To Have and Have Not, and Other Options

1.
When I moved to LA I got started working surprisingly quickly, and the excuse that I could always fall back on was "I just moved here." I could measure my time in LA in weeks, and I could put an inflection on it to get different messages across. A brightly uttered "I moved here three weeks ago!" could mean "I'm very grateful for the work I've been doing so far, and I'd like some more, please," whereas a matter of fact "I only moved here three weeks ago" could mean "We both know that I'm underqualified for this job, but come on, in three weeks, it's amazing that I've even learned everybody's name!"

But eventually three weeks turned to five weeks, and then eight weeks, and then I came to a point where it was weird to measure the time in weeks - I think 9 weeks and beyond is a measurement of time that only pregnant women get to use. When the "about two months" mark kicked in, the amount of time I'd lived in Los Angeles wasn't an appropriate reason not to own things like furniture or a vacuum cleaner.

So when my boss was throwing away a couch, I said "I'll take it!"
"You want this couch?"
"Yeah. I don't really own... like, anything."
"Nothing?"
"I've only lived here for three and a half months."
"Oh," he said, maybe a little disgusted.

"You should probably wash that couch," another guy said.
"Oh?"
"We've all taken a turn on that couch."



So a newly cleaned sex couch was the first thing I inherited from my boss ("Talk about a Love Seat!" (Sorry.)), but his hearing that I didn't own anything opened the floodgates for all the extra stuff that he owned. Next came a thick white wool rug, ("My whole apartment is carpeted" I told him. "Put it on top of the carpet," he said. "Just take it.") a stereo and speakers, two backpacks, a large toolbox, another wool rug, two coffee tables ("Don't get rid of those," he said, "And let me know if you move or anything. I love those coffee tables." "I don't have to take them," I said. "Just don't mess them up.") a hanging lamp, an aluminum breadbox containing a 2-liter bottle of RC, and a pink lightbulb (the last 3 items were given with the instructions "You're an artist - see what you can do with these.)

So now I have a bunch of stuff to sort through. Aside from one of the backpacks, which will return in part 2 of this story, the rest of the stuff is either in my bedroom or in my closet, waiting for the day when I move to an apartment that has some non-carpeted floors, roommates who I don't fear will mess up the metal coffee tables, and a darkroom. But I haven't lived here long enough to be ready to move to a new apartment.

2.
My apartment is right by the main campus of the University of Southern California. When I moved to Los Angeles, I didn't know anything about good places to live. I ended up where I did because it seemed centrally located, and I figured living near a university would be a good way to meet people and take advantage of the school's libraries. However, when I tell people where I live, I get the consistent reaction: "Oh. The Ghetto."

Which I always thought was a little ridiculous, and chalked up to people living in more affluent neighborhoods, imagining the horrible things that must take place in areas where the rent was cheaper and the buildings had more than one floor. From my experience, the problems of the area were more along the lines of groups of girls biking haphazardly down the sidewalk while talking on their cell phones, or the nightly beer-pong tournaments that take place in the apartment above mine.

Then one night I was walking back from the USC library, talking to my girlfriend Emily on the phone and carrying my computer in its carrying case. In my defense this was at 8:30 at night, on a busy street. I heard footsteps running up from behind me, and as they got closer they sounded too fast to be someone jogging by, so I turned just as this guy grabbed my computer case.

And without thinking I grabbed it back from him. He reached for it again and I pulled it away.
"Give me that!" he said.
"NO!" I shouted, and turned and ran down the block.

At some point I had closed my phone, so while running I opened it and called the police, who said they'd meet me at my house. During the conversation, the guy who tried to mug me drove by in a car and threw a plastic bottle at me from his window, which instead bounced off the hood of a parked car.

Back at my apartment, a police officer showed up. I had wondered if I should even bother with the police, since nothing actually got stolen, but it seemed stupid not to call. I told the whole thing to the officer, and after I was done, he said, "And what year are you?"
"Year?" I said, and then noticed that he wasn't an LA police officer, but a USC Public Safety Officer.
"Oh- I'm not a USC Student. I just live near it."
He stared at me.
"I just moved here. Randomly."

Then a USC Sargent walked in. He'd seen the first car parked outside. So I gave my full story to him, and he called it in on his radio, "I've got a student here who was mugged," he started, and went through the entire story, and at the end the first officer said, "I just want to make one correction - he's not a USC student."
"Not a USC student?"
"No."
He asked me, "Were you ever a USC student?"
"No - I just... live here."
The Sargent called back on his walkie to figure out why USC Public safety had gotten my 911 call and not LAPD. While he was waiting for a response, he looked around my living room. "Just moved in?" he said.
"It's been about four months."

