L.A. Success Read Online Free PDF Page A

bruiser, a real tough guy, except that he was wearing thin,
white linen pants. I could see his neon-purple unit sling through them. He had
a white tank top on and around his neck he had a tiny purple scarf, I guess to
go along with the underwear. He was one of those guys who can shave in the
morning and have a five o'clock shadow by lunch. He had black hair and was
furry like a gorilla. His skin was tan and looked oily. I guessed that was
because of tanning lotion, because he had a lawn chair with a beach towel on it
there in the courtyard. Some kind of enormous black poodle was at his feet
having a sniff at me.
    “Hello to you,” he said. He looked
at my Arnold and then followed the treasure trail with his eyes. That’s what I
call the strip of hair leading from my belly button down south. Helen used to make
fun of me and say it was more like a treasure hunt.
    “Hi. I'm the gay that called you.
Guy. Guy, I mean, who called about the house sitting.” I felt pretty stupid
right about then, but he was a good sport about it.
    “You think I went too far?” He pointed
up and down at his outfit. “I'm trying out some new looks, but I don't know if
I pulled this one off right.”
    I didn't really know what he wanted
me to say here.
    “Well, I can see your package,
pretty much,” I said.
    “Of course you can. But what I mean
is do I look too 'nouveau gay'?”
    I was thinking right then that my
cup of Starbucks wasn't going to be the skeleton key I had hoped it would. I
was going to have to say stuff.
    “I don't know too much about this
sort of thing, but when you opened the gate, I was thinking you were trying too
hard,” I said, worried that I'd piss him off and not get the job.
    “Hmm...Why don’t you come in and sit
down. It's so refreshing talking to someone who will tell me his honest
opinion.”
    I walked into the courtyard. As he
was shutting the gate, the big poodle made a run for it.
    “Stay! You're going to get yourself
run over!” he yelled, sounding like the voice on his answering machine. “I just
got this dog. He's almost full grown, but I don't think anyone has ever trained
him,” he said, switching back to the deep chick voice.
    We walked over to the front door and
went in. His house wasn't very well decorated. I liked it a lot, but I thought
that a guy who was like this guy would decorate different. He had some
black-and-white photos of far-west landscapes on the walls. He didn't have a
lot of furniture, but what he did have looked like it came out of a bachelor
pad: black leather sofa and love seat, wood coffee table, kick-ass
entertainment center, a collection of nature magazines—that kind of stuff. He
invited me to sit down on the couch.
    “Would you like a beer?” he asked.
    “That'd be great.”
    He went into the kitchen. I reached
over and picked up a hunting magazine from the coffee table. And then I
realized what was up. This guy must have been pretending to be gay for some
kind of mission. Maybe some wife thinks her husband is cheating on her with a
man, and Dennis here is gonna get naked with him and then, right before the
doing, whip out a camera and spring the divorce papers on him.
    He came back with a couple of Buds.
That did it—now I was sure.
    “Are you on a secret-agent thing,
where you gotta pretend to be gay?” I asked. “Your phone message said you were
'in the field'. Is this your undercover persona?”
    He looked kind of sad all of a
sudden. He sat down on the love seat, took a big swig of beer and stared up at
the ceiling. Then he started talking in his answering-machine voice and never
went back to the other one.
    “Nah, I quit the business a few
months ago. But I did something like what you described, except I didn't have
to disguise myself. A client hired me to follow and take pictures of her
husband because she believed he was hiding his homosexuality. I started
following him around—I have the three very different cars you saw outside so
that I don't get