“You don’t look Jewish.”
“Are you?” I asked.
“Am I what?”
“Are you Jewish?”
“Good Lord, no. I’m Episcopalian… Church of England.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“This place is hot. I mean everybody is trying to get in here, if they can find it.”
“But you’re Episcopalian?”
“So what.”
“You follow ‘The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ party line?”
“Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“Well, Rabbi O’Toole, for one. Unless his progressive-eclectic has gone very wide, I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t follow your Holy Trinity line of reasoning.”
“Oh, that’s OK. To each his own. Besides, I’m not here for the religion. I’m here to pick up clients.”
Richard proceeded to tell me that due to his extensive list of contacts, Rabbi O’Toole had made him the leader of his Young Professionals Group.
“If you give me your phone number and if you go out with me sometime, I’ll bring you to the Young Pros Group,” he said.
I think I was beginning to understand. Richard’s interest in Rabbi O’Toole’s congregation might have been about clients. He was an agent. But then again, it might have been about an available and rapidly expanding pool of eligible women.
Hmmm.
“Richard, I gave you my phone number at the Ivy & Elite mixer. And since you said that you never take anyone’s phone number unless you’re definitely going to call them, I’ll definitely wait for you to call me.”
A day and a half later, he called.
“Carrie, I’m at Bar Marmont right now. It’s really hot. You should come down,” said the message on my voice mail.
Was that an invitation?
“You’ve got to go out with him,” said Bettina later that week while we were jogging.
“Yeah,” said Marcie, who had joined us in a fit of inspiration.
We were attempting to run seven miles, and the going was slow.
“What are you, nuts?” I said. “This guy’s a jerk.”
“He sounds like great husband material,” said Marcie.
“Would that be because you think he has money?” I said. “Why should I go out with someone who can’t even get my name right?”
“That,” said Bettina, “is the kind of detail that you need to overlook.”
Later that week, I got another message on my voicemail. “Cory, it’s Richard. Just checking in.” That, and the other six hang-ups on my voicemail, were definitely worth ignoring.
“Connie?” said a voice on the phone.
“No,” I said.
“I mean… Courtney?”
“Yeah…”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“It’s Richard.”
“What can I do for you… Rick?”
“It’s Richard, not Rick.”
“Whatever.”
“There’s this restaurant that’s opening.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s going to be really hot.”
“OK.”
“And I’m a limited partner in the restaurant.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I was wondering if you’d like to go to it with me.”
“I’m really busy right now, Rich.”
“Richard.”
“What?”
“It’s Richard, not Rich.”
“Whatever.”
“But this is the type of thing that you need to be seen at.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. All the right people are going to be there.”
“I was wondering where they were hiding.”
“You really should take this more seriously,” he said. “I’m sure you don’t get invited to events like this too often.”
“If you really think that’s true, why would you want to be seen with me?”
“Because I think it will be… well… different. I’ve never dated a plus-size.”
“I’m a size 6.”
“That big? I thought you were a 4.”
In a city which had seen the proliferation of actresses who had punished their bodies into semi-starvation, the average dress size for women living between La Brea Boulevard and the Pacific Ocean spanned between a size 0 and a size 2. What made this statistic all the more miraculous was that many of these size 0s had little boy hips and 36D-size breasts.
And I was a size 6 and nowhere near a 36D.
“Well, Rickie,” I said.
“Richard.”
“Uh huh. Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”
It was a foregone conclusion that I was going to go out with him. I knew that Marcie and Bettina would nag me into it.
I wondered if I could find some place on the Westside that sold food with fat in it, so that maybe I could be really large—like a size 8—before we went out.
Richard took me to the restaurant of the moment, a Zagat-described “toughest ticket of the decade” on Melrose in West Hollywood.
“Did I tell you that I was a limited partner in this place?” he said, loudly enough to startle the non-English speaking valets.
“Every 15 minutes,” I said.
We entered the restaurant.
“I’m sorry, we don’t seem to have your reservation,” said the maitre d’.
“But I’m…” Richard turned his body away from me and asked to see the manager.
After what appeared to be a heated discussion with the manager and maitre d’ he came back.
“I set them straight. Let’s go to the bar and wait while they set up my table.”
The bar was, well, nice. I suppose the profit center of the restaurant has to be. I’m not sure what the normal mark-up is on wine, but Richard proceeded to order a Cab that even in the most marked-up retail stores goes for $42.00. Only here, it’s going for $90.00. And the two bottles of water he ordered (retail $2.00) are going for $18.00 a bottle.
We hadn’t had a piece of bread before he downed the Cab like it was Gatorade. And then he ordered another bottle.
We’ve got $276 on the tab, he’s a sloppy drunk, and we haven’t eaten a thing.
We’re finally seated at a table two inches from the swinging reach of the kitchen door, a table so small that it made the meal trays in an airline coach section look generous. It didn’t really qualify as a table. It was more of a tablet, something that my mom would have put on my lap so that I could eat dinner while watching television and not spill anything on myself.
“I love being where the action is,” said Richard.
