by Byron Lane
“A lifer?” I ask.
“West will be an assistant forever. It’s her calling.” Jasmine turns to another curved section of the room, pointing her chin at a guy wearing all white. “He doesn’t want to be a lifer but probably will be. We call him House. He was hired by a certain divorced Real Housewife, who really can’t afford an assistant. So this so-called Housewife, she uses her kids’ child support to pay his salary.” I look at House and his brand-new white sneakers, which match his white belt and the white bandanna tied around his neck. “That drink House is drinking is paid for by money intended for two cute kids’ school supplies, sports equipment, class field trips.”
Shaking her head, looking at a dimly lit twenty-something across the room, Jasmine says, “We call him Titanic, that guy over there, swathed in Gucci and acne. His boss was a big teen heartthrob. Titanic got hired because, with all that acne, he won’t steal women from the boss, and the Gucci is all from the boss’s scraps. Also, Titanic’s boss, he only hires male assistants who are his exact same size. This way, the assistant can be a perfect stand-in during dreaded wardrobe fittings or shopping sprees. Titanic also shares the boss’s sense of smugness and entitlement, if you ask me.”
Turning to the right, Jasmine points fearlessly to a woman in a wheelchair. “She was hired by an aging handsome leading man who is now a leading has-been, a former James Bond type. The rumor is he wanted a physically disabled assistant to soften his celebrity image, to make him look kind, but then he had to hire another assistant to assist the wheelchaired assistant, and now it’s a living sudoku of who’s carrying the luggage to the car, does the limo have a handicapped lift, who’s making sure the red carpet has a ramp?” Jasmine shakes her head. “Both assistants are here tonight, one occasionally rolling the other across the room. It’s nuts, but they’re nice. We call them Bond 1 and Bond 2.”
The crowd of assistants lingers and sways back and forth like seaweed in a current, like a palm tree farm in a strong wind. Besides personal assistants, there are executive assistants here, as well, but they don’t sway like the others. They’re sturdy and grounded, or look that way. “The assholes,” Jasmine calls them. “You already know Bruce. The other assholes you can identify by their suits.”
Clustered with Bruce are a couple other guys and one lady, all in some version of navy with loud shoes—loud not from color but from the click-clack they make while crossing the bar.
“That guy works for the head of a failing studio,” Jasmine explains. “The other guy assists an attorney for famous rapists. And the woman is an assistant to a top agent at you-know-where.”
“No,” I say, “I really don’t.”
“Very good,” Jasmine says, winking.
“No, no,” I say. “I have no idea. I studied journalism in college.”
“Guys!” Jasmine yells. “Come meet our new baby!” She stands and motions toward me. I stand, and I brace myself as a sea of greedy faces approach to see what my life may yield for them.
They all come at me at once, these assistants, my new teammates, jutting out their arms for handshakes or fist bumps. I hardly catch any of their real names, not that it matters. All of them go by some twisted version of their employment, all of them strangely, proudly using their nicknames, their Hollywood identities—maybe the only identities that matter—West, Titanic, House, Bond 1, Bond 2.
Others trickle in during the night. Crooner works for a pop star, and you can tell—he’s got hot-pink hair extensions and glitter nail polish, like he’s ready to be in a music video. Friend is a big older guy who works for a former star of a must-see TV show—Jasmine says he got hired as half assistant and half security. Red works for a fiery comedienne and may as well take the stage herself the way she rants as if she’s doing a one-woman show.
“Clean their closets every week,” Red spills, whipping her large head back and forth so vehemently in an effort to make her point, I’m scared it will snap off her thin neck. “Take their name-brand shit, the good stuff they don’t want anymore, the swag they’ll never use, and sell it at recycled-clothing stores, online, on street corners. It’s like printing money!”
“Always use your personal credit card to make purchases for them and then get their accountant to reimburse you,” Titanic tells me, his sweet face flushing from either the acne or the excitement of talking about low-grade embezzlement. “That way, you get all the credit-card points. Like, I book all of my boss’s private planes with my Visa and now I have 976,000 miles racked up. I’ve also got points for hotels, rental cars, Yogurtland.” He holds up his glass of champagne as if saying, Cheers, but he’s mostly met with blank stares, Titanic not being one of the more popular assistants at our séance, our conjuring of the secrets of the dead-souled living celebrities who help us pay our rent.
