Courting Jinny Flynn
by Alexander Carver Jinny Flynn is a former actress, now in her forties, who I’ve slept with three times in a span of seventeen years. Once at my apartment. Once at her apartment. And once at the waterfront home of a family she was house-sitting for in Malibu. My friend Kelli had initially set us up, predicting that we'd be a perfect match because I’m a cancer and she’s a...whatever she is. Astrological signs are about the last thing I look to when evaluating compatibility, but Jinny and I were both new to L.A., struggling to fit in, and looking for someone attractive to help us navigate the exotic new world we'd chosen. At the very least we had that in common. So we met for a casual dinner at the Broadway Deli on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. A restaurant that has since been turned into a Foot Locker. We both ate Caesar salads with grilled shrimp on top, and drank a glass of red wine, while sitting at the bar. The wine was from Spain and tasted a bit sour, but we pretended to like it. Me: because she had selected it. Her: because she had selected it. I'd never had Spanish wine before, and I haven't had it since. During dinner the conversation that sticks out in my mind revolved around Jinny’s regrets about the setting of her childhood. “I grew up in Iowa, but I wish I hadn’t,” she said. “Why? You don’t like Iowa?” “No, I love Iowa, but I’m embarrassed to tell people I grew up there.” “Why are you embarrassed?” “Because it’s Iowa. It’s not New York or Paris or even Detroit. You tell people you grew up in Iowa and they immediately picture you standing in a cornfield with a piece of straw in your mouth. They think you're simple-minded and uncultured.” “Well, I've known you for all of...what? Twenty-two minutes, and I don't get that impression at all. You have a great personality. You may be a bit wholesome, but isn't that a good thing?” After dinner we drove in separate cars back to my studio apartment in Playa del Rey, watched the episode of Seinfeld where they can’t find Kramer’s car inside the parking garage, and then had sex on my futon with a red candle burning above the TV set. Looking back, I'm impressed that I had a candle to burn, or any romantic sense at all at that point in my life. I was young and inexperienced and probably had yet to realize that women can have orgasms, too. To keep warm Jinny slept in my red plaid button down shirt, and in the morning asked if she could wear it home, promising to wash it and give it right back to me. I said “sure” and told her that it looked better on her than it did on me, while hiding my inward horror at the thought of someone other than my ex-girlfriend, Debby, walking around in that shirt. I didn’t call Jinny that week for a second date. And I never saw that shirt again. That was in February of 1997. At the time we were both in our early twenties. About five years later I ran into Jinny again during intermission of a performance of Othello at Santa Monica Playhouse. It was summertime and she was wearing a tight-fitting, Army green mini skirt, a white tank top, and bright orange flip-flops. A casual ensemble, which set off her tanned and toned figure. As we talked I witnessed both men and women ogling various parts of her anatomy, as they paraded by us, holding small plastic cups filled with “Two Buck Chuck”, a wine reminiscent of kerosene. The effect of which caused me to reevaluate my original opinion of Jinny's overall attractiveness. The ogling, not the cheap wine. She had added blonde highlights to her shoulder length brown hair, which came off successfully, introducing an exotic quality to her appearance, and dissolving any lingering traces of her cow-tipping past. And since the passage of time had also faded out my image as a guy who sleeps with women, promises to call them, and then doesn’t, we managed to have a pleasant conversation. “So what do you think of the play so far?” Jinny asked. “Well, to be honest, I'm not a big Shakespeare guy. To me watching Shakespeare is like watching a play in French or Chinese, or some other language I can’t understand. They should have a subtitle card person standing on the side of the stage for idiot's like me.” She laughed. I'd forgotten what a great laugh she had. Or maybe I just hadn't heard it the first time we'd met. It was probably that. I probably wasn't funny that night. She was on a date with a young dud. Although we did watch Seinfeld together. She must have laughed during Seinfeld. I guess I just forgot. “My friend Daniel's playing the clown,” I told her. “My acting coach Christopher is Iago.” “He's great. Very expressive with his hands... God, I can’t get over how fantastic you look,” I said, exaggerating a wide-eyed expression, and full body scan, for comic effect. “Thanks. I've gotten into yoga.” “Oh. That's the big thing now, isn't it?” “It strengthens the body and the mind.” “So how’s your acting career going?” I asked, changing the subject in order to avoid going down a holistic path. “Not too bad. I just got a part in an indy film. I’m playing a girl who’s in love with her therapist, who’s gay, but in denial... It’s a complicated story, but pretty well executed by the writer, who's gay, and a therapist, and I guess knows what he's talking about.” “It's a comedy?” “No. Well, maybe...it's