VOTER'S BLOCK: The

attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

Heights? Darien? Westmount? Lake Forest? Does it matter? He has one of those bankish money jobs of the sort that when, at parties, he tells you what he does, you start to forget as soon as he tells you. He affects a tedious corporate killspeak. He sees nothing silly or offensive in frequenting franchised theme-restaurants with artificial, possessive-case names like McTuckey's or O'Dooligan's. He knows all variations and nuances of tassel loafers. ("I could never wear your shoes, Andy. They've got moccasin stitching. Far too casual.")

Not surprisingly, he's a control freak and considers himself in-formed. He likes to make jokes about paving Alaska and nuking Iran. To borrow a phrase from a popular song, he's loyal to the Bank of America. He's thrown something away and he's mean.

But then Tobias also has circus freak show good looks, so Dag and I are envious. Tobias could stand on a downtown corner at midnight and cause a traffic gridlock. It's too depressing for normal looking Joes. "He'll never have to work a day in his life if he doesn't want to," says Dag. "Life is not fair." Something about Tobias always extracts the phrase, 'life's not fair' from people.

He and Claire met at Brandon's apartment in West Hollywood a few months ago. As a trio, they were all going to go to a Wall of Voodoo concert, but Tobias and Claire never made it, ending up instead at the Java coffee house, where Tobias talked and Claire stared for the night. Later on, Tobias kicked Brandon out of his own apartment. "Didn't hear a word Tobias said the entire evening," Claire says, "He could have been reading the menu backward for all I know. His profile, I tell you, it's deadly."

They spent that night together, and the next morning Tobias waltzed into the bedroom with one hundred long-stemmed roses, and he woke Claire up by gently lobbing them into her face, one by one. Then once she was fully awake, he heaped blood red Niagaras of stem and petal onto her body, and when Claire told Dag and me about this, even we had to concede that it was a wonderful gesture on his part.

"It had to be the most romantic moment of my life," said Claire, "I mean is it possible to die from roses? From pleasure? Anyhow, later that morning we were in the car driving over to the farmer's market at Fairfax for brunch and to do the L.A. Times crossword puzzle with the pigeons and tourists in the outdoor area. Then on La Cienega Boulevard I saw this huge plywood sign with the words 700 Roses only $9.95 spray

painted on it, and my heart just sank like a corpse wrapped in steel and tossed into the Hudson River. Tobias slunk down in his seat really low. Then things got worse. There was a red light and the guy from the booth comes over to the car and says something like, 'Mr. Tobias! My best customer! You're some lucky young lady to always be getting flowers from Mr. Tobias here!' As you can imagine, there was a pall over breakfast."

Okay okay. I'm being one-sided here. But it's fun to trash Tobias. It's easy. He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short-term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom-feeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. They saw themselves as eagles building mighty nests of oak branches and bullrushes, when instead they were really more like the eagles here in California, the ones who built their nests from tufts of abandoned auto parts looking like sprouts picked off a sandwich—rusted colonic mufflers and herniated fan belts—gnarls of freeway flotsam from the bleached grass meridians of the Santa Monica freeway: plastic lawn chairs, Styrofoam cooler lids, and broken skis— cheap, vulgar, toxic items that will either decompose in minutes or remain essentially unchanged until our galaxy goes supernova.

Oh, I don't hate Tobias. And as I hear his car pull into a stall outside, I realize that I see in him something that / might have become, something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance. Some­thing bland and smug that trades on its mask, filled with such rage and such contempt for humanity, such need, that the only food left for such a creature is their own flesh. He is like a passenger on a plane full of diseased people that crashes high in the mountains, and the survivors, not trusting each other's organs, snack on their own forearms.

"Candy, 6oby!" Tobias bellows mock heartily, slamming my screen door after finding Claire's place empty save for a heap of Dag. I wince, feigning interest in a TV Guide and mumbling a hello. He sees the magazine: "Bottom feeding, are we? I thought you were the intellectual."

"Funny you should mention bottom feeding, Tobias—"

"What's that?" he barks, like someone with a Sony Walkman going full volume being asked for directions. Tobias doesn't pay any real attention to objects not basking entirely in his sphere.

"Nothing, Tobias. Claire's in the bathroom," I add, pointing in that

ARMANISM: After Giorgio Armani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless and (more importantly) controlled ethos of Italian couture. Like Japanese Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control.

POOR BUOYANCY: The

realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

direction the exact moment Claire rounds the corner chattering and putting a little girl's barrette in her hair.

"Tobias!" she says, running over for a little kiss, but Tobias is nonplussed by finding her so intimate in my environment and refuses a kiss.

"Excuse me," he says, "Looks like I'm interrupting something here." Claire and I roll our eyes at the whole notion that Tobias sees life as a not-very-funny French-restoration comedy aimed solely at him. Claire reaches up and kisses him anyway. (He's tall, of course.)

"Dag spilled plutonium all over my bungalow last night. He and Andy are going to clean it up today, and till then, I'm camped out here on the couch. Soon as Dag detoxes, that is. He's passed out on my couch. He was in New Mexico last week."

"I should have guessed he'd do something stupid like that. Was he building a bomb with it?"

"It wasn't plutonium," I add, "It was Trinitite, and it's harmless." Tobias ignores this. "What was he doing in your place, anyhow?" "Tobias, what am I, your heifer? He's my friend. Andy's my friend. I live here, remember?"

Tobias grabs her waist—looks like he's getting frisky. "Looks like I'm going to have to fillet you right down the middle, young lady." He yanks her crotch toward his, and I am just too embarrassed for words. Do people really talk like this? "Hey, Candy—looks like she's getting uppity. What do you say—should I impregnate her?"

At this point Claire's face indicates that she is well aware of feminist rhetoric and dialectic but is beyond being able to extract an appropriate quote. She actually giggles, realizing as she does so that that giggle will be used against her in some future, more lucid, less hormonal moment. Tobias pulls Claire out the door. "I vote that we go to Dag's place for a while. Candy—tell your pal not to disturb us for a few hours should he decide to rise. Ciao."

The door slams once more, and, as with most couples impatiently on their way to couple, there are no polite good-byes.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23