Dead Stars (8 page)

 

oh oh oh -

& still:

he can remember

(like it was yesterday) when his dear dear Emma, when dear Emma got out of the back of the Maybach

oooooo

   
slither-leathersliding

Slip-Sliding-Away (Harry loved to sing that song) over the expensively slaughteredskin seats, but that maneuver (just getting out of the fucking car!) has never been an elegant thing for homo s'apes, you may as well still be getting out of a horse & buggy, but who
gives
a shit if it's elegant 'cause it was never hyperscrutinized . . . . . . until
NOW
———no easy solution not unless handlers hang up sheets to shield the celeb til they're out of the papsmear-free zone, same as it ever was, at least until some engineer thinks to make a seat that pneumatically telescopes out the back onto the sidewalk then slowly tilts like those geriatric TV Guide La-Z-Boys, it ain't like GM's gunna get right on it, but until
somebody
did, Harry's Heroes would keep stirrin' the honeypot & smoking the cracks, exercising their rights in this great Uptonian upskirt democracy.

Harry had no patience for the truculent managers and hypocrite PR flaks who tried to put him down when the truth was he respected those kids more than their handlers. They were shown from an early age how to be ladylike when leaving a car but now, in the ticking weeks before each one's 18th, all the single ladies had to have that embarrassing parental/management office conversation about the birds and the papsmearazzi bees, you know, one by one, all the Hailees and the Bailees and the Chloës, Mackenzies, Abigails & Olivias were told to be
mindful
to cover the goods with whatever was handy—Missoni scarf or Prada/Hermès/Chanel clutch held discreetly just
so
to make sure the unmentionables wouldn't be mentioned in the global conversation. What was so great about Emma's virgin frontgryffindoor honeyshot,
unmentionably
so, wasn't merely the hosiery (which Harry internet I.D.'d as a seamless silicone-beaded cat-girlish Wolford bodysuit. Emma was a Wolford/Smythson/Burberry Prorsum lass), the
unmentionably
perfect thing was, Harry got her by
fluke
, it was a new-hire schlep in the right place at the right time tho not yet fully trained, one of those sophomore in high school kids Harry liked to break in because the
s let their guards down when they saw them, “He was a newbie just like you, Jerzy Shores”
—
his nickname for him & Jerzy took it because it could have been so much worse—“the newbie didn't actually think he got the
honeyshot!
The newbie thought it was a FAIL but I knew better, I had this
feeling . . .
” So he took the kid's camera for a little late-night alone-time in the privacy of his bedroom & gorged on the the iMage, gorged, enlarged it & engorged————
and and and and an 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O O O
oooooooooooo—
there—
there—
perfect English rose, wilding of heathery soap-scrubbed slit hair, peach of an unimpeachable patch sequestered behind Santa Maria Novella-powdered briefs, dampish twittering #tagged coming-out panties, evocative (to Harry, such were his passions) of mulch-dank Lake District moors, “or shall I say
s'mores,
” a perfectly manicured mons that never saw nor ever thought it would the light of online-day———————————————but no no no! what was unmentionably mentionably awesome about Hermione's
honeyshot!
was that once in a blue moon, an unsuspecting,
very
fortunate papsmearazzo captures the
honeyshot!
holy Grail: that epiphany of smushed candlewick, the sanitary napkin—a
rara avis
indeed!
Early bird caught the worm—
tail of the kite—by my
word
, Lord Middleton almost had a
attack when he saw it, for never in his wildest dreams—his Hermione!

Misty-eyed, he related this exuberantly memorable anecdote to young Jerzy—he'd waited
so long
for that moment—Emma's moment—and how much it meant to him that he'd been there to see it first, before it entered eternal history, “and
that
, my new friend, they can never take away. We will always be connected in a way she will never know, & I shall love & cherish it, & carry it to my grave.” He went on to speak of that difficult moment before posting, when he knew she'd no longer be his: in the bedroom, Harry's features illumined by dandelion (milky latex) pussywillow (furry catkins), alone with the image, before
Send
would rob him of the sacral intimacy of fumbling promnight ecstasy, before he shared her with the world—
if you love them let them go—
to
Send
was, afterall, his bold and righteous duty—but still—for a few shining hours she was his. He, Harry, his Highness of lowness, he, Harry, high priest of yeast, sat in bed woefully staring at the rectangular cloud of the Mac that lapdanced him in those tenebrous hours, he, Harry, could practically
taste
the bloodwort copperiness of Emma's new moon menses—for it
was
a new moon: a tender, slender crescent—and oh! that infernal cotton string! His God and his Devil had given him that. He was deserving, & forever grateful.

