"I once worked as a naked maid for some no-name Saudi prince in Bel-Aire Canyon!" I blurted out.
Angry hipsters gathered with the precision of a flash mob to slap citations against the service window Georgia manned, bent on reclaiming illegally parked vintage Mustangs towed from some back alley burlesque club. She flipped over a break sign and clanged shut the blinds, narrowing her eyes. "Was it really this fellow's house you were cleaning, or maybe some other part of his...holdings?"
"There wasn't any kind of funny business," I insisted. "I only even saw him once." Obviously I should have stopped there, but her face said she was going to need more. "I was on all fours scrubbing a bathtub shaped like the giant Sphinx. Suddenly there he was, with his hairy ass on my nice clean sequin john, reading The Wall Street Journal."He offered me a few extra bills to reach up and hand him something to hurt himself with, he didn't care what -- a wooden back brush, a heavy duty toilet wand. I tossed a flowering cactus into his lap. "I think they call it a penis plant," I muttered. "He pricked his own prick, though, I'd hardly call that a sex crime."
"I'll check the statute and get back to you," she said, dismissing me with a snort. "Next!" She opened the blinds to bark above the din. "Let me see some numbers, you morons!"
"That belong to you, Homeless?" she asked.
"Oh, what's it to you?" Granny had always wanted to come to Hollywood. It's the only part of her that made it. I refused to cry over any of it in front of this snotty civil servant reeking of hot sauce and superiority -- not to mention the entire cast of Occupy L.A., standing slack-jawed at the window. Just then, something about Miss Georgia May seemed to soften, if only for a second or two. She might once have had a dream of her own -- maybe something to do with poultry. She looked me up and down like a stray cat at the back door you finally give in and feed, beckoning for me to follow her down a long, dark corridor. "I can type as fast as you talk, did the agency mention that? Oh, and you should also know I have a tattoo," I said, "although it's very tastefully placed."
Handing me a scratchy blanket, she opened an empty holding cell, sparsely decorated with a small television and a pair of twin beds. "Employee break room," she said. "You'll get used to it."
"Does this mean I got the job?"
"I just do the pre-screenings," she said, "supposed to weed out folks like you, talking about some penis plant. Take it up with the captain in the morning."
The captain? There was a captain? Please God, if You really exist, if we're in this together at all, please let the captain be a man.
