I find the office, wait in line for thirty minutes, and pick up her cable starter kit. Everything is going a little too well for me. I call her with my good news, and she asks me to come straight to her house to get some coupons. I readily agree, and find her house is only seven or less minutes from my apartment. The neighborhood is beautiful, old, wealthy West Austin. Gotta love the white folks and their oil money. Her house is small but adorable. It’s yellow and white trim 1920s style. Vines have completely enclosed the fireplace outside and even poof out at the top—it’s like chimney smoke, but green and vine-y.
She opens the door before I can even knock and shrieks, “Don’t trip!”
I look down, expecting to see a rotting stair or something equally dangerous, but there is only a rug. Perhaps it is a rather slippery rug. She ushers me in and starts talking a mile a minute. I’m too overwhelmed to really listen. The first thing I notice is…roses. Pink, fake roses are everywhere. In bouquets, bundles, on furniture, and loosely strewn on the floor. There’s a ten-foot long garland of red roses in the living room, and wreaths to match. Still left over from Christmas, perhaps?
Robin is wearing a white T-shirt and red sweatpants hoisted up below her bosom. She’s also got some snazzy baby blue clogs on. Her face is caked and cracked with makeup. Hot pink lipstick and purple eyeliner….gotta love it on a sixty-year-old.
The house, from what I can make out under the boxes and boxes of crap, is gorgeous. Wooden floors, an ornate white fireplace, small tidy kitchen. Perfect for a young couple or a personal assistant who happens to be in a rich old lady’s will. Robin and I actually have very similar taste…if I were fifty years older, schizophrenic, and suffering from “Daddy’s Girl Syndrome.” There’s a tea set on the floor, and baubles and trinkets in random corners. Gorgeous costume jewelry hangs tantalizingly on doorknobs. Her bed is huge and all white. I make the mistake of setting the cable box on the bed.
“No!” she shrieks. “Don’t do that, ever.”
Okay, so apparently the bed is off limits. Hmm that sounds dirty but it’s not supposed to be. I clumsily try to set up the cable, but I’ve never done it before. Don’t most people (especially rich ones) have some fat guy with a plumber’s crack come over to set these things up? I guess this is what personal assistants are for: doing bitch work. I’m sure everyone else in the world knew this but me.
She gets tired of watching me tangle up the wires and snaps, “Actually, I used to work in the film industry, so I’m good at things like this. Let me finish.”
I gladly hand it over. Then Josh pulls up. Josh is another unsuspecting victim like myself. He, too, was just hired today. We look at each other and I know the fear I see in his eyes is mirrored in mine. He had arrived with two hundred dollars worth of cyclamens and shrubs. It’s landscaping time here at the crazy house. Josh starts to carry out the cyclamens and I hear Robin moan.
“No! No! All wrong! Those are FUSCHIA!”
She runs inside the house and returns with two pink sweaters still inside their packaging.
“See, Josh? This one is SALMON, and this one is BUBBLEGUM. These are colors Home Depot promised me they had. And you brought me FUSCHIA, which IS BLUE-PINK. You’re gonna have to take those back…NOW.”
But first, Josh had to help her decide where to put her shrubs. She declared she wanted her yard like a poodle: poofy, symmetrical, and perfectly manicured. Never mind that it takes years for shrubs to grow enough to trim them into a nice round shape.
Then Robin decides it’s time I returned some clothes for her. We set off on a mission to find the receipt. Oh god, the receipts. She has three binders alphabetized and crammed with every single receipt imaginable. The only upside to this craziness? I got to look at all the weird shit she buys. How about twenty string bikinis at Wal-Mart? Or the 10,000 bill for a plastic surgeon? We open the trunk of her brand new Jaguar and I almost gag. It’s crammed with crap. I can’t even describe all the shit she has, it’s just crap. I’m pretty sure there was some food disintegrating in there, too.
Let’s not even begin about how we got the garage open. She was convinced she had left the garage opener in her Jaguar and we were gonna have to break a window to get in. Luckily, I had the sense to try some keys before we resorted to that desperate measure. She calls a gas station on Windsor and tells them I’m coming, and to fill up my tank with twenty dollars. This part I like.
Then she calls Bed, Bath, and Beyond and tells them to hold six pairs of moss green velvet curtains for her. I am to pick those up along with returning the Ann Taylor pants. Still haven’t found the receipt for those. There’s around fifty receipts in the “A” section. I set off for the Arboretum, already hating this drive up Mopac. I have a feeling I’ll be doing this a lot. The incident at Ann Taylor was awful, but luckily the girl there was a sweetheart. She helped me find the receipt and had to get bitched out on the phone by Robin, but I finally returned the damn pants.
Picked up the curtains and headed back to crazyland. Not without a screaming phone call of course.
“LINDSEY! MY CABLE ISN’T WORKING!”
Well, of course not. I didn’t finish hooking it up.
“AND IT’S THE WRONG BOX! OH, GOD, THIS HAS BEEN SUCH A WACKY DAY AND I JUST NEED TO GO SWIMMING AND THAT’S WHY I HIRED PEOPLE, SO THAT I WOULDN’T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT! MY DAY IS WASTED, AND NOTHING GOT DONE AND I’VE BEEN CALLING THE TIME WARNER PEOPLE AND NO ONE WILL PICK UP AND IT’S THE WRONG BOX AND I DON’T HAVE MY PREMIUM CHANNELS!”
“Let me get home, and I’ll look at it.”
I was not going back to that fucking office again. No sirreebob. I arrive back and Robin meets me…..considerably disheveled. Her right leg is completely bare. Bare as in she pulled up the leg of her sweat pants to her crotch. Yowza! On in the inner thigh is a nasty bruise smeared with something…shiny. She’s got a cable guy on the speakerphone and I feel so so sorry for this man. But more sorry for myself.
She is screaming at the man, calling him an asshole, and demanding to speak to a supervisor. The guy finally hangs up on her. I feverishly try to fix the fucking cable but it’s hard to concentrate when a schizo is shrieking at you with her entire leg exposed. She goes to sit on the toilet and resumes her slathering of….aha! Aloe vera! That explains the fifteen or so cut up plants I’ve seen all over the house. She is really into the natural cures I see.
“I’ve had this bruise for six weeks and I SWEAR, I’ve just been NURSING it like a wound my GOD it just won’t HEAL!”
God finally comes to my rescue and makes the cable work. I’m ready to run sobbing out the front door, but not before she writes me a check. Which she does. Forty dollars for four hours. Not too shabby. No taxes taken out at the crazy house! Then she asks for my school schedule, and when can I come tomorrow?
She says, “I don’t want to lose you, so what time is best?”
Oh, God. Am I really going to come back? Yes, yes I am. I swallow my fear long enough to squeak, “Is one okay?”
“One is good…one to four? Okay, thank you, Lindsey. I promise you I’m not always like this. I don’t like to scream, but it’s just been such an awful, wacky day.”
Lady, you have no idea. “I’ll see you at one, Robin. Bye…….”
Oh, god! God, why?? Here’s the deal: I’m giving it a week. We’ll see how well crazy lady mixes with school. I’m never gonna go out of my way to see her. Fifteen hours tops. I have a feeling she goes through young, helpless UT girls like there’s no tomorrow. How many have stayed? For how long? How I’d love to talk to one of her former slaves. I hope Josh stays. I can do it as long as there’s another sane person involved. And Sergio. She hired Sergio too, another UT student to do her landscaping.
Sadly, this is the end of my story. I worked for her maybe a month before she accused me of stealing her crutches. I finally left a note on her front door telling her I had moved. She still called me a couple times after. Ah, hooray for crazy jobs!
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