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DREAMED I was back on the 18th floor of the Time Life building, and that the corporate Powers That Be had hired Maria back to do some kind of (unspecified) project for them. I was trying to figure out a way to persuade her to take me back on, and kept poking into unoccupied conference rooms to see if I could find her to make my case.
The only thing I knew about this project was that Maria had hired the daughter of the woman who wrote What To Expect When You're Expecting as her second-in-command. Finally I saw her at a distance and was shocked to see how old she'd become. She had a white streak in her hair – sort of like my white streak, come to think of it – and though her face was unlined, it was obvious she'd had Major Work done.
(Parenthetically, it always amazes me when people think that facelifts make them look younger. Blepharoplasty and dermal fillers do make people look younger. But it's pretty obvious to me when someone's had a facelift. They always look like a scleroderma patient. Same way with boob jobs. No, it's not the gravity-defying perkiness of the unnaturally round globes that's the dead giveaway. It's the scar between their breasts – there's almost always a ridge of tissue there, which gives a really unnatural looking cleavage.)
She greeted me immediately even across the distance, her face as unreadable as ever: "Patrizia. What a pleasure. Vi do baci, amore mio."
When she heard what I was after, her pleasant expression did not change, she was imperturbable. "I'll think about it," she said.
###
When I woke up, I was in a considerable amount of pain from the auto-immune disease, so I decided to go for a long walk.
This part of Lawn Guyland has no terroir whatsoever. There's nothing holding the people here but gravity. No ghosts. No sense that this land was anything other than what it is now, which is essentially a grid for people to build foundations for houses surrounded by a wider grid where people can build foundations for grocery stores, chain pharmacies and nail salons.
There's always a lot of litter on the ground. Considerably more litter than I ever saw anywhere in Tompkins County. Real sign that nobody cares very much about the environment here.
On the other hand, the lawn that surrounds each house is as immaculate as a golf course or the lawn outside a mortuary. Just before she stopped talking to me, the Crazy Israeli Neighbor confided that she had spent $1500 or so paying someone to poison her lawn so that nothing but grass seeds genetically modified to produce an unnatural, unvarying green hue would grow there. Aberrant wild grasses need not apply!
Cassandra's house is the only house that really has a garden as I would define such.
It'sa really pretty garden too, and I've been spending an hour and a half or so in it every day, trying to bring it back to some semblance of symmetry. Her husband was the gardener. It's pretty obvious he loved this garden. There are a dozens of little clues from the maze in the side garden to the ramble near the rose bushes and the random-appearing clusters of daffodils, tulips and a knotty blue flower whose name I do not know.
So I've finished pruning the roses – yes, yes, very late, I realize – and retraining the climbing roses to grow over their various trellises and inside their hooks. I need to weed the rose garden, and then I need to weed the herb garden. The perennials like rosemary and oregano are still there, just need to be thinned. I'm not sure what happened to the horseradish – I never dug it up last autumn though I kept threatening I would.
Then I want to plant vegetables. Basil. Heirloom tomatoes. A few varieties of chili peppers.
From an economic point of view, it just doesn't make sense to plant vegetables that you can buy just as cheaply at the nearby Dominican grocery store. So no squash and zucchinis. The Dominican grocery store has lousy eggplants, but no one in this house likes eggplants except moi.
I suspect the reason that there is no terroir on Lawn Guyland is because so many Lawn Guyland residents are from so very far away. Their mana is still in their homeland – China, India, Lebanon, the Caribbean, Israel…
###
Maria was my boss when I worked for Time Inc and then later when I worked for ICM.
Maria was beautiful, brilliant and immensely fucked up – unlike the only other Dragon Lady of my acquaintance, Erica, who was beautiful, brilliant but immensely in control.
Maria was one of the most charming people I ever met. She could sell anything to anyone. I was her backup. Not her administrative aide du campe – that was Ed – but the person who did the actual deliverables for clients.
Unfortunately, Maria was always closing deals by promising deliverables that were impossible to come through with because (a) the technology wasn't in place yet or because (b) their business model was so impossibly whack that there was absolutely no way to monetize it.
