The Seduction Diet

By Bruce Dundore

Dark, funny, sexy, The Seduction Diet is a tale of the winners and losers, dreamers and schemers who slosh around in the sand and surf of this fabled and flawed city on the sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467025966

Bruce Dundore

Bruce Dundore is a novelist, screenwriter and an advertising professional with over 20 years of experience convincing people to buy things they really don’t need. THE CALAMITIES is his second fiction novel, after THE SEDUCTION DIET, which he published in 2011. He is currently working on his third novel, CAT SCRATCH.

Book preview

1. OBEY THE MONEY.

He was face down, arms spread, on an Eastern King bed wearing nothing but a pair of soiled Depends. His skin so pale it glowed blue. Pink drool stuck his lower lip to the black satin bedspread. His eyes were closed. No movement of the lids.

Empty vodka bottles were scattered on rich Persian rugs that covered perfect white marble floors.

A breeze lifted the curtains by the open bedroom window.

It ruffled his Caesar cut crop of walnut dyed hair that had lost its luster hours ago to sweat and desperation and pain.

He didn’t feel the breeze. He wouldn’t feel anything ever again.

And that was just fine by him.

My name is Tommy Cox. I’m a cop. Malibu PD. A place where dumb money has a chance to live stupid.

I lurk in the gated driveways and moated homes of the rich and famous and the rich and not so famous.

Their beach clubs. Private schools. Restaurants. Bars. Pilate’s class. Collagen clinics. Waxing dens. Poodle parlors. Anywhere they spend their money. Anywhere they get in trouble.

The body on the bed belonged to J.P. Buffet. Massively successful diet pill salesman and president and CEO and spiritual leader of Lifethin International, a legal Ponzi scheme in a business they call multi-level marketing.

He sold pills that worked on the hope centers of the brain.

And he sold nothing at all. Because the pills he sold were nothing more than an elixir of guarana, green tea, caffeine, ma juang, ephedrine, sharks tit, and a basal marmalade that didn’t help you lose weight, but made your heart beat like a hamster in heat and give you the energy of a 68 pound 12 year old midget high on Red Bull and Hershey’s and crack.

Those pills should’ve been illegal, but they didn’t come under Washington’s radar because Lifethin would fill the government’s foreskins with the one thing that ends hope and that is money.

J.P. Buffet had plenty of money. But he was shit out of hope.

Everybody should have at least one chance in this crap filled life to get as close as they can to striking it rich. But for money to mean anything, you have to earn it. You have to have done the deed, made the thing, thought the thought that attracts the money. Otherwise, you’re no better than the entitled spawn and revengeful ex-wives of the money magnets, who think they are due theirs just cause they have the same DNA or are a receptacle for the DNA.

I swore I was going to figure out how to bring wealth down on me. But I was going to have to earn it. I spent a lot of intellectual capital figuring out the angles and the one thing I would not accept was that I wasn’t smart enough to be rich. I just needed my break. This is the story of how you get your foot right outside the door of opportunity so that when luck cracks it open an inch, you’re there to shove it all the way into the room. And how you have to earn the money to respect the money.

If you don’t, the money will drive you crazy.

Being a cop, dealing with the wealthy, taught me that there’s one thing that is different about those that Have, and that fucking tax payer fueled insight is that when they get in some kind of trouble it doesn’t consume them, it’s not a moment of panic, the world isn’t going to end, and, frankly, in some circles, gaming the system is a badge of honor. A call from their lawyer informing them that they’re being sued, held accountable, pointed fingers at for a death, a slander or just an opportunity that would assuredly screw over an entire community of elders, the sick or the impaired is water off their feathered backs. They don’t sweat, stay up nights, yell at their wives or kick their mistresses. What they do, what they know they can do, is hire an army of specialists to keep the consequences at bay.

The system was created by them to be gamed by them. The history of money in this country is the story of the big bamboozle.

They created Fortune 500 companies by importing bananas gotten by torturing South American natives to pick them from trees in jungles teeming with spiders the size of a baseball mitt. They spent 18 hour days in air cooled offices drinking gin and whiskey trying to figure out how banana’s taste on cornflakes and how much could they charge for the delicacy. Then they showed a couple Jews in Hollywood how hilarious it was when you slipped on the peel, and voila: The banana was born!

The railroads, automobiles, oil wells, computers and even Lunch-ables were created by shifty dreamers who borrowed from the government and then leased or sold the shit right back to them and the government didn’t even have time to blink.

But goddamn if that isn’t a skill. And so they earned it. They were worthy. They appreciated the wealth.

Everybody else is a tadpole. They have evolved. They have ten times the shelter, ten times the food, ten times the safety, ten times the sex, ten times the love. Shit. Now, all that is left for them to do is to drive everybody they come in contact with crazy, keep them off balance, in a foggy swirl of their vision and genius. Cause if they can convince you of their genius, of the possibility that they’re channeling some superior life force, you’ll sign a check faster in hopes of catching their train to the money.

