People have asked me to tell the story behind the story. The truth is, it’s kind of hard for me. No matter how you look at it, there are some really embarrassing scenes. Oh heck, let’s be candid. I look like a dolt almost all the time. But then that’s why I applied, and that’s why Karen suggested... Enough explaining, let’s go to the story.
I got the message in an e-mail. One of the few non-pornographic ones I get. Wait, better explain that. Some time ago I opened a new e-mail account with my cable modem provider. Well, I don’t like to be unkind, but my sense is that these folks sold me broadband and then turned me into chum for the net-sharks. From day one, my new mailbox was stuffed—no, reeking—with spam.
My new correspondents aren’t a very imaginative bunch. They cluster around just a few themes. One common message trumpets the opportunity to see Britney Spears naked—an offer of dubious veracity not to mention questionable aesthetic appeal. If you’ve seen one silicone valley, you’ve seen them all.
Much of the spam comes from people with cool, new-age names—like “Joe 3743f84” or “Carol 587sd643.” Quite odd. Sometimes I wonder—could these be pseudonyms?
Amazingly, the most prominent theme in this hip spam is anatomical, as in: “x! add y inches to your private part!” In this case ‘x’ is a variable for the recipient’s e-mail name and ‘y’ is a variable of rapidly growing value.
For reasons of modesty and propriety, not to mention fear of rapacious computer viruses, I’ve never opened any of these e-mails, so I don’t understand what they’re offering. Are they talking about prosthetic devices? I mean, how…? OK, never mind, I really don’t want to know. And I’m way off the topic.
So, back to that “normal” message. Its subject line was simple—“Learn to be Cool.” I was intrigued.
Now, I’ll have to confess—this really is the truth—I’ve never been cool. Throughout my life I’ve been consistently clumsy, chronically stumble-tongued, and always, well, kind of jumpy.
I’ve secretly admired the cool ones, the folks who are unperturbed no matter what happens. Our society values cool above all else, and I’m a creature of the culture. I would have given anything, even maybe y-x inches, to be like the cool people.
A while back, approaching middle age (I’m in the not very hip fifties now), I started to want to fix things in my life, to improve before it was too late. That’s why I spent a dozen years doing martial arts. The results were mixed. The good news was that I eventually learned to jump, spin, and kick with sufficient lethality to earn a black belt. The bad news was that I never got style points. My Korean Master would make that little fist-pumping sign when the others broke boards or concrete blocks or landed a particularly solid blow. For me, he just nodded. Inscrutable? No, just unimpressed.
Worse, even after all those years, my martial motor skills didn’t translate at all into the real world. I’m just as clumsy as ever. For example, I’ve never mastered that “hug, kiss on the cheek” thing with women. To me, this is a complicated maneuver that shouldn’t be undertaken without meticulous planning. You know, “OK, you go to your left, uh, that’s my right…now, uh, one, two, three…”
Even when they see I’m trying to be slow and careful, there are impetuous women who rush me into moving too fast and making a mistake. One woman friend actually claimed that I gave her a minor concussion. I think she was still upset about the time I spilled red wine on her new coat.
Anyway, I was really interested in one last chance to be cool. So I opened the e-mail and saw these words.
You can learn to be cool! Click here
Hmm. Injudicious use of italics, but the point was clear. I clicked and went to the web site.
The opening Web page carried only a simple statement.
“If you’ve gone this far, you know you need our help.”
Well, OK. That’s a point. Kind of an insulting one, actually. But I guess I would have to agree. I mean, would Arnold Schwarzenegger have made that first move? No way.
So I clicked on. The school is very expensive, since the training would be all one-on-one and sometimes two-on-one. There was also a peculiar reference to a “scholarship.”
I talked it over with Karen and she was really eager to try it, not at all worried about the expense. I’ll have to admit that I was a little hurt when she said, “this is perfect for you.”
I sent an inquiry, and it turned out there was a “coach” available here in L.A. After answering a few questionnaires, I sent my deposit by credit card and made an appointment.
After talking it over with Karen, I decided that it would be, well, cooler, if I didn’t show up looking like a remedial case. So, taking everything I knew about cool, I prepared for my first lesson. I wore black—shoes, socks, slacks, turtle neck, and, of course, very dark glasses. I even rented a black car.
