by Amy Dresner
“NEXT!” And with that, she hands me a sign-in paper with endless lines to be filled with dates and signatures. On the back are instructions for the Hollywood Beautification Team: “Bring your ID. Arrive at seven a.m. Don’t be late. Wear work clothes. Bring a sack lunch.”
I go home. Terry is FaceTiming with her kids.
“Please don’t swear,” she whispers.
I roll my eyes. I flop onto my bed and look at my phone. I have a new Facebook message from a New York comic-slash-actor named Bradley.
“Facebook says I should poke you,” he writes.
“Well, I think poking is stupid, and I wouldn’t recommend taking life advice from Facebook,” I write back.
Then I log onto Tinder. It’s become evident that none of the guys on Tinder actually read your “profile,” they just look at the pictures. I get it. Male sexuality is primarily visual. And Tinder isn’t exactly land of the soulmate seekers. So I delete my witty blurb about being a writer and a comic and replace it with: “If rehab, jail, and mental hospitals turn you on, I might be the girl of your dreams…” I then add “I’m also handy with knives,” but I delete that. I’m already a magnet for psychos.
No sooner do I post my new profile than I match with some new guy. He sends me a message: “You’re hot and you know it and it kinda bugs.” Charming intro. I block him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I am walking down Hollywood Boulevard. It is 6:45 a.m. and it is my very first day of community service. The air is full of morning fog and the stench of stale urine. I am pale and sleepy, wearing old sweatpants. I’m carrying my “sack lunch” of girly nibbling food: grapes, nuts, Pirate’s Booty, and three cans of Diet Coke. I pass a nudie club: “Deja Vu Showgirls—1,000s of beautiful girls and 3 ugly ones!” There are a few homeless dudes shuffling down the sidewalk and some annoying perky girls jogging. I see a solemn bald man look longingly into the window of a men’s wig shop.
I turn onto Cherokee. A bunch of Mexican men in hoodies are sitting on the curb. I walk up and sit down. I smile awkwardly. Nobody says a word to me.
Right at seven a.m., the doors open. We all file in. I am one of only three girls and the only white chick.
“If you are only working four hours or have paperwork, get in the blue line. Everybody else, green line,” barks a thick, mean-looking Native American woman with hair down to her ass.
I stand frozen in the green line, not sure where to go.
A rocker dude with a ponytail, tattoos, and a nose piercing nudges me. “You’re new, right? You wanna be in the blue line.”
“Oh, okay, thanks.”
I make my way to the front of the blue line where I’m given the lowdown. They copy my ID, take my paperwork, and send me off.
“I’m going to be cleaning graffiti, right?” I ask an older male Mexican crew boss.
“No. Today you are sweeping the streets,” he says. He has a bushy mustache and a shitty faded tattoo on his forearm.
“Oh.”
“You’ve swept before, right?” he asks me.
“Well, I’ve swept privately… I’ve never swept publicly. I’m more of a private sweeper… like the Tina Turner song.” I laugh. He doesn’t.
“Okay, here.” He hands me a disgusting broom and a huge, crusty dustpan. “You want gloves?”
“Uhh… yeah. And a hazmat suit if you have one.” Again… crickets.
I am doing what is officially called “volunteer” community service, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m “volunteering” for. Not to go to jail? In a similar vein, I believe the Chinese Army was referred to as the People’s “Volunteer” Army. Anyway, according to the courts, I have “volunteered” for thirty long days of “community labor,” which is “community service” but with a heavy dose of grunt work.
I spend the next eight hours sweeping up dirty diapers, syringes, whip-it canisters, and cigarette butts off Santa Monica Boulevard. We have a ten-minute break in the morning, thirty minutes for lunch, and another ten-minute break in the afternoon. If you are caught on your cell phone at any time other than break time, you get sent home. If you don’t wear your seat belt while in the truck, you get sent home. If you cop an attitude or slack off, you get sent home. You get the picture.
“So how much time you got?” the rocker guy asks me. He’s one of the very few jailbirds who speak English at all.
“Thirty days,” I answer.
“Jesus Christ! What’d you do? Rob a bank?”
