New Thing #68: starting an investigation

I just got off the phone with my friend Courtney. Courtney is going to NYU right now, she's a budding playwright, actress, designer, jack-of-all-trades.

I was in New York last October for a reading and Courtney let me crash at her pad. (Does anyone really use that phrase in real life? "Crash at her pad." I'm not sure I would ever use it speaking, but it felt right to type the phrase.) (Anyway, moving on:)

When I was in New York, I decided to look up an old, old friend (someone I knew from childhood) who I literally had not seen in over ten years, but whom I had heard had opened up a clothing boutique in Courtney's neighborhood.

Well, it turned out, my old friend's shop was literally around the corner from Courtney's apartment. Like, it was 45 feet away from her front door. Like, boom, smack, right there, you know?

So I went to the boutique and my old friend and I were both like, "oh my god!" and "wow!" and we did some catching up, and he sells clothing for designers in his boutique now, and Courtney's a designer who recently designed a line of sweaters, and yadda yadda yadda, long story short, I hooked them up and my old friend worked out a deal with Courtney to sell her sweaters in his store.

This was last October...Now flash forward to today...

Courtney just called me:

"Have you talked to your old friend lately?" she asked me.

"Well, no, actually, I haven't spoken to him since I was with you--when I got home from New York, I couldn't find his number."

"He's gone."

Huh?

"He has all of our sweaters and he's just gone. We went over there to see if he had sold any of them, and the store was empty, gutted. All of the merchandise, just gone."

Courtney talked to the landlords and it turns out my old friend was several months late on the rent. Like, many many* months. Business must not have been going well. And instead of calling it quits, returning all of the merchandise he was selling for designers, and filing for bankruptcy, or whatever it is you're supposed to do in a situation like this, my old friend packed everything up in the middle of the night and skipped town.

One day the store was there, and the next day, poof, gone.

And Courtney just wants her sweaters back. It's like the time my stereo got stolen in college and all I wanted back was the Lemonheads cd that was in the stereo, and I posted flyers on bulletin boards all over campus asking the stereo thief to return my Lemonheads cd, except, actually, it's not like that at all. Maybe if I was Evan Dando and then someone stole my cd, maybe it would be like that. Okay, whatever, it's like if I had designed a whole bunch of really cool sweaters and then someone stole them, except it's not me, it's my friend Courtney.

So now I'm calling mutual friends of this old friend and trying to track him down so I can help Courtney get her sweaters back.

I am so Nancy Drew it's ridiculous. (Actually, I'm not really very Nancy Drew yet, since I haven't done any snooping yet, but I'm gonna be really Nancy Drew, believe me: I'm gonna find my old friend and I'm gonna get those sweaters.)

*On a completely unrelated note: (and this will only mean something to you if you were living in Southern California about fifteen years ago or so) Whenever I hear someone say the word "many" two times in a row, or whenever I say the word "many" two times in a row, I think of Gloria Estefan.

That might sound weird, but she was in the very first commercial for The Los Angeles Times Calendar Section (or if it wasn't the very first one, it was one of the very first ones) that they show before previews start at the movie theater. I absolutely hate commercials before movies at the movie theater, but I hate the Los Angeles Times Calendar Section commercials even more than I hate other commercials because the Los Angeles Times Calendar Section commercials never really seem to acurately represent anything you might actually read in the Los Angeles Times Calendar Section, and I think they were ahead of the curve when it comes to commercials before movies at the movie theater and so I kind of blame them for starting the trend. Anyway, in this particular Gloria Estefan commercial, which I saw so many hundreds of dozens of times (because it ran in front of movies for a heinously long time, until they finally retired it and started making other bad Los Angeles Times Calendar Section commercials), Gloria Estefan says "Latin music has manymany beats." And she literally ran the words manymany together like that--like, she almost manages to say "many many" in one syllable, it just rolls off of her tongue so quickly. And I always thought that was funny (even though I hated the commercial). And that commercial affected me so much that every time I hear someone say the words "many many," (which you would think wouldn't happen very often, but when you're attuned to something like that, you end up hearing the phrase "many many" many many times) I think of Gloria Estefan and I can hear her saying "Latin music has manymany beats."