When I pulled up to the meeting place, a restaurant on Sunset Blvd. with outdoor tables, I could spot the coach, Joe, instantly. He was dressed just like me. I smiled to myself. A good start!
Approaching the table, I assumed the role of student and carefully observed Joe’s posture. Arms folded, body relaxed in the chair. Very, very relaxed. For a moment I thought he was an inflatable doll, part of some really elaborate joke.
But, wait! Was that a flick of movement behind the glasses? Perhaps a very, very slight smile on his lips? I couldn’t be completely sure, but at least I had hope that he was alive.
When I stopped in front of him, Joe remained fixed in his chair for at least twenty seconds. This kind of behavior makes uncool people like me very nervous. I shuffled my feet. Finally, his eyes flicked (I could just barely see them behind the glasses)—first to the car, then to me. When he spoke, his lips barely moved, “Nice try. Next time get a Civic.”
It was my turn to be cool. I put my hands on my hips. “Well, maybe I made a mistake choosing your organization. A Civic? What a silly, plebian name for a vehicle!” I looked back at my car. It stood there at the curb. Looking tough, its dark paint defiantly absorbing light rays. I gave Joe a look of contempt. “Don’t you know that Taurus is Latin for ‘bull?’”
Joe was smiling openly now. He gave another of those nods, this one more visible. “Yeah. This is going to work out great.”
I never did get Joe’s last name—I couldn’t help but think of the old Peanuts strip and Snoopy in the guise of “Joe Cool.” I suspected, though, that being a reader of Peanuts was not cool, so I didn’t mention it.
Joe told me that he had always been cool—came by it naturally—but that he had noticed “some dudes with problems” and offered to help. This was a “Mother Teresa kind of thing” (his description).
He eventually decided that there were some key elements of cool that he could teach anyone. The problem was that a book wouldn’t do it. You had to teach one on one, so he resolved to give the school idea a try. Web advertising is cheap. He didn’t say so directly, but I had the sense I was his first paying student.
Joe certainly was cool. He had that languid feel to him, seeming comfortable in every situation. He spoke little, but when he did it was with an ironic tone, always faintly mocking (but not self-mocking). The only odd thing was his voice. Joe sometimes seemed to project sound, especially in noisy places like the bars we visited all the time. He encouraged me to do that as well. I said that I thought that cool people mumbled, or at least spoke very softly. He told me that talking “fuzzy” like that was out. It seems that one thing about being cool is that you have to keep up with the changes.
At that first meeting we talked for a half hour or so, then I started my first lesson, which was in many ways the most painful. It began when Joe mentioned that a really attractive woman (not his exact phrase) was sitting at a table to my right. I turned to look.
“Now, here’s your first lesson.” Joe’s irony was pronounced. “Don’t turn your head like that. It’s very uncool.”
I was taken aback, and a little irritated. “I don’t have eyes in the side of my head. You seemed to be telling me to look.”
Joe smiled. “You don’t move your head, you move your eyes. Just flick them, like this.” He took his sunglasses off for me to get a better look. I nodded. I had seen lizards do the same thing. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I tried to follow his example. The muscles in my eyeballs protested. “That kind of hurts!”
Joe’s expression was so ironic you could have pressed your shirt on it. “Practice, practice, practice. That’s enough for today. But I want you to flick your eyes at least five hundred times tonight.”
Joe gave me some papers to sign (“boilerplate about refunds and stuff, copied it out of a book”), took my check—he didn’t seem very interested in it—and set an appointment for “2:00 p.m. in the morning” the next day. This was Joe’s ironic way of reinforcing his earlier point that cool people don’t get up before noon.
When I got to Joe’s apartment the following afternoon, my eyeballs hurt so much I could hardly stand it. Joe just laughed.
Joe’s apartment in Venice was surprisingly big and expensively furnished. When I remarked that this was an impressive place for a struggling young entrepreneur, he shrugged and said someone had loaned it to him—as if that were the most natural thing.
I wasn’t surprised. I had observed early in life that always having what you needed was part of being cool. If you couldn’t afford it, someone gave it or loaned it to you. If that didn’t work, then you simply recast your life so you didn’t need whatever it was any more. The cool aren’t like you and me—they run no risk of being down and out. For the moment, I got the impression Joe had lots of friends—financial backers too I supposed.
