AMEX
*** ** American Express
Platinum Credit Card. In memoriam. (1989-2006)
Finally, there are those items that were destined for the junk drawer but never made it. This is the story of the one that got away.
*** ** was a name I hadn’t known until the day I found his American Express Platinum credit card in my mailbox. Figuring that it had been sent to me by mistake, I put the card in my jacket pocket with the thought of dealing with the matter later on that day. I forgot about it though.
Several months had passed when I realized that I still had the card while going through my jacket pockets at a restaurant. At the table, I recounted the story of how the card came into my possession, while my friends passed it around to examine it. ”Just put it on ****!" they all joked when the bill came. So ever since that day “put it on ****” had become a sort of catchphrase for those of us in on the joke.
I never got around to returning the card. In the months that followed it would find its way into my wallet, from which I would pull it out on occasion to amuse friends. “You still have that thing!” they would all exclaim. This little gag of mine turned into a standing joke that morphed into something altogether absurd when, nearly twenty years later, I was still pulling the card out of my wallet! In the meantime, we were getting so much mileage out of this *** ** guy that he became like a deity, an otherworldly figure who entered our collective conscious to the point that his name would be evoked regularly and in every circumstance imaginable. “Looks like *** had too much to drink,” someone would say while passing a car wreck on the side of the road. Or, “What do you think **** would do?” when wondering which club to use on the golf course.
Somewhere along the line it was learned that Mr. ** wasn’t the invisible person we had all made him out to be, but in reality, a well-known television writer living in Los Angeles, where I had first encountered the card in 1989.
At last, an intersection ensued in 2006. It happened while on a trip to Los Angeles where I was having lunch with a TV writer-friend on Sunset Boulevard. Midway through our meal, he nudged me and said, “You’re never gonna believe whose sitting at the table behind you. It’s *** **!” I didn’t even turn around to look and spent the rest of our lunch hour wondering what I should do. Part of me wanted to confess my indiscretion to the man whose credit card I’d been running around with for nearly a quarter of a century. But *** would have to have had an awfully good sense of humor to find what I had to say funny. Ultimately, after paying the bill (and to assuage my guilt,) I reached into my wallet, pulled out his card and casually dropped it on the floor next to his chair. As I made my way out of the restaurant, I tapped *** on his shoulder and, while gesturing to the piece of plastic bearing his name, said, “Excuse me Sir, I think you dropped something.”
I never looked back.
No doubt this credit card would have made great fodder for my junk drawer museum had it not been abandoned. But alas, it is gone. A small price to pay for a clear conscience, I suppose. By the way, ****, if you happen to be reading this, I hope that you do, indeed, have a good sense of humor. And, just in case you were wondering; I never tried to use the card.
Well, maybe once.
