I’m John the Janitor. Of late I have taken to introducing myself that way, keeping a low profile, trying to be factual, trying not to hate admitting it, not couching it in apologies, not saying it’s a temporary thing. Being a janitor is a good job. I work for an architectural firm in Los Angeles. They have a four story building in West L.A. and I keep it clean. I go in at three in the afternoon and work until about eleven, sometimes midnight, Monday through Friday. I’ve been doing this for twenty-six years. Of late I’ve been telling people my routine. How I cruise the building first thing while there are still people at work, checking to see if there are special things to be done: a light bulb to change, a plumbing, electrical, or air conditioning problem, that sort of thing. I then do the lobby and reception area and bathrooms on the main floor. Next I do a complete cleaning job on one floor: the top floor on Mondays, the third floor on Tuesdays, the second on Wednesdays, the main floor on Thursdays. Friday is for general maintenance, window washing, working in the basement, etc. Finally, I do the bathrooms and kitchens on each floor and empty all the wastebaskets.
I get a good wage relative to most janitors, and full benefits. I even pay ten percent from every paycheck into to the 401K plan and the company matches my contributions. Over the years I’ve built up quite a little nest egg. Could be more, but there you go. That’s kind of the story I’m getting to.
The thing is, I’ve got another job, too. Actually, it is more of a passion than a job, and I put more time into it than janitoring. I used to tell people about my passion rather than my real job. I’ve variously said I was a writer (Oh, what do you write? Screenplays, I tell them. Oh, how interesting. Anything I might have seen?) a screenwriter (Wow! Now that’s interesting. Have I seen any of your work?) a film industry person (Do you direct? Produce? Edit? Are you a cameraman? No, a writer. Oh, (hiding disappointment) what have I seen of yours?). I used to answer that inevitable question with: I don’t know. What have you seen? That didn’t usually get good results, so I changed to say, Probably not. Maybe some small stuff. (Like a tampon commercial. This I didn’t say.) Now I shake my head. No. It’s a tough market, but I’m working on it. That’s what I say now.
The fact is that I’ve written a lot of screenplays and even more treatments (a treatment is a fifteen page summary of a proposed screenplay) and I’ve sold one original screenplay and two treatments. I’ve also been hired to write two adaptations from novels, and one novelizaton of a screenplay. I mean: I got paid for those. The treatments were good, but never became screenplays, the original screenplay that I sold never got produced. Nor did the adaptations, although one of them got pretty far along, over half of the movie was shot before the director got fired and the new director brought in his own screenwriter who re-wrote mine completely and I got no credit. I’m just as glad that the novelization didn’t get published because it was an awful story and there was nothing I could do about it. Still, it’s what I’m good at, and I’m sure I’ll make it one of these days. I did write a whole series of feminine hygiene commercials that were produced and shown for about a year, and three spots for the Green party’s run for governor about 10 years back, two of which made it to TV, although I did them (the political ones) pro-bono because I believed in the cause. And, of course, I know everyone that matters in all the major studios, and not all of them turn and run when I show up. I’m usually able to make my pitch, so my confidence in success isn’t completely stupid.
I started contributing to my 401K plan in the mid-eighties and by 1999 it was up to a little over a hundred thousand dollars, what with the company’s matching funds and the market going up and all. Basically, I’d put in twenty-five thousand of my own pre-tax wages, the company had matched those with another twenty-five thousand, and the market had doubled all that over about fifteen years. Now, in spite of what most people thing about screenwriters, we’re a pretty conservative bunch, and I’m no different. I had my money in moderate risk mutual funds. No high-tech IPOs or New Guinea oil fields for me. I held General Motors, General Electric, Intel, Sysco, CitiCorp, that sort of thing. Then one day in October 1999 my broker called me up and started talking about the Y2K bug. He told me that it would be better to move everything into the money market because there might be a market crash if all of the computers weren’t fixed. Of course, I’d heard about it, but I thought that the problem was pretty much licked in this country, and it was places like Russia and Korea that were really in trouble, but in the end I took his advice. I told him to do it then sat back and watched the market soar.
I have to admit that before then I’d never paid much attention to my 401K plan. I glanced at my monthly statements and saw that it was chugging away, growing in fits and starts, and looking good. But once I jumped out into a low interest, no risk situation, I watched it like a hawk. Right up until the end of the millennium (or the year 1999 for those purists who insisted that 2001 marked the beginning of the new one) I held out hope that the thing would flop. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve I noticed with some consternation that the lights didn’t go out, the parties didn’t miss a beat, and I had bags and bags of pinto beans I’d be eating for the next decade. Then on Monday, January 3, 2000 auto parts supplies from Korea didn’t evaporate, the Russian banks didn’t collapse, and the Dow Jones Average continued to rise. I should have been glad, right? If the worst had happened I’d have had my beans but probably no job, and I knew that, but still something in me was disappointed.
