Gainful Employment
THE next morning, we were up relatively early since we had gotten to bed early the previous evening. It was nothing my mother would have considered early, but it was plenty early for us. I woke with my boyfriend’s body wrapped around mine, just like I had found him the first night we ever slept together. I loved the feeling then, and I still did.
While we had a long list of things that we needed to do, those things were not necessarily as pressing as they had been the previous day. We found a bank first. When we walked in, the bank personnel seemed to have judged us as basic college students and didn’t seem to think we were worth their time. They quickly changed their mind when Bill produced a check for in excess of $100,000 to deposit into our new account.
When they saw the type of money we were talking about, they suddenly were much more interested in us and our business. We had entered the bank to open a checking account, but we left with both a checking account and an investment account—a safe investment account, all things considered, given the short-term nature of our needs. Even though I didn’t have anything like the money Bill had, I also opened a checking account. We had planned to open a joint checking account to hold all of our pooled resources, but Bill recommended that we not do that so that I would perhaps qualify for additional financial aid as a poor, independent, starving student with no money. As usual, his thinking was sound. While circumstances would not allow us to do this now, hopefully one day we would have some assets again and would be able to put them together in a joint account.
We left the bank immensely pleased with our accomplishments. We decided to go over to the campus and see if we could find out a few things about our classes and schedules for the fall semester, and also to see if there was any office that could help us find gainful employment. We were now, as far as the school was concerned, entirely on our own. We also needed to talk to the financial aid office to see what they could do for me in terms of tuition assistance.
Our trip to the campus was quick and easy; finding the various offices we needed, not so much. We finally got our schedules resolved for the fall semester, and then went off to tackle the financial aid issue. I didn’t think the school would be able to do anything much for me for the upcoming semester, but I was hoping that after that I would stand a better chance of qualifying for some assistance.
As I suspected, there wasn’t a lot they could do for me financially for the first semester. They were able to come up with a few thousand dollars of assistance, which certainly would help. But from the second semester onward, and definitely from the next fall semester onward, they would be able to do a great deal to help me. So my mission now was to find a job so that I could make enough money to survive until the second year. The person at the financial aid office sent us across campus to yet another office that handled student employment. There was such an office, but they were largely useless for my purposes, primarily offering jobs on campus that featured just a few hours of work per week at ridiculous rates. We left the campus to go find lunch and talk all of this over.
One thing we had failed to purchase yet was a way to make coffee in the morning, and Bill loved coffee, so when he spotted a Starbucks coffee shop on our way home, he asked if we could stop. The place wasn’t especially crowded. That was a first—these places always seemed packed with people camped out, working on their laptops, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi Starbucks offered.
Bill got his coffee and sat inhaling the aroma with a look of near ecstasy on his face. Wait a minute! I was supposed to be the only one who could put that look there! I had competition! No, this would not stand!
I got an iced tea and a scone. I’d never had a scone before, but it looked interesting so I thought why not. As we sat and talked over our morning, we agreed that we needed to find jobs. How we were going to go about that was another issue entirely.
As we were enjoying our first coffee and tea in California—or in any coffee shop ever, for that matter—the place became busier and busier. They were doing very brisk business, with people coming in and taking their beverages to go. The people working behind the counter were running constantly to try to keep up. And it was at that point that I saw it—a Help Wanted sign in the window. I directed Bill’s attention to the sign and raised my eyebrows, as if to say “So, what do you think?”
He didn’t respond immediately, but mulled it over for a moment. He shrugged, seeming less than enthused with the idea. When there was a break in the customer traffic I went up to the counter and asked for details about the job. The job was open immediately and started at $9.15 per hour. I talked it over with Bill and then filled out an application. After a brief interview, I was hired on the spot and told to report the next morning at 6:00 a.m. I was less than enthused with the early start time, but at least I’d be finished by 2:00 in the afternoon and have part of the afternoon to do something with Bill.
As we headed back home, I asked Bill what troubled him about the job.
“I just don’t want to do that,” he said.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t really know. I want to look around and see what my options are rather than grab the first thing that pops up in front of me.”
Which, of course, made me feel like an idiot for having done exactly that. But I got over that quickly, because I had a job. I was a mere high school graduate—the number of possibilities open to me were most likely not that huge. Overall, I was happy, despite Bill’s reluctance.
