Character(s) an ill-advised cast of characters

[ill-advised]

Jake Bishop
Michael Bird​

 

[ill-advised]

Ex-cop. Ex-con. Fixer. Enforcer. Dad.​

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Down these mean streets a man must go.

Jake Bishop is a fixer and bag-man for the moneyed elite of Los Angeles' sun-bleached underworld. There is no problem too big—or too small—for Jake to take care of. He's made everything disappear, from bags of dope to recently-used firearms to bodies in trunks. He's recovered stolen goods: cash, artwork, cars, and one time an up-and-coming Hollywood starlet's dog-napped poodle. He's worked for crooked politicians and music studio moguls and cartel plaza bosses and Koreatown counterfeiters and everyone in between. He's got an ex-wife—their relationship used to be contentious, now it's complicated (in a "we're not getting back together but there's time for a quickie on the couch" sort of way)—and a pair of young children he sees every other weekend. That relationship isn't complicated, it's simple: he spoils them rotten with filthy lucre and their mother pretends to be upset about it.

But he wasn't always a freelance boogeyman. Before this, Jake was a convict - and before he was a convict, he was a crooked cop - and before he was a crooked cop, he was a bright-eyed young LAPD cadet who had no idea just how goddamned hard the world was gonna hit him. He's been shot at and beaten and shivved, but that was what it took for him to get his head straightened out so he can't even say it was all bad. Prison gave him a cluster of shanking scars shaped like an orbital belt around his ribcage, a couple of years' sobriety, and a penchant for philosophical reading.

Now, back on the outside, he's still got his drinking under control (though he's known to indulge in the occasional psychedelic on this side of the joint), and he spends his days plying his shadowy trade from a comfortable one-story Pico Rivera bungalow or else bumping elbows with an undoubtedly eclectic mix of Los Angeles' myriad ne'er-do-wells.

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[ill-advised]

Small-time crook with kingpin ambitions.​

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This game is rigged, man.

See Michael Bird. He is, among other things: a drug dealer, a car thief, and a stickup artist. He's just barely old enough to have graduated high school (but he didn't, he dropped out), and he's certainly smart enough to get his GED (but he hasn't).

Michael was born and raised in Baltimore, unwanted latchkey kid to a disinterested single mom who wasn't much more than a kid herself. The streets found him early, and they made him grow up fast. The crew of hooligans that served as his surrogate family growing up called him "White Mike," for the obvious reasons, and they oversaw his graduation from petty crime—vandalism, shoplifting, truancy—to middling felonies: drug distribution, armed robbery, burglary. But they were fractious and disorganized: wannabes, mostly, not connected to any of the major trafficking organizations in the city, and with time their little would-be gang became a had-been crew, losing more than half its members to incarceration or the funeral parlor.

So Michael finds himself: aimless but yearning, a gangland schemer perennially on the lookout for the "next big thing." When he was a kid he had dreamt he was going to make it big in the drug game: he'd live in a penthouse apartment with cream-colored furniture, fat-bottomed mamacitas would sprawl on the couch while bossa nova played on the hi-fi system. Obviously, things have not panned out that way for him. Most days you can find Michael circling familiar territory in the 'hood from behind the wheel of his granddad's rustbucket old box Chevy, selling dimebags of bushweed and red-topped vials of dope that's been stepped on two or three times too many.

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