down wouldn’t have discouraged him from continuing to follow her, but that’s exactly what it did. Or as I should say, that’s exactly what it would have done. Jellwagger was set to move on to the next gal, but complications ensued that kept his and Carla’s lives intertwined indefinitely.
That brings me back to the present, with Jellwagger sitting at the friends table at the Napa Valley Grille, wiping that string of drool from his chin while figuring out what in hell he was supposed to say to Carla Houde. Oh screw it. What did he have to lose, right? Isn’t this why he’d given up every night for a week? Isn’t this why he’d been watching Jeremy Irons with a German accent in Die Hard with a Vengeance? He owed it to himself to say something, anything, to this carrot-topped Venus, to get at least one syllable out of his mouth in her general direction. “C-Carla?” His throat had some mucus in it from not having spoken to anyone at all that day. No one heard him. He cleared his throat with an exaggerated sound, then said, “Carla Houde? Oh my gosh, is that you?”
Carla glanced at him with a half-smile, then looked down at her mixed drink, which she stabbed and stirred with her little black straw. From the other side of her Jellwagger could just make out one of that younger woman’s eyes looking at him for a moment before she too turned to her drink and mouthed something to Carla.
Was that it? Weren’t they going to answer? What the hell? “Is that you, Carla Houde?” Jellwagger asked. He picked up his Blue Moon, almost lost his balance when he hopped off the stool, and started toward her.
He barely took two steps when someone clasped a palm on his shoulder and said, “Is that you, Michael Johnson Jellwag?”
Jellwagger’s first thought was his mother. She was the only one who had ever addressed him with all three names. But no, that couldn’t have been her. This was a man’s voice. Jellwagger looked around and saw a big hulk of a guy with a smile plastered on his face. He lowered his voice and kept his smile so no one would be able to hear him or even tell that he was talking. “Don’t move, sir. You feel that? Right there?” Jellwagger felt something hard pressing into the small of his back. “That’s a .38 just for you. I have it aimed at a slight downward angle so that if I pull the trigger, it’ll blast through your bowels, into your urethra, and blow off your measly little cock. Is that what you want? Good boy. Now let’s go meet Carla.”
To be continued...
Mike Jellwag was the very definition of loneliness. At 31, he hadn’t had a single steady girlfriend since college. We’re talking a solid decade as a singleton, folks. Yeah sure, some people are single by choice because they relish the bachelor life. Not Jellwagger, though. He’d been trying to land a steady woman for ages. Isn’t that how it always works? Why is that? Why do those who want to end up with a spouse and family and picket fence always find themselves on their own, while those who couldn’t be bothered about a family in a million years find themselves with fuck buddies who want to take the relationship to the proverbial next level?
No matter, Jellwagger had stopped worrying about that long ago. He wasn’t big on self-pity, that Jellwagger. Nor was he big on wondering how it came to be that just about everyone on Earth called him Jellwagger and no one could ever simply call him Mike. Sure, his grandparents had called him Michael, but notice I said “had called” and not just “called.” The same verb tense could also be applied to his father, who had addressed his son as Mikey. That is, until the very end. Jellwagger wasn’t there when the old man dropped dead of a massive coronary, but his sister Jo was. According to her, she had just broken the news of Jellwagger’s having quit yet another job. Dad cried out: “Jellwagger!” That was the first, and last, time he ever referred to his son as Jellwagger. The second after, he collapsed. Again, I stress that this was Jo’s version of their father’s final moments on Earth. Jellwagger never admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t buy it.
So that left all of two people who called Jellwagger something else besides Jellwagger, and both were middle-aged women: His mother and his boss. His mother always called him Michael Johnson (Johnson being his middle name). When Jellwagger was a youngster and did something to upset the old woman, she’d screech something like: “Michael Johnson Jellwag! Put! The hamster! Down!” She hadn’t gotten that upset with him in ages, at least not since he’d reached legal drinking age. So it was strictly Michael Johnson from the old woman. As for his boss, she called him Michael, and that suited her. I’ll get to her in a future episode, but for now, suffice it to say that Betsy Seth was far too classy a gal to have a word like “Jellwagger” come out of her mouth.
