Initially posted in 2011: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. An atypical thing as I’m usually sullen, but every so often life feels like a sparkling proposition.

“A ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pulled alongside. It had a 4 SALE sign without a number in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.

“I pulled up at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ This sounded like a double-entendre, of course — I should have said ‘what’s the asking?’ Either way she took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’

“Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this…the most withering L.A. social putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell…the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had. A 60-40 deal.”