Pecking Order, page 9
Ivan could hear Paul agreeing excitedly in the background. “Yeah!”
“Six thousand hits per day, hunh? How did we manage to do that?” Ivan asked them. He realized that his party promotion and street teams would hardly drive that much internet traffic. Something else was empowering the site.
Paul said, “It’s all about working the right search engines, my friend. So anything people search for in San Diego, we need to have a page up to identify it.”
“Yeah, because we’re I.D. Promotions, baby!” Jeff shouted in the background. “And we’re new. Internet viewers always want to check out what’s new.”
“Hey, Ivan, you still want to sell this site name to us?” Paul asked him.
Ivan laughed hard at that. He answered, “Like I told you before, I was only joking.”
“Are you sure?” Jeff pressed him. “We haven’t even made any official offers yet.”
“No offer would apply,” Ivan told them. “My name is priceless.”
“Well, we don’t want your name, we just want the I.D. Promotions,” Jeff responded.
Ivan continued to smile. At his apartment, he thought, They’re gonna want me to pay an arm and a leg to manage this website now. But they obviously know what the hell they’re doing. And a deal is a deal. So if what they’re doing makes me money, then it makes them money.
Finally, he told them, “I’ll tell you what, after about five years, we’ll see where we are with this thing, and I’ll let you make me an offer then.”
Paul said, “Five years? The world could be over by then. You see all of the problems going on in the Middle East right now?”
“Yeah, the Third World War is supposed to start over there. It’s been prophesied in the Bible,” Jeff added. “Maybe we’re already in it and we don’t know it yet.”
Ivan said, “Yeah, well, in the meantime, let’s keep on living. All right, fellas? We still got a lot of work to do. You guys haven’t even graduated from school yet. You got a lot left to live for.”
IN HIS QUIET TIME, only days before his second big event, with leftover tax work from the office out in front of him, Ivan daydreamed about how long it would take for him to become intimate with Ida. He had been so busy over the past few months with his mother’s funeral in L.A., his extra tax crunch at the office, and now with his new promotion company that he had gone without the naked touch of a woman for a while.
Ida seemed to be moving real slowly and carefully with him on purpose. She always seemed to have something to prepare for whenever they got too comfortable on their dates.
Does she want to deal with me or not? he asked himself. She probably still thinks that I’m a player because of Catherine that night. But she’s been around me enough to know that I’m too busy for that. What is she waiting for?
Ivan was itching to call her and go for broke that night. Then again, he didn’t want to seem anxious and ruin the rapport that they had established.
Is she looking at me only as a friend? he questioned.
He forced himself to call Ida anyway, only for her to answer her cell phone with the same brevity that he had gotten used to from her.
“Oh, hey, Ivan, are you ready for another big night this Friday? I’m just doing some last-minute running tonight. Is everything okay?”
No, it’s not okay, he wanted to tell her. I need to touch a woman right now.
Instead, he answered, “Yeah, I’m good. I was just wondering what you were up to tonight.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. I’m around. But I guess I’ll see you on Friday.”
Ivan paused. He said, “Well…I was hoping I could see you before Friday.”
“Yeah, I know, but between my day job and helping out my mother at the restaurant and a few other things I’m trying to do, I just run out of time.”
Ivan thought, Okay, so I just need to leave her alone, then, and keep it business.
“All right, I’ll see you Friday, then,” he responded.
When they hung up, Ivan shrugged it off and went back to work on the tax papers.
THAT FRIDAY NIGHT at Raymond’s Hot Spot Lounge in southeast San Diego, no more than sixty-five people had shown up to party by midnight. Nearly half of the people who did show were die-hard supporters of Thomas Jones and the San Diego Urban League.
Needless to say, Ivan was disappointed.
“Well…what do you think now, Ivan?” Thomas asked him near the bar. His purpose was not to rub it in, but to see how Ivan would respond.
Ivan stared into the crowd, wearing a silk red shirt under his charcoal-gray sports jacket, a combination he had come up with for that evening. He had been doing his mental calculations when Thomas approached him at the bar.
Ivan wouldn’t break even on this event. He still had Ida and his DJ to pay. He was already thinking about the next promotion and how to plan his way back into a profit.
“Looks like you were right,” he finally admitted to Thomas. “Maybe you can’t get all the crowds.” He was swallowing his first piece of humble pie.
