Chapters 1 & 2

Introducing Sam and Jackie

 

            Sam was on his way to work, driving his old, beat up, Pontiac Grand Prix (a remnant from high school that he’d kept for the memories instead of the reliability) when he’d decided to have his midlife crisis. He was only twenty-nine, but the folks in his family had the unfortunate habit of dying in their sixties, so the timing of it, at least in his mind, couldn’t have been better. Once he drove past several of the available parking spots in front of the dealership, Sam elected on doing a couple more laps around the building before finalizing on his decision to call in sick.  

            “Okay, Sam,” he’d said to himself while looking at the paranoid eyes that were staring back into his in the rearview mirror. “Let’s talk about this before we do anything brash, okay? Okay. So… are we calling in sick or are we calling out forever?”

            Sam’s expression had shifted from paranoid to perplexed, as if his conscience had brought up an idea that hadn’t yet been discussed between the two of them.

            “What are you talking about? You can’t quit. You have no safety net! You have no financial cushion, no nest egg. You’re an eggless, Quail, Sam!”

            “Yeah? Okay, well, you know what else you don’t have? You don’t have time, Sam,” the Mirror replied. “Look at you. You’ve already spent half of your life doing something you never wanted to do. When are you ever going to at least try chasing after your dreams? Huh?”

            Sam considered the Mirror’s question and then offered his answer.

            “When I have enough money stored up. I’m not gonna be a successful screenwriter right out the gate. I have to be prepared for that, you know? I have to be practical about this.”

            The eyes in the mirror rolled, “Practical? PFFT! Practical keeps your toes out of the water, Sam. You’re scared of drowning in the ocean that’s in front of you, but you’ll choke on the air you’re breathing in while staying dry on the land behind you too. Just jump in the damn water already! Who knows, you might have gills!”

            “Yeah, right, are you kidding me? With the funds and the chances that I got? I’d have to be f*****g Aquaman to reap the benefits of that journey. No. We’re taking a sick day; one sick day only. I just need one day to myself to figure out my life and then figure out… which life I want. And I’ll get paid to do it. It’s not like I’ve taken any sick days before anyway,” Sam told the Mirror.

            “Yeah. You know what? You must be pretty sick. Sick in the head for not wanting to quit this job. Look at you. Look at your eyes. They look like Whitney Houston’s after she gets into a fight with Bobby Brown. You’re a battered house wife, Sam! A battered vagina in a bad relationship with a career that your stupid a*s married.”

            Sam began to examine his eyes in the mirror and noticed the bags that were hanging beneath them. He had worked on an assignment for his boss, Larry, the night before that had resulted in him only getting a couple of hours’ sleep. He tried wiping the bags away and for a second it seemed like he’d succeeded in getting rid of them, but they came right back to prove his alter ego’s point.

            “Those are�"that’s just sleep deprivation,” Sam told the Mirror.

            “Yeah, sure it is. Whitney,” the Mirror replied.

            Sam’s iPhone rang to end the sparring match he was having with himself in the rearview mirror and when he saw who it was that was calling, the Mirror decided to deliver his Knock Out punch.

“Speak of the devil,” he said.

 Larry’s name popped up, along with a picture of him that looked more like the mug shot of a man suspected of flashing people than a service manager of a dealership. He was chubby, had a face covered in pock marks, and the kind of hair that looked like someone had emptied out a basket of burnt curly fries on top of his head. On the outset, Larry Swanson just looked… dirty. That’s what Sam had thought when he first met the guy a few years ago, but in truth, all Larry had really been was a former technician who’d never been successful at either looking comfortable or groomed in a suit. After a back injury left him with no choice but to seek other employment, Larry took it upon himself to stay in the car business by becoming a service advisor at a Ford dealership and when that department lost its manager to a drug overdose, he’d been elected that dealership’s new Service Manager. That had been something close to a decade ago, but for the last three years, Larry had been Sam’s manager and of the four managers that have come and gone there, Sam had liked Larry the most. He wasn’t pushy, he had your back when it needed having, and, for whatever reason, the guy had country songs for ring tones. Sam thought he was an all right guy to work for, which was another reason why he’d been so torn on playing hooky that morning.

“Hey, Larry. What’s up?” Sam answered after pressing the speaker button.

“Sam, hey, are you almost here?” Larry asked.

“Am I almost here? Am I almost where,” Sam asked, caught off guard, and about to drive past the front of the dealership again.

“At… work? At the dealership?”

