Old Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

managed.
    Tom Ross was my supervisor. Imported by Colby from New York, he was a careful copywriter and he taught me to edit my work. His wife had arranged for me to meet the beautician whom I managed to bore into not seeing me again. Once every four months or so Colby would stop at my desk and say, “How are you doing, Robbins?” I would say, “Zipping it out there,” and he would say, “Good. Tell Accounting to give you a twenty-dollar raise.”
    Two new junior copywriters were hired, and Marvin Liebowitz and I moved up to become senior copywriters. Liebowitz was from NYU and came into the agency from New York the same time I did. He was a hyperactive man, which appealed to Colby. Five feet five, Liebowitz was a person trying to create an art form out of superlatives. His favorite copy lines included: “Incredible beyond belief …” “More fantastic than fantastic …” “The biggest sale in the history of the planet …” He also had an exaggerated sense of his social life: “The greatest piece of tail in Western Civilization …”
    By his account, Liebowitz lived a life of pre-laid, laid, and just laid. My social life consisted largely of sexual daydreams about the girls I left behind. I was learning a standard lesson of adult life. Once a person is out of school the office becomes his source of social life. In this case, Colby supplied us with a pool of old gray-haired ladies. “They’re more reliable,” he told Ross. While Liebowitz, according to Liebowitz, met girls at traffic lights, car washes, movie houses, “We were eyeing each other right through the movie, so I made my play and we went home for the real thing.” California girls were not dropping off the trees like oranges for me and Liebowitz was experiencing “the best two consecutive days and nights ever. …”
    He offered me a handout, he was going to set up a double date, “Top of the line. California quality,” as he phrased it. Peggy and Sue or Sue and Peggy, I never knew which was which, were student nurses and they spent the night giggling, as did Liebowitz. After a movie and hamburgers, Peggy or Sue kissed me goodnight and went giggling off. Liebowitz had been necking in the back with his date while I drove the car. On the way home, Liebowitz declared:
    “Well, I scored again. Best quiet quickie in the back seat of a car ever. …”
    “Quiet quickie? That may be alliterative, Liebow, but it’s not true.”
    “You couldn’t tell, Steve. You were driving.”
    “Liebowitz, what you need is a definition of terms, or a discussion of the birds and the bees.”
    In a service grocery store near my apartment, I met Rodi Collins, a divorcee of twenty-one, a thin, nervous woman who worked in the office of a construction company.
    “I’m going to be a girl singer,” she told me.
    “You’re already a girl.”
    “That’s the expression—in the music business. Girl singer.”
    During our first night in bed I did my Nat King Cole impersonation.
    “Not bad,” she said. “Maybe you should be a boy singer.”
    She stood me up several times, was late for appointments, was on an avocado diet because she said avocados were good for her vocal cords, and claimed Patti Page had taken a personal interest in her career. Needing company, I ignored the oddities. Ultimately I could not ignore her voice. She finally sang for me, “My Funny Valentine,” in a thin, cracked voice. Liebowitz would have said, “One of the two or three worst voices west of the Rockies.” I had to concede that she was no more a possible relationship for me than she was a possible girl singer.
    I went to bars along the Strip, the women at the bars were prostitutes. I was not a native, not a college student, Los Angeles was a sprawling place that lacked a center for a person of my age to meet “a nice girl.” I was on my own and I was lonely. I thought the local campuses might be a social avenue for me. If I could have met an older coed or a graduate student I