The first thing you’ll notice about Hillcrest is that there’s a lot of foot traffic, at least in the downtown area. The second thing you’ll notice is how difficult it is to find parking on a Saturday evening. Possibly the third thing you’ll notice is the number of young men wearing tight shorts and T shirts and tennis shoes with no socks and sporting short, military haircuts.
For a successful dinner trip through Hillcrest on the way to the Globe Theater, my theory is you drive around until you find a parking place within three blocks or so of where you want to eat, meaning of course you’ll have to figure out where you want to eat first, which might involve some driving around looking at restaurant marquees and comparing them to appetite and available parking in continuously evolving decision trees until you both agree on where to eat. Then – where was the closest, most available parking?
We had settled on either Thai or Afghan in the 500 block of University. We turned to go round the corner from University onto Sixth and saw available metered street parking on the northbound side of Sixth. A quick U-turn (at the next legal spot for a U-turn, thanks to the rookie LAX cop who saw me hang a you-ee on a side road at the airport one Christmas morning and spent the next 30 minutes writing up what was probably his first ticket ever, which caused us to be so late to our flight that the only logical choice was to park in the daily parking, which cost $160 for the trip, which, added to the $230 for the ticket, totaled a $390 U-turn, and us on our way to meet our first grandchild!), a quick parallel parking on the four lane street, and we’re out the door looking at the meter.
“How much does it say?”
“It says we have 6 minutes. I don’t think that will be enough”.
“How much do we get per quarter?”
“Oh, wait! It takes ApplePay! Lemme get my phone!”
2 minutes and 3 double-clicks on the side button later, we still hadn’t advanced the paid-for time.
“’Hold phone near reader,’ it says.”
“Fuck it! Let’s use quarters.”
“I’ve already found 5. How much will that give us?”
Clink-clink-clink-clink-clink. “An hour and 6 minutes.”
“So, each quarter buys 12 minutes. I’ve got two more.”
Clink-clink. An hour and a half should be enough.
We settled on Khyber Pass Zarparan (Afghan). We declined sidewalk seating due to the traffic noise on University. Our host seated us near the back but still in view of the street in what had been, in a simpler time, a coffee and dessert shop called Quel Fromage, which had stayed open to a serious and often solo academic crowd with books instead of laptops well past the final curtain of the longest of the Tragedies.
She chose the Lamb Kabob and upgraded to Cherry Rice. I chose Qabuli Palao and Doogh. We waited.
Across the street on the sidewalk, between delivery trucks and high-profile personal vehicles, I watched a Chevy Volt expertly maneuver into a parallel parking place. Two young men got out and walked to the parking meter. From my vantage point, they appeared to be circling the meter and asking each other questions about it. A westbound FedEx truck went by, and I missed what happened next, but when the truck had passed, I saw one of the young men holding what must have been an iPhone up to the parking meter and pressing the side button. He threw his arms out in exasperation and yelled something indistinguishable at his partner.
They both dug into their pockets. A dark-colored Chevy Suburban stopped in the eastbound lanes for the light, and when it moved again, the two young men were gone.
I didn’t feel so bad. They probably didn’t even know what Quel Fromage was.
At the theater entrance, I swabbed on what the sign said was hand sanitizer, then climbed gingerly down the stairs holding the cold metal handrails all the way down to Row D, the 4th row, the best row you can get, telling the docents along the way “Row D,” and when I got to Row D, pointing at “those two over there” in the center, where you could see the whole stage and some of the side areas, right past where the other 40-year subscribers were already seated.
I settled in next to a woman wearing a mask, torn white jeans, and glittery silver sneakers. Out of courtesy, I pulled a mask out of my pocket and put it on.
Then I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket, turned to her and said, “Excuse me, do you know how to turn off an iPhone?”
“Yes,” she started, “you just touch the button …”
“Can you do it for me?”
She took my phone, executed the proper two-button sequence, and then showed me the screen where I could either make an emergency call, cancel, or shut down, and pointed at the slider for shut down.
“You just slide this button to the right, and it will shut down,” she taught as she handed back the phone.
I turned off my own germ-ridden phone, as her date asked, “What did he want?”
The Billy Pulpit 