When the Messenger Is Hot (2 page)

S
O GET THIS: they're going to make a movie of my life.

I could kind of care less about the movie, but I figure this is probably my only chance to win an Oscar, which I've dreamed about since I was in seventh grade. Really, I just want to wear the jewels and maybe a simple tiara and have the chance to say,
It's Prada
. Actually, it would be fine just to be nominated, even if I was in one of those categories that doesn't get televised that they show all at once in a quick montage in the kind of slow two hours in the middle of the show. I don't really have any desire to be famous. I'd just like to have something shiny with my name on it to leave behind. Anyway, I hadn't ever given a lot of thought to exactly how to do that, not being an actress or a director or anything related to that at all, but then all these crappy things happened and I wrote a book about it (a
memoir
they call it, even though I'm in my thirties and it seems a bit premature in spite of the events) and made sure to work it out in the fine print that I'd be able to write the screenplay as well. I realize it's a long shot.

So yesterday I get this message on my machine saying,
Hi, this is Apple Fowler and you may have already heard I'm going to be playing the part of Wendy in the film version of
No But Wait, It Gets Worse…,
and I was hoping I could talk to you about it…
and so on. Very bizarre to hear someone refer to you as a “part,” like you're either fictional, or not whole. To be honest, Apple Fowler is a good enough actress, but she's kind of young to be playing me even where the book starts. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Anyway, I call her back, and she's really nice, much nicer than you'd expect a movie star to be, and asks if she can come over for coffee. So we make plans and she comes over and asks me a lot of questions and looks around my apartment like it's this curiosity, like it's somehow different from any other average person's apartment, which I suppose maybe she hasn't had access to as the child of a famous director. It seems like she's never seen a houseplant or a refrigerator magnet or, um, a dog. Still, she's easy to talk to and seems genuinely interested in getting to know me and says that she loved the book and can't even begin to imagine how I made it through everything, and I'm sure she can't, given that she seems a little weirded out by my average-person's apartment, which isn't on the long list of things I personally consider myself to have made it through. Anyway, she eventually asks if she can stay for a week or so, to really
become
the character, and she offers to pay me rent, which isn't an issue since my book's been on the bestseller list for eight weeks, and I've got plenty of room, plus, I mean, who wouldn't want to be friends with Apple Fowler? Maybe she knows George Clooney's e-mail address. I agree with the condition that the bathroom is mine first and the phone is off-limits, which isn't a problem for her since she's got a cell phone, and also because she says she really wants to
experience
my life and intends to use the phone for emergencies only. She says she'll be as quiet as a mouse.

Which she is, and she sticks by her thing not to even use her own phone, but right away I realize that it's not an awful lot of fun being watched, which I suppose is what the readers are doing in a certain way, except they're not in my house. The first day or two she just takes a lot of notes. It's immediately bizarre to me to see someone writing something down when I'm in the middle of doing something absolutely mundane, something that as a writer I hadn't previously considered was worth writing down, like hand-washing a sweater, which of course is not something Apple has ever witnessed, which perhaps would seem even more unusual to a nonchore-oriented person when followed by using a tweezer to pry out the sink stopper, which broke ages ago, one of those numerous daily adjustments I stopped thinking about as anything that even needs a repair, like the way I play my answering machine messages back on my stereo because the machine records messages but won't play them back, or the way I serve Leo (my pug) his Alpo out of my Chrysler Building mug on the sofa every night because he won't eat until I'm eating, and he won't even eat on the floor by the table because it's too far from me, which I personally think is really considerate on his part, and therefore I do not mind fixing him his dinner in my Chrysler Building mug seeing as how he's so obviously trying to keep me company, all of which Apple scribbles down as somehow being crucial and noteworthy character traits.

