Land of Iron Giants: It's all About the Closets

Rich people, I've decided, have very neat closets. They have cleaning ladies, personal assistants, personal shoppers, housekeepers, nannies. I doubt they have anything to do with the state of their clothing, but a well-organized closet is a thing of beauty. The only one we have of any consequential size is the black hole of Calcutta and I can't seem to get a handle on it no matter how much I toss out and rearrange.

Several years ago I was friends with a rich kid. He was my roommate in a house I lived in for a while, a big place with a pool up off Laurel Canyon. I was just subletting, a temporary crash pad between relationships. It was me and two guys - the rich trust-fund kid, and a screenwriter who was about to be nominated for an Oscar, making way too much money to be living in the bachelor squalor we called home.

They had a lot of parties, the kind where people showed up because they'd heard about it on the Strip at one of the many clubs. Even the pizza delivery guy, who came one night to my poker game, stood at the doorway with the pie, looked at the living room and said, 'hey, this is the place with all the cool parties.' My poker buddies were impressed, but they'd never tried to get rid of the black-fingernail and chain-through-the nose gang who arrived at midnight, sucked up the last of the beer, and lounged in our bedrooms until daybreak. The only way we could get rid of them was by playing "Ebony and Ivory" over and over really loud until they hissed like vampires spying a patch of sun and found some other place to crash.

But to an in-betweener like me, the parties were a welcome distraction, and when you have rich roommates, they usually have one or two equally rich friends. Food and drink were plentiful, locations tended to be large acreage abodes with lots of toys.

Mark*, the trust-fund guy, (now a semi-famous music reviewer for a major newspaper) liked to have parties at his parent's BelAir spread when they were at their Malibu weekend place. We went there too, to ride horses, but I preferred the town gatherings because I didn't have to keep up with his parents, experienced horse people who liked to take their mounts into steep canyons and up even steeper hills. To me, that's not riding, that's holding on for dear life.

Mark's family home off the curvy end of Sunset Blvd. was a huge place, owned at different times by movie stars and music moguls. The main house was built to look like a French chateau, and the California modern guest house had four bedrooms and a great view of the ocean. There were two pools, (one for the guests) a tennis court, and so many different gardens, I never did explore them all.

The focus of this large estate was the water feature. This wasn't your ordinary pool, but a large and elaborate man-made lake complex complete with bridges, waterfalls to jump off, hidden coves, step-in warm spots (sort of invisible hot tubs), swim-up bar, and rope swings. It was crazy-sick, and we spent many days doing nothing but living in bikinis, eating Mark's parents' food, drinking their booze, and generally living higher on the hog than any of us had a right to do.

While we had free reign of the property during these playdates, the house always seemed forbiddingly cold and uninviting. It had that 'parent-space' feel to it, and even though we were all well over 30, being in the house made you feel like you were still in high school. No-one really ventured past the well-stocked kitchen, but you could see many rooms in shuttered darkness, every piece of furniture and drapery chosen by a decorator who's name was Otto.

One day, I decided to venture up the grand, curving staircase. I'm not sure why, and certainly had no business poking around in the parent space. Architecturally it was of no interest - predictable, despite the attempts to infuse some European flavor into what was essentially an expensive version of a tract home. The top floor was also in semi-darkness, quiet underfoot with thick carpeting.

In the master wing, I found his parents room, a cavernous space done to death in the soon-to-be out-of style of the day, lots of tropical-themed heavy cherry pieces, Tommy Bahama prints, damask-pillowed furnishings arranged artfully and never used. Ensuite his and her bathrooms of course, sunken tubs, lots of marble, chrome, thick terry towels on heated racks, walk-in steam room and showers with pans the size of dinner plates. I passed through all these public spaces and headed straight for the closets.

This room was the high point of my tour. The size and scope of all the organizational woodwork inside them was not the main event, though the number, shape, and size of the drawers, hanging spaces, and cubbyholes was impressive. I spent little time with the mother's predictable, bejewelled collection of gowns and shoes. No, it was the father's closet that fascinated. Before me was a long row of suits that stretched for at least 30 feet at mid-chest height. More suits than you'd see in Gucci on a good day. Or Men's Suit Warehouse, for that matter, if they had the kind of thousand-dollar bespoke labels Mark's dad, a financial broker, preferred.

Despite the grand scale living I'd been cavorting in all summer, this is where I realized that rich people really did live differently than the rest of us. The suits told all: They were each beautifully pressed and hung exactly 6 inches apart on heavy wooden hangers, organized by color and shade, going from the deepest black, through every shade of the black/greys, and on into light summer wools of smoke, twilight, and fawn. At the far end, there were even a couple of crisp, white linen numbers that Tom Wolfe would have given his fedora for.

The intimacy of the man's collection of perfectly and lovingly organized power wear finally jarred me out of my looky-loo reverence. With a guilty start, I crept back out, certain I had disturbed something in this pristine environment and I would be found out as the voyeur I was. There wasn't a dust mote to be seen, a hair out of place, and the temperature-controlled air smelled like a spring day in a cedar forest.

When I try to make sense of the unholy mess that our sad version of a walk-in closet is, I think about that dark, cool, room, with everything neatly in its place, as remote and foreign to my experience as the ease with which men like him squandered my 401K and moved on. He was entitled to 200 suits, and my life savings helped pay for it.

