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mallorys_cameraSo I was spoiling for a fight last night. And I didn't get one. Still, I made a valiant effort and that made me pretty damn happy since it was possibly the most successful effort I've made in weeks, what with the entire retail universe being such a dismal wash this holiday season. Bigger forces than my entrepreneurial chi at work there but I tend to personalize, particularly as the bill pile grows larger.
I'm not entirely sure why we were invited – I'm off the Heidi Pal list and of course, I insulted Bill too the last time we spent quality one-on-one time together. But feeling alienated from your hosts tends to make these functions easier. You don't have to waste your time on idle chitchat. You can head straight for the bar!
Drink de la nuit was rum and coke. Not my fave, but easy to reduplicate when you're on your fourth. First I schmoozed with Joe about life on the Row –
"Yeah," he said. "Bargetto December sales are off 5% from last year."
SLOW Burn's are up 5% but then last year we only had a half-stocked store while this year we have a functioning web site through which we get a thin but steady trickle of sales. In other words, I spent a lot on inventory with minimal pay-off. Plus it's a dismal prognosticator for long-term success. You'd expect the numbers to trend upwards more sharply.
"And if you think December is bad, wait till January," Joe continued.
"Oh, I remember January from last year," I said. "Thing is I expect January to be miserable. I didn't expect December to be this bad. Throws my business planning off."
"That's why I don't go into business for myself," said Joe. "Bargetto will never close my store. They've been there forty years. The daily cash flow floats the rest of the company. Otherwise they'd have to hire an army of salesmen."
I digest this info through the rapidly disseminating glow of Bacardi. Microeconomics! It's not just supply and demand, it's also distribution! "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," says Joe, leaning closer.
"You know that Chinese guy with the handbag store? Right across the hall from you guys? Has he ever sold a single purse?"
"Not that I've noticed," says Joe. "And he's been there seven months."
We collapse together in mirthless laughter. "He's a drug front, right? A money launderer?"
"Probably."
"Well, thank God someone on Cannery Row is doing well."
"Hey, don't forget Bubba Gump's! Stupid is as stupid does."
"Amen to that, Brother Joe," I say, and wander back to the bar to refuel. Heidi shoots me a nasty look as she unloads frozen taquitas into the microwave. "Do you want some help with that?" I ask.
"I don't expect my guests to help me at my party," she snaps. "I expect my guests to enjoy themselves."
Great, I think and pour myself three fingers of rum to one of Coke and this time descend upon the TV room where Robin is ensconced with the latest Mad Magazine. Alex the printer and his kid Simon are there too. On the bigscreen set, hobbits are killing a lot of guys with big hoods and no faces. I've always liked Alex. Several years ago I spent about a week working on a Photoshop montage of Heidi and Bill's house, airbrushing it off its busy Monterey intersection and plopping it in the middle of a New Mexico meadow. Heidi spent exactly two seconds looking at it. Alex studied it for 15 minutes. "You're really good," he said finally, putting it down.
Alex and I shoot the shit: Quark interfaces, Photoshop interfaces. The kids are bored. Then the door opens and a well-dressed woman leads a child into the room.
On the TV Frodo appears to be having some kind of epileptic seizure.
"What's this?" the woman asks, sniffing in the television's direction.
"Lord of the Rings," I tell her.
"What's its rating?"
"R," says Robin, looking up from Alfred E. Neuman. "For excessive violence. They don't have sex or anything. They kill a lot of people though."
"Well, they're not exactly people," says Simon.
"We don't do movies with R ratings," the woman hisses and pulls the child from the room.
Alex and I look at each other and laugh.
"Can I make a shameful confession?" I say. "I took Robin to see Bad Santa."
"I took Simon too!" says Alex.
"I guess we're just the Bad Parents Room. I draw the line at Grand Theft Auto, though. I won't let Robin play it."
"Me neither!" says Alex. "He sneaked it in from ET Games a couple of weeks ago. I made him take it back." And we smile at each other in a moment of shared parental synchronicity and as I am smiling, I am thinking what a handsome man Alex is, and remembering that I had a dream about him some months before and wondering what my life would be like if I were married to Alex…
"Excuse me," I say and hit the bar again. This time I take my rocket fuel into the back yard where Bill is showing off the big hole he has excavated underneath the house. It's a very clear, cold night. I see the only constellation I've ever been able to recognize in the night sky. Orion. The hunter.
"So, did you find any artifacts when you were digging up the house?" I ask.