“So how are you going to find other options?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. Just look around, I suppose.”
As it turned out, he didn’t have to look very far since a job came to him that evening, but I’ll get to that. After our coffee shop visit, Bill told me that he wanted to do something fun and that he had a good idea.
“Do we have our clothes on or off for this idea?”
“For this one, on.”
“Okay. What is it?”
“I want to see the ocean. I know we see it from our house, but I want to go and walk by it, touch it, feel it.”
The idea was wonderful. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier myself. We stopped at home, changed into shorts, T-shirts, and sandals and drove to the beach. It took us a little work to find the ocean. The GPS didn’t have a setting for Pacific Ocean, and we didn’t know the names of any beaches to give it to work with, so we had to find our way the old-fashioned way—by trial and error. We had a lot of errors, since streets that we thought would go where we wanted didn’t. But eventually we got there. It took us quite a bit of looking to find a place to park since it seemed to be a popular day for the beach, but eventually we did.
A look of sheer bliss appeared on Bill’s face as we took off our sandals and walked barefoot in the sand. I hung back a bit and snapped a few pictures of Bill. I had him turn around and pose for me with the ocean as backdrop. He hammed it up a good deal, striking several faux muscle man poses. When he pulled off his T-shirt it worked a lot better, since he did have muscles from all of our farm supply store work. And as a track person, his legs were like tree trunks. Oh, how I loved licking my way up those legs. The calves…. Okay. Where was I? Oh yes, Bill, muscles, water.
He tossed me his shirt and took off running toward the water. I got a bunch more pictures of him entering it, him looking shocked at how cold the water was, him jumping back out. He tried again, but no, it was still cold.
I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything around us while I was busy taking Bill’s picture, so I practically jumped when I heard a voice right beside me. “Hey, little dudes. Want me to take a picture of the two of you together?”
At first I was skeptical, thinking it could just be a ploy to get his hands on my camera, but I looked the guy over. He looked like someone who hung out at the beach a good deal. He was muscled, tanned, toned, and gorgeous. And for some reason he just struck me as real, if that makes any sense. So I handed him my camera after pointing to the shutter button and ran over to stand beside Bill.
“Come on, dudes. At least put your arms around one another,” he shouted at us over the sound of the surf crashing onto the beach a few feet away.
He took a couple of pictures, but remarked that we looked awfully stony and stiff. Just then a wave came ashore that got my feet wet. I had not expected to get my feet wet and was surprised by its coldness. Apparently I jumped and grabbed Bill a little tighter. As the pictures showed later, the expression on my face went from one of surprise and horror to delight. I laughed, Bill laughed. We had our arms around each other, and the Pacific Ocean was dancing at our feet. Our heads leaned toward each other and smiled and laughed at the camera.
For his part, the guy taking the pictures seemed to know what he was doing and took a bunch of pictures from several different angles. When he returned the camera to us, we thanked him profusely.
“First time?” he asked.
“First time. It is awesome!” Bill said.
“That it is, little dude, that it is.”
We got his name before he dashed off to continue his jog on the beach, and thanked him once again.
After walking and frolicking in the water for almost an hour, we headed home to shower off the sand and to unwind a little bit. We also had to provide for our own meals now, which meant giving a little thought to what we wanted ahead of sitting down at the table. It was all so much easier when my mom took care of all that and I simply ate and then left.
Also, since I was now one of the working class, I would have to go to bed really early tonight so that I could be up and at work at 6:00 a.m. I knew that Bill was no more of a morning person than I was, so I knew I would have to walk to work, which I figured would add twenty minutes to my estimate. All in all, we needed to head home and be adults.
After we had rinsed off the sand, the salt water, and the sweat from our earlier play, we decided on what we wanted for dinner and gave it a shot. While not flawless, it was certainly edible, and we both knew what to change the next time to make it better. Live and learn, as they always say. Bill cleaned up the dishes while I hooked up my digital camera to my laptop to download the photos from that afternoon.
As the photos started to pop up on my screen, I was wowed by the beauty, the intensity, the raw emotions that the guy on the beach had captured when he photographed the two of us. Rather than simply ask us to pose and then take a stiff picture, he consistently waited until circumstances caused us to react, and then he snapped the picture, in the process catching us more “real,” I guess you could say.
