IN A LOVELY PLACE
Hotel Bel-Air
By Arty Nelson
First things first: the food, she is not beautiful. But that doesn't mean a brief fling would be a total waste of time. What I'm trying to express in my own brand of completely strained, if not downright manhandled, poetry, is that there is a truly amazing thing going on out west in Bel-Air. I mean, let's face it, once in a while, for a few fleeting hours, it's all good on the wrong side of Doheny. Life, or something like it, becomes free and easy, and it seems like maybe every lie you ever believed about the West Coast just might, in fact, be true. Credit cards help. Let that highly interested money fly free and easy. Don't sweat it.
After all, none of it matters when you're sitting on the patio at the Hotel Bel-Air, and the waiters are doting on you, and you're waiting for your truffle-onion-&-potato soup to arrive. How bad could it be, really? You didn't overdose in Alphabet City back in '89, or get clipped by an 18-wheeler that night back when you were living in Key West, when you decided to just pull over and fall asleep on the side of the road on your way up to Miami. Of all of the things that could have gone really wrong in your life, here you are in Bel-Air waiting for a cranberry and soda, debating whether to get the Lobster Club or the lump meat crab cake and, well, other things are pretty good, too.
Like, for instance, it's sunny out in the middle of February, and you've got a good shirt on, and you're five pounds skinnier than you were back in January. That's right. The holiday bloat has receded a little. And even though a lot of the people sitting around you are kind of creepy and a little bit too skinny for their age ... it's not your life, so you don't have to hate it more than a little bit. You're a tourist. Visiting for a mere afternoon and it's okay. You haven't signed on for the country club life. You're just sort of slumming it at the other end of the spectrum for a few, while you meet some out-of-towners or maybe an old friend who works on the westside ...
And then the meal comes, and then you realize that, really, it would have been mo' better if you had come here just to drink and eat the free bar nuts and dried fruits. But that's okay, because you file it in your ever-expanding mental Rolodex and remind yourself that the valet is free, which means that no matter what happens, at the end of the time, you'll be tipping solely out of the largesse of your heart and not based on some kind of skewed percentage.
And that's exactly how you're going to win this one - by doing exactly what you should do now that you've committed to a life lived in California. And that means you occasionally need to do things that reek of Old Hollywood. Things in the vein of martinis at Musso & Frank, or a premiere at the Chinese, or even, say, LSD at Dennis Wilson's. Whatever it is, you know it's only going to make things a little bit better. A little bit more like what it must have been like for Cary Grant or Monty Clift ... men who did this whole L.A. thing with a vengeance, the way Bogie did in that great movie, In a Lonely Place. Because, sooner or later, that's the only way you're going to beat this thing. Content is much too highly rated; it's much more about the arc.
I mean, you can torture yourself over whether or not to get the chopped Cobb or the mini-brie and ham, but, in the end, the thing you need will be the thing that will happen when you let yourself slide down a little bit lower than usual in your seat, and take a long and deep breath.
Because, ultimately in life, truly bad things will happen. Sooner or later. But that's probably not the kind of thing you're stressing about right now. What's eating you is probably something much more intrinsically related to your vanity or your ego or your wallet. All of which continue to present themselves as major things but time and time again prove incapable of giving you the big fix you're searching for. It's not that I'm saying it's not good to have washboard abs and a pocket full of C-notes. It's just that you should re-check your notes from the first day of class and realize none of that was ever going to be on the final to begin with. Ciao.
Published: 02/19/2004
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