"Not under the house," Bill says. "We found a bunch under the old outhouse in the garden when we dug that up though. Old glass bottles. Some wind-up toys."
A thin ascetic-looking guy with a tight mouth nods. He is the husband of Mrs. PG 13, I vaguely recall. "That's where you find all the most interesting stuff. Under outhouses. Because after they get converted to indoor plumbing, they become trash heaps.
There are five of us standing there – me, Bill, Mister Ascetic, a pudgy guy with long dark hair and his gray-haired wife who had retained the earth hippie look well into her fifties. I think that's what got me started. I disapprove of women over fifty who wear their hair long but refuse to dye it. Unreasonable? Sure. But I always want to grab them by the shoulders and put their hair into a bun. Maybe shake them a little. Slap them lightly across the face. Tell them you're old now, get used to it.
Bill does introductions. "Bla bla bla, this is Bla bla Panetta."
"Panetta," I say. "Are you related to Leon?"
"His son," says Mister Ascetic, looking unhappy.
Well, it's not like your father's a rock star, I think. I'm quite drunk now and though generally I'm a very happy drunk, tonight I am a hostile drunk. Your father was a mediocre Congressman and a mediocre chief of staff.
"So why did your father step down after Clinton's first term anyway?"
"I have no idea," says Mister Ascetic through clenched teeth.
"Why are you asking him that stuff?" asks the fat guy. "He gets tired of people asking him that stuff."
"I would never have moved back to Monterey," says Mister Ascetic. "Except my wife insisted."
"It's so PG13 here," I say. "She must love it."
"It's so beautiful here," says the longhaired woman. "Not that it's not beautiful where we live –"
"We own a few acres up in Saratoga," says the fat guy. "I'm sure it doesn't compare with the ranch in Carmel Valley. What do you grow there anyway? Grapes?"
"Walnuts mostly," says Mister Panetta. "It's different here, that's for sure. We were living in LA."
"Oh, LA!" says the longhaired woman. "I hate LA. It's so materialistic."
"LA is great," I say. "LA has a street scene. LA has soul."
"You think LA has soul?" says the fat guy. "I mean, it's got some good museums, some nice hotels. We just spent a few days there on our way back from Kauai –"
The fat guy, it turns out, is fabulously wealthy. Inherited wealth, of course. Real estate. He spent his twenties and thirties living out the Veedub bus dream and then his parents died and he came into a fortune. You wouldn't necessarily pick this up from his stylistic cues – greasy hair, greasy goatee, velour (!) sweat suit – but every other word out of his mouth is about vaction time in some fabulous Conde Nast destination or taking the Beamer up to San Francisco to inspect his commercial properties. And I decide my hostility heretofore has been misplaced: it's this guy I hate, not his stringy long-haired wife, not the purse-mouthed scion of a second rate politician.
Pudgy rich guy had embarked upon the Quality of Life In Northern California rant. You know that rant. We take yoga classes and we own our Mercedes, we don't lease them for show. "People aren't always trying to hustle you the way they do in LA," he says. "They just like you for who you are."
"People hustle when they're trying to survive," I said. "You're just lucky your grandparents were foresighted enough to hustle some real estate. Otherwise you'd be out there hustling used cars."
For a second I felt the warm glow of delivering a truly venomous insult. Alas, it was quickly superceded by the knowledge that Mister Pudgy had not heard it because he was one of those guys who once he gets started, never stops talking! And he was still talking about the fabulous vacation he had taken just for fun, just to get away from the dirt and grime of Saratoga, at the San Francisco Ritz Carleton for a couple of days.
"We did all the tourist things. We rode the cable cars, drove the Seventeen Mile Drive –"
"That's in Pebble Beach," said the Panetta scion, looking pained again.
"Sure it is, sure it is. I meant we did the drive you do in San Francisco! And the restaurants! Oh, we had some great meals –"
I floated back into the house. Sean, Bill Sullivan's son, was standing there talking to the Bill Sullivan music pal who'd provided Pudgy Rich Guy's entrée to this festive party scene.
"I just tried to insult your friend," I tell him. "But it didn't work."
"It never does," said the music pal. "Lyle just talks right over you. Trust me. I've known him for thirty years. But it's sure fun trying."
"Do you ever get into moods where you just want to insult people?" I asked. "For no real reason?"
"Oh, all the time," he said. "I generally end up getting punched in the face." Then he reached over and pulled me into a bear hug. "Know what? You're okay!" he said, and the way he said it was less a reassurance than an affirmation.
