The other day I pulled up to a stop light in Los Angeles and heard a man in the next car screaming bloody murder into his cell phone. When I looked over, it turned out to be the actor Adam Goldberg. Generally, I try not to stare at famous people — it’s not polite — but this time, I couldn’t help it; Goldberg was in full throat. It was worse than his death scene in Saving Private Ryan. I gave in and gawked.
It turns out that in L.A. there’s a lot to gawk at. A lot to wonder over, too. It’s not just the celebrities, it’s the way every 55-year-old woman’s face has cheeks so taut you could bounce quarters off them. It’s that something as mundane as exercise consists of bizarre activities like kick-boxing and pilates.
In the City of Angels, people don’t drink Coke or Gatorade, they guzzle “wheat grass” by the liter. The local language is alien. The most important periodical in town, the entertainment daily Variety, carries headlines like: Alphabet Prexy Ankles Post After Ayem Frosh Laffer Flops. Translation: The president of ABC has resigned because a first-year morning situation comedy failed.
Even the non-famous people in Los Angeles live strange lives.
The day after my encounter with Adam Goldberg, I had dinner with a friend and some of her friends — two ballet dancers, a cardiologist, a law student, and an investment banker. Not a party that looks like America, maybe, but a tolerably staid and harmless set, you’d think. We ate at one of those trendy Thai restaurants that Zagat’s Guide loves because they’re close enough to the bad section of town for middle-class people to feel adventurous without being in any real danger.
Dinner was fine, but as the meal wound down I noticed that empty wine bottles were accumulating at a fair clip. Soon the feast moved back to one couple’s apartment, where we settled in for cookies and after-dinner drinks. Everything seemed copacetic until the snake appeared.
I’ve never been a fan of snakes; especially not snakes big enough to snap me like a pretzel and swallow me whole. But everyone else seemed to adore Daisy, a seven-foot boa constrictor.
“You might want to be a little careful with her,” my friend said helpfully. “She’s supposed to shed soon, so she might be cranky.”
Cranky or not, for a cold-blooded killing machine Daisy had a lot of personality; she slithered and coiled and was generally sociable. At one point, she encircled a dancer’s leg, then went for the banker, eventually winding herself around his neck, the whole time hissing in a vaguely menacing way. At least, I thought darkly, the world has plenty of bankers.
My discomfort with Daisy was just starting to give way to fascination when something else caught my eye.
I turned and saw my law-student friend standing in the hallway with a gun — a cartoonishly large object that looked more like a hand-held howitzer than a pistol.
“Relax,” he said grinning, “it’s not loaded, and I keep the ammo locked up.” The banker, spotting a new toy, jumped up and ran over. Daisy hissed.
“Is that a Desert Eagle?” asked the cardiologist admiringly.
“Yeah. The Israelis make it,” the law student answered.
The Hollywood director Paul Thomas Anderson has a theory that at some point in his life everyone in L.A. winds up in a bad situation. You find yourself in a house in the Valley with stuff going on that no good can come of. What starts as chit-chat over pad thai morphs into a brush with the surreal. I was beginning to think that Anderson was onto something, when the banker reached for his back pocket.
He pulled out a out a wad of crisp $ 100 bills. He counted out twenty of them and said to my friend, “I’ll give you $ 2,000 to shoot that into the wall.”
“You’re crazy,” the law student said. “A .357 magnum will go through brick.”
“$ 2,000. You get a conversation piece out of your wall, we get a kick,” the banker countered. “And Jonathan even gets an L.A. story.”
JONATHAN V. LAST
