Vol. 3: Body Brokers
This story is part of “To Live and Drive in Los Angeles,” a series of short stories based on local writer Joe Eckstein’s real, personal experiences in Los Angeles since he moved here nearly a decade ago, spanning the wide range of homes, jobs, people, and drives he has encountered along the way.
A version of this piece first appeared in Issue 01: Lore, Factory Settings’ first print issue, published October 2026.
I got into a great place in North Hollywood off Archwood Street because I took my shoes off at the door. That’s also why Rudi, a brief summer fling I would have a few years later, liked me—not because I had to take my shoes off when I entered my house, but because I wanted to.
I spent nearly seven years in this North Hollywood “Archwood” house. Two of those seven years I spent at Archwood were during COVID-19 quarantine. I loved the Archwood house. It had a criminally underutilized backyard. I built a riverstone fire pit. I taught myself how to garden, with attention to California-native flora. The backyard had a bountiful lemon tree and an orange tree. The scent of their blooms each Spring could do something freaky to a motherfucker. I wish the COVID-19 quarantine had lasted longer. Write it on my gravestone.
Despite imposed “restraints” on the public, app-based dating was phenomenal. The postcapitalist thrill of an evening rendezvous with a complete stranger titillated me because of the implied-yet-not-enacted punishments. Sometimes, we would meet at one of our own places of residence. Sometimes, we would meet at a bar operating under strict regulations, perhaps because the bar operators themselves felt the same law-defying thrill we horny twenty-somethings did. Challenging federal regulations makes people horny. Write that on my gravestone too, please.
That’s how I met Rudi. I took her to an Indian restaurant that offered outdoor seating. I drank a beer. Rudi drank a ginger beer. She was two months sober. She had been living at a “sober-living community” paid for by her parents’ insurance.
The community was called Graceview Ranch. Residents were charged no rent. Instead, the recovering addicts were expected to assist in the production of a TikTok reality show about the sober-living house. Located in Malibu, off Kanan, it was more a mansion than a house. Each of the residents had to sign a waiver granting the owner, Patrick, the rights to use their voice and likeness in his successful YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/OnlyFans franchise called “Learning to Lose.”
In no time at all, Patrick put Rudi front and center. Rudi was unafraid to make fun of the most powerful person in the room right to their face. She got away with this—even managed to make it charming—because she was funny. She did great voices and looked a little bit like Kiernan Shipka. She quickly ascended from production assistant to main character in the “Learning to Lose” saga.
Even though Patrick was married to a woman named Lee (who drank, no less), I suspected that he loved Rudi. This was unsurprising to me. It seemed that both Patrick and Lee had big appetites. They ran an OnlyFans together, after all. The married couple would involve any attractive recovering addict at Graceview on their OnlyFans, should they be willing. Rudi reiterated that she had no part in their pay-per-view shenanigans. I’ve never browsed OnlyFans, so I can’t attest to her truthfulness, but I never really cared either way.
Two things influenced the Florida-born Rudi’s move to Los Angeles: her desire to escape her conspiracy-theorist father and her three-bottles-of-Chardonnay-a-day mother, and her desire to speak her voice in an environment that might reward her for it.
Graceview Ranch was not Rudi’s first stint with anything that resembled a rehab. The night of her high-school graduation, she hopped into her older sister’s Honda Civic. Instead of taking Rudi to the graduation party, her sister took her to rehab, where mom and dad were waiting. The trio did everything but drag her across the concrete to get her ass through the double-doors. By 9:30 pm, Rudi was checked in for a thirty-day stay. She met a guy named Mike. Mike said that, should her parents allow it, there was a sober-living place in Malibu, California that allowed residents to bunk rent-free in return for their “talents.”
She was not going to go to college, but she was going to go to California. She was not going to relapse. Rudi drove across the country and moved into Graceview Ranch thirty-five days later. They made her take her shoes off at the door.
