flights

Years ago, a few months after I moved west for the first time – and traveled west for the first time actually – to be with the girl I thought at the time was my true love, I happened to spend my first Christmas alone.

She dumped me for her ex-boyfriend weeks after I moved. It was a painful but essential lesson, but it’s an old story now, and I’m over it.

The story I’m trying to tell right now is about Christmas.

I had just moved from New York City to Tempe, Arizona. I was broke, but even if I had had the money for a plane ticket, I was not in a festive state of mind.

So I borrowed a little camping gear and planned a trek into the Chiricahua mountains. I spent a very cold Christmas alone there. It was so cold, my bottles of drinking water froze inside my backpack, inside my tent. The sun set at 5:30, and I lay sleepless in the dark for hours. It snowed while I slept, and I woke to find a silent and magically transformed world.

Last Christmas, I found myself alone in sweltering Bangkok.

My first and last Christmases alone. One cold, one hot. Despite the unforgettable settings, I felt bereft and alone.

Last night I went to see Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, a film about – among other things – being alone. It follows a collection of sad characters, all sadly in love with people they can’t have.

Apparently even the Chinese director understands that nothing deepens one’s loneliness like Christmas. The holidays come and go in the movie, year after year, and characters who can’t be with the ones they love, or manage to love the ones they’re with, settle for whatever companionship they can find, because – as one explains it – people need a little more warmth than usual at Christmas.

Yesterday I went to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose with L. In the movie, 3am has special significance as the devil’s hour. Apparently, it’s an inversion of 3pm, the “miracle hour”, when Jesus is said to have been crucified. All the scariest stuff in the movie happens at 3am. Characters wake up alone in their dark homes at that exact hour, night after night. They hear strange noises, see awful things, and by the end of the the movie, you pretty much hate 3am.

After the movie, I met up with my buddies “Hayes” and B**** for drinks and a night out among hook-up-hungry North Beach crowds. We started at Herbivore for dinner, where I had a delicious vegetarian schwarma and a couple pints of Sierra Nevada.

We moved on to a bar called Amante. I switched to whiskey – Jamison’s – which the bartender would not serve on the rocks. I guess I’m uncouth. But jeez, it’s not like we’re talking about a twelve-year-old cask aged single malt.

Hayes connected with a couple of his buddies at Amante and introduced them to Brett and me, describing them as “pros”. Their sport, such as it is, is collecting phone numbers from women. They’re goal is quantity more than anything else. One of them, “Joe”, demonstrated one of the standard opening gambits of his “game” to me, as follows:

I go up to a girl and I say, can I get your opinion on something? If your girlfriend makes out with another girl, is it cheating?

What was a little skeevey (and not immediately clear) to me about this demonstration was that he was role playing. I was the girl. After a pause, I said “um…that’s pretty good.” This was apparently close enough to something an erstwhile target might say, so he replied, “oh, so you don’t think it’s cheating, eh? You’re kind of a bad girl, aren’t you?” He was pretending to come on to me, and it was skeevey. I wasn’t skeeved out in a homophobic way. I was just amazed that there was a girl in the world who would be hooked by this.

But I guess it doesn’t matter how cheesy a car salesman is, if you’re there at the dealership and determined to buy a car.

Joe demonstrated a couple more of these gambits. Unfortunately they’ve slipped away from me, but the main objective of these openings is several-pronged (pardon the pun). The first is to initiate a conversation. For this, a question obviously works much better than a statement, and a request for an opinion (no matter how inane the topic, apparently) suggests one party’s genuine interest in getting to know the other. The second objective is to get a quick read on one’s chances of “scoring” with (i.e. getting laid by) the targeted party. That explains the nature of the question; the answer to which, presumably, will provide some indication of the targeted party’s general willingness to play (and more specifically, level of inebriation, promiscuity, etc.). The third objective, assuming the targeted party is part of a group, is to spark a lively debate among the group and thereby generate opportunities to toss out witty bon mots, etc. etc.

It’s not entirely unclever, really, and it’s certainly effective. I watched the guy and his friend “Sammy” work their way through several unsuspecting targets. I watched them go from first contact to giggly arm-around-the-waist chumminess several times in the course of the night, in a matter of minutes each time.

From Amante, we went to a place called Kells. Presumably (from the name) an Irish bar, but unrecognizable as such. It was a pretty standard loud, crowded pick-up bar. American Pie was blaring when we walked in, followed by Let’s Go Crazy and Sweet Child of Mine.

The highlight of my night, looking back on it, was either the very kind “you’re hella cute” compliment some girl felt compelled to shout into my face as she squeezed past me through the crowd, or the thoughtful embrace I received from a profusely sweaty Japanese girl who descended from her perch on the bar to dance with the group of us for a few minutes.

Anyway, that was basically enough for me to call it a night. It was 1:30, and I phoned L. She was still awake and a little freaked out at the thought of 3am (and so was I, to be honest). So I made my way over to her place to keep her company through the devil’s hour.

It passed without incident, and I woke up to one of the sunniest mornings we’ve seen here in months.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working in LA. My hotel, the LAX Plaza, is across the street from our office, and our office is across the street from the client. So I walk to work, walk to client meetings. I can’t get over how bizarre that feels in LA. Of course I still rent a car, because after work, the Culver City area is just a strip mall ghetto.

They’re renovating the LAX Plaza one-room-at-a-time, so our office manager in LA told me I had to ask for a “new” room. She also told me not to eat in the hotel restaurant or hang out in the hotel bar.

The place is a far cry from some of the places I’ve been lucky to stay in over the past year, so I’ve put together the following list of things the LAX Plaza does not give me for $99 a night…

10. Elevators that tell you what floor they’re on
9. Cable television (except, alternately, CNN or Discovery)
8. Internet access
7. An alarm clock
6. A “Do Not Disturb” card for the door
5. A mini bar
4. Bath slash shower gel
3. Pillows that don’t smell like “head”
2. A blanket without cigarette holes in it
1. That clean feeling

And one old, relevant Top Ten list from the Late Show:

Top Ten Things You Don’t Want To Hear From A Guy In A Hotel

10. “The desk clerk is nuts, so whatever room number she gives you, add three.”
9. “I wrote you a note about halfway through your roll of toilet paper.”
8. “Meet me in the whirlpool in twenty minutes.”
7. “If you want a bellhop, press ‘1′ on your phone; If you want a hooker, press ‘2.’”
6. “Ring this bell again, I’ll burn your luggage.”
5. “Hey, could you go over to the Ramada and swipe us some towels?”
4. “You know, every room has a hair dryer — How’s that for ritzy?”
3. “Are you the bastard that took my gin out of the minibar?”
2. “Wanna see the pictures I took of you sleeping?”
1. “Do you mind sharing your room with a monkey?”

Next time I’m staying here. It’s hardly luxury, but it’s next door.