hard to say. The lines are very serious, but the premise is funny. It's too bad the writer can't write funnier dialogue.” “Well, if he needs someone to punch up the script, I'd be glad to help out.” “Oh, that's right, you're into comedy, aren't you? Okay, I'll mention it to him. Delicately. I don't want to offend him.” “That's true. Be careful or he'll have your character killed off on page two.” “Wait, weren't you doing stand-up comedy the last time we...?” “Yes, I was.” “Are you still doing that?” “Yes, I am. I’ve actually got a gig at Bryn Mawr College in Philly next weekend. It's a school for brilliant women, and I’m a little nervous about how my ‘Knock-Knock’ jokes are gonna go over.” I squeezed a couple more laughs out of Jinny before they flashed the houselights to let us know the second half of the play was about to begin. “Jinny, it was great seeing you,” I said, and then repeated: “You really look fantastic,” to let her know I was interested...again. “You look good, too. I like your glasses. You used to have rectangular frames, didn't you?” “That's right. Wow. You have a great memory.” “I like the round frames better. Stick with these. You'll go a lot farther in life.” I laughed. “Okay, but if I don't, I'm gonna blame you.” After a minty smelling hug, Jinny handed me a business card which read: Jinny Flynn, Professional Actor, and then rejoined her friends in the front row. Having put in an appearance, I pretended to go to the bathroom, and sneaked out the side door of the theater. I knew how the play ended. Everyone died. That was Shakespeare. The next week I called Jinny for a second date. She checked her schedule for the weekend, and said she couldn't go out Friday night because she was having drinks with the director of the film, but Saturday was wide open. Hearing that made me a little jealous, but I said that Saturday was fine, and that I'd enjoyed bumping into her at the play, repeating once again how fantastic she looked, and then yelling at myself when I got off the phone for overdoing the compliments. When Saturday night rolled around, I bought Jinny a bouquet of sunflowers at the grocery store, and with old-fashioned formality, presented them when she opened her apartment door. She sniffed the unscented flowers, took them out of the plastic wrapping, and dropped the long stems into a tall green vase she said her aunt had given her for Christmas. After drinking a Corona at Jinny's head-shot cluttered kitchen table, we boarded my aging Jeep Wrangler and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to a popular restaurant in Manhattan Beach called Pancho’s. The restaurant is authentically Mexican in décor, and features three mariachi singers, who stand at your table and play love songs in an antagonistic fashion, the bow of the fiddle passing within inches of a gentleman's nose. It’s a fun place and the food and drinks are excellent. Jinny and I shared fish tacos and a steak burrito and drank two margaritas apiece. She ordered her's on the rocks with no salt, and I had mine blended with salt around the rim of the wide, deep glass that a goldfish could have lived in comfortably. I've since taken to ordering my margaritas on the rocks, too, having been told by a bartender that you get less alcohol when they're blended. The bulk of the conversation as we ate centered around Jinny's fascination with dissecting people’s idiosyncrasies: her mother, then President Bush, David Letterman, and those of actors and actresses in the spotlight at the time whom she revered or detested. I recall Julia Roberts taking it pretty hard on the chin that night. I don’t think I was visibly affected by it, but I did feel as if Jinny was trying to appear more knowledgeable than me about human behavior, and with what could best be categorized as knee-jerk dissent, challenged the majority of my opinions. Maybe she was still a little angry at me for bailing on her after our first date five years earlier. “Most men want their first child to be a boy,” I said. I don’t remember how we’d gotten into that particular topic, only that the twenty-ounce drinks had led us there. “Oh, I don’t think so,” Jinny said. “Fathers usually get along better with their daughters. At least that’s the way it is in my family. And I come from a big family, so I should know.” “Right, but my point is that I think men want to have a son first to assure the longevity of the family name, and to, you know, protect the younger kids.” “My Dad told me that initially he didn’t want to have boys at all. He's not into sports, and he was afraid they would be, and then he wouldn't be any use to them.” “Okay, but your Dad had a specific, personal reason for not wanting to have a son. I think most men would be pretty disappointed if they didn't have one. Maybe not your Dad, but most men. I know I would be.” “Well, it’s all subjective anyway. Who really knows what other people want? All you can know for sure is what you want.” “Right. Of course,” I said, bristling a bit at her successful attempt to end the conversation by saying something I couldn't dispute. After dinner, as we were crossing Highland Avenue, heading towards the parking structure, a bearded motorcycle cop appeared out of nowhere and ticketed us for jay-walking. I kept quiet while Jinny argued with the officer, saying