“Am I almost at the dealership? No… I’m… almost… I’m just… looking for parking.”

Just as Sam was driving past the driveway entrance to the dealership, he’d had the unfortunate luck of locking eyes with Larry, who was in the middle of making his way toward the sidewalk from the service drive. He quickly returned his eyes to the road ahead of him, hoping to have passed by without Larry noticing.

“Was that you that just drove by?” Larry asked. Sam could see Larry in his side view mirror, leaning his head out from the sidewalk ledge and squinting at his bumper.

“Drove by? Drove by where?” Sam asked, panicked. He made a quick right onto the next street to escape Larry’s assessment.

“Just now, did you just drive by the dealer? I’m up in the front. There’s plenty of parking up here.”

“No. No, I’m in… I didn’t. I took the back road today. I’m driving around back, where there’s no parking, which is why I’m not there yet.” Sam started mouthing out curse words.

“Huh… could have sworn I saw you just now. Didn’t think there was another purple Pontiac out there,” Larry said, backing up his comment with the kind of laugh that a pot head donates to an officer that’s just pulled him over�"a sort of lighten-the-mood-nervous-tick chuckle.

“Yeah, no, it’s maroon. So, couldn’t have been me. Like I said, I’m… I’m coming in through the back today. Why? What’s up? What’s going on?”

“Huh, okay. No, well, I just wanted to give you a heads up. I have the auditors here with me already. They were supposed to be here tomorrow, but showed up early today, I don’t know… I think… I think just to catch us off guard.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, so I’m gonna need your help today. Pulling repair orders, checking for technician notes, signatures, that sort of thing.”

“Sure, yeah… no problem,” Sam replied. Once he’d made his way back onto the main boulevard in front of the dealership, Larry was right there with it, standing in front of three vacant parking spots with a smile on his face that Sam new right then he couldn’t betray with a phony sick day.

“There you are! You must have a doppelganger or somethin’. Could have sworn that was you earlier.”

Sam sighed at the white flag he’d waived at his conscience and pulled into one of the free spots. The brows above his eyes flat-lined in the mirror. P***y, the Mirror said.

“No. No, this is me now, though,” Sam replied, putting the car in park. Larry appeared at Sam’s driver side window like the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, but with intentions that Sam supposed were slightly less nefarious. 

Larry tried opening Sam’s door, but Sam kept them all locked as if there were still time for him to turn the car back on and high-tail it out of there. Larry, still with a naïve grin on his face, started tapping on the window.

“Open up,” Larry said, finally putting his phone back into his pocket. Sam had hung up as soon as he’d seen Larry standing outside the dealership.

Sam kept pressing the lock switch�"an accident that grew more intentional as he pressed it�"which prompted Larry to unsuccessfully open the door several times. Once Larry’s smile gave way to frustrated confusion and both their eyes met, Sam elected to unlock the door. He could feel the rush of the outside air coming in beginning to choke him.

“What was that? You okay?” Larry asked, laughing. Beads of sweat were beginning to form at the corners of his receding hair line.

“Yeah, no. I’m good. Sometimes my lock sticks, which is what happened there.”

“Well, get it fixed! You work at a car dealership for Christ’s sake! Am I right?” Larry said, flicking Sam’s shoulder. Sam forced a laugh as he got out of the car.

“Yeah, I know. I know.”

“Listen, I wasn’t sure if you’ve spoken to Ken at all recently�"have you?”

Sam gave it some thought. He hadn’t spoken to Ken in more than a week. Ken Bauer was the service consultant that Sam had been covering for almost a year after the sixty-five-year-old was diagnosed with cancer. Something that began in the lymph nodes and trickled down into his lungs. The last time Sam had seen Ken was maybe a month ago. Despite looking thinned-to-the-bones, Ken had still managed to maintain his positive, yet sarcastic self.

“Not for a week or so. Why?”

“Well… he called me late last night and told me that he wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Won’t be coming back? What’s that mean? Like back here? Is he gonna be going to another dealership?”

“No,” Larry said, bringing his arm around Sam’s shoulder. The two of them started walking towards the dealership’s driveway. “No, he said that the treatments have worn him down pretty bad and that it doesn’t make sense for him to move forward with any more of them because the cancer’s… spreading.”