Truth be told, I didn't really like the house. Or the pool. I'll take a real Ontario lake over that overblown monstrosity any day.

* name changed to protect the innocent rich guy

2012, H1N1, and Being A Hero

The special effects in Roland Emmerich's film, 2012, are stunningly realistic - especially if you live in Los Angeles, which falls into the sea with spectacular crashing, popping, and upheaving sideways after the overheated earth's core causes something called 'earth crust displacement', where continents shift 1,000 miles all in one go. John Cusak, who plays a talented but struggling author of a novel with modest success, (hmmm...) is the everyman hero, a guy who saves his family when millions perish. We all would like to believe we're that guy, and not the crowds of hapless little figures seen in the long shots, falling off bridges, hanging on to toppling buildings, screaming helplessly all the way.

The debate to get the H1N1 vaccine doesn't reach the cataclysmic heights of a fissure swallowing up an entire city, but there are some similarities when it comes to when and how we listen to our inner voice when it comes to protecting our families. On one hand, the government has been predicting doomsday numbers when it comes to the death of healthy, young people, including those who weather the typical flu regularly. On the other, there are many, equally frightening rumors, stories, and press coverage of people who managed to get immunized and suffered mysterious, wasting diseases, or even died as a result.

When the vaccines began to arrive in the Americas, I was in Canada for a family wedding. Up there, for those of you who think Canadians are socialist-loving sheep who obey the government unquestioningly, we are, in fact, a nation of skeptics and independent souls only slightly left of our ancestors, the hardy fur trappers and bold immigrants who left hearth and home to brave the unknown in the wintry landscape of a northern giant. Yes, we are not generally risk takers who strive for the traditional American free enterprise model (I've worked for mine, so screw you if you're not smart enough to get yours), but we aren't our brother's keepers either, so you might say the Canadian relationship with the government is as rowdy and love/hate as you get. Just witness a typical day in Parliament, where several different elected minority groups who make up our House representatives duke it out over federal issues. Elephants and donkeys got nothing on us.

So most of what I heard up there about the coming immunizations, was nothing short of hysteria. Friends reared up with indignation and warned me the mercury (thermisol) in the vaccine would give Mimi autism; there was talk of the dangers of the augmented version being distributed due to lack of egg protein (squalene- shark oil) somehow linked to the American military and Gulf War Syndrome. Others told me the flu shot had actually caused the flu in their kids. Then there was the poo-poohing of the pandemic numbers, (and most people I talked to thought a pandemic was related to numbers of deaths, rather than numbers of countries involved). No one knew anyone who had died from H1N1, so these stories of deaths among children and young adults were felt to be vastly overstated.

Back in the States, things were calmer, but not any clearer. The government, having promised to deliver enough vaccines for everyone by late fall, was starting to behave like the man behind the curtian in Oz. Bob and I had already decided to give Mimi the vaccine, but getting access to it became nigh on impossible. There was (and still isn't) a clear channel of public information outlining the distribution plan, schedule, and availability. We heard of the first clinic in Redondo Beach on a piece of paper stuck to the counter at Mimi's school. And at this one, panicked crowds of thousands from as far away as Santa Barbara lined up, and caused a virtual shutdown of the surrounding streets.

Although I was glad we hadn't been caught up in this madness, so began a slow, creeping anxiety centered on just how far I would go to protect my daughter. Visions of other circumstances in history began to coalesce. Would I have gotten out of London, as some did, during the plagues? Would I have survived the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918? My great-grandmother had nursed others through it, but she was so exhausted by the effort, she succumbed herself, something my grandmother was bitter about ever afterward. Would I have gotten out of Germany before WWII? Would I have packed my family into a car days before storm surges devastated New Orleans and drowned those left behind? I had always assumed I would, but it was just so much armchair quarterbacking with the gift of hindsight thrown in.

At what point was I willing to make the effort, as some had already, to wait in long lines, push ahead of others, scheme, fight, do what it took to ensure early access to the vaccine? I passed up several more clinics, playing a game of chicken in the hopes that Mimi wouldn't get the flu, wouldn't get it and die, or conversely, get the vaccine and be the one who came down with GBS, wasting away in a wheelchair. I still had a lot of questions about the type of vaccine we were getting, what the risk factors were, and we continued to weigh all the pros and cons.

But in the end I had to trust my instincts. Mimi has had the regular flu mist since she was a year old, with no effects. And enough thermisol in early immunizations in China to dispel any fears on that score. Yesterday we heard about a children-only clinic (which meant the mist rather than a shot, which Mimi prefers). There was only a small lineup, and the job was done within 3o minutes. No sooner was Mimi home than I heard from a friend the vaccine had just been delivered to the pediatrician's office, which meant I could have waited one more day and asked all the questions that were plaguing me. In the end, it came down to a little bit of panic and a little bit of logic. I can't say which side won out, only that it's done. And Mimi is fine - no after effects at all.

John Cusak's character in 2012 managed to avoid falling lava, cracks the size of Manhattan, tidal waves, and disappearing land masses to get his family on one of the four giant arks built by the nation's leaders to ensure the survival of a tiny percentage of the world's population. The guy had way more luck than brains, but his gritty courage and determination to survive is something we all want to believe in.

Real life, it seems, is a lot more complicated. And so are we.

Our new park - ocean beyond.