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Gorgeous Greg

  Gorgeous Greg has some great tobacco. I didn’t quite catch how he gets it, if he gets it shipped from the Res or if he gets a discount with his card that says he’s a member of whatever nation. It’s great tobacco, really makes you realize it’s the same stuff they smoked back before the sawdust and pesticides.

  He carries two Tupperware containers around in his satchel: one has the tobacco, the other has cigarette shells. Then he pulls out this red and black plastic cube and opens it. Inside there is a sort of “V” indentation, he sprinkles the tobacco down into it. Then he puts the shell at the end of the chamber, closes the square and pushes a lever that pulls the shell into the cube. He opens it up and inside is a perfect filtered cigarette. It’s so good your lungs feel cleaner after smoking it, but in LA that’s the case most of the time.

  Gorgeous Greg has spiky dyed-blonde hair and looks a lot like everyone else. Square jaw, tan skin, blue eyes. Once he pulled his driver’s license and showed me the picture. It was taken two years back when he was still living on the Res. He had that long black hair that looks like night flowing off his head.

  We take this smoke break on the loading dock every day and he give me smokes for free, says he gets them for almost nothing. It’s a consolation prize, he says. He split before the casino went up.

  “Half my friends are working there now. Getting paid shit to clean up shit. People think that’s our money in that thing are a fucking joke. Ain’t all bad. Gets us all the booze and smokes we want. The businessmen come in and say, ‘Give something to the monkeys. Hey, Tonto! Have some firewater!’”

  I ask my co-worker Wanda if Greg really is gorgeous; I can’t tell when it comes to guys, so for all I know he is. Every time I ask she never answers, just giggles and walks away down the aisle.

  He’s having an affair with one of the ladies that take delivery.  Her kid calls him “Uncle Greg” and knows not to tell daddy; he tells me that in a voice that sounds almost like bragging, but you can tell he knows it’s messed up.  It’s really sordid, like something out of a Telenovela.  She says she’s going to leave her husband for him and I think she might.  The dad’s always out of town, so really for the kid it might not be so different except less lying.

  He got the nickname because he’d talk about himself that way, like “that might be the case for you, but when you’re handsome as I am…” or “Not being sultry and alluring like I am you couldn’t possibly understand…” It’s funny as fuck, but you can’t tell if the guy’s kidding or not.

  I don’t know if he’s gorgeous, but in that picture on his license with the midnight hair and the blue granite eyes I think he looked beautiful.