Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (20 page)

I resisted. I tried to distract myself by putting on my running clothes and stretching for a run.

But I knew myself. I was going to go for the hard stuff.

I decided to get it over with. I walked into my kitchen, cut myself a two-by-four-inch slab of Velveeta, and ate it like there was no tomorrow. It made me feel better, for a moment. I cut myself another Post-it size square of my beloved Velveeta brick.

Then I called Jennifer and I told her the Frank news.

“I hope you’re not hitting the Velveeta,” she said. “Your little addiction is nothing but an artery-clogging chunk of fat.”

This from a woman who used to eat a quart of Ben N’ Jerry’s Chunky Monkey for dinner.

“It’s very, very small,” I said.

“I’ve seen your version of small, you could hurt someone with it.”

“Well, I’m not too happy right now.”

“Well, neither am I,” said Jennifer. “Can you come up this weekend? I need your advice on a situation.”

“You know how I feel about The City. Can’t you just email me?”

“No,” said Jennifer. “I need you to observe this situation.”

“What’s his name?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your situation. What is his name?”

“Funny.”

“Uh huh.”

“You’ll hear all about it when you get up here.”

During my flight to San Francisco, my seat companion, a thirtyish-looking six-foot guy with cropped hair, an earring, motorcycle boots, and a weathered black leather jacket continually eyed me. Finally I turned to him.

“What?” I said.

Just then, the flight waitress appeared with snacks. After I got my Snappy Tom and junior pack of pretzels, he turned to me. “I was wondering if you actually lived in Los Angeles?” he said.

“Yes, I actually live in Los Angeles. What’s it to you?” He was going to tell me that although he was a 33-year-old Kinko’s assistant manager living with eight other guys in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat in the Sunset, his achievements were far superior to mine because he lives in San Francisco.

I braced myself for the first punch.

“Because I’ve always heard that everyone in L.A. is really superficial.”

“So you’ve met all eleven million of us.”

“What?”

“Everyone in L.A. means that you’ve met all eleven million of us. And we’re all superficial.”

“Well, I mean…”

“I know exactly what you mean. You mean that there are no ‘real’ people in L.A. You mean that every woman has dyed blond hair, every body part is filled with silicone, and no one reads anything, unless it’s script coverage or a menu, which damn well better not have anything on it but bottled flat water, poached salmon, sushi, or Chinese chicken salad. Right?”

He was silent.

“I…”

“Let it go,” I said.

“I was going to tell you that I was surprised at how many creative people I met.”

I looked at him.

“Yeah, it was really cool. I met writers.”

“Screenwriters.”

“Those too. I met musicians. I went to art shows. But the reason I came down is because I’m sick of The City.”

What?

“San Francisco is the new Los Angeles. It’s crowded. It’s smoggy. And people are leaving because you have to make $350,000 to be able to live alone in a safe area. In L.A, I could afford my own apartment in Echo Park. Or Eagle Rock. Maybe even downtown. If I’m lucky, I might fall into a place in Venice with great light that’s walking distance to the beach. In San Francisco, I can’t even afford to live in the Mission, which—by the way—has become very, very hot.”

“No way.”

“You better believe it. There’s nothing but bankers, lawyers, and technocrats in San Francisco now. They’ll buy anything. In the Mission. In the Sunset. Alamo Square. They don’t even care where it is or how much it costs.”

All that to live in the world’s only retirement community for people in their early 30s.

I had waited for an eternity to hear that someone else didn’t think that San Francisco was The Lost Paradise. For years I had suffered in silence while my friends rhapsodized about The City.

The San Francisco I knew was a place where the fog rolled in from nowhere in the middle of July and chilled the city to 48 degrees in under 20 minutes and you were caught wearing a sleeveless T-shirt while waiting for the bus. Where you were much more likely to step in dog shit, get hassled by junkies looking for change, or accidentally see a prostitute doing business than to find an apartment with any kind of back yard. Where the most likely view you would ever get would not be one of the Golden Gate Bridge but that of the big hairy butt of the guy who lived in the building next to you.

