Last Weekend - Part One

We still haven’t figured out what that story I was going to post is, chalk it up to old age. The following will have to suffice.

Anyway, we did have a lovely weekend. Friday night we had dinner with a couple of old friends whom we haven’t seen in quite some time. We had a great dinner at a local bistro which is immediately downstairs from our place, which is altogether way too convenient if you know what I mean. After dinner, we adjourned back upstairs to get caught up on everyone’s life, drank wine, and even had a civilized political discussion, which I enjoyed because it is such a rare thing these days. After several bottles of wine we decided that it was best to call it an evening, I think it was around one am.

One of these friends gave me my first real opportunity in my previous corporate life, and I will be forever grateful. He’s a great friend, and I’m going to make sure we keep in touch.

Saturday, we had to get up way too early to be out of the house by 9:00 am for our trip to LA. We live in San Diego; LA’s a two hour drive north or if you drive like me 90 minutes. We arrived at the Voldemoors' around 11:30 am (we had to stop at McDucks in San Clemente as I was starving – it’s Pavlovian – we always stop there), it’s hugs and kisses all around and we were lucky enough to get a parking space right in front of their house. It’s Manhattan Beach and parking is more of a problem than in Little Italy.

La and Lady Voldemoor had an appointment for a manny/peddy, and the Lord informed me that he had committed to a neighbor to move some furniture, but it should only take a few minutes. Great. He said, that because I was wearing such a nice shirt, I really didn’t have to do any heavy lifting. Great! So the girls go off, and we walk to the neighbors, the Lord knocks and knocks on the door, a huge barking sound emanating from behind the door. I had met this dog before, so I wasn’t nervous. Not that I’m nervous around dogs, but… well, you just never know do you? So his neighbor opens the front door after what seemed a long time and we make the introductions and as we enter the home, “J” tells me to be careful as the dog jumps – OK. So whilst I’m guarding my upper torso against a possible 85 pound projectile, the dog “Nef” lunges like a torpedo out of German U-Boat right into my groin! The effect was instantaneous and painful.

OOOF! Doubling over as the word escaped my mouth, not so much a conscious articulation; as air being forced out my body, past the surprised vocal cords, and tongue and lips (equally surprised and not in position to make cogent vocalizations).

J says, “Oh man, I’m really sorry. Nef NO!”

Unnggh, No worries.

I managed to quickly recover, and we moved to the upstairs back portion of the duplex to inspect the furniture. Two large sofas, an armoire and what looked like an architectural drawing file cabinet. Each piece looked to be about a thousand pounds a piece. It reminded me of our last home; we had a hide a bed in the “library” and an upright grand piano in the living room. There was no way, we wanted to move either of those pieces so we included them in the counter offer and they went for it!

J is a great guy by the way, although he talks like Jack Kerouac’s prose in Subterranean, rapidly with no punctuation and no paragraphs.

As I had the great shirt, I didn’t have to lift anything but feeling a little guilty about just standing around I took the pillows off the couches and brought them down to the garage to await their compadres. It was at this time I noticed the staircase leading off a ninety degree angle from the front door, it’s about 32” wide and rises steeply at about a fifteen degree angle, and I’m thinking – How the hell are they going to get the stuff down the stairs? Not to mention the immediate left turn at the bottom of the stairs into a hallway about 36” wide into a 30" wide door about 2 feet from the left turn.

One couch was about 8 feet long and just cumbersome, it had to be tilted on its side and hung over the entranceway landing about four feet just to get the ass end out of the house, turned again and made the slow trip down the staircase. Unfortunately, once at the landing they couldn’t fit the couch through the garage’s rear entrance. So a little later they had to carry it around the block and bring it through the garage front entrance. The other couch was a modern version of a hide a bed, I say modern because it had wheels and the bed didn’t pop out from within the couch, rather it had a mechanism where the back of the couch folded backwards to make the bed, pretty clever but problematic when you’re trying to move it as the back kept want to “lay down”. The couch managed to behave on the way down the staircase, but once they made the landing it decided it was nap time, and whoosh the back folded outwards and locked in place. We conferred a minute, and decided it was best to bring the couch into the living room of the front duplex; once it was placed we could not figure out how to get the back in its upright position again. We pulled, we tugged, we looked underneath, we stood up and scratched our heads…

This went on for about ten minutes.

Finally, we noticed that we’d been pulling on the front of the couch NOT the back. We gave the back a quick pull and up she went.

Thankfully, J said we didn’t have to move the armoire that day. This was a good thing because they both had lost about 10 pounds of water. So we all had a beer to replenish our bodily fluids. After making short shrift of the beers the Lord and I departed to meet up with the girls for lunch. We’d be seeing J later that evening at the grand soiree at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

We had lunch at a lively Tapas Restaurant at Hermosa Beach Pier. Now if you’re familiar with that neck of the woods, but haven’t been there in… let’s say 20 years, I can tell you it’s changed A LOT. The first thing that you notice is that the road has been closed at Highland and Pier, now it is an esplanade of some sort. There are some of the originals still there though, The Lighthouse is still there, but it looks a bit more upscale than when La and I used to go there, the church pews are gone replaced by what appears to be belly bars. I’m not sure because the Neanderthal bouncer wouldn’t let me get that close of a look, that’s new too. There are many, many bars that cater to the 20 something crowd. The Poopdeck is still there, with the same clients from way back when, although they’ve aged a bit. They’ve made quite a bit of improvements to the pier itself, it’s much nicer today than when we used to hang out there. Although, the crowd hasn’t changed much, they’ve just more disposable income.

On the east side of Highland on Pier the Either Or Bookstore is gone, replaced by colorful little boutiques. It makes me a little melancholy as that was one of the best bookstores in LA County, reminiscent of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore. It was the Either Or that introduced me to Kerouac, Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda. There was also a dive Mexican restaurant there called El Yaqui (or El Yucchee) that we used to frequent, everything they served was under a quarter inch of grease, but it was cheap!

We finished our lunch with just enough time to spare to get La to her facial appointment.

The Lord, Lady and I went back to their place to chill a bit before getting ready for the big event.

I’m not sure how but the day seemed to get away from us, after we picked up La from the facialist it seemed there was very little time to get ready before the Limo arrived. So we rushed around and managed to make the 4:30 arrival time of our chariot with a few minutes to spare. Everyone looked all sparkly and shiny; it’s fun to get dressed up sometimes. “R” another neighbor of the Lord and Lady met us at the house, an altogether nice guy who’s a partner in a retail toy business; followed a short while later by J. We piled into the limo and we were off for our grand event.

to be continued...