Michael Estrin's Blog, page 27

Talk about an amazing beard

Walk up to the counter at Cactus to order a taco, but the woman behind the counter has other ideas.

“I’m not a cashier, so I can’t take your order,” she says. “But I’ll be happy to make conversation until a cashier comes back.”

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

“Cool. So… that’s an amazing beard you got.”

“Thanks!”

“Yeah, I wish I had a beard that was that big and glorious.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Don’t judge me.”

“Who’s judging? You want a beard, have a beard. But it comes with a price.”

“For instance?”

“Hummus,” I say. “That’s just one of dozens of foods that can get stuck in there.”

“Dang. That would suck. And I’ll bet it’s a fire hazard too.”

“It is,” I say.

“Well, crap. What’s the upside?”

“It’s a great conversation piece,” I say.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all

A mechanic asks me if I want to know what bad luck is.

He explains how another customer bought a brand new car and got into an accident two days later.

“That is bad luck,” I say.

“We fixed it,” he says. “Good as new. Fantastic!”

“Oh.”

Three days later, another accident.

“Oh man, that’s…”

“No, no. Again, we fixed it. Good as new. Fantastic!”

“So it worked out?”

“No, because a week later she got in another accident. Totaled, my friend. Totaled.”

“Wow, that’s nuts. Is she ok?”

“She’s fine. But have you ever heard of such bad luck?”

“But she’s ok, so maybe it’s good luck.”

He thinks about that for a moment, then shrugs.

“It’s bad luck,” he concludes.

I decide against offering the “luck had nothing to do with it” theory.

That time my cashier almost died

I pay the check at Du-par’s this morning and the cashier asks me what I have planned for the rest of the day.

“Just working.”

She asks what I do. I tell her I’m a writer.

“Have I heard of you?”

“Probably not.”

She asks my name. I tell her.

“Yeah… I’ve never heard of you,” she says. “Writer, huh? I should’ve been a writer. I had a near-death experience that would make a great story.”

The phone rings and she goes to answer it. I’ve paid my bill and could leave, but how do you skip out on a near-death experience?

She returns and tells me about her near-death experience. When she was a teenager, she was diagnosed with a severe ulcer that required surgery. But instead of surgery, she took some sleeping pills.

“And it was just like in the movies, I left my body and I went to the door of my bedroom, and I looked back and I could see myself asleep in bed.”

“Wow,” I say. “Then what happened?”

“Well, I realized that your body is just the suitcase for your soul. It’s a temporary case.”

“Got it.”

“And my soul was on the move and it was going down this tunnel toward this light. You’ve probably heard about the tunnel and the light before, right?”

“Yeah, they’re classic set pieces.”

“Ok, but in this tunnel I heard all these people,” she says. “But I didn’t just hear them, it was like I could feel them, touch them. But they were all dead.”

“That sound terrifying.”

“No, it was actually very calming and peaceful. It was like we were all connected.”

Then she explains how she walked to the end of this tunnel and ended up in a small valley, near where she grew up. She explains how she used to go to this valley to watch the sunset.

“And there was this little baby boy. He was a neighbor’s boy and he had died about a year earlier. It was very sad. But there he was playing and talking the way babies do.”

For my benefit, she does her impression of baby talk.

“Only, it wasn’t gibberish,” she said. “I could understand him.”

“What was he saying?”

She’s about to answer, but another customer comes up to pay. I wait as she handles his check.

“So when I woke up the next day,” she continues, “I saw the boy’s mother. And she told me that she could feel me touching her that night. And that the things in her son’s room — a room that remained untouched since his death — had moved. Mind you, I lived down the road, so there’s no way I could’ve touched her or moved those things. Not physically possible.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yes! But the really interesting thing is that when I went back to the doctor, he couldn’t believe it. I had been cured.”

“Because of the boy?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you talked with a dead boy and then your life-threatening ulcer just went away?

“Yes,” she says. “Near-death experience.”

“And kind of an out-of-body experience too.”

“Yes! And after that I started doing [psychic] readings,” she says. “Like that’s why I asked what you did because I knew you were a writer and that we should talk about this.”

“Well, my advice is you should write it down.”

“Yeah I should, shouldn’t I?”

“I just think we need to know what the boy said.”

“Oh, right! He said we all need to love each other.”

Another kind of weirdo

“You just put me on a leash and lead me around,” says the man behind me in line at the CVS.

I turn around, perhaps a little too fast to be covert. I don’t see a phone, but I do see him notice me.

“I’ll be there at five and you can lead me around,” he continues. “You’re the boss and I am totally at your mercy.”

He finishes his call. A moment later, he taps me on the shoulder.

“I was on a call,” he says, tapping his Bluetooth earpiece. “I didn’t want you to think I was the kind of weirdo who just talks to himself.”

“Not at all,” I say. “I didn’t think you were that kind of weirdo.”

Orange is the new car

Lots of down time when you’re buying a car.

We’re sitting in the finance manager’s office waiting on something or other.

“That’s a nice watch,” Christina tells the finance manager.

“It’s a Nixon,” he says in a charming English accent. “Do you know why I bought?”

Christina and I look to each other for the answer, but none comes to mind.

“It’s got orange hands!” he says. “I’m just one of those people who loves orange.”

And suddenly, I find myself scanning his office like the payoff scene in The Usual Suspects.

Orange frames on his photos. Orange pot for the plant behind his desk. Orange highlighters in an orange cup.

He goes on and on about his love for the color orange.

“I’m not sure why I love it, I just do.”