Case in point: Around the turn of the century, Maria snagged a major French telecom as a client that was interested in rolling out video on demand. My job was basically to put this package together. Except I really couldn't. For one thing, the infrastructure didn't yet exist to allow people to welcome VOD into their homes. The Internet was only slightly faster than a snail on Valium. TV sets would need to be tweaked and the manufacturers were not interested in tweaking them. For another thing, though it's hard to envision this now if you didn't actually live through it, at this time Hollywood was immensely computer-phobic. I pitched this deal to someone at CBS – Imagine a channel that's all "Survivor" B-roll – and the producers literally laughed in my face.
It was very difficult to work for Maria. On the one hand, she paid me an immense amount of money. On the other, she was constantly promising things that were beyond my ability to pull off.
Maria was not above using her own considerable charms as manipulative tools in her business dealings either. I suspect she got her deal with ICM because she was sleeping with Jeff Berg, at that time one of the top agents in Hollywood. Jeff Berg was immensely bored with being an agent though, and having to deal with actors who were so much stupider than he was, and producers who may have been as bright as he was but were ravenously hungry for the money and the maya that didn't particularly interest him. Jeff Berg wanted to be a Silicon Valley tycoon, and Maria promised she could make him one! And presumably threw in a few blowjobs for good measure.
At that time, Maria was married to a beautiful and angry man named Chris. Chris had actually put together a pretty successful sound recording business – not bad for a boy who'd come over from Cuba – and bought a great house in Los Feliz. I'm not sure how or why he gave up the sound recording business, but I suspect Maria was instrumental in that process somehow. Then they sold the Los Feliz house and moved into one in the Hollywood Hills.
(Another parenthetical aside: Why does anyone want to live in the Hollywood Hills? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the views – but it's not as though you can actually see anything but a great hunkering orange cloud of smog. And the roads are incredibly narrow and the houses perched so precariously that you spend tens of thousands of dollars every year just keeping them on their foundations.)
Chris was not an idiot, and just kept getting angrier and angrier. I'd have to go back over my journals, which I am way too lazy to do, but I'm remembering there was some physical abuse and around this time he decided he wanted to be known as Fernando – which was his real name. Also, Maria bought him a Cessna.
Flash forward seven years. Fernando née Chris, had just died in a plane crash. He'd done something incredibly stupid – he'd forgotten to close the nose baggage door before the plane he was piloting took off.
Maria planned a state funeral for him at the Mission San Fernando Rey de España and I drove down from Monterey to go. It was the last time I saw Maria, and I never got close enough to talk to her. We'd been on the outs because when the ICM deal finally crashed and burned, there'd been considerable expenses on my expense report that she never reimbursed. I thought it was important to show up and fly this flag though, plus it gave me an opportunity to hang out with Ed who'd been as deeply damaged as I was by flying too close to Maria's sun.
Ed and I smoked a ton of dope before we showed up at the funeral, and I must say, that put an even more surreal spin on what was essentially a surreal situation. Maria as the grieving widow!
"I always figured she would just poison him, you know?" I whispered to Ed. "Or maybe con her life insurance salesman into knocking him off."
"Where's James Cain when you really need him?" Ed laughed.
"Is Jeff Berg here? I don't see him."
"That's a joke, right?"
"Did anybody from her actual family come?"
"Oh, come on now. You've spent enough quality time around Maria. Maria's family hates her."
"I don't hate her," I said.
Ed laughed. "What do you want to want to bet that she spent this morning in the offices of one of LA's top personal injury attorneys planning the big Cessna lawsuit?"
Maria had paid a shitload of money for a flotilla of planes to come flying over the cathedral after the service. This was supposed to be some kind of salute to the deceased. I thought it was in excrecable taste.
Bud I did cry for Chris later that night. At the wake when Dirk brought Chris's dog Cecil down the stairs, and took him out on the narrow ledge of road for a walk. Cecil had been the Brakepoint mascot when we had our offices in San Francisco, a big black Lab with a sweet disposition. And now he was old with a kind of white frost to his black fur and limping badly. And his master was dead. And it just broke my heart.
Three things about Maria:
Maria's younger brother committed suicide when he was 12. He drowned himself in the bathtub.
I turned Maria on to Ruth Rendell, and Ruth Rendell subsequently became Maria's favorite fiction writer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ruth Rendell, she is an incredibly kinky writer.
Maria was incredibly invested in being Sicilian. In fact, I think the only reason she related to me at all is because I'm Sicilian. I never quite had the nerve to tell her that whereas her Sicilian ancestors hailed from the same mountains that spawned the Casa Nostra, mine were Sicilian fishermen, timid folk whose lateen-rigged trawlers hugged the coast, prey to every marauding Viking.
