Chapter 8

Bagger Vince and the Sunset Sage.

Sunset Blvd is an amazing place. It's a wild mix of a tourist trap, hookers, junkies, and various weirdo's who evidently cant abide being too close to water. Otherwise they'd hang out on the Venice boardwalk. That's my take anyway.

Included in the mix is a rich sampling of old movie biz types. The ones who either never did mix into the party and Premier and Oscars scene or who got bored with it and gave it up. One of the places those types hang out is a bar named 'Charley D's'. It's a couple blocks down from the "Chinese Theatre" or whatever it's called this decade and non-descript to say the least. It's as exclusive as any of the bars that get written up as favorite of the current class of pretenders but in a different way. It never advertises and has only a simple sign outside, looking like any of the other dive bars that populate the Hollywood area.

But it has an electric latch on the door, and a CCTV camera, and the only ones admitted are old show biz types and friends of theirs. That's how I found out about it. Mary always had this thing for a certain director's movies and he became one of her first 'boyfriends' ... obviously she sought him out once we transplanted and stalked him till he caught her. She quickly lost interest in him (in person he was a putz) but not until he'd taken us to Charley D's a couple times.

I did find out, however that you could buy into the place for ten grand. So I did. Oh, I wasnt really an 'owner', just a stockholder/member paying a thousand a year membership fee just like a lot of those community swimming pools that sprang up in the fifties and sixties. That works better for bars than pools, btw.

Here's an interesting side item; to me, anyway. If it's not interesting to you, tough noogies. I'm writing, you're reading ... go on to the next paragraph.

The approximately $150,000 annual member fees go to the rent. The place has an ironclad 99 year lease, signed in 1962. Ridiculous you say ... yeah. It was contingent on the viability of the original stated purpose, that is 'Bar/Bistro' and on doing business continually. And it has done so and under the same ownership which the Lessor failed to note was a family Limited Liability Partnership. This means as long as the place didn't change hands and was open 5 days a week every week, the lease couldn't be broken. Now 150 grand was a lot of high priced rent at the time. And everyone knew that bars came and went as styles and trends dictate so it seemed reasonble to the lessors. It's been challenged a couple times and a few concessions made ... for instance the place was 2,500 square feet, now it's 1800. Frontage was split off for a streetfront shop space in the eighties, which allowed the lessors to at least double the income of the original terms. So now the patrons walk a corridor to get to the bar. Big Deal ... private club made more private.

More interesting, the service help aren't paid at all by the owners. Not even minimum wage, it's ALL TIPS. They're all independent contractors to the 'membership corporation', which is a separate entity from the lessee's. In fact a nominal fee is charged to actually work there. That means the drink prices are discounted severely and haven't risen much in thirty years as more and more members signed up. Minimum tip is ten percent but the kicker is that not only are the service people rated by tip income, so are the member patrons. The ten percent lowest tippers are put on one year probation and lose privileges for good if they don't perform better. That's how I got the slot to buy into.

All charges are paid in plastic, of course. All tips are, since recently, deposited directly into the contractor's bank account weekly. Thus it's really easy to do the books. Everything else is pretty much equally 'alternative'; the contractors police themselves, the 'senior members' pretty much 'Manage' the place even when there's no Manager from the Lessee company on duty.