“When you order from the personal chef,” Friend says, pulling up on the waistband of his size-36 pants, “always order a little more than the family needs, and then there’s extra for you to take home and you’re eating gourmet cooking for free.”
Their advice, they all give it freely, but they also want to take. They want to know not how I got the job with Kathi Kannon, or even why, but what I’m getting out of it: What’s the pay, what are the hours, what are the perks? They’re like sharks circling my position, as if they think I may not survive, as if they may want a bite if I don’t quite cut it in these first weeks. Hey, Siri, I want them to be wrong.
No one is interested in the minutiae of Kathi Kannon herself. None of these bleary-eyed modern assistants care about the details of her celebrity. They already know the big picture: mansions, money, mess. They get it. The broad strokes are apparently the same at all these jobs. Instead, they want pity, attention, to make sure the hard edges are just soft enough so they can amuse the world with their stories of martyrdom at the hands of beloved cultural rulers (for better or worse), back-dooring compliments as reminders that they’re important, their existence imperative, and they’re ostensibly a coveted arm’s length from the spot the rest of the world would die for: sitting at the right hand of the Holy Star.
Friend grumbles of his employer, “She once asked me to have a water softener installed in the house. I found the best brand. I spent thirty thousand dollars of her money. The next day she told me, ‘Now the water is too soft.’”
West takes another sip of champagne and rats on her boss: “I’ve never seen her drink a glass of water. Never. She pees straight champagne—and the good stuff, not this crap,” she says, with no sense of irony as she guzzles another gulp.
House elbows into the conversation: “I have to go to Whole Foods every day and text my boss pictures of the salad bar so she can pick out exactly which items she wants me to include in her lunch.”
Red, not to be outdone, whips out her tale of martyrdom: “Well, I cook chicken and rice for her dogs to eat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. I feed them; I walk them. They’re so happy to see me on Monday mornings that it makes me think there’s a chance she doesn’t feed them at all over the weekend!”
Crooner stops biting his glitter nails for a moment and shouts, “You get weekends off?! I was getting so many text messages from my boss on my days off—‘What’s the Wi-Fi password?’ ‘Can you unclog a sink?’ ‘Where’s my hair gel?’—I literally just moved into one of his guest rooms. For real. I gave up my apartment, sold my furniture, and now live in a mostly empty wing of his mansion, and I don’t even think he knows I’m there.”
These other assistants, they’re all sharing their horror stories with a slight smile, these weary travelers, who wink to their knowledge that they’re complaining about the weather in paradise, their wallets full and their arms outstretched; I wonder how many of them are like me, wearing bribes from their bosses, little gifts to encourage them to work harder, keep secrets, stay drunk on a gatekeeper’s power. All these people complaining, they’re also in awe of their own lives beside their golden idols. I’m thinking, How much am I like them?
“How
do you know what to do all day?” I ask the group.
All these eyes stare at me and all these jaws drop—not with wisdom but with shock.
“No one told you?” West asks.
“Told me what?”
“No one left you an Assistant Bible?” House asks.
“A what?” I wonder aloud, a fool at the bottom of a well.
“An Assistant Bible is a document that tells you everything about your boss,” Jasmine says. “It includes their likes, dislikes, passwords, allergies, medications, important phone numbers, airline frequent-flier miles, rules and policies, et cetera, et cetera. Every time an assistant leaves a job, they hand the Bible down to whoever is replacing them. You don’t have that?”
“No,” I say, playing a victim. “I think I replaced one of her fuck buddies.”
“Work on an Assistant Bible right away,” Crooner says.
“And the rest should be easy,” Red says, bobbing her head so intensely I’m not sure if it’s how she likes to make a point or if it’s a medical condition.
“Easy? Am I missing something?” I ask. “Once I have a list of her passwords, what am I supposed to do all day?”
