Dead Stars Read online

  – Do you think she’ll give it to you? Early? Your mom?

  – It’s my money. I’ll fucking sue her if she doesn’t!

  – Hahahahahahahahaha!

  – Sue the bitch.

  – Beeyotch.

  – She’s a MILS—Mom I’d Like to Sue.

  – ahahahahahahahahahahahahah—

  – TMZ said Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart made like $30 million last year each—

  – Yeah but Taylor Swift—no, Taylor Lautner made, like, 50 million.

  – Who said?

  – Dlisted. And TMZ too.

  – Johnny Depp made 125.

  – Thousand?

  – Million, you spaz.

  – O. My. God.

  – You are spastic. In Touch said that works out to like 40,000 an hour for a whole year, 24-hours around the clock!

  – O my God.

  – That is so crazy. Then Jennifer Lawrence is probably a billionaire!

  – No, the internet said she got totally fucked, she’s only making like a million dollars for like the first three.

  – Eminem probably made more than a billion.

  – Would you fuck Eminem?

  – Are you kidding? Of course!

  – No, I mean if you could marry him, and you found out he really likes it when girls don’t, just, like, fuck him right away—

  – Do you mean could I not fuck him?

  – Like do you think you could not fuck Em if you thought there was a chance he would marry you?

  – What if you didn’t fuck him and he didn’t marry you?!?!

  – If it was between fucking him or not fucking him but the marriage wasn’t, like, guaranteed?

  – I’d fuck Drake.

  – I would so fuck Drake. He got so hurt by Rihanna.

  – Slut.

  – Drake’s a Jew.

  – Nuh uh.

  – He is, he’s a Jew.

  – How could he be.

  – But why is Eminem so pissed off all the time? Eminem is so angry. He has so much money!

  – He’s probably a pussycat. It’s just that he’s been hurt in love. You know, love is, like, heavy on his heart.

  – I used to think he was gay.

  – You thought Em was gay?!?!

  – When “I Need A Doctor” came out, they said “doctor” was like code for “dick”—

  – Who said?!?!

  – It was on the internet . . .

  – That is so lame. “Doctor” is Dr. Dre.

  – I’m just sayin—

  – The song is totally gay, tho. You know, Dre says “All I need is him” and Eminem’s all like “Come back, Dre, you’re the only one who believed in me, why should we care what other people think, let’s just like, you know, fuck—”

  – You are so crazy!!!

  – I think it’s sweet, they’re really good friends, Em’s just saying to Dre that he needs him. It’s so like vulnerable. I mean, rap never talks about man love—

  – & Royce sayin he loves Em like Em loves Dre & how he would kill for him it is so gay!

  – Eminem gave Elton John a cock ring made of diamonds—

  – O that is such BULLSHIT—

  – No, he did, it was in the Rolling Stone . . .

  – Eminem is like so stuck up. I mean like every song he’s on that has other people, it’s like so funny, he’s always talking about how he’s the best, like the others’ll just be talking about weed or cars or bitches or whatever, and all Marshall Mathers talks about is how he’s like the most amazing rapper who ever lived!

  – Whoa! What is your issue.

  – Cause you’re talking—she’s talking like she’s been—what do they say—“a woman spurned”!

  – A woman spermed—

  – Squirted!

  – A woman spurted!

  – She wishes!

  – If I had $100 million trust me I would not be angry.

  – Maybe you would be! Maybe you’d be Charlotte Sheen!

  – Who?

  – Charlotte Sheen. Sister of Charlie!

  – Oh! Charlotte! Hahahahahaha!

  – Charlene. That would be Charlene.

  – Charlene! Charlene! Charlene Sheen!

  – Fuck yeah!—

  – I’d fuck Hov and Ye before I did Eminem.

  – Look at choo. Look @ dis biatch! “Hov” & “-ye”! Lissen to choo. Girl think she a nigga.

  – Nicki Mee-naj. Nicki Ménage à twaht.

  – What about Johnny Depp.

  – What about him.

  – Would you let him d.p.?

  – I’ll tell you my dream d.p. . . . I’m on top of Robert Pattinson & the guy on In Treatment is in my butt. Up to the nuts!!!!

  – Tea baggggggggg!

  – What is In Treatment?!?!

  – Gabriel Byrne is so sexy.

  – I’m kinda over Johnny Depp.

