"Adult"

I was remembering, about the job I had in Century City, on Avenue of the Stars-- where there are a lot of well-dressed people and I drove a VW Rabbit. I wrote descriptions of items up for auction over the internet: "Stunning solid 14kt gold wedding band, engraved 'Love You Always,'" and as I thought of that broken, loveless woman pawning the last evidence of her failed marriage, I'd almost cry. So, like I said, I worked with these well-dressed adults, commuting an hour each way because of traffic. I'd never commuted. I'd never worn a pantsuit. I'd never felt inferior, inadequate, slovenly, and deplorable. But now I did.

It cost more per hour to park in the structure than I made in an hour, so I parked down on Olympic. No parking 8am-5pm, so I waited until 8:01am, then snuck in. People honked. Once, a guy stopped his car and told me I was an inconsiderate bitch. I told him to learn to read a fucking watch, and have a nice day.

I was at the bottom of the dung heap. And it wasn't even a dung heap that I would have liked to conquer. It stank like shit at the top, too.

The first day I walked into the ABC building, I was elated; felt like Mary Tyler Moore. Slowly, I came to despise the place. Traffic was always completely jammed for the last 1 3/4 miles before my exit. The offramp was an arc-- a bridge over Olympic Boulevard.

I noticed on my first day that there was a dead tabby cat on the shoulder of the offramp, unnaturally curled with its back towards oncoming traffic. The next day, it was still there, and that was strange. When I saw it the same way on the third day, I was unsettled. I wanted to call someone, to say, "Hey, come get this dead animal off the side of the road, it's indecent!" But I wouldn't know who to call, and they'd probably ignore me anyway. So the cat stayed there.

Some mornings, I looked far enough in the other direction to keep it out of my peripheral vision. Sometimes I would look right at it, the way its fur sank in, and leaves and other debris sat in little piles against its back. I could not tell if there were maggots crawling on it. I was glad I could not see its face. It was there every day until I quit, more than a month, and by then it had become no more than a tuft of hair. I said I quit, and it was because I didn't like to be ashamed of my VW, and who would want to work in a city that let animals rot on the side of the road anyway?