High School Mucosal

I drove out to the Beverly Hills Hotel, an hour and a half in traffic while the oily Tuesday afternoon sun melted into the toxic rainbow sherbet that is the Los Angeles sunset, for the singular purpose of snubbing Ken Starr.

I’d been imagining the scene for weeks, the sophisticated crowd, the sound of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five sashaying through the room like a happy stewardess, the tap on the shoulder, me turning with my glass of Romanée Conti to see Ken Starr standing there completely scentless and emitting no heat, his face split into the sort of well rehearsed smile that comes from decades of overachievement and never joy.  He extends his hand.  I look down at his chubby fingers, the manicured fingernails as shiny as wet cough drops, the soft puff pastry of a palm, the gleam of a watchband roughly approximating the value of Rhode Island.  I do the classic gasp-chuckle of sitcom disbelief and turn back around, shaking my head.  His face begins to redden as if he’d just stepped into a freezing wind.   I continue with my conversation, my voice elevated just slightly to be heard over the shrill whistle of steam coming out of his ears.  Applause.  Curtain.

And why would Ken Starr want to shake my hand, anyway?

Well, as a freelance artist I’ve always had to take in extra laundry to pay my bills and a couple years ago I took in a big stinky load from the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the preeminent law newspaper of Southern California, sometimes referred to as the Hillcrest Country Club of L.A. papers due to the exclusionary nature of its subscription-only availability, its content too hoity-toity to fraternize with other publications at newsstands, its Web content secured behind a pay wall like the sort of pornography that no decent person hoping to remain decent would want to see.  My assignment was to draw nearly nine-dozen portraits for the paper’s annual supplement dedicated to recognizing the top 100 lawyers of California and Ken Starr was one of them, so was Gloria Allred, of O.J. Simpson and Amber Frey fame, and so was Harvey Levin, of the People’s Court and TMZ.com fame, and so was Jerry Brown, of Linda Ronstadt and Governor Moonbeam fame.

“We also have a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the issue is published,” I was told by the Journal’s editor when the job was pitched to me.  “We’re going to have all the originals of the portraits put in frames and give them to the lawyers as little presents,” he said, “and you can be at the party – I’m sure they’ll all want to shake your hand.”  The whole time he was talking I was trying to figure out how I was going to get the words fucking and asshole into the Starr portrait with the same deft hand that Hirschfeld used to get in his Nina.

Reaching out my hand I took the ticket stub from the valet twink and threw on my jacket, straightened my creepy glowing bug-eyed Jesus tie and walked through the hotel lobby in search of the concierge to help me find the room where I imagined Starr was eating enough cocktail weenies to verge on some infringement of Megan’s Law.  Moments later I walked into the Sunset Room and, having had the point of my pencil up the nose and inside the pupils and along the lips and in between the teeth of every face surrounding me, suddenly had the uneasy feeling that I was some voyeuristic pervert who had been watching these people through a two-way mirror for six weeks.  I looked around for the bar, hoping to blur my vision.

107 LA lawyers morphed into a single portrait

“The portraits look great!” said the editor of the Journal, appearing out of nowhere to shake my hand.  “Did you see them?”

“Yeah, on the way in,” I said, referring to the table just outside the entrance where all one hundred framed drawings that I’d done sat near a large sign requesting that each lawyer wait until the end of the evening before retrieving his or her portrait to take home.  “By the way,” I said, “I never asked, how did you guys determine who belonged on the list of top100?  Given the fact that the average person finds lawyers, as a group, somewhat despicable – individually, they find them repulsive – I’m guessing that it wasn’t a contest that had been put to a public vote.”

“It was very unscientific,” he said, appearing uncertain as to whether he should be offended by my characterization of his bread and butter as repulsive.  “Me and the other editors got together every morning for a couple months and talked about who should be on the list and who shouldn’t.”

Then he excused himself, leaving me to realize for the first time that I’d been hired to glorify the equivalent of the football team for a high school newspaper and that the primary purpose of the Journal was to publish insular stories that celebrated the victories and chastised the failures and mourned the disappointments and trumpeted the dreams of all the prom kings, prom queens, star athletes, sluts, burnouts, unassuming nerds, chess club geeks and mediocre C-student toiling in the profession, fuck everybody else.  And as it was with every school dance that I’d ever attended, I dropped my sense of morale superiority like a glass slipper, letting it shatter on the floor while I took my place against the wall, Clark Kan’t in my glasses, and waited all alone for the room to empty.

Two hours later I left just as the hotel staff began to bunch up the soiled tablecloths and remove the chairs and scratch their heads and wonder what they were going to do with all the framed portraits sitting untouched at the entrance to the room, while Ken Starr, having never left his home all evening, continued posing in front of his mirror like a star quarterback preparing to lead his new team, called Blackwater Security Consulting, to victory against a bunch of ill-prepared pussies like me.