Heresy—that’s what it was to admit that you didn’t like The City to any resident of San Francisco, especially if that resident wanted to hide the fact that they were originally from some uncool place like Long Beach or Glendale.

Before we landed, I apologized to my seat-mate.

“I’m sorry I was so rude,” I said.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I used to give people from L.A. a hard time. And then I realized there’s only one thing that San Francisco still has going for it.”

“What’s that?”

“Attitude. We still think that we’re better than everyone else, like it’s so great to live here. But it’s not. You can get everything you can find here someplace else. And living here isn’t great. It’s just hard and expensive.”

After the plane landed I went downstairs and waited for Jennifer on the Departures level at SFO. Thirty minutes later, a beach bunny with long, white-blond hair in a spanking new $85,000 black Range Rover pulled up at the curb and started honking her horn to attract the attention of some moron who had to be dead not to hear her. The bunny had clearly pulled every bit of equity out of her property to buy the Rover. Just then, two 23-year-old guys wearing Aqua Team Hunger Force jackets sitting not five feet from me decided that 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, now, was the perfect time to start eating two huge orders of chili-cheese fries that smelled like 10,000 calories. I eyed the Hunger Force, glanced at Ms. Leveraged Equity and decided I would tell her that if she didn’t cut it with the horn-honk symphony I’d key a scratch on her new purchase.

I walked over to Ms. Leveraged Equity and wondered if smearing my sticky bun on the passenger door of her new ride might accomplish the same effect. But just as I got to the new blonde and her Range Rover, I took a better look.

That beach girl drinking a pulverized grass concoction while applying hot pink lip-gloss to her mouth was Jennifer. I poked my head in the open window of the passenger side door.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “I’ve been honking my horn for the last 15 minutes. Didn’t you see me?”

“Oh, I saw you all right. I just didn’t recognize you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since when did you enter the beach girl look-alike contest?”

“I decided to let my hair go back to its original color. You know I’m a natural blonde.”

“Really. Because in the thirteen years I’ve known you, you’ve never had anything but dark brunette hair cut in a corporate attorney helmet. And right now you have a half-inch regrowth of your
natural
hair color. And it doesn’t look blond.”

“Well, Marshall really likes blond hair. He says that it reminds him of the innocence of children.”

“Marshall?”

“My boyfriend. Kinda. This is his new car.”

“Your friend Marshall just screams leveraged equity or vested options.”

“Marshall is a wise soul searching for a resting place in the universe,” said a voice from the back seat.

I turned to the back seat and saw a pumped-up guy with a pin head who looked like he had been existing on a 10-year diet of ground sirloin, raw eggs, and steroids. He had massive shoulders, a 50-inch chest, and the largest thighs I had ever seen.

He was a West Hollywood/‌Mr. Universe type somehow transplanted to the Bay Area.

“And you are?” I asked.

“Haggis. At your service.”

The endless possibilities of that sentence entered my mind. It was more than I wanted to know. I rolled my eyes, hunched down in my seat and decided not to pursue it.

We left the airport circle and entered the 101 Freeway back to San Francisco. Then I saw something that I had never seen before in the Bay Area—a traffic jam running from the airport to the outskirts of San Francisco—at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. “Boy, I love coming to the Bay Area,” I said. “It’s just great to be able to get away from the stress and pressure of Los Angeles.”

“At least we don’t have the L.A. smog,” said Jennifer.

My eye panned the horizon. I noticed a layer of brown haze that looked suspiciously familiar.

“Then what’s that?”

“It’s fog.”

“It’s 77 degrees outside. Sunshine burns off the fog.”

“It’s fog,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

It was clear that we had entered some zone in which reality had become a missing ingredient in our conversation. Perhaps it had become a missing ingredient from our relationship. I took a hard look at Jennifer. Something else was missing.

“You’re missing something.”

“What?” she said.

I stared at her for about 30 seconds. I was puzzled.

“What?” she said. “Do we need to go back to the airport?”

“Only if that’s where you left your butt.”

“What…” she said with a laugh.

“Your butt.”

