7days7authors

Sunday - "The Morning After" - Will M.

Val met Caitlyn for brunch at Hugo’s.  They had discovered it a year back when Caitlyn embarked along a short-lived experiment with veganism, but kept coming back afterwards because they liked the food. Caitlyn looked like she was still suffering from a not-yet-ended late night.

“Owen Wilson wouldn’t hit on me.”

Caitlyn had been obsessed with Owen Wilson since her small-town Mississippi days and thought she had spotted the actor the previous night at Skybar.  What neither Caitlyn nor Valentine knew was that it was actually a USC reserve placekicking named Lucas, who’d been on the wrong end of a kick-blocking defensive lineman two weeks previous and was really enjoying the newfound attention he recieved as a result of his epistaxis.

“I’m sorry sweetie. Let’s eat.” Autumn and Val both learned to easily shift conversations away from the subject of Owen Wilson with Caitlyn. Caitlyn was still too hungover this morning to notice.

“I even…oh…shit…I think I flashed him.”

“What?”

“Well, I borrowed that great little dress from Autumn, and then saw him out at the bar, and kept hoping he’d look…and he wouldn’t so…”

“…Yes?”

“I went into the bathroom and took my panties of and then came out and kind of…Marylin Monroe’d the dress at him.”

“Oh geez…Cait..we need to get you some help…or laid.”

The waitress arrived with their food.

“It’s his loss anyway Cait, really it is.  Are you ready for your audition?”

“Oh sure.”

“You do know it’s Wednesday right?”

Caitlyn paused.

“Yes.”

“But you had to think about.  You know today’s Tuesday right?”

“Yes.”  No pause.

“So let me guess, you’re running on maybe…three? hours of sleep?”

“More or less.  I got up, killed some time at the newstand and walked here.”

“Walked?”

“Well, I took a cab to the newstand. It’s too hot to walk.  Plus I had to look through the latest Yearbook.”

‘The Yearbook’ was Caitlyn’s term (actually her best friend in high school, Kelli Miller coined the term, but Caitlyn felt, that as the only one of them to actually follow through on that drunken-weekend-before-junior-prom promise Caitlyn, Kelli, plus this girl Maribel they didn’t actually like that much but who had an older sister that bought them the booze, and Kelli’s younger sister Sarah had made to move out to LA and make it big—“making it big” being vary ill-defined; not surprising given the heroic number of amerreto sours consumed and soaked up into largely virgin livers—that ‘The Yearbook’ and its coingage were fair game for her—Caitlyn—to claim) for US Weekly and all the related gossipy celebrity life-following magazines featured prominately in most grocery store check-out aisles that, despite sharing much of the same store terrain as National Enquirer and its ilk, were somehow seen as somehow more respectable.  Caitlyn surmised the reason was because A. ‘The Yearbook’ was a magazine—cheap paper or no—and didn’t have the icky finger aftermath you get with the newspaperian tabloids plus also B. it was full of color photos whereas the tabloids were stuck with at best blurry color photos on their ink-shedding front page only.  Caitlyn had a near preternatural grasp of subilties and meta-messages inherent in mass media marketing and advertising and on a gut level understood that the message implied by the two magazines’ side-by-side placement was that ‘The Yearbook’ cost more to produce, and with such a heavier overhead, they clearly had more to lose if they ran with erroneous gossip.

Val sighed. “Anything interesting in there?” She doubted there was. Val was a Variety reader if she wanted her Hollywood news.

“Nah. Rumors and innuendo.”

Caitlyn (well, first Kelli) came up with the nickname because they viewed Hollywood—particularly the major celebrities (though who was and who wasn’t ‘major’ was another debate altogether)—as a macrocosmic version of a typical suburban US high school.  There were cliques, fights, popular kids, dropouts, loners, weirdos, druggies, drug dealers—pretty much every sub-grouping but poor kids—only unlike high school, where the events would at worst be blogged about (sometimes) then rarely read about (more often) or recorded in the school paper or yearbook (in highly sanitized form) for posteritiy, in Hollywood all the gossip and backstabbing and behind-the-back catiness (not limited by age or gender) was written down, recorded, photographed, or sometimes outright fabricated, but it all made it into some mdium for everyone outside the metaphorical ‘school’ to see, observe, add to, and pass judgement upon.

Small-town girl though she may be, Caitlyn wasn’t naive enough to think her friend had stumbled upon a perfectly new and unique metaphor for the role she (Caitlyn) now lived in, but she thought the metaphor was apt, and no amounts of eye-rolling, kvetching, derision, faux-snores (an Autumn favorite) or incomprhension (which Caitlyn encountered mostly in the model-turned-actor types that had been ravingly attractive since birth, and probably dropped on the head in a non-outwardly-scaring way once or twice when little, and not read to, and got by on their looks alone while their brains atrophied at a faster decline than job offers for actresses over 50) none of these factors could divorce her from using her favorite linguistic metaphor.

“I wonder how much some of those writers get paid…” Val really felt a sudden urge to go home and take a nap.

“Too much. I mean…fuck..how would you like to get married and then have it go to shit and have people covering the whole thing—spreading who knows what rumors and saying whatever they like about you, because even if it is false and you sue, it’s still publicity for them?”

“Well who would when you phrase it like that.”

“You know what I mean. It’s shit.”

“They cover the happy times too.”

“Yeah. But they don’t.  Unless it’s weird, like Tom and Katie.”

“That might not be the best example of ‘happy’ to use…”

“Still.”

“But what do they say: ‘it’s the price of fame schweethaht’” Val could pull of a passable Bogart impersonation when the mood struck her.

“Maybe. Still sucks though.”

“But wait. Hold on. Don’t you want to be famous?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And you don’t think this will happen to you too?”

“Well…I don’t know…I was kind of hoping to…move to the south of France or something.”

“You don’t think they have paparazzi there? Or are you just hoping to hook up with Johnny Depp?”

“Oh hush. There’s less of them there, it’s less intrusive.  They don’t take pictures of Johnny everytime he goes to market.”

“Does he ‘go to market’ there?”

“Come on, it may be a fantasy, but the least you could do is play along with me here.”

“Fine. But only because you seem over your hangover now.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Caitlyn hoised her second green tea of the brunch aloft in mock-toast.