The only thing I knew about this project was that Maria had hired the daughter of the woman who wrote What To Expect When You're Expecting as her second-in-command. Finally I saw her at a distance and was shocked to see how old she'd become. She had a white streak in her hair – sort of like my white streak, come to think of it – and though her face was unlined, it was obvious she'd had Major Work done.
(Parenthetically, it always amazes me when people think that facelifts make them look younger. Blepharoplasty and dermal fillers do make people look younger. But it's pretty obvious to me when someone's had a facelift. They always look like a scleroderma patient. Same way with boob jobs. No, it's not the gravity-defying perkiness of the unnaturally round globes that's the dead giveaway. It's the scar between their breasts – there's almost always a ridge of tissue there, which gives a really unnatural looking cleavage.)
She greeted me immediately even across the distance, her face as unreadable as ever: "Patrizia. What a pleasure. Vi do baci, amore mio."
When she heard what I was after, her pleasant expression did not change, she was imperturbable. "I'll think about it," she said.
When I woke up, I was in a considerable amount of pain from the auto-immune disease, so I decided to go for a long walk.
This part of Lawn Guyland has no terroir whatsoever. There's nothing holding the people here but gravity. No ghosts. No sense that this land was anything other than what it is now, which is essentially a grid for people to build foundations for houses surrounded by a wider grid where people can build foundations for grocery stores, chain pharmacies and nail salons.
There's always a lot of litter on the ground. Considerably more litter than I ever saw anywhere in Tompkins County. Real sign that nobody cares very much about the environment here.
On the other hand, the lawn that surrounds each house is as immaculate as a golf course or the lawn outside a mortuary. Just before she stopped talking to me, the Crazy Israeli Neighbor confided that she had spent $1500 or so paying someone to poison her lawn so that nothing but grass seeds genetically modified to produce an unnatural, unvarying green hue would grow there. Aberrant wild grasses need not apply!
Cassandra's house is the only house that really has a garden as I would define such.
It'sa really pretty garden too, and I've been spending an hour and a half or so in it every day, trying to bring it back to some semblance of symmetry. Her husband was the gardener. It's pretty obvious he loved this garden. There are a dozens of little clues from the maze in the side garden to the ramble near the rose bushes and the random-appearing clusters of daffodils, tulips and a knotty blue flower whose name I do not know.
So I've finished pruning the roses – yes, yes, very late, I realize – and retraining the climbing roses to grow over their various trellises and inside their hooks. I need to weed the rose garden, and then I need to weed the herb garden. The perennials like rosemary and oregano are still there, just need to be thinned. I'm not sure what happened to the horseradish – I never dug it up last autumn though I kept threatening I would.
Then I want to plant vegetables. Basil. Heirloom tomatoes. A few varieties of chili peppers.
From an economic point of view, it just doesn't make sense to plant vegetables that you can buy just as cheaply at the nearby Dominican grocery store. So no squash and zucchinis. The Dominican grocery store has lousy eggplants, but no one in this house likes eggplants except moi.
I suspect the reason that there is no terroir on Lawn Guyland is because so many Lawn Guyland residents are from so very far away. Their mana is still in their homeland – China, India, Lebanon, the Caribbean, Israel…
Maria was my boss when I worked for Time Inc and then later when I worked for ICM.
Maria was beautiful, brilliant and immensely fucked up – unlike the only other Dragon Lady of my acquaintance, Erica, who was beautiful, brilliant but immensely in control.
Maria was one of the most charming people I ever met. She could sell anything to anyone. I was her backup. Not her administrative aide du campe – that was Ed – but the person who did the actual deliverables for clients.
Unfortunately, Maria was always closing deals by promising deliverables that were impossible to come through with because (a) the technology wasn't in place yet or because (b) their business model was so impossibly whack that there was absolutely no way to monetize it.
Case in point: Around the turn of the century, Maria snagged a major French telecom as a client that was interested in rolling out video on demand. My job was basically to put this package together. Except I really couldn't. For one thing, the infrastructure didn't yet exist to allow people to welcome VOD into their homes. The Internet was only slightly faster than a snail on Valium. TV sets would need to be tweaked and the manufacturers were not interested in tweaking them. For another thing, though it's hard to envision this now if you didn't actually live through it, at this time Hollywood was immensely computer-phobic. I pitched this deal to someone at CBS – Imagine a channel that's all "Survivor" B-roll – and the producers literally laughed in my face.
