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sushi happy hour
Monday, September 20 1999
Kim and I made plans during the day to go out to some sort of happy hour at the end of the working day. She picked me up at 6:00pm wearing a brand new grey "runwayesque" dress. Much like in the case of the manufacture of sausage, I prefer not to know the details that enter into the decisions women make to buy new clothes. It was a nice dress though [and it only cost $12].
As always with dates with Kim, our plans ended up taking us to a sushi bar. We found ourselves driving to a happy hour then taking place at Sushi on the Rock, Kim's favourite sushi bar in La Jolla. We actually showed up a minute too late for happy hour, but Kim went beyond the "em.. excuse me" manager to the owner and we had our way. Kim knows all the fun little rituals one can initiate at a sushi bar, like having one of the chefs join you in the drinking of sake. Kampai! It's rare that I discover any American fads at this late stage in my life that are genuinely cool, the kind of cool that can withstand the test of time, but sushi has to be one of them. What with it being happy hour, shit, it was cheap too! Double kampai! I had my new little Psion palmtop with me, and occasionally I'd whip it out and show Kim some interesting Excel spreadsheets I'd stored on it. I'm still trying to figure out how the good folks at Psion managed to cram an entire multitasking operating system and an improved knock-off of Microsoft Office into only 10 megabytes of ROM.
On the way home we stopped at a Pacific Beach Blockbuster to pick up a copy of one of Kim's favourite documentaries,
Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam. It's by that master of the $20,000 movie, Nick Broomfield, the same guy who came up with the obscenely over-hyped Kurt and Courtney. Watching the Heidi Fleiss documentary, I realized what Nick Broomfield's real talent is: he can find the worst villains of any story and get them to spill their guts on camera. With such people, there's never any need for rebuttal or second opinion; they're pompous windbags who gladly dispatch their reputations over the course of many paragraphs of dialogue. With Kurt and Courtney, the most memorable villain of this sort was Courtney Love's own evil father. But in the Heidi Fleiss documentary, there were more self-defaming villains than I can possibly remember. The couple I recall offhand include Heidi's elderly backstabbing boyfriend Ivan as well as Daryl Gates (erstwhile LA Chief of Police and hero to angry white men nationwide).
The underlying reality that makes this documentary so fascinating is that, beneath the orderly façade of contemporary urban American culture there exists a feudal, primate-urge-driven structure that includes both a male component and a female component. The male component in this case was the high-rolling world of entertainment, politics, corruption and organized crime. Heidi Fleiss seemed to represent the pinnacle of a well-honed parallel female political structure, one that served the sexual needs of the men while systematically exploiting their access to power and money. These political structures aren't documented in any official documents and their bylaws cannot be found in charters or constitutions. It's a primitive world that exists outside of the law, where relationships with the operatives of the law are more complex than those between pieces on a chessboard. In this world, you're not necessarily in trouble just because people know you're committing crimes, but you have to be careful what moves you make and you must never allow yourself to fall into a losing streak. Most of the criminals in this world form grudging host-parasite relationships with the State (as represented by the local police). They divulge enough information (or pay off enough bribe money) to keep the State's involvement to a minimum. It's only when the criminal refuses to support these blue-coated parasites that she finds herself in any real trouble. In this case it appears that poor Heidi Fleiss did the admirable thing, thumbing her nose at the law while she ran her gleeful group of call girls. But because she wasn't playing by the rules and informing on her customers, the State felt it had to hold her up as an example. She ended up receiving three years in the slammer.
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