My Dinner With Nicholas
My pal Roy the bassist and his gorgeous wife Linda had many problems, the greatest being their refusal to communicate. Roy once invited me over for dinner on the same night Linda had made plans for them to go out with their new friend, an astonishingly handsome actor who'd once had a popular TV series. I'll call him Nicholas. My arrival touched off a violent squabble, my two friends each blaming the other for the screw-up. I offered to leave, but neither found that acceptable. The solution, they said, was for all of us to have dinner together. I agreed. Nicholas, however, unexpectedly showed up with two of his friends, a producer at a major studio and a senior editor from a famous trade magazine. They'd just attended a wake for a friend who'd dropped dead at 35 two days before, the second such tragedy they'd endured that year.
This was the cast: a raggedy, marginalized writer; an unhappy married couple trying to break into the Business; and three Players who'd already made it. The setting was a Chinese restaurant in West Hollywood. Roy and I went in my car and Nicholas drove Linda and his friends in his $100,000 BMW, which was fitted with a voice-activated, hands-off car phone, he informed me before I asked. When they walked into the restaurant, Linda was in front, rolling her eyes and mouthing silent obscenities at the other three behind her. She later told me that in the twenty-minute ride from their house, nobody said a single word.
My experience as an interviewer had honed my schmoozing skills, so I led where I could, put at ease where I could, and let myself be ignored where I could. Both the editor and the producer were conversational Black Holes; everything I said to them was sucked up and disappeared without a trace. They sat and stared at me in silence most of the time. I would’ve been happy to just sit and stare, too. We could’ve had a staring contest like back in elementary school, where the winner got to punch the loser on the arm: "You blinked!" Bam. Linda, however, needed to be distracted by constant chatter, so for her sake I kept up my monologue. Afraid I was running out of material, I asked the three Hollywooders about their dead friend.
"He was the rudest, most self-centered person I ever met, but so lovable," sighed the editor.
"He was always talking, never listening, but just the sweetest guy," recalled Nicholas.
"When his wife found him on the kitchen floor, she thought it was just one of his practical jokes," related the producer.
I could just imagine: "Look, honey, I'm dead! Ha-ha! Gotcha again! Hey, what the-- Ow! My heart! Ook! Umph! Gaaaaah..." Clunk.
"Aw, come on, sweetie. Quit fooling around. Honey? Poopykins?"
We eventually settled on the topic of films and television, which allowed everyone to babble on with relief while I took a breather. Nicholas was obviously infatuated with the lovely Linda, so much so that he lost control at one point. Somehow the two other Hollywooders got on the topic of an ancient Chinese military hero called General Tripod because of his purported three-foot Schwanz. Nicholas began whinnying and stomping his foot, screaming, "Could you imagine if he was walking down the street and saw a pretty girl?"
He leaped up in the middle of this crowded restaurant full of grim-faced, elderly Chinese, ran about fifteen feet from the table, turned around, pointed his right leg straight out in front of him at waist level, and hopped back to us on one foot, waving his arms and yelling, "Aaargh! Aaah! Eeyaa!" He sat back down, panting but completely at ease.
Without missing a beat after this appalling spectacle, the producer mentioned that Nicholas had recently made several guest appearances on a prime-time series that I loved. I asked Nicholas which character he'd played. He ignored me. I asked again, more loudly. He pulled his head down into his shoulders, readjusting his grip on his beer bottle. I tried a third time. He squinted his eyes, clamped his lips shut, and leaned forward as if into a gale-force wind. I began asking him over and over, like a parrot: "So whodja play? So whodja play? So whodja play?" He never answered my question, and I ceased to exist for everyone at the table until I stopped pestering him.
Later, I spoke with the producer about a famous writer/director, whom we both despised. I said, "He looks like a Punch puppet. He looks like a troglodyte," and the editor shocked herself by laughing. She examined me closely, trying to see my face under my beard and glasses. Nicholas interrupted from across the table, "Excuse me. The word is troglyte." He winced at me in commiseration. I didn't know what to say, so I told him I was pretty sure it was troglodyte.
"No." He shook his head. "You're talking about a cave dweller?"
I nodded.
"A spelunker?"
Oops. "Uh... maybe not," I stammered.
He scooted forward in his seat, dipping his head in gracious apology. "The word you're trying to think of is troglyte. My economics professor used it all the time."
There was a cesura, uncomfortable for all, so in desperation I said, "Actually, a Trog Light is a low-calorie Norwegian beer." Nicholas glared at me for a full three seconds, then threw back his head and went, "Ah-HAAaa. HAAaa. HAAaa," at the ceiling. Everyone else laughed, and I stole a glance at Linda, who gazed at me with a cocked eyebrow and her ferocious little kitty-cat smile. I knew she was thinking, "You're the coolest guy at this table." She may also have been comparing my tattered K-Mart velcro watchstrap to Nicholas's gold Rollie and thinking, "Too damn bad."
When it was time to leave, Nicholas smashed my hand in his weight-lifter's grip. "Hope to see you again," he lied. I (silently) thanked him for some great material. I always thought my buddies Roy and Linda were too easily star struck. Nicholas was just slumming when he accepted their invitation to dinner, and soon he'd go back to his real friends. When I'd asked him his life's ambition, he said, "I wanna f*ck Winona Ryder!" She had a great rack.
"What's a rack?" I asked, since even that late in life I’d never heard the term.
He hunched over, cupped his hands in front of his chest, and chuffed out the word, "T*ts."
To achieve his pronunciation, you have to clench your teeth, open your lips, pull the corners of your mouth down, tuck your chin into your neck, raise your eyebrows as high as you can, and say it with lots of saliva.
Then wipe your chin, something Nicholas didn't to do.