It was very difficult to work for Maria. On the one hand, she paid me an immense amount of money. On the other, she was constantly promising things that were beyond my ability to pull off.
Maria was not above using her own considerable charms as manipulative tools in her business dealings either. I suspect she got her deal with ICM because she was sleeping with Jeff Berg, at that time one of the top agents in Hollywood. Jeff Berg was immensely bored with being an agent though, and having to deal with actors who were so much stupider than he was, and producers who may have been as bright as he was but were ravenously hungry for the money and the maya that didn't particularly interest him. Jeff Berg wanted to be a Silicon Valley tycoon, and Maria promised she could make him one! And presumably threw in a few blowjobs for good measure.
At that time, Maria was married to a beautiful and angry man named Chris. Chris had actually put together a pretty successful sound recording business – not bad for a boy who'd come over from Cuba – and bought a great house in Los Feliz. I'm not sure how or why he gave up the sound recording business, but I suspect Maria was instrumental in that process somehow. Then they sold the Los Feliz house and moved into one in the Hollywood Hills.
(Another parenthetical aside: Why does anyone want to live in the Hollywood Hills? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the views – but it's not as though you can actually see anything but a great hunkering orange cloud of smog. And the roads are incredibly narrow and the houses perched so precariously that you spend tens of thousands of dollars every year just keeping them on their foundations.)
Chris was not an idiot, and just kept getting angrier and angrier. I'd have to go back over my journals, which I am way too lazy to do, but I'm remembering there was some physical abuse and around this time he decided he wanted to be known as Fernando – which was his real name. Also, Maria bought him a Cessna.
Flash forward seven years. Fernando née Chris, had just died in a plane crash. He'd done something incredibly stupid – he'd forgotten to close the nose baggage door before the plane he was piloting took off.
Maria planned a state funeral for him at the Mission San Fernando Rey de España and I drove down from Monterey to go. It was the last time I saw Maria, and I never got close enough to talk to her. We'd been on the outs because when the ICM deal finally crashed and burned, there'd been considerable expenses on my expense report that she never reimbursed. I thought it was important to show up and fly this flag though, plus it gave me an opportunity to hang out with Ed who'd been as deeply damaged as I was by flying too close to Maria's sun.
Ed and I smoked a ton of dope before we showed up at the funeral, and I must say, that put an even more surreal spin on what was essentially a surreal situation. Maria as the grieving widow!
"I always figured she would just poison him, you know?" I whispered to Ed. "Or maybe con her life insurance salesman into knocking him off."
"Where's James Cain when you really need him?" Ed laughed.
"Is Jeff Berg here? I don't see him."
"That's a joke, right?"
"Did anybody from her actual family come?"
"Oh, come on now. You've spent enough quality time around Maria. Maria's family hates her."
"I don't hate her," I said.
Ed laughed. "What do you want to want to bet that she spent this morning in the offices of one of LA's top personal injury attorneys planning the big Cessna lawsuit?"
Maria had paid a shitload of money for a flotilla of planes to come flying over the cathedral after the service. This was supposed to be some kind of salute to the deceased. I thought it was in excrecable taste.
Bud I did cry for Chris later that night. At the wake when Dirk brought Chris's dog Cecil down the stairs, and took him out on the narrow ledge of road for a walk. Cecil had been the Brakepoint mascot when we had our offices in San Francisco, a big black Lab with a sweet disposition. And now he was old with a kind of white frost to his black fur and limping badly. And his master was dead. And it just broke my heart.
Three things about Maria:
Maria's younger brother committed suicide when he was 12. He drowned himself in the bathtub.
I turned Maria on to Ruth Rendell, and Ruth Rendell subsequently became Maria's favorite fiction writer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ruth Rendell, she is an incredibly kinky writer.
Maria was incredibly invested in being Sicilian. In fact, I think the only reason she related to me at all is because I'm Sicilian. I never quite had the nerve to tell her that whereas her Sicilian ancestors hailed from the same mountains that spawned the Casa Nostra, mine were Sicilian fishermen, timid folk whose lateen-rigged trawlers hugged the coast, prey to every marauding Viking.
