My good friend David Schoffman is a man about town. Myself, I'm more of a homebody, preferring to experience the rattle of urban life at the remove of my fifth floor flat in the 10ème arrondissement. David, on the other hand, can't sit still.
On most nights you can find him perambulating from bistro to jazz club to after-hours speakeasy to an all night caucus of penny ante, former comedy writer pinochle players in Echo Park.
I guess that comes with bachelorhood.
He usually sets out at dusk, preferring the ebb of Los Angeles' ubiquitous sunshine to the coarse perfect beauty of the temperate midday glare.
He prefers to walk, something only fools and the indigent do on a regular basis. "I like the loneliness of it all," he explained to me one day as I accompanied him on a trek from the downtown Central Library to Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard. "It's the ultimate expression of defiance."
(Or madness)
Even the rain fails to deter him.
He'd rather get soaked then be driven in a car, (Schoffman lost his license several years ago after being diagnosed with ODS or ocular deciduous syndrome). He claims he knows the city inside and out - a justly marginalized talent in an age of bite sized mobile global positioning systems.
All this eccentric solitude has turned my once lively friend into something of a bore. It's no longer uncommon for him to literally put a dinner companion to sleep with his monotonous recitations of street corner arcana and trigonometric traffic pattern trivia.
This is not to say that Schoffman doesn't know how to have a good time.
I just received this video from his last astonishing stroll in Beverly Hills!
This is not to say that Schoffman doesn't know how to have a good time.
I just received this video from his last astonishing stroll in Beverly Hills!
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