I called my broker, but he assured me that we’d made a prudent decision, perhaps a bit early, but that we should continue to hang out in the weeds just to be sure. He’d let me know when the time to buy back in was right. The signals were mixed but he was still banking on a crash. Of course, the market soared. All of my sold stocks rose by twenty, thirty percent. I was getting pissed, but I hung loose. I was working on a new screenplay, a great idea I had stolen from a friend of mine. The premise was that this Swartzenager-like character, a reporter for the L.A. Times, gets a tip that something weird was happening at some airstrip in Mexico, so he goes down there and using some wonderful night-vision technology watches as a plane lands and the cargo is unloaded into a pair of waiting Suburbans. He’s an old hand and it turns out he recognizes the pilot as a CIA operative. He manages to check out the cargo and finds that it is cocaine. Well, he follows his nose and gets into a passel of trouble, gunfights, death threats, his girlfriend kidnapped, daring rescues and escapes, all that sort of stuff, and along the way he figures out that the cocaine is being smuggled into Mexico from the US. Now this is really weird, right? The action gets heavier, his paper is getting political pressure and orders him out but he refuses, goes in alone, you know the score. Eventually he figures it out. The cocaine is laced with poison. It’s a slow-acting kind that takes a couple of days before killing you. Turns out that this is part of the US anti-drug program. The CIA figures that if enough US citizens are killed snorting cocaine that a) the demand will go down, which would be a good thing, b) the government could get REALLY pissed and provide a TON of money to the anti-drug campaign and seriously arm the Colombian para-military, which would be good for the CIA and their thug friends abroad, and c) the government would be able to crow ‘I told you so’ to all of the bleeding heart do-gooders who favor the liberalization of the drug laws instead of more enforcement. The Swartzenager hero type is determined to block the movement of the cocaine before it can kill all those innocent Americans. I was working on a couple of endings. The one I favored was that the hero fails, and the movie ends with the President of the United States making some speech about hitting back hard and advocating a) and b) above and doing a lot of c), while another planeload arrives at the airstrip and Swartzenager strains hopelessly against his chains in some dungeon or his girlfriend weeps at his grave. The ending I figured the studios would like would be the hero saving the day.
Anyway, I was working on these two endings in late March when my broker called me again. Seems we’d made a mistake. The market was going to just keep rocketing and we should get back in the game. I bawled him out for being such a whoose the six months before. Wasn’t it his job to predict these things? How could he be so wrong? He hung his head (metaphorically at least. I couldn’t see him since this was all done by telephone) and said his wasn’t an exact science, and I told him to go ahead. He said that if I really wanted to make it up I should buy more heavily in the high-tech stocks. He especially liked Claris and maybe a phone company like MCI Worldcom. I told him I was a little nervous, but he should go for it. Maybe I was influenced by my hero hopelessly chained to a dungeon wall, I don’t know. For sure I didn’t want to fall further behind.
I wrote down all of the stocks he told me he would buy and the next day bought the paper to check them out. So, we lost a bit right out of the gate. I wasn’t deterred. The next day I got another paper and saw they were further down. By the end of the week I made the call. I’m losing my shirt! I told him. We’re off fifteen percent in one week! Sell! Sell! Sell! My broker (his name is Peter) was pretty cool. Hey John, he told me. Don’t you think that next year folks will still want computers? Don’t you think there will be need in the future for routers? For telephones? What’s a router? I asked him. He didn’t know, but it was what Sysco made. Oh, I said. Do you think that the world has all of the telecommunications gear and services it will ever need? Of course not, I said. So, he said, we stick with the big boys. They’ve had a rough week. Panic selling is where you really lose. We’re in this for the long haul. You’re only fifty, right? So, you’ve got another fifteen years before you can touch this money. It will all work out. I didn’t tell you, but Peter works for Salomon Smith Barney, which is a big Wall Street company, so he should know. That’s what I figured. Those guys have people on the inside feeding them the info first, feeding them info the rest of us will never hear, and, in spite of the recent screw-ups, in the long run, I should trust him. Did I think I could do any better buying and selling on my own? I didn’t even want to think about it!
I shopped my script. Drug movies had been on the outs since the eighties, but were making a comeback. Look at Traffic and Blow. I figured I was on the inside track with this one. I cleaned offices by night and shopped the script by day.
Every time Peter bought or sold a stock I got notification by mail. He’d bought Claris at $111 a share in late March, then even more a week later at $66 per share. I shrugged it off. Two weeks later he bought as much again at $39. I called him up. You going to buy this losing stock until I’m broke? You buy it at 110, at 60, at 40… What’s next? It’s a good company, he told me. These are bargain basement prices. Our analysis shows it’ll be back up over a hundred within a month and you’ll be thanking me. What did I know? I decided he was probably right and I should just let him do his thing.
Nobody liked my script. I talked it up and re-worked the treatment through the spring and summer. What a bust! It was a great idea and would make a great thriller, a thriller with a killer twist, but it just wasn’t going to happen. It was the fall before I looked at my stock portfolio, that’s how tied up in the script I’d been. $60,000! That was all it was worth! I checked Claris, my chosen bellwether. It was trading at ten bucks. Five grand that asshole Peter had dumped into that stock and it was now worth eight hundred! What’s going on? I bellowed down the line. You’re ruining me! It’s not me and it’s not you, he said. He sounded like a whipped dog. It’s the market. A real bear. Everything’s in the dumpster. What are we gonna do? I demanded. Just hang tight, he said. We’re near the bottom. Maybe it’ll settle a bit more, but the indicators are looking good. If you look back at the last crashes… and he started talking about the market in the 1880’s for Christ sake, and the 1930’s and October 1987. We bought at the top, he said. YOU bought at the top! I yelled. I could feel my face darkening. Five thousand was nuts, he said. What’s five thousand? The NASDAQ. Five thousand was just too high, but you ride it up, you ride it down. NASDAQ! NASDAQ! I was shouting. I never rode the fucking NASDAQ up! I was solid DOW. What are you talking about? He was kind of quiet for a while then he said, my mistake. You’re right. We invested in the tech stocks in the New Year. AT YOUR FUCKING SUGGESTION! I was losing it. Look, he said. If you want out, I’ll pull you out, but it would be a big mistake. You’ve lost forty grand, more or less, but you’ll get it back. Bail out now and it’s gone for good. Stop bullshitting me, I said. I could pull out now and get back in when it turns around. What are you talking about gone for good? Listen, he said. You study the market you’ll see. Every year there are only about a dozen days to be in the market. You miss any of them and you’ve missed the boat. You can’t sit on the sidelines and jump in a day late. That’s for sure. That’s a loser’s strategy. Been proven a million times. The only way is to hang in. This is a long-term proposition. You’d better be fucking right, I snarled then slammed down the receiver.
