July 07, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
Dear Gato,
I”ll tell you some more about Armando Rhon, “greatest realtor in Mexico””Baja California, that is”when I have time. Unfortunately, I have a feeling he and I will be seeing a lot more of each other.
It’s a shame it has to be in court. Even worse, it’s in a Mexicali court.
I need to get something off my chest. I”m on the rebound from a strange encounter and I don”t know what to do with myself. After said encounter in a trailer on a movie set, I calmed myself down by driving home at top speed in the AMG”an experience not unlike Space Invaders, especially at night. If another car is coming down the hill as fast as you”re coming up, good luck to them. The onus is on them. It is, I believe, harder to redirect a car moving uphill than one moving down. It was man-or-mouse time. Kamikaze time.
You know how steep and snaky those Hollywood Hills roads are? Well, all I ask is that you let me get to the top of the street before you even think about emerging from your driveway. I”ll be gone so fast, the wait won”t be noticeable. Six, seven seconds”that’s what I”ve got it down to. The entire street, bottom to top: six to seven seconds. Including unexpected bobs and feints, as incoming obstacles”wayward trash bins; cats and dogs”come out of nowhere. I drive the Merc the way Miles Davis played the trumpet. Maybe there’s a reason we both mostly play alone.
It’s like the “big boat in the harbor” theory, upon which I sometimes reflect, the issue as to who has right of way when you”re in a hurry driving a residential street with room for only one vehicle. I”ll tell you the theory right now: It’s a motto my baby sis and I still chuckle about, having heard it straight up”as children”who still, young though we may have been, realized we were in the presence of greatness when we heard it.
Herewith is a theory of life applicable to all those in a bind and with little or no time to spare…
Says the Fat Cat on the yacht, with the seersucker Bermudas, bleached red polo shirt, Cuban cigar in one hand and the other hand casually manning the helm, a master of the universe and, as such, a natural sailor just as he’s a natural in the forex markets…
Says the Fat Cat on the yacht, entering the harbor of Nantucket Sound, on this American holy day, the Fourth of July, entering a sea lane fraught with WASPish etiquette, an island where good form and understatement hold sway along with low-key East Coast power…a bay where he doesn”t truly belong, being a brash opportunist and a beneficiary of the 80s bull markets…
Says the Fat Cat, somewhat irritated by the claustrophobic tenor of good breeding onboard, annoyed by his invitees who accepted the invitation upon his”the biggest”boat on the Sound and now are studiously ignoring him. Whom he”d love nothing more than to shock…by waving around a kilo bag of yayo, by getting down with a planeload of party girls courtesy of Platinum Lace’s IVIP Concierge Service (the I is for “International”)…
Says the Fat Cat, these thoughts filling his mind, straining hard not to neck his Scotch, eager to get off his own damn boat, too”when a confusion animates his guests, some kind of a surprise that abruptly has his guests on their legs, shouting, gesticulating”is it some kind of an emergency? Fuck it, he thinks”and on glides the Fat Cat, on into the Sound, oblivious and dismissive of whatever it is that caused the sudden animation.
On he glides, at a fair enough clip (“perhaps a little quick?” someone suggests), considering that he’s less than a mile from shore…when a breathless guest, a teenage mummy’s boy followed by his yummy mummy, leaps from bow to helm”having seen whatever fix, whatever grand fiasco, into which they were sailing. And the boy shouts, “There’s a dinghy up ahead. Right in front!””whereupon the panic mounts.
My sister and I lean out to view the situation for ourselves. And the situation is as described: A tiny dinghy, no outboard, just some oars, is struggling vainly against the offshore breeze, attempting desperately to remove itself from our path, to get the hell out of the way of the largest yacht Massachusetts has seen this year. The tiny dinghy has failed in these attempts and, as we bear in on the little thing”one hundred and fifty feet of aluminum that we are”we notice it holds a young boy and a man trying to teach the boy some tricks and definitely not succeeding. They both are out of their depth.
