Only an American woman—a salon blonde in her straight vodka 50s—would correct a vacationing Frenchman on the proper pronunciation of his own French language. Her crisp, new blue L.A. Dodgers shirt and matching windbreaker jacket were a dead giveaway of her own holiday status and vacation highlights—no detectable accent, though, but hearing her every word from clear across the bar was indication enough that she was from the East Coast somewhere. But that’s the beauty of drinking in a hotel bar in Los Angeles: You imbibe beside all types of people, from all over the planet. Put a few overpriced Blood Marys in them on a Friday afternoon, and each one is buddying up to any asshole within two barstools or earshot.
As I watched all this from my own barstool, I was thinking about Natalie and the offer she had proposed to me earlier in the day. Nat was a cute English bird that had an accent like calligraphy on silk, and when she asked me to join in a threesome with her and whatever lesbian we could drunkenly dig up on a Saturday night, it was as if I was being bathed in that silk. It would be my first time being invited into a threesome, although I think Nat just wanted to get laid and having me as a wingman increased her chances of something happening.
Penis had always been off Natalie’s agenda due to some weird events from her childhood, but she’d led a colorful and full life in spite of never coming into contact with one. She had spent a few years as a personal assistant to Cher before coming to the States. The aging Bono-less singer then brought Nat to L.A. on a work visa just months before the job went south and she got kicked out on her ass in Malibu. Nat bounced back by meeting the nearing-40 granddaughter of the legendary Liberace and moving in with her. The two had only been dating for a few short months when the granddaughter suggested Nat marry her brother—the drugged-out, still-living-at-home grandson of the great Liberace—to get a greencard. Nat did just that, then grew to despise the pair of them and moved out on her own some months later. Invigorated with her newfound citizenship and bachelorhood, she found a cheap studio apartment (a “flat,” she called it) in Sherman Oaks and her first official American retail job. That’s how I met her. We were coworkers—floral arrangers—at a very posh flower store in The Valley. And the reason I knew all of this personal past history about her after only two months was because she talked a lot.
But this leads me to why I’m drinking a German beer in a hotel bar in downtown Los Angeles during business hours. When I wasn’t assembling floral bouquets and taking phone orders at the store, I was out making deliveries of lavish $400 flower baskets and $600 tulip-filled vases to various film producers’ offices, Beverly Hills mansions, and the occasional hotel lobby. The Dodgers lady then began squeezing the mouth of the Frenchman in order to correct his pronunciation of oui to more of a wah, and I knew that was my cue to get the hell out of there and back to work.
I returned to Mark’s Garden to find Nat talking to a customer and Joel, our third and final front-counter coworker, smiling at me from behind the cash register—his bleached yellow hair violently gelled into a raspy pompadour. He resembled a futuristic and very pornish Roy Orbison, with his thick black wayfarer glasses, leather pants, and sleeveless button-up shirt. And it was hard to fathom, but that was his daytime disguise—the incognito workday outfit. Because the nights and the gothic clubs knew Joel as Fate Fatal, the not-quite-yet-legendary singer of the band The Deep Eynde, who crooned onstage in skintight outfits and chains.
At the back of the store were a dozen anonymous European designers, each with their own floral skillset and colorful accent. But up front at the counter it was just the three of us. Our two work-worlds were separated by at least a hundred bins of various fresh-cut flowers kept in a chilly, rustic, almost fairy-tale environment—canvas-less antique picture frames hung nakedly from walls, wrought iron shelves and tables supported flowering orchid plants and topiaries, and stacks of different-sized terra cotta pots peppered the floor. And each colorful aisle of tulips, roses, freesia, and lilies had its own candy fragrance wafting around in the air conditioning current above it. And tethering this entire mystical environment together was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing on endless repeat. It was truly a magical place to work. It was our little rabbit hole of employment; our job behind the looking glass.
“I heard you and Nat are going to have a big night tomorrow,” Joel said with a proud grin when I tucked my delivery receipts beside the register.
“She told you?”