I realized that the problem with my script was Swartzenager. He was the wrong model for the character. What I needed was more William Hurt, maybe a controlled Michael Douglas. Replace the machine guns with intellect. Make it more believable. Not this could happen but this is happening! Given the two losers who were duking it out to be the next Prez – this was the fall of 2000, this is a reality! Make the politicians and bureaucrats, the policy and political climate, the real villains. Make a political statement. It was a big change and something new for me. A different audience, maybe a different studio. A smaller movie, but a more important one. The re-write took me a year. I spent thousands of hours on-line and in the library learning about the DEA, the CIA, the FBI, DARE; understanding, as best I could, the incestuous intricacies of politics, policy, funding, and bureaucracy. Quite frankly, it slowly dawned on me that not only was my scenario possible, it was probable! I became a zealot. And as I got closer and closer to it I realized that every contention had to be, if not provable fact, strongly supportable. No weirdo conjectures, no conspiracy theories or flights of fancy. This was not Matrix I was writing, or a Terminator movie, it was Disappeared. 2001 flew past in a blur. I knew real passion for the first time in my life. I understood the importance of my craft. This wasn’t entertainment, this was the engine of political change, the guts of democracy and free speech, the stirrings of Paul Revere. September 11 came and went. Our malicious little president morphed into a rampaging tyrant – declaring war on the whole world because of an event caused by his daddy’s and his predecessor’s insane foreign policy. In a climate of fear strong voices are called for!
Early in 2002, fired with conviction, I made the rounds with my pitch. There was an audience. Some heard me out. I found tentative interest. I looked further, smaller producers, the indie market. Eyebrows, snorts, pensive nods. These were good signs. A half dozen copies of the script were out there being passed around. This is how it works. I thought of nothing else.
Then, one day I received a slip of paper informing me that my WorldCom stock had been sold for $7.50. Huh??? My mouth fell open. It was like digging myself out of a dream. I was in the groove! What was this shit? Still, I had to deal with it. I knew in my gut that something bad had just happened. I’d taken my eye off the ball.
I dug through my files to refresh my memory. Peter had been slowly accumulating WorldCom, like he had Claris, over the past two and a half years. He’d spent just over $3,500 for it in all, and just sold it for seven bucks! I didn’t call him immediately. Instead I bought the paper and started reading about it. Turned out that Salomon Smith Barney had been in cahoots with WorldCom, getting kickbacks for selling stock, kickbacks for giving it a solid buy rating. After I had all my ducks in a row I called Peter and demanded an explanation. Yeah, gee, it was a mess, he told me. The kickback rumors were false, of course, but the company, WorldCom that is, had been cooking the books. Cooking the books with Salomon’s oversight, I snarled. That’s not true, John. Not true, he said. Your guy, Grubman, was rating it high so WorldCom would give Salomon more business, I’ve read all about it. That’s just bullshit speculation, he said. I know Jack Grubman. Yes, he was wrong about WorldCom, but it was an honest mistake. You’re covering for the bastard! Your whole company was behind this scam! Think what you like, John, he said, but it’s not true. If you’d told me a year ago that America’s biggest corporations would falsify their books, lie to their share holders and the government about their liquidity I’d’ve laughed in your face. Who would have guessed? It’s beyond belief. We’re as surprised as anyone. I thought you were the smart guys, I said. I was banking on it! We are the smart guys. Bullshit! At the very least you got conned by some guys a lot smarter’n you. Not smarter, he said, crooked. And you helped them be crooks! You flogged their stock like there was no tomorrow. You purposely spent my money on a crooked game that your company had a vested interest in. Obviously I didn’t know it was crooked, he said, and of course we get a commission for selling stock. But why did you buy MCI with my money again and again as the stock stumbled and wallowed like a stuck pig? Well, he hadn’t seen it as stumbling and wallowing, he said. He’d just taken the advice of headquarters to buy. So, you’re just an order taker, I said. I thought you were some brainy guy who could out-guess the market. That’s what you told me. Well, I do pretty well, he said. Bullshit! Every stock you buy for me goes down, every stock you sell goes up the next day! Oh, that’s not true, he said. I started naming a few examples. Why did you sell my Oracle stock at $32? One week later it was at $120. Yeah, he said, and what is it now? $26. So why didn’t you sell it at $120? I got a sell order from headquarters. So, you’re an order taker! No! But I listen to what I hear. Seemed like good advice at the time. You said you got an order. Was it an order or was it advice? It was a recommendation, he said. And you took it, a bad recommendation. Why did you do that? We felt it was overpriced, and it was overpriced, we were just a bit ahead of the curve. So what about Intel? You sold ha
lf of my stock at $78 and it went to $110 then split. He took a minute to check, then informed me that the stock had been doing so well that it had become over 20% of my portfolio, which made me unbalanced, so he sold it off to keep an even keel. We didn’t want to have too much in one stock or sector. Besides, he said, look at it now, at $36. Good thing I sold. You made money on that. We bought it at $24. What’s my portfolio worth right now, I asked him? Forty-two thousand. Shit! Less than half of what it was worth two years ago. You are still ahead, he told me. How do you figure that? Well, you’ve a little over twenty-seven thousand invested… And my company’s put in another twenty-seven, I interrupted him, so that’s fifty-four thousand real dollars you’ve pissed down to forty-two. Whoa John, whoa. Now, let’s not get abusive, he said. It’s a rough market. Most have lost a lot more than you. Like, that was supposed to mollify me.