I quickly learn that most people are here for DUIs, garnering them about ten to fifteen days. One other girl is also here for domestic violence. She’s some semi-infamous girl from a TV show who beat the shit out of her boyfriend, but unlike me, she only got fifteen days because she didn’t use a “weapon” (although I’d hardly call a dull bread knife wielded by a skinny desert Jew on a three-hundred-pound dude a “weapon”). After hearing her drone on about her outfit for the Playboy party and her appearance on Playboy radio, I couldn’t resist Googling her. She is famous, but only for her fake tits, fake nose, fake lips, and bitchy personality. I also stumble upon what appears to be her tweet for that day: “Just finished hiking for 8 hours with underprivileged kids.” Really? Is that what you’d call it?
At lunch at Jack in the Box, I eat my hippie rabbit food and drink endless Diet Coke. One of the girls on my chain gang asks me, “What’s that tattooed on your finger?” referring to my ex-husband’s name branding my ring finger.
“This? Just stupidity and optimism, my friend. Stupidity and optimism…”
After the brief lunch break, we are back on the broom.
“Just pick up the trash; don’t worry about the leaves,” the Native American crew leader tells me.
“Okay,” I call to her.
Fifteen minutes later: “Don’t just pick up the trash; get the leaves!”
“Oh, okay.”
Fifteen minutes later: “Listen… you are the only one I am having to correct. If I have to speak to you again, you are going home.”
“I am trying my best here. Really I am.” It is evident she hates me, and I can do nothing right.
At three thirty, we are released. I have never been so tired in my life. My back has seized up. I’m sunburned. There are leaves in my hair. My feet are throbbing. I am limping.
Four things I learn from my first day of community labor:
1. My back hates me and hates sweeping even more.
2. I need to learn Spanish immediately.
3. There are lots of condoms east of La Brea and south of Santa Monica Boulevard.
4. I look terrible in a tan Dickie’s shirt that says “Clean Team” on the back.
I get home to the sober living house, hobble into the kitchen, and wolf down anything I can find. I hobble into the bathroom to hose down. I take off my shoes and socks, and my feet are black from street soot. I can hear myself moaning. After eight hours of sweeping up Hollywood, I smell like an underground New York nightclub: all sweat and latex. I watch as the street dirt washes off my body and circles the drain. I hobble into my room and collapse onto the bed. I fall immediately into a deep sleep.
I’m in bed for two days. I’m so fucking exhausted and sore that I can’t move. Linda comes to pick me up. She takes me to a cheap Thai spa at a local mini mall. I listen to the soothing sounds of a CD of bamboo pipes and stare at a bad wall mural of the Huangshan Mountains while a stocky Asian guy who speaks no English vigorously rubs me down. Cheap massage and Tylenol… a Beverly Hills princess-turned-felon’s best friends.
It’s always amusing to me to see Linda try to tell some guy who doesn’t speak a lick of English about her hip. Thanks to bad genetics and a lifetime of long-distance running, Linda had a hip replacement at thirty-seven. I remember going with her to her first doctor’s appointment. I thought the waiting room would be filled with athletes, sports stars, and marathoners, but there were only eighty-year-olds shuffling around on walkers.
Linda shot me a look as she took in the scene, and I ran o
ut of the office and collapsed onto the hallway floor laughing. Finally I walked back in, wiping my eyes.
“Keep it together,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth, pinching my arm.
Of course, when she met with the orthopedic surgeon, the first thing out of his mouth was “You’re way too young to have a hip replacement.” But then he took a look at her X-rays and immediately scheduled her for surgery. As he rattled off all the drugs he’d give her for pain during and after the surgery, I gave Linda an excited thumbs-up on the heavy narcotics and a disappointed thumbs-down on the Tylenol-based and non-opiate meds. The night she had the operation, I slept in a chair in her hospital room, even though she was too sedated to need me or remember. It was a rare chance to try to repay just a tiny bit of her angelic devotion to me. For months after the surgery, she walked with a limp, and she had a handicapped parking permit for the next half year. God, that premium parking was divine.
So this Asian guy is standing there about to start his aggressive rubdown, and she says, “No good. Hurt. Operation,” pointing to her left hip.
