Right now, my best friend Thomas is driving to LA. Which means it’s time for me to face the music and blog about some news I got last week, news that I’ve been in total denial about.
Thomas is my closest writing pal, the one who (years ago) published my first article ever and encouraged me to write books — and as a professional technical copyeditor and copywriter, and a guy who has written over twenty published novels (mostly under pseudonyms), he’s helped me with advice every step of the way. I repaid him by helping him get a job a Good Vibes, in fact he’s the only person I’ve ever been able to help get a job there, and I don’t think you can exactly call that a favor. In fact, right when he got the job I was once again at the center of a political shitstorm and I called him and told him *not* to work there, if he had any sense of reason as a human being, he’d stay far, far away.
But like when you tell a kid not to put a bean in their nose, he defied me, and the past few years at GV have been very cool indeed with Thomas as GV’s Marketing Manager, my supervisor, and black humor co-conspirator in all things overly politically correct. But then, last week, that bastard had to go and get himself offered a job. A fucking sweet job.
He broke the news to me last Thursday, in the junkie-infested alley behind our offices. I actually had to choke back tears, except I was also laughing like a crazy beeyatch at the outrageousness of his new life. For his "interview," they flew him down to Los Angeles (!) with the full red carpet treatment. He was picked up by their "personal assistant," a stacked Finnish blonde wearing a half-shirt tank top and low-rise jeans, in a mini-Cooper with two yippy microdogs, named Boris and Gepetto, respectively. Can you get anymore LA porn industry than that? Thomas will work one week out of each month in Panama, where they will fly him for who knows what shady website operations, in addition to the fact that they are paying to relocate him. I though only Microsoft did that. And if that’s all not crazy enough, his predecessor made seven figures a year, and quit to take a year to write screenplays. I’ll say it outright — he’s working for the gay mafia, an empire that owns over 70,000 gay websites. But the even weirder twist is that the owners themselves aren’t gay.
Sheesh, flown all around and paid well. Ummm, okay, I’m really looking forward to going back to the office next week, with the bordering alley and all its acrid piss smell, shit-strewn walls, and puddles of blood on the sidewalk from the junkies. I don’t wear sandals to work, ever, because of all the needles in Mary Alley and Natoma Street — and Thomas gets a cabana boy, or at least a tropical stable for his girlfriend, Ponygirl. She’ll be clop-clop-clopping around the world. Globe-clopping. I told Thomas he’s going to walk in on his bosses cutting up a body and boiling eyeballs, and they’ll make him swear an oath of silence on his mother. Know what I mean?
How can Thomas be my friend if he lives in LA?