  – He’s over you. And his wife.

  – I’m over that swashbuckling shit. I need uh ass-buckling . . .

  – Have you seen his wife? She’s hot. She’s a singer.

  – Voolay-voo coushay ahveck m’wah, çe swa.

  – I wonder if she’s been d.p.’d.

  – Totally. She’s been totally Johnny D’p.’d! That’s why they’re breaking up. She’s over it.

  – French people invented the d.p.

  – “The” d.p.————————ha!

  – And Americans perfected it.

  – This smoke is amazing—

  – It’s from Rikki’s stash.

  – That purp, that bomb, that kush . . .

  – Gimme that blunt. Gimme gimme gimme.

  – Ree, do you have any Adderall?

  – No!

  – O please O please O pretty pretty please?

  – Do you think Laurence Fishburne ever saw any of Chippy D’s feature films?

  – O, gross!

  – I mean don’t you think he would’ve had to see something, like even by mistake?—

  – Please ReeRee please? Ollie Ollie Addie, oxen free . . .

  – Wouldn’t a father be curious about his daughter—I mean, he’s already seen her nude, he’s washed her in a tub when she was little, he’s already seen that nasty vadge . . .

  – ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

  – ReeRee, pleeeeeeeeeeease?

  – What?!

  – Please can I please have some Adderall?

  – Wouldn’t a father be curious to see his baby take it in both holes & SQUIRT?

  – You are so sick!

  – Thar she blows!

  – Thar she blows——

  – [all together now] THARRRRRRR SHEEEEEEEEE BLOWWWWWWWWWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  CLEAN

  [Jacquie]

  The Family of Mann

  Jacquie

  lied when she told Steve Martin she was almost finished with a suite of new photographs she’d been working on the last few years—the culmination of everything she was as an artist. When Steve said he’d be very interested in seeing them, she knew he was lying too. They exchanged energized hellos while he was in the middle of signing books after the Library event. Jacquie waited half-an-hour longer for him to finish, standing a discreet distance apart, watching him autograph, with an old courtesan’s half-smile. When he was done, a dozen giggling fans lingered, taking cellphone pics with the author for their Facebook pages. With the help of a library staffer, Steve finally disengaged, and Jacquie approached. He was warm and polite. They spent a few minutes catching up, then he said he had to rush to a business dinner. Another lie, she thought. He gave her a contact number.

  What happened?

  For a while, she’d had such a good run . . .

  . . .

  Jacquie grew up poor, in Ocala.

  DOB: 1960.

  Dad was a short order cook. Migratory. Worked up and down those beaches in the summers—

  Pompano, Vero, Cocoa, Daytona, Satellite, Neptu
ne, Boynton. She had no ambition. All roads led to Ocala.

  Dropped out of (the evocatively named) Junior College of Central Florida & became a Wal-Mart worker. At least it gave her the ability to live away from them.

  Perfect timing because right about then her father got disabled & became a stay-at-home dad. Seemed like everybody’s dad had a fucked up spine.

  The irony was, she met that married professor not at (the lyrically christened) Junior College of Central Florida, but at Wal-Mart. He was handsome, angry, boyishly hurt, sophisticated. 63, with a full head of hair gone professorially grey-white. Even looking back, Jacquie believes it to be true: that the outsized, sensuous quality of her remembrance of his outsized, sensual (boozy) cynicism wasn’t some trick that youth played on her mind. The man actually smoked a pipe, wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Now, she smiles to herself & says, Can you believe it? It really worked on him though (the look); and he really worked on her. Everything worked & was working. His pipe-stem breath smelled like sex & mouthwash. The professor was her 1st big physical love affair, she didn’t really have too many more after that, not on that scale, with that resonance. To this day, the Professor essentially was it, for a multifariousity of reasons. Jacquie got hooked emotionally too, oh did she did.

  His wife found out but didn’t leave him.

  The not so nutty professor gave Jacquie a camera.

  And a boy—Jerry (Jr.) AKA Jerzy. DOB: 1984.

  And child support; his wife found out about that too.

  What are you gunna do.

