Sunday, April 25, 1999

A Brush With the Elbow of Minor Greatness

When I lived in L.A. for some five years, even I, recluse that I am, couldn’t help bumping into my fair share of minor celebrities, and let me just say that the experience is almost always a bit of a letdown. They’re inevitably much smaller and plainer than you expect, and sometimes even borderline homely. (I always feel like the disillusioned Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia lamenting after he learns that Lawrence lied to him: “He is not perfect.”)

On the other hand, this apparently doesn’t apply if you don’t realize you’re dealing with a celebrity until later. Certainly there was no disappointment whatsoever when I noticed a rather voluptuous blonde in tight black stretch shorts playing tennis in the courts in front of my San Diego apartment.

Whoever she was, she must’ve been visiting or just recently moved in, since she looked good enough to be a model and I would have seen the commotion around the apartment complex every time she set foot out the door. In fact, between the squarish jaw and Playboy physique, she looked a bit like ....

...Kerri Kendall?!

I couldn’t believe it. Kerri Kendall of Playboy and Internet fame was playing tennis in front of my apartment. Maybe. It was hard to be certain, since her hair was pulled back and she didn’t have any makeup on, and she was, of course, a tad more lifesize than I would have expected (5' 6"). As I walked toward the tennis court for a closer look, I quickly took inventory of what my eyes could see and compared them with what I remembered of Kerri:

• Whoever this woman was, she had a good face and a great physique;

• As good as she appeared, her au natural look made her almost seem approachable;

• Kerri Kendall is a native San Diegan, so it wasn’t entirely ridiculous to assume that this could be her;

• I was pretty sure I had spotted Kerri in front the sports bar just around the corner not more than a few months before;

• Like many models, Kerri insists that her dating life is less than one would expect because guys assume she’s taken.

“Excuse me — is your name Kerri Kendall?”

“Yes.”

Mystery solved.

But then the conversation continued:

“Do I know you?”

“Uh, no.” I introduced myself, and explained that I thought I had recognized her from some magazines I had seen her in way back. (For some reason I thought it best not to mention Playboy by name.) We make the gesture of attempting to shake hands through the chain link fence, shake fingers instead, whereupon she asks:

“Are you online?”

Whoa. Did she know that or was she just asking? Perhaps when I introduced myself I inadvertently said something that tipped her off, somehow revealed that while I was a cheerless office drudge by day, I was Golem, Black Trenchcoat curmudgeon of The Iconophile by night. Maybe she’s even heard of me. Perhaps, though I wasn’t aware of it, I’ve actually become somewhat (in)famous among certain circles, a kind of mildly pornographic Drudge Report. But would it be Lin Milano-style legal threats now? (“You better not have any pictures of me there if you don’t want my lawyer to rip you a new asshole!”) Or was this in fact an opportunity? This quasi-celebrity might actually put me on more equal footing with the celebrated Miss September 1990. And she did say that it was hard for her to get dates, and maybe I actually —

“’Cause I just got a new website at kerrikendall.com...”

Oh. Boy, did I set myself up for that one.

If ever I had been unconscious of my terminal nerdom before, I was painfully aware of it now. The world was right to shun me lo these many years. What a doofus!

“Ah, yes. I’m not surprised,” I said. “A lot of you guys have, uh — ”

“Yes,” she smiled.

I wished her luck with her website, then went both exhilerated and defeated back up to my apartment. And then the final irony hit me: The day I meet Kerri Kendall — and find out that she’s quite possibly moving into my building — is the same day I come to move the last of my stuff out. Yes, I was moving on to better digs. Yesterday this apartment was a tiny rathole daily plagued by a pugnacious, psychotic neighbor I could hardly wait to move away from; today it was a balcony seat to daily watch Kerri Kendall leap about the tennis court wearing next to nothing that I had to give up. To say nothing of the swimming pool! It was enough to make a guy want to fellate a shotgun.

And people wonder why my little bios seem callous and bitter...

(Oh, for the record, the photo above was taken by someone named Wright on June 3, 2000.)