Flaming Messiah
(p. 2)
The room was of a decent size, with a dozen tables dressed tastefully in draping cloths with skinny vases. One couple dined quietly and anonymously in the corner. They might have been important movie producers or directors for all we knew. We were in Brentwood after all. This is where they all hung out.
One time Deborah was walking around the perimeter of the Brentwood Country Club. Ally McBeal, whatever her real name is, ran by in the other direction. It was that kind of place. That's why I never flipped anyone off in traffic, no matter how hard they laid on the horn or whether they threatened to run me off the road. I figured that when I got to whatever casting call I was going to or whatever voiceover session I was doing, it would be just my luck that the person I flipped off would be sitting there with a clipboard and a bottle of Evian. That's the way my career could have ended.
An attractive dark haired girl welcomed us as we walked in. "We were told that this is where the KCRW volunteers' party is," I said to the girl. I know had a puzzled look on my face. There was no question that I was puzzled: I could see my reflection on the mirrored wall. No one's face looks like that when they walk into a restaurant unless something stinks or the lights are way too bright. That certainly wasn't the case here. This place was downright tranquil... yoga studio tranquil... doctor's office waiting room tranquil. Last year the party was at a bar in Santa Monica in one of the heaviest rains we'd had in a long time. That one was bursting from the seams with people. Were expecting at least the same here.
"Right through here," said the attractive dark haired girl with stunning neutrality and just a pinch of indifference. She was poised and calm as if her only purpose in life was to keep that single table of diners on the other side of the room from noticing that we were even there. Her hand lilted, gently motioning like a falling leaf, as a signal for us to pass through a curtain of beads behind us.
She parted the beads with that lilting hand to expose an alternate world on the other side. She motioned us through and we obliged. Suddenly I heard a booming sound in my skull that I couldn't explain. I looked behind me. The girl was gone. She'd disappeared. I turned back around and looked into the room. I couldn’t see anything. I thought that she’d cast a spell on me, then I realized that the booming was techno-dance music, the same kind they play on the station, KCRW. It was thunderous and it throbbed. It was surprising that we hadn't noticed it from the other room. A beaded curtain is porous and flimsy and couldn't possibly have acted as any kind of sound barrier. Could it have been a sophisticated psycho-acoustic sound barrier manufactured from sound absorbing NASA "smart" sound beads? Yeah right. Doubtful. I would have known about it already.
We unzipped our coats while our eyes adjusted to the new temperature and the relative absence of light, then had two sensations. The first was that we were probably the two oldest people in the room. Everyone appeared to be between 20 and 30 years old. They all seemed to be wearing black as if they'd been issued uniforms: black blazers, black shirts. Many had up-to-date black shoes even though the room was so fully packed with bodies, chest against chest, back against back, you couldn't really see their shoes except for an occasional glimpse. Many wore black-rimmed glasses... which were also very stylish.
I had a sense that I was giving off a silent signal, a silent signal — a scent perhaps — announcing to everyone that an old and unstylish outsider had arrived, and that he was wearing no glasses and that he was wearing white athletic shoes. A side effect of the signal was that I was also invisible.
I've found that being unstylish often gets one of two reactions, by the way. One is that you're invisible and unnoticable, not even registering a radar blip's worth of attention... like I was that night. The other is that you draw so much attention to yourself because you're so unstylish, that it's actually remarkable and noteworthy. In the worst case, you'll draw ridicule.
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