“These jobs are not about doing,” Jasmine says, touching my knee. “That’s not the hard part. These jobs are about being. Rule number one is simply being there the second they need something. Of course, they want the daily tasks done and whatnot but never at the expense of—nothing is more important than—being there for them.”
Smiles break across all of their faces. They all nod. They are living these tales, these unverifiable tidbits of tawdry, these little living anecdotes who ease the pain of their boss’s celebrity, who dose their famous employers with the cures of commonality, banality, of the everyday.
“Just be there for her, baby. Cheers,” Jasmine says, and this time everyone lifts their drinks.
“Cheers,” I say, shoving my drink toward theirs, and among the ringing of cheap barware a bell goes off inside me. I’m thinking, the thing Kathi wanted while I was trying to eat a cheeseburger and fries at Mickey Fine, the thing I failed to give her that upset her, I now get it. She wanted me to be there. I realize that being, the thing Therapista says is hardest for me to do, is exactly what’s needed at this job. I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that “good things” include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers.
My job responsibilities include proving my worth, growing my hair, becoming what she wants of me. I look at Titanic’s clothes. I look at Bond 1 in her wheelchair and Bond 2 standing behind her, both of them happily following along the absurd game in which they’re immersed. I watch Jasmine relish her moment as the leader of these others, and I’m thinking, Time to get to work.
I savor my Truth and close my eyes and see myself in Kathi’s bedroom, in Kathi Kannon’s life.
I imagine her mess.
I imagine her chaos.
I imagine her crazy.
I’m thinking, From now on, this is my mess, my chaos, my crazy.
Hey, Siri, I want to clean it all up.
7
Today is my new first day. My real first day. I’m wearing my bribe—my gray cardigan, this cashmere costume, this buttoned-up bowing-down to my efforts to improve my failing assistant grade. Kathi Kannon doesn’t come with an owner’s manual—yet.
As I prepare to clean up her life, my thoughts naggingly remind me of my dad cleaning up his. I think about him tidying our old Perris house, making an empty home even more empty, fighting with the garbageman over just how much of my mother’s possessions he can have hauled away each week. Fighting with nature as he tries to burn whatever he can; his burn pile is a joke—Louisiana humidity keeps everything wet, so his trash pile never actually burns, just grows. Dad, finally trying to clean the house, burn the trash, cut the baggage, it’s all decades too late.
I’m purging, too. Purging the ideas I had about this job with Kathi Kannon. I’m trashing what I thought I knew about my role and getting ready for a new approach. I’m still mourning the losses no doubt piled at the front of that red-clay driveway—imagining Mom’s clothes in trash bags, her old melted spatula in a landfill, her memory crushed by garbage-truck hydraulics. But fuck Dad. I was helpless then and I’m helpless now. I have to let Mom go and orient to a new North Star. I have to look forward. I have to believe Mom would want it that way. I have to look to Kathi Kannon.
This is where my writing background comes in handy.
This is where certain policies become clear.
This is where the first of my celebrity-assistant rules are written in a Google doc I dutifully title “Assistant Bible.” This mansion has a tennis court and a pool house and groundskeeper’s quarters but no human-resources office. I’m going to write my own job description, my own duties, seize control of this operation for real, give this a real shot, no more waiting around. I’m doing … and being.
Assistant Bible Verse 1: Get information! I find answers to all her questions to date: “Yes, you could use more socks; e-cigarettes are not known to cause heart attacks, but I’ll make a cardiologist appointment anyway. Don’t do ecstasy. Or any drugs. You’re sober, right? I’ll schedule you a physical. The testicle-shaped pink pills are hormones for lady functions. A Google Images search shows that you and Gene Hackman met at least once, because you were photographed together at a party in Aspen. A chode is a fat penis. There’s cilantro in La Scala salads, which you eat, so I assume you’re tolerant. And I’ll search for the Jean Smart picture.”
Assistant Bible Verse 2: Merge. I add her iCloud account to my phone and input her contacts, calendar, Safari bookmarks. No more scraps of paper with appointments. I need her contacts and bookmarks synced with mine to get my job done, so I can answer Kathi’s questions: “What’s Dr. Miller’s cell number?” “When are we going out of town?” “What’s that website with those things I hate in that store I love?” Merging phones, merging lives.