  She fooled around in her backyard with the Rolleiflex 2¼. Took lots of pics of cats and spiders in their webs. The film wasn’t cheap, she had to find a fancy camera store that stocked it. She lugged the thing to work. During lunchbreaks, she took arty parking lot (Wal-Mart) pics: shopping carts, crap cars, asphalt detritus. Everything but people, she never liked people in the shot, not if she could help it. (She wasn’t ready for people pics.) Her co-workers thought she was an agreeable dufus. Which she was. Got along with everybody and never made waves. The emptier the lots, the better. Jacquie loved her an empty parking lot, the slanty dividing lines, & empty curbside metered spaces too.

  Oh and she went through a dumpster-pic phase.

  Then she started getting her kicks on weekends (only when the professor wasn’t able to see her). Took pics of all the beach places where her daddy short-ordered, up and down. Obsessive. She was like someone who assiduously studied guitar; one day, mysterious moment, they just can play, suddenly they’re guitar players. Without knowing what she was doing, she’d given herself a carefully calibrated apprenticeship, & there came that moment of mystery when she effortlessly knew more or less what she was doing with the shutterspeed, the light, the artfulness of it. Self-consciousness lifted away. No agenda anymore. She went driving for hours, taking pics of anything, even people. Even the professor, but never the professor’s wife.

  Her father died. Became a stay-underground dad.

  Then, exactly 2 weeks after renting a bungalow (a belated gesture, but still) for Jacquie and their son, her beloved had an aneurysm. She went to the hospital & sat in the car in the lot, not knowing what to do. Most definitely not up for encountering the wife. Beleaguered. Weeping & listening to wrong songs on the radio. Taking pictures of parking places to soothe herself.

  When a tall woman of officious mien strode toward her, she thought, She’s going to tell me to stop. It’s probably that you’re not allowed to take pics on hospital grounds.

  Instead:

  “I’m Jerome’s wife.”

  (She’d never heard Jerome. He/she always used Jerry.)

  The widow invited Jacquie to visit her comatose husband’s room. She never asked about Jacquie’s son. Only saying, “You know, we have no children,” which broke Jacquie’s heart.

  (She wished she had brought her camera up.)

  (The widow even left her alone with the body, because that’s what it was, just a body.)

  When she got back to her car, the glass was broken, the camera gone. Even as she sobbed, she realized how textbook symbolic was the theft. She sat behind the wheel, collecting herself. Cheap glass diamonds littered the vinyl seat. She focused on the (less than half-empty) parking lot. That familiar, reflexive, self-medicating urge to get out and take pics, which was not to be. She kept thinking about the widow’s kindness. To come get her, to leave her with her professor, alone. A simple act of grace that still glows deep inside her to this day, providing warmth.

  She bought a new camera, but her heart wasn’t in it. Hardly used it . . .

  1990. Now 30 years-old— oh! Waitressing (again).

  So unhappy, such unhappiness.

  Single mom with a 6-year-old.

  She decides to drive to NY and stay at the Chelsea Hotel. Has approx $3,458.52 in savings. (Left nothing by the Professor, for whom she held no resentments, he’d just leased her & Jerry Jr. the bungalow, Jacquie was certain he had plans to further provide, how could he have known he had a bleedy brain?)

  She sets off, leaves Jerry Jr. with her mom.

  On the way up (on the 95), she takes pics of kitschy outdoor volcanoes/miniature golf courses & all the tourist traps lining beach town main drags. More pics of where Dad worked, and the sunny desolate apartment houses they used to live in. Lonely moonshots, camp & lovely: the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater—the exquisite nearby homes of Jupiter Island, hidden behind privets & parterres. Forgotten Kennedy Space Center parking lot outback, forgotten custodians who worked at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. St Augustine Fountain of Youth giftshop pics. Swamps, plantations, & cemeteries, & pics of folks who spoke Gullah and could tell a good Gullah ghost story. (They were all good.) She goes to Jekyll Island & Cape Fear, she always wanted to because of their names—Cape Fear was a wash, nothing frightening about Cape Fear at all, there didn’t need to be, the name was perfect enough, gothy frightening name, frightful beacon in the imagination.

  The Ava Gardner Museum. Yes. The old woman who works there—an Ava lookalike. The lonely parking lot. Yes. Of a castle in what they call the low country. A crazy-baroque synagogue in Savannah. On the beaches, she succumbs, like a teenager, to taking pics of shells: harps, pagodas & turbans, sundials, nutmegs, periwinkles.