Speaking of classy gals, that was exactly why Jellwagger was here tonight, at the Napa Valley Grille in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was here to introduce himself to a woman in the hopes of ending the relationship drought once and for all. What the poor sap didn’t know was that the gorgeous dame he was waiting for was, in fact, a high-class madam with a boat-load of her own troubles.
While he may have been the only one at the bar, behind him were small groups of friends who’d just gotten off work, mostly gorgeous, professional-looking women, sitting at small tables next to the floor-to-ceiling window pointed toward Westwood Village. Halfway through his second pint of Blue Moon, he finally had the courage to try to make eye contact with them, but no one acknowledged his existence.
It was just as well. If they had noticed him, they would’ve discerned in a heartbeat that he wasn’t from these parts courtesy of his clothes. There was no way Jellwagger could’ve masqueraded as an upper-middling in that cream-colored butterfly collar. Sure, the small hole just behind the collar, from simple wear and tear through the laundry over the last fifteen years, was impossible to see from further than a foot away. Yet somehow that didn’t matter. And those black jeans? In Christ’s name, those black jeans. The belt covered the logo patch above his left ass cheek so that from a distance it might look like slacks. Suffice it to say these jeans didn’t exactly aid in Jellwagger’s sartorial cause, or lack thereof. So thank God he was no more substantial to those hotties than the shadow of a ghost.
The funny thing is, though, right? It wouldn’t have been hard at all for him to show up looking professional. He did work in a law firm after all. A huge firm, in fact, in downtown Los Angeles, where the dress code from the highest-ranking partner to the lowliest temp was business formal. Even—the horror!—on Fridays. If the genius had just gone straight to the restaurant from work, he would’ve shown up in his burgundy button shirt with black tie and real, honest-to-God black slacks. Granted, he still would have had to get to his car, which meant hopping on the Red Line to North Hollywood, then driving back down over the Hill into West L.A. Instead, he zoomed the five miles from the North Hollywood subway stop to his apartment in Van Nuys, slapped on his current casual wear, and slogged his way down the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass, the most notorious traffic choker in the Milky Way.
He’d left his apartment at six-thirty and reached the Napa Valley Grille at seven-forty. It took him over an hour, in other words, to drive fifteen miles. Still, Jellwagger was early. The gal he was expecting wasn’t due until eight o’… Oh wait. No. Here she was now. God, she was gorgeous. Look at how she stepped up to the hostess with a steady, deliberate gait, standing out immediately amongst the speed-walking waiters blurring by. She smiled down at the hostess with perfect teeth and genuine cordiality. Did they know each other? Hard to say. Oh what in hell did it matter? How in hell was Jellwagger, the slob sitting friendless at the friends table down yonder, supposed to approach her? She may have been only a year older than him, but she was light years beyond his league. Imagine, right? Just imagine this same scene had Jellwagger and Carla Houde come in as a couple. There’s Jellwagger, looking the way I’ve made you painfully aware of. And there’s Carla. Actually, the hottie’s outfit was simple. Just a black one-piece affair beginning with thin straps draped on her shoulders and ending with a thigh-hugging skirt. Standing in front of the hostess put her next to the other end of the bar, where the diffuse lighting beneath the bar top made her red hair glow orange. And that skin. So pale and soft you felt you could have gone to sleep on her right now and gotten the deepest, most satisfying slumber mankind has ever known. You’d have to remove that silver pendant around her neck, though.
By now you must be asking yourself why Jellwagger was waiting for a gorgeous babe he didn’t know. A babe who had, in fact, an entire stable of call girls to administer. No, he wasn’t a stalker. Let me nip that in the bud right now. A stalker pursues a woman even after she’s made it clear as crystal that she’s not interested. Just as Jellwagger was too practical to feel sorry for himself, he would never pursue a woman who told him she wasn’t interested. It wouldn’t exactly leave him feeling like a million bucks, but at least he’d have the wherewithal to pull up the line and find another pond. In this instance, he still had his rod dipped into the pond of Carla, and he was determined to see if she’d take a nibble.