“Ahh,” the masseur says, not understanding a fucking word.
“She used to be a man,” I pipe in, lying on the table next to her.
“You’re still a man,” she shoots back.
I pull into my now-usual parking lot for community labor. It’s run by an old Iranian guy who’s always in his minivan listening to Christian radio. Today he’s asleep. I tap softly on the glass. He wakes up, takes my money, tears off my orange ticket, and tells me to “Have a good day.” The first day I parked there, I asked him how much it would be. “Seven dollars,” he said. “Today.”
“What do you mean, ‘today’?”
“Tomorrow might not be seven dollars. Might be more.”
“Great. But it will never be less, right?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh.” Yeah, praise the lord, Achmed.
I’m on the street-sweeping crew again, this time with Geraldo, a lanky Hispanic guy, maybe sixty, with a handlebar mustache and eyes that linger too long. The day’s route is down Vermont—from Hollywood Boulevard to the 101 and back. It’s easily four miles, and all in the blazing sun. The good part about Geraldo is that he’s a lazy fuck, so we get a lengthy lunch break—an hour—and then if we finish early, we get to sleep in the truck until it’s time to head back to the center. The bad part of Geraldo is that he’s a lecherous fuck. “You so flaca (Spanish for ‘skinny’) and flexible. Why your husband get rid of you?” he keeps asking me, followed by unwanted shoulder massages. This type of shit keeps happening until I ask him casually what “sexual harassment lawsuit” is in español.
I notice that most people don’t talk to any of us on the crew. In the mornings, the homeless—already drunk—will bid us “good morning,” but everybody else ignores us. Once in a while, some dumbass will thank us for our “environmentalism” or “volunteer work.” But most people, even the hobos, know who we are. One ratty black homeless guy yells, “Keep doing what you are doing. I know it sucks, but it beats the pen!” We all laugh.
You learn a lot sweeping the streets. For instance, did you know that Sunday August first is the Annual Festival of El Salvador’s Independence? And more importantly, did you know it is also “Latin Labor Day” at Club Papi?
I come home absolutely fried. Terry is in our room, slogging away on paperwork to get custody of her kids.
She is amped. “Oh, my God, my ex is such a dick. And look how dark my spray tan is. I look like an Oompa Loompa. And that shmuck I went out with last week blocked me on Facebook. What the eff?”
“Terry, you have to shut up. I just swept poo in the sun for eight hours. I wish my problems were an orange spray tan or some douche on Facebook.”
I am a working man now. When I come home, I want a sandwich, a blow job, and silence. I pull off my T-shirt, and Terry notices I’m emaciated. The stress and exertion from community labor are taking a toll on my naturally slim frame.
“You’re too skinny,” Terry says.
“I don’t care. I just don’t want to go to jail.” I yawn, picking a twig out of my hair. “I’m rocking the Auschwitz winter casuals look,” I joke.
“Seriously, Amy, you’re not eating enough. You’re walking all day. When you’re doing that, you can eat frosting and lard and still lose weight.”
Terry then switches into mommy gear. Every three hours for the next few weeks she comes into my room with mac and cheese or an apple and peanut butter. And despite her soft voice and sweet demeanor, she can be a mean food Nazi, hovering over my bed and refusing to go away till I eat everything. Thank God for her, because within a month, I’m still thin but I no longer look terminally ill.
Terry is always hounding me. “Get off your phone and eat, Amy.”
“Okay, okay.”
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m on Tinder.”
“What’s Tinder?”
“It’s like eBay for cock.”
“Ewww!”
“I’m serious. It’s too easy to get laid on here. ‘Crazy’ and ‘criminal charges’ seem to fly if you’re hot enough.”
“I thought you wanted a boyfriend?” she asks.
“I do want a boyfriend. I want to get married again. But I’m not going to stay celibate till I find the next Mr. Dresner.”
“Are you telling these guys you’re sober?”
“Yeah—and that’s not going over so well. It’s what I’d guess having herpes must be like. They’re into you, and then you tell them and it’s like ‘sayonara, bitch’!”
“Are there cute boys on there?”
“Yeah, but most of the hot ones can’t spell. And if you can’t spell, I can’t deal. Keep it moving, honey.”
