Presidents Day. L.A.
Off in a drizzle to my 12 step meeting. It has been raining steadily here most of the winter. It’s like living in a dimly lit aquarium. The “climate change” nuts had been telling us that we humans had caused the drought and now we were going to have 500 years of drought. And the state was just going to die. Just because of us humans.
Oh, wait. That wasn’t a climate change nut. That was our governor, Jerry Brown. A fine, level-headed fellow. A great man. He’s a genius.
Anyway, as I was leaving my very fine meeting and going to check on my mail, I ran into D., a well-heeled man who lives near me in Beverly Hills. He’s one of the few I know here who’s an open and avid Trumpian. “I have just thought of another reason why I love Trump,” said the man. “I am feeling more sexually powerful since he became President. I feel like a new man.”
“Really? Because he’s such a tough guy and he’s running the country now? Or because he’s so rich and he’s running the country? Or, because he’s not afraid of the media, or why?”
“Because since he became President, the stock market is up about 10 per cent. That’s enough money for me to buy another house. I feel like I can breathe again. I feel confident again. Thank you, Mr. Trump. I’m 72, and the Viagra had stopped working a long time ago. But money works, and Trump is all about money. Money and sex here in L.A. are basically the same thing at my age.”
“Well,” said I, “three cheers for Mr. Trump.”
I went off to my favorite store on this coast, Pavilions, a higher end Safeway, and bought my usual filet of sole. I make it on the grille with many readily available sauces and spices. It’s heavenly. At the fish counter, I ran into E., a stunningly attractive young Asian woman who is working her way through a prestige university here by being the girlfriend of MUCH older, rich men. She is so good looking it is almost blinding. I know her from the nearby car wash. Somehow, she has a new Bentley and I have a ten-year-old Cadillac, but then that’s love, L.A. Style. She’s also a Trump fan. And she has taken me into her confidence. “You know that I’m a descendant of The Khan?” she reminded me.
“I certainly do,” I said. “And you can ride the pony with the best of them.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something amazing,” she said. “I think Trump must have some of the Khan blood in him.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said. “Did you know that there are at least 16 million men in Asia who are descendants of the Khan? That’s how potent he was.”
“Very impressive,” said the envious, plump old economist in me.
“But I’ve noticed that all of my older friends, the guys who send me to Hawaii and Switzerland and Mexico, are feeling like seeing me a lot more since Trump took over. They’re happy. They want to party hearty.”
“Because he sneers at Schumer?” I asked.
“No, dopey,” she said. “Because he’s made the stock market go up and that’s all these guys live for. It’s like he’s given them a giant shot of testosterone.”
“Can I expect for you to have a place at the California Yacht Club soon?”
“We’ll see,” she said, with a Khan-like wink.
Home to take a nap with my ailing big wifey, who has been ill forever. It’s a ridiculously bad flu.
Then off to see an insurance adjuster about some water damage to a property I own. The adjuster was a simply stunning exotic, Middle Eastern looking woman. She looked like she was right out of a French painting of women in the Seraglio. “Where are you from?” I asked her.
“Uzbekistan,” she said. “Tashkent.”
No accent at all. None.
“Former part of the Soviet Union,” I said with a smile. “Put to rights by the former followers of Karl Marx, now capitalist pigs.”
“Who’s Karl Marx?” asked this woman, who is 28 and went to high school in Tashkent. So, it’s not just our schools that are in trouble.
“What’s your ethnicity?” I asked. None of that PC garbage for me.
“Part Mongol and part Tatar,” she answered.
“Oh,” I said. “Stalin hated the Tatars. They loved the Nazis and hated Stalin. So Stalin wanted to kill them all.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “Did you know that Genghis Khan was going to kill all of the Tatars, too, because a Tatar had poisoned his father?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said, as I carefully eyed the sole.
“And he had killed all of them except for one village of about 500 Tatars and then he saw a beautiful Tatar woman and her sister. She was so beautiful that he said he would spare her and take her as a wife. But she said she would kill herself if he did not spare the whole village. So he did and he ‘married’ all of the young women in the village and so now I’m part Tatar and part descendant of the Khan.”
“Really my day for the Khans,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Do you think Trump reminds you of Genghis Khan?” she asked.
“I didn’t really know Genghis that well,” I said, “but if you say so. I heard he was hell when he got mad.”
“He’s a strong man,” she said. “Most men like him even though the people on TV hate him.”
As I went out in the misty rain to my car, a handsome, elderly Prince who had been married to Zsa Zsa Gabor called me by name. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told him. “She was a great woman.”
“A great and good woman,” he allowed. He’s the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Honestly and no kidding, I think he’s supposed to be related to Genghis Khan.
The sole was delicious, cooked over the grille in the rain.
