When I catch up to Al, what a day, what a mood I’m in. The mood I’m in comes from that feeling we all know. That feeling you have on that bad morning in a strange city when you walk into a barber shop you know is a shade dirtier than your safety zone allows. But there’s no one there except you and the barber and some man-to-man thing goes on and it’s impossible to turn your back on this barber, a grimy man from the old school plying the only trade he knows. So you sit down and he drapes the vaguely soiled cloth over you and no one else walks into the barber shop the whole time you’re in the chair. And in the last two minutes of the haircut, the scant few moments that stand between you and the door and the street, he nicks you ever so slightly with the straight razor he’s using to clean the fuzz off the back of your neck, the straight razor he took off the vaguely soiled napkin on the shelf. And while you’re paying him you stare wildly around the barber shop, looking for the sterilizer or the germicide but all you find is the blood-stained tissue on the floor with your strewn hair, that and the door and the street and the rest of your life, which is different now, psychotic and philosophical, and all because you decided to kill time with a haircut, and you’re overawed at the vastness of the time you possibly did kill, all of it in one shot.
When I catch up to Al he’s outside an elementary school or community center, I can’t even tell which, in a bad, broken-down part of L.A. He’s there because the school or community center has a broken down running track, an oval of cracked asphalt sprouting grass tufts in the fissures, as part of its outdoor recreational facility; and this is just the kind of place low budget production companies look for when you’re on a job with a shoestring budget. It’s only a casting session anyway, not the actual shoot; but shoestring is a good word for this entire project. We’re doing Bristol bargain dress shoes, the shoes that are knockoffs of knockoffs, the shoes you wear if your job is to sit at the security desk in the lobby of a giant office building and point out the right elevators to visiting bigwigs clicking across the marble in Ferragamos and J.M. Westons, just so they can soar above you to floors you will never, ever walk on or even see.
So the hero of this commercial, by definition, is an earnest junior executive on the move. On the move to such a degree, with such ambition and aspiration, that he runs, in full business attire, to every meeting he’s asked to attend in the various buildings that comprise the vast campus of office buildings where he works. He breaks records sprinting from Building A to Building C, all so he can be first in the room with the doughnuts and the slide projector, all so he can escape the fate of sitting at the security desk while the rest of the world runs by and soars above him in rocketing elevators. He wears shoes, these bargain dress shoes, that are so well built, so ergonomically advanced, they perform even better than real running shoes in getting him to first place in the rat race.
Al sits in a black canvas chair sipping designer water, which will surely activate his bashful kidney. He sits next to the haughty director, who’s in a matching black canvas chair sipping a secret formula energy smoothie. I’m the latecomer so I join them in a third black chair, sip a tall iced mocha, and watch them for a while to get the hang of this casting session, so I won’t say anything stupid or, worse, uncool. I watch them as scores of struggling actors, boiling in the high sun, submit to the various ordeals required of everyone auditioning, the last of which is a full run around the oval track at top speed wearing a shirt, a tie, a business suit and the miracle-working bargain dress shoes.
What a crew, what a gang of thespian-athletes shows up for this low budget bonanza. There are those who haven’t run ten feet in the last ten years. They wheeze and turn purple and sweat through their business suits, drawing yucks from the gallery of homeless and jobless guys shooting hoops and peering at the proceedings through the fence, the chain link fence that separates the oval track from the other main component of this recreational yard, the basketball court. There are those who show up who are the kid brothers of famous millionaire movie stars; brothers who have virtually the same face as the big star, but nothing else, not a shred of the magic, and you see them at all the auditions and they never get it right. Then there are those who can run but don’t run correctly, not like a real runner. They’re either flatfooted or chicken-legged or bowlegged or pigeon-toed and they waddle or stomp or bounce in an unseemly manner, which the camera picks up right away, even a handheld video camera. Of the sixty or so contenders who try out only two break into a true competitive stride, long and open, a gallop as opposed to a fast trot. And of those two, one is incapable of sprinting in a business suit without looking as if he just robbed a bank.
So we have our hero, by default, and Al and I and whoever else is thirsty can head for the Sky Bar, where we can sit all afternoon like the jackals and hyenas of the movie business, dissing the losers at the casting session, feasting on the bones and offal of the Hollywood scene until evening brings somebody important who wants our table and ousts us.
