Shooting Stars

by Jennifer Buhl

  I glance over and suck in my breath. No question, he is the David that Michelangelo sculpted.

  I roll down my passenger window, and before long he looks over. I raise the cup of coffee I have in my hand and mouth “Coffee?” hoping he’ll realize that I’m the photographer following him and that I’m asking him to stop for a picture. This morning is on his terms; I knew that going in.

  David’s head rolls back slightly as he smiles at me—and sends me spinning toward heaven.

  I drop back behind security (who’s swerving all around now and clearly in distress that I’m so close to his boss) and keep my distance until we hit the Long Beach exit where the Galaxy, DB’s soccer team, practice.

  Just after leaving the freeway, David pulls into Starbucks.

  My heart skips a beat. Is he doing that for me?

  David goes directly to the drive-through lane, and both security cars pull into parking spaces to wait. I pull in behind David. The drive-through makes a tight curve, such that David’s head and my head are less than ten feet apart even though we’re both in our cars. Our windows are rolled down.

  “Hi,” I say, feeling my face get flush.

  He looks right at me, sunglass-less. His eyes twinkle and he flashes his signature smile, the one that looks like he’s kind of bashful.

  “Do you think I could have a picture?” I ask respectfully.

  There’s not a shot unless David allows it. He can easily tuck back into his car or put his hand up and avoid being photographed. And if I get out of my car, he will just turn his head and roll up his window until security escorts me out of the way.

  “Ohhh…no, I don’t think so,” he says gently, almost like he’s sorry.

  “OK. Are you sure?” I persist, though am conscious not to grovel. Usually I will sacrifice my dignity for a picture, but today is different. I prefer an angelic encounter with or without the shot.

  “I’m sure you’ll have another opportunity,” he says politely. David seems to be enjoying the interaction too, leaving his window down, his body language giving no indication he doesn’t want to converse.

  Good-looking Security has finally noticed us talking and rushes over. Casually, David waves him away.

  “Hmmm…” I start. “Well, how about tickets? I’m dying to see you play.”

  “Yeah? You should come to a game.”

  “Yeah, I should.” I pause. “Good tickets would be nice. You know, like, your box.”

  “Well, I generally give my tickets to my family.” He puts me down softly. It even looks like he’s blushing.

  “Oh, of course you do. That makes sense.”

  Pause. He keeps his head a bit out the window. We’re both engaged in this conversation.

  “You know, David, maybe it’s best I can’t photograph you. I’m shaking so much I don’t think I could hold the camera.”

  Another award-winning David Beckham smile, dead into my eyes mere feet away.

  I love you.

  I try to think of something clever to say, but can’t.

  “Sooooo. What now? No pictures, no tickets. I’m just a nice American girl. You’re sure, yeah?”

  He smiles again. Then, he slowly reaches into his car, grasps his aviators, and slides them over his perfect nose.

  Is he doing that for me?

  “Yeah?” I question. Putting his sunglasses on, I think, means that I can have a picture, but I want to be sure. “I…I can have a picture?”

  Ever so slightly, he nods. I bring my camera up—shaking as fiercely as I suspected—and fire away for about fifteen seconds while David takes his cup of coffee from the girl at the window and glances back at me.

  He pulls his Porsche forward into the street. I wave at the Starbucks employee with the jaw-dropped expression as I pass the drive-through window without ordering. Then David turns right toward soccer practice and I turn left to get back on the freeway. I “thank-you” honk my horn, and he sticks his hand out the window and waves.

  If I died now, my life would be perfect.

  * * *

  Bartlet is the first call I make on my drive back to town. He thinks I’m joking. It doesn’t happen that way, not with a star like David Beckham.

  Claudia had stayed at the Beckhams’ house, but since we’d committed the day together we’ll split the sales. I’ll get 30 percent, Claudia will get half her staff cut, and CXN’s three owners will make over 50 percent. David’s shot often—not by paps, but by official sports photographers—and as no real story is associated with my pictures, they aren’t super valuable. (To anyone other than me, that is.) I’ll get respect points in the pap world, but I’ll be lucky to make more than a couple grand from the set.

