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the old Giacomo
Friday, October 1 1999
This morning those in my "resource" participated in a weekly "product resource meeting." I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with this whole exercise. For one thing, it's run by the schoolmarmish VP of IT, and though she's a nice enough lady with a reasonably good heart and an adequate sense of humour, she's so steeped in years of corporate management that she's completely absorbed its uselessly propagandistic style. For example, this morning she somehow managed to go on at great length about the proper forms to fill out to qualify for a certain new kind of bonus, but she never got around to mentioning what had happened with the "new architecture" and it's supposed übergeinus "IT team." She didn't, for example, read from the stinging report (details of which periodically leak to me) which evidently decried the whole effort as a $100,000 boondoggle. Indeed, "the new architecture" wouldn't have come up at all had I not brought it up as a tangential point of frustration related to our ongoing "code freeze." My voice contained detectable scorn as I traced quotes in the air around the undelivered "new architecture." I wasn't really mad at the VP of IT except for the fact that she wasn't bringing it up. The mistake, secrecy, which lead to the birth of the "new architecture" in the first place seemed to be attending its death as well. "Open communication" is one of three core values of the company, and it's definitely my favourite one. And bitch though I do about various company absurdities, I have to admit that there really is a genuine desire among management to cultivate open communication (even if most people are too intimidated to participate). When, for example, I found myself dealing with a suddenly contentious (and thoroughly schoolmarmish VP of IT) after I'd brought up the taboo subject of the vapourware "new architecture," the Director of Web Development (whom I occasionally call "my boss") leapt to my defense, as did John the Senior Editor dude. I was, after all, fulfilling a definite purpose here, airing an issue that everyone else was thinking about but was too intimidated to bring up. It would be safe to say that my leadership skills are pretty much limited to the stirring up of shit, although there's always a little sweetness in my sour. I never end my bitches on a bad note. For example, the last thing I said at this particular meeting came in response to an insinuation that the code freeze had perhaps left me without enough to do (as a real code freeze might) and I said simply, "I'm not exactly playing Tetris all day."
When I got off work, I went down to the nearby Mission Valley Center Trolley Station and caught one of the fire engine red trolleys into downtown. I'd arranged with Kim to meet her after work at her place of employment, the Victoria Rose Spa. I have no idea whether or not it's really acceptable to bring a bike on the trolley, and though people had a little trouble getting past it in the aisle, no one complained.
We'd been planning on going all the way up to La Jolla for Sushi on the Rock, but on the recommendation of Kim's boss Vivienne we went instead to an Old Town oyster bar called the Brigadine for happy hour. It ended up being a typical Goldilocks new-restaurant experience with Kim. First we took a table, then Kim decided she wanted a place at the bar. She ordered champagne but it was flat (of course) so she ordered beer, but the beer was too light, so she wanted something else. We found the happy-hour food to be uniformly excellent, but the orchestration left something to be desired. The first thing that came out was the clam chowder, which was so rich that it quickly destroyed our appetites. We were living dangerously, ordering raw oyster on the half shell, but that's something you have to eat when you're really hungry, not after a hearty bowl of clam chowder. We ended up taking most of the food we ordered to go. Kim described the atmosphere as "somewhat Schtevesque" but not too bad. She has no desire to return, however. She said that it doesn't compare favourably to, say, El Agave. After she said this I was thinking about what made El Agave such a good restaurant and I decided it had something to do with the quirkiness of the place: the 500 bottles of tequila on the wall, the weird second-floor location, and surreal conduct of the waitstaff. A great restaurant can never be truly great unless it has a good set of quirks. At the C&O in Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, quirks include the lack of a dishwashing machine, the medieval vintage of most of the equipment, the punk rocker workforce and the narrow treacherous ladder connecting the downstairs kitchen with the tiny überfancy upstairs dining room.
We got home and took Sophie for a walk down Cape May, stopping at a friend's house. These particular friends are among our few "married with children" friends, so we had a couple of the little people hanging out with us as we conversed, providing most of the content of our discussions. The daughter is in kindergarten this year and, I was amazed to discover, she's already been recruited to sell things for one of those companies that shamelessly recruits its workforce from the classrooms of public schools.
I remember as kid and being herded with my chums into an auditorium and coerced to sell flowers. If we sold enough, we were told, we'd have an opportunity to get toys. These toys would be seductively demonstrated at the initial auditorium meeting and all the kids would file out, greedy for worthless plastic trinkets. They'd work their asses off selling flowers only to get a little hose that would wail if you swung it quickly around your head. If a kid was really successful, he'd get a chance to keep all the change he could grab from a jar which contained mostly pennies. Being cynical even at this early age, I never once participated. I always wondered what sorts of child labour laws these flower companies were violating, and I also wondered what cut the school was getting from the proceeds of this labour.
And now here it is, 1999, and some companies are still using the schools to exploit kids, even here in the most progressive of American states. Seeing this marketing for the first time from the adult perspective, where the adorable little child is asking me to buy something, I realized why it's so effective. How do you say no to a child, especially the child of a friend?
Kim and I were walking back home down Cape May, discussing what had come of all the friends with whom we used to hang out some ten months ago. They had all either moved away, dropped out of radar, or stopped communicating with us. San Diego is weird like that; you never hang on to your friends for long in this town. It's a city of transients at all economic levels. The economy is on overdrive, fueled by the tax dollars of so many childless young people. They come, they work, they leave. If you've been under this hot San Diego sun for as long as a year, you're already an old timer (and probably should check in to a dermatologist to see if your moles are behaving themselves).
We wondered what had happened to Giacomo, our old Italian friend from Christmastime last year. "The thing about San Diego," I told Kim, "is that there will always be new Giacomos to come and take the old Giacomo's place!" But this didn't satisfy Kim. She said, "We can wait around for a new Giacomo and take the trouble to make him our friend or we can go find our old Giacomo and save ourselves a lot of fucking around." When last she checked, Giacomo had lived in one of the Cape May apartments nearby. So we went to see if we could find him.
There were a bunch of young guys having a sausage party barbecue in front of what might have been Giacomo's apartment. We asked if they knew who Giacomo was, and though they didn't, they knew that someone with an accent lived mysteriously there behind the blinds on the first floor.
Yes, it was Giacomo's apartment. Tonight he was hanging out with his father, who was visiting from Rome, Italy. Giacomo invited us in enthusiastically and we sat around shooting the shit just like old times. Giacomo is a travel agent these days, and he asked how much we'd paid for the plane tickets that would take us to New Orleans in a few days. When Kim told him, he didn't say he could have done so much better, but instead, "You got a good price."
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