And sitting there in celebrity heaven Al suddenly has better things to pay attention to than me. Down the stairs from the Sky Bar, in the pool area, they have an unusual piece of poolside furniture. In addition to the lounges and chairs there’s one industrial-size mattress, for good-natured Hollywood sport, and it’s become occupied by another shoot gang. They’re in town for a print shoot obviously, an even cheesier project than the one we’re on. Tits and ass instead of heels and soles. Rolling around on the mattress in thongs of dental floss thickness are the three models. As butts go, theirs are double scale or better on the standard compensation system, but the faces don’t even make scale, which tells you what this shoot is about.
On break from the lenses and lights, they form a meaty, jiggling, salon-tanned orbit of tush around the grinning guy who sits in the center of the mattress in a Hawaiian shirt, sipping a pink drink, the bar’s famous and delectable Cosmopolitan. He’s either the photographer himself or his assistant, and right now Al wishes he were that guy.
“Think they’ll model for me?” he says. “I want to get back into serious stuff. Caravaggio on Sunset Boulevard.”
We snarf, we sip, we stare.
“Jesse Ventura says he wants to be reborn as a bra,” says Al. “I want to be reborn as a thong.”
Everybody’s looking at the frolic on the mattress. The business guys from the East in their blue blazers are looking. Even the stoic Sky Bar bouncer is stealing a peek.
Before I can comment on Jesse Ventura, Al’s halfway across the room - call of the bashful kidney. Leaving me to my gin and my hopped-up ruminations. I run my fingertips over the nick on the back of my freshly shaved neck, which is where this all began, and observe the shenanigans on the mattress as they turn spicier and pull more eyeballs from around the pool and cocktail patio.
One of the models is on her tummy, pushing her thonged, creamed, oiled and bounteous booty towards the smiling sun. She yelps merrily as another model peppers the photogenic cheeks with little sharp slaps, turning them plum pink. Everybody’s into it now. The blazered Eastern businessmen are falling out of their lounge chairs. Security guards are leering around corners. Brainy lady executives from the media and entertainment world, gym-slimmed and sexy in their bikinis - sexy until now - roll their eyes and put down their ice teas and leave.
The clatter of fast footsteps spins us around. And out of nowhere it’s the audition, déjà vu. Men running in street clothes. But the action is right here at the high-budget Mondrian, not the low-budget school or community center with the shabby oval track.
Two guys in full business suits and dress shoes are going like hell, sprinting across the open cocktail patio towards the pool. They race right past the fun-filled mattress, their attention so riveted on something else they don’t even notice the buns and the giggles. Or the waiters with their round cocktail trays, dumbfounded and teetering.
It’s déjà vu kicked up a notch. Yes, the very thing we were casting a few hours ago - but these two bulging jocks, half bald and fortyish, don’t look like actors at all. They’re too beefy. Not workout-beefy but truckdriver beefy. Their business suits are too tight in the gut.
And by the time they reach their target, a table near the diving board where a young couple is drinking and smooching, their big police automatics are drawn and pointed, and the whole Sky Bar goes into a freeze.
The young man at the end of the gun barrels is up on his feet at once, pleading no contest, offering his hands to the cuffs. He has that guitarist vegan look, scrawny, sensitive and devious. He doesn’t seem surprised at the intrusion, not at all, but his beautiful girlfriend is. She screams and then weeps as they lead him away. For dealing whatever.
Even though we’re all in the same afternoon, it’s as though someone has cued a column of light on her alone. Whoever she is, she has gifts of the highest cinematic value. The eyes, the exquisite bone structure, the natural aristocratic slenderness. Everything the camera loves. You just know the cops despise their thin little prisoner, this scum of the earth, for his power to attract such a woman.
For a while she sits at the poolside table, sobbing quietly at the empty chair. Then she stands and walks across the patio towards the lobby and her future - Juliet in a pink gingham slip dress. The waiters stop in their tracks as she goes by. A balding man in reptile shoes stands up and slides out a business card. Upstaged, the party girls on the mattress turn their bouncing butts around and sit normally. They seem modest and glum. And overweight.