The Mystery of the Mysterious Shopper

Exhibit 1: November, 1995. I worked at a place called Hollywood Digital in Hollywood and I lived on Orange Drive, only about a mile or so from work. Behind the Mann Chinese theater. Hollywood Digital was one of the biggest “boozefest masquerading as a place of business” trainwrecks you ever did see.

It seemed we (the hundred or so employees) turned each and every work-related event into a traumatic and drunken display of debauchery. Once, a vault worker dropped something in the film cleaning solution…and the reaction led to the formation of a toxic cloud. He ran to the bathroom where he became violently ill. The fire department arrived and evacuated our building.

We waited for quite a while at the post office parking lot next door. Finally (I believe the VP of sales was the one who suggested it) most of us paraded en masse down Sunset Boulevard to the Hollywood Athletic Club where we all proceeded to do a little mid-day drinking. By the time we were cleared to enter the building and resume work, we were all so toasted we barely noticed the lingering soapy scent of whatever it was the fire department used to clean down the place.

It was the same VP who had various bottles of liquor in his office for those “special occasions.” Which in this company meant the sun happened to come up in the morning.

It was on one of these countless drinking nights celebrating some meaningless shit, meaningless shit which fronted as a good reason to get sloshed with co-workers, that I indulged a bit too much, as was my style. I don’t know how or when I got home (close enough to walk hopefully) but evidently, for me, the night was just beginning.

I awoke the next morning feeling like crap and struggled to get ready for work…when I found a carton of butter sitting on my kitchen counter. New, unopened, 4 sticks of butter. And as usual, the blackout was not completely black, because choppy memories did return.

For some reason I had taken a walk down to the neighborhood mart (the kind of place that charges an arm and leg to tourists for deodorant) and bought a carton of butter. That’s where my memory refused to shed any more light. I had no idea why I decided to buy butter at 1 in the morning after getting lit with my co-workers, but the fact is, I did.

I held on to that butter for ages.