How long should you keep this up? Well, if after a good hour nothing much seems to be happening, consult your watch and move on to the final powerful step. Wait for the first conversational lull and then jump in with both feet and begin to dominate with stories from your childhood. If, after twenty-five minutes, you find your date is still both present and feigning interest, assume he has the hots for you. Go ahead and make your move.
Postscript
Because not every completed seduction attempt leads to anything particularly pleasing I feel compelled to answer the following common question before it has even been asked:
Question: How many times should you allow a guy to slam your head into the wall behind your bed before you officially declare it “bad sex” and attempt to abort the proceedings?
Answer: Two. The first time, it is still possible that it was only an accident.
Hip, Pretentious L.A.
No one would argue that L.A. leads the country in opportunities for being hip and pretentious. But what is often overlooked is how many distinctly different ways to be pretentiously hip L.A. has to offer. Yes, yes, other cities all have an “in” spot or two. But within the borders of the greater Los Angeles area, there are multitudes of dissimilar kinds of pretentious “in” spots available to ensure that visitor and resident alike can experience the widest possible variety of ways to feel inadequate, inferior, irrelevant, and out of it.
Let’s Start with Beverly Hills, of Course
There is no place like the streets of Beverly Hills to make people of every race, creed, religion, and nationality feel too large, too clunky, too poorly groomed. This section of the city offers such a well-worn path to self-loathing that even guests from faraway countries know to begin preparing themselves for that ugly, fat, and ill-at-ease feeling as soon as they get off the plane.
From the moment you join the matched set of impeccably detailed nouveau blondes nuzzling the maître d’ at the Grill, you will find yourself surrounded by some of the most superficial and pointlessly judgmental humans in all the world. You are now in the midst of our nation’s largest indigenous population of nature’s most innately repellent creature: the professionally manicured male. The upside of this for you, the incipient diner, is that it works as a form of weight control since there is nothing like the sight of a little clear nail polish on the hands of a tanned, overgroomed, overperfumed, middle-aged heterosexual man to make a normal person lose their desire to eat.
Once you have settled at your table by the kitchen door, observe how many of the patrons here move in clusters from one table to the next, cooing as they extend suspiciously oversize greetings to people they may have seen earlier that very day. They are lawyers, agents, heads of production companies, assorted executives, producers, managers, and the new second or third wives or girlfriends of all of the above, and they are awash in very specific kinds of watches, purses, shoes, haircuts, jewelry, accessories, and brands of clothing the likes of which a status-symbol-impaired person such as myself could not identify if Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mike Ovitz, and Michael Eisner and all of their wives, past and present and future, threw fistfuls of them at me from now until Christmas.
The Sunset Strip: Another Place to Feel Like a Dork
A more complex but only slightly more original way to feel out of it is available at the hip and pretentious nightclubs and bars along the Sunset Strip. Welcome to the part of town where the idea of printing the name of the establishment somewhere visible is thought to be a laughable overstatement. If you are so out of it that you need to see the name of the place to which you are going, you do not deserve the privilege of feeling inadequate there.
Let’s begin at the Bar Marmont, where the glittering transsexual maître d’s set such an immediate standard of full-court hipness that you know immediately you will never be able to measure up, no matter how many times you think about going home to change outfits. The good news is that inside the bar the lighting is so low you will soon become the invisible person you desperately want to be.
Just a few doors down is the Standard, a big concrete structure that has had a real identity crisis since it was a retirement home in the eighties. The Standard does have its name printed on its marquee, only it’s upside down! This pointless affectation will give you some idea of the rollicking good time that awaits you inside. Out in the driveway, you are greeted by a valet parking team all dressed in extremely puzzling, possibly demoralizing jockey outfits. Walk through the large glass doors, and notice that right behind the concierge desk is the Standard’s signature piece of room décor: a large human-size aquarium in which a swimsuit-attired human reclines on a clear vinyl air mattress atop a layer of Astroturf. The other night it was a twentysomething spiky-haired male in boxer shorts and sunglasses, boogying visibly to a continuous loop of “Love to Love You Baby.” He was also wearing inflatable dinosaur hands and feet to show he had personality plus, lest we get the impression that he was just some unemployed recent high school grad who probably hadn’t even tried yet to explain his new part-time job to his parents.
