I’m dispatched to a nice, single story home off of Sunset Plaza. I can see the top floors of the Playboy building past some neighbors’ roof tops. Sunset Plaza is a winding road that climbs up into the Hollywood Hills. Parking can be tough. Sometimes, at four am, drunks careen off of parked cars like pin balls. I once had Richard Dreyfuss knock down nine orange cones and my little metal fence around my manhole I was working in, but, another story. Anyhow, I’m ushered in by a medical looking guy. Laid back, but in a nurses outfit. He takes me right to the phone closet since all the phones are down. Sparing you tech talk, I find the room that’s the culprit and inform the nurse. He’s in the nice, wide open kitchen playing cards with three other nurses. One is a fantastic looking gal, just spilling out of this short cut, nurses skirt…Having mastered the Jedi booty glance, I pretend not to notice her and speak directly to my first contact person. He leads me to the master bedroom. Not that I’m some genius. When I pulled off the wire that was marked, ‘MASTER BED’, the system came back up…In this large, well lit but spartan room, is a big hospital type bed with the I.V. hookups and monitors next to it. I have to get behind the bed to reach the phone jack for the Multi-line Merlin set. The nurse says a quiet, “He’s in a coma, so, don’t worry about upsetting him!” I nod and he leaves me to my work. I look at the face of the man in the bed. Actually, more of a barely past teens man. He’s pale and thin. Maybe from the coma? I notice he’s missing an ear. I look at my dispatch order. Getty? It comes to me in a flash. Its Getty’s grandkid who was kidnapped and lost an ear because grandpa was slow on paying up. I also knew he had done an eight ball and had the lights go out on him at a party a while back. I look into his face from about a foot away. His eyes are moving around but out of control. One keeps rolling back into the upper regions of its socket, a life of its own. Having done Truman Capote’s phones for years, I had read a copy of, ‘JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN’. It was about a man turned into a living torso from a war injury. I wonder if I could communicate with him, like in the book. I stand in front of him and tell him who I am and what I’m doing. I then told him if I was in his shoes, I would take a dump in my pants every hour to get that hot nurse to clean me up. Stuff like that. I give up after a few minutes and fix the phone trouble, spilled water in the jack. I inform the nurse guy he’s all set, they have a maintenance contract, so, no bill, off I go…The next morning, my boss is shitting tacks. He informs me I’m to go to a certain address in Beverly Hills, “TEN FUCKING MINUTES AGO!” Huh? I roll for the pad. Oh man, a roller coaster ride had just begun I wasn’t going to get off of for quite awhile…