Thomas slapped a comforting hand on his right shoulder. He said, “No, you can get this crowd, you would just have to do more than a couple of parties to get them. You already realized that when you made the additional party deal with Raymond. A bar crowd parties mostly from word-of-mouth, and in places that they’re already familiar with. So it’ll take a while.”
He continued, “But my point is still what I asked you in the beginning: do you even want this crowd? Come to think of it, even though Raymond is happy with the turnout, I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t have even thrown this party.”
Ivan looked Thomas in his eyes. Was he admitting fault?
Thomas nodded to him and read it. “Yeah, I’m admitting it, Ivan. It was my mistake to drag you into this. My eyes got too big on the money you could make. We both got big eyes. But you were right, a lot of professional folks won’t wanna party here. And they only showed up tonight out of respect for us.”
Even Henry had shown up to support them with his wife. They were having a great time dancing, and they preferred having the extra room to move around in.
Ivan nodded to Thomas and squashed it all. “I’m thinking about throwing a network party downtown next. You were right, too,” he told him. “I’m an accountant, and I need to stick to meeting professional people. That’s where all the real money is. This right here would be nothing but pocket change anyway. But at least my guys took some more good pictures for the website.”
Thomas grinned and said, “It’s all a learning curve, young man. If you never fail, you never learn how to succeed.”
Then he looked over behind the bar. “Hey, let me get a rum and Coke, Raymond.”
AT THE END OF THE NIGHT, Ivan didn’t feel up to chasing Ida anymore. It would have been nice of her to give him a small consolation prize of a woman’s attention, but he was no longer pressed about it. Where Catherine had been all up in his face with her advances, Ida seemed to be the running-away type. So he paid her, he paid his DJ, he told everyone good night, and he took the remaining three hundred dollars he had left in his pocket home with him to brainstorm the next goal: an event in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter downtown.
When the going gets tough, that’s when you find out who the real players are, Ivan told himself on the drive back home. I got no excuses to watch from the sidelines anymore. So I’m staying in this damn game until I win it.
BY THE END OF SUMMER, Ivan landed his first event downtown. He found owners of a wine lounge on Sixth Avenue who were willing to allow him to bring his old school R&B music and a professional African-American crowd to their establishment on a Wednesday night. He even got in touch with Emilio Alvarez to invite him and a few of the Padres to stop through.
He called it “Old School Jam Part III—The Business Network Toast.” Instead of one featuring more dancing, Paul created a sophisticated flyer with a group of business folks drinking wine and mingling, with the skyline of San Diego above them. The cover charge was “$10 with Free Wine Tasting.” At the very bottom of the flyer was printed, “Meet Us in the Gaslamp.”
In his steady growth, Ivan picked up a few more young and eager teammates from San Diego State University to work with, and he jumped back on his promotional horse with class and poise.
Thomas was pleasantly impressed by it all.
“Looks like you got the stomach to ride the waves of business,” he mentioned to Ivan.
Ivan grinned and said, “I got plenty of time to learn it. I plan to suck it up like it’s college all over again.”
Among other lessons, he reminded himself to use his profession as an accountant to work more relationships in his favor. So he began to contact the professionals he met and casually offer them tax and accounting advice, while asking a few of them to consider the firm of Hutch & Mitchell for their accounting work.
He also offered his services to the Young Urban Professionals at the Urban League in a free lecture at one of their membership meetings. Thomas was surprised by that move as well. Ivan had gone from a man who barely spoke out in public to engaging a crowd regularly in a matter of months.
“The business made me do it,” he joked to all who noticed the change.
All the while, his website at IDPromotions.com continued to draw increasing traffic. So even though his first downtown promotion at the Wine Cavern would not earn him much of a profit, Ivan felt relaxed and progressive, while making his supporters feel welcomed and appreciated.
He stood before the crowd of nearly a hundred, with a glass of red wine in his right hand. He wore black on black, blending in perfectly with the elegance of the dark cherrywood background.
He said, “I wanna thank you all for coming out tonight and looking professional, grown, and sexy.”
He stopped there and allowed everyone a chance to laugh and gloat while feeling good about themselves before he continued.
He smiled and said, “I mean that,” to produce more laughter. He told them, “But I also wanna thank you all for supporting my goal to create a promotional vehicle that continues to bring like minds together for business here in the city of San Diego.”
Thomas joked from the crowd and asked him, “What, are you running for mayor now?”
Ivan ran with it and joked back, “You give me five more years of your support, and I’ll let you know by then.”
