My Hero, Zero

One night last spring Monica, Nadine, and I were sitting on Nadine's fabulous patio, the one that overlooks the courtyard, and is so much nicer than mine, which overlooks the chicken place where the students hang out, when Nadine started telling us about a friend of hers who'd recently married a millionaire she met online. Some site called Millionaire Match, or something like that, Nadine wasn't sure.

You can probably guess what happened next, Gentle Reader. That's right, I signed up. Heck, it's free to browse them millionaires, and they, the millionaires, almost all of whom are men, of course, have to initiate communication, because they're the ones paying to be advertised, so to speak.

I spent a couple of hours browsing, had a couple of "winks" (and you thought Facebook was moronic), but nothing materialized storywise, never mind date-wise. Until now. I got this email today:

My Name is Kelvin and i am 46 of age i am a Polish American by nationallity and i seek to find the love of my live.. Having gone through your profile i find it really cool and i decided to email you peharps we could have a chance to get along and who knows where it could lead us to.

For Me true love must be characterised by honesty and sincerity and the foundation must be build on Trust and with the help of God we could make this work..

I am a Building Engineer by Profession and i love my Job.. I am sure you love your Job as well. For me i am Honest and Sincere and i possess a great sense of humor. I would love that you write me back it is my very first time on this dating stuff and i hope i find my soulmate soon enough.

I did prefer that you email me at my private Email dontplaykelivn1@yahoo.com so we could have a good conversation and also use the Instant Messenger.

God Bless you and i hope to read from you soon

Kisses and Hugs

K.
http://www.MillionaireMatch.com/user_details?user=Kelvinisgreat

Other than deleting his last name (yes, he included it), I haven't altered so much as a comma in his message.

By the way, doesn't Kelvin mean absolute zero?

Sunny one so true

She's a dame, all right. A dame like only a man can write her. For other men. For only a man could write a woman like a man so she'll appeal to men both as a man and as a woman.

That's Sunny Randall.

Sunny isn't sunny at all, disposition-wise. She's a smart alec. She says things like, "I had nothing to say about that, and I said it." She gets into it with a bad-ass pimp, and tells him, calmly, "I'm a small blonde cutie. You're a big ugly pimp. I shoot you, who's gonna take your side?"

The Sunny Randall novels remind me of what I hated about the TV show NYPD Blue: all the characters talk with the same distinctive mannerisms. Crooks, cops, teachers, kids, shopgirls, didn't matter. Snappy patter flowed equally snappily from all the characters' mouths.

So it is with Robert B. Parker's writing. See if you can tell which of these characters is the gangster, and which is the cop:

"You need help, you call me."

"I don't need help."

"You need attitude. The more things you can do, the more choices you have. You have more choices, life doesn't kick you around."

"So I learn to cook, my life will be better?"

"It could be worse."

Can you guess which is which? Either way, you're wrong. It's a conversation between Sunny, the blonde cutie smart-alec detective chick, and Millie, a fifteen year old prostitute runaway. Or runaway prostitute. That is to say, she ran away from home and became a prostitute, not that she ran away from being a prostitute.

Enough. Trying to write like Mr. Parker makes my left eye twitch. Thanks for the recommendation, Rex.

I've got big balls

I'm not exaggerating when I say I've never driven a car as big as Nadine's big-ass Mercedes, the one I told you about here, so it shouldn't have startled me nearly as much as it did when I hit the curb while making a sharp turn as I raced Nadine to the airport last Friday. She was late, as usual.

I'd asked her the night before, what time do you need me to be at your place, and she'd replied, after two minutes of extemporaneous rambling, 3:45. Then she called me at 3:00, in a panic, demanding to know where I was, as her plane was taking off in one hour. So there was that.

Then there was the two vodkas and cranberry she'd consumed, obliging me to take the wheel instead of her.

Oh, and it was raining, did I mention? Not just raining raining, but pouring. The kind of rain that never happens in California, but for once each year on the day you are desperately needed to drive your friend to the airport.

As I raced up 87 I prayed that all the drivers surrounding me, idiots on their best days, would be slowed down by their terror of rain. If you're like me and have had your share of driving through six inches of snow, or skidding into a ditch during a blizzard, or having to abandon your car and walk the last half mile home because the snowplows haven't made it to your street yet, you'd die laughing too at these Californians, forever whining and crying about weather they don't have. Weather: they shouldn't be allowed to use the word, since they have no comprehension of its literal meaning.

Nadine, meanwhile, got on the phone. "Hello, yes, I'd like the number for Southwest airlines, please, and can you connect me directly? I don't have a pen and paper to write anything down." Her voice was curiously calm, considering I'd just whacked her car into concrete, possibly necessitating a wheel alignment at a future date.

"Hello, yes, Darlene? Hi, Darlene," Nadine continued, one hand holding her cell phone, the other bracing herself against the dash. "I'm flying to Albuquerque at 4:05 and I'm running late. The traffic was just terrible; I was stuck for an hour behind a three car pileup on 101, and then of course there's the rain... Oh, you're in Phoenix? Well, I'm in San Jose and it's been pouring all day here; it's unbelievable."

She sure was. I was in awe.

"I'm just pulling into the airport now..."

We were doing no such thing.

"... and I should be there in two minutes. Can you tell me if I'll make my flight?"

Nadine and Darlene continued chatting until I pulled up to the departures zone ten minutes later. The plane would be delayed, it seemed, on account of the rain. Nadine is one of those people for whom things always seem to work out, even when she doesn't deserve them to. She's like my friend Angela: helpless, always the damsel in distress. Always needing rescuing, and somehow always managing to get it.

Next: Postmodern Sass parallel parks the big-ass Mercedes in downtown Palo Alto.