I don't watch much TV but I do flip through the cable channels before I go to sleep. Bad habit, whatever, I don't care. I pour myself a little bourbon, get under the covers, then I check the news, click through to see if there's any good music shows, there's usually not. I like to watch the local shows, like the suburban city council meetings -- I can't tell you why, they are making decisions that affect me but what I really like is just the reliability of the process, it's kind of charmingly unimportant. Some guy in a suit explaining all the tiniest details about how high the curbs should be at such-and-such intersection, the arc of the corner, the type of cement they should use, details he knows intimately and that make our modern life comfortable because we never have to think about them. When my eyelids get heavy I turn it off and go to sleep.
You know what I'd actually like to see, clicking through, sipping on one last drink before I crash? A sexy woman. I don't mean some perfect starlet in designer cleavage, I mean a real, honest, sexy woman. It always strikes me as ironic, almost funny, that you see sexy women everywhere you go, at the park or the library or the mall, but never on TV. On the screen, they're all packaged to some stereotype that I-don't-know-who thinks is sexy. About the closest I can think of are the two blondes on Big Bang Theory, but even there you know you're being manipulated by Hollywood. They're acting, but at least they are acting like regular sexy women. Nice, but it's all done in the writers' room and the makeup table and they might make sex jokes but they make sure they never cross the line into actually sexy. You will never see a tit jiggle or an unscripted sideways smile when someone walks past.
There is one exception. On weekends, Jess Laflaca does the weather on Channel Twenty Seven, which is what they call a "public access" channel for the county. The programs are cheaply produced, I assume they use students from the community college to run things, and they often present information for and about our little community. Nobody ever watches these things, but it's there if you want it -- high school band concerts, county award ceremonies, ribbon cutting, Labor Day parade, the Martin Luther King Day speeches, that sort of thing. At eleven they have the local news and weather, and on weekends it's Jess Laflaca telling us about the weather. They call Jess a meteorologist but I'd be surprised if she had more than one or two courses in college on the subject, if that; she mostly talks about whether you'll need an umbrella tomorrow, or a jacket, or sunscreen; in this area the weather report includes surf conditions and even fishing if there's something unusual, with some stock footage of waves breaking, always the same. But Jess isn't like the weekday guy who uses scientific terms and shows you why the arctic air mass is spinning around the front that's stalled over the Kansas jet stream inversion dewpoint. She dresses stylishly, conservatively, but ... man.
Jess's voice probably bothers some people, it is not an announcer's voice, she just sounds like a regular person that you'd know. I would bet her first language is Spanish but she doesn't have an accent, other that the normal American street pronunciations of things, 'git' for 'get,' for instance. Tends to drop the 'g' in 'ing' endings. She seems to be friends with Montana Zorra, the weekend news anchor, who is also likeable and also probably grew up speaking Spanish, but Montana does not have the magnetism that Jess has. And by magnetism I do not mean she attracts metal objects. I mean you can't keep your eyes off Jess when she's on the screen.
Jess probably has some African blood in her, her skin is tanned -- I have heard her jokingly refer to herself as 'brown people' -- her hair is black and thick, lips are pouty and full. She is a kind of American mixed-bag, ancestors from all over blended together, and in her case I have to say the blend is beautiful. She might have ancestors in the Pacific islands, or the Mayan regions of Central America or the Caribbean, I don't know. Maybe a Black vaquero got it on with a Mexican beauty a hundred or two hundred years ago, and their blood mixed with... whatever. The closest I know to her appearance is the young Sophia Loren, with those almond eyes and a body that won't quit. Jess dresses modestly on the show, but she stands in front of the greenscreen and her profile is voluptuous and womanly and ... ta-daaaa ... sexy. Yes, she is the only truly sexy woman on TV.
So I watch the local weather on weekends before I fall asleep, if I don't have a gig. My eyes consume Jess Laflaca's figure and then I conk out. Once my drink is finished. I'm just glad there is at least one real woman on TV that isn't a cookie-cutter stereotype designed to make women think their husbands are dreaming of some unreachable ideal that they can never be. No, actual women can be sexy, and are.