that we were only a few feet away from the crosswalk, and that he was being “nit-picky”. The officer remained calm, wrote out the tickets in the tinniest handwriting I’d ever seen, and then presented them to us with what Jinny later called a “cavalier grin”. He then further compounded our indignation by jay-walking across the street himself, en route to his bike. “Hey, you just jay-walked!” Jinny yelled, her training as an actor lending her voice just the right inflection of irony. The officer turned around, but didn’t respond. My Dad later commented that I should have grabbed Jinny's ticket and paid both of them. It was a good point and would have been the gallant thing to do. Obviously my Dad's more gallant than his son. With tickets in hand, we drove back to Jinny's apartment in West Chester, and slept together for the second time. Her apartment complex in the town of West Chester, a Los Angeles suburb, was seconds away from LAX, and more than occasionally a plane came whooshing over the top of the building, rattling the fixtures in her apartment. They were like little scheduled earthquakes, the embarrassment of which caused her to list the compensating benefits of living there, like a heated swimming pool, gated parking, and extremely low rent. The next morning while Jinny was showering, and I was cooking eggs and bacon for our breakfast, I took a moment to search through her closet in the hope of finding the plaid shirt she'd borrowed from me during the previous decade. It was a favorite that had gone great with my black leather jacket...lost to another woman. The shirt was nowhere to be found. Perhaps when I’d failed to call her she’d turned it into a cleaning rag. My sister Beth told me that’s what she does with the clothes her ex-boyfriends leave behind. She said it's therapeutic using their T-Shirts, jeans, and even their underwear to wipe away household dust and grime, while dually serving to cleanse her spirit. The following week I called Jinny twice, leaving messages on her voice mail to see if she wanted to go to a Counting Crows concert at The Wilshire. She didn’t return my calls. A couple days ago, twelve years and two presidents since our last encounter, I spotted Jinny as she was jogging down the Venice Beach boardwalk. I was dressed in a suit and tie, having just come from a lunch meeting with my new booking agent, and must have looked ridiculous running to catch up to her. Jinny wears her hair shorter these days, and the blonde highlights have been washed out in favor of her natural color. Her face is remarkably unlined, although her eyes look less vibrantly green than I'd remembered them. Thankfully I was wearing sunglasses that prevented her from seeing the weary aspect that a recent break-up and drinking binge had brought to my eyes. “Oh my God! Hey, Andrew!” she said, pulling her headphones down around her neck. Through the earpieces I could hear the muffled voice of Bruce Springsteen singing something from an early album. “Hi! I’m sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt your run, but I had to say: ‘Hello’,” I said, trying to catch my breath after my sudden, impromptu sprint. “No, I'm glad you did! How are you?” “I‘m fine! This is crazy! It's been a hundred years!” “Yeah, wow, look at you all dressed up, wearing a suit.” “Well, to quote Steve Martin: 'As the face gets worse the clothes must get better.'” She laughed her wonderful laugh. “So are you still acting?” I asked. I’d seen her in a couple commercials over the years, playing a disillusioned housewife in one, and a sleepy-eyed school teacher in another--the products of which I can’t recall, but I’d never seen her appear on a TV show or the big screen. Clearly her dream of being a famous actress had not panned out, just as my dream of being Jerry Seinfeld had been whittled down to my current status as a road comic, who does an occasional spot in Vegas. “No I gave up acting awhile ago,” she said. “I couldn’t get any big breaks, so I moved onto plan B and got married.” “Oh, you’re married?” “Divorced. He warned me that he didn't want to have kids, but I thought I'd be able to break him eventually. I was wrong.” “Well, I'm sorry to hear that.” “How about you? Is there a…nope, no ring on your finger either,” she said, eying my hand. “No, I came close a couple times, but I couldn’t pull the trigger.” “I saw you on Letterman a few years ago, you were great.” “Thanks. Yeah, that material went over pretty well. Audiences love dog humor.” “Do you really have a crazy dog?” “No, I just pretend to in my act. I'm on the road so much it wouldn't be right to have one. The poor guy would grow up with abandonment issues and, well...go crazy.” “Hey what are you doing this weekend?” she asked. “Well, a couple things. Why, what’s going on?” “My friend Lori and her family are going away for a week, and I'm house-sitting for them. They have this amazing place in Malibu overlooking the water.” “Oh, great. That sounds like a nice get-a-way.” “Yeah, and I was thinking maybe if you’re up for it, you could stop by Saturday night, and we could cook some steaks out on the grill. They have a real dog so you can work on some new material.” I laughed, although I'm sure she could tell I was thrown by the invitation that ignored the twelve year gap in our acquaintance. Obviously