The Great Melting Pot
Just as in New York, normal people and celebrities seem to occupy the same world in LA. The weird thing about this place though, is that the former can become the latter in the blink of an eye. One minute the person next to you is just some poor shlubb from a parking lot while the next he is a movie star living in the hills surrounded by opulence. There was once a New Yorker magazine cover done by Peter DeSeve, a master of pictorial irony, portraying the rich next to the poor in the form of a cigar-smoking fat-cat walking across a sidewalk artist's work while simultaneously praising it. L.A. is like that image with entertainment billions pulsing through its arteries.
A couple of years ago, I saw a vision, a girl in line at the checkout in the supermarket. It was a sunny day outside, so the light streamed in through the windows like a Vermeer painting, pointing its finger towards one thing in the room. She was a gorgeous redhead wearing a white top embroidered with various colors and she smiled at me. In a room of hundreds of people, chaos all about us, this sweet woman, chosen by the elements, turned her attention, albeit briefly, in my direction providing me with an image to hold in my head for the rest of my days...a painting to lay down from memory one day. It was an instant of perfection...and I had to go and ruin it.
I finished my shopping and went to my car. My eyes followed her loading groceries into her trunk, getting into her car, backing out of the lot. She came to the intersection of flowing traffic awaiting her turn to go. Had she noticed me? Would she look back before joining the stream? I was burning a hole into the back of her head with my stare. If she looked back, I decided, she was interested, I told myself. I watched the side mirror. Waiting...waiiiitiiiiing....there! She looked back at me and smiled and then she hit the gas and was gone. Shit! My life is a series of almost run-ins with destiny. If only I had stepped up and said something...anything! Ugh!! I berated myself as if this passing validation and invisible defeat meant something to anyone else. I cursed the hurdles of shyness that I'd been stepping over since adolescence. Then, like a 747 matter-of-factly crashing into the house next door, she drives back into the picture, having done a U-turn somewhere and enters the parking lot across the street. Yes!!
I eagerly drove across the street and followed her into the adjacent store. There she was again. This time there was no confusing miasma. There was just her and me and the opportunity of an awkward silence before us. I stumbled through an introduction and said hello. In my way, I am charming, I suppose...the kind of charming you sense in a man who is really a boy, who is self-conscious, but working past it. I get her number and we subsequently make a date.
A couple of days later I meet her in Larchmont Village for sushi. We eat outside. It's good, but not great, but I'm there for the company, not the cuisine. She is still a vision, if a slightly more mundane version of it. We have a nice conversation. She is won over enough to give me her home phone and accept a second date. It's gone incredibly well. She sounds excited on the phone. We walk past the newsstand that has stories about incredible lives that have no bearing upon reality...but none of those things matter...we're just a guy and a girl on a date...and I offer to walk her to her car. I always offer to walk a woman her car. It's polite and even in a time when the world doesn't appear to be dangerous, the gesture is always appreciated. We share a goodnight kiss. I walk back to my car, pausing in front of the magazine rack. Newsflash! The broken-hearted has triumphed and found love in his heart again! And that's where everything went wrong. Immediately after date one, I decided I had found my someone and that she had found me.
In a nutshell the relationship, such as it was, went like this.
Two great dates
One daytrip date to the beach (which was good, but not great)
An Emmy Party date in which her opinion of me turned (I don’t know what went wrong, but it’s not like I threw up on the host or groped another woman, though)
A cancelled date.
A low-key “just-hanging-out date.”
Even as my attraction to her grew, when she kissed my goodbye this time, it seemed final. Afterwards, she called my phone and thanked me...for what? I wonder. For being understanding about her desire to slow things down, I suppose. But I am still in fantasyland in my head. It is already done and I still think we're an item.
...This is where the frog analogy takes hold again. Remember the frog sitting in the pot of water who will not jump out even though he's being slowly cooked alive because he's unaware of his circumstances? Two and a half years later and it's only now that I realize that the water was getting hot.
So fast forward to tonight...as I said, much later in the story. I just got done dropping off a chair to my most recent ex-girlfriend, who is amazing and who I did not appreciate enough. She is producing an independent film. After having sushi alone at that same joint in Larchmont, I stroll past the magazine rack and the actress is on the cover of one of those magazines. Her life has no relation to mine anymore and she is famous while I....well, I'm....not. I'm still the same guy trying to wrestle an artistic vision to the ground in a gluttonous town that devours ideas and throws them back up.
