Brankton Walks Austin (Part 12)

Brankton palmed the keys to the rental and his room and nodded a terse thanks to Pete who still had those rays of energy -- powerful enough to sterilize unsuspecting passersby -- projecting out in Brankton's general direction.  As he wasn't sporting his lead underwear, Brankton tried putting enough distance between himself and the desk where others in the Baron's party might also be checking-in.

He settled behind a large desert plant with several dark red flowers in full bloom from where he could regroup and assess his next move.  It seemed like a lifetime had passed between yesterday's casual Friday at NBCUniversal and today, standing in the Driskill's lobby with a large knot pitting in his stomach.

"Mr. Newhan!"

Brankton jumped in spite of himself; so much for keeping a low profile.  He'd been caught spying, and looked back over his shoulder to Pete with an annoyed and guilty head gesture of "yeeesss?"

"Elevators are just around the corner, sir!"  Pete pointed with a crook in his arm.  "Shall I show you the way?!"

The top-half of Pete began to move from out behind the desk, but Brankton didn't wait for the lower-half of his energetic escort to appear as well.  He bolted around the plant and headed for what appeared to be the way.   In the same instant he remembered that the Sabbath was over and reached for his phone to call his office.  He glimpsed Pete giving up the cause and was momentarily relieved as he turned the corner.

"Hey!"  It was a woman's voice, with an accent.  There wasn't enough time for another word to be spoken so Brankton couldn't place its origin just yet.

The side of Brankton's face met with the top of his ex-mother-in-law's head at an odd angle, emanating a sound not too dissimilar of two bowling balls bumping into each other in the rack after their trips down the local lanes.  The pain and bruising would subside, but the hollow thud both heard would not soon be forgotten by either Brankton or the Baroness.  Insult to injury was the shattered screen of Brankton's iPhone as it landed flat on the tile floor.

"Ooooh, oooh!  Oh, darling!"  The step-mother to Brankton's ex was rubbing her head as if making a wish on a genie's lamp.  A more lithe figure could not be cut by a 50 yr-old woman.  She was legs and  leisure and embodied about the only class in the Baron's immediate circle, save for his daughter, Brankton felt.

"Sh*t!"  Brankton bent to pick up his phone, which surprisingly was still intact, though the screen was cracked in several large sections.  He also picked-up two tiny envelopes with rental keys in them as well.   He looked up to make his apologies.  "I am so sorry.  Are you all right?  That was my fault," he said.  "I think this one belongs to you,"  he extended a small envelope in her direction.

"Oh, not to worry, darling," said the Baron's wife miffed.  She reached out blindly to Brankton, feeling for this stranger with her keys and asked, "Are you okay?"  She put the the envelope in her purse.

Their eyes met for the first time, and in spite of concussed senses each recognized the other.

"My God!  Oh, my God!  Brankton, darling!"

"Hi, Dominique." It was Brankton's turn to rub his injury, and because he had about a 3-minute head start on expecting the Baron's family to be in Austin, he wasn't as surprised as she about ramming his cranium into her's.

"What in the hell are you doing here, darling?!"

"Well, it's good to see you, too," Brankton deadpanned.

"I'm sorry, Brankton, but do you know that Sophia is getting married?"

"I just found out," Brankton pointed back toward the front-desk and felt like a complete idiot that a glorified bellhop had informed him that the love of his life was remarrying.

"Surely, you must know that this, your being here," the Baron's third wife, with a silver clutch in her hand, waved her arms around in a swirling motion as she looked about, "is quite unexpected, darling."  She was about twenty years younger than the Baron who was almost 70, and yet she could pass for late 30's.

Brankton noticed for the first time that the trip-hop ambient chill soundtrack favored by most upscale hotels had begun its evening shift.  He liked it, even if it was a bit played out.  All of a sudden he needed a drink.

"Dominique, I just checked-in.  I'm in town on business."  Brankton pointed again back in the direction of no-period P, which reminded him that he had to call the office which was two hours ahead; he pushed the power button on his iPhone to see if he needed to be more pissed off than he was currently. Please work, he thought. 

"Darling, but how did you know that Sophia was getting married this weekend?"

"I didn't.  Swear," said Brankton a bit irritated.  Divorce had many attendant negative consequences, but one of the more ungainly  had to be the creation of a new class of hyphenate family members.  The iPhone's home-screen finally appeared to the relief of Brankton who looked back to his ex-step-mother-in-law.  "I'm here to sign a new act, and have to go out tonight to see him at some club just down the street."

"Oh, really?  So you just decided to stay at the Driskill?"  Sounded a bit fishy to Brankton now that he heard it put like that, and with the English lilt of an islander no less.  The Baron was a man of wealth and taste.  And his taste in women leaned toward the Caribbean:  Olive-skinned, tall, beautiful, and well-spoken.   Brankton had to give the Baron that at least.

