Mark: Actually we encountered each other in the fabulous Camwood Apartments on Venice Boulevard and Beethoven in the year prior to 1977. Ed was an actor, of all things. My god, an actor. I couldn't believe it.
Alex: And I used to live over on Penmar and would drop by to see Ed and have a couple of brews.
Mark: Ed knew a lot of peopie.
Alex: He still does. And you were a repo man and thence began the saga. I was never a repo man. but I was your accomplice on a couple of jobs. My favorite was the day I got to drive the car.
Mark: You got to drive a Cadillac, no less. Out there in Studio City. The victim was a stockbroker with a history of non-payment, this being his second or third repo. I guess he was a three-time loser.
Alex: He was in the Presto Print getting his business cards.
Mark: I believe he \vas in tlh^e laundromat. We trailed him from his apartment and got him half way thru the wash cycle. He never knew what hit him, Al. The son of a bitch walked out with an armful of clean clothes and no trunk to put 'em in. And you had a hand in that. That wasn't nice the w'ay you drove off in that red Cadillac.
Alex: I thought starting out what a terrible thing it was to be a repo man, what a wicked and immoral thing it was, but I really enjoyed stealing people's cars.
Mark: Absolutely. One of the first times I went out was with a fellow countryman of yours. He slim jimmed the car, got in, and found the driver's hat. It was a fairly expensive hat with a little feather in it. He walked over to a mud puddle, set it in the mud puddle, and jumped up and down on it three of four times . Then he picked it up and set it back in the car. That was my first lesson in dealing with personal properties. I Iater found that a lot of people who had their cars repossessed were slobs in their eating habits and would leave food in their cars. Fast food, you know. So I would always include the fast food remnants along with their personal property.
Alex: So this would be put in a bag, right?
Mark: Yes. All items in the car must be properly tagged and itemized. It's very important. This guy has just had his car repoed and is mad and narurally he wants his flashlight back. I received an official reprimand for including half-eaten sandwiches in property bags.
Alex: Which the victim would get several days later.
Mark: Sometimes several weeks later, However, it was brought to my attention down at one of the towing yards in a rather rough part of town, that the rats were attracted to the food, and were gnawing their way into the property bags, thusly destroying not only the personal property . . .
Alex: But the bag itself.
Mark: Yes, the lovely down bag that the property went into. Of course I was thoroughly lectured on the proper procedure of stowing away personal property and itemizing the things .
Dick: I'm sure you had a lot of dogs attack you in the line of duty.
Mark: I only got bit once. Animals are bad news. They can only be a problem. Sometimes they would actually be in the car. A guy I worked with got bit, tore a hole in his pants, and the company was so cheap they wouldn't fork over the money for a new pair of pants. So what if it's only fifteen bucks? It's the principle. You got your pants damaged in pursuit of your job, but no money comes towards the pants. That's how cheap the company was. A good repo man would not let a dog bother him in the least. I was always afraid of being in a car and getting shot while I was in the car. It's every repo man's nightmare because it's so real. It could happen any time. It don't have to be in the middle of the night. It could happen anywhere. And you could just hear the guy telling the judge, "Man this dude was stealing my car." You were on his property with a lock breaker. The guy gets a plea bargain and you know he's gonna get off or do twenty-four months of low security and you're dead.
Dick: What type of areas have the majoriry of repossessions?
Mark: I've spent time all over. In very nice areas as well as poor areas. Generally they're in the poor areas. The black and Mexican areas. But that didn't mean they had a monopoly on flakism. It was all over . Beverly Hills was a daily stop on my itinerary as well as Watts or Inglewood. You name it, I was there. I always made sure to keep this area clean of repo victims. I didn't want them giving Venice a worse name than it already had.
Alex: You were kind of like a volunteer policeman in a way.
Mark: Like a credit cop. I had to deal with people who elected, sometirnes thru no fault of their own, and sometimes thru their own volition, not to pay. It was my responsibility to enforce the codes of the office. And that was to remove from them their car or to collect the payments current.