“You know,” he went on, “there are no smart people in Los Angeles.”
Well, there were two things that I knew about Richard immediately.
Number 1.
“You went to SN-IVY,” I said.
“How’d you know?” he replied while reaching for what would be his sixth glass of wine, which he proceeded to spill on our tablet.
It was easy.
You couldn’t have a two-word conversation such as “excuse me” with a SN-IVY (my acronym for the School that was Not-Ivy League but managed to produce the biggest jerks in the world) grad without receiving 20 minutes of pure disdain. Innocent remarks such as “That’s interesting,” “Turn left here,” or “Can I help you?” could be counted on to produce a torrent of snotty remarks from a SN-IVY grad such as “Not really,” “What do you know?” or “Why would you think that you could help me?”
It was as if they purposely asked you questions to set you up for their ludicrous reply, which was always delivered on autopilot as if it pulsed from a chip that had been implanted in their brain on the day they signed the SN-IVY acceptance letter and had Daddy send in the deposit.
I usually knew better than to engage with a SN-IVY person, but sometimes I slipped: A SN-IVY Grad once asked me the history of my violin and before I realized that it was a typical SN-IVY set-up, she cut me of
f after ten words with “Does anyone care?”
It was so easy. A SN-IVY alum would always start a conversation with an insult.
And Richard knew that I was born in Southern California.
I often pondered the genesis of this nastiness.
I occasionally encountered it from Harvard or Yale graduates, but after they dropped the word “Yale” for the 25th time in a three-minute conversation, you knew that going to Yale was the most prestigious thing that had ever happened to them, that it had been a miserable mistake—given that they could have been in Palo Alto instead of New Haven—and that their Yale grades fell squarely at or below a 3.0 GPA.
But with the SN-IVY alumni, it was different.
I’m sure it killed them that in Los Angeles, SN-IVY meant about as much as any of the less competitive University of California schools.
But I think it was more that they never quite got over going to a school which was clearly not their first choice, a school which balanced on the very perimeter of the Ivy League, and that they were determined to spend the rest of their lives making up for it.
Number 2.
“And you grew up on the East Coast,” I said, while waiting for the Chardonnay he spilled to dry from my clothes.
“I would never have taken you for such an observant person,” said Richard, while trying to signal our waiter.
I might have been mistaken, but I thought I recognized our waiter as the lead from Genie’s drama school production of a cross-dressing Hamlet, a play for which Genie was rumored to have been shortlisted for a MacArthur “Genius” Award.
Our waiter, true to his training, was pretending not to notice Richard while standing five feet from us and staring directly at him.
“How did you know that?” said Richard.
That was even easier.
Whereas someone who had lived in San Francisco would take a swipe at the physical characteristics of Los Angeles with a pathetic statement like, “L.A.’s so ugly,” someone from the East Coast never dared do that.
I mean, what are they going to say? I hate living in a city that has consistently beautiful weather? But some of them did try out the idiotic “I miss the seasons” line. No, the disgruntled East Coast transplant usually came across with the hackneyed “This is definitely not New York.”
But I had news for them.
We know that.
That’s why we call it “Los Angeles.”
Occasionally, you’d run across the very tired “There is/are no good… in L.A.” a sentence which could be filled with nearly anything, but most often with: bagels, pizza, night-life, bookstores, bad weather, public transportation, or theater.
I never understood it.
You never found a person from L.A. going to Manhattan and complaining that there were no good beaches, the surfing was lousy, and there were no decent Mexican restaurants. I found Richard’s “There are no smart people in Los Angeles” statement so ridiculously stale.
And then I knew one more thing.
I truly didn’t like him.
So it came as no surprise when he took it upon himself to correct my table manners.
“The way you hold your knife and fork, it’s just… well… so common.”
I looked around the room.
“I’m holding it like everyone else in the room.”
“My point exactly. I prefer to hold my knife and fork as they do on the continent,” he said.
“That’s very interesting, Richard, but what continent would you be speaking of?”
“Why, Europe, of course.”
“Really,” I said looking at him, “that’s very educational. Because I was unaware that in Europe, the main course was eaten with the salad fork.”
Richard slumped in his chair like a balloon that had been popped by a machete. “Well,” he said, “at least I wasn’t born in Los Angeles.”
“Really, Richard, really?” I said. “Because if you’ve been in L.A. longer than 24 hours, you’d know that almost no one is actually born in Los Angeles. That you’ve actually found a native, a true native, whose family has been in California over five generations, is highly unusual.”
Richard looked away.
“And might I add,” I said, “it’s not… no, let me change that, it’s never the natives who act like idiots, who drown in “The Grotto” at Hef’s, who overdose on their toilets, who have seven wives and then get addicted to… whatever… in L.A. It’s the people who come here.”
Somewhere after Richard’s lecture on the superiority of a private college (SN-IVY again) rather than a public university—which I attended for law school—our bill arrived: $572.36, pre-tip.
