CALIFORNIA DREAMING

The weather in California is dreamy. Dreamy in a Sixties/Tab Hunter/surfer film kind of way, the omnipotent sun infusing everything in a Technicolor glow as if injected with radium. Movies look like that because that’s LA weather - always sunny, slightly breezy and the same day after day after day. Truman Show weather. Being a weatherperson in LA means saying “Today was sunny and tomorrow will be sunny. Followed by sun.”, possibly the easiest job on Earth. It’s not hard to imagine bobbing along in a dream, the cheerful light, my talking dog, Polly, and ready (as one is in dreams) to engage in whatever comes along.

Famous actors feed the illusion. It’s one thing to dream about being Best Friends with Cameron Diaz - watching her apply cherry red nail polish while we laugh and have a cocktail - it’s another when one of your Dream Figures is in line behind you at Urth Cafe. Which (you might ponder while trying to use peripheral vision without looking zoned out like a zombie) actually feels more “real”? The long conversations you imagined having with Cameron about life or the fact she orders Hot Chocolate, a slightly surreal choice for mid-July?

Of course I actually know nothing about Cameron Diaz, imagined or otherwise. Actors in particular seem hard to get a sense of in a very Three Faces of Eve way. Eve White is the roles they play in TV or movies, Eve Gray is the actor who plays these roles while Eve Black is the actual person under the actor. Hard as I find it to try and be one person all the time, I certainly don’t envy having to be three.

Interacting often depends on which Eve they are at the moment. Visual clues help and there are some rough guidelines I follow. Eve White, the role, dresses very NYC (usually meaning all black) and avoids sunglasses. They often emerge from a car with a driver and tinted windows. Eve Gray, the actor, drives a flashy car, dresses to the nines in the middle of the day and wears full makeup. Sunglasses, natch, but only when needed. Eve White, the strangest of the bunch, is always wearing sunglasses, preferably ones covering the top half of their face like a sneeze guard over a buffet. They may act like Secret Service agents, eyes darting to scan the crowd for possible cracks in their disguise.

I was chatting the other day with a young couple at the newsstand around the corner from me. It was their first summer in LA and, per usual, a perfect day for the beach. As we talked a sedan drove up to the curb across the street and a driver got out and walked around to open the passenger door. “Check it out.”, I quickly said to the girl, sotto voice. We watched a man emerge and my first red light was his hair, a perfectly coifed mullet (as my friend Barry used to say, “Honey your hair’s not teased, it’s tortured”). He was wearing reflective sunglasses, a black leather blazer over a white t-shirt and as he crossed the street, I was blinded by the shiny metal tips of his spike-toed cowboy boots. Accessory of choice was an enormous bone fishhook on a raffia string around his neck. You buy them at Hawaiian tourist stands and he obviously opted for the Moby Dick model.

From the car behind him emerged a woman in her forties with the same style hair though twice as big and dyed platinum. Her precarious spike heeled mules were offset by her rayon hotpants and skin tight tanktop which did little to cover what looked to be a girdle around her waist. I could be wrong, perhaps she broke her back and it was a cast but she began pacing and yelling into a cell phone. I couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying but I imagined something along the lines of “EAT YOUR DINNER! I’M NOT MESSING WITH YOU NOW! PUT CHERYL ON THE PHONE! NO, YOU CAN’T WATCH COPS TONIGHT, I MEAN IT!”

My eyes Ping-Ponged between the two and I was so excited to find out the story, I could have burst. The couple and I were dumbstruck and staring as if we were parked in front of TV. My good friend R. who runs the stand finally broke the silence.

“So, you caught him!” he says to the man. He then turns to me and asks, “Do you know who this is?”

“Uh... no.” I had already scanned through my mental rolodex and come up blank. At first I’d thought Nick Nolte? Hulk Hogan? Maybe some aged, drug-addled rock star without his makeup. Whoever it was, it was real True Hollywood Story stuff far as I could tell.

“This,” R. proudly informs me, “is the bounty hunter who caught the Max Factor heir in Mexico.” I had vaguely recalled hearing the story in the news: heir to a huge fortune, rapes a number of women, on the lam for years, finally caught living in luxury abroad. Psycho/Suspense/Action with the man before me transformed by the Powers That Be into Harrison Ford.

“Oh.” I replied. “This must explain the fish hook.” The man looked at me and I suddenly pictured him bursting through the door of my apartment with a gun the size of a VW Beetle. I immediately recalled my Golden Rule - when you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything. He and R. chatted for a few minutes while I held my peace until the bounty hunter paid for his two packs of cigarettes and left.

After the sedan drove off, the girl and I began comparing notes. Did you see her fingernails? What was up with the belt buckle? He was, I declared, the picture perfect ideal for what a bounty hunter looks like.

“She played a bounty hunter.” her male friend pointed out about the girl.

“I was in a TV movie called The Huntress and my dad was a bounty hunter who got killed and I took over his business.” Later when I got home, I Googled it and it’s true.

I looked her over, a sweet 5’5” girl in a cotton sundress and tried to meld the picture of her and the man with the fishhook. It wasn’t easy but things were different there in that place, in that moment, here in the bright sun. I finally saw her walking down the middle of the street in her pointed boots, the breeze blowing her hair away from her face. She’d walk up to me and we’d start talking about the fugitive she’d caught, the men she’d killed, Polly’s new collar, the beach, the perfect weather.

Just like any other day here in Hollywood, just like in a dream.


4:41:12 PM    sro home /