"Fine, darling.  Whatever you say," Dominique pulled Brankton toward the elevators.  "Meanwhile, you can tell me your version of the truth over a drink as you and I get away from the lobby."

For a brief moment, it looked like the bartender on the second-floor veranda was actually reading the recipes of the drinks he was pouring.  He'd read a bit, turn the page, then walk over and make a drink.  Then read some more, pour a few more drinks. Brankton watched this for a few minutes before he confirmed that the bartender was most likely the second-string crew, probably a local college kid trying to get some reading done for class while working what would ordinarily be a slow shift.  The A-team would be downstairs working the wedding or the rehearsal dinner or whatever his ex had planned.

"Clink-clink, darling!" said the Baron's wife, shaking Brankton's empty glass with ice rattling to that area behind the bar where waitstaff do her bidding.

"Another Jack-n-Coke?" said the bartender.  Brankton took the span of his hand and inverted it vertically for visual aid.

"Make it tall," said Brankton.

The bartender looked at the Baron's wife.  "She'll have another Bellini," said Brankton, who personally preferred the blackcurrant of the Kir Royale over the peachy, summery Bellini as far as Champagne drinks are concerned.  He pulled his glass from her hand.

"We have one of these every Sunday afternoon at the club," said the Baron's wife now with only her rightful drink in-hand.  "Some traditions are good, wouldn't you agree, Brankton?"  He did agree, but he didn't like the traditions that screwed him over.

"What's it been?  Three years?" asked Dominique.

"Not quite 150 Bellini's," said Brankton pointing at her Sunday afternoon drink, calculating.  Plus three Bellini's from today is 153, he thought.

"You look amazing, Brankton, darling."  The Baron's wife threw one leg over the other, with her open-toed pump pointing at her former ex-step-son-in-law.  Brankton pulled another ice cube from his glass and rubbed it on his cheek bone.

"So, I have to know ... who's the guy?" he finally asked the question that no ex wants to really know the answer to.

"Here.  Try one of the these."

"What's that?" he asked.

"For my back.  Does wonders for the pain, as well as rehearsal dinners," she said.   She placed a silver pill box on the bar and opened it revealing nine elliptical Vicodin pills lined-up 3x3.  "You're going to need it."

"Yeah?  That right?"  Brankton looked at his watch; he had a little over an hour until the set would start.  "Two please," he said.

"Two?  Why not?"  said the Baron's wife.  One neat little row of life-numbing capsules disappeared; two for him, one for her style as they toasted with freshened drinks.

"Clink-clink," said Brankton.

Share |

Brankton Walks Austin (Part 11)

Previous "Brankton Walks Austin" (Part 10) -- click here

Next time he'd come here during the week, when a pedometer wouldn't clock the seven Sabbath miles he walked in the Austin, Texas, heat.  That was the thought that was running through Brankton's head when someone's shadow provided momentary shade from the sun that was bathing or barraging his squinting punim with a warm glow or harsh glare of its damaging or darkening rays.  Depends on one's perspective thought Brankton.  His mother never went in the sun without a hat on and SPF and the occasional parasol.  His dad couldn't be bothered, and since he wanted to emulate his father, whether he admitted it or not, neither could Brankton.

"So, dude, are you ready for Jackie to drop you off at your hotel?"  asked a somewhat optimistic Nelson.

"Dude!  Don't call me dude, dude," said Brankton in monotone irritation, eyes closed.  "You call your father the Rebbe "dude" with that mouth?"

The shadow didn't answer.  It just hung over Brankton with an air of expectancy.

"That a no then?"

"It's dad or sir," said the voice providing the shade.  "Sometimes 'pop'."

"But, never dude, am I right?"  Brankton's eyes remained closed, but the squint was gone; he could hear the eternal smile in Nelson's voice.  "So, do you have three dates for this evening now?"  asked Brankton more as a pretext.

"Nah, their idea of fun isn't quite on the same page as mine."

"Do you mean not quite on the same side of the plate?"  Brankton's eyes opened.  He wanted to see Nelson's face for this answer, shade or no shade.  He was instead offered a large hand and pulled to his feet.  A silent Nelson examined the stippling and indentations on Brankton's back made by the concrete as Brankton trudged up the walkway.   He found his clothes where he left them hanging on the small oak like some Mark Twain character fixin' for a swim down by the watering hole.

"The offer stands," Nelson finally said.  "You really don't need to hike it back.  We can drop you."

After a few awkward moments of a wrapped towel around his waist and struggling out of wet trunks and the slipping on of khakis trying not to expose himself to sexually aggressive coeds and ambiguous Chaucer-loving beefcakes, Brankton turned his back to Barton Springs and walked to the Driskill Hotel.

