Latterati’s perk: They make work look easy
It’s 2 p.m. on a weekday, when people are supposed to be working. Instead, the chattering masses are lazing over lattes, late lunch and even later breakfast.
The insanely popular Toast is jammed. I can’t park anywhere near Lulu’s.
This being Los Angeles, we know that some of the latterati are allegedly working -- the flip-flopped screenwriters and Hollywood deal-makers with their Ray-Bans and beeping cells. But work isn’t supposed to look so much like vacation.
I’ve always fantasized about getting out of the car to ask these people who they are, and whether I can have their job. Today is the day.
I stop at Kings Road Cafe on Beverly because there’s a parking space half a block away, and before I get to the front door, a waiter is calling my name. It’s Johnny Moezzi, a guitarist I met while doing a column about blues singer Mickey Champion.
“I thought the same thing when I started here,” Moezzi says. “What do these people do for a living?”
The red-haired woman is a singer, he tells me. The two guys leaving are in the music recording business. Actors and screenwriters are in and out all day.
“There’s a saying in L.A. that musicians are waiters by day and actors are waiters by night,” Moezzi says. “I think it’s true.”
The singer’s name is Heather Donaldson, and her Chihuahua, Higgins, is on her lap as she relaxes with a cup of black coffee. Who’s her muse? Billie Holiday, Donaldson says, telling me that I should come see her at the Dresden, where she starts her set at 11 p.m.
I ask if she ever heard that Frank Sinatra says he picked up some phrasing ideas from Holiday, and this gets us started on how rare a thing it is for a singer to create something that lasts -- something that’s distinctive, even if it’s derivative.
“I think it’s about telling a story,” Donaldson says, and each night, maybe a mood or a distant memory gives her an expression that wasn’t there the night before.
So what about her fellow diners, I ask, taking a look around. That guy with the porkpie hat -- musician?
“Musician or poser,” she says. I decide to find out which.
Patrick Melcher has black sneakers, tight jeans on bird legs, cool shades and the brim. But he’s neither musician nor poser.
“Professional skateboarder,” he says.
Long hours? I ask.
“I don’t work Monday through Friday,” he says, telling me he hangs out at different restaurants and finishes up at his favorite bars, then sleeps in until noon.
“I don’t own a stove or a refrigerator,” he says, so there’s no temptation to do any housework or shopping.
He’s sitting with Anna Tabakman, whom he met at a skate park in Houston. Now she’s at USC and wants to be a 1st Amendment lawyer. I could be wrong, but I don’t recall law students hooking up with pro skateboarders back in my day. But then, that was Northern California.
“I don’t really compete anymore,” Melcher tells me.
This is sounding better by the minute.
“Then what do you do?”
“I don’t have any obligations at all,” he says.
At 30, he’s living my dream. I ask Melcher what he thinks about my chances of going pro, and he laughs at me.
If Melcher doesn’t compete, how does he cover all his meals and the rent on his Hollywood bungalow?
“I’ve made it to the point where I can live off my name,” he says. “Michael Jordan doesn’t have to get out of bed in the morning.”
Death, a skateboard company, markets a board with Melcher’s name on it, and he also pushes clothes, shoes and sunglasses. If the mood strikes, he might do a photo shoot or make a public appearance on a Saturday or Sunday.
Or maybe not.
I don’t care what he says, I’m buying a skateboard.
At the table next to Heather Donaldson, two unemployed producers named Jennifer and Adele are working through a crisis. Adele’s old boyfriend, his heart broken, has made e-mail contact with the guy she’s dating.
I tell Adele he sounds like stalker material.
“I didn’t even think he liked me that much,” she says.
“After a year of dating,” Jennifer adds, “he never said I love you.”
And now he’s upset that Adele won’t go to a wedding with him.
It sounds like a Ben Stiller movie to me. My advice, I tell the producers, is to start writing the script.
Inside the cafe, semi-retired real estate agent Ron New asks if he can help round up interview subjects for me. “I’m good at approaching people,” he says, and besides, he’s got nothing else to do.
Sure, I tell him, and he starts making the rounds as I follow waiter Kelly Boden, a former rock ‘n’ roller, back outside. Stanley Richer, a 20-year-old mortgage broker who took the day off, is having lunch with two buddies visiting from Brooklyn. They look like the cast of HBO’s “Entourage,” but I don’t get too far into their story before my assistant, New, tells me he’s made a connection.
“Those three guys are closing a movie deal,” New says.
I stroll into the cafe and meet actor Jaime Gomez, a regular on the TV show “Nash Bridges.” He’s been called here by director Gary Ambrosia and writer-producer-actor Michel Laurin, who thought he might be right for a role in an independent movie called “Foreign Policy.”
And?
“We just shook on a deal,” Gomez says.
No agents, managers and lawyers? A cup of coffee and it’s done?
Sometimes it’s easy, says Laurin, who tells me he was a six-time martial arts world champion before getting into this business.
“I succeeded in martial arts because I loved it,” he says, “and I’m succeeding at movies because I love this too.”
What’s not to love?
It’s a warm, summery day and all the normal people are driving trucks, mowing lawns, cleaning hotel rooms, selling insurance and pouring concrete.
The pro skateboarder is gone now, and the jazz singer too. An independent producer has taken over her table. A regular customer who says he’s an unemployed journalist (lot of that going around) is bumming cigarettes.
They’re the characters in a day’s drama, their lives intersecting in a city with a million definitions of work, success, happiness.
Who, in L.A. of all places, would deny my dream of a senior circuit in professional skateboarding?