“Are you serious?” Sam asked. Of course, he’d known Larry was serious, but he still would have preferred that his boss be bad at telling jokes than good at telling truths. This time, at least. Cancer had won most of the fights that Sam had witnessed the disease start in his lifetime. Even then, though, Sam thought it would be different for Ken. Sam thought Ken’s cancer would just be another a*****e customer he’d put in his place. For as long as Sam had known Ken, he’d never known a negative situation to win him over. Ken had always overcome his obstacles with the cool finesse of a jazz musician who’d fingered the wrong key during a performance�"he just played on and sometimes he even made his missteps part of the act, creating an even better one than the sheet music he was following. Sam had expected as much from his battle with cancer.

“Afraid so. You should give him a call. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you,” Larry said.

“Did he say anything else to you? Like… if he was planning on… I don’t know. Planning on going another route? Other than chemo?”

“Didn’t seem like it. I think he was trying to say that this was it.”

“Why do you say that? Did he say that?”

“No, not in so many words. He just… look, I told him that I would reserve his position for him for as long as he needed me to and he said that it wasn’t necessary anymore. That if I had someone waiting in the wings for a spot, to let them in. So…” Larry paused a moment to look at Sam who was still absorbing the words of their conversation. Once Sam noticed what Larry was leading to, he stopped walking. The two of them had made it into the mouth of the Service Drive and stood there like two pigeons on a telephone wire.

“No,” Sam said.

“Look, I know being a service advisor is not your thing. Ken even told me to leave you out of it, but it’s an opportunity for you to make more money and I want to see you make that money.”

“Well, then, pay me that money for what I’m doing now.”

“It’s not that easy, Sam. If it were, you know I’d take care of you, but just… just think about it. Okay? I mean, you’re already doing it! The only difference will be that you get an official title and the better money that comes with having an official title. That’s all. I’m not telling you to give up on your writing or whatever, I know that’s important to you, all I’m saying is… you gotta make a living now by doing what’s available to you now and this is it. This is what I can offer you right now that I think will be a great opportunity for you. I’m only offering it to you because I trust you and because I know you won’t let me down.”

That’s another ring on your finger that you don’t need, Whitney. Don’t let screenwriting become the girl you have to sneak around with before heading home to Bobby, the Mirror returned.

Larry gave Sam a pat on the shoulder and left him on the service drive to think about his offer. As Sam’s eyes searched the ground for an answer to Larry’s request, he’d found it in the bars of white paint he was standing on. When he took a couple of steps back, Sam saw a “NO PARKING” warning painted across the floor and when he looked back up, he saw a man scraping Ken’s name off an office window. Larry leaned into the man’s ear as he was scraping off the last letter, pointed at Sam, and whispered something into his ear that caused the two of them to laugh. Larry gave Sam a thumb up before retreating into the building.

“How do you spell your last name?” the man asked after removing the “R” from Ken’s office window. “Is it with two T’s or one?”

Sam’s last name was Pruitt. Two T’s he’d decided right then and there would not be going on the glass.

 

#

 

The black company jacket that Jackie was wearing had been two sizes too big for her slender frame. She felt like she was floating in it as she was driving to work that morning. California Winter was in full effect, however, which had allowed for brisk 65-degree breezes to sweep through her tram as her partner would drive it through the Universal backlot, and cause her teeth to chatter through semi-scripted tour guide spiel. On two or three occasions, it had taken her three seconds longer than it should have to get the words “Psycho House” out of her mouth as they sat parked beside the famous Bates Motel. On the upside, she thought, having a bigger jacket is better than having no jacket.

It had been a trip to the abortion clinic last week that kept Jackie from getting first dibs on a jacket that was closer to her size, so instead, she’d been given what was left of Mark’s employment at Universal Studios�"his jacket. Mark, the tram driver who had also given Jackie her unborn child. The majority of their relationship had taken place at bars after work where she’d been more than happy to accidentally fall into his bed on the few nights she’d been too drunk to drive herself home, but it was a rare occasion when she’d been able to look at the thirty-eight-year-old sober without feeling the need to vomit�"a feeling that came well before the morning sickness had.

Mark was eight years older than she was and existed somewhere in-between the cute and not so cute scale of attractiveness. She’d like cuddling with him�"he was a big guy, not fat, but tall and comfortably stuffed like an IKEA mattress that visitors of the furniture store had the habit of jumping and laying on at first glance, but she could think of little else that would have made a future with him make sense, although she had thought about how she could learn to, in time. At one point, Jackie had thought of Mark as a nice guy, but when he flat-lined at the news of her pregnancy, she’d retracted the attribute.