  Still, today wasn’t about the money. (Although, I will be disappointed if they don’t sell—what’s pleasure if it can’t be shared?) And, David’s random act of kindness will take a little skin off his back. He’s an experienced enough celebrity to know that by giving it up, more paparazzi action will perpetuate. Paps will see these shots and may choose to work on him because they will wonder will he give it up again? But, despite the inconvenience, David did it anyway.

  He made my day and will make my tomorrow and my weekend. I won’t kid myself and think that I made his day, but I do wonder if his random act of kindness for little ole me maybe, possibly, made his morning. We all know it feels beckham to give than to receive.

  The MAMMOTH Celebrity

  The Beckhams are one in, quite literally, a billion. At any given time, there are only a handful of MAMMOTH celebrities in the world. Right now, that’s stars like Brad and Angelina, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez, and Madonna. These celebrities operate with security fleets, they are almost always in private jets and cars, and they are rarely photographed not on their terms. Paps may doorstep them when we know they’re in town, but we’re typically successful only when the mammoth celebrity chooses to give it up. They are rarely our targets because we can rarely get them. These celebrity elite definitely must change the way they operate in this world, but that’s as much about the public as it is the paparazzi. And with their fame comes enormous power. With so much money and so much security, they are able to control a good part of the world around them.

  14. These rules apply to women. Very few men get famous via the tabloids. If you’re a beautiful Hollywood man under forty (or maybe forty-five, if you get better with age), generally no one cares. The exceptions: men will sell with babies, bathing suits, and balloons, or if they are young, stylish pretty boys like Zac Efron. But the general rule is Men Don’t Sell. The reason is that women mostly read tabloids, and women like to look at other women. We want to see what female celebrities are wearing, how they’ve done their hair, who they’re dating, what their bodies look like, and how they compare to us.

  15. Madonna, “My Worst Outfits Ever,” Us Weekly, April 28, 2008.

  Chapter 18

  Back to reality. I’ve often wondered what makes some of us desire kids so strongly and others not want them at all. For me, there wasn’t a time when I didn’t want kids. Even in my twenties, I knew I’d have three. And with them, of course, a healthy husband.

  Conversely: I always knew I didn’t want them early. I had too much to do—travel, play, work. I was in no rush. Besides, guys were everywhere. At least a few years ago they were. No one told me they would go away.

  Since I moved to L.A.—and aged—there’s been only one short-lived boyfriend. Sure, I had prospects. OK, so maybe Adrian wasn’t a realistic prospect. And OK, OK, maybe Aaron was a dream too. But without my Aaron dream, I would have lacked hope—hope for romance, hope for a family. So I let it stay alive longer than it should have.

  But now, with no viable male and having vowed that this year, my thirty-seventh, would be the Year of the Baby, I have decided to consider the completely unnatural and awkward twenty-first-century alternative to sex: the sperm bank. Not that this idea is sitting easily with me. Sure, I am thankful that I have the option, but to be honest, I find it very di
sturbing. I mean, what will people think? “She can’t even find somebody to sleep with her?” More than that, what will my “potential” kid have to deal with? “Your dad was A Sperm?” How will that affect him?

  But the more I think about it, the more I warm up to it. My other option, using a friend—who at this point would have to be Aaron or Simon, the only two men with whom I feel remotely comfortable enough to sleep with but neither of whom I want to involve in the rest of my life—is not attractive to me. And since I don’t sleep around (I don’t even know how to sleep around), if I want a kid, what option do I have?

  So swallowing that heavy pill of reality, I took two action steps. First, I said what I was going to do out loud. I told my mom, my sisters, and a few close friends including “the girls” that if I didn’t meet a guy in the next year I would try to get pregnant with a sperm donor. Some were skeptical, some were supportive, some were judgmental, and some were empowering. The backing of my traditionally conservative mom was particularly meaningful. Second, I did some research. ’Cause in the end, if I do decide to get “artificially inseminated” (I hate this term), I want everything to be in place so that when I am ready, I can just make the appointment and say, “Go. Let’s do it. Now.”