Everything I am going to tell you is cobbled together the way a good cop cobbles together a case. It’s a 40-30-20-10 deal. That’s the percentage mix of fact, conjecture, eyewitness, and fancy. So pay attention. I’m going to tell you about how some people manage to get theirs, while others spend their entire lives waiting under the table, begging for scraps.

And how I finally got mine.

2. LADIES AND GENTLMEN, THE GREATEST SALESMAN IN THE WORLD.

The Staples Center was crowded to the rafters with seventeen thousand diet pill salesmen hopped up on diet joy juice looking for a shot at touching the sleeve of The Man That Made Them Rich.

He could spin tales of happiness that made their eyes wet with the promise of limitless opportunity. It was all multi-level. Which is about as hard a business model to figure out as exists in the world. It meant that you sold the rights to others to sell for you and they in turn sold the rights to others to sell for them and at the end of the day the only thing that got sold was the right to sell.

Multi-level is a bugle cry to cab drivers without a sense of direction. Receptionists who don’t know how to use a phone. And divorcees. You have a boatload of divorcees. Women who sucked at marriage and divorce. They all made a fortune from the early efforts of one fucked up but uniquely talented man.

J.P. Buffet borrowed the initials from J.P. Morgan and pilfered his last name from Warren. What better calling card was there in business than a cobbled together name that demanded respect and awe. His real name was Oscar Dard. He hated it. He thought it sounded like people swearing at him in Dutch.

His mother died when her intestines fell apart from too much speed, vodka, ice cream and a weak genome. His father disappeared when he found he’d be stuck raising spawn he never really wanted and wasn’t sure was his.

And so the kid grew up feral.

Stealing hubcaps is a gateway crime. It leads to stealing the cars the hubcaps are attached to. And so one night that legions of Public Relations Specialists later managed to bury, young J.P. Buffet pushed an old woman from the driver to the passenger side of her Ford Pinto, took off and crashed the car and killed her.

The next five years were spent in a under funded foster home for wayward boys. The only good thing to come out of it was that J.P. Buffet, AKA Oscar Dard, developed a silver tongue so slick it kept him safe in the shower.

He could sell just about anything. When he sold, he felt wanted. When people bought, he felt loved. His first year out of the foster home—when it was obvious no one wanted to adopt an eighteen year old who looked like a member of a Boy Band and would waste no time talking the pants off your daughter—he sold three hundred thousand dollars worth of diet pills from the back of an old Plymouth.

He sold each and every one of them with a tear in his eye as he explained the death of his mother due to diet pills. He didn’t mention the vodka, speed, and the bad genome. And he did it by telling people he felt morally compelled to create a diet pill that wouldn’t kill you. He was going to help people lose weight for the good of the world. It was complete bullshit, and then people lost some weight because they took his shit and just stopped eating completely. They spent their waking hours chewing on their fingernails and scratching their elbows because of the chemicals in his pills and because their bodies were starting to eat themselves from the inside out. And then a couple of them died. The government took him in and he charmed them too. He told the Senator from Arkansas that headed up the investigation that his belly went too far over his belt. He told the Congressman from New Jersey from the oversight committee that his double chin was threatening his blood pressure and how he could help both of them with just three green pills and a purple pill a day. Then Lifethin put twenty grand in both their reelection campaigns, and two months later, when the Senator from Arkansas went down a notch in his belt and the Senator from New Jersey’s neck was no longer spilling over his tie, Buffet got off with just a tiny fine and a small black eye to his reputation. And the next year, both those Senators quit politics and became distributors full time and were earning upwards of two million a year.

He was purely and simply The Best Salesman in the World.

In America, that made him an Artist. When it comes to selling, Americans are Picasso’s and Rembrandt’s and Da Vinci’s all rolled into one. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and The Beatles are culturally on the same plane as Kroc, Kellogg, Ford and Popeil. That’s no bullshit. Look it up.

I was lurking in the aisles in the middle of a sea of over fifteen thousand folding chairs on the floor of the Staples Center. The place thundered with the multi lingual hoops and hollers of distributors from every corner of the universe. They were so hopped up on the diet juice and the culture of Lifethin that it wasn’t hard to feel like an outsider, an interloper, like I had just stumbled onto an alien space ship and was hoping the little green men wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t green or little.

I always wanted to see Buffet in action. I had studied his rise to see if there was something I could learn about the art of making money from promises. Every now and then, when I was asked to move by some lackey, I just flashed my badge. I think that’s the thing I like most about being a cop. The badge. It told everyone to just leave me the fuck alone.