After the watching and the note-taking, she starts trying to imitate me — my gestures, facial expressions, my voice. I think she's sort of got it, but what do I know? It's not like I ever studied myself. But you think you know how you seem to people, and you really don't. I think of myself as unremarkable in a lot of ways; I don't have a New York accent, and I don't think I have any overly weird habits like not letting my food touch on the plate or being especially neat or sloppy, although I am sometimes afflicted by a tiny bit of obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to locking my door; I usually have to unlock it and lock it again to make sure it's locked, and I tend to check it a bunch of times before I go to bed, too, which obsession has not gone past Apple, but so anyway she manages to find interest in the way I shuffle my slippered feet and in my fairly rigid schedule of having frozen donut holes and 1 percent milk in bed when
Seinfeld
comes on at 7:30 (Leo joins at the foot of the bed with a Milk-Bone), which I notice because she shuffles her slippered feet over to my bed with her own donut holes and milk (and Milk-Bone) before I have a chance to get there first. I do end up letting her chip in when she asks to use my shampoo and conditioner and pretty much all of my products. It may be equally as fascinating to me that she thinks using my shampoo has some relevance to the Wendy experience as it probably is to her that I use generic shampoo. Anyway, she goes as far as getting her hair cut like mine (by my haircutter) even though her hair is poker straight and mine takes forty-five minutes to blow out and still needs to be slept on for a night if I don't want to look like an extra on
Dynasty
. She wants to know where I got my purple camouflage pants and all my little beaded cardigans (which I'm sort of known for) and has never heard of eBay, so I sit her down at the computer and take some bit of time to explain to her how the Internet works, and when we finally get into eBay, although she's completely willing to out-and/or overbid for any item by a ridiculous amount, she doesn't want to wait for the auctions to end, so we venture out to get her some sweaters, which I wouldn't have minded so much if she weren't a size two. Those cardigans tend to be on the small side (I don't know if women were smaller in the fifties or what), and she ends up with a spectacular midnight blue one I could never have gotten one arm into, but I try to keep my resentment to myself; she was just born that way.

Naturally, I don't ever drive around New York City, but Apple has a car and knows from the book that I lived in L.A. for a while (after a fight with my then-boyfriend I got on a plane in an alcoholic blackout, and even though I sobered up about a week later I wasn't in any big rush to get back to New York) and that driving was this huge deal (and I'm not even going to discuss the whole matter of buying a used car in L.A., which is a trauma I just don't have the time to get into), suddenly having to drive everywhere, driving a mile even just to get milk (and then it's some giant Ralph's where the milk is of course in the back and you have to walk three city blocks through the store to get it so that the total milk-errand time is never less than forty-five minutes), but also having to drive 37.4 miles to and from work every day, not to mention the many thousands of dollars spent on auto repair totaling more than the actual cost of my car. I lived in L.A. for four years and never got comfortable driving. And so Apple asks me to take her for a ride in her Expedition, which to me is the equivalent of driving the Broadway bus, and we go on a short, rectangular route (all right turns) up Riverside Drive to 107th Street, back down West End Avenue, and home, which is going to have to be enough for her to observe my driving weirdnesses, which apparently it is, because she finds it noteworthy that I keep both hands on the wheel at all times (at “ten and two,” isn't that the law?) and can only change radio stations at a red light and cannot do anything like change a tape or drink something (
Even with a cup holder and a straw?
she asks) and of course would never even consider trying to use a cell phone. She also makes note of my Tourette's-like swearing at any car that comes within three feet of the perimeter of our car, which is of course pretty much constantly, and I tell her that that trait was genetically passed on to me by my mother, who makes creative use of the word
cock
in any number of unpleasant driving scenarios. Apple then makes the same loop and has to correct herself a few times when she's inclined to zap a Ricky Martin song while in motion, but quickly gets the cursing down and by the time we get back has also incorporated other small gestures, like the way I shake my watch down toward my wrist when it gets too tight and the way I wear my sunglasses on top of my head to keep the hair out of my face but then squint the whole time, and I begin to feel a little uncomfortable, wishing I were some perfectly generic, gestureless individual.