My first lesson was kind of intensive. We covered all of the basics. In addition to eye-flicking, there was the laconic hand wave (“you never actually wave the hand,” Joe said in disgust), the measured speech, sitting like you were a corpse, and, the essence of it all, the “cool walk.”
This last one was tough. Looking like you weren’t in a hurry was easy when you were sitting down. Presenting the same image when you’re in motion requires lots of practice (or being born to it).
I knew this last concept would be hard for me. “I mean,’” I asked, “what if you’re crossing the street and a car is bearing down on you?”
Joe didn’t think this was a tough question, “Just don’t get yourself in that situation.” So simple to say.
Joe wasn’t impressed with my background in the martial arts. “Yeah, I did that for a few years. It was easy.”
This was kind of deflating for me, since I was really proud of all those years of effort. But I knew he was right. It was easy for some people—mainly cool people like him. One could learn to hate the cool. Better to join them, though.
“Now, here’s a very important tip,” Joe said. When you see an attractive woman, you need to give her a long, appraising stare. One good way is to start at the ankles and work you way up, lingering on your favorite parts of the anatomy.”
I was taken aback. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous? I mean, won’t I get arrested?”
Joe laughed. “Of course not. Women really appreciate being admired—so long as the guy is cool. There is one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t move your head.” He rolled his eyes, part of that “gotcha” expression that I was to become very familiar with.
We practiced at Joe’s place every day for the rest of the week. The focus was entirely on how to behave in bars and restaurants. This seemed odd at first, but then it occurred to me that no one needs to be cool at the gas station. Joe was more succinct—if you could avoid melting in the incredibly harsh hormone-laced conditions of a trendy Wilshire Boulevard bar, you could do it anywhere. Made sense to me.
One of the toughest things about my initial training was that Joe made me wear dark glasses all the time. His apartment was unusually bright, but I still managed to bump into stuff, often resulting in dramatic falls. It almost seemed as if Joe was moving the furniture to make it harder on me. But when I accused him of this, he just smiled and observed that I had failed to flick my eyes.
“How can you see my eyes behind these glasses?”
“I can’t. But I can tell when you’ve flicked because a little bolt of pain goes across your face.” He was right about that. Those muscles must take a lifetime to condition.
Somewhere in these early sessions, I noticed a disturbing characteristic of Joe—he seemed to like to make fun of me. He was particularly mirthful about the old-fashioned expressions I used. Well, so what’s the big deal? I wasn’t “thirty-something” like my mentor, and I like to watch movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s on TV. Once, when Joe was irritated about something I screwed up, I told him not to “get all bent out of shape.” I thought he would laugh forever.
One of my worst experiences was a “woman admiring” exercise that Joe launched on a Friday night at, La Lunita Loca, a trendy bar on La Brea Blvd. “This is going to be perfect,” he said. “There will be lots of great looking women [not his precise words], and it will be early enough that people won’t be distracted by the music.”
Well, I wish they had—been distracted by something other than me, that is. I won’t say this was the most embarrassing evening of my life—I got a lot of practice during my period with Joe —but it was right up there.
I was sitting near the bar, alone, when I decided on my first experiment. Standing nearby and talking with a female friend was an athletic, Aussie-type, blond who was either a supermodel or a basketball player. Over six feet, anyway.
After I caught her eye, I started at the ankles. There was a whole lot of leg, so it took me a very long time to get up to and past her very tight sweater and, with some considerable trepidation, back to the face. I was sure daggers would be coming my way.
She had certainly noticed my noticing. She stared right back and… smiled! Joe was right! The Aussie said something to her friend and came toward me, walking in a way that was extremely seductive for her height. As she stood in front of me, she was the picture of cool, a cigarette in her right hand, just off her hip, and an elegant little ashtray curled in her left. But the smile was a little different, somehow. After a suitably cool pause, she spoke.
“Someone is going to make the movie, but it [expletive deleted] won’t be you, mate.” With a neat flick of her wrist, she dumped the contents of the ashtray in my beer.
You always have to look on the bright side, and I congratulated myself on being right—that was definitely an Australian accent.
