2006-07-11 - 6:03 a.m.
I was at Amelia’s Café this morning, having an exceptional lentil soup, along with the most amazing iced cappuccino available outside of Florians Café in Venice. I don’t know what it is, but I swear that I have never had coffee as good as the coffee Amelia serves.
It makes the brackish swill served by Starbucks and the Coffee Bean taste like lighter fluid. And as for the kitchen sink-water they piss at you at The Novel – well, Amelia’s coffee is like a different species of animal. Novel Coffee bears as much of a resemblance to Amelia’s coffee as a paramecium bears to Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare.
Now, I know lentil soup doesn’t sound like much to you, but trust me: This was the most brilliant ur, echt, Ubu-yummy lentil soup, stewed with small chunks of pepperoni and these little pasta ears that go by some Italian name that I was told but have long since forgotten. It was less of a soup than it was a sort of yummy, country Italian stew, and even though it was served piping hot, it was perfect food for a warm, Santa Monica midsummer afternoon.
It is a little known fact that hot soup on a hot day is a dynamite Italian combination. Followed by a slice of Amelia’s air-light almond cake, which has this thin, thin layer of sweet raspberry sauce right between the cake and the lower crust, and another iced cappuccino – oh my goodness, it was good. The rest of the day simply could not compare with it.
While I was dining, I had forgotten that today was the day right after the World Cup finals between France and Italy, which Italy won. It turns out, much to my surprise, that Amelia’s serves as a sort of “city center” for some members of Santa Monica’s Italian American community. And every couple of minutes, a car would drive past, flying a gigantic Italian flag out its rear window. The car’s driver would honk his horn, and he’d stick his head out of the window and call out, “Yaaay! Amelias!”
The kindly maternal Amelia would raise her head from the sandwich which she’d be preparing and become very excited, calling out to her husband Ralph, “Oh! That was Gino and Lucia! I LOVE them!” And then she’d rush out from behind her counter, dash out to the sidewalk and wave her arms madly, calling out, “Viva Italiana! Viva Italiana!” This happened something like eight or nine times while I was eating my soup. It was charming. You would have thought that Amelia’s was the center of Italian culture in Los Angeles! And you would have thought that the World Cup victory was as important an event as the discovery of penicillin from the way that the folks laughed and cheered and danced about.
Meanwhile, last night I decided to visit the Roosterfish, the local gay bar in Venice, for the first time in about two or three years. I didn’t see anyone who took my fancy, but it was really very enjoyable anyway. It is a funny thing: About a decade ago, I used to go to gay bars and become terribly depressed if I was unable to find anyone to talk with. Nowadays, I couldn’t really care less. I just groove with the atmosphere and enjoy the fact that I am part of the crowd.
In my dotage, I have also come to realize that if I don’t meet anyone at a place like that, it’s my own fault, for not making the first move. But on the other hand, I no longer feel the same do-or-die pressure that I felt years ago. Part of it is I suppose I have just given up on finding The Perfect Man. But I daresay that it’s also hard to get too upset when you know you can just run home and log onto Gay.com to find someone hotter than any of the guys at the bar, who will come right on over and let you do whatever disreputable thing you want to do to him. The knowledge that you can do this undeniably gives you a sort of freedom of spirit.
I was leaning on the Roosterfish’s mahagony bar, noting with interest the lonely face of a middle aged man who was staring dolefully into his melted iced scotch and soda, when I felt a sudden chill running up and down my back. I spun around. The bar was fairly crowded, with layers of folks surrounding me in the place’s murky, flattering half-lighting. In the back of the room, from atop a set of benches, lit by an eerie blue luminiscence, a pair of white plastic horn rimmed glasses glittered, the buggy eyes appearing to follow me wherever I went. The glowing blue glasses peered at me. And suddenly, a shadowy bulk heaved itself up from the darkness, parting the air in waves, like a piano falling from the top of a skyscraper. The walrus-like figure, caparisoned in a huge, baggy T-shirt and billowing, RAI tent-like shorts, waddled its way towards me.
“Welll, helllllo, Johnny Darling!” a deep, rheumy voice bubbled from the depths of the creature’s capacious belly. “How arrrrre you dooooooon?”
Oh my lord! I shrieked to myself. It was FAT BOY! It was the most evil and vile disgusting pig of a man who ever walked the face of the earth, and who a year ago was justly banned from The Novel for his drug dealing, his attempts to skeeze on the male college students studying for their finals, and for his habit of dragging into the restaurant the worse denizens of the local homeless shelters, who were his sycophants and followers. And there he was – in my space at the Roosterfish!
And then I remembered: It is one of Fat Boys major habits to trade oral sex for pot, bribing cute young bar-boys into sucking his flaccid little penis, which rumor has it resembles nothing so much as a tiny Vienna sausage wrapped in a scrap of bacon. It was horrendous to see him again, I must tell you. My knees knocked and my stomach lurched. I felt vomit hitting the back of my throat. I made a hasty, polite “Yeah, how ya doing, gotta get a drink,” and ran away from him, leaving him quivering and wobbling, like Jabba The Hut in a windstorm.
Later on, as I left the bar, I spotted Fat Boy perched on the back of a pick up truck parked in the parking lot. He was flirting with a pair of cute boys, neither of whom were likely to be over 21. And both of whom, at closing time, were only too likely to endure psychic trauma that would be keeping their shrinks in clover for years to come. How detestable is that Fat Boy!
