Hollywood Ass. (2 page)

They day after the “incident” started with me waking up at ten-thirty (it was my day off) and thinking for a second it was all a bad dream. It was a blissful moment, but it ended as soon I reached for the iPhone and saw all my text messages.

It was all over the place, of course, the vomit, everywhere your browser could take you. Twitter was blowing up with jokes, the Youtube clips were already in the hundreds of thousands, and the talk shows were busy writing top ten lists, all dedicated to the disaster. The comments were pretty much aligned, with some variations. Some called her a drunk (half-true), some predicted she was pregnant (not true at all), and some said she was going through a rough time in her life and that a divorce might be looming (maybe true). I knew
B
’s agent Julianne was probably trying to spin this around to the best of her abilities, but the fact of the matter was that
B
had made a royal ass out of herself and for that I felt really sad.
B
was not only my employer, because after four years as her loyal assistant, we had also become good friends. At least as good as you could be in such a working relationship.

After showering and getting dressed, I headed down to the kitchen for my morning espresso. To my surprise I saw
B
out in the garden, lying in a deck chair by the pool, dressed in a lime-green bathing suit and holding some kind of drink.

“Can you get me another
Smoothme
, Fred?” I heard her shout to the pool boy and gardener, 19-year-old gay and aspiring make-up artist Fredric Thomson, who had started working there three months prior and despite the rough patch
B
had been in, really seemed to enjoy it. The star glow can be very addictive, especially if you’re 19.

Fredric, who was fiddling with some plants in the small poolside garden sighed, said “sure” in a high-pitched voice and walked inside to make
B
's favorite drink, a fruit and vegetable smoothie with a generous dose of vodka in it. This had become her way of dealing with a hangover, just smooth it over and get on with it. She was sadly starting to become quite experienced at this.

“Don't put any vodka in this one, Fred, we can't have her drunk before lunchtime,” I said and switched on the espresso machine.

Beautiful dark java slipped out into my cup and I looked at my phone again, expecting Julianne to call at any minute, wanting to discuss the damage or chat to
B
. On my employers behalf, I had become a filter when it came to unwanted calls and most people knew there was no point in calling her directly, which made my phone vibrate more than a nymphomaniac’s sex toy. I was okay with it and according to a test I did many years ago, I have a really high stress tolerance, a requirement for anyone working in the insane entertainment business.

I managed to just about finish my morning shot before I heard her cracked voice calling me, like a crying child begging my name. I took a deep breath and headed out to the pool.

“How are we doing today?” I said, feeling like a caretaker in an insane asylum.

“I’m feeling great, full of energy and ready to take on the world, what do you think?”
B
said, sarcastically. We had thankfully progressed beyond the polite in our communication. Now we were more like an old married couple.

“I hear you. So...I expect Julianne to call any minute you know. You feel like taking that or?”

“I’ve got nothing to say to her. I know she’s great at turning things around, but right now my world is pretty much painted black as you can understand. I of course knew that things weren’t great, but this bad? I mean, Charlie Sheen is probably rubbing his hands somewhere.”

I sat down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder, “I know it’s shitty and I’m not going to give you some bullshit cliché to feel better, but I just want to say that when you’ve hit rock bottom there’s only one way and that’s up.”

“You’re such a fucking Teletubby sometimes, Darryl, but I still love you,” she said giving me a rare smile. Not rare when judging by how she normally was, but sadly seldom those last few months.

I returned her smile and gave her some good advice: “I don't think it's such a great idea for you to lay in the sun and drink smoothie cocktails when you're hung-over. What do you say I have Jorge fix you a nice lunch and then we'll go for a drive or something? How does that sound?” Our drives and walks usually made her feel better and somewhere deep down I hoped even such a disappointing situation could be remedied by exercise and good company.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll have the one Fredric is preparing and then I’ll take a shower. Deal?”

“Deal. But no alcohol this time, just a regular smoothie, okay?”

