MONTECITO MURMURS: PIATTI CROCKPOT (Flashback)
The Underbelly of America's Most Expensive ZIP Code
A night crocked full of emotion, angst, betrayal, pirandellian drama—and poor timing.
The protagonist is Kleppy (so nicknamed for his proclivity to purloin), his antagonist, Joline (the love of his life).
As for betrayal: It is construed and misconstrued by both, respectively.
With angst for all.
Piatti is quiet at 5:47… until Kleppy interrupts my tranquil solitude. He is looking for Joline, having been in love with this haphazard gal since they were both seven years old—and continues to adore her in a tempestuous kind of way that both soothes and rips at the hearts of those who bear witness to their soapy spectacle from front-row barstools.
“She’s outside,” I tell him. (I’d seen her peering in earlier.)
Kleppy hurls himself out and returns bewildered. “I can’t find her anywhere.”
I shrug. “She was about to come in, I think.”
Kleppy nods enthusiastically “It’s her birthday.” He fiddles with his cell, connects to her. “I’m here—where’d you go?”
Kleppy listens, ends the call, relieved. “She’s coming back.” He whips out a birthday card, asks Sarah the manager to sign it—me too.
Kathy arrives, Bargster right behind her and Kleppy looks out the window for the 28th time since arriving. “I got an idea,” he says to Bargster. “Let’s have a barbeque at your house.”
Bargster shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“C’mon, Joline loves barbeques. I’ll call her.”
Bargster reluctantly relents.
A change of plan provides Kleppy an excuse to phone Joline. He goes outside, returns exuberant. “Yes, she wants a birthday barbeque!” Kleppy is impatient to get going, while Bargster and Kathy are just starting their glasses of chardonnay. “Give me your keys,” he says to Bargster. “I’ll get the barbeque fired up. Kathy will drive you.”
“Absolutely not,” says Bargster, mindful that Kleppy drinks vodka by the pint glass.
But Kleppy is relentless, fretting that Joline will arrive and find no one there. So Bargster hands him the keys, if only to enjoy his chardonnay in peace, and Kleppy scrams.
Not five minutes later, who saunters into the crockpot? Joline—with a guy hanging off each arm.
Bargster is shocked by the sheer audacity of this. “Kleppy’s not gonna like this,” he understates to Kathy and me, shaking his mane of white hair. “That woman is pure trouble.”
Our communal groan subsides into solemn discussion. Should someone phone Kleppy?
No.
Eventually, Kathy and Bargster drain their drinks, drive to Bargster’s house, a barbeque.
Brainy Bill and Raffaelli follow them a few minutes later; Rhino Jim, Queen Barb and I remain behind.
About twenty minutes later Brainy Bill returns, ashen faced.
“What happened, Bill?”
Brainy Bill explains that he just gave Kleppy a ride home. “He begged me to let him out here but I kept going.”
“How is he?”
“Not good.”
“What happened?”
“Listen, you can’t write about this.”
“What are you, my editor? Just tell me.”
“No.”
“No worries, I’ll find out from someone else.”
***
Next morning, coffee outside Pierre LaFond, I hear the sordid details:
When Bargster and Kathy returned to Bargster’s house, one of five racks of ribs had gone missing from the fridge. Bargster accused Kleppy of, well, kleptomania, and said, “You fucking asshole, I’m sick of you abusing my home.” And to get his revenge, added—discretion now out the window—the reason Joline was not present was because she was down at Piatti. With a guy. Two guys.
Perplexed, Kleppy confessed to his rib rack rip-off and, aggrieved more about Joline’s double-dealing than pork ribs, turned on Bargster. “You want your damn ribs! Take them!” He retrieved the rack of ribs and shoved them into, well, Bargster’s rack of ribs. Bargster responded by offering fisticuffs and slapping Kleppy’s face.
“You think that hurt?” hollered Kleppy.
Bargster ordered Kleppy to “get the hell out of my house and never come back!”
That’s the moment Brainy Bill & Raffaelli arrived.
By this time, the barbeque was definitely off.
No pork ribs for no one. Not even Raffaelli.
“Get Kleppy out of here!” Bargster told Brainy Bill.
Kleppy wanted to be dropped off at Piatti for an escalation of histrionics. But Brainy Bill prudently sped past and dropped him home.
It should have ended there. It really should have.
But it did not.
Wouldn’t you know it: After hanging at Piatti another half hour, Joline made it to Bargster’s house and stormed in like a tornado: “Where is my barbeque? Where are my presents?! WHERE IS MY BIRTHDAY CAKE?!”
Bargster folded his arms and shook his head. “No barbeque tonight.”
“NO WHAT!”
“It’s off. Kleppy went home.”
First Joline shrieked. And then she morphed into the Tasmanian devil, launching a cluster of ballistic missiles in all directions: nuts, bananas, apples and oranges, the whole bodega. At some point during her whirlwind tantrum she phoned Kleppy, screaming, “Where the fuck are you!?”
Kleppy tried to explain where the fuck he was—and why.
But Joline’s question was purely rhetorical. She was not in the mood to listen to where the fuck he was or why. “There was never any barbeque!” she screamed at him. “YOU RUINED MY BIRTHDAY!”
The call ended when Joline hurled her cell phone onto the tiled floor, busting it into a dozen pieces. Then she turned on Bargster. “There is no meat! Nothing! Prove it! Show me the meat!” A new thought occurred to her. “Kathy told me to come. Where is that bitch? I’M GOING TO RIP OUT HER EYES!”
(Kathy had wisely locked herself in a bathroom.)
Bargster threatened to call the cops and Joline threatened to do the same herself and, for that purpose, demanded to use Bargster’s cell phone.
But having studiously noted what Joline had done to her own phone, he refused, thus provoking Joline into another manic frenzy during which she invoked every profanity ever invented, putting the possessed Regan of The Exorcist to shame until, totally spent, she demanded that Bargster drive her home.
An overheated crockpot cracked that evening.
It would never be the same.