After a few weeks of dating, Rudi informed me that “Learning to Lose” was going to release a Halloween-themed found-footage-esque video of Rudi hijacking an iPhone and self-documenting her slaying of all the residents during a Joshua Tree vacation. They needed a blood guy. Season Two of Euphoria had just wrapped filming, so when Rudi asked, I told her I would help out.
They needed three effects. The first of the effects was a woman being slashed by a chainsaw, and they wanted blood to gush out. The second effect was a man being beaten to death by a fake crowbar, and they wanted blood to gush out. The third—and only effect that ended up looking decent—was a man getting his throat slashed. They wanted blood to gush out. I charged $500 for the day, but I could have charged three times that much, and they wouldn’t have known the difference.
I arrived at Graceview Ranch with my equipment the morning of the departure to the J-Tree shooting location. Apparently, it was an AirBnB. Rudi met me at the gates of Graceview Ranch and buzzed me in through an elegant gate. I parked behind a massive G-Wagon and exited my Mazda 3.
“Come on in, and meet everyone. Sorry, it’s a little hectic.”
As Rudi and I approached the door, a man burst out. We stepped aside to clear a pathway for him to get through. He looked visibly agitated. He had face tattoos. He had tattoos everywhere. He had a few gold teeth. He looked like a mix between Riff Raff and Post Malone.
“Hey, Patrick. This is Joe.”
“This… is Patrick?” I thought. Patrick barely glanced in my direction before moving onwards to rummage through his G-Wagon. He didn’t even say hello. “Okay, so that’s how it’s gonna be,” I thought to myself.
Rudi invited me inside and introduced me to a guy named Wikum. There were a few other recovering addicts staying out of view. They hugged the corners and walked along the walls and looked at the ground as they moved from hallway to hallway or from room to room. The ones that did remain in view actively avoided looking at me or even acknowledging my existence. My initial thought was, “No wonder everyone’s moody, these poor sons of bitches can’t have a drink or a toke of weed at the end of the day,” but I soon inferred the hostility I perceived was more about my presence with Rudi. I still made an effort to introduce myself to everyone.
“Wikum has some special effects stuff he thought you could use. I’ll be right back,” said Rudi.
She hurried up a staircase. I didn’t know why. I approached Wikum. He didn’t say much. He more or less just pointed lethargically at a couple of plastic bags from Walmart and Spirit Halloween strewn across the lounge by the foyer. The only items of any worth were some Tinsley prosthetics. The rest was trash. The fake chainsaw looked like it was from Toys-’R-Us. As someone expecting a well-oiled production with everyone involved actively doing their part to accomplish something, this is not what I expected.
Rudi returned to the first floor and introduced me to Lee, Patrick’s wife. I knew Lee and Patrick were in an open relationship, and she looked at me as if she knew that I knew. After seeing Patrick, I couldn’t have distanced myself further.
“So what’s the anticipated wrap time?” I said, trying to grasp some semblance of the schedule. Everyone looked at me like I was drunk. There evidently was no schedule. There was no crafty. There was just a kitchen sink. Nobody offered me a tap water. My couple of years working on major productions had clearly spoiled me. I immediately wanted to leave. In an attempt to break the ice and understand the situation somewhat, I asked Patrick to elaborate a bit on what I needed to do. I was friendly.
“Yeah, just blood, man. We'll see,” he said.
Rudi drove the two of us towards Joshua Tree in her Honda Civic. We stopped at a strip mall along the way, where she purchased two new outfits and bought us lunch—all on Patrick’s card. We arrived at an elegant and modern house in the middle of the desert. There wasn’t a sign of civilization for miles. Patrick, Lee, Wikum, and a few other recovering addicts arrived soon after. They had lunch for everybody but me. Rudi gave me half of her BLT. Patrick was to “direct” this “found-footage” faux-reality horror short, and Wikum was to be the “director of photography.” I was the “blood guy.” Everyone else was just background. The other recovering addicts seemed in high spirits, enjoying a change of scenery from the beautiful yet understandably oppressive Malibu Hills.
