The Zamboni
THE ZAMBONI
A Zamboni is a gentle urging of dull facts toward a shinier truth.
—BEANIE ROSEN
October 1983
Getting Moze into the trainee program wasn’t quite as easy as Beanie had represented. While she still technically worked in Personnel, Personnel no longer handled the trainees. Mike Barron did. The board had given him purview over the trainees as a consolation prize for not getting the Jamie Garland job. Abusive and vindictive, he used his new position for his own gain, asking trainees to perform menial tasks while they tried to curry his favor. And he was the wave Beanie had to swim through to get Moze the position.
The first thing she did was falsify Moze’s college degree. That was the easy part. She then needed to handwrite two letters of recommendation on good, bonded stationery, carefully changing her cursive for each, hoping that the personal touch would overshadow the fact that neither was typed on business letterhead. She chose names important enough to give Moze a pedigree, but not so top-heavy that they could be questioned. Short of nepotism, the tumblers did not easily fall into place at the Sylvan Light Agency, so Beanie needed to be smart and strategic.
Given that Moze was from New York, she decided to write a letter of recommendation from Bernard Warbler, an alumnus of Sylvan Light who was now a manager looking after most of the talent on Saturday Night Live. Knowing that Warbler had ruffled feathers when he pulled John Belushi from Light and delivered him to the Alliance Group, a red-hot agency full of Sylvan Light defectors, she assumed he wouldn’t be someone Barron would readily call. She wrote that Moze had interned for a summer in Warbler’s New York offices, and Bernard, impressed by his integrity and hustle, thought he would be a great fit for the Light boys. The second letter, she decided, would be from the theater world. Again, she chose a non-client, Joseph Papp, who, being a Russian immigrant from Brooklyn, she stated, was a longtime family friend. Again, she wrote of Moze’s determination, loyalty, and diligence, all qualities the board, if not Barron, admired.
With Moze’s application packet complete, she needed to figure out a way to slip it into the folder of preapproved trainees that sat on Mike Barron’s desk. The applicants in that folder had already been vetted, interviewed, and listed in order of preference by the trainee committee before getting the final sign-off from Barron. Moze, who had neither the credentials, the references, nor the inclination to lie about any of them, would be taking a shortcut.
Just before lunch, when Barron was in the motion picture meeting, Beanie asked Hawkeye to call his secretary to reception, giving Beanie enough time to go into Barron’s office and slip Moze’s application packet into the folder with the other preapproved applicants. Believing that Barron would look at the list and question the placement of number one and number two, Beanie strategically retyped the list, putting Moze Goff third, after Howie Mishkin, referred by Rodney Dangerfield, and Joe Portola, Norman Lear’s nephew.
Later that day she went back into Barron’s office and, introducing herself as Jamie Garland’s new “girl,” told him that Jamie personally wanted to recommend Howie Mishkin, a trainee candidate that Jamie thought could be a winner.
Barron looked at Beanie and then opened the trainee folder, looked down at the list and saw that Howie Mishkin was the first name. He pulled out Mishkin’s application and perused the letters of recommendation. He told Beanie he’d see what he could do but added that there were only two positions open, and there were a few other outstanding applicants that he was also considering.
Half an hour later, Barron’s secretary came into Personnel to tell them to ready the paperwork for two new hires: Joe Portola and Moze Goff.
Howie Mishkin had been waitlisted.
“You are fucking amazing,” Ella said at the food truck later that day, absolutely gobsmacked that in less than twenty-four hours Beanie had gotten Moze a job that would take most applicants months if not years.
Beanie shrugged, explaining that once she told Barron that Jamie Garland preferred the first choice, she knew that he’d choose numbers two and three. “It was his only way of exerting power,” she said, making Ella swear not to say anything to anyone.
She didn’t want Moze to know that this wasn’t just a simple Zamboni about a college degree. This had been a full-frontal attack in which Beanie had gambled not just his future, but her own.