“We have totally different taste, though,” Terry says.
“Right… you like old Jews. Yeah, I can’t fuck my own tribe. They’re all yours.”
Bing! I look at my phone. I have a new match. He’s twenty-five. Jesus Christ…
He instantly sends a message: “u seem fun. But can u keep up w/a wild child like moi?”
I chuckle and message back, “Honey, u have no idea who ur talking to…”
CHAPTER NINE
There’s a new kid on my crew. I guess—accurately—that he’s twenty-seven. I smell money. We spoiled kids can sniff each other out. He’s also newly sober. I smell that, too.
“What’d you get busted for?” I ask as we take our morning break outside McDonald’s.
“DUI and possession of Xanax,” he says, glancing over stupid-looking oversize yellow Ray-Bans.
“Party on!” I say sarcastically.
“So dumb. I was totally done with my last community labor, even finished the DUI class. I was going in that morning to see the judge and have everything dismissed.”
“And?”
“I put on this jacket that I hadn’t worn in a while…”
“I already know where this is going.”
“… and I set off the metal detector in the court building. They searched me and found some foil with heroin trails. Bam! Not just violating probation, but a whole new charge of felony possession.”
“Ouch.”
“Yep.” He takes a drag off his cigarette. “So… what… we just sweep all day? Doesn’t seem bad.”
I laugh. “You’re obviously new.”
I lay down the rules for him: Don’t look at your phone while sweeping. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t smoke while sweeping. Make sure you get the gutters and all the cigarette butts. Don’t take off your community labor shirt.
“God, you could work here. You know everything.”
“Dude, after a week of this shit, so will you.”
We are slowly making our way down Vermont. The new kid is lazy and slow and misses all the fucking cigarette butts. He doesn’t realize it’s a team effort and that what he doesn’t pick up, doesn’t not get picked up. It gets picked up by the rest of us. Working on the street sweeping
crew, I’ve come to realize that it’s just as easy to do a job well as it is to do it poorly. But try telling that to a twenty-seven-year-old junkie… or even to me a few weeks ago.
Then it hits me: I finally have a work ethic. Holy shit, miracles do happen! I’d heard a saying tossed around the rooms for years: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” I had just scoffed. I did some research, and it’s not classic AA scripture but a quote from T. Harv Eker. Think about it: how you do anything is how you do everything. I’d been half-assing my whole life. I’d figure out the least work I needed to do, and I’d do only that. Not a fucking smidge more. But how had that been working out for me? Not very well. What if I started to give my all to everything I did? And not because I was being yelled at by my father or a sponsor or a Hispanic crew boss?
“Hey…” the kid asks me, “ever find money or drugs out here?”
“Dude, it’s community labor, not a fucking treasure hunt.”
He chuckles. He’s easygoing. Later, I try to make him smell my disgusting sweaty hands, fingertips all pruny from hours in rubber gloves. I mean if I can’t haze the new guy, where’s the fun in being the old hand on the chain gang?
I occasionally snap a picture of these guys (from the back, of course, to preserve their anonymity). I show Linda, and she tells me she wants one of the uniforms—a holey, paint-splattered T-shirt, or one of the grimy ones that say “Business Improvement District,” or maybe a tan button-down with “Clean Team” on the back.
Her request does not come as a surprise. She collects all the clothes from my bad decisions and wears them as pajamas. So far she has jail socks, psych ward pants and gown—and soon—a community labor T-shirt. Needless to say, she has an obsession with the dark side of life—while somehow avoiding all of the legal and psychiatric pitfalls herself. It’s nice to have a friend who sees the humor and, dare I say, the souvenir opportunities, in my epic life fails.
We are on Vermont, up by Hollywood Boulevard, sweeping the gutters. A slim young girl with erratically chopped hair, smeared black eye makeup, and rotting, chipped front teeth is manically gesticulating and walking up the street. She is obviously a speed freak. She is wearing a T-shirt that barely covers her ass with ratty underwear underneath. No pants. She has on stained fringed boots and something tied around her head. I feel a weird fear come up inside me, but then I remember my newest motto: “See everybody for their humanity—the way you want to be seen for yours.”
