Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (2 page)

You do lots of strange things when you get fired. On top of walking around hoping to be struck by a car and injured badly enough to make bank but not badly enough for it to hurt or have lingering effects, you may find yourself having long, mostly one-sided conversations with pets who are not used to seeing quite so much of you.

I really got to
know
my Shih Tzus that summer. They’re amazing people.

Or you may spend time discovering that if you watch every airing of
$25,000 Pyramid
reruns on the Game Show Network, you will eventually see the one where excellent player Tom Villard of
We Got It Made
fame—who was probably already a bit sick with the AIDS that would kill him a few years later—was all but called stupid by a non-celebrity contestant who just couldn’t fathom his inability to guess a word based on her opaque clues.

Or you might sit at your computer, literally waiting for Gmail to refresh because hey, you’re used to receiving hundreds of e-mails a day and they’ve tapered off rather precipitously since the day you were pink-slipped. “
Sooo
sorry to hear that. You’re awesome; you’ll find something soon. Let’s talk when you do.” When you’re fired, a large number of your contacts will treat you like you’re in cryogenic suspension on a long space trip to a planet that might not wind up existing.

Along with doing
all
of those things in 2012, I found myself thinking about my life, my accomplishments, the things on a bucket list that was drawn up at a time when the bucket was decades further away than it is now, and viewing my first forty-three years (forty-four if you’re pro-life, which is another compelling reason not to be) as some sort of first chapter in a wildly uneven book series.

I’ve loved book series (and parenthetical asides, and tangents) ever since I was ten and my older, blonder, straighter, cousin Wally and I chipped in using money earned turning in found soda cans for ten cents apiece (
Seinfeld
is right—Michigan has the best rate) to buy the pornographic purple prose of V.C. Andrews. As an author, she was hot, she was sexy and she was dead. We didn’t know the dead part, which literally made her a ghostwriter. What we
did
know was that she really
understood
what would happen if a litter of children was raised with no sunlight in their evil grandparents’ attic while their amoral mother lived a full life under their feet. Answer: Incest would happen. Achingly, minutely described…just what any developing child needs to read as a primer to human sexuality.

(To this day my sister and I will blurt out, “Incest is best!” for no real reason, and never during sex, since we have not had it so please don’t Lena Dunham me. It’s something we always planned to stop saying by the time her daughter became old enough to repeat it. Instead, we just say it when we’re pretty sure she’s not around.)

But anyway, thinking of that first part of my life, I realized some things.

First, I realized that I’d been in some interesting, potentially documentable situations. I had worked for a rich, eccentric literary agent in Chicago; had worked in book publishing in Manhattan back when paper was a major part of the equation; had been the editor of a gay porn magazine and seen firsthand how it was possible for nearly all of the support staff of a jerk-off publisher to be Evangelical Christians who never looked at the product that fed their families; had founded a popular teen-entertainment magazine known for featuring future superstars when they were still covered in placenta; and had published a whole bunch of books, including an encyclopedia devoted to Madonna, one of the first entries of which was “abortion,” and a gay novel that contained—what else?—
incest
.

But beyond the idea that I’ve had some encounters more readers than just my mom might find interesting, I saw my life as being driven by my relationship with celebrity. Whether it was how I viewed and deconstructed stars as a chubby, studious, gay child, my lifelong obsession with Madonna (yes, still—
always
), interacting with pornstars and conducting (or making up) interviews with them as an adult, or my more businesslike dealings with famous or about-to-be-famous kid stars for the youth magazine, I’ve always thought of myself as a fan, or as a fan of fandom. Sometimes both.

Above it, yet of it.

Even if celebrity bombards us all and we all engage with it on an almost nonstop basis, I saw that it would be hard to deny that my relationship with it has been more intense than the average person’s. Sitting around with no silly paychecks to clutter my mind, I wondered why.

