The Old Man and the Scooter

How to Look Stupid, According to Experts

One of my oldest friends is a plastic surgeon, and he likes to suggest this simple experiment: place your hands in prayer position and put them against your face, pressing onto your nose while tucking your thumbs under your chin.  Then, with your thumbs still touching, open up your hands like the covers of a book and sweep them back.

Now look in the mirror.  

That’s what you’d look like if you went to my friend and asked him for “a little work.”  If you want to know how you’d look with a more drastic approach, do the same thing only put a little elbow into it.  If you pooch out your lips while in this position, this is what you’d look like with lip fillers.  

It’s also how you’d look if you were fully amphibious.

I lived in Los Angeles for thirty years, so I’m no stranger to extreme plastic surgery.  It’s not unusual there to see people out and about with lips so pillowy and cheekbones so high your initial reaction is to wonder which aquarium they escaped from.

The world is sexist, as we all know, so it’s mostly women who suffer like this.  It’s women who keep the Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in Tesla’s and Brioni suits.  It’s women who walk around with skin so tight and bronzed they look like aboriginal drums.  In Hollywood, men may go in for a subtle eye tuck or a little liposuction, but when it comes to the full facial tug, that’s almost exclusively a product for females.

What men do, when they’re feeling old and worn out, is get age-inappropriate clothes.

I remember having a lunch meeting with a very successful producer — a winner of multiple Oscars; a Bentley owner; a museum trustee — and almost didn’t recognize him as he crossed the restaurant to greet me.  He was head to toe in hip-hop wear, with a sideways baseball cap and a white vinyl messenger bag with “Supreme” stenciled on it in blood red letters.  He shook my hand with a jangle of bracelets, and it was at least ten minutes into the conversation before I could really focus on what he was saying.  I was too busy repeating silently, to myself, when you’re sixty, do not be this person, when you’re sixty, do not be this person...

I still have some years to go before I reach sixty — and it’s really none of your business exactly how many years that is — but I can safely report that sporting a hip-hop wardrobe is a remote and unlikely danger.  On the other hand, it’s possible I’ve done something worse.

First, the excuses: I no longer live in Los Angeles — I moved to New York last spring — but I’m back there often for meetings and to remind people in the entertainment industry that I’m still alive and relevant and available for hire.  For longer trips, I rent a car.  For shorter stays, I rely on Uber and Lyft to get me around.  Sometimes, though, to get from a studio in Century City, say, to an office in Santa Monica — maybe two or three miles, tops — I rely on a simpler and more immediate solution.

I take one of those idiotic electric scooters.

I know, I know.  A man my age — and, again, none of your damn business what that age might be — carrying a few extra pounds, perched atop an electric scooter, zooming along Olympic Boulevard...it’s just not a portrait of a dignified and respected writer-producer.  I am expected to glide around town in a BMW-or-better, not bounce along the pock-marked streets of Los Angeles, hair flying back, satchel swinging wildly.  

“What are you doing?” Asked a colleague, as we walked out of a meeting with a television production company.  We were on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica, and I had pulled a scooter from the rack and was mounting up for the short ride back to my hotel.

I assured him that I knew how to ride these things, that I knew the rules, that I have a great sense of balance.

“No,” he said, “I don’t mean that.  I mean, you look totally ridiculous.”

He looked at me the way I must have looked at that producer, years ago, who walked into the Four Seasons Hotel looking like a very white, very Jewish, very old Kanye West.

I shrugged and zoomed off.  

About a mile from my hotel, I heard a siren and saw flashing lights.  It was a Santa Monica Police patrol car pulling me over.  I was in violation, the young policeman told me, of the Santa Monica municipal helmet law.  For riding an electric scooter without a helmet, I received a citation that cost me $75.  

But I think we all know what my real crime was.