party, anyway, you’ll find me chasing the main chance, seeking that sweet harmonic convergence of deep pockets and weak mental defense. Defenses drop on Halloween, as a function of altered identity but mostly as a function of booze. Plus, I have some lovely Christmas cons that take about six weeks to put the partridge in the pear tree, which makes Halloween sort of the kickoff to the Christmas scamming season.
So there I was, panning for grift in a stilt-level Mulholland Drive mansionette with a stunning view of the San Fernando Valley, the magic of its twinkling lights alchemized out of dust, grit, and imperfectly combusted hydrocarbons. This was a Hollywood producer’s party, as I gleaned from context: the framed signed movie posters in the front hall and the swarm of urgent actorlings costumed in disguises sufficiently elaborate to impress but not so elaborate as to hide the identities of people whose need to be recognized is, let’s face it, pathological. I disqualify these struggling artisans from con consideration, for they generally prove to have no money, plus, their interpersonal answering machines are so relentlessly set on Announce Only that you can’t get your pitch in edgewise.
At Hollywood parties, even Halloween ones, actors and others are always working the room. Unlike me, they’re not trying to steal an honest buck; rather, they carry this myth inside them, the Myth of the Perfect Party. They believe that they’re always just one party (or industry softball game or even AA meeting) away from encountering that one producer or casting director or studio executive who’ll change everything for them forever. With this flawed thought in mind, they relentlessly parse everyone they meet into two groups: Those Who Can Help My Career and Those Who Don’t Exist. To be “nonpro” at a Hollywood party is to be a wallflower perforce.
I noticed this one older couple, clearly nonpro and therefore fully marginalized, completely ill at ease in their homemade Raggedy Ann and Andy drag. Hopelessly adrift on this surging sea of ego, they had eddied to a corner of the living room and stood isolated in their own private backwater. I had it in mind to join them there, pitching myself as a socially awkward inventor of medical devices—in search of investors, of course—as out of place as they in this clove-cigarettes-and-appletinis crowd. First, though, a quick spin to the bar to collect some sparkling water, for we socially awkward inventor types are notoriously teetotal.
As I waited at the bar, the woman beside me said, “Couldn’t find a costume?” I looked left and absorbed at a glance the parts of the whole: Nordic nose, slightly seventies cinnamon shag, big silver hoop earrings, bas relief collarbones, and the rounded curve of breast beneath a creamy satin vest that missed exactly matching her teal blue eyes by about 5 percent of spectrum tilt toward true green.
“You either, it seems.”
“No,” she said, looking herself down and up. “I misunderstood. I thought it was come as you are.”
“On Halloween?”
“Like I said, I misunderstood. What are you drinking?”
A good grifter adapts quickly to changing circumstances, so … good-bye, socially awkward inventor, hello, bourbon connoisseur.
“Fighting Cock,” I said, fully expecting a nervous, entendre-engendered laugh.
Instead I got a haughty, “Here? You’re lucky if they pour Four Roses.”
“Four Roses, then,” I said with a shrug. “You?”
“GMDQ,” she said.
“Not familiar with that libation,” I said.
“Libation.” She snorted a laugh. “Like, ‘Let’s all get libated tonight?’”
“I’m not sure libated is a word.”
“Oh, it’s a word,” she said. “Not that you care.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You just don’t strike me as a slave to orthodoxy.”
“I admit I’ve never been accused of that,” I said. “And GMDQ?”
“Get Me Drunk Quick. Two parts vodka, one part attitude.”
“Might want to cut back on the attitude,” I said. “I think you’ve had a little too much already.”
This also created a hole where a laugh should have been. Nevertheless, she extended her hand, offered her name—“Allie Quinn”—and waited for me to offer mine back. This was not as simple a matter as you might think, for I had many to choose from, and your name, let’s face it, defines you. Kent Winston makes you a bowling buddy; Raleigh Newport is an investment counselor. Who did I want to be?
It was Halloween. I chose to be me. “Radar Hoverlander,” I said.
“Radar?” she asked. “Like that guy in M*A*S*H?”
“No, but I get that a lot.”
By now the bartender was waiting to serve us. Allie pointed to two bottles and said, “That