I GUESS buying flowers is “personal”…

If you’ve been reading my blog regularly, you know that I’m a personal assistant to a TV producer/director (Dean) in the great (or not-so-great) land of Hollywood. Only, today, his wife (Chloe), is my boss, not him. (Who knows where he is…) The below is a continuation from last week…

Chloe just texted me about the flowers: tulips, roses, azaleas, and poppies (“If you can find them”). She wants all red and pink; how cliché. She wants me to get at the flower mart at 6 a.m., but how will she know if I’m late? I’m not supposed to be at their house ‘til ten, so I decide to sleep in. Besides, after yesterday, I deserve it, right?… Absolutely.   I finally get up a bit after seven and head downtown. If you’ve never been to downtown L.A., you’re not missing anything… except a lot of weird people selling drugs as I get out of my car, double – then triple – check that I locked my car doors. Then, paranoid, I decide to park someplace else, perhaps on a street where I won’t be bothered by drug dealers selling “candy” and “X” before eight a.m. This takes over forty-five minutes… It is about eight when I finally enter the flower mart – and it is amazing. Any kind of flower you could possibly want to put in a vase (or Jacuzzi, as is Chloe’s preference) is there. I am in awe… and then Chloe calls. Do I answer? I should have been done by now… I decide I don’t want her to hear the ambient noise around me and let my voicemail get it.  She leaves a message saying that I probably went back to bed (and that she doesn’t blame me) and hopes the flower-buying went well and that I should not come to the house until after 2 p.m. WTF? This is great, yet not – WTF am I going to do with all these flowers? But let’s look at the bright side — at least she didn’t find out I hadn’t even bought them yet… I go back in and start picking out different bunches of flowers from my list… To spend five hundred dollars means a LOT of flowers. How am I even going to get them all back to my car? Hmm. I have about two hundred dollars’ worth when I learn that they have no more pink tulips… or red roses. This must be some kind of joke, I think. “You should have come at six,” a male Chinese vendor tells me in his broken English. “But—“ I start. “Six o’clock,” he says again. FUCCCCCCCK. Now what? “How about yellow?” he says. Last time I checked, yellow is nowhere near red, so I say no. He tells me to come back tomorrow for red ones. I say tomorrow is too late, cursing myself for having slept in. “Just tell them we ran out,” he says. If I had a normal boss – or boss’s wife, in this case – this would be a viable option. But it’s not.  I walk around, seeing if any of the red and pink flowers left even resemble roses or tulips… Nope. Shit.   A nearby vendor, after trying to talk me into getting fuscia roses – you know, the spray-painted, bad Vegas wedding kind – finally makes me a list of local flower shops to go to for red roses. I buy the $267.39 worth of tulips, roses, and azaleas I did get and go on my way. I stumble around the streets, trying to remember where I parked (guess I didn’t have enough coffee). I swat the drug dealers away with my bouquets, saying, “No, I don’t want any ‘X,’” far too many times for the early morning hour that it is.    I drop off the flowers in my 100-degree car and head to the barely legible flower shops on my list… Two hours later, I have gone to ELEVEN shops. Holy fuck, am I tired.  I add the $232.61 worth to my car and call it a morning. A few of the flowers from the mart look like they’re in bad shape, but maybe I can do some botanical CPR on them later. It’s a little after 10 a.m. now and I have nearly four hours before I need to be at my boss’s house. What’s a girl with a backseatful and trunkful of flowers to do? Should I buy coolers and ice them? But I don’t have any money left for coolers. Why didn’t I think of this yesterday? I’m sure Chloe and Dean have more than enough coolers in one of their five garages… I stop for some jugs of Arrowhead and a pair of scissors. I make makeshift vases for the wilting flowers, positioning the bottles carefully in my backseat, lest they spill. I then race home - as though I am racing to the E.R. to save these poor tulips’ lives - and decide to do what any economically conscious person would do… I take them to my apartment’s bathtub. Only, I get home to find the elevator out of order. Are you f’in kidding me?  I go downstairs. As I start to remove the flowers, I realize the backseat of my car is soaked (guess my vases weren’t so good, after all). I make over a dozen trips up four flights of stairs to my bathtub, dropping off armful after armful, cutting my fingers on dozens of roses in the process. At this point, I want to lie down in the bathtub with the flowers. I then realize I forgot the ice. Fuck and double fuck. Shit. I tell them to hang on for their lives and leave again…  

I get home with two dozen bags of ice, ten pounds each (I couldn’t imagine carrying the twenty-pound ones up all my flights of stairs). I ice the flowers, add some cold water, and take pictures of the insanity that has become my poor bathtub. It is about noon now, so I set my alarm and go lie down. And, just think, I get to do this all again in a couple hours when I take them to my boss’s house…