when it rains it pours

this is rain in LA. (Look closely.)

In Los Angeles rain is rare, but when it does it comes like a waterfall.  Within minutes the streets become rushing rivers, parking lots become great lakes, and television channels are interrupted with warnings of flash floods.

Not long after our Vegas trip Jaime and I received a series of parking tickets from the ruthless iron fisted LA municipal parking police.  They can start out at $50 a pop and double when they go unpaid after the deadline.  Which makes sense because if you don’t have $50 today then it is much more likely that you’ll have $100 tomorrow, right?

Following the parking tickets Jaime discovered that LAMILL would be changing how employees collected tips.  Instead of individuals collecting tips on an individual basis, they would be pooling them and splitting them evenly.  For those of you who have not worked in the restaurant industry, for waiters who are less then stellar the pooling system is great.  For good waiters like Jaime who work hard and make their customers happy the pooling system can cause you to take a big hit in what you take home at night.

I was also having difficulties, struggling to scrape together at least thirty hours a week at Borders.  The writers strike had just ended in mid February and the hope was that there would be an exodus of guild writers going back to their jobs.  Unfortunately the four month strike turned out to be the death of many productions.  Shows that had been getting by on just the skin of their teeth got axed and there wasn’t an immediate need for tons of writers.

All of this was hardly enough to handle, but one morning while on break at work I got a call from Jaime.  I could tell from the worried tone of her voice that I was not going to like what she had to say.  She started with,

“You know how they say, ‘when it rains it pours?’”  To my knowledge no one has ever followed that sentence with, “well, I found $5 on the sidewalk then twenty minutes later I found a brief case with $5 million.”  Instead Jaime told me that she got a traffic ticket on her way home.

What happened was this:

After dropping me off at work Jaime was on her way back to the apartment when she stopped at a three way intersection outside a school.  If you’ve seen the Hangover you know what school I’m talking about.  It’s the one in the beginning, where we’re to believe that Bradley Cooper is a teacher.  What the movie doesn’t show you is that there is no parking lot for parents to wait and before and after school the place is an absolute mad house.

The intersection in question can easily be eight cars deep in all directions.  There are no crossing guards and kids stream into the crosswalk in a constant flow.  When it was Jaime’s turn to go, a pair of kids play fighting on the opposite side stumbled into the crosswalk.  They weren’t crossing and they weren’t near Jaime so she went.  About a block later a cop flipped on his lights and siren and pulled her over.

It was a bullshit ticket, for bullshit reasons, but the whole event was made worse by three factors.  The first was that we still had Washington plates, which as a resident you have two weeks to change.  The second was that she still had a Washington drivers license which also needs to be changed.  The third was that, while we had car insurance, our card was expired and we had no proof of current legitimate insurance.

He wrote Jaime up for not stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk and expired car insurance.  He must have felt bad for her or could see the little back rain cloud following our car because he gave her a break on the license and the plates.  The ticket total was still nearly $1000, but he explained that it would be reduced significantly if she took her proof of insurance down to the court house.

By the time the ticket was due we had even more bad luck as our car broke down and had to be taken to the service shop to fix what ended up being five major problems that would occur immediately after moving to LA.  It felt like the cloud would never lift and we would wash away.

After it the rain LA’s dirt and dust covered wasteland begins to sprout green, the smog temporarily lifts and for a least a little while Angelinos appear to be happy and less self centered.

The ticket ended up costing us about $300, the parking tickets were paid and my parents generously paid for the car repairs.  While my situation a Borders would never get better, the tips situation at LAMILL did get better and soon Jaime was bringing home something resembling a livable wage.  It was a lesson to us, as long as you can sit back and wait out the rain the other side is always a bit greener.

the first year is the hardest part iv

all those presents are from my mom

Our first Christmas in Los Angeles away from family was bittersweet.  Christmas for Jaime and I had always been a marathon, she would wake me up at 5 am to open presents.  At 9 am we would go to my dad’s house for breakfast.  Around noon we would head off to Jaime’s Grandparents, for Lunch with her family, our visit there would be shorter because Christmas eve was also spent with her family.  By 3 or 4 we would head off to my parents where we would finish our evening with dinner before going back to our own home.  The day was exhausting and often difficult to enjoy without worrying about when and where we were going next.

In LA our day was significantly less eventful.  Jaime still got up around 5 am to open presents but then we went back to sleep.   We woke up later to eat breakfast and watch television and call our families to wish them a merry Christmas followed by snacks and more television.  We started cooking dinner around 4, ate by 6 and finished our evening by falling asleep in front of Survivorman.  

