Tuesdays with Henry

I decided to post some of the deep intellectual discussions I've had with my longtime collaborator Henry Ferreira, with the hopes that young prospective minds might glean some knowledge.

Los Angeles is a Fantastic Land Filled with Mythical Beasts

I found my second cockroach last night. My old roommate and reader of the blog, Florian (Hello, Florian) found the first one in our kitchen, and trapped it in a Pringles can (by the way, after you put the can on the cockroach, how’d you flip it over and get the top on it? Impressive). We studied the cockroach through the clear plastic lid, and then threw the sealed Pringles can into the dumpster outside.

And at some point, that cockroach escaped, and over the course of four and a half months, journeyed back to the same kitchen, this time with something to prove.

I smashed him with a metal sauce pot. In my defense, I tried to take a page from Florian’s book and trap him, and then I guess throw the sauce pot away with the cockroach inside. If I had started out planning to smash him I would have used the cast iron skillet, which is only for punishment, whereas the sauce pot sacrifices some of its smashing ability in exchange for the ability to contain things, leaving open the possibility of an insect’s rehabilitation and eventual release. But I missed when I tried to put the inverted sauce pot on him, and rather than risk him escaping, I re-inverted the pot and hit him with it. And then, because somebody (probably Florian) told me that cockroaches can survive heavy blows like being stepped on, I dragged the sauce pot along the floor for a few feet, leaving a long brown line of former cockroach. Which I immediately cleaned up, because cockroaches eat the bodies of other dead cockroaches, so the place where the line was is now actually cleaner than the rest of the floor.

My hope is that this cockroach was just a fluke, a bug in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe a bug in the right place, right time, that wanted to die. The point is this apartment has had an infestation before, but with ants.


A lot of times around the middle of a commercial I’m working on, I’ll fall into a routine of eating dinner from a drive thru as I race home from work, so that I can get to sleep as soon as possible because I have to be back at work in seven hours. And then when the job ends, I’m faced with an indefinitely long weekend where I can reflect on how dilapidated my apartment has gotten while I was working on the commercial. This happened to me at the end of a set of two commercials, back to back, when I came home and found a line of ants coming into the kitchen through the window, and marching across the wall into my cupboard. They had found a box of cereal, and were covering the outside. I wiped up the ants with a paper towel, and threw the towel and the cereal box in the dumpster outside.

But an hour later when I came back to the kitchen, I found an entirely new line of ants, this time going into a bag of tortilla chips. My new roommate, Jay, (who doesn’t read the blog, because I haven’t told him about it) saw the problem, and said that using Windex on ants kills them by dissolving their exoskeletons. He said it as a joke, like “wouldn’t that suck?” but this turns out to be a really good strategy when you need to kill hundreds of ants in a short amount of time, and you’re running out of paper towels.


So I killed the second line of ants, threw away all the food I owned that wasn’t canned or unopened, and left a little puddle of Windex at the base of the window as a warning to new ants. And the next day, came into the kitchen and found a new line of ants, coming in the window and marching around the puddle, up the wall, into my cupboard and finally into a (sealed!) box of Honey Bunches of Oats. I Windexed the ants and threw away all my food that wasn’t canned, and went to Home Depot for ant poison.

The ant poison worked after about four days. The ants are supposed to take the poison out of the trap and back to the colony, and share it with all their friends, and then die. At first, ants were just climbing over the poison, up the wall, and into my cupboard, where there was no more food. I put a second trap by the window, and by day three the ants were congregating around the trap but not going in. I put a third trap by the window, and after the fourth day, there were suddenly no more ants, and I haven’t seen any since.

So I’ve survived one infestation here, but according to the internet, poison often doesn’t work on cockroaches, because apparently they taste their food before actually eating it (clever bastards). The other sticky traps you can buy attract the cockroaches and then kill them, but until I see more around, I don’t want to bring any product into the house that proudly proclaims “Attracts Cockroaches!”


You’re probably thinking that I live in a disgusting insect infested apartment and now you’re never going to visit me, and you’re right, but you were never going to visit me anyway. In my defense, my boss lives in a nice house, in a nice part of Los Angeles, and also has problems with Los Angeles beasts.

We often work out of his garage, which sits behind his house. One night, I was staring out the open garage door at my boss’s house, and saw something climb out of a tiny hole in his roof, run across the shingles, and jump onto a nearby tree. At first I thought it was a squirrel, but noticed the tail as it was running, and figured out mid-jump that it was, in fact, a rat. So not only do they approach the size of squirrels, the rats in Los Angeles can also climb trees.

My boss also has an iguana named Napoleon, whose cage he paid me to clean out once (for more on random tasks that have nothing to do with my skill-set, see the “Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker” post.) While I was hosing the tank in the backyard, my boss told me that he had found the iguana burrowing under a neighbor’s house, trying to escape a stray cat. In other words, it’s a wild Californian iguana.

Or possibly my friend Emily Schmidt(who may or may not read the blog)’s iguana, which escaped into the walls of her house, where she assumed it died. More likely though, it traveled two thousand miles to California, where my boss found and recaptured it. The smell in your house was probably a decoy, left by the iguana, so you wouldn’t come looking for it. If you want Napoleon, or whatever his name was when you owned him, I can probably spring him for you, but you’ll have to come to Los Angeles to pick him up.

Well that’s enough shout outs for one blog posting. The moral of the story is that in Los Angeles I’ve discovered a magical garden of wonderous creatures, like that episode of TaleSpin where Balloo and Kit Cloud Kicker find an island where dinosaurs still exist, but have to keep it a secret so that the Air Pirates won’t exploit it. I know somebody besides me remembers that episode.

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.