  There: a newish prison in the middle of a city, and the bailed-out blacks who pour forth. There was actually some kind of museum of slavery next door, & the just-released prisoners would bump right into it.

  She drives & drives under gusty civil war skies.

  Where am I going, where have I been.

  She doesn’t bother with Atlantic City. Atlantic City will do very well without her. Besides, she’s running out of film.

  She settles into her room at the Chelsea. (The Professor told her he stayed there a whole month once, that’s how Jacquie got the idea.) She hates it.

  She’s lost, exhausted. Wants/needs to be touched. She puts on her sexiest dress and goes to a bar, fancy one, sleeps with the first man who tries to pick her up—a DP. Movie cameraman. Two weeks later, she’s living in his apartment. All the while, she’s watching herself, watching the insane speed at which things are happening, the whole crazy city, a million miles an hour, & now Jacquie a part of it. She loves it.

  Ronny hires her for his camera crew, commercials & indies. (The beginning of indie golden years/Parker Poseydom.) She loses the ambition to document her world, hangs up her lenses, still in that world though by default. (Her job. Her man.) (Which she eventually takes for a “sign.”) Getting her bearings . . . missing her son. Wants/needs to forget about the Professor, which is tough, especially when Ronny’s fucking her—he’s the only one she’d been with since her beloved—Ronny fucks her well but not with the freight/impact/import of Jerome. Needs/wants to make a life for herself, a real life, a city life, still not feeling that’s what she has or even getting close. It looks like I do but I don’t. And it’s late, late, I’m getting old, how could I have stayed in Florida so long, oh how how————————�
�all this time shuttling to Ocala every six weeks, that’s about as long as she can stand being away from him, Jerry Jr., wanting of course her son to be with her in the big city, maybe it’s out of respect for his father, allegiance maybe, loyalty, fear, before she puts a man in his life, before she gives him another dad, Jacquie just wants to make sure (as sure as she can) this thing with Ronny is real. She finally brings him to NYC for better for worse, to have & to hold. Ronny of course saying all along how cool he was with it, bringing the boy up, he’d been very sweet, & Jacquie believed him but still needed to know, to see, if it’s real, needed Ronny to demonstrate it was real. But Ronny was fine, & so was Jerry Jr., they were good together, it was Jacquie’s own skittishness, reluctance to change/go forward, the definitive change, really nothing to do with Ronny at all.

  He starts working on bigger movies, studio ones. (Going to ball games with Jerry Jr.) Now she can get in the union. She needs that security for her son, that’s real. Starts taking pics again, Ronny’s encouraging. When they move into a big loft—shit, Tribeca, frickin huge space, today there would be no way!—they move in & Ronny builds her a darkroom. She gets busy. Dusts herself off and takes cityscapes. The usual. Pigeons & vagrants on Central Park benches. Gap-toothed smiling cabbies. Penn Station porters/couples. Children at the zoo, eyes filled with wonder. Ugh when she thinks back. But really enjoying herself. When she shows him her pics, Ronny settles into an armchair with a joint and says I really like that. That’s what he always says. Which is annoyingly gratifying. Because she hates the idea of being the asst cameragirl girlfriend with the kid from another whatever who takes dumbass black&white pics on the weekends, she knows where that will end, and it does: Ronny renting a whitewashed gallery space & hanging her pix, inviting friends, colleagues, people from the neighborhood, the cheap plastic glasses with screw-in stems, cheap wine, cheap cheese, cheap crackers, cheap smell in the air, cheap art. Ronny was so sweet, he even put those little red dots beside half the pics so it looked like they were already sold, it’s very loud inside that whitewashed makeshift gallery space, a DJ, people spilling into the sidewalk, after a while nobody looks at the walls & Jacquie runs into friends there who don’t even know that’s why they’re there, because it’s her show, of her pics . . . as it turned out, most of what she chose to hang were from that first trip, on the road from Ocala, the Myrtle Beach pics, the sad-faced astronaut janitors & gullahville folk, & the shells (she couldn’t believe all the pics of shells!) & even a heartbreakingly empty parking lot or two, for old time’s sake. She sells seven of them, though as far as she knows her old man snatched them up himself, as far as she knows he lied when he told her a guy came off the street & bought em—some were bought by a few of her friends, & as far as she knows maybe Ronny’s reimbursing them, that’s how she was thinking, a low self-esteem thing.