  Los Angeles has a huge sperm bank. Each sperm is assigned a number, about which you may see basic genetic information. But the bank offers no pictures of donors. To me, the idea of blindly picking a donor number based on height and hair color alone seems too much like driving down La Cienega, pointing my finger out the window, and picking the first XY chromosomes I land on. So I spend a big part of April on the Internet and on the phone. I research sperm banks in Scandinavia—I figure if one race is consistently beautiful, it’s the Nordics! And I find a bank in Denmark, which much like Match.com, has copious personal information about each donor online. Like the L.A. bank I checked into, it has no pictures, but what it does include is personal feedback on each guy from the sperm bank staff. Since every donor is screened for physical and mental health, and hobbies and educational level are irrelevant to me, I am looking for one thing: Who’s attractive? “Dane” and “Atle” (pseudonyms, not numbers—so much more personal) were clearly the staff picks for “best looking.”

  Next, I called the bank to see how it worked. They told me that the United States had recently instituted new restrictions which did not allow for the importation of “human tissue,” so if I were serious about Dane or Atle, I could either come pick up their sperm myself (and smuggle it back into the States or spend months in Denmark till “it took”), or I could go to Mexico where they could FedEx it to me. A long trip to Denmark sounded pricey, so I got on the phone. After leaving many messages—I don’t speak Spanish—a competent-sounding, English-speaking doctor in Tijuana called me back. He told me that if I could get my fallopian tubes checked out in the States, and they were passable, he would squirt me full of Viking material during each ovulation cycle.

  It felt like an episode of Sex and the City except without the humor. Should having a kid really entail crossing the Mexican border for Danish sperm applications? Was using a sperm donor the moral solution, or was I going against nature? Would I ever find a real daddy? I didn’t know the answer to these questions. The only thing I knew was that, for me, not having a child was not an option. I was born to be a mother.

  * * *

  Justified or not, lately, it felt like I was always getting the short end of the stick.

  “Officer, can you tell us what happened, please?”

  Officer Cregg walked up to the white board and drew a diagram. “This was Ms. Buhl’s car,” he said, pointing to a car he had drawn. “These were the three cars behind Ms. Buhl that she was blocking,” he said, pointing to the three cars he had drawn directly behind my car.

  He walked back to the podium. “Your Honor, Ms. Buhl pulled up in front of me on Beverly Boulevard to view the set of Entourage. I asked her three times to please move along—she was blocking traffic—or I would have to ticket her. I did not want to ticket her, Your Honor, but she refused to move, and the cars behind her couldn’t move. I had no choice. She was impeding traffic.”

  “Thank you, Officer. You may be seated. Ms. Buhl, you may approach the podium.”

  I walked up.

  “Would you like to ask the officer any questions about his testimony?” the judge asked.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you lying? Why did—,” I began only to be interrupted by the judge.

  “Ms. Buhl, you may only ask questions to clarify the testimony. Would you like to do that?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  I tried again. “Did you see my camera—”

  “Ms. Buhl, you’re testifying. This time is only for questions. Do you have any questions?”

  “I guess not.” Damn. How is this gonna uncover truth? I need a lawyer.

  “OK. Then please tell us what happened,” the judge said.

  I went to the diagram and erased the three cars that Officer Cregg had drawn. “There were no cars between the traffic light and me,” I said. “When I pulled to the side of Beverly, there was no one behind me within several hundred feet. And no one came up behind me for at least three minutes because the traffic light here [I pointed] was red.”

  I stepped back to the podium and continued, “I slowed down to look at the film set, but my car was still moving forward when Officer Cregg banged his hands on it and leaned his entire head inside my window to look around. He went like this.” Here, I illustrated to the judge the officer’s head movement, which to me had looked like a turtle coming out of its shell. I continued, “I feel sure he saw my camera equipment lying on the front seat and took me to be a paparazzi. He demanded that I stop—as my car was still moving at this point—and he said, ‘Pull ahead, ma’am. Right there. Pull up to the curb and stop.’ I stopped only because he told me to and I was obeying him. I did not want to stop. I was only rubbernecking and slowing down, and that’s not illegal.”

