Fine Italian Cuisine: Partying Like a Big Pharma Detail Man

 

The Sunset Strip kicked into liquor and coke-fueled high gear on a recent summer LA weekend.  Giddy college students and wannabe actors and actresses thronged the pavement.  Although I’d rather polish my eyeballs with steel wool than deal with drunken frat boys and miscellaneous human debris, my cousin Maria, who flew into town for the weekend, guilt-tripped me into getting a few drinks.  We were crossing a busy intersection when I heard her shout “Bill!” She latched onto a stylishly dressed, blandly smiling man in his late twenties.  They talked for a moment before she finally coaxed him into joining us at a bar just across the street. 

 

In the past, Maria had befriended, dated and even married a few animators and artists, but a decade later, to my chagrin, she gravitated more towards businessmen: executive salespeople who loved to put on a big show, as if everybody loved them and their false, “infectious” good will, but their affected manner felt more to me like a disease that needed to be wiped out. 

 

This type of manufactured vivaciousness probably charms and fools somebody.  Lonely senior citizens, perhaps, or maybe small children who haven’t been burned repeatedly throughout their lives by hucksters, users and pimps.  Anyone who preens and gesticulates and tries to be my friend after just meeting me—like a car dealer attempting to lull you into a sense of inflated self-worth, showering you with compliments on your esteemed job title, your beautiful wife, or your baby, foaming green snot in a sweat-stained photograph pulled out of your rancid wallet, or anyone else who goes through these transparent motions to put you in a good mood before starting in with “Well, let me show you this here model…”—makes me want to puke. 

 

I slam my door on moon-eyed proselytizers.  At the movie theater, I wanna rip my hair out when, right before the film starts, I see a baby polar bear sucking on a red-labeled bottle of turd-colored, carbonated sugar water.  I stopped answering my landline due to any number of robo-calls from carpet cleaners, mortgage refi scammers and empty-headed celebrities endorsing another soon-to-be disappointing presidential candidate.  I ignore the catcalls of cell phone hawkers in the mall, and I chafe with indignation whenever a fat dope in a pair of wrinkled Dockers, a twisted silk tie dangling pendulously from his thick neck, lumbers over to me in a mattress store, asking me invasive questions, when all I wanted to do was stare at a fucking mattress and think. 

 

So, my first inclination while marching through the thicket of wannabe playas on Sunset Strip was to write guys like Bill off as some kind of Hollywood tool.  But maybe I was being unreasonable, I thought.  I mean, he’s just another man trying to make it in life, like me.  Depending on how you do it, as long as you’re not hurting anyone, then what’s the problem?  Why, I asked myself, do I often feel so much sudden, knee-jerk vitriol over someone I don’t even know?  You’re in LA, talking to a trendy hipster with a vacant smile.  That’s why you immediately went on the defensive.  But wait…if I give him a chance, he might turn out to be an okay guy…

 

All of these thoughts fought for dominance over the pounding of Panic at the Disco in the background.  So, I ordered a tasty boilermaker, and I quietly reminded myself to not be an asshole and to make the best of the situation.  And, I hoped that my cousin would finish chatting with the bartender and rejoin Bill and me so that I wouldn’t have to continue making small-talk, which I hate, with this stranger. 

 

Upon first glance, he didn’t seem like a bad person, just vaguely empty-eyed, like he might’ve gotten stoned before he left his apartment, which he said was just nearby.  I distinctly remember Bill’s mouth, which, when he smiled, resembled oily taffy pulled and left to sag into a U shape.  Thin lines creased his sweat-sheened, suntanned forehead and his hairline receded slightly, making his face appear somewhat simian, like a child-sized Richard Nixon mask pulled tightly over an adult’s head.

           “So,” Bill starts in, “your cousin says you live in Long Beach.  Which part?”

           “Bixby Knolls,” I told him. 

           “Nice area.  That is one of the cleanest, safest areas in Long Beach.”

           “Yeah, I guess.  Sometimes.”

           “Hey, Joey, you ever get down to Pine Street, restaurant row?” 

           “Used to.  It’s been awhile.”

           “Well, I have this little restaurant down on Ocean, near Pine but a little further down south.  It’s called Spinoli’s Fine Italian Cuisine.”

           “Oh yeah?  Cool.”

           “Yeah, it’s a nice little place, you ought to stop in there sometime with your…girlfriend?  You got a girlfriend?  She’d loveSpinoli’s Fine Italian Cuisine.”

           “Oh, that’s great, I’ll try it.  I love Italian.  Hell, I’m half-Italian myself.”

           “Yeah?  Thought you were Filipino.  Well, you can’t get any finer Italian dining than Spinoli’s Fine Italian Cuisine.”

           “Mm.  So if I ever go to…Spinoli’s Fine Italian Cuisine, will I see you there?”

           “Well” he said, his eyes skipping past my shoulder, his thin lips pulled back into a sheepish toothy grin.  “No.  I haven’t been in a few months.  But you gotta try it, Spinoli’s Fine Italian Cuisine.  Gettin’ great reviews, that place.”  He also mentioned the clothing shop that he co-owned with someone in LA.