Anyway, it burst my bubble. I was so pissed I couldn’t work. Instead I went to the library to read back issues of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, and I got online to gloss all of the news clips and articles and chatter; any and everything about WorldCom. WorldCom, Enron, Tyco. I spent a couple of weeks doing nothing else. There was a lot to catch up on. My scripts started coming back to me, but I didn’t get them out again. I think I left a few calls unanswered. It’s hard to figure now, but somehow I lost my punch, let my tires go flat. And the interest dried up just like that. People think of California, Hollywood in particular, as being laid back, but it’s not. The Hollywood people I know are the hardest working you could find. For them everything is work. When they’re getting their nails done, they are on the phone working the deal. That sounds funny, but getting their nails done is important! It’s part of the job. You can’t sell a script or land a part if you got raggedy nails. But that’s not the point. The point is I lost focus, and in Hollywood that is fatal. Scripts, even the best in the world, don’t sell themselves. Persistence, follow-up, follow-through, one-hundred percent attention: these are simply required. Maybe Brad Pitt can get away with a few slack days, but not the rest of us.
So, I dropped the ball. But not because I’m an idiot. What happened was I got an even better idea. I would have LOVED to sell that damned script. I think it’s important as hell to make that movie, but the next idea came along and I had no choice but to follow it. I tried to fool myself that I could keep both balls in the air, but deep down I knew it wouldn’t happen. You see, there’s a great movie in the Salomon WorldCom debacle. Think about it! Everybody got burned one way or another with the market crash, and these sons of bitches engineered it. I began feeling downright evangelical.
The insider dealings were complicated and not completely clear yet, but I figured they could be simplified enough to make villains out of the Wall Street sharpies and a hero out of the guy who exposed it all, maybe somebody inside. Some sort of an exposé with a bunch of stupid dupes like me in the background. I decided that there would be a Peter character, a dupe himself who, in his ignorance, was duping others; somebody somewhat sympathetic who was getting pressure from both sides, who was just trying to keep his head above water, trying to keep hold of what little integrity he still had. Another role for William Hurt or Michael Douglas. A real person who would end up being another victim. I might try to have him strike out on behalf of his investors and be squashed by the corporate machine. I thought I could get inside such a person’s head. I could maybe use Peter as a model, see how he lived, maybe get to know him a bit. Then there’d be someone like me, a janitor even, also sympathetic, who just gets pushed too far; one of Peter’s clients who would strike back.
I know that there is something creepy about janitors. Really, of course, there is nothing creepy about them, but I think that in general most people are a little wary of us. Or, maybe not wary, exactly, because how many people ever even meet a janitor, but we have an unsavory air about us: lurking in furnace rooms, having keys to locked doors, working odd hours, eating alone in the basement someplace. So, although a janitor with a stock portfolio might be a rarity, he could still be a good choice for the edgy character I had in mind. Somebody you could have sympathy for, poor working stiff losing his hard earned savings, but a little shady, a little suspect, just a little creepy.
The Salomon Smith Barney offices aren’t too far from where I worked, so I decided to just drop in on Peter on my way in one day. I’d been there once before, all those years ago when I’d opened my account. I’d not met Peter face to face since. I remembered that they had the third floor of a glass tower, but found that they’d grown since my first visit to occupy the fourth and fifth floors as well. I wondered cynically if they’d expanded upwards to fill a vacuum left by the high tech firms they had not long ago serviced, pumped up, and bled dry. Probably a stretch for the script. A blonde with big teeth told me that Peter had a late luncheon meeting and would not be back for a while. I asked her if she could be more specific, but she told me that she couldn’t. I was welcome to wait. I glanced at my watch. He starts early, she said, as if it might make me feel better. Six a.m. Well sure, it made sense, Wall Street being three time zones away. She told me that it was a drag, from which I was supposed to understand that she also had to start at six a.m., so I should be sympathetic. I just shrugged. I work weird hours too, I told her. There was just a flicker of hesitation in her eyes when I asked to use the restroom. She had sized me up by then, my jeans, sweatshirt, and scuffed work boots. It’s not that I’m a slob. You can’t be a slob and make it in Hollywood. You can’t even have a beard and make it in Hollywood. The beards come later, a badge of success. But I was dressed like a janitor, which understandably gave her pause. But then she handed me a key from her desk.
