Dead Stars Read online

  The women darted in & out of Whole Foods like exotic luminous fish in an aquarium castle: to and from the Yogaworks above the Starbucks across the street, to & from Peet’s, Caffe Luxxe, & Sweet Lady Jane’s . . . they didn’t have to wish they were California girls. They were insanely preserved & insanely rich, and if no longer in the zip code of beautiful, they were residents of the posh, gated community of Old Town—most were in their 50s. Lotta divorcées. No need to cry for em either, cause on Montana adjacent that usually meant a $25 mill+ settlement.

  Sometimes if things were slow & Jerzy wanted to hang at the beach, he’d hit this very spot. Last week he got Phoebe Cates pushing a shopping cart & turned it around to one of the STARS—They’re Just Like US! dillios. In these parts, you got people like Madeleine Stowe, Jamie Lee Curtis . . . or Renée. An older crowd, so he usually avoided the area. Come to think of it, lots of stroller-pushing pussy today tho maybe they’re au pairs . . . he swung back to Peet’s but still no sign of————here she comes. She looks so un-Renée, he almost missed her. Whips around & parks residential, so he can telephoto. Got her . . . . . . . . she looks dumpy, shitty, preoccupied. Not a complete disaster—what the business calls a “gasper.” There were “hooters” and there were “gaspers.” Kirstie Alley at 600 lbs was a gasper. Clint Eastwood’s disgusto-looking vericose veins on the golf course in Carmel was a gasper. A hooter would make you hoot aloud, like, say, when Jerzy took a perfectly photogenic image of Katie Holmes and advanced it forward or backward frame by frame til she looked zombily scientologized and/or disheveled, weird-eyed, blinky-weepy, psycho or whatever. By the same means, he made Gwyneth look homely & bag lady-bitter, cellu-lumpy, age-spotted. Jerzy was good; he sold a pic of Michelle Obama looking wild-eyed indigent that really made the supermarket shoppers hoot.

  But the Renée he got was neither. More of what they call a page-turner—filler between the Hooters and the Gaspers, you stare at it, you take it in, you register the shittiness and dumpiness of it, you get that quick, pleasant little hit that reminds you, stars can be dumpy & shitty-looking, just like you & me. Stars can be dumpy, shitty-looking, plastic surgery-deformed, sad, binge-eating cunts, but they’re just like you and me, only with more money.

  Like a million times more.

  Jerzy had his own Smarmy Army of twittering sickos—he called them shitters, twitfarts, twittiefucks, what have you—on the payroll, some of them bonafide bottomfeeders but most just 14 & 15 year-old kids who got a (small, very small) % whenever Jerzy sold a pic they had tipped him on. They were easy to cheat. They were middleschoolers (one was his weed connect), fucking sk8trs who were in it for the sport—just another computer game. Stalking the wild celeb gave em that GPS spy-high . . .

  More tweets now as he rolled down Sunset toward Beverly Hills. Paula Abdul was at Fred Joaillier on Rodeo (go, Paula!) . . . Trent Reznor @ CB2, Santa Monica Mall (why would anyone give a shit) . . . Piers Morgan (hate that dipshit) b-fasting at the Polo Lounge w/Carl Bernstein (you needed to be 70+ to know who Bernstein was) . . . slow morning. Fuck it . . .

  He parked on Burton Way, across from the L’Ermitage. Nice green grass, in the island between lanes . . . Burton always made him feel peaceful. He snorts some coke, leaves the truck, & strolls to the “park” (10 yards away). Sits down cross-legged in the sun. My place in the sun. Feels nice. All buddha-buddha.

  The stars will never be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . just like ME.

  Harry Middleton “hired” him but that didn’t really mean a thing. H around the M would buy pics from anyone, you could be a serial childkiller or a Muslim shoebomber, Harry didn’t give a honeyshot! badger shit, as long as you delivered, Harry would pay the long green. The man had “hired” Jerzy because he liked the idea of staff, he liked playing the big pasha, the poobah, the grand vizier commanding his Smarmy of papsmearazzi, all that horseshit appealed to the freak’s baroque sense of e-trepreneurialism. What being “hired” really meant was that Jerzy could hang at Harry’s apt (an awesome thing) & use it as a pitstop, a place to smoke a joint between Olsen twins, do his meth in the john while H was in the middle of spieling pussymania. But man could not live by honeyshot! alone.