“Bill! You’ve got to come see these!”
“What?” he asked, wiping a dish as he walked over. Looking over my shoulder, he saw what I saw. “Those are really good! Look at the look on your face! You look so happy, so alive in that one!” he said, pointing to one picture where a wave had just splashed me.
“We look really good in these,” was my analysis.
“Oh, look at those,” Bill said, pointing to some of the photos I had taken of him. While I was not on par with the stranger on the beach, I had caught a couple of really good shots of Bill, with him shirtless, laughing, frolicking, and looking happy.
While Bill finished with the dishes, I resized a couple of the best photos and uploaded them to my mom so that she and Dad could see what we had been up to that day. I also made a point of telling her that we had been to the bank, had lined up our schedules for the fall, and had dealt with the financial aid office. Oh, and by the way, I got a job! I made sure to toss that fact in, but told her I would have to provide more information after tomorrow morning when I started said new job.
The sun was setting as another day slowly moved on. Bill had just finished the dishes and I had just finished sending my e-mail when we heard a knock at our door. Two days of residence and two visitors! This time, though, our visitor was Moira, our landlady, who gave us a smile until she caught herself expressing a positive emotion and tamped it down. She asked how we were doing at getting settled, so we updated her on what we’d been up to.
I told her I had gotten a job at Starbucks and started at six the next morning.
Her comment was short and simple. “Can’t stand the place, but a lot of people seem to love it. Whatever.” Looking at Bill, she asked, “And you, Bill? Did you get a job in record time as well?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I may be able to help you with that. Where I work, we get a lot of tourists and have a lot of tours constantly running. We are in our busy season and need an extra tour guide. You won’t get rich—it only pays ten dollars an hour—but it will give you some income.”
“That sounds wonderful!” he said excitedly.
“Good,” she said, handing him an inch-thick binder. “Read this. Learn it. You start tomorrow at nine. You’ll be paired with an old hand for your first day, and then you’ll be tossed into the deep end on your own for the second day. The address is on the front page inside the binder. Better be at the gate a half hour early to allow enough time to clear security and get to the appropriate office—it’s a big lot.” Seeing that Bill wanted to give her a hug, she said, “And don’t even think about giving me a hug. And remember: you screw up and I’ll come kick your butt from one end of the lot to the other… and then back again. That’s a promise.” Try as she might to be ferocious, at the end she smiled at us both and said good night before she walked back to her house.
We jumped up and down and hooted and hollered with joy. We were both now gainfully employed! We were officially a two-income family! Two days in California and we were marching through our checklist with ferocious speed. We knew that we couldn’t sustain such a pace, especially now that we were both about to start work.
While we hadn’t really talked about it explicitly, I think we both were surprised at how quickly we found jobs and were starting work. Don’t get me wrong! I was super pleased by both of us finding something so quickly, and we certainly needed the money for school, but at the same time it would have been nice to have some time to be beach bums for a few days, to mellow out and explore the LA area, maybe visit a few of the attractions in our new backyard. But there would be time in the years ahead to do those things. That, plus weekends.
That evening Bill started devouring the manual the landlady had left him, trying to learn everything about his new job. The manual covered everything from studio history to facts and figures about acreage, number of films in production at any one time, number of employees, and the logistics involved in making a movie. He had to learn which big name movie was filmed on which lot so that during the tour he could spit those facts back at the tourists in his group.
While he wasn’t given a script, it was only one step short of that. The manual covered what he should say to each group, how long to stay at each spot along the tour, in addition to what to do in the event of several occurrences, such as an earthquake (oh, right, we were in California now), a sick tourist, the unexpected appearance of a well-recognized actor. Bill read quickly, which was good because the book was huge and packed with more details than any one person could hope to assimilate in one quick read.
By nine o’clock, though I hated to admit it, I knew that I needed to get to bed. Though he still had a lot of reading to do yet, Bill joined me in bed. While I had to go to sleep, at least I could do it with Bill reading in bed next to me. It was always nice to lie in bed naked together with my boyfriend and drift off to sleep with the vision of him studying next to me.