  Monitoring the set of Entourage on the sidewalk in Beverly Hills was, I would venture to guess, the most power Officer Cregg had enjoyed in quite some time. He took his job seriously, and he was gonna show me who was boss.

  Of course, there’s irony here: the crew of Entourage loves paps.

  I carried on, “The officer then told me that he was writing me a ticket because I was ‘impeding traffic,’ but I looked in my rearview mirror and asked, ‘What are you talking about? There is no one behind me.’ I pointed behind me and asked him to look. The officer refused to look, and after another sixty seconds with him writing the entire time, I appealed again, because still no one was behind me. ‘If I leave now, I will never have impeded anyone,’ I told him. But he continued writing, then handed me a ticket, and in a very sarcastic voice said, ‘You can go now.’ And he smiled.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Is there anything further?” the judge asked.

  “He’s telling a bold-faced—”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” And in the same breath, and in the kindest tone, the judge said, “In the case of [blah, blah, blah], I rule in favor of Officer Cregg.” Then, he hit his gavel and said, “You’re dismissed.”

  As I walked to the courtroom exit past Officer Cregg—who hadn’t looked at me the entire time—I couldn’t help myself. “Fucking liar,” I mumbled.

  Then, I quickly corralled my closest pap friends and arranged a gang-bang outside the courthouse taking Cregg’s picture and posting it on the Internet with the true story. The following week, I spotted him working as a greeter at Walmart.

  Kidding! (No one shops at Walmart in L.A.!) But I wished that as I paid my ticket.

  * * *

  It’s June 16th, the day after my thirty-seventh birthday. Summer is boiling full-steam, and I head to Malibu. What’s ahead of me in the next few months will change me forever. Of course, I don’t know that yet.

  I’m going to Malibu to join Simon on “McC.” McC is what Simon call
s Matthew McConaughey because he can’t pronounce “McConaughey,” much less spell it. Simon’s always impressed with my “big words” and math, i.e., paycheck, calculations. But where he’s lacking in some areas, he’s a genius in others, and you’ll find no one better at making fun of celebrities. I Nextel Simon every morning to pump me up, and unless he’s in a funk, he’ll get rolling on a comedy routine that would top Chelsea Lately.

  This morning I take the scenic route through town to the Westside, then onto the PCH. The Pacific Coast Highway follows the ocean shore from southern to northern California. Surfers, seagulls, and sailboats dot the bright blue waters, and it’s hard to pay attention to the road.

  Simon beeps me on my way in. “Did you remember your oxygen? You’re headed for the Bubble today. The air is thick out ’ere.”

  “The Bubble” is what Simon calls Malibu—shiny and sparkly on the outside, suffocating on the inside. “The Bu” is what the tabloids call it.

  McC just moved from his Airstream trailer where he lived for months parked in a Malibu campground off the PCH into a rented home in an elite neighborhood on the north end of Malibu beach. In McC’s new subdivision, the ocean—meters away—is blocked from the public’s view by elephant-size homes like the one he’s building. (He rents adjacent property while overseeing the construction.) Julia Roberts, her husband Danny Moder, and their three kids are also new to the neighborhood, having moved into a custom-built, eco-friendly home situated on a cliff overlooking Little Point Dume beach. I don’t think there’s anyone (besides maybe Bitchworth) who reviles the paparazzi like Julia Roberts. Simon “gets a giggle” when he thinks of how her “britches must’a knotted up” when she discovered Matthew would share her same chunk of sand. You see, the problem is, Matthew adores the paparazzi. And since he always produces an attractive salable picture with strong resale value (especially wearing a bathing suit, his most frequent attire), we love him too. Or at least we love photographing him. So now every time Julia heads down to her beach, she must “SMILE!”