That meant having to introduce himself. As you can see, Carla and her female friend, the blonde who looked barely old enough to drink (yes, one of her call girls, a newbie in fact), didn’t make any acknowledgement that anyone else was sharing the bar as they took the two pedestals at the opposite end.
So if Jellwagger didn’t know her, why was he here? For that, we need to go back in time a wee bit.
Remember the law firm I mentioned? That’s where we’re going, to the law firm of Powell and Powler, LLP, located in the Sanwa Bank building in downtown Los Angeles, one week ago today.
For the past four years, Jellwagger has worked at Powell and Powler as a data entry clerk in the marketing department. With over three hundred attorneys, the powers that be at Powell and Powler had decided long ago to have a fully dedicated marketing department to keep the client stream steady. Today that department had a staff of two dozen. By the way, the powers that be in this instance do not include Powell and Powler themselves. Mr. Powell had passed away years ago while Ms. Powler—with whom Mr. Powell had founded the firm while they’d still been married, originally calling the firm, therefore, Powell and Powell—was in her eighties and looked ready to drop dead any second now. Yet she didn’t. She came in at seven o’clock in the morning every morning as she’d done, sans a single sick day, every day for the past Christ-knows-how-many decades.
As a data entry clerk, Jellwagger’s job was simple. All he had to do was sit at his computer all day and type into the firm’s database the names and contact information of new clients, prospects, and referrals. That’s it. That’s all he did for eight hours a day, five days a week. Typing in names and addresses. The one and only thing that made the minutes go by with any appreciable pace was the audio book for Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, narrated by Bruce Willis. The main reason he listened to it was not because he had any interest in psychology but because, for as long as he could remember, Jellwagger had been a major Bruce Willis buff. I’ll get to this more in a later episode, but one of his main goals in life, when he wasn’t typing in addresses or hitting on madams, was to complete a spec script for an action adventure epic entitled Exit the Danish, which would star Bruce Willis or bust.
With a planetful of attorneys, Powell and Powler tackled all kinds of practice areas, one of them being divorce law. About a month ago, the morning after yet another speed-dating debacle during which one woman said Jellwagger reminded her of her childhood poodle Sissie, who had been crushed by the garage door, Jellwagger hit on the ingenious (he thought) idea of using the data he entered from the divorce side of the firm to find available women. Sound desperate? Really, what did Jellwagger have to lose? What would you have done in his moccasins?
Because the data he was given didn’t include date of birth, Jellwagger simply saved the raw data of all the female names after entering them into the database. Then, when his shift was up, he’d linger at his desk until most of the joint was empty so that he could take the raw data sheets to the area of the firm where the divorce attorneys worked and go through the filing cabinets next to the secretaries’ desks until he found the names he was looking for. As he expected, most of the women he looked up were much older than him, by a margin of ten years if not more. Still, it only took Jellwagger three nights of hanging out after work before he landed on Carla Houde. Not only did her file tell him she was just a year older, but it also included a photo. It was just a simple head shot, but it made Jellwagger’s mouth fall open. It seemed too good to be true that he’d find a woman like this so quickly. And it almost was.
Jellwagger was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the divorce department corridor at eight o’clock at night, Carla’s file opened on his lap, when he heard an all-too-familiar gait from his right, followed by an all-too-familiar voice: “All right, Jellwagger!”
It was Grant Prossich, senior data entry analyst and Jellwagger’s immediate supervisor. Grant was a good ten years or so older than Jellwagger, and his salt and pepper hair and mustache showed it. The reason I called his gait all-too-familiar was because no one else walked around the office like Grant. He didn’t so much walk as march, his feet pounding that poor colorless carpet with a measured mercilessness while his fists and jaw remained clenched. Grant didn’t do this because he wanted to intimidate people. His sandpaper demeanor was more of a natural thing, and after four years, Jellwagger was convinced Grant had no idea of the rough-edged image he projected to those corners of the firm who weren’t familiar with him. Another of Grant’s traits that further complicated interpersonal relations was his penchant for walking up to within an inch of you and staring at you for an interminable five or so seconds before he finally said anything. Because Grant was gay, Jellwagger at first thought this whole staring thing meant Grant was checking him out. But no. Grant did that to everyone regardless of gender or sexual preference. Speaking of talking, Grant never said hello. It was always “All right, So-and-So!” And one more thing about talking. Besides the marching and clenching, another attribute that separated Grant from the rest of the herd was his having the deepest voice in the firm. He was always the female in the male-male relationship, but you’d never know that talking to him. Jellwagger had already been working with him for a month when, during a Friday team meeting, Grant dropped the phrase “and my better half Zach” in the middle of sharing his weekend plans. When Jellwagger finally met Zach at a holiday party, he was reminded of Chewbacca.
