David Rakoff is doing his fish-out-of-water thing.
On this sweltering morning he is outfitted in a brown jacket over a navy T-shirt, dark slacks and black thick-soled boots--made not for scaling mountains but for prowling, clubbing and other vagaries of urban adventure.
The current trek plops this Canadian-cum-New Yorker at the fringes of L.A. summer with a different purpose. This time, instead of gathering color and quotes for one of his wildly outrageous magazine stories, he's on other side of the Q&A--promoting his new book, "Fraud" (Doubleday).
Though seated outdoors, Rakoff politely removes his oval shades and squints against the ridiculousness of the over-bright sun. If he's incredulous that it's nearly 90 degrees and only 11:30 a.m., he hides it well, flipping open the menu and ordering a Nicoise salad and tall iced coffee. He leans into business, a man used to acclimating quickly. Or attempting to will himself to.
Whether over the radio, on the page or across a narrow two-top beneath a fast-wilting ficus in a Pasadena restaurant, Rakoff knows the incantatory power of a story well-told, the art of keeping words aloft like the bubbles in a champagne flute. He possesses the crackling wit of a '30s screwball comedy ingenue, a vocabulary that is a treasure chest of \o7 mots justes\f7 , impressive but most times not too showy for everyday wear.
Known for his off-kilter perspective, in person he tends to downplay it all. "Being humorous is, I think, preverbal. I don't know if I'm all that funny. I think sometimes I can get off a good one," says Rakoff, whose voice and build are both slight and elegant, yet full of unexpected angles. "I think that my perceptions of things are from a humorous stance. Whether that manifests as humor that other people like is luck of the draw. And frequently," he says with the pause of the world-weary, "it's what you get if you don't get to be beautiful."
But the arriving salad cheers him. His eyes widen at the toss of greens in a puddle of orange dressing--a green onion stalk plunged into its center like a listing flagpole. He pauses. "This couldn't be so perfectly L.A. I feel like I'm in the movie 'Shampoo'! Julie Christie is having lunch with Goldie Hawn," he enthuses. "It's delicious."
