Ivan shook it off again. “We’re expecting different crowds,” he argued. “Now I know how to separate them all. And once they finish this new Padres baseball field downtown, you can get thirty, forty thousand in the Gaslamp Quarter easy. All we want to do is find our small percentage of that.”

She listened to him and gave in. “Okay.”

Ivan had made up his mind.

IVAN HAD LEARNED the party game quickly. But he wasn’t too quick to brag about it to the press. He wanted to sound as humble about the process as possible. He understood that the rich would be more attracted to humility. So he focused his comments to appeal to the established and the upwardly mobile who were already used to making money.

“I just try to make sure I do my part to make San Diego a more interesting place to live, love, and party in,” he told the reporter at 944, the San Diego regional magazine.

When asked what made him a unique promoter, Ivan responded, “Sometimes you can’t answer that question, you just do what you do. That’s for others to figure out. I just happen to have a lot of people who like me and like doing business with me.”

After being pressed to explain his character, Ivan answered, “If I had to nail it down, I would just say that I always try to be fair to people and pay them what I owe them.”

Accepting Lucina’s advice to use his certain look to cross over, Ivan finally broke down and had his left ear pierced before he bought one of the most colorful diamond studs that he could find to match his eyes. The idea was to allow his good looks and humility to create a following on their own without him trying too hard to sway people.

“The real sex symbols are the guys who never talk about their looks,” Lucina commented.

Ivan still wasn’t sure about the earring in business, and definitely not the sex symbol thing, but he did realize he needed to sell himself to the fullest for his plans of attraction to work. The catch for the 944 magazine article was getting the cover story.

Lucina told him, “You let me handle that.”

In the San Diego Union Tribune, Ivan wanted to express more of his human side. He knew that more people would read it who were not business related or steady participants of the nightlife.

So in the interview, set up by Eddie K., Ivan told the reporter, “I’m just a kid who had a dream to try and create events for people to have a good time around me.”

In the Tribune article, the reporter did research on Ivan’s background as an African-American out of South Central Los Angeles. When Ivan was asked about growing up there, he was quick enough to put a spin on that as well.