I guess that’s what four bottles of wine, five bottles of water, two appetizers, two main courses, two desserts, two coffees, and the sales tax costs. I quickly did the math. Ouch. With a 20 percent tip and sales tax, this was going to cost over $700. It was a good thing that he was a limited partner in this joint, or someone was going to see a small dent in their credit line.
“I’ll take care of this,” said Richard.
He picked up the check, and raced up to the front of the restaurant.
After what appeared to be another extremely animated discussion with the manager and the maitre d’, Richard came back and sat down.
“It’s all taken care of. I just had to remind them who I was.”
Not two minutes later, our waiter appeared.
“I’m afraid your credit card has been denied, sir,” said our waiter. “Would you care to try another card?”
Two credit card denials later, I found out Richard wasn’t a limited partner in this place. His second cousin was. Although his cousin had let him eat for free a few times, Richard had been cut off.
Apparently, the third time he brought a party of ten at eight o’clock on a Saturday night and pulled the “limited partner routine” he had been shut down.
“I mean, she’s my cousin and it’s her restaurant, so what’s the problem?” he said. “I don’t get it.”
I got it.
As it turned out, Mr. Ivy & Elite was maxed-out on all six cards, $40,000 on each, so that he’s $160,000 in debt. He was waiting for his year-end bonus to pay it all off and it’s only mid-August. He still had four and a half debt-filled months before bonus time and no credit left on his existing cards, which meant that the other person at the table who had decent credit was going to have to pay for dinner.
That would be me.
While they were processing my credit card, Richard table-hopped and decided to run out front to smoke a cigar with a guy from his health club.
I looked over at the bar and saw Josh, whom I hadn’t seen since the Emmys. He was sitting alone. I walked over and sat down next to him.
“Hey. How’s it going?”
“Well, well,” said Josh. “If it isn’t the little litigator. Come over here to start a fight?”
After my remarks on our first date, I guess that this was to be expected.
“Noooooo, I came over to say hello and see how you were,” I said. “But I think I know the answer to that.”
“Did the word drunk come to mind?”
“No. But the words extremely drunk did.”
I motion to the bartender to cut him off, and he gets it.
“So what’s going on?” I ask.
What’s going on is that he’s a mess. It turns out that Cody, the D-girl from the Emmys, has dumped him. After four months of dating, she told him that he wasn’t powerful enough.
Then Richard reappears.
“What’s this?” he said.
“This is my friend Josh,” I say.
They look at each other.
“Hey,” said Richard.
“Hey,” said Josh.
I take Richard aside. “Look, my friend Josh just got dumped and is feeling pretty terrible. So I think I’m going to stay and make sure he gets home alive. OK?”
“But I thought you were with me tonight,” said Richard.
&
nbsp; “Look, my friend Josh is a mess. He needs some help.”
“OK,” said Richard. “But I’d like to do this again. I had a really good time tonight.”
I just say “good night” and don’t even go for the obligatory kiss.
I walk back over to Josh, order two coffees, tell the waiter to keep them coming and then wonder if I’m making a mistake. In this restaurant I could deplete my IRA trying to cover the cost of endless coffees. We stay until the restaurant closes. Then I take him to Cantor’s so he can talk himself out and I can stop paying for $6 cups of Maxwell House Blend.
Josh talks for four hours. Before I leave, I give him my cell phone number.
“Call me if you feel bad. Don’t worry about the time. I’m a light sleeper,” I tell Josh. This is a lie, but he looks awful.
When I get home, it’s about 3 a.m.
My cell phone rings. I pick it up.
“Josh?” I say.
It’s not. But there’s breathing on the line.
“Whoever this is, this breather thing is so tired. Give it a rest.”
“You’re not the best-looking woman that I’ve ever slept with. I know you think you are. But you’re not.”
“Oh hi, Ted,” I said. “Are you the Breather?”
“If you want, I’ll come over,” said Dr. Ted.
“Let it go, Ted. It’s 3 a.m.”
“You should feel lucky that I want you,” said Dr. Ted.
“And why is that?”
“Because I’m a doctor.”
“Really? Does the word HMO or… try this one ‘Managed Health Care’ mean anything to you? Good night, Ted. I’m going to lose you in a second.”
“Bitch,” barks Dr. Ted, just before my cell dies.
11
Did You Vest?
I’m not one of those people who like to stay in contact with a boyfriend after we break up. I think the act of breaking up demonstrates that on some level you hate each other. To stay in contact with each other on the basis of some ridiculous lie, like a pretense of friendship (“let’s be friends”), only prolongs the inevitable. There isn’t going to be any friendship. You’re not going to get any closure. You repulse each other. So cut it off. When it comes to a former fiancé I take this theory to a higher level. Whereas with a boyfriend I’ll acknowledge that I did date him, with a former fiancé I generally refuse to publicly acknowledge that he ever existed. This keeps me from inane thoughts about how our wedding would have been, what our children might have looked like, or what in God’s name I’m going to do with the $6,500 raw silk wedding dress sitting in my closet. I find that this is the most effective method for enduring the naked humiliation of it all.
Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts Page 15
