Outside, past the rows of touts, we waited for the shuttle bus to take us to the car hire place, and watched a woman being moved on for pulling up in her four wheel drive tank where the shuttle buses stop by a curt airport traffic cop wearing enough hardware on his belt to sink the Belgrano.
The bus pulled up outside a run down looking white concrete office. Inside, there was a large marble reception area with tellers behind a long counter, not ‘posh’, more like a sleazy Italian train station.
The first guy I came to was a Hispanic, slouched with heavy eyelids. He avoided my approach, looking down. I asked him if he was serving. ‘I guess’ he muttered. ‘Good, then I’ve come to pick up this’ I said, proffering my printed out booking confirmation. He dragged the paper over the counter like it weighed a couple of pounds, and said ‘Licence and credit card...’ I confess that the way he said this got my hackles up…and I said ‘I can see why you need my driving licence, but why do you need my credit card if the car is already paid for?’ […] ‘Licence and credit card’ he repeated, eyeing me. ‘Yes’ I said ‘I heard that, but why do you need the credit card…this paper says its been paid for prior’. ‘Licence and credit card’ he repeated, looking more determined still. Pause. ‘OK….I can see this is too difficult for you…here’s the card’. He took the card without looking up at me, punched the keys with his stubby nicotine stained fingers for a minute and then said; ‘Home phone’. Pause. ‘What do you need that for? ‘Home phone!!!’ he repeated, brows furrowing. ‘I don’t have a home phone…’ (Lying by now…interested to see where he’d go with this)… After a little more hackle tickling I said to him ‘I tell you what….why don’t you go and have lunch, and get me someone who likes the job to check out the car?’ at which he got up…and walked out. The guy on the next till took over. He said he was sorry. This guy was no charmer either, but at least he got the job done by communicating with me. He even upsold the deal by adding on a sat nav at $12 a day.
We set off for the hotel…with the sat nav chirping away in a ‘primitive’ synthesised voice a la ‘Microsoft Millie’. The hotel was probably about a mile away. We got lost! We didn’t put the right address in or something. About 5 miles later we were in a nice little suburb, and saw a police cruiser pulling up outside one of those classic looking timber slatted American homes and I wound down my window to explain our predicament. The sheriff walked over smiling and asking if there was anything he could do to help. I told him we were lost, and pointed at Millie the GPS saying that we thought we’d done it wrong. He had a go, and showed us that the hotel was already programmed into it. ‘It’s a good thing you folks got lost here and not the other side of the freeway’ he drawled, ‘cos everything you heard about LA, and the hoods and the bloods….its true!’ ‘REALLY!’ we both responded together.. ‘yeah really! Folks like you are unaware that only a mile that way is hard core gangster land…and you don’t want to be pulling up lost there!’ We thanked him for the tip. Wendi asked him if it was a good idea to go to Disney…and he sort of went …well ‘mushy’. His face all softened, like he was snuggling up in bed with his teddy…it was quite bizarre! We drove off, bemused, and grateful.
Later, we went down to Venice beach, the place where (according to Wendi) they shot Baywatch. We declared it a shit tip. It must have been nice once. Then the American’s moved in.
We walked up and down the street immediately parallel with the beach which is reminiscent of Notting Hill carnival but considerably less carnival and considerably more carnivore if you know what I mean. We felt a bit like lambs walking up and down in front of wolves.
Our predicament was that we needed some American cash to pay to get out of the car park we’d left the car in. Almost every sleazy little ‘shop’ had a cashpoint. They looked like each one had a bloke sitting inside them to me! Eventually Wendi decided to risk one because it actually had the pictures of the cards it accepted on it, and wasn’t quite as filthy as the others we’d walked past. It read her card, she punched in her pin, it made lots of noise, and then dispensed….precisely nothing! She’d only asked it for 20 bucks…and she walked over to the guy behind the counter. He shrugged and claimed no knowledge. She started to walk off, angry. So I went up to the machine and looked in, just as another guy appeared feigning concern. There was the note, ‘stuck’ in the mechanism. He pulled a pair of pliers out of his back pocket and retrieved the note. We left, hoping that that was as sophisticated as the fraud would be.
Today I met up with Bob the builder. Bob is from Artguild in New Jersey. They are the company that we’ve been liasing with to build the bits of this stand that are not coming from other parts of the world. (The seats are from Frankfurt, but built in France, the bar is from New Zealand, the carpet is from Canada, the fabrication actually took place in Las Vegas, the designs happened in Brisbane, and it all exhibits in Los Angeles) He’s cool. In fact he’s really laid back. I’m confident that its based in the fact that he’s got 27 years of experience in this industry.
Tomorrow I’m doing some work from the hotel until 2pm when I’m going to the convention center [sic]. Interesting turn of events for me this. Normally its me that’s there putting everything together waiting for the client to approve. I could get used to it. The ‘bump in’ as its called in the exhibition industry, will take till Sunday night, with a wipe down on Monday morning.
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