A nicely appointed Men’s, bigger than any in my building. A tight row of eight stalls, as many urinals and sinks. High quality fixtures, well lit. White tiles gleaming. I ran my finger along the top of the stalls. Clean as a whistle. At home I always sit down to pee. If you clean restrooms for a living you know how unsanitary men are, even when they are conscious of it. We weren’t built to hit a pot, and then there is splash control. Anyway, I went into one of the stalls and peed standing up. Didn’t even raise the seat. Upon my reentry to the reception area Ms. Teeth shook her head, Peter hadn’t returned, so I shrugged and said I’d try another day. She didn’t bother to ask my name.
I had time to kill. I cruised the building lobby, and in one of the groupings of leather armchairs, there he was, huddled over a low table stacked with open file folders and across from a thirty-something long legged creature in a pinstriped mini-suit. I took up my post in a leather lounger across the lobby where I could observe them with ease. It took less than twenty seconds for a thug with a badge to ask me if he could help me. Help me what? I said. He informed me that this was not a public building. I’m waiting for my broker, I snapped, and pointed my chin across the lobby to Peter. The guy was making the same mental calculations as Ms. T. upstairs given my less than corporate appearance. He shuffled for a few moments then cleared his throat and returned to his stool at the security desk. I could feel his glower on the back of my neck.
Peter had put on weight. His belly bulged over his belt where his jacket hung open. He’s younger than I am, mid-forties, but letting himself go. His blonde hair was close-cropped and thinning. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but whatever it was, he was earnest about it, his fingers pushing through the files and down sheets of paper, tapping decisively now and then. The woman’s interest, in the few minutes I’d been watching, had begun to flag. She straightened her posture as if to stretch her back, but then remained upright, crossing her legs and glancing about the room. I didn’t lower my gaze but she looked right through me. Peter continued his intense monologue for perhaps another minute, then seemed to notice her ambivalence. Quickly he closed the files, slid them into a leather briefcase and stood, straightening his tie. I’m starved, she said. I’ve got to eat. Let’s go then, he said. We can take this up later. I watched them cross the street and go into a Mongolian Barbeque. It was time for me to get to work.
The only things in LA worse than the transit system are the traffic and the smog. Probably some kind of linkage there, but it worked in my favor: Peter was a rider. I’d got some kind of vicarious thrill watching him the other day and I convinced myself I’d learn more about him on the sly than with a face-to-face. Must be one of those creepy janitor things. I called his office giving a phony name and asked Ms. Teeth what was the latest appointment I could make with him. She told me he left at four. I made like I couldn’t make it until after five, so I’d try some other time and hung up. I’ve got all night to do my cleaning, so after a quick scoot around the building I headed back to his tower.
I didn’t think he’d recognize me after more than a decade, but I’d let my beard scruff out and I wore a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes. Just after four he came striding through the glass doors, turned abruptly to the left and clipped smartly up the street. He glanced once over his shoulder as I slouched along behind him and I thought for a minute he’d spotted me, but, no, he was eyeing a city bus that was coming up the street. I’d let him get a block ahead and suddenly he was boarding the thing. I sprinted like a demon and wedged my hands through the closing doors, shouting at the driver to let me on. He didn’t slow down, but opened the door enough for me to slip in then swore under his breath at me as I paid the fare. A few of the riders glanced up to take in my entrance, but not Peter. He was seated halfway back and already digging through his briefcase. As I passed him on my way to an empty seat in the back he was opening a thick three-ringed binder on his lap and groping in his jacket pocket for his glasses.
The bus headed north, got onto the freeway in the HOV lane, and plugged along in fits and starts through Santa Monica, past Venice Beach, and up into Topango Canyon. I felt like a fool, but when Peter closed up his briefcase and queued up with half of the other passengers to get off at the second stop up the Canyon, I followed suit. We were at the entrance to a large gated community with some fluffy California name, about a dozen of us in all, one woman with a kid in a stroller, one business woman, and all the rest men wearing ties and briefcases. There was a little chitchat, but not much, as we streamed past the unmanned guardhouse and through the wide-open gates.
I held back a bit, not enough to be conspicuous, but just to get the lay of the land. It was a nice complex, lots of variation in the houses, moderately spacious lots green with privacy hedges manicured to the point of foolishness. You expect these places, at least I do, to be humongous, uniform, cinderblock houses, with southwest style stucco and lots of terracotta tile, but this one was different. Most of the houses were redwood or cedar gabled two storied affairs with double garages and shake roofs, some with that fake weathered look they get with gray stain, and others walnut or chocolate. The streets were broad and curved without sidewalks. Aspen Circle, Cedar Park Close, Meadow Loop. Peter made quick work of the three blocks to his house at 107 Tiger Tail Court, a twisty little street two blocks long that ended against the canyon wall. His house was the first on the street, and modest, at least compared to the neighbors, having more of a lake cottage appearance. It was on what was certainly the least favored lot on the street; flat and narrow and exposed.
Without much spring in his step Peter mounted the worn wooden stairs to a covered front verandah as I ambled past. I heard the screen door slam hollowly behind him, no Honey I’m home, as I continued up the street right to the roundabout fronting two monster houses, one Tudor eight-gabled affair and the other a Bavarian stone castle complete with a moat and portcullis. Jesus, there are some pretentious assholes in California! How would you like them for neighbors? I realized as I sauntered back down that they probably asked themselves the same about Peter.
The back yard was fenced but easy to peer into. Swimming pool, barbeque, evidence of kids, but no kids. Peter was slouched in a deck chair under an umbrella nursing a beer. I surmised he was recently divorced. Poor schmuck. I headed back for the bus. So it was a bust. Big deal. You win some you lose some. There was no character in Peter, probably because he had no character. I’d have to find some other source.
