Chore Whore Read online

  I sent back all the checks well-wishers had sent to start my new life as a grad. Rather than tuck my tail between my legs and hightail it back to school, I put on a false bravado and said “Screw it” to the world of higher education.

  I took an assortment of horrifying jobs. I scrubbed bugs off small crop-dusting aircraft at the local airport, packed nectarines in shipping cartons and cleaned toilets. So when I found that newspaper ad in the bathroom trash can I was cleaning and actually got hired as a celebrity’s personal assistant, I thought I had it made.

  The hours were long, seventy to eighty per week, but I was young and energetic and I earned enough money to travel. I didn’t mind not having the comfies of a nine-to-five job, a 401(k), a pension plan. Travel was more important than the future. I was living in the present, a young woman desperate to see the world. And fortunately, being a celebrity’s assistant enabled me to do just that.

  When one of my stars got a three-month film in Italy, I traveled ahead to make sure the housing was perfect and set up to her specifications. I was the one who made sure the twelve Louis Vuitton trunks were delivered to the proper airline. I got them cleared through customs—and “Yes, sir, I was the one who packed every last one of these, and trust me, they have not been out of my sight.” I passed out tips left and right to every soul who had to move the trunks.

  I was also the one unpacking them—the one who could complain in six different languages (an asset in my line of work) that no, ordinary 310-thread-count cotton sheets would not do. Pratesi or Frette sheets only. And no, she doesn’t want San Pellegrino, she wants Fonte Tavina, in glass, at room temperature, grazie mille.

  In Paris, in November, I had the pleasure of Christmas shopping with my client’s credit card. She was busy shooting her movie, but had the intention of making it look as if she carefully chose each gift for the people back home. In the pouring rain, I combed the Marais, Saint-Germain, Saint-Honoré and the Champs Élysées, carrying multiple shopping bags while fending off pickpockets.

  Loaded down, I approached a taxi stand when a man walked up to me and in perfect English said, “You rich! You are nothing but whores!” and spit in my face.

  To add insult to injury, he stole my cab.

  In London, I arrived to personally cater to another client’s every whim. Without the language barrier, I swept the city for organic produce and wild Scottish salmon. I chopped veggies and fruit to his specifications, in exact one-half-inch cubes. The salmon had to be steamed, and no oil could touch anything. All food had to be put in individual Tupperware bowls, brought from home. I called these his troughs. I stocked every fridge within arm’s reach for his consumption. While he dined with a half-moon of troughs in front of him, I dined with my London-based friend Marla, eating the best fish and chips ever at Wheelers in Piccadilly.

  If a production company shot a movie on location and decided to pay for a local to assist my stars, I was left at home. Time for my vacation! No special sheets or water or Tupperware. Just a toothbrush, sunscreen, camera and clothes in my own affordable, sturdy, green 1960s Samsonite luggage.

  I went to the Caribbean, right in America’s backyard.

  Antigua, a small dot on the map in the Eastern Caribbean, has 365 white, perfect sand beaches. The water lapping at the shore is warm, shallow and decorated with every color of blue and green imaginable. Tropical reef fish swam between my fingers and slumber came easily in the balmy night air. The scents of fresh coconuts, mangoes and ginger lilies wafted through the air. I was hooked.

  I learned to snorkel and scuba dive and even went deep-sea fishing. And that was where I met Basil . . . the captain of the ship.

  I heard the deep bellow of his laugh first. When I saw his sea-bleached blond dreadlocks and his tall, gorgeous body with its skin like caramel candy, I wanted to taste it. I found him addictive. Basil would tell fisherman tales with his deep West Indian accent and swear they were true: nights at sea, legendary ocean monsters, fighting off Colombian pirates and reeling in tuna by hand in the South Seas. He showed scars from encounters with sharks and emotional scars from past loves.

  His father, a doctor, had insisted Basil return to England to finish his medical residency, but Basil wanted to fish. He wanted to be free out on the Caribbean. After we met, he considered coming to Los Angeles to finish his residency. After a year of long-distance phone calls and occasionally seeing each other, I went to Antigua and impulsively married him with the promise that he’d return home with me.

  Basil and I were in what he called “young stupid amounts of love.” For our honeymoon, we went sailing in his fishing boat. We explored small, uninhabited islands by day and made love on deck every night. We sailed up the island chain to St. Martin, where we docked and explored.

  As I shopped in the small French seaside town of Marigot, Basil went out to sea to catch our dinner. I went to the dock at the agreed-upon time with a bottle of wine, cheese, cornichons, boiled eggs, tomatoes and a baguette.

  I waited at the marina until sundown.

  Basil didn’t return. I sat through the night nibbling on the bread while mosquitoes nibbled on me. I waited some more. I waited until I felt sick to my stomach. I called his mother in Antigua. Basil hadn’t come back.