The man was becoming a natural crowd-pleaser.
I knew he had it in him, the gift of gab, Thomas thought as he watched Ivan woo the crowd.
As the network function wound down and a professional photographer documented the event through his camera, Ivan talked business with one of the lounge owners off to an empty corner of the room.
“So, you don’t have to advertise at all?” he asked the co-owner.
“Well, our clientele already knows us, and they get the word out quite effectively for us through word-of-mouth.”
He was a slim, clean-shaven man with graying hair, wearing a white shirt with no tie under his dark blazer.
“What about being a wine sponsor if we agreed to buy a few cases for a much larger event?” Ivan asked him.
The partner hesitated. That was a good thing.
“Ahh, I would have to talk to Dale on that, but what…what would a sponsorship entail?” he stuttered.
Before Ivan could answer him, he felt the presence of a tall woman waiting patiently behind him. He turned, looked, and failed to recognize her. But she was definitely striking, a caramel-skinned black woman, wearing a daring red dress and professional makeup with seductive long lashes.
“May I help you?” Ivan asked her. Was she coming on to him? He wouldn’t mind it if she was. However, she didn’t even smile when she spoke to him.
“I have someone here who wants to meet you.”
Ivan froze. Whoever it was had excellent taste in women, because the messenger was a hell of an attention getter.
The wine partner looked Ivan in his dazed and confused face. He told him, “Go ahead, Ivan, we’ll catch up. This is your party.”
Ivan hesitated before he nodded. He followed the woman to a lone table at the back end of the room. On the way over, she didn’t even bother to make small talk with him. Then she stepped aside to her left at the table, where Ivan came face-to-face with Lucina Gallo. She was having a bottle of Chardonnay. An extra empty glass sat out on the table across from her.
Ivan panicked. Oh, shit! Is that who I think it is?
She stood up from her seat and extended her delicate hand to him. She was wearing an expensive multicolored dress. It looked like Versace.
“I-van Da-vid, I’m Lucina Gal-lo,” she said with an accent. They looked into each other’s eyes with a double sparkle.
Ivan took her hand and nodded. “Yeah, I know who you are.”
“Good. We talk, then.” She pulled her hand back and sat down across the table. Her messenger walked away.
“Have you had enough wine? Or do you want more?” Lucina asked him.
Ivan sat down across from her. He still couldn’t believe that she was actually there in front of him. He nearly forgot to answer her question.
“Oh, ah…nah, I’m good right now with the wine,” he finally answered.
Like her messenger, Lucina refused to smile.
She asked him, “Where are you from?” and took a sip from her glass.
“L.A. Where are you from?”
“I’m from Bra-zil,” she told him. “But much of my family is Italian.”
Ivan nodded and smiled at her. He said, “I was thinking something like that. Your accent don’t sound Spanish or Filipino. But you look like you could be anything,” he told her.
Lucina ignored his comment. She said, “I like your website. I think it has a lot of pa-tential.”
She made Ivan’s small talk seem meaningless. She was there for strict business.
“So, you’ve been checking us out? How’d you find out about it?” he asked her. He was flattered by her research on him, to say the least.
“I see you plan to be very busy,” she responded. “So you want to throw parties now?”
It was a rhetorical question.
Ivan looked into her colored eyes and answered it anyway. “Yeah.”
He wondered what she thought of his eyes. The two of them were definitely close enough to get a good look at each other. However, Lucina stuck to her script, as if Ivan were faceless.
“I hear you work as an accountant. Are you any good?”
Ivan still couldn’t believe it. She had done her research well. With each new question she asked him, he kept thinking that he would wake up soon. But he couldn’t let her know that. So he grabbed hold of his emotions and rode out his excitement.
“I don’t think they would have hired me if I wasn’t,” he bragged.
However, he didn’t feel so secure after noticing Lucina’s sustained grille of icy demeanor. She took another sip of her wine and said nothing.
Damn, she’s just like she was in my dream, he told himself. She’s making me feel stupid over here. And I’m not even high now.
Before either of them could get another word out, a few of the people in the crowd called for Ivan’s attention.
“Hey, Ivan, we’re out of here, man. It’s a workday tomorrow.”
He felt hesitant to move. He looked into Lucina’s eyes first, as if asking to be excused. She had that kind of hold on him.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “I will wait for you.”