Grant’s basso profundo carried further than a space shuttle, so on this night, when the firm was quiet as the vacuum of space, his “All right, Jellwagger!” jolted Jellwagger as if electricity shot up his colon. The tips of Grant’s black shoes stopped a millimeter short of Jellwagger’s khaki pants, and his face pointed straight down at him. Wow, Jellwagger had never experienced the Grant Gaze from directly above. The way Grant didn’t blink and left his lips—but not his teeth—slightly ajar sent yet another current through Jellwagger’s innards.
“Whatchya doin’?” he finally said.
“Research.”
“Oh I see. Uncle Jellwagger’s doing some research.”
“I was missing some information about this one client. She just got a divorce. The sheet you gave me didn’t have her contact info.”
“Yeah.” A pause. More staring. “Yeah.” Grant’s “yeah” was almost under his breath, not a whisper, but still a notch lower in tone than you thought he could go. And he stretched the word out in the back of his throat, as if his larynx were a rubber band. Anyway, the bottom line, right? About Grant? Is that you simply had to know him. If you didn’t know him, and were exposed to all his mannerisms at once, he’d just freak you the hell out in every way. Right now even, with Grant towering above him, Jellwagger was thanking his lucky stars he knew Grant, or else he’d’ve probably been shitting his britches this very moment.
“Why are you here?” Jellwagger finally thought to say.
“I was just going to ask Uncle Jellwagger the very same thing.”
“I told you.”
“The research couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
“I wanted to get some OT.”
“But I didn’t offer any OT.”
“I thought you sent an e-mail last week saying OT was available.”
“Did I?”
No, he didn’t, and Jellwagger damn well knew it. However, it was impossible to tell if Grant was really thinking about it or was just being facetious. Grant had been a serious drug and booze abuser for years, so much so that his artist friends called him the Anonymous Man for all of the various programs and twelve-steps he had to subscribe to in order to kick his various habits. Excepting the occasional joint, Grant had been clean of the major stuff for years, but the long-term mental effect sometimes manifested itself with the occasional senior moment.
“I thought you had,” Jellwagger said. Maybe Grant’s brain really had gone off-course for a moment. “I thought you had” would only slow him up some more.
“Yeah.” A pause. Staring into space. “Yeah.”
“Grant, what the hell? Why are you here?”
He stared at nothing in particular for a few more seconds before he said: “Yeah. I’m trying to get ideas for my new sculpture. There’s a particularly gorgeous filing cabinet in alternative litigation. It’s a slightly different shade of cream than the rest. I’m not going to sculpt a filing cabinet, but sometimes I like to start with color before I actually set chisel to plaster. Shades of cream. Maybe that’s what I’ll call it. Yeah. Hey. I should go home and get started on Shades of Cream.”
Grant marched away to the elevators (alternative litigation was upstairs). Jellwagger, meanwhile, didn’t miss a beat with Carla Houde’s information. He hurried back to his desk, looked up her address on Yahoo! Maps, and saw that she lived in a Brentwood neighborhood not too far from the part of Wilshire Blvd. along which Jellwagger would drive to and from the beach. He drove to her house that night and pulled up just in time to see her coming out and getting into her Mercedes Z4 convertible. This Carla was a speed demon. Residential streets did nothing to discourage her from going over sixty. At one point, to keep from losing her behind a red light, Jellwagger floored it and nearly rear-ended her during the left turn onto Wilshire. By now he figured he’d blown it. She was probably frowning at him in her rearview mirror, wondering what sort of psycho would drive into Brentwood in a beat-up Mazda and then tail her. Still, unless she drove like this all the time, good ole Carla was in a hurry, which meant there was a small possibility she was too distracted to notice Jellwagger. Regardless, he didn’t want to risk losing her, and he couldn’t risk running a red light either, not in this part of town. Brentwood, like Beverly Hills, had cameras in the intersections that would snap your photo with a blinding flash and an unmistakable click, sending your photo to the police, who would then graciously forward it to you with a ticket and a fine.