Two days later I got a notice in the mail that Peter had sold off all of my Claris stock at six dollars a share. So, what I’d paid six grand for he’d dumped for six hundred. The trade had occurred on the day I’d followed him to his house. The one good thing about this fucker is I could reach him on the phone. Our analysis is that Claris will likely not recover, he told me. They suffered a two-dollar a share loss last year, a one dollar a share loss this year. Grim prospects, so I got what I could get. Tomorrow your six hundred would be three hundred. And what if you’re wrong? I couldn’t keep the abrasion out of my voice. Yeah, wrong. Wrong like you’ve been with every other one of your fucking Analyses? What good is six hundred bucks to me? I started with six thousand. Look, he said, we gotta fish or cut bait. Claris is a loser. We gotta face it and get into some decent stocks, something that’s gonna make your money back for you. But you could’ve done that without selling the Claris. How much Intel or whatever can you buy with six hundred bucks? It’s a stupid gamble. It could be at fifty a week from now. No way, he said. How do you know? Your analyst told you to buy Claris all the way down into the basement, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong every time. How can you possibly believe he’s right now? It’s nuts, fucking nuts. Do you own any Claris stock? Did you? I’m sorry, I don’t discuss my personal portfolio with my customers. Why not? ‘Cause it’s just bad for business. In other words, you never bought any Claris for yourself while you were pissing my money away on it. Same with WorldCom, I’ll bet. Huh? Am I right? I’m sorry… I cannot and will not discuss this with you. Okay, so let’s make a bet, shall we? I don’t bet. What do you mean you don’t bet? You bet my money all the time and you always lose, man. A friendly wager. Let’s bet on the Claris stock price tomorrow morning say one hour after the opening bell. A hundred bucks a point. I’ll pay you a hundred bucks for every point it goes down and you pay me a hundred bucks for every point it goes up. What do you say? Put your money where your mouth is instead of just mine for a change. I’m sorry. I told you, I won’t bet with you. What? Stakes aren’t high enough for you? Make it a thousand a point, then. I’m good for it. Can’t lose more than I’ve already lost, which is six grand, now can I? What’s the price right now? Let’s get our baseline established. A grand a point from the price right now. He was silent for maybe ten seconds. I figured he was looking up the price, but then he said, Do you have anything else you want to talk about John, because I’ve got calls backed up here. I’d like to close this conversation now unless you have something else on your mind. You’re an asshole, do you know that Peter, a real fucking asshole. As are you sir, he said. Good day. And, with that, the bastard hung up on me.
Well, I guess I deserved it. And, unfortunately for him, he’d re-awakened my interest. Peter was a stodgy, self-righteous, anal-retentive, incompetent worry-wart. I could make him mean, which I didn’t think he was, and funny, which he definitely didn’t intend to be. I could also make him drive his unhappy clients to do anything I wanted them to do. In particular some lowlife, pig-headed way-too-serious janitor type. I suddenly knew that the janitor had won the lottery: that’s how the movie would open, that’s how he gets the money to start with, and then rather than just blow it, which is his first inclination, he gets smart and self-important, buys himself a suit and tie, goes shopping for a broker, a smart guy, crooked or straight, didn’t matter to him, just somebody who’d turn his hundred grand into a million. And he chooses Peter. You get it, right? He didn’t earn the money, so it’s a godsend, something that could never happen again. It’s his once in a lifetime break, his one and only chance to be the big shot, to golf at Augusta and Saint Andrews, to sit behind some fancy desk in the corner office on the top floor of some glass tower, instead of creeping in at night to clean the damned place. He’s going to put all of his money in with Peter, quit his job, and monitor his portfolio twenty-four hours a day. Peter will double his money in the first couple of months with some fluky deals, exuberance all round, then it’ll go to shit and Mr. J will make Peter’s life hell. Sounds like a comedy, but it’s not. The janitor’s got nothing to do but to investigate, and digging is his middle name. It’ll be like janitoring all over again, but now he’ll be exposing the dirt instead of getting rid of it. And it will all be true, Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, the real dirt, the real stories, the actual steps taken in the cover-ups. A fucking docudrama.
But these aren’t nice guys, either of them. They’re not working for the public good. Mr. J wants his money back, sure, but once he’s drawn blood he likes the taste of it. He’ll go for revenge. And Peter, maybe Solomon Smith Barney, not sure about that, got to be careful, but somebody will fight back. The ending needs some thought, but it will probably be obvious once I get into it.
Next day Claris was up fifty cents. You’re not being helpful, Peter told me. Huh? Sweating the small stuff, he explained, bitching over fifty cents. You told me Claris would be three bucks today Mr. Stock Genius. You assured me the company was down to tubes. And I believe it is, he said, his voice was cool as a fresh Fudgecicle. There was some reckless buying yesterday, that’s all. Don’t you mean reckless selling? John, he said, I’m tired of this. I advise you to seek another broker for your account. I’ve taken steps to turn you over to a Ms. Welsley in our firm. I think you’ll get on better with her than you have with me. Shit Peter! I don’t want your little Ms. Weasle. I chose you! I just want you to do your fucking job is all. Quit buying at the top and selling at the bottom. Work for me instead of against me. Stop using me as cannon fodder for your fucking backroom schemes with fucking corrupt degenerates like Bernard Ebbers and Kenny Head-up-his-ass Lay. John, he said, not even a tremor in his voice, I’m going to ask my secretary to cease putting your calls through. You’ll be directed to Ms. Welsley in future. If you have a problem with that you may talk to my superior. Superior? Superior? You mean there is somebody better’n you? Well, that was childish, but it didn’t matter because he’d already hung up on me, which made it twice in a row.