Ivan was still hesitant, glued to his chair. Then he shook it off. “Yeah, let me see them all out,” he told her.
When he got up to walk away, Lucina’s eyes followed him across the room. She studied his mannerisms and how people responded to him. But every time he glanced back in her direction, she made sure that he never caught her staring.
After another minute in his absence, she called her messenger back to her table.
“What do you think about him?” she asked her. “And don’t look,” she warned.
“Umm…I mean, I don’t know. He has nice eyes, I guess.”
Lucina frowned at her. “But do you trust him?”
“Do I trust him?” her girlfriend repeated. How am I supposed to know if I trust him? I don’t even know him, she thought. But she wouldn’t dare say it.
“Yes,” Lucina pressed her. The girl was so irritating. She had so much to learn.
“Umm…I guess. I mean, he looks right at you when he speaks. That’s usually a good sign, right?”
“Yes, thank you. Bye,” Lucina responded, and brushed her away. She saw that Ivan was headed back to the table. It was time for her to get to the point of the evening and test his will with her pitch. So as soon as Ivan sat back across from her, Lucina looked around the room at the majority-African-American crowd, who were sipping wine, conversing, and listening to the music. Then she looked back into Ivan’s eyes.
“So, I-van, are you throwing parties for business, or just because you like parties?”
Ivan frowned at her and got back to business himself.
“Nah, I’m not throwing parties just for the hell of it. I got major plans,” he told her. “But it’s just gonna take time. So I’m learning to be patient.”
When he said that, Lucina stared at him. “Patient?” she repeated.
Ivan caught on to her objection. “What, is that a bad thing? I thought patience was a virtue,” he commented.
“Virtues don’t make money,” Lucina told him.
That comment caught Ivan off guard. He laughed it off. And it was true. People seemed to want the forbidden fruits ten times more.
But while Ivan laughed and grinned across the table, Lucina remained about business. She said, “Let me ask you this question. Are you just trying to make black money, or do you want to make money money?”
Ivan looked into her colored eyes and was speechless. He couldn’t even think for a few seconds. When he finally did think of something, all he came up with was, DAMN! In real life, Lucina was icier than she had been in his dream.
Before any words could tumble out of his mouth in response to her, she pulled out a business card from her expensive purse and placed it on the table in front of him. Then she stood up to leave him there.
“Six thousand hits per day, hunh? How did we manage to do that?” Ivan asked them. He realized that his party promotion and street teams would hardly drive that much internet traffic. Something else was empowering the site.
Paul said, “It’s all about working the right search engines, my friend. So anything people search for in San Diego, we need to have a page up to identify it.”
“Yeah, because we’re I.D. Promotions, baby!” Jeff shouted in the background. “And we’re new. Internet viewers always want to check out what’s new.”
“Hey, Ivan, you still want to sell this site name to us?” Paul asked him.
Ivan laughed hard at that. He answered, “Like I told you before, I was only joking.”
“Are you sure?” Jeff pressed him. “We haven’t even made any official offers yet.”
“No offer would apply,” Ivan told them. “My name is priceless.”
“Well, we don’t want your name, we just want the I.D. Promotions,” Jeff responded.
Ivan continued to smile. At his apartment, he thought, They’re gonna want me to pay an arm and a leg to manage this website now. But they obviously know what the hell they’re doing. And a deal is a deal. So if what they’re doing makes me money, then it makes them money.
Finally, he told them, “I’ll tell you what, after about five years, we’ll see where we are with this thing, and I’ll let you make me an offer then.”
Paul said, “Five years? The world could be over by then. You see all of the problems going on in the Middle East right now?”
“Yeah, the Third World War is supposed to start over there. It’s been prophesied in the Bible,” Jeff added. “Maybe we’re already in it and we don’t know it yet.”
Ivan said, “Yeah, well, in the meantime, let’s keep on living. All right, fellas? We still got a lot of work to do. You guys haven’t even graduated from school yet. You got a lot left to live for.”
IN HIS QUIET TIME, only days before his second big event, with leftover tax work from the office out in front of him, Ivan daydreamed about how long it would take for him to become intimate with Ida. He had been so busy over the past few months with his mother’s funeral in L.A., his extra tax crunch at the office, and now with his new promotion company that he had gone without the naked touch of a woman for a while.
Ida seemed to be moving real slowly and carefully with him on purpose. She always seemed to have something to prepare for whenever they got too comfortable on their dates.
