Email from Hollywood (July 2007)

Good to hear from all of you.  My stint as a telemarketer lasted less then
>half an hour when I found out the company was legally bipassing the law
>through some loopholes that had already been outlawed in 14 states.  I was
>supposed to lie to a secretary/receptionist and ask her for the model
>number of the office photo copier assuring her that I was a representative
>of the xerox company (as long as I didn't drop which one and said I was
>merely a mailroom clerk sending out an updated instruction manual.  The
>jist of it was to send them over-priced toner and ink cartridges with a
>correct invoice that would ultimately be cheaper for the company to keep
>(since they were the right parts) then to send back.  A truly noble cause I
>was championing with an apathetic completly conspicuous and bogusly
>see-through tone that afforded me not one secretary friendly, stupid, or
>pitying enough for me to jot down one meager model number and make my
>commission.  It took me half an hour to figure out what we were doing,
>being kept in the dark we were not aware of the complete moral absence of
>our profession or its charlatan tactics.  I worked in a cramped, moth
>colored room, furnished with old school desks and antiquated office phones
>alongside a phone team of West Hollywood crystal meth-heads,
>hermaphrodites, mexican queens, and black transexuals with curling
>plasticine nails of pink and orange, sounds like srgt. pepper on tweak.  So
>after I quit the job assuring Carmen (the redneck loiusinana bayou boss)
>that my moral qualities were not consistent with the nature of the work and
>that she should reconsider the way she promoted it on Craig's list, then I
>told her I'd wrestled with bayou alligators that were nastier than her.  
>Walking through the bright sunlight down Melrose avenue where the hordes of
>yuppies flock like peacocks to strut their pre-tattered fashion clothing
>and scoff at the unwashed and unfortunate lying in gutters  (oh wait those
>rips in your jean were't purposely stitched in by the  designer, OMG), or
>pushing rusty shopping carts down the streets, or the hippies, punks and
>drop outs and old Vietnam vets, The van that I slept in has been
>towed, repossessed and will be auctioned off at the end of the month, it
>sat on the roof of Hollywood towyard winking at me with sun glinting of its
>battered bumpers, as I said goodbye, taking my possesions and piling them
>into a vietnam vet's car, he said I could store it there until I get a
>place, which won't be too soon as desperate as I sound, because I have a
>decent-paying job, and actually he gets an SSi check for 1000 so I may just
>split rent 325 a piece for a month ( no lease) and then with the money then
>saved up, I'll get my own single, I coudn't live with an old man for too
>long, he'd creep out potential cock-suckers and cum starlets (i think i've given up
>on a romantic notion of love), especially since he lost both sets of toes in 'NAm and walks with
>a cane with a gait that crosses between a Charlie Chaplin two-step and a
>charles bronson swagger, it's kind of like he's walking on hooves, so I
>have dubbed him Pan.  Yeah, it's pretty sad becuse he has terminal cancer
>and was expected to die last year, but he keeps on nursing his sclerosis
>and making sure I don't drink alone, but I never really know if I'll see
>him the next day, so I try to make the best out of each fleeting moment. 
>Then Angelo's got the pick-up across the street, also a Vietnam vet, 214th
>airborne division, gunner and paratrooper sole survivor of his group of
>friends, but he's the true Puertorican version of Chuck Norris meets Cheech
>and Chong with a joint hanging from chafed purplish lips.  I don't think he
>handled the war too well but he likes me says i remind him of someone,
>but Angelo gets amped and manic and has a lot of trauma that you only see if
>you look for it like one of those 3d puzzles  that hung on the white walls
>of JFK.  He also surfed in 'nam like that crazy colonel Robert Duvall
>played in Apocalypse Now.  That vision alone makes me smile, cheers me up. 
>But the agent orange fucked up his liver and he's dying too.  He is an
>aspiring fashion photographer and is about to get his degree, he used to be
>a real- estate mogul, until his wife fucked him out of everything.  Now he
>lives under the camper shell of a beat-up Chevy filling his days with
>dreams of what will come when he opens his fashion studio in Vegas, but
>never will because face it this is America and good never comes to those
>who wait, or serve their country.  This is the land where the spoiled
>children of wealth and privilege amass more and more to the plight of the
>working man, the poverty divide gets more staggering, "dog men and their
>mean women pulling poor blankets over our soldiers".  So it goes.  I weighed
>myself today.  I've lost 32 pounds, hungry, I've really got to go find a
>food-line until I get my check.
>take care,
>yours truly the phoner pirate, swash-buckling, drunk vagabond drifter known
>to those who still care,