“Mhmm,” she mumbled like a kid refused her candy.

I went back to the kitchen to check on Fredric, who was struggling with the mixer. Fredric had green hands and knew styling and make-up like it came in his breast-milk, but couldn't tell the stove from the fridge, so I helped him by clicking on the wall-switch.

“She's really off the tracks, isn't she?” Fredric said above the mixer noise and gave me a concerned look.

“Yes, it’s bad. We need to do something, but I don’t know what.”

“Why can't we call AA? Or a psychologist? We need an intervention!” Fredric’s voice traveled up to a pitch I thought wasn’t known to man, at least
a
man. I think part of him got really excited about the drama
B
’s life provided. After four years together, I wasn’t excited by it, just worried.

“I don't know. We’ve tried to talk her into therapy, counseling, even some holistic stuff, but she’s not budging. This goes deep and if she’s not seeing it as a problem herself, then we can’t force her to do anything.”

Fredric poured the thick green mixer liquid into a glass and said, “Can we at least get her to drink some water and do a facial? If she keeps this up her skin will be hosting next months blackheads-fest.”

He was right.
B
’s star glow had been hijacked by the evil Dr. Vodka and his mischievous cousin Deep Depression and we needed to guide her towards a better, brighter path. Wherever this lay.

“You know what?” I said, “Call that dermatologist lady who came last time, she was a pro and
B
was really happy with the results.”

“Roger that.” Fredric said, handed me the smoothie and strutted off like a flamingo bird on speed.

***

Before heading out towards Runyon Canyon, I managed a long and disturbing call with Julianne. Julianne was almost always pissed at something and after the “vomit incident” she obviously had plenty to be angry about. Besides, she didn’t like me much and didn’t understand what my role had become. Before, I was managing and coordinating most of the time, everything from sorting out dry-cleaning, to booking appointments, arranging schedules and plans, and now I delegated most of those things to Fredric and the rest of the team. I had my hands full just being around
B
and making sure her every wish came true. I was her one-man entourage and had strangely become her link to the rest of the world. Yes, even between her and her husband sometimes.

I put on my tracksuit and headed over to the garage to take out the Range Rover, when I stumbled upon
A
, polishing one of his many luxurious toys, the Ferrari F430 Scuderia. He looked like he had gotten dressed in a time machine in his tucked-in white t-shirt and tight, stonewashed jeans and cowboy boots. He was an attractive man with a muscular jaw and bulging biceps, but had the dress sense of someone collecting bottles for a living. This was one thing that irked
B
, but she said that, like most men, he was unchangeable in this respect. He looked up at me and I followed a bead of sweat roll down his forehead with my eyes.

“What’s up, man?” he said.
A
sometimes talked like he was still in college. Maybe he thought this was how black guys talked, that we couldn’t utter a sentence without inserting words like
man
or
dawg
or worse, the dreaded n-word. Since I had worked alongside him for years and was a book worm, he should’ve known better.

“I’m taking her for a walk,” I said, and realized I was talking about his wife like she was a dog. If only she was as well-trained and easy to please.

“That's good. Hope it makes her feel better,”
A
’s voice came out dead as timber and reflected the emotional investment he had shown for her the last year, at least according to
B
. He had a knack of retreating down to his four-wheeled friends as soon as the going got rough. And it had been rather rough lately.

“She’s worried you're still angry with her.” I put my hands in my tracksuit pockets and leaned against the door frame. Talking about
B
with
A
always made me feel strange, because I was
B
’s assistant, but at the same time a close friend of both. I didn’t like to take sides or listen to the rants of a married couple in a desperate need of counseling.

A
focused his eyes back on the Ferrari logo, the stampeding horse which was now so shiny it looked like it would spring to life and run away by itself. “Well, she can keep on worrying, because I am. She really took it to another level last night. I mean, how would you react in my shoes?”