I'm not entirely sure why we were invited – I'm off the Heidi Pal list and of course, I insulted Bill too the last time we spent quality one-on-one time together. But feeling alienated from your hosts tends to make these functions easier. You don't have to waste your time on idle chitchat. You can head straight for the bar!
Drink de la nuit was rum and coke. Not my fave, but easy to reduplicate when you're on your fourth. First I schmoozed with Joe about life on the Row –
"Yeah," he said. "Bargetto December sales are off 5% from last year."
SLOW Burn's are up 5% but then last year we only had a half-stocked store while this year we have a functioning web site through which we get a thin but steady trickle of sales. In other words, I spent a lot on inventory with minimal pay-off. Plus it's a dismal prognosticator for long-term success. You'd expect the numbers to trend upwards more sharply.
"And if you think December is bad, wait till January," Joe continued.
"Oh, I remember January from last year," I said. "Thing is I expect January to be miserable. I didn't expect December to be this bad. Throws my business planning off."
"That's why I don't go into business for myself," said Joe. "Bargetto will never close my store. They've been there forty years. The daily cash flow floats the rest of the company. Otherwise they'd have to hire an army of salesmen."
I digest this info through the rapidly disseminating glow of Bacardi. Microeconomics! It's not just supply and demand, it's also distribution! "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," says Joe, leaning closer.
"You know that Chinese guy with the handbag store? Right across the hall from you guys? Has he ever sold a single purse?"
"Not that I've noticed," says Joe. "And he's been there seven months."
We collapse together in mirthless laughter. "He's a drug front, right? A money launderer?"
"Probably."
"Well, thank God someone on Cannery Row is doing well."
"Hey, don't forget Bubba Gump's! Stupid is as stupid does."
"Amen to that, Brother Joe," I say, and wander back to the bar to refuel. Heidi shoots me a nasty look as she unloads frozen taquitas into the microwave. "Do you want some help with that?" I ask.
"I don't expect my guests to help me at my party," she snaps. "I expect my guests to enjoy themselves."
Great, I think and pour myself three fingers of rum to one of Coke and this time descend upon the TV room where Robin is ensconced with the latest Mad Magazine. Alex the printer and his kid Simon are there too. On the bigscreen set, hobbits are killing a lot of guys with big hoods and no faces. I've always liked Alex. Several years ago I spent about a week working on a Photoshop montage of Heidi and Bill's house, airbrushing it off its busy Monterey intersection and plopping it in the middle of a New Mexico meadow. Heidi spent exactly two seconds looking at it. Alex studied it for 15 minutes. "You're really good," he said finally, putting it down.
Alex and I shoot the shit: Quark interfaces, Photoshop interfaces. The kids are bored. Then the door opens and a well-dressed woman leads a child into the room.
On the TV Frodo appears to be having some kind of epileptic seizure.
"What's this?" the woman asks, sniffing in the television's direction.
"Lord of the Rings," I tell her.
"What's its rating?"
"R," says Robin, looking up from Alfred E. Neuman. "For excessive violence. They don't have sex or anything. They kill a lot of people though."
"Well, they're not exactly people," says Simon.
"We don't do movies with R ratings," the woman hisses and pulls the child from the room.
Alex and I look at each other and laugh.
"Can I make a shameful confession?" I say. "I took Robin to see Bad Santa."
"I took Simon too!" says Alex.
"I guess we're just the Bad Parents Room. I draw the line at Grand Theft Auto, though. I won't let Robin play it."
"Me neither!" says Alex. "He sneaked it in from ET Games a couple of weeks ago. I made him take it back." And we smile at each other in a moment of shared parental synchronicity and as I am smiling, I am thinking what a handsome man Alex is, and remembering that I had a dream about him some months before and wondering what my life would be like if I were married to Alex…
"Excuse me," I say and hit the bar again. This time I take my rocket fuel into the back yard where Bill is showing off the big hole he has excavated underneath the house. It's a very clear, cold night. I see the only constellation I've ever been able to recognize in the night sky. Orion. The hunter.
"So, did you find any artifacts when you were digging up the house?" I ask.
"Not under the house," Bill says. "We found a bunch under the old outhouse in the garden when we dug that up though. Old glass bottles. Some wind-up toys."
A thin ascetic-looking guy with a tight mouth nods. He is the husband of Mrs. PG 13, I vaguely recall. "That's where you find all the most interesting stuff. Under outhouses. Because after they get converted to indoor plumbing, they become trash heaps.
