Last Job

 

Living in the Paradise house with my mom was cramping my style. I was part of the Pulp Fiction gang, pulling jobs with Jules and Vincent, and we were in between capers, planning our next gig. Winston Wolfe was trying to give us our instructions and discussing logistics like where to stash bodies, how to elude authorities and get from point A to point B, etc., but my mom's presence in the living room meant that he had to speak in code, which annoyed him.

"Andrew, I suggest you sell the front half of your submarine, and buy a boat," he said cryptically.

"I don't know what that means," I said.

He and the others went outside to finish the discussion in the driveway. After all of the roles were assigned, I found that I had been cut out. The last job had went OK, a little shaky perhaps, but we had gotten through it. I was confused, so I asked him what he wanted me to do. Lookout perhaps? Play an innocent bystander, hanging around for backup in case things got dicey? Surely, there was something.

"I told you to sell that submarine," he said firmly. "We can't use you. That was your last job. You're out." 

They sped off in Winston's Acura and left me standing in the driveway, picking gravel from my teeth. I was bummed, and I went in the house and began lamenting to my mom. 

"But they were my friends!" I blubbered, "and I'm going to miss them!" We'd had some good times together.

"You'll make new friends," my mom said. "Besides, I never liked that bunch. They always seemed like there was a criminal element they were concealing." She didn't know the half of it.

I had always told her that we were doing improv, or rehearsing for a play at the local playhouse, and she'd bought it. I knew I should have conveyed that to Winston, so he didn't have to tippy-toe around with his instructions. It could have worked, I thought. It still could. I jumped on my quad, determined to go after them, hoping to plead my case.

I'd lost sight of them, and after driving the quad out of Paradise, I found myself in the southeast section of LA, near my old apartment on Imperial Highway, in Downey. I was still a couple of towns away, and there was traffic and the threat of law enforcement to contend with. My main problem was the quad. I was driving an unregistered off-road vehicle on the busy city streets.

I tried to remain inconspicuous, but that's hard to do when your vehicle will barely keep up with the flow of traffic. Some gearing problem was keeping me from reaching top speeds, so I kept it slow and stayed in the bike lane, weaving in between parked cars and driving on the sidewalk when necessary. To make matters worse, the engine started bogging down and stalling, and I had to keep restarting it.

I drove through a department store, timing my entrance with the opening of an automatic sliding glass door. The quad barely fit through, and once inside, I found that the rear exit doors were smaller and wouldn't accommodate an easy escape. I'd have to get it up on two wheels and try to drive through leaning sideways. That's when the first security guard saw me.

"You can't go through there," he said amiably. 

"Thanks," I said, quickly putting the vehicle in reverse. I put my finger to my lips, giving him the signal to shush. "Let's just keep this between us, shall we?"

That must have activated his cop mode, because I saw him reach for his radio. I wagged my finger at him, and he stopped. He seemed to be fearful that I was armed, and he smiled and pointed me to the front entrance. While I was distracted and looking in the direction of the door, he reached over and pulled the key out of the ignition. Cheeky monkey. He wasn't so dumb after all.

I snatched the key out of his hand, jammed it in the ignition, and away I went. Too close for comfort. I knew he'd be radioing for backup soon. 

Down the road a ways, I encountered another obstacle. The police station lay directly in my path to get back to the apartment. It was a huge building, taking up a whole city block. I found a narrow alleyway between two sections of the building, and I putted my limping vehicle through the opening. That's when I encountered the second cop.

He was a real cop, not the mall security variety, a middle-aged diminutive figure, Caucasian, of Scottish descent, with thinning strawberry blond hair, combed over Trump style. His face was wrinkled and scarred, as if he'd seen some action in his day. The wrinkles were crow's feet, though, and belied a slightly devious and mostly friendly demeanor.

"You're going to have a hell of a time getting this thing home in this condition," he said, hopping on the back and riding double with me slowly up the alley.

The terrain got steeper once we reached the other side of the alley. With its current engine trouble, having two of us on the quad slowed our progress almost to a standstill. We inched up the hill, with me revving the engine full throttle to zero acceleration. It stalled several times, but I kept restarting it. We finally made it to Imperial Highway, and the cop got off the quad. 

"You should be fine from here," he said. "You can pedal if you need to."

"I really appreciate your help," I told him, surprised that he'd put his cop job on the line to help me get my illegal vehicle home.

"I don't know what that is," he said, smiling. "I love that line from Pulp Fiction. The one where Winston says, 'I don't know what that is.'" 

I laughed and agreed with him, although I didn't remember any such line. It was just good to have a friend in the cop business. I explained to him that I was in an improv group, and we'd just been doing a theatrical version of the story. He seemed satisfied with that and waved me on as I fired up my sluggish quad one more time.

It sputtered and coughed as the last of the engine's nine lives expired. I supposed it could have just run out of gas, but I had no way of knowing. There were no gas stations between me and my destination. I looked down at the pedals. They were silly little things, the size of moped pedals and had an annoyingly short stroke. I was only a couple of blocks away at this point, so I resigned myself to the task.

<cue exit music>

I woke up to Miserlou by Dick Dale playing on my TV stereo speakers. Playing the same movie over and over as a sleep therapy has its advantages and disadvantages. I can fall asleep relatively quickly and stay asleep all night, but my dreams become infiltrated by the soundtrack's seepage into my subconscious. Perhaps Harvey Keitel was telling me that I need to find a new set of characters to cast in my nocturnal improv.