Eventually we found out that LAPD were on their way. The Sargent asked the Officer if he could stay at my apartment until LAPD arrived. "They usually take a long time," the Officer said. "It could be like an hour." We agreed that he would leave and call me in an hour to check if LAPD ever showed up.

Two LAPD officers did come in less than an hour, and I again gave my statement to them, and a few minutes after that two more officers showed up, so in the course of the evening I gave my statement five times to seven people, counting the 911 operator. And in the end, there was no reason to file a report because nothing was stolen. Now when I'm walking to the USC Library, I carry my computer in one of my two new backpacks.

3.
Dedicated readers of Blog is Mark Brinker will remember that I recently worked on a commercial for a Swedish furniture company known for having cheap but good looking products that you have to assemble yourself, which I'm trying not to name in this entry because I don't want some guy that they've hired to troll the internet looking for references to their company to see this post and think I'm somehow giving away insider secrets. If you haven't figured out the company, refer to other posts on this blog, where I do say the name (I'm hoping that if these trolling internet guys do exist, they don't try very hard).

The company wanted everything in the commercial to be their products, so at one point something like $40,000 worth of furniture was picked up by us from pretty much every branch from Los Angeles to San Diego, and then assembled. The plan the whole time was to return all the furniture to the store, since it was used by them for their own commercial. But after the shoot, when the first truck arrived, the people at the store had no idea what it was doing there, and no interest in their assembled-but-never-actually-used furniture.




That was the last I heard about the whole thing, until two days later, when I got a call from my boss saying "I need you to meet the truck at Goodwill, so you guys can donate all the that furniture."

So I did, and we parked the 5-ton truck stacked to the ceiling with furniture next to the Goodwill drop off area and started unloading. Until the Goodwill people saw the furniture that we had partially disassembled so that it would all fit, and decided that they didn't want it either, they only wanted fully assembled furniture, and no appliances. So we picked through the fully assembled pieces to donate and started loading the rest of the appliances and partly assembled furniture back onto the truck, wondering if Goodwill knew they were turning down a brand new dishwasher, 2 ovens, and about 20 doorless cabinets.

Apparently somebody did realize that, because at some point a Goodwill manager came out, looked in the truck, and said "Okay, never mind about before. We'll take it all." So we re-unloaded everything into the Goodwill drop off area.

The Production Manager from the commercial was also there, taking pictures of everything we unloaded so he could catalog the things we donated. "Let me know if you want anything, and I'll see if we can give it to you," he said to me and the other guy unloading. He took some dining room chairs for himself. He had to drive them to his house in shifts, and when he was gone he left me with the camera. "So I'm gonna take the rest of these chairs, and Chris is taking those other chairs. So if you don't mind, just stage a photo where you take those chairs off the truck so it looks like we're donating them."

After several hours of couch and appliance moving, I called my boss to tell him we were done and ready to send the truck back.
"You didn't give them ALL of the stuff, did you?" my boss said.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Not the couch though. Or the dishwasher. Right?"
"We unloaded everything."
There was some swearing on the other end of the phone as my boss talked to someone else he was with.
"You need to get that couch back. And the dishwasher." And then, "You had better pray that you can get that stuff back."

So the truck driver and I ran back into Goodwill to tell them that we needed to take two of the nicest items we'd just donated away from them.
"It's already been priced and put on the floor. You can't take it back," they said.
After the truck driver explained that he would lose his job if we couldn't get the stuff back, Goodwill agreed to call the regional manager. And I went out to the showroom, to sit on the couch so that nobody would buy it. After a while the truck driver came out to wait also. This Goodwill's manager was on the phone with the regional manager figuring it out.
"This couch is overpriced at $600," the driver said, loudly. "A person would have to be crazy to pay that much for this couch."

Eventually Goodwill agreed to let us take the items back, and as we carried the couch out the door people browsing commented that we'd been lucky to have purchased it before anyone else could.

Back at my boss's house, he apologized for overreacting, explaining that he'd promised the couch to the commercial's makeup girl, who'd recently moved, and had no furniture. "As for me, I need a new dishwasher," he said.

Out of the whole thing I got a coffee table that was never assembled because when we opened the box originally, it turned out to be the wrong color for the palate of the commercial. It's sitting in the corner of my living room, and I'll probably just wait until after I've moved to put it together.