“You’re not gonna keep it? Right?” he’d said, right out the gate. Eight years older than she was and he’d looked like a child to her then. A child who’d lost track of his parents inside a Target and looked at her as if she’d been the stranger who asked him where his parents were. Before she’d said anything to him, Jackie had entertained the idea of having the baby. She was thirty, after all. A late-bloomer as far as family-starting went compared to her friends on Facebook. If she wasn’t going to leave her legacy behind in film or television (all that seven years of auditions had gotten her were a few community theater gigs, a student-loan commercial, and a direct-to-DVD slasher movie that still had no rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite having been released in 2014), maybe it had been time for her to leave it elsewhere. Like in a family. These had been her thoughts before Mark opened his mouth. After he opened his mouth, she’d decided to focus on the career she didn’t have yet as an actress.

A scene from a screenplay sat in the passenger seat of her car, rolled up and warped from Jackie’s anxious grip. She had an audition later that day for a show being written by Diablo Cody and the part she was reading for belonged to a character that was right up her alley�"a dead-pan, Daria-like manifestation that had been only a slight dramatization of who Jackie already was as a person. She knew that getting the part would mean that she wouldn’t be able to exercise all of her acting muscles to their fullest extent, but seeing as how every other role she’d auditioned for was outside of her comfort zone and that she hadn’t landed any of them, maybe playing a character that was closer to who she was would actually get her a job. All Jackie had to do to get the part was know who she was and even though she’d spent most of her life in a city that preferred the opposite, she was fairly confident that she knew who she is.

When she pulled up to the gate, Sharon had been there to greet her, just as she had been for the last three years. Sharon was an African-American woman in her early forties, whose body had become a massive, left-over monument from all the weight-lifting competitions she’d taken part in more than a decade ago. She claimed that she stopped working out a long time ago, but Jackie didn’t believe her. The way Sharon’s shirts hugged her muscles, it was almost as if she had just climbed out of a pool with all her clothes on. No uniform company in all of L.A. had anticipated an employee of her build. On Sharon, their large shirt looked like garb they’d grabbed from the Baby Gap.

“Morning Sharon,” Jackie said, after rolling her window down and flashing her parking lot pass.

Sharon smiled and shook her head. “Jackie, baby. I told you. You don’t have to take the pass off your rearview mirror. I can see it through your windshield.”

Jackie shrugged and tried to slip the laminated piece of plastic back around the neck of her mirror. After a few failed attempts, she elected to leave the pass on her dashboard.

“I know,” she said, returning to her window. “It’s always such a pain trying to put it back on too, but it’s cool. I like flashing my pass. It makes me feel like I’m a scientist that’s heading into a lab and not just any old, run-of-the-mill lab either. I’m talking about the lab that accidentally made Godzilla.”

“Girl, this is Universal Studios. You know I can’t have you talkin’ all that Legendary Pictures business on this lot without throwin’ you out of here. I’m just gonna pretend that you said King Kong. Say King Kong.”

“King Kong.”

“All right then. We’re good,” Sharon said, smiling. “You know that used to be my stage name?”

“Really? What kind of stage are we talking about exactly? Stage, like a strip club stage?”

“Strip? No! Wrestling! Remember I told you about that stint I had in the late nineties?”

“The WWE thing?”

“Yes! Only lasted one episode, but-

“They called you King Kong?”

“Yeah! Well, not King. I was Queen Kong. Hello!”

“Wow. Isn’t that a little…

“What?”

“A little… I don’t know… racist?”

“Racist? Girl, stop. I came up with that name. I quit when they wanted to change my name to Black Thunder. That’s when I pulled out the race card. How the hell you gonna give sound a color? Now that s**t’s racist as f**k.”

“True,” Jackie said, staring past the gate post as if she were looking for sense somewhere beyond the booth.

“I could have wiped out the entire federation. They knew it too. That’s why they let me go. Could have taken out Cena, Undertaker, Triple H, all them b*****s.”

“Are any of them still alive?”

Jackie watched another car pull up behind her in her rearview mirror. Sharon saw it too, but it didn’t prompt her to push the lift button just yet.

“Some of them died from natural causes. That was another name I was thinking of calling myself. Sharon “Natural Causes” Wilson. The name on everyone’s obituary.”

The car behind Jackie honked. Sharon’s eyes grew wide from their hay-day gaze and returned to the present. She poked her head out from the booth and mad dogged the man behind Jackie.

“That better have been an accident, Sir,” Sharon shouted over Jackie’s rooftop. Then to her, “Give me your badge.”

“What?”