“Of course! Why wouldn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. It just seemed like something you’d keep between the parties involved. Until after.
Joel glanced around then leaned in closer to me. “You have to be cool, let them do their thing for awhile. Help out, but pace yourself. Pace yourself. It’s more of a viewing spectacle than a sex act for you. OK, I’ve said my peace, I’ve gotta split. I’ve got a show tonight. You guys coming? We’re playing at the Mint at 11:45.”
“I’ll do my best,” I answered, but we both knew what that meant.
For all intents and purposes Joel was our manager, though he never acted like it. He really loved working at Mark’s Garden, and he put his heart into every bouquet he made. Nat and I loved the place too, but in a slightly different, more-realistic way. As soon as Joel went out the back door I sidled up to Nat and waited for the wink. Once she finished the worst looking bouquet ever made in that store, she glanced over and flashed me the eye. Then a little smile. I tapped a few functionless keys on the cash register, which made a series of beep sounds but little more. The wink was our signal for a cash-paying customer.
“I’ll just ring you up for that, sir, since Natalie has her hands full,” I said to the older man who boasted a bewildered expression at the sight of the two dozen tulips peppered with baby’s breath and sunflowers, which he was about to purchase. “Say, that’s beautiful, Natalie. The Tuscan Sunrise is really quite a masterful creation. Natalie is one of our finest florists.”
“It’s like my fingers are dancing when I make it,” she replied in that chirpy accent.
Two more taps on the functionless keys then, “Oh, darn. This thing is jammed again.” Natalie wrapped the bouquet up and I flashed a quick peripheral scan of the store for any other coworkers in view. “Well, it’s about $65 with tax … but let’s call it $60 for the hassle.”
He begrudgingly handed over three $20 bills and Nat gave him the aborted fetus of Mother Nature’s offspring. He’d never come back again; all three of us knew it. As soon as he left I opened the cash register and exchanged one of the $20s for two $10 bills then divvied up the loot between the two of us. We chalked it up to our cost-of-living increase and lack of paid overtime.
“We can get a little charlie with this and have a real good time tomorrow night,” she said tucking the money into her pocket. I learned a few weeks back that “charlie” was an English euphemism for cocaine. Not sure what kind of aphrodisiac it would make, though. “You still in for tomorrow night? Did you think yourself out of it? I’ll understand if—”
“I’m still in,” I snapped. “Very in.”
I awoke early Saturday morning to a chill in the air and in the stomach. I had spent the prior night recording myself shaving my chest then most of the early morning setting that footage to classical music. I went downstairs to get my customary weekend drive-thru breakfast only to find that my beautiful 23-year-old Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham—a hulking, silver, finned beast of a car—had been molested in the night. Much unlike the previous evening, its windshield now had a thick crack running from the top to the bottom of the glass and the drivers side mirror sat on the asphalt beside the front tire, with its electrical wires splayed out around it like severed arteries. Some weeds and rubble had pooled on the hood. My face grew red and heated, first due to being victimized followed then by pure rage. I scanned the apartment windows around me, hoping to spot the perpetrator peering out at his wrath of destruction below, but saw nothing. Both directions of the street were desolate, quiet; a couple of birds chirping but nothing more. The only person awake at that ungodly hour of 8:20 a.m. was an older man with a gas-powered weed-whacker roaring away the unwanted greens surrounding his lawn. He watched me as I approached with my side mirror in hand. He was my prime—and only—suspect and I was going to make sure he knew it.
“What’s up?” he asked, letting the weed-whacker idle quietly.
“Someone busted up my Cadillac’s windshield,” I stated. “Were you weed-whacking over there this morning? Something you want to tell me?”
He shook his head, frowned his lips, and continued whacking. I pointed back to my car with the hand holding the mirror. “There’s some dirt and grass left on the hood; something you might see if a weed-whacker had been involved.”