Now it is your option to sit in one of the moderno furniture groupings and observe dinosaur boy’s shiftings and repositionings as you wait a good half an hour for someone to take your drink order. Perhaps you will find it amusing to watch as the young, trendily dressed clientele try not to bump their heads on the low-hanging goosenecked lamps or trip on the retro shag carpeting. You will never have a better opportunity to observe clusters of moody young men slouching on fuzzy couches, preparing for the lifetime of watching television they know lies ahead! For a challenge, see if you can spot two females in a row on the line for the restroom who do not yet have breast implants. Or work on cultivating your patience as you realize you cannot leave because, even though you ordered your drink forty-five minutes ago, you gave the waitress your credit card. Now there is no sign of her anywhere. Does she even still work here?
Perhaps you’d like to go out to the patio, stare at the large inflatable starfish floating in the lighted pool, and contemplate whether the other people here are really having a fabulous time or are all just faking it.
Which brings us to the Sky Bar, a couple of doors down at the Mondrian Hotel, a place that will be forever distinct for me as the Sunset Strip location where I suffered the maximum amount of punishment for not being hip enough. I speak of the day I went there for an early dinner with a colleague from work. We were seated in a tiki-hut area, just off the pool, where we could watch as hotel staffers who looked like Milli Vanilli carrying spray bottles full of distilled water circulated amongst the swimsuited hotel guests to offer them a complimentary moistening in the name of better tanning.
Once my salad was delivered by a Pamela Anderson clone, I noticed that on the table in front of me were two condiment dishes: a container of salt and a small galvanized tureen of granules. As a longtime L.A. resident, I am only too well acquainted with our city’s fixation on condiment reconfigurations: the fresh-ground-pepper mill versus the stale old pepper shaker; the grind-your-own-salt mill; the gigantic crystals of rock sugar; the small dishes of unidentified oils and sauces. So I said to myself, “Salt and a container of granules. Must be a hip new way to serve pepper.” And I took a pinch between my thumb and forefinger and sprinkled it on my salad.
That is when I noticed that my colleague was looking at me funny. As I began eating, I realized I had a lot of sand on my salad. And so it came to pass that I learned that the small tureen of granules was not a hip new pepper-distributing system but a tureen of sand, intended for cigar night. I was so humiliated that I ate the salad anyway, pretending it had hardly any sand. Which of course was a lie. My tongue thought we were at the beach.
The other night, when I revisited the scene of my humiliation, it seemed to have gotten even more pretentious. I was prohibited from stepping into the tureen-of-sand area for lack of proper hotel ID by a haughty young male model wannabe stationed at a troughlike BARRICADE OF WHEATGRASS!!
Most Origina
l Way to Feel Out of It: Silverlake
Even though you may have felt too hip, too artsy, too alienated for the bars of the Sunset Strip, from the minute you enter one of the small—I am tempted to call them Mom-and-Pop establishments, but they are really more Mom and her weird third husband who fixes motorcycles—anyway, one of the small establishments in the heart of Silverlake, you will realize that you are not underground enough, not up to speed enough on alternative bands, not pierced or tattooed enough, not original enough in your choice of clothing. Now you are too mainstream.
Before social discomfort causes you to flee, Silverlake offers opportunities to feel ill at ease in some of Los Angeles’s most artistic-looking rooms. Akbar, on Sunset, leads you from a very nondescript exterior to a very lush Middle Eastern–themed interior full of fezzes, hanging paper lights, and mosquelike architectural details, columns, arches. And men, men, men!