Alex: When you see a policeman, do you feel a warm feeling of brotherhood ?
Mark: No, not really. But let me tell you, one time I got stopped for speeding in the pursuit of my beloved duties. And the officer said to me that I was crazy to do that stuff. He said that stuff's more dangerous than what he does. I never thought of it that way. In that respect I was a little crazy, because I was going down into some areas that even the cops will only go into in twos or threes, such as Nickerson Gardens, which is on Imperial down near Watts. The cops will never go in there by themselves. It's always at least two of them, and they have guns.
Alex: What did you think of the film we made in terms of its depiction of the repo life?
Mark: I thought it was fairly accurate. The one scene where Emilio jumps in the car and that guy comes around and starts choking him was very accurate. The slim jim, the lock breaker, the Christmas trees. Extremely accurate .
Alex: Was it true about the Christmas trees? That there was one in every repo car?
Mark: Well, I wouldn't say in every car, but I sure had a lot of them. I made it a practice to immediately yank them from the mirror and give them to my tow driver. He had a stack of a hundred of 'em, a foot wide, hanging from his emergency brake.
Aiex: They're popular in Spain as well. In Southern Spain. Also in Scotland .
Mark: You're kidding. Christmas trees? I would never have believed it. I used to get sick of that stuff. To me, the Christmas tree was synonymous with a repossession. Like eighty-five percent of cars I ever repossessed had one. I mean, the cars reeked like shit. I hated that smell, like stale cherry perfume. There were so many of them I couldn't believe it. I thought that maybe there was a brotherhood of flakes out there that all liked Christmas trees. Then they started getting into the strawberries and the dice. They would all be air fresheners, but mostly it was Christmas trees.
Alex: The Christnras tree is definitely the most popular.
Mark: Oh, by far. It must be the most popular car item. They sell them at car washes, you know. So maybe people who get their cars washed might get a little Christmas tree.
Alex: They get a new tree and get all excited.
Mark: Yeah. Most of them have the money to buy little ornaments for their cars but they don't have money for their payments.
Alex: Yeah. The crooks .
Mark: They weren't all crooks, Al. There were some hard-working people who were trying. Four years is a long time to pay on a car. Things happen. You work, you get fired from your job, you start school. I would walk into the office and immediately these big shots are coming down on me: "What do you know about this guy?" "Where's this guy's car?" "What do you know about these guys?" And I realized that I was the front line between this big corporation that has millions of dollars in outstanding loans, and the victims, who were ordinary people .
Alex: How did you leave the repo trade?
Mark: It was just bureaucracy, just putting up with big corporations and bosses that never spend any time out there in the field and can't relate to what you have to do all day . They wanted to put me behind a desk, farm the repossessions out to a cowboy outfit. When I declined, they wanted to know where the company car was. "Where's the car, Mark? Where's the car?" Think of how ironic it would be if I decided to make them repo their own company car. I declined their official ride home.
Alex: And you walked home?
Mark: Yeah. First I gave them the location of the car, then I cleaned out all my personal property, all my repo tools and my briefcase, and put them in one of those bags. Then I walked back to Venice. From the office, which was down near Vermont and Wilshre, along Wilshre and crossed down to Olympic, and down Barrington in west L.A., and then over to Gateway . . . that turns into Ocean Park, I think. I walked down around Santa Monica Aiport, out toward here.
Alex: That's a long walk, Mark.
Mark: Yeah. I was giving a lot of thought to leaving the job. A Iot of thoughts going thru my head that day, walking on down Wilshre. All for the best, though. It's a great feeling, seeing the repo car for the first time. Then you'll do almost anything to get it. You almost don't care if they come out, because unless they've got a gun or block you with another vehicle, you're gonna get that car. You got to meet a lot of interesting people and you got to see a lot of different places where people worked. It was very much a learning experience.
Alex: But in the end . . .
Mark: Ah, the futility of it all. There's no chance of winning. The amount of people never ends. There has gotta be something more worthwhile to life outside of money and momentary thrill . I mean , whaddya gonna do - spend the rest of your life searching out dead-beats?