“Whoah, easy, buddy! Don’t make an accusation like that on me. I had nothing to do with your windshield,” he said, very clearly angered by the allegation. He idled the weed-whacker again and turned it upside down so the whirling plastic coils were buzzing between our faces. I thought he was going to use it like a weapon to drive me away, but he instead raised his hand and tapped it against the circular red blur twice, hitting spinning plastic each time. Then he showed me his reddening but uninjured hand.
“This thing can’t break a windshield! It can’t even break skin!” he clarified. “And my lawn stops right there,” he pointed to the far side of his driveway, which was a good 15 feet from the front of the Cadillac.
He had two very valid points, but I wasn’t ready to remove him from my list of suspects just yet. I walked back to my Cadillac and assessed the scene of the crime as thoroughly as any CSI agent on television. Just below the center of the enormous crack in the windshield was the point of impact, where a finely shattered indent—about an inch in diameter—told me that it was a blunt instrument that did the damage, and not something with a point.
I took the side mirror back up to my apartment and doodled some diagrams of my Cadillac’s angled windshield, the street directions, and the most likely trajectory of whatever blunt mystery object hit the glass. I analyzed multiple scenarios, various directions, and numerous theories, but it was nearly impossible with only two dimensions to go on. I needed three dimensions. I needed three dimensions to fully grasp the recoil of the blunt object. What I needed was a crime lab, but all I had was a picnic table that I used as a writing desk.
It was already early in the afternoon when I thought up the plan to find a plastic car model with the same angled windshield my Cadillac had and run some trajectory tests on that. I drove to a hobby store and found a 1:32 scale model of a 1975 Monte Carlo, with nearly the same type of long, rounded windshield and spent another two hours building it. I probably could have forgone painstakingly gluing the headlights and chrome details on as well as spray-painting it silver just like the Caddy, but I wanted the most factual representation of the incident as possible. Once it dried I set it onto the table then pushed the table up against the window, so I had a crisp, clear view of the actual silver car facing north on the street below and the plastic silver replica facing north on the table right in front of me. I gathered a handful of tiny pebbles and flung them one at a time at the plastic windshield, from every angle. Only one direction provided a clean hit at the center of the windshield then to the driver side mirror, and that was if it was thrown from the passenger side. So I could rule out a drive-by rock thrower. My list of suspects now stood at three: the backseat pipe swinger, the remote-but-still-possible weed-whacking neighbor, and some asshole who just walked by with a big rock and smashed the windshield then the mirror then walked his big rock away.
Natalie called just as I was about to start testing the drive-by pipe theory, and she asked what time I’d be picking her up.
“I thought the plan was for 6:00?” I asked.
“Yes, it was,” she answered sharply. “And it’s 6:20.”
The clock said she was right, and I told her I’d be there in 40 minutes, to which she loudly exhaled. I wasn’t going into my first threesome unshaven and unshowered—the night was young; we had all night to find our concubine.
Natalie and I were sitting in the dark booth of a dive bar in Sherman Oaks, drinking pints of beer at a lacquered wooden table that our forearms stuck to each time we lifted our glasses. She had put her brown hair into two braids that arced out from each side of her head like a 12-year-old, and her tight T-shirt hugged her little pudgy tits and exaggerated her pierced nipples. I had taken account of her nubile naughtiness on the drive over, but the two lines of cocaine we did in the parking lot had sent my brain into an entirely different direction.
“So, it must have been some type of a steel pipe, like a plumber’s pipe, with a knobby blunt edge to it, right? And this guy, he … he must have swung it at the windshield, right? Boom! Breaks the windshield! Boom! Recoil sends the pipe into the side mirror, knocks it clean off, like some madman with a Viking axe taking swings at … at a palace door. No reason for it. No reason for it. Malicious! Yes, I’d label this just plain old malice. Full asshole move. No reason for it.”
She was watching me talk but I could tell her mind was fiddling with six to eight things she wanted to say as soon as I shut up. And like a game of musical chairs, whichever of her chance thoughts I happened to silence on would surely launch straight out without hesitation nor connection to the statement before it. I was analyzing all of this very diligently while my mouth continued to spew out theories about the Cadillac, like two separate machines working in tandem. Conscious and subconscious dialogue happening simultaneously, parallel to one another. It was actually like there were four separate conversations running around our table: my inside and outside voices, and hers, then all four acknowledging one another in some weird psychic-cocaine phenomenon.