“Pretty much the same, I guess.” I said, and thought nobody knows what they would do in another person’s shoes, but I didn’t think
A
’s reaction was strange either. What concerned me was how much he had managed to slip away prior to the vomit. It didn’t strike me like he wanted to
fight
for their marriage, but even the all-seeing assistant couldn’t know everything of course. There are two sides to every story and naturally I mostly got
B
’s point of view.

He looked back up at me with his sharp blue eyes and said, “I don’t know what to do anymore. She’s become this other person, so deeply unhappy and strange. It’s not who I fell in love with that’s for sure. She refuses to seek help for it too, like she doesn’t see a problem that’s right in front of her, you know?”
A
was waiting for a guy response, some agreement, a feeling of camaraderie.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was contemplating a divorce. After all it wasn’t the most uncommon thing in Hollywood for people to say, “I’ve had it with you and your obsession with yourself, your constant traveling and your absurdly elevated need for attention,” although it was a mirror image they were talking to. How could you make such a strenuous concept as marriage work in a world so demanding? There are obviously no secrets, only hard work, and my guess was that
A
had grown tired of working hard for the relationship, he wanted to see some results.

“It’s very frustrating,” I said, feeling uneasy about being sandwiched in between their struggles, “We’re heading out now, I’ll see if I can talk some sense into her.”

“Good luck,”
A
said without a hint of belief in his voice and returned to his Ferrari, a car that always performed flawlessly, something I’m sure he wished for in his wife.

***

Runyon Canyon is the celebrity-prone park above Los Angeles, which has featured in countless of movies and series, especially from the 80s. The fact that it’s near high-end neighborhoods like the Hollywood Hills makes it possible to run into a celebrity at any time and if you were lucky you might even have stumbled upon the Johnsons taking an evening walk or a morning jog.

I parked the black Range Rover and
B
walked out in her velvety blue Juicy Couture track suit and adjusted her pants and her hair. I had told her the outfit wasn’t in fashion anymore and that it made her look like a big baby in overalls, but she said she loved the material too much to let it go. And let’s face it, when your new claim to fame is vomiting on one of the bigger televised awards in the calendar year, showing up in a three-year-old tracksuit is not going to do much to your reputation. I was wearing a grey t-shirt with “Who let the dogs out” in big block letters, so perhaps it wasn’t the right time to be pointing out fashion mistakes.

B
started walking down the so called Star trail with verve, her long legs striding and picking up speed rapidly and her head focused forwards. She was apparently eager to shed both calories and inner demons and that was a positive sign.
You go girl!
I thought to myself in my inner gay voice. Every man has an inner gay voice, at least if you spend as much time around a woman (without sleeping with her) as I did.

I jogged a few steps to catch up with her, “Aren’t you an eager beaver today?” I said, trying to keep my voice upbeat. She needed me to be on my A-game today and remind her the world wasn’t ending just because she had
literally
spilled her guts on TV.

“I’m no beaver, I’m Barney the drunken dinosaur. Please keep the tempo with me, I can’t run into someone today. I just can’t.” B said, annoyed.

She had a fire in her step while I was panting like a dazed Rocky Balboa after 15 minutes. It felt kind of humiliating that she drank alcoholic smoothies for breakfast and still was in much better shape than me, a warning signal to lose my morning chocolate croissant. Not that I would, but I considered the signal.

“How are you feeling back there?” B said, likely noticing the increased intensity in my breathing.

“I’m good, I’m good.” I lied, trying to sound unaffected. “How are you?” I threw right back at her.

“I feel like I’m in a bad dream and I can’t wake up. But otherwise I’m fine.” B was in a sour mood which was very hard to reverse. She had been sinking for some time and it finally seemed like she had submerged herself entirely in misery. It would take a heroic effort to dig her up and to be honest with you, I wasn’t sure I was up for it.

“Did you fart? Something smells nasty,” B said and wrinkled her face in disgust.

“Small one. Sneaked out.” I raised my hands in the air to show my innocence.