On that tip, around the time I lost my job, my mother turned seventy, which is something that only happens once in a person’s life. Unless they’re Charo, who went to court and convinced a Spanish magistrate that her birth date had been off by ten years her whole life due to a paperwork error. She’d better never run for president because even Barack Obama would support calling her out on
that
birth certificate. On the other hand, considering the fact that she got away with it, I suspect that
chica
wasted her life as a virtuoso guitarist and moneymaker-shaker when she should have been a lawyer, a hypnotist, or perhaps a magician.

Back to my mother. Literally, because I think my lifelong love affair with celebrity goes back to my mother, a thought that crossed my mind when she hit the age past which Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and “Granny” from
The Beverly Hillbillies
had
all failed to live.

I may have tested as “gifted” in elementary school, but I wasn’t very good at dreaming up productive uses for my brain as a child. I would get so bored I’d resort to asking my mom what to draw. (What kind of a gift leaves you unchallenged and yet incapable of thinking of things to do about it?) She would invariably first tell me to draw flies, a joke I did
not
get for a long time. (Again…
gifted
?) But then she would bring up a famous person I should try sketching. Drawing Ann-Margret was a lot harder than drawing “Cubby” for the Art Instruction School, especially since my frame of reference for Ann-Margret was “Ann-Margrock” from
The Flintstones
.

This activity morphed into my favorite time-killer: creating random, longhand lists of stars. Just…
lists
. As their names entered my head, I’d write them down. And when I’d ask my mom to help, her first suggestion was always, “Faye Dunaway,” which she would say with the exact pretentious air the acting empress deserved. “Feh. Dunna. Weh.” I don’t think she knows it, but my mom has a totally unique way of speaking. It’s not weird, it’s distinctive. It’s a mix of her many years living in the Midwest (when I would do something naughty, she’d say, “May-utt!”) and her fondness for her parents’ Southern roots (our conversations are littered with phrases like, “She really favors her,” meaning two girls look alike; a nappy-time song she sang to my sister and me and to my niece was all about how Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’ bread). Her speech is also peppered with little impressions repeated so often she probably doesn’t even remember where she got them. My favorite is, “Why botha?” lifted from Bette Midler’s 1985 parody on David Letterman called
Angst on a Shoestring
, something we saw together more than twenty-five years ago and still quote almost every time we speak.

Asking my mom to give me stars’ names for my lists—and listening to her unconscious mimicry of them when she’d say their names—was like looking at a snapshot of what impressed her about public figures and what didn’t. “Feh. Dunna. Weh.” Talented, good cheekbones…but hoity-toity. “What’s her name…[whispery] Joey Heatherton.” Glitzy glamour, also a nod to a performer she and my dad had seen on their honeymoon, someone whose name she might’ve forgotten otherwise. “Elizabeth-uh-Taylor-uh.” Staying power, wealth, beauty. The queen of…
something.
Everything? I used to say my mom looked like Elizabeth Taylor, which she played along with but wouldn’t accept because Liz and Marilyn were the idols of her youth and were supposed to be on a different plane, even if Liz got fatter than my mom ever did and Marilyn probably would have resembled her autopsy photo (why did I look at it?) had she lived and kept hitting the booze and pills. They were fantasies, and fantasies, I understood from my mother’s modesty, were sacrosanct.

I always thought of my mother as a local celebrity herself, considering she had been on the Homecoming Queen’s Court in high school. I swear the actual winner, at least from her photo in a yellowing newspaper clipping, looked like Tyne Daly’s uncle, but my mom always graciously insisted it had been a bad snap. Big of her since I know for a fact she thought she was robbed.

My own additions to writing lists of stars started out with people whose work I knew, like “Lynda Carter” or “Lee Majors.” But over time, I absorbed more and more names until I had more names in my head than a reference book and I knew all the stars my mother could possibly be bothered to rattle off. “George Gobel?” she’d say, trying to stump me. “Got ‘im.” I’d confirm. “Oh. That reminds me,” she’d say, “Grandma threw out all the autographs I got in the mail when I was a teenager, but my sister has all hers and George Gobel is one of them. That’s okay. Who in the world would want
his
autograph in the first place?”

