CHLOIE: BARBARIAN AT THE GATE

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Barbarian At The Gate

The Park LaBrea apartments were the first apartments I lived in when I moved to Los Angeles so I didn’t need directions. Park La Brea has 17 tower buildings and Chloie lived in the Burnside tower right across the street from where I had lived.

Park La Brea is a gated security complex with guard patrols and steel fences. It’s the kind of place where you expect to see a ‘No Barbarians’ sign posted on the gates. I kept the keys when I moved out six years ago and when I tried them in Chloie’s gate, it opened.
Lynnie had told me Chloie was a pretty European blonde he had been driving Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights for the past few months.

From his description of her I expected to meet a 6-foot runway model wearing some satiny designer gown. A courtesan. A woman too classy to have ever crossed my pedestrian, blue collar path.

What greeted me at the door was a 5’5” buxom strawberry blonde wearing a silver-studded black leather jacket over an hourglass figure.

Her eyes were bright store-bought blue and her eyeliner was tattooed on. She had high cheekbones, full scarlet lips, and a head that was a little too small for her body.

Her makeup gave her a perpetually surprised look like those K-Mart dolls on special on aisle four. Her mouth was small, tight, but her lips were collagen puffy, pouty. She reminded me of a character out of the old ‘Pinhead’ cartoon, only prettier.

There was a demur aura about her, though. Something in her eyes told me that this was a woman with a lot of money . . .or she was a woman who had been around a lot of money, could get her hands on it if she really needed it. She smiled at me like I was an old boyfriend.

I wondered what it would be like to have a relationship with this woman. Would it be like most of the rest of L.A. women: 90 percent about how much money I had or what I could do for their career and 10 percent interest in me as a human being? Or would it be different because this woman already had her own access to money?

“Are you James?” she asked in her thick French accent which made the question sound like, “Ardue shamed?”

“Uh, hi,” I responded, “I’m James.”

“But you are not zee black.” Chloie informed me.

“Huh?”

“On zee phone. You ‘ave, ‘ow you say? Zee black sounding.”

“Oh. I play a lot of dominoes out at the pool with Dave and Ralph. Guess I picked up the sounding.”

“Yes. ‘Appy to seize you. Entres vous.”

“Oh, you’re French?” I asked as I stepped inside the cluttered studio apartment. She nodded.

“My best friend in L.A. is French,” I stammered, relieved that I had found some common topic of conversation to break the tension. “We play Chess almost every night.”

No response.

“And man can he cook. I thought that French cooking thing was just nationalistic hype, but this guy can cook,” I added.

No answer.

“His name’s Bernard,” I tried again. “He told me the name of the small village he comes from, but it escapes me right now.”

Nothing. Stupid me, I thought. All French people don’t know all other French people, small world or not. I looked around her apartment for something else to talk about.

Chloie’s apartment looked like an Egyptian museum display being packed for an overseas exhibition. There was a small mattress on the floor in an alcove and an oddly bare chair over by the kitchen and no other furniture.

There was a truck tarp covering a five-foot high by 12 foot long pile of something along one wall and Egyptian-like sculptures and paintings of buxom women licking other buxom women and leopards copulating with leopard women covering the other walls.

One wall had several large posters of European rock singers I would later find out Chloie dated as a teenager. There was nothing in this apartment I could relate to, nothing resembling my world, so I tried again:

“You would like him. He cooks, he cleans. He treats. . . uh treated his wife like a queen. Too bad what happened to her. You remind me a little of her: straight posture, regal air about you. I always knew her as Eponine, but I found out later that wasn’t her real name. I miss her. Spooky girl. Frightened the neighbors.”

No response. Bad subject. Talk positive.

“He’s a great carpenter. Makes wonderful furniture from scratch. His wife wanted to take Flamingo lessons one time, so he made her a dress from scratch. Real talented guy,” I said desperately.

What the hell am I doing here, I thought, running a dating service? She doesn’t care about some carpenter, French or not.

“Would you like to copy?” she offered.

I stared at her. Lynnie didn’t tell me about this job requirement. Should I have brought pen and paper? Did I have to sign something?

All the clawing and gnashing and animal fucking on the walls was fogging my mind. The low watt floor lamps casting crazy horror show shadows across the ceiling wasn’t helping, either.

I chuckled nervously, helplessly. She must think I’m a moron, I thought.

“Ellow,” she said bringing her finger and thumb up to her lips, “copy?”

“Oh, coffee, Yeah, great. I’d love a cup, but it’s 7:55. Don’t we have to go somewhere at 8?”

She laughed. Later on in my career as an escort delivery boy I would find out that most of the girls were in no damned hurry to start the evenings.

It would be me, driven by the Dragon Lady, driving the girls, pushing, cajoling, whining, and literally dragging the girls out the door and into the night. Even when they were sick, drunk, stoned, frightened or otherwise disoriented. Following orders, of coarse.

“We ‘ave zee time. Do you living close by?”

“Eh? Oh yeah. Right down the street. I used to live here a few years ago. Now I live at Crookside. . .”

“You living ‘ere?” A look of mild horror crossed her perpetually surprised face. She had moved to Park LaBrea precisely to avoid riff raff like me, I thought.

“Used to. Called it ‘Mother LaBrea’. Best dumpsters in town. Furnished my apartment out of these dumpsters. I’m intimately acquainted with all 17 basements here, but I live in the evil empire now.”

Oh this kind of talk is going to win her over, I thought, but I couldn’t help myself. I had never been in the presence of a bonified French courtesan before.

“It is zee nice place?” Chloie’s horrorfied/surprised dollface reverted back to it’s natural perpetual surprise.

“The neighbors are a little rough. Proper etiquette when meeting a new neighbor for the first time is to shoot first and ask questions later,” I joked, but saw that she didn’t get it, relieved that she doesn’t get it.

“Are you living alone zere?”

“My babies have moved back in with me so it’s a little crowded and my grandbaby lives with me, too. . .”

“Grandbaby? ‘ow old are zee children?”

“19 and 20. The grandbaby is one.”

“Do zey knowing what you do?”

“I don’t even know yet what I do,” I joked. Nothing. No response. A slight smile. I tried a different answer, happy at the chance to establish myself as a normal family man:

“Yeah. It’s cool. They’re used to it. I’ve always had strange jobs.”

“And zee wife?”

"Buried her in ‘90, right next to the first one," I blurted, thinking ‘Damn, why did I say it that way? Now she’s going to think I’m some sort of Bluebeard.’ I looked around the cluttered apartment again for subject matter.

“Did you just move in?” I asked.

“Mon Duex, no,” she answered laughing, “It is too small for me, zis place. Soon I will be moving to zee upstairs.”

The phone interrupted. Chloie talked to someone in low French tones, glancing over at me occasionally. It sounded as if she was making an appointment of some kind. I was happy at the opportunity to shut my rambling mouth.