  All in all, being a Hollywood paparazzo suited him. Jerzy liked the perpetual motion. Before Mom was MoMA, she lugged him along on photo expeditions (so she said; he was too young to remember) on the Floridian coast; maybe that had something to do with it. O right, of course! That explains why I’m a paparazzo & a speed freak. It’s all because MoMA hauled my diapered ass along on her lame, peripatetic excursions! Then she ditched him for New York. Jerzy was left in Ocala with his grandma & her Banquet® TV trays and muy depresso ways. And just so Jerzy wouldn’t forget her, MoMA left a shoebox of warpy, sun-drenched Polaroids, some with her & the Professor—his father—in that rathole-looking place she always called “the bungalow,” a few with the three of them—Jerzy, MoMA & Dad—(dad, her married lover)—one had Jerzy in the curly-haired arms of the professor—the name he still called his father in his head (that’s what MoMA called him) . . . MoMA & the Professor all squinty-eyed and happy, staring down the camera in the white-out FL sun. He wondered who took the pics. Maybe a neighbor . . . when he entered toddlerdom, the Professor dropped dead; more Polaroids now, with Jerzy, MoMA and the grandparents staring down the camera, MoMA squinting no longer smiling into the once-paradisal unbearable brightness of Sunkist Florida sun. Then Gramps collapsed & died, and MoMA left. There were no pics from that time.

  He fought a lot in school, they called him a bastard, like the cliché goes, the kids and teachers always find that shit out, & everybody finds a way to torture you about it. Jerzy fought hard, but all he learned was, when you fought you lost. Never a correlation between fighting & winning/only fighting & defeat & humiliation. That’s what he learned. At least they didn’t call him bastard in New York, everybody was probably a bastard, even though he became a rechristened bastard because MoMA forgot to marry Ronny the DP—Ronny Vomes. “Vomes”—what an assholish moniker . . . MoMA used Crelle-Vomes as her “professional name,” but never married either one of them. What a load. So now he was a bastard two times over, and his baby sister was a bitch.

  After MoMA and the DP broke up, they moved to Brooklyn. Ronny was still in their lives, being Jerilynn’s real father & Jerzy’s fake one. Sometimes Jerzy worked on the camera crew like his mother once did, that’s how he got an aptitude, even fantasized about getting into the union. Jerzy went to Baja on a shoot & Ronny fired him for not showing up on the 1st day of principal photography. Those were (the beginning of) the Heroin Years, now he was in the (middle of the?) Tweak Years (still mix ’n matched with H), Jerzy’d always been way into both but now he was super-grateful into the joyful, joyous SLAM Days & GBH/Xanax Nights.

  He got loaded in Costa Rica, Belize, BC, Krakow, Colorado, Crete. Detoxed in UK, Rome, Colorado, Crete, Krakow, BC, the Cape. Returned to New York at 28, took all those years just to find his true calling, that of celebrity craphouse creep. A creeperazzo makes his own sked. Creeperazzi are independent contractors. But the very best part of being a Creeperazzo creeper is you have the wherewithal to do Rx all day long.

  The Master Plan was to fuck with/edit down the Best of the Best of Jerzy’s vanilla creeperazzi & (still to cum) papsmearshots! then assemble them into a gallery show. Oh, that would righteously piss MoMA off! She might never recover from the blow! He’d call the exhibition Jerzy Shores—Harry would love that he used his nickname, he’d give him credit for his cleverness in the catalogue. Jerzy would show his work in LA as Jer-Z or Squeegee or Jeezy, or maybe he’d use all three just to confuse people. He was going to shoot for the top—he wanted to be repped by the Gagosian. He wanted to be the 1st (& last) one on the block to legitimize/commodify/artworld-monetize the moneyshots. Jerzy’d done a bit of late-night tweakstudying about the Gagosian on the web, they had a client that took pics of Lindsay, Sasha Grey, & whomever—made short shitty videos of them too—real dumbass shit—Jerzy thought no way
could the guy compete with him. Another Gagosian guy named Richard Prince did paintings of nurses & stenciled jokes that went for millions—& Jerzy was convinced that the reason it went for millions was because the guy was Number Uno, he must have been the 1st to be totally serious about making a nurse-and-stenciled-joke painting—or if somebody else had, then this guy’s paintings of nurses & stenciled jokes were the 1st breakthrough nurse-and-tell-an-actual-joke paintings, that’s all you needed, it was all about breakthrough, maybe the other guys who did that kind of painting—paintings of nurses and whole jokes—maybe the other guys blew it because they used the wrong jokes, knock-knock jokes or whatever with doctors instead of nurses . . . but Jerzy thought: more power to him, more power to this guy Richard Prince and to Larry Gagosian—Larry Gagosian was King—all he (Jerzy) had to do was have that breakthrough, be the 1st, or the 1st breakthrough anyway, like Jean-Michel Basketcase was with graffiti, or Arbus & her freakshow folk———no one (so far) (to his knowledge) had thought to hang their altered/fucked with/edited papsmeary vulturazzo creepshots in a major gallery of art (tho it must be said that Jerzy didn’t really do a thorough internet search of it because he didn’t want to come across someone who had already done or was just about to do the very same thing that was his Gagosian Dream) but it was a fairly safe bet that no one had. Certainly none of Jerzy’s esteemed colleagues could in their pathetic minds even come close to imagining such a thing. The collective Smarmy Army brain was unfathomably clueless & ill-developed in the realm of this degree of sophistication. How could any of them even know about or understand the genius and the cultural force Larry Gagosian, who was King?