He didn’t have to follow her long. Westwood Village was only five minutes away. When he saw her pull over to a valet attendant, Jellwagger slowed a bit to read the Napa Valley Grille sign, then continued on. Carla never even glanced in his car’s direction.
And so every night after work for the next week, Jellwagger drove to Carla’s and waited for her to come out. On some nights she’d never come out. The way he timed it was by watching one of the Die Hard movies on his portable DVD player. If the entire movie played, and Carla still hadn’t come out, Jellwagger would give up. On one night she came out to run errands to the grocery store and dry cleaners. On several nights she went to the Napa Valley Grille sometime between eight o’clock and eight-thirty.
Okay, I know Jellwagger is looking awfully weird right now. Let’s just say it: He’s stalking Carla. If all he wants is a date, why not just try a bar or a club? And of course, there’s always online dating and speed dating. The truth is, Jellwagger has tried all of those things. He still does now and again, but the bottom line, right? Is that here he is, thirty-one years old, healthy, trim, sober, working steadily…and completely alone. What did he have to lose? The only discouraging aspect of this new venture was that, if Carla wasn’t interested in him, he’d have to go back to the drawing board and start tailing someone else. And as you might have guessed, turning him down was exactly what she was about to do, and then some.
That’s why it wouldn’t be quite right to label Jellwagger a real stalker. For if he was, then Carla’s turning him down wouldn’t have discouraged him from continuing to follow her, but that’s exactly what it did. Or as I should say, that’s exactly what it would have done. Jellwagger was set to move on to the next gal, but complications ensued that kept his and Carla’s lives intertwined indefinitely.
That brings me back to the present, with Jellwagger sitting at the friends table at the Napa Valley Grille, wiping that string of drool from his chin while figuring out what in hell he was supposed to say to Carla Houde. Oh screw it. What did he have to lose, right? Isn’t this why he’d given up every night for a week? Isn’t this why he’d been watching Jeremy Irons with a German accent in Die Hard with a Vengeance? He owed it to himself to say something, anything, to this carrot-topped Venus, to get at least one syllable out of his mouth in her general direction. “C-Carla?” His throat had some mucus in it from not having spoken to anyone at all that day. No one heard him. He cleared his throat with an exaggerated sound, then said, “Carla Houde? Oh my gosh, is that you?”
Carla glanced at him with a half-smile, then looked down at her mixed drink, which she stabbed and stirred with her little black straw. From the other side of her Jellwagger could just make out one of that younger woman’s eyes looking at him for a moment before she too turned to her drink and mouthed something to Carla.
Was that it? Weren’t they going to answer? What the hell? “Is that you, Carla Houde?” Jellwagger asked. He picked up his Blue Moon, almost lost his balance when he hopped off the stool, and started toward her.
He barely took two steps when someone clasped a palm on his shoulder and said, “Is that you, Michael Johnson Jellwag?”
Jellwagger’s first thought was his mother. She was the only one who had ever addressed him with all three names. But no, that couldn’t have been her. This was a man’s voice. Jellwagger looked around and saw a big hulk of a guy with a smile plastered on his face. He lowered his voice and kept his smile so no one would be able to hear him or even tell that he was talking. “Don’t move, sir. You feel that? Right there?” Jellwagger felt something hard pressing into the small of his back. “That’s a .38 just for you. I have it aimed at a slight downward angle so that if I pull the trigger, it’ll blast through your bowels, into your urethra, and blow off your measly little cock. Is that what you want? Good boy. Now let’s go meet Carla.”
To be continued...