Does she want to deal with me or not? he asked himself. She probably still thinks that I’m a player because of Catherine that night. But she’s been around me enough to know that I’m too busy for that. What is she waiting for?
Ivan was itching to call her and go for broke that night. Then again, he didn’t want to seem anxious and ruin the rapport that they had established.
Is she looking at me only as a friend? he questioned.
He forced himself to call Ida anyway, only for her to answer her cell phone with the same brevity that he had gotten used to from her.
“Oh, hey, Ivan, are you ready for another big night this Friday? I’m just doing some last-minute running tonight. Is everything okay?”
No, it’s not okay, he wanted to tell her. I need to touch a woman right now.
Instead, he answered, “Yeah, I’m good. I was just wondering what you were up to tonight.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. I’m around. But I guess I’ll see you on Friday.”
Ivan paused. He said, “Well…I was hoping I could see you before Friday.”
“Yeah, I know, but between my day job and helping out my mother at the restaurant and a few other things I’m trying to do, I just run out of time.”
Ivan thought, Okay, so I just need to leave her alone, then, and keep it business.
“All right, I’ll see you Friday, then,” he responded.
When they hung up, Ivan shrugged it off and went back to work on the tax papers.
THAT FRIDAY NIGHT at Raymond’s Hot Spot Lounge in southeast San Diego, no more than sixty-five people had shown up to party by midnight. Nearly half of the people who did show were die-hard supporters of Thomas Jones and the San Diego Urban League.
Needless to say, Ivan was disappointed.
“Well…what do you think now, Ivan?” Thomas asked him near the bar. His purpose was not to rub it in, but to see how Ivan would respond.
Ivan stared into the crowd, wearing a silk red shirt under his charcoal-gray sports jacket, a combination he had come up with for that evening. He had been doing his mental calculations when Thomas approached him at the bar.
Ivan wouldn’t break even on this event. He still had Ida and his DJ to pay. He was already thinking about the next promotion and how to plan his way back into a profit.
“Looks like you were right,” he finally admitted to Thomas. “Maybe you can’t get all the crowds.” He was swallowing his first piece of humble pie.
Thomas slapped a comforting hand on his right shoulder. He said, “No, you can get this crowd, you would just have to do more than a couple of parties to get them. You already realized that when you made the additional party deal with Raymond. A bar crowd parties mostly from word-of-mouth, and in places that they’re already familiar with. So it’ll take a while.”
He continued, “But my point is still what I asked you in the beginning: do you even want this crowd? Come to think of it, even though Raymond is happy with the turnout, I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t have even thrown this party.”
Ivan looked Thomas in his eyes. Was he admitting fault?
Thomas nodded to him and read it. “Yeah, I’m admitting it, Ivan. It was my mistake to drag you into this. My eyes got too big on the money you could make. We both got big eyes. But you were right, a lot of professional folks won’t wanna party here. And they only showed up tonight out of respect for us.”
Even Henry had shown up to support them with his wife. They were having a great time dancing, and they preferred having the extra room to move around in.
Ivan nodded to Thomas and squashed it all. “I’m thinking about throwing a network party downtown next. You were right, too,” he told him. “I’m an accountant, and I need to stick to meeting professional people. That’s where all the real money is. This right here would be nothing but pocket change anyway. But at least my guys took some more good pictures for the website.”
Thomas grinned and said, “It’s all a learning curve, young man. If you never fail, you never learn how to succeed.”
Then he looked over behind the bar. “Hey, let me get a rum and Coke, Raymond.”
AT THE END OF THE NIGHT, Ivan didn’t feel up to chasing Ida anymore. It would have been nice of her to give him a small consolation prize of a woman’s attention, but he was no longer pressed about it. Where Catherine had been all up in his face with her advances, Ida seemed to be the running-away type. So he paid her, he paid his DJ, he told everyone good night, and he took the remaining three hundred dollars he had left in his pocket home with him to brainstorm the next goal: an event in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter downtown.
When the going gets tough, that’s when you find out who the real players are, Ivan told himself on the drive back home. I got no excuses to watch from the sidelines anymore. So I’m staying in this damn game until I win it.
BY THE END OF SUMMER, Ivan landed his first event downtown. He found owners of a wine lounge on Sixth Avenue who were willing to allow him to bring his old school R&B music and a professional African-American crowd to their establishment on a Wednesday night. He even got in touch with Emilio Alvarez to invite him and a few of the Padres to stop through.
