Tag: newportbeach

L’apres midi d’un dorque

Idling at Kéan with Mike (used to have a big black beard Mike) today, I saw a stream of Newport Beach stereotypes including:

  • 85-year-old man with perfectly trimmed white beard parking a brand new $200,000 200mph Porsche Turbo sports car, which I then observed to have an automatic transmission
  • A young woman of classic magazine cover head-turning beauty accompanied by two rich and tough-looking beefy older guys. The three of them were having a business meeting, no doubt about her career. They toasted one another with Bubble-Up. The two guys looked serious the way Mafia guys look serious. She looked depressed, which in someone with her looks comes out as a pouty, puppyish yearning look. She smiled once, revealing 47 very bright white teeth.
  • This woman’s Ghost of Newport Past showed up, too: a 14-year-old future model, all dressed up in fluffy sweater and tight jeans and slightly-too-grownup heels. Same perfect model face. Her mother was identical and 35, with a very hard and focused look to her.
  • An assortment of very large expensive cars with grilles on the front that looked like BIG MONSTER FANG TEETH MOUTHS. Each of these cars was larger than the others. Several very large diesel trucks driven by small, finely-built men in pressed jeans are included in this category.
  • One 80something gentleman all covered in liver spots and combover who was trying to guide in his friend Mike to the place. He kept getting the names of things wrong, and telling Mike that he wanted to meet him at Plums but they had an hour wait “even after I told them who you ARE”. There were at least five of these calls. Two other people showed up to sit with Liver Spots but Mike never showed. His dog, an ancient cocker spaniel named Annie, was doing about as well as he was and kept walking into things like brick walls and trees and then harrumphing.
  • An outrrrrrageously Italian employee of Kéan. This guy was maybe 30 and looked a lot like Antonio Banderas. He was wearing the kind of lacy, frilly shirt that only guys from the Mediterranean can wear. He was slightly sweaty and had a huge 500,000 watt grin and whooshy airy hair that he held back with a headband. I don’t know how he carried it off, but he was every housewife’s dream European waiter/lover. Jean-Luc!

You’d best be movin’ on.

I went over to Newport Center to the doctor to get fluids removed for the scienticians. On the way there I saw a car pull on to Coast Highway in front of me. Beat-up old early 80s Buick or something, one of those huge two-door American mistakes. There were a couple of pieces of furniture haphazardly roped to the roof and a frazzled looking couple of people inside. Tramp Family. They radiated disorganization, poverty, and sadness.

I thought as they went by that they were unusual for the shininess of that part of town. Almost anywhere else in America you wouldn’t even notice them unless the furniture fell off, but they were in the heart of the Wealth Star.

Went in, got poked with a needle, peed in a cup. As I left I saw that two Newport cop cars had pulled them over and they were doing the shame squat on the curb while an officer talked to them. Police around here don’t miss much.

Seeing pharmaceutical reps always reminds me how fucked-up that part of medicine is. I put chemicals into my face every day that are aggressively marketed to physicians by stewardessy young women with too much makeup on.