L.A. STORIES : He Can Already Taste Success

I have reason to be proud of myself. I’ve been accepting and enjoying many lunch dates lately.

For most of my adult life I have found this seemingly banal activity excruciating. An invitation to dine (often backed up by an expense account) at some pleasant eatery sometime around noon would fill me with dread. I’ve sat in many an upscale trattoria, forcing myself to make small talk over penne alla funghi, completely at a loss as to what I was doing there and what was expected of me.

Of course, when I say lunch, I don’t mean having lunch, the gastronomic event. My be^te noir was doing lunch. And, let’s face it, in a town where doing lunch is elevated to a sacred institution, my alienation from the process amounted to a serious handicap.

Were it some simple anxiety, such as fear of public speaking, therapy could have handled it. Some systematic desensitization would be in order. First learn to say “Let’s do lunch” without wigging out. Then try to simply walk into a trendy restaurant during the afternoon and walk out, and so on, until I finally reached a functional lunch state.

But my problem was no neurotic quirk. Lunch was an existential nightmare where meaning eluded me at every course. To contrast: breakfast and dinner are comprehensible. You have them with good friends or people you’ve slept with (or hope to sleep with). When these meals are over, you have more of an understanding of where you stand with the other person. You’ve probably either made up, made love, made promises or made tracks.

But that midday meal always seems to raise more questions than it answers. For instance, Vince, a TV producer, regularly takes me to lunch. He insists on it. In between chitchat and pad Thai, he’ll query me about what stories I’m working on. Sometimes he’ll take notes. He always pays and lathers on the assurances.

“Great stuff, Mark,” he’ll say as we wait for the valet. (I secretly parked around the corner to avoid the $3 fee). “I think we can really do something with this,” Vince will say. “We’ll get you aboard as an associate producer.”

After which, nothing happens. Except, a few months later, I’ll get a call and be invited to another lunch and the process begins anew. No one seems to be bothered about this arrangement. Well, Vince isn’t, anyway.

In most cases, my relationship with whomever is sitting opposite me is business-related. Yet, most of the conversation tends to be informal. So which are we over lunch? Are we friends or business associates? And really, can’t we hash out any proposals and ideas via mail and fax? If more interactivity is needed, why not use the phone?

But, sooner or later, a conversation ends with, “Well, we should have lunch sometime,” and we’re back at the bistro. After the check is paid, my lunch companion and I exchange the usual politenesses and return to our separate routines. The nagging questions are left hanging like the straw-encased bottles of Chianti above our heads.

I realized I would have to penetrate the heart of this secret if I was to get over this lunch thing. The better lunchers were getting ahead, while I was stuck in a career holding pattern. In short, I needed to plumb the very meaning of lunch.

Since I take a rather bull-by-the-horns approach to self-improvement, I began setting up appointments in the heart of lightness--1 p.m.

“I’m not really sure what I do,” says Mark, a marketing director for a company I used to work for. I quit around five years ago and for a while Mark and I kept in touch. Recently, he called out of the blue, extending a lunch invitation.

When we worked together, Mark was a video editor. Now, he talks about his recent promotion to marketing director and what that seems to mean. For one thing, he takes an awful lot of lunches.

“Used to be that at the end of the day, I could see that I had done something,” he says over black bean burgers and beer. “It was tangible, you know? Now, my job just seems to be to set up appointments and be nice to people.”

For this, Mark was given a handsome raise. As amorphous as lunch is, the marketplace obviously places quite a premium on superior lunching skills. To be sure, not everyone is so invested in the lunch process. In some parts of Asia, I’ve been told, mixing food and business is considered rude--not to mention unhealthy--and I even know many people here who refuse to do lunch and consider it a colossal waste of time. (“Lunch? Oh, pul-eeeeze.)

“That’s totally wrong,” argues George, an attorney for a motion picture studio, discussing the topic over a roasted eggplant and radicchio sandwich (with a tantalizing honey-dijon dressing). As proof of the value of lunch, George cites his friend, another attorney at the studio, who was admonished by their boss for not having enough lunches. “He told him that the key to success is in lunching and meeting people, and boy, was he right,” George says.

George pauses dramatically, taking a sip of his tropical iced tea before his summation. The attorney took the advice. “That person embarked on a very successful lunch campaign and today he is one of the youngest VPs at ICM.”

Sounds like a bit of lunch apocrypha to me, but George swears it’s true.

Steve, the person who really guided me toward my lunch epiphany, also says devaluing the middle meal is a mistake. A magazine editor whose calendar contains as many as 20-25 lunch-date entries a month, Steve calls himself the King of Lunch.

“I don’t know how many ideas I’ve worked out over lunch,” he says, as we sip cappuccinos at his favorite eatery. “Lunch can be incredibly productive if you know what it is you’re doing.”

His boss, on the other hand, skips lunch completely and as a result, says Steve, “hasn’t a clue as to what’s really going on.”

So that explains the preeminence of the midday repast among creative types and those who exploit . . . er, develop them. Agents, studio movers and shakers and magazine editors holed up in their offices need that personal input from the outside world.

With each successive lunch, I began to see a need on the part of my lunch partners to capture something of the texture of that life--the kinds of experiences unavailable to the cloistered office crowd.

Worthwhile creative ideas came out of the chaos of life--the very stuff that gets filtered out in the safe, predictable office routine. Lunch allowed them to wade into the ether of the creative world, while remaining tethered to the security of their routine. Tellingly, Kevin nervously declined my invitation to join my poker clique.

As I continued my plunge into lunching, I began to notice people were giving me offers for work that could easily have gone to others, were merit the only consideration. Referrals were up (not to mention lunch invitations). For all its ambiguity, lunch seemed to solidify some kind of secret bond.

Indeed, far from being purposeless, I began to see lunch as the meat of the workday and the four or so hours before and after merely the bun. But to go on about it in this manner would be futile. The Zen of Lunch is not something that can be conveyed via the written word. And don’t bother calling, either. If you really want to be hipped to what it’s all about, I suggest we do it in person--over lunch.