Then I look out the window at the showroom. The view is of a black sports car with several panels painted orange. Sort of a Fast & Furious look.

“Well, for a man who loves orange, you have a great view.”

“Goodness no,” he says. “That car is a monstrosity.”

“But it’s orange.”

He studies the car for a moment and says with a sigh, “There are limits.”

Later, when we get up to leave, I notice that those limits don’t extend to his socks, which are as orange as a pumpkin.

Beard envy in the sun

“It’s so hot the sun will cook our faces off,” a man says while we wait for the crosswalk signal to change.

He tells me he “wishes” he could grow a beard like mine.

“My beard is solid,” he says. “Not like yours, though. But in this heat…”

“Brutal,” I say.

“Yes. Brutal. I’m going to trim mine tomorrow.”

“Yeah, now that it’s summer I’m thinking the same thing.”

His smile turns serious.

“No,” he says. “I would not do that if I were you. It is a man’s beard.”

Then he shakes my hand, tells me his name is Eddy, and rounds the corner.

Beard envy is real, guys. And usually it’s real weird.

Career opportunity

He’s about twice her age and full of career advice. She’s taking notes.

He says he used to be an agent, but then one day he decided to become an artist. “I sold a painting in Moscow, which is crazy because we don’t even have diplomatic relations with Russia.”

She’s very impressed, wants to know how he did it.

He launches into a lengthy lecture about how eliminating the word “no” from your vocabulary is the key to success.

“What if the answer is no?” she asks.

“Then leave the door open,” he says. “Say that it’s possible. People respond to what is possible.”

She writes everything down. She wants to be a filmmaker, so she asks about his producing credits.

“Did you see any of those films?”

She doesn’t want to say no, but he lets her off the hook.

“It’s cool,” he says. “I haven’t seen them either.”

He explains how, as a producer, he’s “not really involved in the production, per se.” He explains how he can spot talent, which is why he took this meeting with her, and how he likes to “put artists together with artist.”

“Like an agent?”

“That’s one way to see it,” he says. “But I see it as an art, just like my painting, my sculpting, my photography, and my singing.”

She’s wowed by all the art this one man can produce. She asks if there are any opportunities to work together.

“It’s possible,” he says. “There are some projects and a lot of possibilities.”

Kids (A San Fernando Valley Redux, 2015)

Four teenagers killing time on a summer afternoon.

The two guys are drinking coffee. The two women are drinking iced tea.

They’re talking about parties, or the lack of them. They’re talking about their friend, who is “totally screwed.”

Talk turns to drivers license photos. They pass around IDs, laugh. One of the women notices that one of the guys has a pot card.

“Is this for real?” she asks.

“Of course.”

“Can you get me some?”

“Sure.”

They talk edibles for a few minutes, then the guy with the card leaves.

About ten minutes later, the guy returns with a pharmacy bag. He gives it to his friend, she gives him the cash.

The group hangs for another ten minutes. Then they say their goodbyes.

They leave, but the bag is still on the table.

A busboy clears the table.

The woman returns.

“Shit! Where’s my…?”

“I think the busboy took it,” I say.

A look of horror. She bolts.

A lesson in business from a guy who trusted the wrong Greek

The coffee bar is nearly empty, except for a man and a woman drinking espressos.

He’s telling her about his business. Turns out he had a “brilliant idea,” so he hired these computer programmers.

“They’re all Russian,” he explains.

“Russian? Bad idea.”

“I know,” he says. “But the company is run by a Greek guy from Orange County, so I overlooked the Russian thing.”

Now, he starts talking about how the tech they built didn’t scale.

“It was perfect with fifty users, but with 10,000 users it breaks.”

“Nightmare,” she says.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Now, he explains how he went through a “year of hell” with his Russian programmers and how the Greek from Orange County was born with a “silver spoon stuck up is ass,” so whenever he complained about the Russians, the guy was like, “…and this is my problem, how?”

Again, he reminds her that he is “not rich,” despite the fact that he has a million dollars of his own money tied up in this idea, which he upgrades from “brilliant” to “revolutionary.”

But he has another problem. The first lawyer he hired to write the contract was a “moron” and left out a bunch of stuff. The second lawyer he hired was “lazy.” So he explains how he finally found his third lawyer, who is “a killer,” but who costs him $100,000 a month.

“And I am not rich!” he reminds her.

“But you’re paying him each month?”

“Of course! I have to.”

And now, he explains how the Greek in Orange County says his Russian developers did a great job and how he’s demanding final payment, and how he said “no fucking way am I paying you assholes the rest of the money.”

So the Greek sued him. And his lawyer told him to hire a developer from Seattle — “not a Russian” — to audit the work.

“They screwed up everything!” he says. “The guy in Seattle used to work for Microsoft, so he knows what he’s talking about.”

“Everything was wrong?”

“Not one single thing was right,” he says. “So they’re suing me and I’m countersuing, and I’m in hell, and it’s costing me a fortune, and I am not rich.”

“That’s terrible,” she says.

“Yes. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I do something myself, it’s perfect. Seriously, it’s amazing. But as soon as I bring on other people, it always turns to shit.”

She nods sympathetically. He changes the subject.

“So listen,” he says. “Let’s talk about you coming to work for me.”

 

Don’t I know you?

This morning, while walking the dog, I waved to a passing car. I thought the driver was my neighbor. The driver waived back, and as she drove by me, she shouted out the window, “Looking good, Ted!”

Obviously, she got the wrong guy. But here’s hoping the magic of social media will get that message to Ted. If you’re out there, buddy, a woman driving a Blue Prius thinks you are “looking good.”