He called it “Old School Jam Part III—The Business Network Toast.” Instead of one featuring more dancing, Paul created a sophisticated flyer with a group of business folks drinking wine and mingling, with the skyline of San Diego above them. The cover charge was “$10 with Free Wine Tasting.” At the very bottom of the flyer was printed, “Meet Us in the Gaslamp.”
In his steady growth, Ivan picked up a few more young and eager teammates from San Diego State University to work with, and he jumped back on his promotional horse with class and poise.
Thomas was pleasantly impressed by it all.
“Looks like you got the stomach to ride the waves of business,” he mentioned to Ivan.
Ivan grinned and said, “I got plenty of time to learn it. I plan to suck it up like it’s college all over again.”
Among other lessons, he reminded himself to use his profession as an accountant to work more relationships in his favor. So he began to contact the professionals he met and casually offer them tax and accounting advice, while asking a few of them to consider the firm of Hutch & Mitchell for their accounting work.
He also offered his services to the Young Urban Professionals at the Urban League in a free lecture at one of their membership meetings. Thomas was surprised by that move as well. Ivan had gone from a man who barely spoke out in public to engaging a crowd regularly in a matter of months.
“The business made me do it,” he joked to all who noticed the change.
All the while, his website at IDPromotions.com continued to draw increasing traffic. So even though his first downtown promotion at the Wine Cavern would not earn him much of a profit, Ivan felt relaxed and progressive, while making his supporters feel welcomed and appreciated.
He stood before the crowd of nearly a hundred, with a glass of red wine in his right hand. He wore black on black, blending in perfectly with the elegance of the dark cherrywood background.
He said, “I wanna thank you all for coming out tonight and looking professional, grown, and sexy.”
He stopped there and allowed everyone a chance to laugh and gloat while feeling good about themselves before he continued.
He smiled and said, “I mean that,” to produce more laughter. He told them, “But I also wanna thank you all for supporting my goal to create a promotional vehicle that continues to bring like minds together for business here in the city of San Diego.”
Thomas joked from the crowd and asked him, “What, are you running for mayor now?”
Ivan ran with it and joked back, “You give me five more years of your support, and I’ll let you know by then.”
The man was becoming a natural crowd-pleaser.
I knew he had it in him, the gift of gab, Thomas thought as he watched Ivan woo the crowd.
As the network function wound down and a professional photographer documented the event through his camera, Ivan talked business with one of the lounge owners off to an empty corner of the room.
“So, you don’t have to advertise at all?” he asked the co-owner.
“Well, our clientele already knows us, and they get the word out quite effectively for us through word-of-mouth.”
He was a slim, clean-shaven man with graying hair, wearing a white shirt with no tie under his dark blazer.
“What about being a wine sponsor if we agreed to buy a few cases for a much larger event?” Ivan asked him.
The partner hesitated. That was a good thing.
“Ahh, I would have to talk to Dale on that, but what…what would a sponsorship entail?” he stuttered.
Before Ivan could answer him, he felt the presence of a tall woman waiting patiently behind him. He turned, looked, and failed to recognize her. But she was definitely striking, a caramel-skinned black woman, wearing a daring red dress and professional makeup with seductive long lashes.
“May I help you?” Ivan asked her. Was she coming on to him? He wouldn’t mind it if she was. However, she didn’t even smile when she spoke to him.
“I have someone here who wants to meet you.”
Ivan froze. Whoever it was had excellent taste in women, because the messenger was a hell of an attention getter.
The wine partner looked Ivan in his dazed and confused face. He told him, “Go ahead, Ivan, we’ll catch up. This is your party.”
Ivan hesitated before he nodded. He followed the woman to a lone table at the back end of the room. On the way over, she didn’t even bother to make small talk with him. Then she stepped aside to her left at the table, where Ivan came face-to-face with Lucina Gallo. She was having a bottle of Chardonnay. An extra empty glass sat out on the table across from her.
Ivan panicked. Oh, shit! Is that who I think it is?
She stood up from her seat and extended her delicate hand to him. She was wearing an expensive multicolored dress. It looked like Versace.
“I-van Da-vid, I’m Lucina Gal-lo,” she said with an accent. They looked into each other’s eyes with a double sparkle.
Ivan took her hand and nodded. “Yeah, I know who you are.”
“Good. We talk, then.” She pulled her hand back and sat down across the table. Her messenger walked away.