Of course, sometimes you can’t ignore the negativity. Having to order another beer was the least of my problems. The incident had been one of those time-stood-still things you see in the movies. The bar was deathly quiet when Miss Down Under delivered her line—I would have sworn that there had been music playing but it had stopped—and I didn’t need to look around to know that everyone was watching. Even if there had been music, the laughter would have drowned it out.
After things calmed down a bit—meaning everyone was no longer looking at me—I went to caucus with Joe. He insisted that I keep trying. We moved to another part of the vast bar where I was to make a few more attempts at appraisal. This was hard. My self-assurance was deep in the negative range. To be quite honest, I wasn’t feeling good about myself.
After a few hostile stares, the worst, and final, blow came from a woman at a nearby table. Evidently riled by my pathetic, nervous appraisal, she turned to her friends and spoke in a loud, stagy voice to the many within earshot, “Now I’ve seen everything. I didn’t know a fungus could drink beer.” To prevent any ambiguity, she pointed at me. I’m pretty sure that isn’t polite.
Well, I again had one of those movie moments. It seemed that everyone in an area about three tables deep had stopped to watch, as if somehow knowing in advance that something was going to be said. To the sound of loud, derisive laughter, I fled.
Naturally, I couldn’t make a clean exit. Notice how in the movies, people in a hurry just throw some cash on the table and take off? Well, I tossed down a couple of twenties—more than enough—I thought. But the waiter came running after me, waving the bills in the air and calling loudly, “Two bucks! You think that covers a twenty-seven dollar tab!” Of course, I had another great audience as I stood there and paid him off.
I wanted to quit after the incident at La Lunita Loca, but Joe argued it was an aberration. It was actually Karen who decided that I needed to end the classes. She had checked up on Joe’s place of work, and thought that would be the best place. I was skeptical. But, for obvious reasons, I follow Karen’s lead.
After a short drive across town to Hollywood, we parked near a non-descript office building and walked up a long flight of stairs. A door in the dimly lit hallway was slightly ajar, I went ahead of Karen and entered.
Inside was a long room, with a kind of antechamber by the door. It was brightly lit, but no one noticed me enter, in part because sections of the room near the door were blocked off by a short wall and in part because those in the room were at the far end with their backs to us. I walked toward them, the sound of my steps swallowed by the deep carpet and erased by music coming from a massive set of speakers. I went to the front of the room and turned, facing back the way I came.
Joe was sitting in a long chair, a beer at his side. The dark glasses were up on his head. He must have been very surprised to see me, but didn’t show it.
“It’s you.” He flicked his eyes to the right. “That’s my friend, co-worker, Brad.”
“Hey, Brad.”
Brad nodded infinitesimally. I’d give the precise inclination of his head, but I didn’t have a micrometer with me. Obviously he was cool, too.
Joe looked at me, the familiar ironic smile on his face. He was holding some kind of disk—CD or DVD, I couldn’t tell which. After the trademark long pause, he spoke.
“I was going to tell you tomorrow, but now will do. This is the end of the lessons. We don’t need any more.”
Something he had said was odd, but I responded to another issue.
“Over! We’ve only had five lessons and I paid for ten! That’s not right!” I was showing the need for those additional lessons—as Joe had told me repeatedly, cool people never speak with exclamation marks.
Joe put the disk down on the arm of the chair. Slowly, he reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He stuck his arm out at me.
“Don’t get all bent out of shape, man.” Joe chuckled at this little bit of sarcasm. Brad joined in. He had a rather nasty laugh, I thought. “This is a refund for the entire amount, including $40 from La Lunita Loca. It seems the waiter made a mistake.”
I shuffled my feet. Another no-no. “But, what’s going on? I signed a contract!”
Joe and Brad both laughed at this. Joe seemed to have acquired the nasty overtone from Brad. Finally, Joe spoke.
“Don’t you get it, man? You’ve been Foxed! You’re on reality TV! The only contract was for you to waive any claims against us. All the lessons will be on TV! You’re going to be a star!”
Was that sarcasm? I thought probably so.
Catching my expression, Brad added, “And there isn’t anything you can do about it!”
There had been a whole bunch of exclamation marks there, I was sure of it. Obviously, Brad wasn’t cool after all. Hah! Of course, I should be focusing on something else.
I frowned and said, “I didn’t read the contract, I guess. Still, that was a rotten thing to do.”