Elton John was on stage pounding out ‘Tiny Dancer’ on his red lacquered grand piano in front of a huge LifeThin Corporation banner. It was there to remind him he really wasn’t the dinner, just the appetizer.

He didn’t want to be there. But his fee of a half a million dollars for thirty minutes of music-just piano, orange wig optional-was agreed to in thirty seconds of negotiations.

The man who created hundreds of memories for millions of people, who sat at the left thigh of Lady Di, was one of the poorest men in the room. He’d spent most of his life not paying taxing and buying custom made glasses made out of diamonds and suits made out of recycled chandeliers. He had a red piano, for Christ’s sake. So when the government did come calling with the bill, Elton’s pockets were empty. On the suits that actually had pockets at all. The principals of Lifethin, those charged with arranging the entertainment, knew this. So they bid low. Elton bit. But only after he heard that Willie Nelson, another man in dire need of satisfying the IRS, had asked them for a million dollars and they had turned him down.

J.P. Buffet waited just off stage. He was shiny in a sweat, as unnatural substances struggled to find a way out of his body. His eyeballs were dilated. Nice big brown spots that made him look like he had two holes in his head. And they darted and rolled. Upward, side to side, apart. Like he was channeling the ghost of Marty Feldman.

His handlers—Hank Gates (took his name from Bill) and John Welch (took his name from Jack)—waited at his side. When Elton finished the last flourish, Gates ran out on stage, pumped his fists in the air, and screamed, Are we ready for the show! to the hordes of juiced up rich and on their way to getting richer diet pill junkies.

They exploded in a multi-lingual YES! that was ten times louder than the applause for Elton. Elton slinked off the stage and got a handoff of his check from Welch.

J.P. didn’t even acknowledge him as he poured airplane bottles of vodka down his gullet to satisfy the bad genome he inherited from his mother. Gates pumped up the already pumped up crowd, thrusting his fist in the air as he shouted, Here is your leader! J.P. Buffet! I could see Welch was worried. He’d seen J.P. in this type of wild-eyed frenzy before. The last time, the old boy wound up in a hospital in Saigon in what passes for intensive care after sitting too close to what passes for a bar girl who shot ping pong balls out of what passed for her cootch and one hit him in the eye so hard he fell off his stool and cracked his head on the floor. If he hadn’t been so drunk, it might have killed him is what passes for doctors in Saigon said. Welch and Gates knew their King was on the downward spiral. They just had to make sure no one else did.

J.P. wiped the sweat from his forehead and glided across the stage in his seven thousand dollar Armani suit and perfectly dyed hair, arms flapping like any minute he would make his body leave the stage and follow his brain to the rafters, where he would stand and piss on them all.

And the crowd went wild.

Gates ran over to J.P. and buffered his walking like you would a toddler who was taking its first steps: Arms spread out, not interrupting, but making sure if the little rug rat fell, he wasn’t gonna hit his head on the coffee table.

Get the fuck away from me, Hank! J.P. scolded as he spun around and faced his disciples and shouted, I see a million dollar check!

The crowd roared and stamped their feet. J.P. smiled and sucked in the power. I see a two million dollar check! And the crowd roared again.

J.P. rotated his head from side to side, like Ronald Reagan used to do when he gave a speech. Perfect little ninety-degree arcs so he could see everybody, make eye contact with everyone in the room. And come to think of it, he had a lot in common with Reagan. They both forgot a lot. They both were about as removed from the world around them as a human being could be. And they both needed unconditional love and admiration.

Are we in a spaceship? J.P. rallied out to the worshippers.

The Crowd roared back a big sweaty Yes!

Are we ever gonna land?

The Crowd roared back the inevitable No!

You guys are great! and with that, J.P. dipped below the podium, then shot back up with a white cocaine shmear across his upper lip and got a big welcome cheer from the crowd.

He was even sweatier now, coke and alcohol seeping from his waxy pores.

You guys are great! I love you guys.

They all answered back We love you too in their own languages. Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, English, and Hmong. It was a terrible noise, like the UN being evacuated during a Godzilla attack.

Then, in the middle of the cacophony, J.P. took off his clothes.

First his tie. Then his shirt. He flung them into the crowd, as Gates and Welch were caught between stopping him and hoping this was just a playful stunt that he’d end early. Whatever it was, the crowd devoured the shirt and tie like they hadn’t eaten shirts and ties in over a month.

J.P. sailed around the stage, got close to Gates and Welch and taunted them, Crack whore on my dick. Baby out my ass… Then he pulled off his pants, flung them into the crowd, ripped off his briefs, threw them into the soup too. Gates and Welch rushed out, grabbed JP by his arms and pulled him offstage. The crowd went crazy. And why not? They just saw God’s balls.

3. THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS.

J.P. Buffet’s mansion squatted on the beach like an elephant hypnotized by the ocean. Everything about it screamed new. It had too much of everything. Too many windows, to many columns, too many balconies, too many railings, too many doorknobs.

It was a wedding cake Mediterranean. Perfectly formed imported rocks were individually lit up to create splendor. It looked like Camelot had Liberace been King Arthur, Lisa Minnelli been Guinevere, and Richard Simmons been Lancelot.

The house didn’t get much better inside. The décor was bad imitation Blenheim Palace, which was already bad imitation Versailles.

Big rococo gold framed paintings of the hunt; hounds, horses, horns, gentry, and lions. English Nobles posing with lions. Lions killing bears. Lions perched on cliffs overlooking all they were about to kill, maim or scare the shit out of.

These surrounded a portrait of JP done in the style of the hunt paintings but without the craft. That was lost when art got to be about slicing up sharks and formalydehyding them in tanks. Or the day Pollock splattered a canvas and someone said genius and art schools all over the country told their models to cover up and go home, we won’t be needing you anymore.

There were camera’s everywhere. Part of an extensive system a paranoid J.P. had his security team install. Picture and sound, it kept a running record of all the low points of J.P.’s high life. It was secretly expanded by Gates and Welch to keep a running record of all the legally embarrassing and share holder value damaging details of J.P.’s sordid life.

I was there to question Lou Mellini and Lars Sackman, J.P. Buffet’s minders. Hired by Gates and Welch to make sure J.P. stayed out of trouble in public in addition to the general security a man his balance sheet demanded, they were present the evening of J.P.’s last night on earth. That made them suspects. Guilty of something. And I had been dying to pinch these two for a long time. They always seemed to walk on the dark edge.

Lou was a former Special Forces Op. Could’ve worked for the department, but these guys always came back a bit too damaged to pay attention to something as ring-a-ding as Miranda Rights. And there was a boatload of jobs for them amongst the wealthy. Not that they liked what they did. Rescuing a drunken, drugged up naked millionaire did not hold the same thrill as securing Fallujah.

Lou’s right hand man, Lars Sackman, was a little more mysterious. He was an Afrikaner from South Africa. From everything I’ve heard about these people, they’re the Dark Continent’s version of a redneck. He had a fucked up Afrikaner way of talking which was essentially to spit sentences out like he had Tourette’s. Half of them ended in a question embellished with a yes? He was also a black belt in Kempo and Judo, and got to be a contender in the welterweight division of the Ultimate Fighting business. He had a job once as a personal bodyguard to one of the stars of bimbo pop. But he hit on her—You like me? Then, we fuck, yes?—and got fired by the record company so he washed down to Malibu where the rich hire the dangerous to protect their Chihuahua’s.

According to Lou and Lars, when the chauffeur dumped J.P. home after the event, he had taken his clothes off inside the limo and run out onto the beach, pulling on his dick like it was a leash and he was taking the rest of his body for a stroll.

Didn’t you guys think to help him? I asked.

Deal or no deal! Lars burped up.

I’m not arresting you, you stupid shit. I’m just asking questions.

Deal or no deal, yes?

What he means is that we were watching Deal or No Deal, Lou clarified.

Banker was up to five hundred thousand! She could get rich, yes? Lars explained. Lou went on to tell me they had been watching a real cliffhanger with a contestant that still had the one million, eight hundred thousand, forty thousand and the twenty-dollar amounts on the board.

She was an unemployed cashier from a Walgreen’s in Spokamonk Acres or some such shit place like that. She lost her husband in Iraq, and lost her health care too. And she had two children, who had turned the garage into a meth lab and were getting a little harder to discipline.

Lunatic hung on, Lou said.

She was greedy, yes? Lars asked/said.

Lou told me that the woman No Dealed the half a million, thinking, believing, hoping that inside the case she had chosen was the million. Even Howie Mandell was trying to tell her to take the fucking deal, He was pleading to her, for Christ’s sake, Lou added. But she didn’t. She didn’t take the deal. The next two suitcases she chose held the eight hundred thousand and the forty thousand dollars. She had a fifty-fifty chance on the million or the twenty dollars. The banker kept his bid at three hundred thousand, she turned him down, chose a case, it turned out to be the million and she went home with twenty dollars. Came out later she had to borrow another twenty from Howie Mandell for the cab back to the airport.

Money makes stupid, yes? Lars observed.

I could only glare at these two semi-bozos. So that’s it? Your boss is naked, out of his head, running on the beach, and you’re too busy watching Howie Mandell avoid physical contact with some out of work cashier on Deal or No Deal.

Deal or No Deal? Lars Touretted, shaking his head, like just saying those words made him happy.

Lou, tell your fucking monkey to shut the hell up.

Lou led me to the video security room, which was a whole separate wing of mansion.