  He’d spent a lot of time in galleries, afterall MoMA made her splashy little sensations when he was just turning 18, right around the time she was ab-/using his baby ½sis who he loved, Jerilynn, whom he always had protected from harm but had failed to against the MoMA machinations. These days mother and son were estranged, but big brother and little sister IM’d, little sis told big bro MoMA was getting desperate, which gave him a kind of wicked pleasure, and while big bro did not tell little sis his Master Plan, little sis did know that big bro was a creeperazzo but big bro distinctly told little sis not to tell MoMA that’s what he did for a living, he didn’t want that bitch anywhere near knowing how he was paying the rent (MoMA did know—just how, he forgot—that her son wasn’t on the East Coast, & was living somewhere in LA), he wanted her to know as little about him as pah-see-blay. What he prayed for was for MoMA to wake up one LA chelsea morning to see that her son’s creepshots! had been declared A R T—she could come to Gagosian’s with everybody else & kiss the ring, the ring of my hem’rrhoided shithole.

  . . .

  Three tweaking tweeters said Michael Douglas was at Sur. With who? he twittered back from his twat. Did not rec was the teetering reply. Did not recognize. Meaning it was probably an agent, manager, lawyer, whoever, though J’s twitshit troops should be able to recog even them.

  Re selling Douglas pics to the e-/print tabloids, the demand had leveled off. They still paid okay, nothing like what they did in the six months after the Big C, but the $$$ was still okay, tho the prices had begun to drop the further the actor got in recovery. Still, they paid. The tabloids wanted a stockpile of the actor lookin good because the more shots they had of him lookin good, the bigger would be the fall (for their readers). They knew the fall would come—one way or another. They knew their readers (& non-readers too) were just waiting for a recurrence. How long had it been? A few years already? The actor was already overdue, it was time, he’d been cancerfree long enough, & their readership—public drama demanded a recurrence, only one that wouldn’t be so easy to be licked, Patrick Swayze-style, & one where he wouldn’t be able to keep his hair . . . public drama demanded a recurrence that maybe ended in a Roger Ebert-style mutilation. Jesus . . . if Douglas lost the whole lower jaw, whoever got that 1st photo of Catherine OBE holding a stained scarf over the missing bottom of his face—Jesus, that was probably worth $5 mill.

  . . . . . . . . . Jerzy got another tweet from one of his twats saying Mary Murphy was there, at a different table. Jerzy never saw So You Think You Can Dance but knew that her thyroid cancer had supposedly been successfully ZAPPED . . . . . . . . . . Jerzy still held to his personal axiom that whenever a celeb declared themselves cancer-free, the devil woke from his nap————

  Sur, on Robertson . . .

  Big Sur, yessur.

  Creeperazzi crowding & papsmearing the sidewalk.

  “Paparazzi”—dumb word from another era, La Dolce Vita word, era of Cinemascopic glamour and arclights strafing Hollywood premiere nights, era of MGM oldschool grandeur/oldschool restraint (era before the internet), era before they sawed off Zsa Zsa’s feet, era before Liz became a rouged-up, roughed-up canteloupehead, era before a stoned nurse tamped his cock into Mickey Rooney’s cracklipped hundred-year-old mouth for webcam kicks. Reagan was still chopping wood for chrissake . . . but time & TMZ wait for no man . . . & they’re very young, these jeepers-creepersazzi Jerzy uses—they’re, like, lone wolves with ADD, tense & smelly & fuckin crazy, with their SUPREME t-shirts, $500 hightops & threadbare vintage American Apparel————now, one of em who’s standing in front of Sur sees something—someone deliberately stepping out of a car down the street, seemingly to avoid the———RachelBilson RachelWeisz RachelMcAdams? LisaEdelstein LisaRinna LisaD’Amato? RyanGosling RyanReynolds RyanSheckler? AshleeSimpson (AshleeWentz) AshleyGreene AshleyTisdale Ashley———?—& one of the lone wolf creepers tears across the street, sweaty relay runner solitaire, infernal Olympiad. . . .