He was certain he'd live to be very old. The single ladies gave him
life
, each and every one of them, but he had always loved Emma the most, nothing untoward, nothing that was a problem, he took his sons to see all the Potter movies, and the 1st time he saw her he was struck by her beauty, he
saw
what she would look like as a single lady & full-blown adult woman
yet he
never
objectified her, promised himself he never would, not until her 18th, in thought nor in action, instead he would wait for her on the sidewalks (Harry sang:
If it takes forever I will wait for you, for a thousand summers I will wait for you
), not with the SmArmy but with the
fans
—her fairytale crocodile prince at river's bottom, patiently biding his time . . . . . . . . . before devouring & disseminating that toothsome, magian
honeyshot!—
a Julian Assange of cunt, acting on behalf of the millions of boys, men, & boys-to-men who adored her, grew
up
with her, and would forever keep her in their hearts.

. . .

He was a late-starter, Jerzy was, he'd frittered away so many years in the shadow of his mother.

Jacquie Crelle-Vomes was famous, one of the phonies of her gen who achieved notoriety for taking snaps of pre-stacked progeny. Pre-Jerry's Deli Jerzy hated that she'd taken nudies of his little sis, saw straight thru all her bullshit. He knew that his mother's one-time obsession was to have a show at MoMA—she thought her daughter's underage body could catapault her over the museum's walls
—
that's when he started calling her MoMA instead of Momma, which irritated her to no end. O how he loved to tweak her shit. Still, MoMA went further than her firstborn thought she would. Had to hand it to her, the woman was a real hustler. She really knew how to work the wealthy adolescephiles, & acquired (marginal) fame in the process. She was famous enough to have a Wikipedia page anyway (not even Harry around the Mersey had one) even if it was stubby, with a giant
This biographical article needs
additional citations for verification
. It didn't even have her picture.

MoMA used to have him assist on some of the shoots, which felt weird toward the end when his sister was getting tits. He would at least have respected her if she'd taken skinnygirl pornshots but apparently MoMA never had the heart; her shit turned out like “subversive” David Hamilton.
How fucking pathetic. The bitch who thought she was so incendiary couldn't even light the fuse. Total rampant pussification.

It
was
far out, tho, to watch her work, a real education that maybe he could learn from. From his teens, he scoped haughty MoMA's cynical traveling circus with its floating galleries & carefully orchestrated, county-by-county 1st Amendment uproars; the ensuing staged-for-maximum-PR-effect local library bans of her books; the rote howls of the conservative media; the rote, smug rebuttals of the liberal media; the pious ACLU voices advocating in her behalf, shoved between sports and weather—and there was MoMA, ever MoMA, with her recondite emotions, quietly nobly preening, stealthily thrilled with herself, all her bullshit-fancy monographs frontloaded with fancy bullshitting essays by bullshit-fancy fake geniuses, fake poets and incomprehensible tenured pervs—skunkhaired Sontag lites + other sundry putative superstars, meaning anyone MoMA deemed worthy to co-opt/seduce/fuck into sponsoring her barfy, exploitative, flat-chested body of work—well, Jerzy thought his new boss was
so
much cleaner in the pursuit and publication of his quarry,
so
much more the accidental
artiste
than MoMA because he didn't try to hide behind Art
or
his upskirts, didn't dress it up to be anything but what it was: xxxxxtreme pervation. Pervomatical pervatoriness. His nocturnal prey
signifying
what MoMA was too chickenshit to nail to the wall. MoMA hung out in the shadows. MoMA cockteased her collectors with a silver gelatin tween's sexless come-on. MoMA pimped out her oblivious daughter's cobalt palladian thighs.

There was a space in time when Jerzy aspired to be the new Weegee—or Son of Johnny Pigozzi, anyway—but it never worked out. He was a vulturazzo in Manhattan for a while, staking out hospitals & clinics & the offices of Park Ave docs with a camera, waiting for skulking celebs. Facelifts, freakouts & O.D.s. He shot Michael Douglas in the subway, scrawny & disoriented from chemo, poor schmuck, leaning on one of his kids. (Jerzy used to buy coke from his son Cameron.) Stalked Michael J. Fox when the actor was in town, waiting for that elusive Parkinsonian pantspiss, which sadly never came. Would've paid the rent for a year.

But it was cold in NY and Jerzy was burned out. The streets didn't make him feel brand new, no dreams to be made, nothing he could do—not the Jay-Z experience. The move to LA felt right, but nothing had clicked. Nothing until he met Harry.