Jennifer had once had a butt that would have courteously been considered ample. This was no surprise. Years of diligent studying, working 24-hour days as an associate in a big firm and a diet of take-out pizza eaten at 10 p.m. had created a body that reflected the toll extracted to stay partner-track in a first-tier legal practice. Now she had the butt of an eight-year-old boy.

I guess leaving the partner-track and becoming the in-house counsel at an internet company had given her new options.

“Jennifer and I have worked very diligently to create a new body and a new life,” said Haggis.

“Did you also tell her that she needed to look like a 35-year-old beach bunny?”

“Courtney, cut it out. Haggis is my personal trainer.”

“Personal trainer to the stars?” I said.

“Kinda,” said Jennifer. “But more like personal trainer to the internet stars.”

It turned out that Haggis was the personal trainer of Marshall, Jennifer’s kinda new boyfriend. Marshall had told Jennifer that it would improve her “Chi” if she worked out with Haggis.

“How much are these butt-removal sessions costing?”

“Courtney, not in front of Haggis,” said Jennifer.

“What do you mean? It’s his business. He shouldn’t be afraid to hear what his services cost.”

“It costs $150 per session,” said Jennifer.

“I guess I could live with shelling out $150 a week for a boy-butt.”

“I’ve determined that my services aren’t effective in a designated time span unless I work out with my clients at least three times per week,” said Haggis.

“$450 per week. I hope Mr. Improve-Your-Chi is paying for this,” I said.

Jennifer was silent for a moment.

“No,” I said.

“Marshall and I decided that Jennifer wouldn’t truly own her self-improvement, that it wouldn’t be something she valued, unless she paid for it,” said Haggis.

I turned to Jennifer.

“And you bought into this?” I said. “At $1,800 a month, you could
own
some pretty cool things.”

We were silent for a few minutes.

“At least Marshall lets you drive his car,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s pretty cool about that. And to thank him, I drive Haggis home and get the car washed.”

“Does he fine you if you’re late?”

We dropped Haggis off at a Victorian house in the Castro which had a lavender exterior. The trim—the window frames, awnings, and door—had been painted a complementary egg-shell blue. The bushes and hedges had been meticulously clipped into submission.

“Interesting. Haggis has matching trim on his house,” I said.

“I know what you’re thinking. But he’s got an awful lot of female friends.”

“I think the operative word would be ‘friends.’”

We drove to her place in the outer Mission. When Jennifer and Kevin had first bought the place they had paid almost nothing: $200,000 for a two-story flat, a 3600-square-foot building.

They were considered urban pioneers for choosing to live in this slightly risky area of San Francisco, three blocks from the projects, which could only be described as massively overcrowded, covered in dog poop, and catering to the most aggressive street heroin trade in the Bay Area. Now, it was considered a desirable area. Each of them could have separately sold their flat for over $1,000,000.

When we got to her building, I noticed that something was different—her solid off-white building had been painted pale green. The trim—the window frames, awnings, and door—were now painted pine green.

“You repainted the building.”

“Yeah, we just did it.”

“And now you have matching pine green trim.”

“That was Marshall’s idea. He thought that the matching trim would give the building a balanced look, where I could do the necessary work to correct my Chi.”

I took my things upstairs to Jennifer’s guest room, a tiny room in the front of her flat which was always 15 degrees colder than the rest of her place. Despite the soft, lumpy bed which always gave me a crippling vertebra adjustment, I liked the room. It always gave me a bird’s eye view of the local street life, which, of course, also involved male and female prostitutes giving blow-jobs or dealers selling crack. Before I could get my fill of beautiful San Francisco, Jennifer walked in.

“I’m hungry. Let’s go get something to eat,” she said.

“What about the grass-goo you were drinking at the airport? Isn’t that all that you’re allowed to eat on your Chi-correction program?”

“That was just for Haggis. Now I want some real food.”

We walked to a local cafe, carefully choosing our steps so as not to step on the items laid on the sidewalk by drug addicts who were selling their clothing so they could buy some more smack. Somewhere in the middle of her second cream-cheese-smeared bagel, I got the story.