(I suddenly did. I don’t know why.)

I would also cheat to fill my lists by paging through the free
TV Guide
that came with
The Flint Journal
and copying down all the stars’ names from every movie playing that week on TV. The guide would usually only list the most important two or three stars, but that was enough to get me everyone from “John Wayne” to “Marjorie Main” to “Peter Lorre.” And it taught me a lot about first billing, a concept that I still hold sacred even if it has absolutely no practical application to one’s life unless one is considering a life on the stage and one’s co-star is Glenn Close.

My star lists continued to evolve. After names, I started listing names
along with
every movie I knew they’d starred in. I was equal opportunity, placing as much importance in someone as kill-me boring as Charles Bronson as I placed in someone as fuck-me exciting as Paul Newman.

So many of the names meant nothing to me…Thelma Ritter, a star whose work I would come to adore in college, was just made-up sounding to the pre-adolescent me. That impression led to the next phase of my starfucking, which was drawing fake movie posters featuring made-up stars. I would do literally anything to have them all today, but I destroyed most of them after drawing them because they were mortifyingly faggoty and if discovered would have put
me
on a list with Tab Hunter, Farley Granger, and Rock Hudson—a list that had
nothing
to do with movies.

In pencil, I would draw a dozen posters—in miniature—representing the entirety of a phony starlet’s career, from a 1919 silent debut for 16-year-old Topeka, Kansas, runaway Dory Desirée (the name given to Estella Gluck by movie-mag fans) called
Shady Streets,
to her Oscar-winning triumph in a mid-life potboiler called
Anything But Murder,
to an embarrassing 1970s creature feature called
The Frog That Ate Grandma’s Brain
, in which Dory had one of the titular, yet smallest, roles. In spite of a horrendous slide in popularity, my made-up star Dory was still the only face on the movie poster as late as her final silver-screen appearance, in an awful Disney movie about a rich woman too afraid to leave her rooms who employs a pair of psychic children to figure out where her late husband hid their priceless art collection.

Once, my aunt (the one with the pointless/coveted George Gobel autograph, which I hope she still has because it gives me alarming flu-like symptoms to imagine it in a Michigan landfill) saw me drawing these things and teased me because of the gigantic, unrealistic cleavage each woman had. This was before so many women actually went out and purchased their own gigantic, unrealistic cleavage on a regular basis. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the curvy “V” I planted on my leading ladies’ chests where they poured out of their low-cut period dresses, “A ‘V’ for victory?”

If so, it certainly wasn’t a victory for feminism. All my fantasy starlets had secretly been prostitutes on their way up and had sucked a lot of studio cock in the ‘30s to get where they were—“Ya gotta give a little head to get ahead,” Dory would drunkenly reveal to scandalized newcomers at small, industry-heavy gatherings held in the ‘60s at her soon-to-be-foreclosed-on Mulholland Drive mini-manse. People like Victor Mature would be there and would shake their heads in embarrassment for a good actress who was heading down a bad road. But whenever she headed down that road, she always managed a comeback, which always warranted another lavish movie poster, “Critics be damned—the great Dory has done it again!” was one of the pull-quotes, even if nobody noticed it had come from a fan club newsletter.

Dory and so many others had surprisingly rich lives and checkered pasts considering I made them all up around the time I was just learning long division.

I was a late bloomer when it came to pop music, I guess because I was so immersed in the world of real and imaginary cinema and bad TV reruns. (I can hum the incidental music from any Brady Bunch scene you show me on mute.) But bloom I did when “Somebody’s Baby” by Jackson Browne and Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s (unnecessary apostrophe and all) led me to buy my first single and album, respectively. The single I bought for $1.44 at one of Michigan’s most iconic businesses, Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. It sat on the outskirts of my hometown of Flushing on a strip of fast-food joints that boasted another Michigan delight, Halo Burger, with its giant sign of its mascot, a benign bovine with a halo over her head. It was really cute but is ultra-morbid when you consider you’re eating dead cows and there’s signage of one of them prepping to enter heaven.