Halloween

A Halloween wedding, a Jewish wedding. The bride and groom are lifted up in chairs, everyone holds hands and dances in circles. It makes you want to be Jewish, or at least incorporate this tradition into all cultures. We wear costumes. I have a thick pair of glasses and someone calls me Le Corbusier. We talk about Le Corbusier's Delhi and Chandigar. Only architects know these things. A 7-year old boy in large sunglasses and a Marge Simpson wig does a a horizontal belly-dance on the floor: an ambitious but disabled worm. Later, we try to get into the saddest looking bar in all of Claremont: Piano, Piano, next to the Doubletree. There are only four people inside, and we are a motley crew at the door, a pirate, Le Corbusier, a French man with a "moostache," a gay cowboy, a serial killer, a caped vampire with a pink wig, a milkmaid, the bride and the groom, dressed as themselves.

"We close at 2:00 AM," they tell us.

"Come, on, it's daylight savings," we tell them. And this nice couple just got married today. And the mariachi band didn't show up. Just for a drink?" We are relentless. No dice.

"You guys are douchebags," says the groom. "We're never coming back to Piano, Piano," I tell them.

"It was my cape," says the pink-haired vampire. "It was just the way they looked at it."

"They're capists," says the pirate.

We take the elevator back to a fourth floor suite at the Doubletree. There is some discussion about the transmission of oral herpes and the deftness with which the DJ incorporated Halloween songs, 80s songs, hip hop, Michael Jackson, the Zombies, Kinks, Depeche Mode.

"Michael Jackson, will his deadness ever die?" ponders the pirate.

In the suite we pass out. People smoke hash on the balcony. Pizzas are delivered. Women sit in their boyfriends' laps and negotiate the draft coming from the balcony.

We wake up the next morning in a place that reminds me of the east coast. We drive around the campus, stop and get coffee. College campuses, particularly the kinds with rolling green, they have a way of inspiring an intense desire for personal normalcy.

Brunch at Gjelina in Venice: a castmember from The Hills at the table next to us, in leopard print and large pink sunglasses. I am mesmerized with her ability to roll her gaping mouth around an abundance of words that all mean nothing. People speak of real-estate, shopping, shoes. What to do with places that offer their inhabitants no reason for complaint? A town of people who are beautiful, well-coiffed, well-dressed, they even have beautiful homes and beautiful weather. And they all look so jaded and tired with life. They reach for the next shiny thing, the way one reaches for a breadstick before dinner: thoughtlessly.

"Did you like the food?" he asks.

It wasn't the food, I think. It was the recognition that certain places are their own exposed-brick and reclaimed hardwood solipsism, almost as though even the wrought iron urban chandeliers, with different-sized light bulbs sigh in a bored and yet self-congratulatory way.

"We're here," they say. "What to do now?"