Now you can picture me in my Crocs and a tank top, pushing a cart through Costco on a Tuesday afternoon. Once or twice a month I make a run for supplies. My room is small and I don't need much but I hate shopping, and people do tend to come over and hang out, so I gotta have stuff, you know what I mean? I get it all at once, load up a cart, pay cash, throw the shit in the back of my car, haul it into my room, and the deed is done.
Even in sunglasses I recognized her coming up from the far end of my aisle. Jess Laflaca herself was leaning on her cart, looking at a list scrawled on a torn scrap of paper, in flip-flops, a stained t-shirt, a raggedy denim skirt, and some stupid sunglasses that looked like she got them at one of our souvenir shops along the beach, reflecting lenses smudged with fingerprints. Her trademark thick hair was tied back in a bushy pony-tail, which I thought was irresistible. She was gorgeous without makeup. Nobody else recognized her, well she is not exactly what you'd call a TV star, weekend weather on the least-watched channel in the country, probably.
I didn't know what to do. She was coming toward me, walking slowly, looking distracted. In fact, she looked like she enjoyed shopping about as much as I did. Like me, she had a cart half-full with staples, she looked bored, unhappy. I couldn't pretend I didn't see her, but I didn't want to bug her.
As she pulled up to me, I said, "Jess Laflaca?"
I know, clever. I always was good with the pickup lines.
She looked surprised. She studied me for a second and said, "Do I know you?"
"No," I said, "We've never met. I'm just your biggest fan, ever."
"You are?" She seemed genuinely surprised.
"I don't know the rest of them," I said, "But I might be your biggest fan." I felt like an idiot.
She had stopped, and it was just the two of us in a narrow aisle. "I have a fan?" she said.
"Are you kidding?" I'm pretty sure she could tell I was shocked to see her.
She was slow to respond, processing this. "Well I do the weekend weather on a channel nobody watches. Sometimes they send me on a news interview but they don't let me do many of those. Like the guy last week who had a bear in his yard, did you see that?"
"No," I said, "Why don't they have you do more?"
"How the fuck would I know?" she said. "I guess because I'm not one of them." Besides throwing me entirely off-balance with her language, she threw up some air quotes around "them."
"I stay up late to watch you," I said.
"That is amazing," she said. "What'd you say your name was?"
"They call me Doc," I said. "I suppose Jess is your real name?"
"Yeah," she said. "Are you a doctor?"
"No," I said, choosing not to explain. Sometimes it doesn't matter.
"Well, Doc, I've been doing the weather for nearly a year there, and you are the first fan I ever heard of. My husband keeps telling me I should quit that stupid job."
"What would you do?"
"I don't know," she said. "I have a friend who has a house-cleaning service, I could work for her. We don't need the money but I do need to get out sometimes and do things."
"That's unbelievable," I said. "You do know that you are one of the most beautiful, sexiest women in the world, don't you?"
"I don't know what to say."
"When I talk to people about you I say you kind of look like Sophia Loren," I said.
"You talk to people about me?"
I gestured toward her, sort of waving my hand from her face to her toes. "Of course, I mean, look at you."
She shook her head. "You are such an innocent man," she said. "You don't know anything about me, do you?"
"Well I've looked at your Instagram account but no, I don't know anything about you."
"You seem like a decent guy, Doc," she said, surprising me. "This 'fan' stuff could get addictive. Tell you what, when we're done shopping, let's meet up over at Moony's for coffee and you can tell me again how beautiful I am." She was grinning, teasing me but also keeping me on the line.
"Really?" I felt like a dork. "Okay, I just need a couple more things."
"Me too." And we rolled away in opposite directions.
Moony's is on the same block, next building down. It's just a little coffee shop, run by a Korean family, never very busy. I have sometimes wondered how they stay in business, but I think it's just hard work and scrimping on extras. I'm old fashioned, I'm still resisting the latte shit, I ordered a black coffee and got a seat at the counter facing the window. There's a park across the street, it's a quiet neighborhood with lots of trees and beautiful scenery. A nice view.
I started to worry that I'd been stood up, but then Jess came in the door and waved. I held up my cup so she ordered and joined me.
"I like this place," she said.
"I've been here a few times," I said. "I didn't know you came here."