Which is apparently not true according to my friend Sue, who calls later that day when I'm out picking up a quart of milk and is still on the phone with Apple when I walk in. Apple looks a little guilty and apologizes to me for picking up the phone by
force of habit
and tells Sue to hold on and passes the phone to me, but when I say hello, she says,
I think we have a bad connection. I have to go anyway, I'll call you tomorrow
, even though I can hear her perfectly fine. Apple seems pleased with how easily she was able to convince Sue that she was me, but I've been mistaken for other people on the phone plenty of times and I try not to make too much of it this time.

Day three she asks me a lot of questions about when it was that I started drinking and why, since the book starts right after I got out of rehab, and some of this is covered in the book, but when I started drinking, it was just this complete sense of rightness with the world. Maybe some people feel that way naturally, maybe some other people talk with Jesus, I don't know. How I've stayed sober is as much a mystery to me as to anyone. I had just celebrated ninety days of sobriety when my boyfriend broke up with me and at that point I still wanted to drink pretty much every day. But I had already enrolled in grad school for a doctorate in philosophy (also in a blackout, although it turned out to be a better idea than most of the ones I came up with while unconscious), which, although a debatable program, given future job prospects, gave me something more constructive to do than sit around and contemplate the leak in my ceiling. (Which, trust me, is not a metaphor, neither the leak nor its subsequent contemplation.) I didn't have a job at the time, and the thought of getting one was kind of horrifying. Apple asks a lot of questions I'm not sure I really have answers for. It's not as though I'm some Olympic triumph-over-tragedy story with violin music playing in the background as I discuss the nature of my faith in god and explain that I believe that there was some mystical reason I survived being hit by a car going forty-five miles an hour on Wilshire Boulevard (I was
walking;
I was in a very bad drunk-walking accident and I'm sure I crossed against the light, not to mention that there aren't even a lot of sober pedestrians in L.A., and I'm sure the driver who hit me was not at fault in any way) without anything more than a scraped knee, this after landing in front of a Star bucks that was a good half block from the site of impact. It wasn't until after I ordered a double espresso that I happened to notice the totaled Lexus still in the middle of the street; some people in the Starbucks were asking me if I was okay, which I thought was odd since there was a totaled Lexus in the street that might have someone dead in it (it didn't; the driver had only minor injuries) and they told me that the totaled Lexus had just hit me, to which I think I said something like,
Really
, because of course I had no memory of anything before the double espresso. Anyway, the point is that while it was undoubtedly the first time I noticed that fairly bad things happened when I drank, I didn't quit drinking because I suddenly thought I was called to go on some drunk-walking lecture circuit, or because some clouds parted and Hello Kitty told me to carry a message of love and tolerance and rebirth, or because some other upper-level spiritual message came to me which I can't really even make up an imaginary example of, that's how ridiculous I think that is. I'm pretty much of the I Have No Fucking Idea school of why the hell this has all gone down. Whether god hates me or loves me or is involved in other things entirely, I have no idea. I've run into more than a few people on the book tour who've had experiences similar to or worse than mine who tell me the particular ways they've stayed sober, which usually involve a very particular god idea I either can't comprehend or don't want to comprehend, like god speaking to them through their dog or whatever (although I have a close personal relationship with Leo, I am 100 percent certain that he is just a dog and not a deity of any kind), and I always nod politely, but the truth is I'm looking into their black eyes and thinking nobody's home. I'm sure that a lot of people just get to a point where they realize they don't have answers for certain things and so they just tell themselves these little lies so that they can make sense of some senseless things, whereas personally I'm not so inclined to be 100 percent certain that there's even a sun in the sky (which is not unrelated to the whole philosophy-study thing), but what I do know is I wasn't built with that switch, otherwise I might have skipped the booze. There's not a second of my day that goes by that I can avoid the awareness that I'm different, and the best I can do now is try to blend in and hope no one notices.