“… but it’s those little pale pebbles that have really stumped me on this case.”
A second of silence then boom! “What are you going to do? Tonight! Watch? It’s so weird! I’m nervous! Tonight! Let’s get drunk first!” I was wrong—all her boiled-up thoughts had rolled out into one big blob of words, wide eyes, and flashing teeth. She took another quick gulp, flashed a gaze around the near-empty bar and spun back to me. “I’ve only been with one lad. When I was a teenager. My first time. I didn’t like it. At all.”
“You know, we never set any ground rules for tonight,” I interjected. “We’re both new to this … to a threesome. We should discuss the … I don’t know if … I mean … do I put it … do I put it in you both? Is there some proper system to this? We should discuss this.”
“Hmmm, good idea. Good idea. Okay, let’s figure this out now.” She took another swig before leaning forward and interlacing her fingers. “I think you could—and if only tonight happens, not like just us two—but you could do oral on me, and I could do it to you a little bit. And fingers and stuff. And do whatever you fancy to her, and so will I. We should just focus on shagging her! That’s what we should be thinking.”
“Yes! That’s it! That’s good! Focus on her. All things point to her. A little doodly-doo on you but focus on her. This is going to be awesome. I’m going to show her things even you don’t know about yet!” The reality of the situation had already left the table and filling its void was another swallow of a Coors Light and two eager smiles.
Natalie then slid her closed hand across the table and deposited a rolled $1 bill and a thumb-size bag of “Go Yeah” powder between my empty glass and fiddling cigarette hand. “Do a bump in the loo and get us a ‘nother round, yeah?” she proposed. “We’ll take turns.”
There’s nothing as rock ‘n’ roll as doing cocaine in a bar bathroom—it’s like a lyric-come-to-life of any number of Rolling Stones songs. The rounds of Coors kept coming, and the lines on the toilet paper dispenser kept getting snorted—first every 30 minutes, then about every 15. Hours had passed with this same reckless rotation in place until the bravado of the drugs and alcohol had reached its prime, and our pick-up strategy couldn’t get any finer tuned. We both looked around the bar to find that it had filled up nicely by the eleventh hour—a perfect time to put our threesome plan into action:
Step One
Natalie scoped out the barstool area—where the heaviest concentration of lesbians, transgenders, and full-on butches meandered into one big herd—until she found her prize.
Step Two
After another quick toot in the bathroom, I sidled up to the lanky woman with the blonde flattop, who Nat had nodded at, and I ordered two Coors. She was pretty decent looking for a woman with a square-shaved head: light southern drawl, on the easy side of her 30s, cute smile. We made a little chit-chat, then it was time for Step Three.
Step Three
“Hey, so ma friend and ehhhh are eeeerrrr on a special … sssignment,” I drunkenly explained. I could think clearly and in perfect sentences, but the dialogue coming out of my mouth was warbled and chewy. “She wants essss … with you and … she’s looking at you. She’s … say hi.” I pointed toward Nat with my beer hand and spilt suds across the floor. Then I spilled again when I signaled for Nat to join my new flattopped friend and me over at the bar. Smiling, Natalie sauntered over and the two began talking. I wasn’t intentionally trying to eavesdrop but they were right there beside me, playing touchy-feely with one another as they shouted over the jukebox. She said her name was Ty, which was lesbian for Teresa. She was on leave from the Navy and housesitting her friend’s place a few blocks away. Natalie was shit-faced, and I heard her shout to Ty that I was her long-lost American brother and we were into some weird things. Ty then bought me a beer and asked if we wanted to take the party back to the house where she was staying. I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Nat judging by the relieved expression on her face: Our plan was actually working.