I called back immediately. My broker, Peter, has directed me to speak with his superior. Who would that be? That would be Mr. Brown, sir. Could you put me through, please. I’m afraid Mr. Brown is out of town for the rest of the week, sir. Would you like his voice mail? Well, tell me, who would his superior be? Mr. Brown’s superior? Indeed. Why, that would be somebody in New York, sir. This person, he or she, has no name? I would have to check, sir. What? Check if this person has a name? No sir. I mean I would have to check my organizational chart and my New York directory. Will you hold? No! No, I don’t wish to hold. Please ask Mr. Brown to call me. One moment please. And I was into their voice mail system. I resisted the urge to slam down the phone and was eventually able to leave my number.
If that was a mistake it wasn’t my first. He returned my call about ten days later, left me a message full of apologies about his busy schedule. I let it drop.
Please understand: I’m a professional. My job is to create characters, to create situations – with my imagination. I didn’t need to use Peter as a model, nor myself, for that matter. I just decided to, for the fun of it, for the hell of it. But I’m not stupid. If I was going to start hounding Peter the way my character was going to in the movie, I had to get myself, my real self, out of the picture. To do that I needed information on his other clients. It didn’t take long to find out what outfit cleaned the Salomon Smith Barney offices. Now, if this were a movie I’d have been in there the next day, but in real life it took me two months to get hired, and they paid me shit, even knowing I was twenty-five years in the business. Not that that matters. The shift was four to midnight and they did four clients, four big suites of offices, in that time. It was a big outfit, mostly illegals. I hit my building at three just to show my face, then worked my new job until midnight, then was back over to do my regular job, just finishing up before the secretaries came in at eight, eight-thirty. What a life! It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d put me where I needed to be, but it was a full month before I even saw Peter’s office.
He had a big space, a corner office, enormous tinted windows with not much of a view, and it was the most sterile, boring room you’ve ever been in. The desk completely clear but for a telephone and a crisp little silver-framed studio picture of a foursome of frozen smiles, the happy family I didn’t see at his house, a dozen tall metal filing cabinets with four drawers each, and a wall of lockable bookshelves. Everything, every single drawer, door, cabinet was locked. I tried every one of them twice, and not a place to hide a key. At least nothing I could find. I figured his secretary, Ms. T, would probably have a key, but everything in her space was locked up tight as a drum as well.
Two days later it was Saturday, but instead of catching up on badly needed sleep, I went over to Universal Studios where I know a bunch of guys, let’s just say they’re in the technical side of things. I gave them the make and model numbers of the cabinets and desk drawers I wanted into, and within a half hour was supplied with a set of keys.
On Monday I was back in Peter’s office. The damned keys didn’t work in there, but one of them opened the desk of Ms. T, and there I found a master key to all of Peter’s cabinets. I turned on the photocopier and by the time it was warmed up I’d found what I wanted: a complete client list including telephone numbers, addresses, and a summary of each of their holdings. Needless to say, that was my last day on that job.
I began working on my new script in earnest. The working name for the broker was Peter, and that of the janitor John. I’d change them later. John was dark, intense, wily, suspicious, and dangerous, all attributes I lack but occasionally hanker for. I’d make Peter a pudgy, good-looking, philandering weasel with a bit of a conscience, a coward, but vicious if cornered.
Something you need to know about screenwriters is that we know lots of stuff. Think about it, we’re always researching some arcane field or another. If some scene is going to take place in a submarine, you need to know something about submarines. Same goes with everything. Now I, and John, happen to know a bit about telephone systems. In particular, we know that, when a call is placed, part of the initial digital message that is sent to the telephone company is the number from which the call is being made. This is called the ANI, for Automated Number Identification. We also know that companies that have their own switchboards and do their own voice mail system have access to this initial outgoing digital message. It took me a weekend, another trip to Paramount and two hundred bucks (John it took just a few keystrokes in the dead of night) to get a laptop plugged into our architectural firm’s phone system and a simple program that would override the ANI of all outgoing calls to whatever we typed in via the keyboard. So for the next week after the office was closed and we were sure there was nobody in the building, using the list of phone numbers, we placed hundreds of calls on behalf of Peter’s clients. You understand? From the Salomon Smith Barney phone records, the calls would appear to come from Peter’s clients. We called and left messages for Peter, his boss, the Salomon Smith Barney offices in New York, the Wall Street Journal. Very specific messages. You bought such and such at this price and sold it at that. What the hell are you doing? John threatened legal action, threatened to bomb Peter’s car, break his kneecaps, kidnap his children. He was outrageous. Of course, he disguised his voice and pretended only to be Peter’s male clients, including himself, but not all of them. We knew that he could be caught via a voice print, so, in real life, I made sure never to call Peter again as myself and never to answer my phone in case it was the police recording the call. We knew that Peter, his boss, eventually the police, would confront these people, Peter’s clients who were supposedly making these nutso calls, perhaps even charge them, but if the threats were crazy enough it would make sense to everyone that they would deny everything, which would buy us a bit more time. We also knew that when the police eventually crosschecked the calls, looking for outgoing calls from the phones of Peter’s clients, they would not find them and they would realize it was a hoax. But by then our work would be done.