  He was pronounced lost at sea.

  Three weeks later, I went home to L.A., a married, pregnant woman with no husband to be found. I was in yet another situation where I was embarrassed to admit what I’d done. While my friends were getting married (to men who were here and could be supportive), pregnant and prequalified for mortgages, I was alone and raising my son, Blaise, in a small apartment I rented in West Hollywood. We lived only two miles from my clients’ multimillion-dollar homes in the hills, but light-years away from their lifestyles.

  Ten years later, I struggle to balance being a good mom who’s there for my son and a good employee who’s there for my other children—my clients—who need mothering almost as much as Blaise.

  My oldest “kid” is Jock Straupman. At fifty-four, he needs me to supply his creature comforts. I need him in order to pay my rent, make car payments and cover medical insurance premiums.

  I’m not qualified to do most types of work, and other jobs I’ve had don’t pay enough to live on. In the dog-eat-dog environment of Hollywood, I have to fight to keep my job. As I do Jock’s fan mail, I’m constantly throwing away eight-by-ten-inch headshots and resumés from young beautiful women who would give anything to be the assistant to a movie star.

  In December I’m overwhelmed by eighteen-hour days, but when January arrives, work slows down to a mere trickle because celebs meet with their accountants for a reality check on how much the holidays truly cost them. They try desperately to regain control of their spending. Their good behavior lasts sixty days tops, then I’m back to work as usual.

  Jock Straupman called early this morning needing more groceries than the ones I buy him twice a week. Any other time of the year this would be an easy request, but the groceries he needs are from three different specialty stores, all in different directions, fifteen miles apart. This one errand combined with traffic being a bear becomes a two-hour affair even after I’ve called the stores and had the items bagged and prepaid.

  I have the fantasy of telling Jock I can’t do it, it’s physically impossible to be in all the places I’m needed, but A-list movie stars don’t take that kind of news well. If his assistant of fifteen years isn’t available, he might get the idea that I don’t need the job. He may entertain the notion of getting himself a younger, more nubile assistant, one who doesn’t have a ten-year-old boy with twice-a-week swim lessons, one who never gets sick and will work twice the hours for half the pay and throw in a few goodies on the side whenever she feels so inclined.

  As I pick up at the last grocery store, my cell phone rings. I transfer the grocery bags to one hand and dig my cell out of my purse to answer it.

  “Corki Brown?”

  “Yes, this is she.”

  “This is Dr. Ca
stillo.”

  Oh shit, Blaise’s principal. It must be bad if she’s on the phone personally. She’s only done this twice before: once when he needed stitches and once when he broke his arm.

  “Hi, Dr. Castillo. How are you? Merry Christmas!”

  I pelt her with good wishes before she accosts me with the real reason for phoning.

  “Thank you, to you, too, but that’s not the reason I’m calling. Blaise is fine, he’s not hurt or anything. However, I can’t say as much for our school.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “He set off the school’s fire alarm system. By law, we had to evacuate all eight hundred students and it was an enormous disruption. He is presently in my office and I’d like for you to come pick him up. Now!”

  “Dr. Castillo, I am so sorry he did this, but I can’t. I’m in the middle of work and I’ll lose my job if I don’t deliver. This is the busiest time of year for me. Can I speak with Blaise?”

  “Ms. Brown, this is the fifth incident this year,” she says, barely containing her anger. “He needs to learn consequences to his actions. I’ve already given him a one-day suspension and that didn’t seem to teach him very much. Right now, I’m filling out the appropriate paperwork to have him suspended from attending our school for one week, following the winter break.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. He may just have to sit in your office until I arrive. It could be a few hours though. And Dr. Castillo?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you suspend him for a week, I’m afraid he’ll just take it as an extended holiday.”

  “That will be up to you to make sure that it’s not perceived that way. This will be going on his permanent record. He’ll be waiting here for you.” Dr. Castillo hangs up.

  Within a minute my phone rings again.

  “Mom, it’s Blaise.” Then there’s silence.

  “Blaise, tell me you weren’t the one who set off that alarm.”

  “But I was.”

  “Why did you do something like that? You know better,” I urge.

  “I wanted to hear what it sounded like,” he says without a hint of emotion.

  “Yeah? Well, you heard. Are you happy? Now you’re going to get suspended and they want me to come down there and pick you up. But I can’t, I have to work. And chances are it’s going to be a few hours, so you’ll have time to think about that fire alarm for a good while. Wait there and I’ll get you when I can.”

  I don’t know what’s gotten into that boy lately. His counselor warned me that he has reached the age where a boy really needs his father, but what am I to do? I’ve made sure to give him as many positive male role models as possible. His teacher, swim coaches, piano teacher—all men.

  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 belon
g 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.