There are five of us standing there – me, Bill, Mister Ascetic, a pudgy guy with long dark hair and his gray-haired wife who had retained the earth hippie look well into her fifties. I think that's what got me started. I disapprove of women over fifty who wear their hair long but refuse to dye it. Unreasonable? Sure. But I always want to grab them by the shoulders and put their hair into a bun. Maybe shake them a little. Slap them lightly across the face. Tell them you're old now, get used to it.
Bill does introductions. "Bla bla bla, this is Bla bla Panetta."
"Panetta," I say. "Are you related to Leon?"
"His son," says Mister Ascetic, looking unhappy.
Well, it's not like your father's a rock star, I think. I'm quite drunk now and though generally I'm a very happy drunk, tonight I am a hostile drunk. Your father was a mediocre Congressman and a mediocre chief of staff.
"So why did your father step down after Clinton's first term anyway?"
"I have no idea," says Mister Ascetic through clenched teeth.
"Why are you asking him that stuff?" asks the fat guy. "He gets tired of people asking him that stuff."
"I would never have moved back to Monterey," says Mister Ascetic. "Except my wife insisted."
"It's so PG13 here," I say. "She must love it."
"It's so beautiful here," says the longhaired woman. "Not that it's not beautiful where we live –"
"We own a few acres up in Saratoga," says the fat guy. "I'm sure it doesn't compare with the ranch in Carmel Valley. What do you grow there anyway? Grapes?"
"Walnuts mostly," says Mister Panetta. "It's different here, that's for sure. We were living in LA."
"Oh, LA!" says the longhaired woman. "I hate LA. It's so materialistic."
"LA is great," I say. "LA has a street scene. LA has soul."
"You think LA has soul?" says the fat guy. "I mean, it's got some good museums, some nice hotels. We just spent a few days there on our way back from Kauai –"
The fat guy, it turns out, is fabulously wealthy. Inherited wealth, of course. Real estate. He spent his twenties and thirties living out the Veedub bus dream and then his parents died and he came into a fortune. You wouldn't necessarily pick this up from his stylistic cues – greasy hair, greasy goatee, velour (!) sweat suit – but every other word out of his mouth is about vaction time in some fabulous Conde Nast destination or taking the Beamer up to San Francisco to inspect his commercial properties. And I decide my hostility heretofore has been misplaced: it's this guy I hate, not his stringy long-haired wife, not the purse-mouthed scion of a second rate politician.
Pudgy rich guy had embarked upon the Quality of Life In Northern California rant. You know that rant. We take yoga classes and we own our Mercedes, we don't lease them for show. "People aren't always trying to hustle you the way they do in LA," he says. "They just like you for who you are."
"People hustle when they're trying to survive," I said. "You're just lucky your grandparents were foresighted enough to hustle some real estate. Otherwise you'd be out there hustling used cars."
For a second I felt the warm glow of delivering a truly venomous insult. Alas, it was quickly superceded by the knowledge that Mister Pudgy had not heard it because he was one of those guys who once he gets started, never stops talking! And he was still talking about the fabulous vacation he had taken just for fun, just to get away from the dirt and grime of Saratoga, at the San Francisco Ritz Carleton for a couple of days.
"We did all the tourist things. We rode the cable cars, drove the Seventeen Mile Drive –"
"That's in Pebble Beach," said the Panetta scion, looking pained again.
"Sure it is, sure it is. I meant we did the drive you do in San Francisco! And the restaurants! Oh, we had some great meals –"
I floated back into the house. Sean, Bill Sullivan's son, was standing there talking to the Bill Sullivan music pal who'd provided Pudgy Rich Guy's entrée to this festive party scene.
"I just tried to insult your friend," I tell him. "But it didn't work."
"It never does," said the music pal. "Lyle just talks right over you. Trust me. I've known him for thirty years. But it's sure fun trying."
"Do you ever get into moods where you just want to insult people?" I asked. "For no real reason?"
"Oh, all the time," he said. "I generally end up getting punched in the face." Then he reached over and pulled me into a bear hug. "Know what? You're okay!" he said, and the way he said it was less a reassurance than an affirmation.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 04:43 pm (UTC)Great Entry
Date: 2004-12-13 03:16 am (UTC)I'm always amazed at the generalizations hurled at
10 million people and 2,000 square miles. In my
NoCal days I used to enjoy working over geographical
chauvenists to an absolute froth. One thing I've
learned about LA is that a lot of it is sub rosa.
It's not just conspicuous consumption scenery like San Francisco.
We don't break it out for just anyone:-).
Re: Great Entry
Date: 2004-12-13 07:46 pm (UTC)