The Driskill with its six million bricks was a place that tried to shutdown every few decades or so.  Built just after the Civil War -- or as they say in the South, the War of Northern Aggression -- the Driskill Hotel was the vision of a cattle baron who sold cattle to the Confederate Army and made a tidy little fortune.   If the war was his mint, the Driskill was his sinkhole.  Two years after losing the Driskill in a poker game, Colonel Jesse Driskill died broke.

From one baron to another, only a century apart.  A Confederate cattle baron built it, and now an Italian Baron with a portfolio of luxury hotels around the globe, also owned the Driskill.  Brankton knew this, but he didn't.  Like so many things about his ex-wife's life, he "heard" that the Baron owned a luxury hotel in Austin, but didn't "hear" that it was the Driskill.  There was a reason his ex lived in Austin, yes, and there was a reason she called him obtuse.  Some things just didn't stick.  Things that had to do with her family's wealth mostly.  With her trust fund, yes, but more to do with their privilege and condescension.

It wasn't that he didn't want to know about his wife's family and life.  It was that, well, yeah, Brankton didn't want to know about his wife's family and their forcing a prenup on him last minute like that.  He forced himself to not know. To unremember.  To be a dimwitted dullard when it came to her Baron father, which was tough considering that he was standing in front of him, off to the side, between the lobby and the bar not 30 feet away.

Brankton recognized his accent and resonant voice, even from a distance, over the din of what?  Definitely something was going on in Austin.  Brankton sneaked left to check-in with the front desk where he found a man who was as still as a wax figure.

"Hi, there.  Brankton Newhan."

"I'm sorry, you must have me confused. I'm Sarell P Goodworthy.  My friends call me Pete on account my middle name is just an initial, "P" -- no period --so they named me Peter in the 5th grade ... which I have always hated."  Brankton looked blankly at the man to make sure he was serious.  Was this perhaps an animatronic like Abe Lincoln at Disneyland that came to life when spoken to?  Brankton began to say something.

"I'm just joshin' with ya, Mr. Newhan.  But, now you know a little about me, and we're lookin' forward to learnin' about you during your stay with us."

The energy that exploded from no-period P almost sapped all of the remaining strength from Brankton.  It reminded him of when he used to crouch around corners and jump out and frighten his mother.  Several times she nearly fell reacting to his antics and once she even cried, which put an end to the fun of scaring the hell out of one's mother.

"Welcome.  We've been expecting you, sir."

Brankton would have preferred a simple "good evening," but whatever. "Hello," was all he could muster back to ole Petey.

"We have your car for you parked just outside.  And we've already taken your luggage which arrived FedEx today upstairs and unpacked for you."   A freakishly small yet bespoke envelope contained his room key and another the keys to his rental.  Pete presented them to Brankton hand-over-forearm like a sommelier would a fine Cabernet.

"Say, Pete, what's going on tonight?  Isn't that the Baron I spy with my little eye?"  Brankton felt the sarcasm creeping in with alacrity.

"You know the Baron, sir?"

"Yes, well, let's just say I used to be apart of a subsidiary of his vast empire.  Based in Los Angeles."

"Oh, very good.  Well then you must know our GM, the Baron's daughter, Sophia.  It's her wedding this weekend."  No-period P seemed to rise on his toes several inches as if he were trying on heels for a bridal party dress.

"You don't say."  The universe was telling Brankton something he was sure of it; he just wasn't sure if he was hearing it right.

Share |

this appointment with disappointment

separate lives.  river splits the two, the two versions of ourselves.  you know.

over there all verdant where a canopy of contentment stands over manicured yards and money raining down all timely and whatnot.  a rive gauche for the accomplished who sleep sweetly and love deeply and things are straight and teeth perfect and none need hindsight.  a life we think better that actually exists.

makes me think of

these separate lives. of ours.  well mine.  from the ole here now.  not just about means or money or status, but the disconnect of knowing and faith, from still hoping and just dreaming. my feet banked with acceptance rather than disappointment. still swinging for dimly lit, rippling dreams, still reaching and learning.

makes me realize finally

that over there begins, you know, over here.

Share |

Paul Smith: British Designer Admired by This American

Most Successful British Designer Wouldn't Get Recognized in America 

Sir Paul Smith, Westbourne House

When I was a young pup in college, I dated a rather comely, totally in-the-know (a little too in the know in some respects if you catch my drift) young woman.  She and I were fast becoming "of the" and finding our way "in the" world; you know, deciding what things we were going to reject from our betters, and appreciating what we thought was important, and even learning what we liked doing with our free-time.  