I left my Cadillac at the bar and we piled into her ‘90s Camaro, which reminded me a lot of Knight Rider. And I kept speaking into my pretend wristwatch communicator and telling KITT, “I need you, buddy!” the entire three blocks to the handsome blue house.
I remember Ty showing Nat and me the refrigerator full of food, the cupboard full of wine and booze, and the kitchen drawer with a bag of grass and rolling papers in it. I remember her telling me how nice it was for a brother to care this much about his sister, then she suggested I make a drink, roll a joint, and find a movie on cable. It was the most amazing recommendation for a plan that I had ever heard, and I quickly accomplished all three in the span of a minute or two. I remember Ty saying she was going to show Nat the rest of the house as I gnawed on cold pizza in one hand, sipped from a rum and Coke in the other, took a few puffs from the smoldering joint in the ashtray, and watched the beginning shoot-out scene from Terminator 2 on the TV. Then I faded.
When I came to a short time later, Schwarzenegger was being submerged into the vat of molten metal and giving the thumbs-up to little John Conner. The mix of drugs, alcohol, more drugs and alcohol, and, finally, food, had taken over and temporarily shut down headquarter operations. It felt like I had only closed my eyes for a second, but almost an hour had passed, judging from the scenes in the movie. I glanced around the living room but there was no sign of the two ladies. I stood up and steadied myself against the wall before stumbling into the hallway with my drink. “Nat,” I whispered into the darkness, but no one answered back. I was sure they were in the thick of romance somewhere in this house; my only hope was that I hadn’t missed it entirely by passing out.
With my hand grazing the wall at my side, I Frankenstein-walked farther down the dark hall until hearing soft moans and pants coming from a bedroom door left ajar. It was pitch black inside but I poked my head in and clearly heard the ground zero of sighs. This was the place and, judging by the sounds around me, I wasn’t too late. I couldn’t see a thing when I walked in, but I felt the presence and warmth of the two coiled lovers on the carpet at my feet—I was standing right above them. I tossed my shirt off, kicked off my boots, and let my jeans fall to the carpet in a jingle-jangle of loose belt buckle. I stood there right next to them, naked as the day I was born, with a boner planking directly above them like a street sign to Horny Ave. I was close enough to hear pubic hair rustling against pubic hair and feel the exhaled warmth of orgasmic groans across my bare shins. I must have stood there for a solid minute listening to them grind together, hoping one of them would just reach up and pull my pecker down into the mix. But neither of them did. I deliberated several strategies on how to get myself involved—should I just lie down and work my way in? Announce my arrival with something like, “Did somebody ask for sausage on their pizza?” Start making my own sounds? All were decent options, but I went for a more direct approach: I licked my middle finger, blindly traced someone’s arched back and simply inserted my digit into the first hole it touched—anus, vagina, Ty or Nat, I had no idea, but it went right in up to the knuckle. Very wrong approach, and definitely very wrong hole. It was instantaneously obvious and quite loud that Ty didn’t like having a male’s finger inserted into her ass because she screamed with all her might, “Get the fuck OUTTA HERE!” Her anger clinched her rectum and shot my finger right out like a magic trick.
Once the shock wore off, I fumbled around the floor and quickly retrieved my jeans, shirt, and boots and rushed out the door. I hurriedly dressed to the closing credits of Terminator 2, gulped down my drink, and let myself out the front door. I was much drunker than I was in the darkness of the bedroom and staggered down the sidewalk trying to find my way back to my Cadillac at the bar, but I had no idea where I was. I hit a car bumper and fell on someone’s lawn before stumbling back to my feet. That three-block drive in the Camaro turned out to be the most elusive journey an American car had ever made. But I found a liquor store at the next corner, mumbled something into a payphone about “a taxi” and “home,” and 20 minutes later I was jingling my keys into my apartment door.
It was a painful Sunday spent under the covers, and the only reason I got to my feet all day was to take another taxi back to the lesbian bar to retrieve my Caddy. With my throbbing head and trembling hands, the busted windshield and broken side mirror didn’t seem like too much of a problem anymore. We matched now. We were both torn up and slightly damaged from a night that got away from us, but we both still started up and made it home.