“Poor Howie Mishkin,” Ella said, realizing his fate had been shuffled by Beanie’s agenda.
“I know,” Beanie told her, “but Barron will hire him. You’ll see. He just wants to make Jamie sweat.”
That night Beanie and Moze were watching Valley Girl on her Betamax. It was one of the few Mercedes perks that Beanie could appreciate. They were cuddled on the couch when Beanie leaned over to Moze and asked if he had a white dress shirt pressed and ready.
“Why?” he asked.
“You got the job,” she said, smiling.
He reached for the remote and paused the movie. “Wait,” he said, “what are you talking about?”
“You start tomorrow,” she said triumphantly.
Moze was astonished. “Are you kidding?”
She grinned ear to ear, shaking her head. “Not kidding.”
Moze stood up and began pacing. “How is this possible? I haven’t met anyone or interviewed or anything.”
Beanie shrugged and said, “We just got lucky, that’s all.”
“You dreamed this up last night, and suddenly, poof, I’m a trainee?”
Beanie shrugged again. “Sometimes dreams come true, and when they do, you shouldn’t question them,” she said, getting up and bringing over the wine that Rabbi Kirschenbaum, the new rabbi at the new temple Miriam and Dr. Spitz now attended, had gifted them. “When I want something, I figure out a way to get it,” she told him.
“Me too,” he said, grabbing the bottle, taking a swig, and then giving her some.
Droplets of wine dribbled down her chin, and he caught them with his finger, bringing them to her lips. Oh my, she thought. Here we go…
He opened her mouth and ran a line of red wine from her lips down her chin to her chest, unbuttoning her periwinkle blouse tucked into her form-fitting Guess jeans, which Ella had insisted she wear. “Men like junk in the trunk, and you’ve got some junk, girl,” she’d told her.
Beanie reached over to turn off the light.
“Don’t,” he said. And then stroking her cheek, repeated, “Don’t hide the thing that’s most attractive about you.”
She looked at him questioningly. “Your confidence,” he told her. “From the first time I saw you, I thought, what must it be like to be with someone so sure of themselves?”
Fuck , she thought. All she wanted to do was hide her tummy and position herself in a way that at the very least elongated her torso, but Moze didn’t want to see that. He wanted the girl that stood up in class and exclaimed that love was a lie and lust was a detour. He wanted someone who loved themselves warts and all, or in her case, with a fat ass and a pot belly. And so, inhibitions be damned, she took a swig from the bottle, and turned on the light.
He looked at her with lust and took the wine bottle, dragging it down her chest, unbuttoning her blouse and slipping it off her shoulders. She shivered as he began kissing her neck, expertly unclipping her front-clasped sheer black bra, and releasing her heavy breasts. “Beautiful,” he said and then dragged the bottle around her areolas, following with his tongue as her nipples hardened to his touch. She moaned uninhibitedly as the bottle found its way down her tummy. He kneeled over her, pulling down her jeans, and though her belly jiggled, she didn’t care. She embraced her curves and her shape and her wanton sexuality and arched her back as he took the bottle and ran it down one leg, and then the other, opening them wide, and then gently moving it over her crotch, massaging her through her drenched panties.
She had a new appreciation for the new rabbi and the new temple.
Finally, Moze set aside the bottle, replacing it with his mouth, nuzzling her most private area with his nose, his lips, his tongue, breathing hot air inside of her until she was ready to explode. No one had made love to her this way. She wanted him inside her, and pulled at him frantically, undoing his belt, taking his pants down, releasing his penis which stood at full attention. All at once she was kissing him, inhaling his sex. She ran her hot tongue up and down his shaft, expertly deep-throating him as she’d been taught by Fish, and then taking it in her hands she guided him inside of her, as he took over, moaning, plunging deep.
They had sex twice that night, and once the next morning, and then drove to work, where he reported to the Sylvan Light mailroom and started a whole new career, never knowing how rough the ice had been, or how intense the Zamboni.