she was as lonely and desperate as I was...chasing after her in a suit. “Dinner by the ocean sounds wonderful.” On Saturday night I rode my bike down the beach to Malibu, stopping along the way at a wine shop to pick up a favorite bottle, and, since it was on sale, a coconut cream pie. Her friend’s house is modern, spacious, comfortably furnished, and extremely livable for those in need of luxurious relaxation. The view of the ocean below, as you stand out on the deck, is glamorous at night, and rejuvenating in the dim light of the early morning hours. The moon that evening was low in the sky, and a few nights away from being full. There was a calm breeze blowing and the sound of the lapping waves on the shoreline. The cats were nowhere to be found, but their dog, Buster, an affectionate Jack Russell with a charming personality, hung out with us on the deck all night, as we cooked T-bones on the grill, and drank bottle after bottle of red wine...mine, hers, and theirs. Jinny apparently felt secure enough in her friendship with this Lori--who she told me was her sorority sister at Iowa State--to invade their wine closet and sample some of their lesser aged, but quality tasting wines. Before the night was over we had uncorked four bottles, and it felt wonderful to be drunk and holding hands with a pretty woman, as we talked, and laughed, and looked out at the ocean. In the middle of the night, after a bout of much improved love-making in her friend’s king-sized bed, with the photographs of a family I didn't know smiling at us, we went into the kitchen and made quick work of the coconut cream pie. In the morning, the box, left out on the kitchen table, looked like it had been attacked by seagulls. Much of what Jinny and I talked about over dinner, and later, while lying in bed, had to do with our experiences over the past two decades, surviving and succumbing to the “personalities” strewn across our paths as we tried to make a go of it in the entertainment business. Jinny told me about a Korean “right to video” filmmaker she’d worked with, who was constantly rewriting his initially tame, action-oriented script to include scenes where Jinny would appear in either her underwear or a bikini. “And the scenes had no bearing on the plot whatsoever,” she said. “He just wanted to see as much of my body as he could. But I needed the money, and, what the hell, I was proud of my body. It's actually nice to pop that DVD in once in awhile and get a look at those perky breasts again.” We laughed. “Once when I was doing a set at The Comedy Store, some drunk guy was sitting in the front row heckling me. He was relentless, breaking up my rhythm, trying to guess the punch lines—a first class prick. Finally I looked down at him and said, ‘Hey, if you think you can do a better job up here, why don’t you give it a shot’—not thinking he would actually take me up on the offer.” “But he did?” “He did... Now, you have to understand, I was supposed to do twenty minutes that night, and at that point I’d only done about five. So there I was, fifteen minutes to go, and clearly he wasn’t going to let me finish my act. And of course now the audience is into it, wanting him to hop on stage and do some jokes, and so I said ‘fine’ and handed him the mic, a big “no-no” in the world of stand-up comedy. Then I sat down in his seat next to his buddies, who were wildly cheering him on. Of course this idiot had no experience on stage, and no jokes to work with, and suddenly the realization that he was standing up there on a brightly lit stage in front of an audience with nothing funny to say, hit him. I could see a look of terror come over his face. He'd had a lot to drink, but obviously not enough. It was beautiful. He stammered out some pathetic story about something that happened at the office that day and then died a horrible death. Taking my cue when the story proceeded to go nowhere, I assumed the role he’d been playing moments earlier, and I heckled him.” Jinny laughed. “That’s great! You turned the tables on him!” “I did. And he looked at me with this wonderful, shit-eating grin on his face, put the microphone down on the stage, and walked away. The crowd went nuts, and when I picked up the mic and held it over my head, they gave me a standing ovation.” “That’s great. You must have felt like a God.” “It was the single most satisfying moment of my career.” Early the next morning to relieve our hangovers, Jinny and I went for a swim in the ocean with Buster. After our swim we enjoyed an hour of sun on the deck before I had to peddle back to Santa Monica and pack for my trip to St. Paul. When I hugged Jinny goodbye I could tell by the way she squeezed my arms that this time she was sad to see me go. The culture in Los Angeles is youth-oriented, and it can be a tough place to live for someone who's single and aging, as we both are. Our time together was just what I needed after a tough stretch and I wished I could stay there with her playing house at that oceanfront spot in paradise. The audiences have been great here in Minnesota. But I'm looking forward to getting back home so I can see Jinny again and ask if she wants to go to Vegas next week and watch me do a set at The Sahara before they tear the old hotel down. |
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