The cocaine-and-booze hangover wasn’t much better on Monday back at Mark’s Garden, even with a full two nights of sleep under my belt. Nat looked like shit, too, but she had the cherub glow of a freshly laid woman to mask it. She asked where I had disappeared to Saturday night, and I explained the whole finger-in-the-angry-hole tragedy to her. She had no idea; she didn’t even remember me coming into the bedroom that night. We joked about trying a threesome again, without cocaine, but we both knew that plan would never come to fruition—both the “threesome” part as well as the “without cocaine” part. Once you do a particular thing on coke, it’s never as much fun to do it again without coke.
After making six of the worst bouquets my dulled senses and watery eyes had ever witnessed, I knew it was due time to put that Monday to rest. Tulips should never have to go through that sort of punishment. As I circled my block trying to find a parking spot big enough for the Brougham I happened upon an open patch of street directly behind where I had parked Friday night—the night of the incident. I took the spot, and as I walked past the new Lincoln Town Car parked ahead of me, which was sitting exactly where my Caddy had been assaulted, I noticed an all too familiar sight: Its windshield had been cracked at the center, too. There were no grass blades or concrete pebbles on his hood, and its side mirror was still attached to the door, but a long, straight crack ran from the Lincoln’s roof straight down to its glistening black hood.
It was an odd feeling I got from seeing it—a trace of anger, a surge of empathy, but mostly a feeling of relief knowing that someone else’s car had been damaged like mine. It took some of the sting away, and I’m not too sure why. Our mutually broken windshields made us brothers—like sibling victims of the same abusive father. Neither of us was unique in our persecution. We were simply the prey of some stupid asshole who liked to break windshields on that particular side of the road. Twice.
Twice. Twice could be a coincidence. But twice could also be a good hiding spot. Twice could be a good vantage point. Twice is confidence. Twice is a reason. Two windshields. Two identical cracks. Same place two nights in a row. Someone wanted that parking spot; that’s why our windshields were cracked. They were warnings for us to keep our distance. I glanced around and noticed a large, beaten RV parked precariously in front of some trash cans down the street—too big to fit properly in the spot that could easily fit three cars. I remembered that same RV had been parked for an entire week right here, where my Caddy and the Town Car now sat. I remember its enormity had taken up the entire allowable parking section on this side of the street, leaving the red parts of the curb to bookend each of its bumpers by mere inches. The old RV had wanted his perfect spot back—it must have been his elusive white whale, that perfect parking spot. And he would go to any lengths to frighten away would-be takers, including smashing their windshields. It all made perfect sense.
Once it grew dark enough out, I moved my Cadillac to the next block over and snuck back to my apartment through the alley. I knew the Town Car would also be leaving soon—its owner was a chauffeur, and I heard him getting ready next door. It wasn’t more than five minutes after the Lincoln pulled out when that big behemoth RV chugged its way up and eased right into that long, open spot. Its headlights extinguished and the engine gasped before silencing. All the drapes were drawn but I noticed a small TV flicker awake in the back, unsuspectingly. I had laid out the cheese and he had fallen right into my trap.
With my apartment lights still off, I grabbed my pellet gun and opened my kitchen window. I cut a small slit into the screen and slid the barrel of the pistol through. Camouflaged behind the blossoms of the tree just outside, I began firing little lead rounds at each of the RV’s side windows. I heard about a dozen tinks of pellets bouncing off glass until recognizing that one unmistakable sound of a window shattering. A big one near the back, by the sleeping quarters. And it was going to be a cold night, too.
I felt immediate gratification at breaking his window and hopefully sending glass shards all over his warm bed. His little TV stopped flickering, and he was presumably now glancing out from behind his darkened drapes trying to find his RV’s assailant. But he would not find me. And the next day he would disappear to some other street forever. It turned out to be one hell of a long, electrifying investigation, but the case of the Cadillac’s broken windshield had been solved.