For me work was going fine, I was working at developing a routine and had started taking the bus home.  Jaime on the other hand was barely clinging to her sanity.  Her interview with LAMILL coffee, an LA based roasting company had gone well.  Up till that point LAMILL had exclusively sold their beans to upscale restaurants like Spago and now were opening their own cafe in Silverlake, a nieghborhood bordering Los Feliz and Echo Park.  The interview went well enough that they hired her which was good news except that they weren’t scheduled to open to the public until February, she would start training in mid January.  This was all good news she just needed it to come sooner, before she lost her mind.

On New Years eve our friends Joel and Annika invited us to the Archlight where they would be having an adult only showing of Bad Santa, they allowed you to take drinks into the theater.  I’d never seen the movie before and can’t really stand to watch Billy Bob Thornton do anything, but after two rum and Cokes I found it to be humorous.  Afterwards we bought a frozen pizza from Von’s and took it back to our apartment.

It was hard to believe but due to family issues our general stress concerning jobs we’d not seen the only two people we knew in LA until this evening.  We ate pizza and caught up and drank until Joel heard about a work party that was taking place at a house on Winona Avenue, about a mile and a half from our apartment.

We decided to walk their and avoid the need for a designated driver.  When sober the mile and a half walk seed easy and reasonable.

The party wasn’t terribly lively, the highlight was playing Wii bowling.  Midnight was a non event I don’t remember counting down the seconds or if we watched anything on television.  It might simply have been that one person looked down and noticed that it was after midnight and we all shouted a pathetic “happy new year!”  What I do clearly remember was catching Jaime in the kitchen chugging a bottle of Champagne. 

I had work the next morning which meant that I needed to leave the house no later than 5:20 am.  The party wan’t getting any livelier and Jaime and I headed out back home.  At first everything seemed fine, we were a little tipsy and it was unusually cold outside for an LA evening, but as soon as we turned the street corner onto Franklin Avenue Jaime went berserk.  (I should preface the next portion of the blog by saying that Jaime has told the following story on stage numerous times and so I tell it heree with her consent.)

It was a major shit storm, as if Jaime walked through an invisible wall that brought out all the absolute crazy in her.  She began screaming at me, crying, falling to the ground, flailing all around.  She screamed nonsense at the top of her lungs and I begged to be quiet.  I literally dragged her for a mile and a half, while cars slowed down as they passed us trying for a closer look.  I was lucky no one called the Police, the whole scene looked terribly suspicious and I had no idea how I was going to convince them that I wasn’t taking her home to rape her.

me: Oh hello officers.

officers: Is there a problem here?

me: oh, no... everything’s fine.  She’s just drunk... I’m... it’s not fine... I’m trying to get her home.  I’m her boyfriend... we live together.  I need to get her to bed... just to sleep.

I could just see the scene with a dozen cop cars blocking the street, Jaime and I in hand cuffs and separate cars and me talking a mile a minute telling the Police that really everything was fine and that in the morning it would all be worked out.

I had to carry Jaime the last block before we got home at 2:30 am.  I put her to bed and she wasn’t there but two minutes when she sat up and vomited all over everything.  I took her to the bathroom and propped her up against the toilet and began cleaning up.  By 3:30 I was finished and found Jaime passed out on the bathroom floor.  I should have let her stay there but instead felt that she should come back to bed.  After tucking her in she immediately sat up and vomited again.

I didn’t get to bed until 4:00 am and with an hour of sleep I awoke and headed off to work.

It was one of the lowest points in our three years in Los Angeles and about as low as I could imagine starting 2008.  I didn’t blame Jaime, I don’t know what either of us really expected our of our first two months but I know we both expected things to be different than this.  I felt for her and knew one thing for sure; we’d just set the bar so low that things had to get better.

*               *              *

Things did get better, within a few weeks Jaime started training and by February the restaurant opened.  She would be busy with work and getting to know her coworkers who were a truly a great group of people Molly, Viv, Nick, Matt, Andy, Grace and so on.  We got to know them well and they were able to help Jaime began to get a foothold in the industry.

I would like to say that this was the end of our job hunt, that now we had steady pay checks and we were able to spend our free time chasing the dream.  I would eventually quit Borders without notice, sending only an email to the GM that I would be in Saturday  to pick up my paycheck.  Following a series of accusations against her coworkers by the company Jaime and her coworkers began weekly drinking sessions at dive bars called “Fight Club” and eventually Jaime had no choice but to quit.  There would be other jobs and better times, we were never settled but if you dedicate yourself enough you can find those jobs in LA.

There is no doubt that the first year is the hardest, in just two short months that saying had been proven true.  Unfortunately there were still ten months to go before we could call it a year and get the second year underway.