“Give me your badge. Your pass. Let me see your pass.”

Jackie, confused, started fingering the pass off her dashboard and handed it over to Sharon. Sharon took it, looked it over with an angry glare, then handed it back to Jackie.

“Thank you, Mam,” Sharon said, exiting her booth. She was such a broad shouldered, muscular woman that Jackie didn’t think exiting the booth was possible, but she did. The way she strolled past Jackie’s car and stopped at the driver door of the man behind her, reminded Jackie of how the space ship glided toward the White House in Independence Day. A shadow swallowed the man whole and Jackie could tell from his eyes in her side view mirror that he’d instantly regretted his decision to honk his horn.

“Well?” Jackie could hear Sharon saying to the man.

“Well… what?” he asked.

“Well, was it an accident or did you mean to honk your horn at me?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m just running late to a meeting and I really need-

“Oh, yeah? And that’s my fault, huh? That you’re running late?”

“What? No. I never said that.”

“Let me ask you something, Sir. Would you rather be late to a meeting or early to your grave?”

“What are you saying-

“You think all I do all day is push a button? You think I got this big because of all the button-pushing I do all day? Sir? Do you?”

“No. No, I don’t think that.”

“No, is right. Every day I have a responsibility to make sure that the right people come through this gate and you know what that does, Sir? Mister… what’s your name?”

“Ray. Ray Gilroy.”

“Mr. Ray Gilroy? What that does is allow you to have your meetings, all the ones you’re running late to, uninterrupted by thieves, flashers, and terrorism. I’m protecting you, Ray Gilroy. Let me ask you this. What happens when you rush putting on a condom?”

“They… break?”

“What are you asking me for? You’re the one putting the condom on. What happens?”

“They break.”

“They break. And what happens when they break?”

“You… your sperm gets inside the-the-the poon-

“Yeah, okay. That was a rhetorical question Ray, you didn’t need to go there, but that’s correct. Your whiter-than-you sperm gets inside and starts headin’ for that egg, where an eighteen years to life sentence starts to grow into a little person that eventually punches its way out your girlfriend’s never-the-same vagina, and wreaks havoc on your bank account for the rest of your days. All that hassle just for wanting to get your little Willy off.”

There was a ball of words unsaid bulging out from Ray’s neck that he swallowed down after Sharon paused.

“Now, doesn’t it make more sense for you to take your time using protection? Roy?”

“Ray.”

Sharon’s eyes gave Ray’s chin an upper cut that prompted him to move forward.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is rushing your protection worth it, Ray?”

“No.”

“Thank you for your understanding, Ray.” Sharon gave the top of Ray’s hood a “Good Boy” pat and made her way back towards the booth with one hand hovering over the flashlight that was strapped around her waist.

Jackie straightened her back up against the seat. She was thinking about Mark and regretting, again, the sexual escapade that had led to her aborted child. Where had Sharon been to coach them through their one night mistake?

“You’re very intense this morning,” Jackie said to Sharon as she squeezed herself back in through the narrow booth entry way.

“What can I say? Never f**k with a lady on her period,” Sharon said, finally pressing the lift gate button with a snicker.

“You still get those?”

Sharon shrugged. “Yes and no. My doctor said that my age makes me a good candidate for menopause, but at the same time, there was this one injury I sustained back from my wrestling days? Had this one, big a*s European b***h- she went by ‘Gute Nacht’- which basically means ‘Good Night’ in German? She straight upper-cutted me right in the you-know-what. Practically got her whole fist up in there and opened it up. My s**t’s been bleeding ever since.”

“Oh, my God…”

“Tell me about it. I broke every single finger on that b***h’s hand though,” Sharon said with a wink. “She’ll never wrestle again.”

Jackie could feel the nutri-grain bar she’d had for breakfast two hours ago, climb back up from the pit of her stomach. Her saliva became acidic as her imagination brought Sharon’s story to hideous life. Sharon was laughing at the face Jackie was making.

“Make sure you practice your kegels, girl. S**t comes in handy,” Sharon continued, laughing tears from her eyes. “Get it? Hand-y?”

“I do. Yeah, I wish I didn’t, but I do,” Jackie wheezed, pressing her foot on the gas pedal. “Have a nice day, Sharon.”

“Have a good day, boo!” Sharon shouted as she drove into the lot.

As soon as Ray pulled up beside her, the friendliness fled from Sharon’s face and got replaced with a suspicious snarl. Ray handed Sharon his lot pass without making eye contact.