Brad and Joe were now doubled over in laughter.
“Rotten thing to do!” Brad gasped the words, in kind of a high pitch, between laughs.
Joe was convulsed. All I could hear was something that sounded like, “True to form.” I also thought I heard another exclamation mark. These guys were losing it. It was then that I decided to do things my own way—I had thought about it earlier, but hadn’t made a decision. I snatched the disc out of Joe’s hand.
No guy likes to have something pulled out of their hand, so it wasn’t surprising that Joe leapt out of the chair and grabbed my wrist. He moved fast, and his grip was strong. He could tell I was feeling some pain.
“Loser!” Joe almost screeched. “That’s not the only copy. There are others.” That’s when he made his first mistake. In an involuntary reaction he looked at a rack of discs on a table behind me. There was a lot of computer gear there; probably video editing equipment. Joe realized his mistake quickly. The grip on my wrist tightened. Perfect.
I did a little hapkido flip and suddenly I was holding Joe’s wrist. He was surprised and shocked—enough to keep walking through the wide door I had just opened for him. He threw a punch at me with his left hand.
Now, when someone is holding your wrist is not a good time to throw a punch. It was obvious that Joe hadn’t spent any time doing martial arts. More likely he had just watched The Karate Kid.
I blocked the punch with my left (was it “wax hand” or “wash hand?” I couldn’t remember) and shoved Joe backward with my right. Kind of hard. He went down, his face matching the off-white carpet. Brad, who had been moving toward me, quickly stepped behind a table.
I spoke in a hurt tone. “Joe, I’m shocked and disappointed. I thought you were really trying to help me. And, I guess I’m not sorry you’re injured.”
I turned to go out. A puzzled look crossed Joe’s face, but he quickly suppressed it.
It was finally time. I smiled. “Oh, you’re wondering why I’m not destroying the discs? Well, actually, I don’t care about them. I have my video, and that’s all I need.” I looked to the back of the room.
Joe and Brad turned to follow my glance, their heads moving with an actual jerk. They had to be rattled. If they hadn’t been upset before, they certainly were when they saw the back of the room.
Confidence came to my voice for the first time since I’d met Joe. “That’s my cameraman, Pete. Wave, Pete.” The small man holding the large, professional video camera raised a laconic hand. Just the way Joe taught. “Oh, and that’s our producer, Karen.” Karen, standing next to Pete, gave a feminine wave and a nice smile. She had a very attractive smile. She was a very attractive woman. Neither Joe nor Brad bothered with an appraising stare.
Joe was sitting up, now. “Our? Producer?….Don’t…”
“You don’t understand? Well, let me explain.” I gestured slightly, my voice becoming a bit nasal. Subconsciously I suppose I was trying for something of a Basil Rathbone effect. “You had your cameras at the restaurant and the bar, and we had ours a bit farther back filming you and your people. We even installed cameras at the apartment.”
“Oh, and of course I’ve been wired the whole time and we put a tiny, tiny microphone in that little bag you carry around. No—don’t worry, I’m afraid that even today’s television standards won’t allow us to use anything from the festive event you hosted last night.”
I smiled again. Now I was Clint Eastwood watching the villain’s death throes. I flicked my eyes from Joe to Brad. “Still don’t get it? Well then, here it is. We’re from one of your, uh, rival networks. A little bird told us that you sly ones were going to be doing this new reality series, making fun of people trying to learn to be cool. We thought it might be even more amusing to do a documentary about people making a reality show that was designed to humiliate ordinary folks. Put another way, we thought it would be cool —I paused for emphasis —to humiliate you.”
Joe’s face would have made a great painting. As he slowly put the pieces together—being cool is not the same as being a deep thinker—he looked like a hunter who has lost his gun and suddenly finds the tiger moving back toward him. Of course, there was no need for a painting. Pete would have a bunch of great close ups.
“So, I guess it’s you guys who are going to be stars.” I moved toward the door. Pete walked slowly backward in front of me.
I turned. Pete would have my profile with the two stunned men just in focus in the background. “Oh, and don’t leave your mouths open like that, it’s not cool.” I flicked my eyes to the camera, smiled and moved forward and out the doorway.
Fade to black. Fortunately. If the camera had still been on, it would have recorded me tripping over the power cables. That wasn’t in the script.