Part of this transmogrification included the personal fashion styles we aspired to, which ultimately meant we were growing apart faster than a NASA shuttle being launched from Cape Canaveral leaves behind its temporary mooring.  She the fiery and fleeing temptress, I the temporary stabling force.  For awhile there, right near the end of our six or seven years together, she grew into a club kid looking for the next party wearing her outfits with leg warmers and gold belts and brightly colored skirts and pants, and I remained the boring (mooring) boyfriend, digging my trad style, even rocking several bow ties at various weddings and proper events. 

I can remember one night where she was so embarrassed by my sartorial display at her company dinner, that she actually asked me to (the horror) take off my bow tie because I looked like a waiter.  Classic line.  I actually laughed, but knew that we were done.  Within six months, we were broken up.  I then, the dutiful dumpee, dropped out of undergrad for almost a year, and then dropped about three grand adding some new additions to my wardrobe which would include Willie Smith (Willie Wear), Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, "creepers" and Doc Martins, Armani, and even some Tommy Hilfiger.  I grew my hair long, and then found myself back in school, living with three girlfriends from high school, and trying to figure things out anew and by myself, the way it should be.

But, this lovely ex-girlfriend did add two things of lasting genius and import to my life down in Malibu one fine afternoon.  It was my 20th birthday, and she gave me a brand new book by Michael Chabon (who, some of you may recall, would become my favorite author ever, and whom I just happened to run into, almost literally, at SFO airport this past Thursday afternoon as I was running to gate 90) his master's thesis-cum-future novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.  This petite beauty also gave me a skillfully tailored, blue-striped Paul Smith collared shirt. Never had I owned any shirt like it before.  I felt like an adult wearing it.  An adult with fine taste.

We sat there enjoying a nice lunch in the shade, and I was a bit amped because I had just met Ben Stein for the second time (he was teaching at Pepperdine), whose writing and voice I'd always admired, and I was with my gal, and we were happy and had nothing but the future in front of us.  Well, at least a few more months.  By the bye, I still have to share with you, Dear Reader, how Mr. Stein encouraged me to go to law school.  But, that's for another post.  

So, Paul Smith and his style and influence and expensive clothing.  I wore that shirt of his out.  I mean I even had the cuffs replaced because I didn't want to part with that shirt.  I bought others, but that one was special.  Within the last couple of years Paul Smith (GQ’s multi-winning designer-of-the-year) has opened shops in Los Angeles and San Francisco, hoping to finally crack that American market.  Each of these buildings reflects an architectural through-line back to Paul Smith himself: colorful, drawing influences from sport, history, art, pop-culture or modern architecture.  Paul Smith the brand continues to open stand-alone shops throughout the world, including this past month with a new 3-story flagship in Seoul, South Korea, featuring Paul Smith’s personal art collection on its walls.

British designer Paul Smith is not a household name in America; not yet I don't think.  I mean you probably know him.  I know him.  But, whereas the average Joe or Jill American can recognize Armani or Tommy or Calvin ... Paul?  Not so much.  And that bothers me.  

Where the French have always had a reputation for women’s fashion, it is the Brits, well, London’s Savile Row specifically, that has the well-earned reputation for turning out men in bespoke suits, fitting the country’s elite and sophisticated and, yes,  the wealthy in clothes that definitely make the man.

But, truth be told, these companies churning out high-end men’s fashion haven’t been “British” in the strictest sense for decades; they can be, and are often, owned by multinational corporations headquartered in France, Italy or Japan.   The designers, and their sense of style, most assuredly rock a British idiom that push past typical Savile Row boundaries, leaving the shores of England as fast as any Virgin airlines jet can whisk them away. 

The globalization of British men’s and women’s fashion is certainly alive and well from Asia through to America, with the likes of British (and award-winning) designers like Christopher Bailey (Burberry), John Galliano (Dior), and recently departed Alexander McQueen influencing the way men and woman are dressing.

Bringing us back to the iconic British designer Paul Smith, who is arguably the most successful designer in British history.   Knighted by the Queen in 2000, Paul Smith’s fashion strengths have always played to a man’s sensibility: well-made clothing with just a touch of unique style as seen in his signature multicolored stripes.   Sir Paul’s fashion house, still independently owned, supposedly has revenues now past $600 million from 48 different countries, including 12 different men’s and women’s lines, licensing and limited edition deals with Evian water, cameras, Cross pens, Barneys New York, luggage, furniture, skis,  and the list and revenues go on (and on).

In his book Paul Smith: you can find inspiration in everything (2003), author Sir Paul says that we should seek to be childlike, not childish; and that the key to staying inspired is to see and to think about the world horizontally, where we can find inspiration from all of the things around us (not other designers).  As Paul Smith expansion continues around the globe, his personal inspiration is sure to follow.  Now, if I just had that blue stripped shirt back.

Share |