They winged it. In between takes Patrick and Wikum would noodle around and talk about how this idea would someday be ranked amongst the films of Christopher Nolan and the Safdie Brothers. The Safdie Brothers had not yet separated at this time. To bother detailing how uncoordinated and unplanned and unflattering this “production” was would only serve to further exhaust my rhetoric. As the sun set, we executed the throat-slashing shot—the only good shot in the entire “movie.”
To Wikum’s credit, he composed the shot nicely. To my credit, the spurting blood is what made the shot. The sun had set, and the stars now glistened in the sky. One of the recovering addicts played a body that Rudi beat to death with a crowbar. It looked fine but not good. Afterwards—I kid you not—Patrick and Lee took a sojourn to the master bedroom with Wikum, so he could film an OnlyFans scene on their rented camera. Rudi, the rest of the recovering addicts, and I twiddled our thumbs for thirty minutes as we waited for them to finish. It was now two A.M., and we still had yet to accomplish the “gory chainsaw shot.” (Spoiler alert: It looked awful.)
Rudi and the other recovering addicts began talking about sleeping arrangements. I took Rudi aside.
“You never mentioned sleeping here.”
“What do ya mean? We’re in Joshua Tree, we’ve got this place booked until eleven—“
“I don’t know these people. I am not sleeping here.”
“Oh my god, is it so bad?”
I wasn’t going to tell her that everyone here gave me the absolute creeps, so I took a different angle. It was still a valid angle, thougH—one that I stand by to this day.
“I came into this under the circumstances you articulated, which was that this was a job, and that this production was a professional operation, and that I would be paid for twelve hours—not twenty.”
“I’ll ask them to pay you more.”
“I don’t want more money, I want you to take me home. You need to take me home when we wrap the last shot, or else I’m walking into town.”
“But there are coyotes…”
Once we wrapped the god-awful chainsaw sequence that never made the finished product, Rudi announced that she would be driving home with me. Everybody, especially Patrick and Wikum, looked like Caesars on the Ides of March. Wikum declared he would ride in the backseat. I didn’t care. Fine. Fuck it. Come on, Wikum, we’re leaving.
Rudi hauled back to the Malibu Hills and parked by my car. It was four A.M. I loaded everything from Rudi’s Honda Civic into my Mazda 3. Rudi said she needed to “go get something” from the mansion before I drove us back to my place. Wikum went with her, and I waited by my Mazda. Five minutes later, Rudi emerged from the front door, and Wikum was following behind. They stood under the porchlight and exchanged some words. Without warning, Wikum leaned in to kiss Rudi. Rudi arched her back away like a piece of spaghetti and spun around promptly. Wikum didn’t even look in my general direction before he slumped back inside.
Rudi and I didn’t last much longer after that night. A few months later, I read an article from a reputable magazine that accused Graceview Ranch Sober Living of practicing body brokering. Body brokering is, apparently, a frequent problem in sober-living communities in Southern California. The sober-living facility enlists a “body broker”—somebody who essentially convinces an addict to attend a cooperating sober-living community for a generous cut of insurance money. Kids under twenty-five still benefiting from their parents’ insurance are the most frequent targets. Mike, the “recovering addict” Rudi met at the rehab in Florida, was, in fact, a body broker.
Rudi’s parents, no matter how dysfunctional they were described to me as, convinced her to leave when they discovered their insurance was being billed $500-a-week for drug tests. I never spoke to her again. She released a grippingly moving extended-play on Spotify called “Gemini.” “I’m not a person, I’m not a person, I’m not a person, I’m not a person,” she urgently belts in the opening track over expertly produced drums and synths.
As far as I know, Graceview Ranch continues operations, and its social media channels are alive and well. Also, look up “Joshua Tree Massacre Patrick” on YouTube—there’s a wicked blood effect or two.
I don’t live at the Archwood house anymore. This all was five-or-so years ago. I live with my girlfriend now. Even though I may slip up now-and-again, I still try to take my shoes off every time I walk into the house.
