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cheap endless spaghetti
Tuesday, December 15 1998
In the evening Kim's friend JL showed up. He's a tall, thin handsome man and used to be one of Kim's hard-partying Loyolla-Tulane friends back in the New Orleans college days. Now he's a big-shot sales manager for a company that manufactures ultra-modern filtration equipment. Normally he's stationed in Taiwan, but he frequently travels all over the world. He'd come to San Diego specifically to learn a little about the product he sells. As an "engineer" myself, I often wonder how the vaguely clueless folks in sales ever learned enough about our products to talk about them intelligently enough to cut deals. Now I know.
We smoked some pot and shot the shit. The overall direction of the conversation seemed to be dominated by Kim, whose principle motive was to show me off as a good choice of boyfriend and to showcase JL and his stories as evidence for me of a more decadent past. He reminded me a lot of one of the Erics at work, an Eric who is also in sales. I don't understand sales at all, and I'll never have much respect for anyone who does it for a living.
For dinner, we drove down to a sadly tidy little Italian restaurant on the south fringe of Ocean Beach. There was hardly anyone there, save for one lonely young man by himself eating the special: an endless plate of spaghetti. That's why we'd come, so that's what we ordered, along with a modest amount of wine. The thin wrinkled waitress with good bone structure fetched me a second plate of spaghetti when I was the only one who asked for it, but I couldn't bring myself to eat more than half of it. I felt sorry for this tragically neglected place. It was in a bad location and served bad food, so it had to resort to an all-you-can-eat special to drum up business, but the food was too bad for even me to gluttonize.
I was rather stoned throughout the meal and kept feeling socially inferior to JL, whose dapper manners and social graces put my own to shame. Kim is skilled in the same way, but I've grown accustomed to being around her and have come to depend on her social skills to fill in the gaps in my own protocol. In the presence of the other two, I was like a Russian field hand at a Parisian art opening. Still, I found JL vaguely irritating, especially when he failed to answer my questions about his life in a satisfying manner. No one ever set me straight about whether or not Kim and JL ever "went out," and I found it inappropriate to ask.
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