In the meantime John stalked Peter. He was reading a newspaper at the bus stop when Peter disembarked at five forty-five in the morning, and he rode the elevator with him up to his office. Peter started to look like shit. John sat in the neighboring booth while Peter wolfed pastrami on rye at the Schlotzsky’s deli with Ms. Mini Pinstripe, overhearing his woes. The morning after one of his clients threatened his kneecaps Peter didn’t arrive by bus, and we watched him nervously descend, at four that afternoon, to the underground garage for his car, a Porsche Taiga. He was skitterish as he threaded his way between the concrete pillars and automobiles, pausing behind every obstacle, looking over his shoulder, all the time with his right hand buried in his jacket pocket. We realized he was toting a pistol. Next day John went down by the back staircase and slashed all four of the Porsche’s tires. That night another of Peter’s clients threatened to bomb the car, specifying the make, model, and license plate. After that Peter started coming and going by cab. On the fifth day John and I was ready with his own car (a rumpled van that I’d ordinarily not be caught dead in) and we followed the cab to a second rate hotel about a mile from the office. From the pay phone in the hotel lobby John called the front desk and left a message for Peter in which he suggested Peter find some other line of work.
I was working day and night, what with my regular job, my role-playing job, and getting it all down on paper, I was scraping by on two, three hours of sleep each night. And, in spite of my dogging his every step I wasn’t getting enough information out of Peter. I could see we’d stressed him but I didn’t know what was going on in his office, in his head. What was his relationship with his boss? The papers hadn’t picked up on this yet, so I had no feedback. I couldn’t go in and interview him, ask him how he was holding up. I needed to tap into his phone, either at the office or at home, which was now a hotel, but I simply couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how and wasn’t crazy enough even if I did. But John, my character, knew how, and he was crazy enough, and would probably get away with it too. And that’s my job: to create fiction where I’ve no fact. So, once we found out that Peter was in the hotel, before we called him from the lobby phone, John waltzes up to the front desk carrying his laptop and a belt of appropriate tools, says he’s from the phone company, flashes his Custodian badge from wherever the hell he works, and gets let into the phone room. He taps into the hotel registry, discovers Peter’s room number, then sets up his laptop to record all his incoming and outgoing calls.
In real life, Peter didn’t show up at work after that. In the script we know why. We hear our message being delivered and within seconds Peter is on the phone to his boss, a slick aging asshole who lifts weights in his office, Michael Douglas, I think. Peter is freaking out, talking about death threats and bringing in the cops, and how he needs round-the-clock protection from these crazies. Mike Douglas yawns, tells him to chill out and to take a vacation. Offers him his timeshare in Cancun.
We get home that night and there’s a letter from Salomon Smith Barney. My quarterly statement and a little bonus pep-letter signed my Ms. Weasel, my new account manager, whose existence I have ignored and denied ever since Peter dumped me with her. From the quarterly report I see that my portfolio is now worth just under thirty grand. There has been no activity with my stocks. Ms. Weasel has just let them slide for the several months they have been in her domain. Really, I should have been sitting down. It was a lesson hard learned over the past years when receiving news from my broker. But I was in the kitchen, having just poured myself a Scotch and water, and standing at the counter. Shit! I shouted as I staggered back against the stove, my eyes still riveted to the statement. I lurched blindly for my drink but succeeded only in dumping it onto the tile floor, where the crystal shattered into a million tiny shards. I dropped Ms. Weasel’s missive and, grabbing the J&B from the counter, hurled it through the kitchen window, where it presumably sailed six stories into the alley below. I stepped through the slop and glass on the floor and leaned heavily against the counter, staring at the space between my hands and took a series of deep breaths. This was not me! I’d never thrown a Scotch bottle through a window before. Nothing even remotely close! Bending, I retrieved the papers I’d dropped and stumbled to the living room where I slumped onto the couch. I giggled. That is what John, my character, would have done.
For some reason I turned back to the correspondence and saw the bullish, but nevertheless feminine, squiggle at the bottom of one of the pages. It was a form letter signed by Ms. Weasel touting Salomon Smith Barney’s success in a tough market. Sure, we’d almost all lost money, but on average Salomon Smith Barney customers were still up 10 percent over the past ten years. These recent losses were just the lumps that come with success. Now, I couldn’t exactly calculate what my earnings had been over the past ten years, but they could not possibly have been positive, since I’d invested over $54K in hard cash and now had less than $30K. If the letter was not a complete lie then I’d been doubly, triply screwed by that incompetent bugger Peter. I read and re-read the letter. I turned white as a sheet. (I didn’t have a mirror, but I’m sure I did, turn white, that is.) I buried my head in my hands, but couldn’t work up a sob. FUCK! I screamed. I jumped to my feet. FUCK!
I kicked the coffee table against the entertainment center. Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! I stormed into the kitchen, but the liquor cupboard was empty. I glared at the broken window then hurled a coffee cup through it. The first thing we need, I said aloud, is a fucking drink.
In the car heading north. Just a few blocks is an all-night liquor store. Better get a couple, says John when I tell the Korean kid to give me a bottle of J&B. So what would you do? I ask him as we get back into the car. Burn down his fucking house, he says.
Todos Santos August, 2003