The irony of the place is upon me. This woman touched my life briefly and I am still disturbed by it...by the fact that she was so close for an instant and is not so far away. I wonder if I'll feel this way when the producer gets her magazine cover. I realize that the fairy tale is not about the frog becoming a prince. It's about the frog getting out of the pot and selling the rights to his story of overcoming enormous odds.
A couple of years ago, I saw a vision, a girl in line at the checkout in the supermarket. It was a sunny day outside, so the light streamed in through the windows like a Vermeer painting, pointing its finger towards one thing in the room. She was a gorgeous redhead wearing a white top embroidered with various colors and she smiled at me. In a room of hundreds of people, chaos all about us, this sweet woman, chosen by the elements, turned her attention, albeit briefly, in my direction providing me with an image to hold in my head for the rest of my days...a painting to lay down from memory one day. It was an instant of perfection...and I had to go and ruin it.
I finished my shopping and went to my car. My eyes followed her loading groceries into her trunk, getting into her car, backing out of the lot. She came to the intersection of flowing traffic awaiting her turn to go. Had she noticed me? Would she look back before joining the stream? I was burning a hole into the back of her head with my stare. If she looked back, I decided, she was interested, I told myself. I watched the side mirror. Waiting...waiiiitiiiiing....there! She looked back at me and smiled and then she hit the gas and was gone. Shit! My life is a series of almost run-ins with destiny. If only I had stepped up and said something...anything! Ugh!! I berated myself as if this passing validation and invisible defeat meant something to anyone else. I cursed the hurdles of shyness that I'd been stepping over since adolescence. Then, like a 747 matter-of-factly crashing into the house next door, she drives back into the picture, having done a U-turn somewhere and enters the parking lot across the street. Yes!!
I eagerly drove across the street and followed her into the adjacent store. There she was again. This time there was no confusing miasma. There was just her and me and the opportunity of an awkward silence before us. I stumbled through an introduction and said hello. In my way, I am charming, I suppose...the kind of charming you sense in a man who is really a boy, who is self-conscious, but working past it. I get her number and we subsequently make a date.
A couple of days later I meet her in Larchmont Village for sushi. We eat outside. It's good, but not great, but I'm there for the company, not the cuisine. She is still a vision, if a slightly more mundane version of it. We have a nice conversation. She is won over enough to give me her home phone and accept a second date. It's gone incredibly well. She sounds excited on the phone. We walk past the newsstand that has stories about incredible lives that have no bearing upon reality...but none of those things matter...we're just a guy and a girl on a date...and I offer to walk her to her car. I always offer to walk a woman her car. It's polite and even in a time when the world doesn't appear to be dangerous, the gesture is always appreciated. We share a goodnight kiss. I walk back to my car, pausing in front of the magazine rack. Newsflash! The broken-hearted has triumphed and found love in his heart again! And that's where everything went wrong. Immediately after date one, I decided I had found my someone and that she had found me.
In a nutshell the relationship, such as it was, went like this.
Two great dates
One daytrip date to the beach (which was good, but not great)
An Emmy Party date in which her opinion of me turned (I don’t know what went wrong, but it’s not like I threw up on the host or groped another woman, though)
A cancelled date.
A low-key “just-hanging-out date.”
Even as my attraction to her grew, when she kissed my goodbye this time, it seemed final. Afterwards, she called my phone and thanked me...for what? I wonder. For being understanding about her desire to slow things down, I suppose. But I am still in fantasyland in my head. It is already done and I still think we're an item.
...This is where the frog analogy takes hold again. Remember the frog sitting in the pot of water who will not jump out even though he's being slowly cooked alive because he's unaware of his circumstances? Two and a half years later and it's only now that I realize that the water was getting hot.
So fast forward to tonight...as I said, much later in the story. I just got done dropping off a chair to my most recent ex-girlfriend, who is amazing and who I did not appreciate enough. She is producing an independent film. After having sushi alone at that same joint in Larchmont, I stroll past the magazine rack and the actress is on the cover of one of those magazines. Her life has no relation to mine anymore and she is famous while I....well, I'm....not. I'm still the same guy trying to wrestle an artistic vision to the ground in a gluttonous town that devours ideas and throws them back up.
The irony of the place is upon me. This woman touched my life briefly and I am still disturbed by it...by the fact that she was so close for an instant and is not so far away. I wonder if I'll feel this way when the producer gets her magazine cover. I realize that the fairy tale is not about the frog becoming a prince. It's about the frog getting out of the pot and selling the rights to his story of overcoming enormous odds.
posted by wally @ 1:06 AM
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