A few blocks away, the totally unlabeled Good Luck Bar, so named because that is what you need to find it, has a beautiful red interior, full of little lights, paper lanterns, and dark rooms with sofas better suited for making out than talking. It’s so loud in there I suggest you bring a megaphone. There are, however, some very hip drinks, such as Ng Ka Py, a Chinese herb whiskey that tastes a little like licorice. But inebriation alone will not provide a sense of belonging.
Around the corner, the barely labeled Vida restaurant offers a unique chance to sit at a subterranean table and eat at the always desirable eye level with the floor. I think that one of the best indicators of a hip, pretentious place is menu language that is too embarrassing to say out loud when you order. The menu here is corny enough to convince you that you are at a bohemian-themed restaurant in Anaheim, next door to Medieval Times. There is a salad called Lettuce Entertain You and a soup called Flavor Flave, phrases a sensible person would never speak aloud.
From “too geeky for Beverly Hills” to “too alienated for the Sunset Strip” to “too mainstream for Silverlake,” L.A. offers more reasons to just not bother going anywhere than any city in the world!! Those of us who are too lazy to go out anyway must bow our heads in a humble gesture of thanks.
One of the Most Thrilling Days of My Life
“People never say what they mean,” the speaker tells us for the third time. He is a bug-eyed redhead in his early thirties named Peter Lowe and he is addressing what looks like a sellout crowd of several thousand people who have come to the L.A. Convention Center to attend “SUCCESS 2000. SEE YOU AT THE TOP!” We are here to learn “How to gain rapport with anyone … instantly!” and “How to turn dreams into reality.” And we are as widely varied a group of humans as I have seen congregated in one place at one time since high school assembly. The black guy with the gold earring in the gray sweatshirt looks like a rapper. The woman in front of me in the dark green sport coat and scruffy half boots looks like a riding instructor. The blond woman across the aisle in the brown turtleneck knit dress and patterned nylons looks like a kindergarten teacher. The bulldog-faced guy in the tight sport coat seated behind her looks like … okay he looks like a salesman.
“It was one of the most thrilling days of my life,” says Shirley Hartford of Century 21 right at the top of the advertisement that caught my attention in the L.A. Times. “What will you be saying after attending this dynamic event?” I can’t wait to find out. I haven’t had that many extraordinarily thrilling days lately. This sounds like something I can’t afford to miss.
“Before we begin, I want you to turn to someone you don’t know and introduce yourself,” says the speaker. Since I have a history of being unwilling to participate even in audience clap-alongs at incredibly cool rock concerts, I am naturally planning to stare at my lap and pretend that I didn’t hear the command when the woman seated in front of me turns, fixes me with a direct stare, offers me a hearty handshake, and tells me she is Barbara from Egghead Computer. That’s when I remember I am a minority group member here—a spy in the ranks. I am the lone person from the customer sector.
“When we talk to a customer and they come up with an objection, it’s a time of stress for us,” says the speaker. “But remember, in our society customers are trained to automatically give objections. It’s a time of stress for them, too.”
This is a new one. The idea that my reluctance to throw out my own money on questionable purchases amounts to stress for salespeople has never occurred to me before. I usually regard salespeople as land mines in a ground war I would rather not fight. When I shop, I don’t want to interact with anyone. I don’t want to hear how nice I look. I don’t want to hear how smart I am or what a wise decision I am making. But I never realized this made me a nightmare to all the people who now surround me here at SUCCESS 2000.
“In selling, it’s not what you know but what you can think of in time,” the speaker tells us. He encourages us to open up our complimentary booklet (“Yes! You can learn how to sell effectively!”) to page two and study the diagrammed hands that are labeled “The Precision Model.” “Why do we use the precision model?” it asks on the bottom of the page. “Because PEOPLE NEVER SAY WHAT THEY MEAN.”