With Kathi’s contacts at hand, I’m filled with power. I can reach out to any assortment of famous people—though sometimes, to get to Kathi, the stars call me. I speak casually with Shirley MacLaine, asking her about the weather, of all things, while stalling so Kathi can finish eating a scoop of Magnolia Bakery banana pudding. I take a call from Sean Hayes and make him hold while I explain to Kathi who he is. Beverly D’Angelo calls me frequently, though there isn’t much time to chat; before I say, “Hello,” she says, “Where is she?”
Assistant Bible Verse 3: The personal assistant should never give a celebrity drawers, nooks, crannies, crevices, folds. The personal assistant knows the celebrity will stuff everything into anything, and when they ask you for it later, you won’t be able to find it.
Tap, tap, tap. Fizz, fizz. Crackle.
Every inch of Kathi Kannon’s estate is filled with photos and memorabilia: Stacks of casual snaps from birthdays and literal Hollywood history, with living and dead actors alike captured forever in old Polaroids and black-and-white lithographs. Pictures of the pictures before they’re the pictures you see published. The no-makeup, no-wigs, bare-boned, and vulnerable snaps any tabloid would pay top dollar for. In one drawer, smashed together black-and-white images of a past generation. In another, crumpled images of another generation. Pictures of parties. Young Penny Marshall sitting on chairs where just hours ago I was sorting Kathi’s pills. Fresh-faced Robin Williams wearing a chicken costume in Kathi’s kitchen. Ageless Sally Field sitting at Kathi’s piano, tickling keys, with some quip that left bystanders laughing. The inventory of her life is staggering.
In her bathroom sit vintage magazines with Miss Gracie Gold on the cover, young and fresh and holding baby Kathi, the two of them posing for the cameras as naturally as the rest of us breathe. There are dozens of these magazines, marking the multitude of moments of attention Kathi and Miss Gracie have received their enti
re lives. I go on Amazon and order magazine protectors to keep each one preserved, safe, so they don’t accidentally get pee on them. I’m certain Miss Gracie would appreciate it more than Kathi, me preserving their picture-perfect legacy of mother-daughter devotion, though the reality is more complicated. Miss Gracie seems less a mother and more of a brand. I have yet to meet her. Kathi is keeping a little distance between us for reasons I have yet to discover. So many mysteries here, including why everyone, even Kathi, refers to her as “Miss Gracie.” When Kathi’s iPhone rings, the caller ID says “Miss Gracie,” because that’s how Kathi has entered it. It doesn’t say “Mom.”
Besides magazines with my boss on the cover, throughout the house are other less sentimental bits of clutter—gifts, swag, cell phones, designer scarves and gloves, dozens of pairs of eyeglasses: Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana—all unopened. Even the little towelettes for cleaning the lenses are still in their safe plastic packaging. She approves me donating them to Agnes and Benny and Goodwill.
I note Kathi’s favorite toiletries. The moisturizer, the makeup, the boring essentials: Q-tips, perfume, hairspray. I clear a cabinet under her bathroom sink of old makeup and unopened hand-soap samples and put labels like a mini-store so when she needs some cream, she can just go grab it, and every week I can check to see what needs to be restocked. She’ll never run out of anything again: her lotions from Le Labo; her toothpaste from Aēsop; her Tom Ford Amber Absolute perfume, which is discontinued and has to be purchased in various used quantities from strangers on eBay. If they only knew where their old toiletries were being misted: a Hollywood movie star’s neck, wrists, toilet bowl.
When Kathi is ready to go out, she walks into her massive closet—less a closet and more a room for clothing—and sheds whatever she’s wearing. She opens all the doors to her cabinets and wardrobes and grabs this or that and heads out into the world. I put a dirty-clothes hamper in the room and take all the cabinet and wardrobe doors off the hinges; this way she never has to close one to open another and the bang, slam, yank, grind of getting dressed is eased, at least a small bit. She can now walk in and see all her options at once, every shoe choice, every legging, every blouse and jacket.