  Jerzy stands outside the restaurant . . . in the world of creepers but not of it. Oxycodone-dreaming of being interviewed in Interview by Richard Prince: RICHARD PRINCE Talks To Art World’s Latest Bad Boy Genius, Papsmearanarchist SQUEEGEE/JERZY SHORES. But until then, to make the rent, he needs something tweet & potatoes, needs to start building up his photo archive for reasons of Gagosianocity. And if along the way he so happens to score some of that happy accident poon for Harry Middleton’s Private Stock Vineyard, well that would just be icing on Elle’s or whomever’s cupcakes, a big payday no doubt, Harry said he’d pay a premium, Jesus, might be high as fifteen-thou for a Hailee or a Chloë or a Kendall, but it’s very hit and miss, that kind of work. Jerzy knew enough to know you could never chase that kind of honeyshot!—you had to let them happen.

  He didn’t talk about it with Harry, or really much with anyone, but he considered his specialization, that true calling, to be the sick celeb (that’s why Mr. Douglas à table @ Sur got his attention). He loved the moment that came weeks—or, if he was fortunate enough, days, or even hours—before death, when, with sniper’s telephoto viewfinder, he caught their eye. The moment they looked back. When Harry spoke of his own epiphany—that private moment shared with Emma Watson—tho the content was dissimilar, that was when Jerzy knew him to be a kindred spirit. Maybe the two Moments weren’t so different; maybe they were really just the same. In the wee, wee hours, when he was very stoned, Jerzy would google recent celebrity deaths [“About 90,100,000 results (0.06 seconds)”], clicking from site to site, scanning the ebituaries of the month & those from years gone by. He read with nostalgia, for some he’d captured & been paid a bounty for; most were lost for all Eternity, residing in honeyshot! Heaven. He usually checked www.deathlist.net/; last night, Kirk Douglas was #5 on the Top 50 of those most likely to expire.

  The list comprises celebrities thought most likely to pass away during 2012. Candidates must be famous in their own right such that their death is expected to be reported by the media, however candidates cannot be famous purely for the fact they are likely to expire shortly. DeathList 2011 was a big disappointment, chalking up its lowest score for over a decade, but, with the performance in the latter half of the year, surely there are signs that the dry season is behind us.

  That strange & special moment . . .

  The beauty of his Moment with Farrah still haunted him
.

  For weeks, the vulturazzi camped outside her pre-cadaverous home. She was returning to St John’s in the morning, & (somehow) slipped out without being noticed. The night before checking into the hospital she would spend at her hairdresser’s, an old & dear friend. But Jerzy got a tip. (It wound up costing him $10,000, but was worth it.) He stayed up all night in the SUV, smoking crack & waiting. At 9AM, beyond the modest hedge of the modest house, there was a commotion at the front door: Farrah & 3 others. He readied himself to leave his truck. The others were already climbing into the station wagon that was in the drive . . . suddenly, without warning, Farrah walked into the street. What was she doing? Jerzy was thrown off-guard. One of the group paused beside the car & called out to Farrah; from the tone of it, he wasn’t very happy. It wasn’t Ryan O’Neal . . . but what was she doing? She looked—well—lovely—or—well—there were aspects of loveliness, easily reminding of the youth & great beauty that once was. She wore jogging pants—the hair of course was perfectly done up by her friend—and was leaning down at the curb . . . to pick up a blue-wrappered New York Times from the gutter.

  She looked all around her, as if seeing the world for the first time & knowing it would be the last, that she wouldn’t be returning from her morning trip to St John’s. Jerzy had tried a thousand times to remember those seconds during & after he sprung from the car with his camera. From the seconds he’d been watching her pick up the paper to the instant he found himself in front of her, only 5 or 6 feet between them. But he couldn’t—it was like a black-out. It was as if he had been teleported before her just so that he could look in her eyes. She startled for a moment, her instincts not knowing if he was an assailant—friend or foe—but when she saw his camera, she unmistakably Farrah-smiled, there was relief, not foe but friend, he was part of her tribe. He began to shoot her, & she was gracious enough to give him the shot—like a kiss—he recalled that after 30 seconds or so she said, “Is that enough? Do you have enough?” Then she said, “I’m tired,” but he kept shooting. And that was when it happened: every showbiz cell in her body bade her smile, graciously and valiantly, even during a rape such as this, & at the very end the swimsuitfamous smile collapsed into the tender rictus belonging to one already launched into oncoming oblivion. She fought it from happening, but sheer weakness of flesh, not of mind or of spirit or of heart, betrayed—that axiom of teeth & lips, timeless equation of Americana/girl-next-door majesty which had rallied (not just by decades-old celebrity reflex, but by impulse of simple humanity, & pretty girl/neighborhood sweetness) to hold in place (for him, for Jerzy) the curbside illusion of an icon still vibrant (which Jerzy in these seconds had believed, it had worked on him until now, until this very Moment) crashed into the grimace in a rotten death’s head.