“Have you had enough wine? Or do you want more?” Lucina asked him.
Ivan sat down across from her. He still couldn’t believe that she was actually there in front of him. He nearly forgot to answer her question.
“Oh, ah…nah, I’m good right now with the wine,” he finally answered.
Like her messenger, Lucina refused to smile.
She asked him, “Where are you from?” and took a sip from her glass.
“L.A. Where are you from?”
“I’m from Bra-zil,” she told him. “But much of my family is Italian.”
Ivan nodded and smiled at her. He said, “I was thinking something like that. Your accent don’t sound Spanish or Filipino. But you look like you could be anything,” he told her.
Lucina ignored his comment. She said, “I like your website. I think it has a lot of pa-tential.”
She made Ivan’s small talk seem meaningless. She was there for strict business.
“So, you’ve been checking us out? How’d you find out about it?” he asked her. He was flattered by her research on him, to say the least.
“I see you plan to be very busy,” she responded. “So you want to throw parties now?”
It was a rhetorical question.
Ivan looked into her colored eyes and answered it anyway. “Yeah.”
He wondered what she thought of his eyes. The two of them were definitely close enough to get a good look at each other. However, Lucina stuck to her script, as if Ivan were faceless.
“I hear you work as an accountant. Are you any good?”
Ivan still couldn’t believe it. She had done her research well. With each new question she asked him, he kept thinking that he would wake up soon. But he couldn’t let her know that. So he grabbed hold of his emotions and rode out his excitement.
“I don’t think they would have hired me if I wasn’t,” he bragged.
However, he didn’t feel so secure after noticing Lucina’s sustained grille of icy demeanor. She took another sip of her wine and said nothing.
Damn, she’s just like she was in my dream, he told himself. She’s making me feel stupid over here. And I’m not even high now.
Before either of them could get another word out, a few of the people in the crowd called for Ivan’s attention.
“Hey, Ivan, we’re out of here, man. It’s a workday tomorrow.”
He felt hesitant to move. He looked into Lucina’s eyes first, as if asking to be excused. She had that kind of hold on him.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “I will wait for you.”
Ivan was still hesitant, glued to his chair. Then he shook it off. “Yeah, let me see them all out,” he told her.
When he got up to walk away, Lucina’s eyes followed him across the room. She studied his mannerisms and how people responded to him. But every time he glanced back in her direction, she made sure that he never caught her staring.
After another minute in his absence, she called her messenger back to her table.
“What do you think about him?” she asked her. “And don’t look,” she warned.
“Umm…I mean, I don’t know. He has nice eyes, I guess.”
Lucina frowned at her. “But do you trust him?”
“Do I trust him?” her girlfriend repeated. How am I supposed to know if I trust him? I don’t even know him, she thought. But she wouldn’t dare say it.
“Yes,” Lucina pressed her. The girl was so irritating. She had so much to learn.
“Umm…I guess. I mean, he looks right at you when he speaks. That’s usually a good sign, right?”
“Yes, thank you. Bye,” Lucina responded, and brushed her away. She saw that Ivan was headed back to the table. It was time for her to get to the point of the evening and test his will with her pitch. So as soon as Ivan sat back across from her, Lucina looked around the room at the majority-African-American crowd, who were sipping wine, conversing, and listening to the music. Then she looked back into Ivan’s eyes.
“So, I-van, are you throwing parties for business, or just because you like parties?”
Ivan frowned at her and got back to business himself.
“Nah, I’m not throwing parties just for the hell of it. I got major plans,” he told her. “But it’s just gonna take time. So I’m learning to be patient.”
When he said that, Lucina stared at him. “Patient?” she repeated.
Ivan caught on to her objection. “What, is that a bad thing? I thought patience was a virtue,” he commented.
“Virtues don’t make money,” Lucina told him.
That comment caught Ivan off guard. He laughed it off. And it was true. People seemed to want the forbidden fruits ten times more.
But while Ivan laughed and grinned across the table, Lucina remained about business. She said, “Let me ask you this question. Are you just trying to make black money, or do you want to make money money?”
Ivan looked into her colored eyes and was speechless. He couldn’t even think for a few seconds. When he finally did think of something, all he came up with was, DAMN! In real life, Lucina was icier than she had been in his dream.
Before any words could tumble out of his mouth in response to her, she pulled out a business card from her expensive purse and placed it on the table in front of him. Then she stood up to leave him there.