“All, every, and never are ‘universals,’ ” says the speaker. “They indicate a loop in the customer’s mind. For example, a customer says to you, ‘Everyone is buying Japanese cars.’ You need to break that loop. So you respond, ‘Everyone???’ ‘Well, I guess not everyone,’ the customer is forced to admit. Now the loop is broken. Universals are never true.” (“Never?” I want to yell out.) He’s on a roll now. We’re getting to the meat of the selling sandwich, so to speak. “Trying harder doesn’t work,” he tells us. “You know what works? The RMA works. What’s the RMA? The Right Mental Attitude. And what feeds the RMA? The RPE. What’s the RPE? Recent Positive Experiences.”
The guy across the aisle from me blows his nose into a napkin and looks into it as Peter Lowe prepares to reveal the key: THE THREE RULES OF SELLING. He writes a single word on the overhead projector: Rapport. “Rapport. Rapport. Rapport. You must establish rapport with your customer,” he explains. “How? Communicate based on their feelings. By matching someone’s physiology exactly, by matching the tone of their speech, the volume of their speech, the tempo of their speech, you also build a rapport with them. And once you have a rapport, then you can shift into your sales pitch and they will shift with you.”
This stuff is starting to make me uneasy. The very idea that there are books, tapes, whole schools of psychological and philosophical strategy designed to coerce me into buying things I don’t necessarily want suddenly makes us customers sound like naïve victims in a big insidious plot. What recourse is there for the poor, overtaxed, underdefended customer? What schools of thought can we turn to in a brave attempt to hold our own in the face of such an onslaught? Which is why I now offer:
Obstinacy 2000. Yes, You Can Learn How to Buy Only What You Want To
The single greatest key to holding your own as a customer is NC: No Communication. To do this most effectively you will need to learn the perfect LMAF: The Leave Me Alone Face. You must appear to be a person whose every pore and follicle scream out, “I am a ticking time bomb. All my feelings are just about dead. Don’t be the one to trigger the final frightening explosion.”
If this is not immediately effective, remember that salespeople never mean what they say. So it will catch them off balance if you question the veracity of their every word. If the salesperson comments “You look very well in that outfit,” respond instantly “Compared to what? To how I looked when I came into the shop? Are you saying you didn’t like how I looked in what I was wearing when I came in?” They will answer, “No, no, I didn’t mean that. I thought you looked very nice.” “You did?” you reply. “I thought I looked horrible. Fat and bloated. If you thought that looked okay, I can’t trust your judgment.”
All the while, be sure to Stand By all Your Universals (SBYU). For example, if you say “Everyone is buying Japanese cars,” and the salesman says “Everyone?” you immediately sna
p, “Yes, everyone. Do you have some difficulty with your hearing? Maybe not everyone in the whole big wide world, but everyone that I know and have any respect for, which is all the people whose judgment matters to me. Now which other of my opinions do you want to pick apart and dispute, Mr. Waiting and Hoping and Praying for a Commission Sales Wizard?”
Meanwhile, be sure to watch closely to see if you are being “mirrored.” When you lean forward, does your salesperson lean forward? When you speak softly, does he? If you sense that this is taking place, begin to behave erratically. Shout in the middle of a sentence. Sit down. Stand up. Spin around for no reason. Lie facedown on the counter and begin to sob quietly. Now take out the Merck Manual and insist that the salesperson help you to diagnose the symptoms that you feel. Does he think you have septicemia, liver tumors, or some kind of nerve damage? Do they have a sphygmomanometer on the premises? This is the moment when you must begin to overwhelm him with your HMA (Horrible Mental Attitude). Remind him of the futility of a frivolous materialistic purchase in a world so full of tragedies as ours. “Sure,” you say, “I could start to make endless payments on this giganto TV, but wouldn’t it be better if I just donated the whole sum to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund? Then at least I can write it off on my taxes. Not that I even have any money to spare.” Now take out some of your current bills. “Look at this thirty-one-hundred-dollar Visa bill,” you say. By now the salesperson should be wide-eyed, pale, and clammy; a twitching, throbbing, wretched mess. Which is precisely the moment you choose to close the deal. “Do you like my watch?” you ask. “I got it as a Christmas present. It’s a fifteen-hundred-dollar value but I can let you have it for eight-fifty.”
What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned Page 16