86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,31
routes to the airport and downtown. Busy work.
When the one-week training period was over I decided to begin driving more of our clients in the afternoon and evening, forcing sobriety on myself, absenting myself from the office.
In response, because she sensed me pulling away, Portia made the decision to hire a new night dispatcher: tit for tat. The kid was Joshua Wright, a twenty-nine-year-old black guy, a part-time actor and an ex-corporate bookkeeper with a master’s degree in theater. Portia interviewed Joshua twice then wanted me to talk to him too. I approved him right away because he was smart and had showed up to both meetings dressed in spiffy sports jackets with a shirt and tie and because he sounded like the Channel 4 guy on the TV news when he talked. Her plan was to have Joshua dispatch and do our company books in his evening downtime. Over the phone to New York David Koffman rubber-stamped the hire because we were saving money, covering two gigs with one employee.
On his first night of work Joshua arrived driven by his fiancée, a pretty, sexy college girl from USC dental school, Katie Sanders. A white girl. He introduced us and then announced that they would be married the next spring. I was hoping that now I’d be off the hook and for once everything might be okay at Dav-Ko.
One of the clients whom I began driving regularly was Ronny Stedman, a film producer and a true Hollywood asshole. Ronny was originally from Australia but had been raised in L.A. from the age of ten. Now, at twenty-eight, he had made three films and had recently formed his own movie production company. His famous gay uncle Robert owned Adelaide Records and Adelaide Films. He’d passed on a few mil to Ronny to give the kid a running start in L.A. Ronny loved our stocked-bar limos and made up excuses to rent our cars two or three nights a week to hang out with his pretty singer-actress girlfriend, Carol.
When I drove them together they’d hit the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel or Sammy’s in Century City or Matteo’s in Westwood. Carol was a big baseball fan and when the Dodgers were in town the couple never missed a game. She was a former Texas beauty queen and a hot number, ten years older than Ronny. If they’d been partying late and had visited her coke dealer in Westwood on the way home to his Los Feliz condo, the center passenger partition would go up and she’d jump him right in the car. I like that. I liked her. She was funny and pushy and oversexed and refused to take any shit from her asshole boyfriend.
There were some nights when Ronny would go gambling alone at Hollywood Park Casino or one of the clubs in Gardena. I’d sit in the parking lot smoking cigarettes, reading a book, or jotting short story notes in my binder. Portia had instructions from me to only ring my cell phone in an emergency. Stedman didn’t know that I was Dav-Ko’s main guy in L.A. and I wanted to keep it that way.
He continued to request me to drive him primarily because I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t a wannabe anything, not an actor and not an aspiring director and I didn’t need a job in film production and I wasn’t one of the hundred people a day trying to get over on him or his uncle.
When, a couple of weeks later, he began a new film, I became his driver on a twelve-hour-per-day basis, shuttling assistants back and forth from the production office and running local errands. I was determined to stay busy and stay away from Portia and my boozing. I drank only a pint of Jim Beam while I worked, stretching the jug out as long as I could, plus a few wine coolers mixed in with my normal Xanax and Vicodin regimen to keep the edge off. I put in three days straight and had logged thirty-two hours behind the wheel.
The first day of actual shooting on It Creeps was a location at Santa Monica Beach beneath the Palisades, a quarter mile away from where a hundred Baywatch episodes had been filmed. It was a summer night-swimming scene where two girls are in the water nearly nude and their stalker, a tattooed serial killer called Kozmo in the script, wades in to slash them both up with his barber’s razor.
I drove