I've Had A Weird Week (In No Order At All)

1) I only have one wisdom tooth, I'm 29, and two weeks ago it started moving. Out of nowhere, it exerted pressure on my jaw, a pressure that felt like a spoon wedged between two of my molars. A large Turkish man named Dr. Beni removed the tooth last Friday with a ballpeen and hammer. He shattered the tooth, which was attached to my jawbone, after he had shot me up with TONS O' NOVACAINE. Right before he shattered it, he said, "Are you ready to party?" in his Turkish accent, and then laughed, low and sleazy. Later on, after the removal, his cel phone rang and he had one of those musical rings that was all Turkish-disco and shit. Yeah. He seemed really embarrassed when it rang, and his eyes darted back at me as he turned it off. But the thing was, I already could tell he does coke and dances to bad music. I could tell by his arm hair and bad back-alley-Rolex-ripoff wristwatch.

2) Tuesday night I went to this networking party. I've been to one of these things before in Chicago but never in LA. Basically, it's this society for writers/journalists and they host get-togethers every few months or so. All the journos gather and bitch about how little money they make, how no one lets them write their big dream opus about Band X or Politician A or Social Phenomenon B and this is supposed to show how vapid the media industry is. And the media industry is vapid, but not for these reasons. Anyway, this party was kind of pathetic--did I say that already? I met the lowliest bunch of freelance writers, including one dude who lied to me about who published his novel. "Oh, Random House published it." Turns out dude self-published it. Nothing wrong with that, but why lie about it? Now it makes *everything* he told me suspicious, including his little story about being hired at a bigshot music mag and then laid off two weeks later. "Oh well," he sighed, brushing aside his too-long bangs, "they wouldn't have let me publish what i wanted anyway."

3) At this same party, towards the end, I decided to sit down with an intense-looking bunch of people just for the hell of it. Thing is, at these parties, no one is supposed to know each other, and blind networking/socializing is encouraged. So I was following directions. But the moment I sat down at this table, I felt like "Uh-oh." I clearly was the nerd sitting down at the cheerleaders table. One chick, the Sally alpha-female of the crew, immediately gave me this look like "Whatthefuck?" But I ignored that and turned on the best of my Margaret Louise charms. Soon enough, I had half the table on my side, while Sally and her friend continued to give me the cold shoulder. I got drunker, and so did two other guys sitting with me. By the end of the night, it was me, these two guys and a bunch of half-drunken glasses of wine. One of the guys, Stephen, drank all of everyone's dregs. The bar decided to close the back patio and kicked us out. I asked Stephen, "Hey, do you want to go to the beach?"

4) To the right of me is the dead ring of the Santa Monica ferris wheel, with only a thread of lights blinking in the dark. In front, the Pacific, mounting and roaring, lapping at my toes. To the left, a swooping crescent of maligned Los Angeles shapes--houses and palm trees and myriad hotels. Stephen has already waded in, and he's pretty far out there, so far that his head is only a bobbing sphere of black curls. I'm wearing a dress and black tights, but I run in anyway, screaming and laughing, loudly not only because I'm excited but because it's comforting to hear myself, to have my voice as some sort of center in the dark blurriness of the beach. The water is cold and delicious, and the smell of salt and strangers' garbage wafts up and pinches my nose, stings my eyes. And then the surf overtakes me and for a second I'm very scared, as I always am when the first wave hits me. I'm not a good swimmer but my legs kick up anyway and make the appropriate shapes in the water. I forget everything, including Stephen's name. When I loose track of him, I yell out, "Hey!" and then struggle to remember who the hell he is.

5) I ate chicken at the Burritto King that was suspiciously pink. Like, fucking carnation pink. Wha??

That's all for now...

An encounter with The Chick from American Beauty

I was sitting in this coffee shop/wine bar around the corner from studio 1021, writing in my journal and rereading Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This winebar/coffee place called The Banquette is nothing special but I like it because you can work in there for hours and no one cares. They also have nice soups, like squash and lentil, though the lentil soup that day was kinda greasy.
So I'm sitting there, writing, and in walks that chick from American Beauty, Mena Suvari. I couldn't think of her name at the time, so I said to myself, "There's that chick from American Beauty." She was with this older guy, older like maybe late 30s/early 40s, not very attractive, with fine brown hair that was slightly curly at the ends like a baby's. He was dressed like this character on Deadwood, the priest who eventually goes insane and is mercy-killed by Swearengen. That is to say that this man was wearing a dark cloakish type of thing and the kind of rugged, oil-cloth boots you should only wear on a field frequented by horses. I remembered then that my friend Tony, who worked as a waiter in WeHo, had waited once on Mena Suvari and her husband, who is some successful producer or another (I realize I could verify this with imdb.com but that would take the fun out of it), and Tony said that Mena was nice but that he'd found her husband creepy. Apparently he was fully and frothily delighting in the fact that he's married to a young, beautiful Hollywood starlet. Tony is gay and so wasn't affected by what this guy probably imagined to be deep dark pangs of jealousy, but bad taste is offensive, no matter what.
But I didn't think about that showboating when I saw Mena; I only remembered that detail much later. What I remembered was Tony saying she's married to a not-that-good-looking producer dude. So, seeing this guy flapping around in his cloak, protectively shielding Ms. Suvari from the cruel eyes of The Banquette, I wondered: Is this The Guy? I didn't stare too long at Mena, just long enough to take in her heavily made-up face (lots of foundation), her turquoise sweater and white, long coat which was pretty and looked expensive in a handmade-by-some-unknown-but soon-to-be-hot-designer-fresh-out-of-fashion-school kind of way. I continued to scrawl in my notebook, as if about something all-consuming, but really I was writing something like "that chick from American Beauty just came in and her husband (?) is with her and..."
As I wrote that, I listened as Mena, in a high voice, uncomfortably asked if the sandwiches could be made with wheat bread instead of panini. Like I said, The Banquette is nothing special, just one of those coffee shops with a few grills for making sandwiches... so the waitress explains that panini is all they have, and then there's some back-and-forthing I don't quite catch because of a loud espresso machine, but somewhere in there, I hear the waitress defensively explain that the sandwiches would be "ice-cold" if made with anything other than panini bread. I honestly have no idea what the fuck she was talking about at that point, but I felt sorry for her that she was obviously being questioned so heavily by Mena and her baby-haired cloaked friend/husband person that, backed into a corner like a terrified feline, she had resorted to a crazed line of no-logic, you know, the old "ice-cold sandwiches" defense. Does it get any thinner than that?
Anyway, Mena and baby-cloak man decided to take their business elsewhere. They walked out of The Banquette and into Pete's, the real restaurant right across the lobby (both are located at the bottom of an office building). I kept on writing and maybe a moment or two passed and then, spaced out, I looked up, expecting to take in the ordinary scenery of The Banquette as it had been pre-Mena. But I looked up and BAM! Not an eyeful of garlic, but something more unexpected: Mena was back! And for whatever reason she was staring dead at me when I looked up. She did not have a friendly expression. Her mouth was set tightly, her cheekbones drawn in and her eyebrows were mashed down. We locked eyes. And because her expression was hostile, even if it was in a distracted, bland kind of way, I returned something that probably didn't look so friendly either. Then, when I realized what was happening, I broke the eye contact.
Isn't it weird that Mena and I gave each other rude looks? Why did she give me a rude look anyway? I wasn't doin nuttin! Speculations welcome...