“For Valentine’s Day, my mom got my dad strippers,” the sister bragged. “They did flaming shots out of their assholes and now my mom is, like, best friends with the strippers.”
I closed my eyes and felt the corners of my lips curl. I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I flossed. Then I got into bed, rolled over, and fucked ’em.
Their yard lit up as if a helicopter were preparing to land on it.
“What the hell?!” they cried, confused and squinting.
“Turn that off!” they cried.
“That’s annoying us!” they cried.
One of them called me a cunt, which I did not think they had in them. It takes a certain kind of girl to bypass “bitch.” Because they were animals, they threw rocks, and because they were drunk, they missed. The sister tried to reclaim her authority by deploying the only logic in her arsenal.
“It’s our property!” she shouted. “We can do what we want!”
I yawned. In the months to come, I would reward good behavior with darkness, but that night I left the lights on, even after they admitted defeat and went inside.
There was a pleasant, almost celestial glow that illuminated my apartment. This was the light bouncing off their windows and into mine. I thought of the evening I saw Jared and his friends dancing in their kitchen, of how gorgeously happy they all looked. I tried mustering some of that old generosity of spirit, but whatever heartstrings had tied my world to theirs had gone slack. Questions drifted through my fading consciousness: Would the sister call her brother at college and tell him about this? Would he be impressed by the enemy’s tactics? And, really, who cared? I couldn’t be bothered to worry about what people like that thought of me anymore. Their lives were out there and mine was in here. They were forever behind me in time, as unable to catch up as I was to wait for them. All around me, the shadows of tree branches stretched across the walls—branches that lived only because they were connected to a trunk in Jared’s yard.
A Dog Named Humphrey
When the opportunity to appear on the teen drama Gossip Girl came my way, I felt like I had won a contest. Not a contest it would have occurred to me to enter, but the type of contest of which I am dimly aware as a result of living in the world. Instead of cars or cash, the prize is people. Yes, people. Be pulled onstage by Bono and have him lick your face! Have a very light lunch with Kate Moss! Some philosophical confusions arise—for both the winner and the prize—when it comes to packaging real people and presenting them as if they were objects to be bid upon and bartered, as if their allotted hours on Earth were more valuable than yours.
For one thing, it strikes me as vaguely denigrating to the celebrities. And I say this as someone not historically concerned with the denigration of celebrities. But the underlying message to civilians seems to be that a celebrity life is best accessed not through hard work or talent but through lottery-type luck. Their fortune is a fluke that, with a flick of the wrist, could belong to any man on the street. What a lesson. And what of us civilian participants? Are we not setting ourselves up to feel bad about our modest level of notoriety, a level with which we were perfectly comfortable just the day before? Then there’s the shame of the thrill, the tiny hope that someone famous will whip around and call you a natural, tell you they see the faint outline of your high school production of Pippin in your delivery. Is it healthy to place this much value on the celebrity gaze? We are, at best, pleased by the scraps. We are, at worst, validated by them.
These were the kinds of thoughts swirling around my head after I got the call. The prize I’d won—the chance to mingle, and for a moment be an equal, with the actors on the set of Gossip Girl—was not initially meant to be mine. Hollywood is not known for its sensitivity; I was told outright that a more famous writer had been offered the walk-on and declined. The news that someone I respected would not do what I was willing to do in a heartbeat had absolutely no effect on me. I did not slavishly follow Gossip Girl, but I certainly knew what it was. I was familiar with the premise, knew what channel it was on, and had watched parts of the first season. The show is what my grandmother used to call “good junk” because she died before the phrase “guilty pleasure” entered the lexicon. Because I was tickled by the invitation, I told myself that the famous author had clearly said no because she was unfamiliar with the show’s good-junkiness—not because she was weighing the benefits of playing a caricature of a writer and making her decision based on what a serious author should or should not do.
But when I hung up the phone, I thought: Which is what, exactly?
*
What’s unclear to me, even now, is how I missed the part where I would be playing myself. I knew I wasn’t being solicited for my acting skills. But I thought I’d just be a mute extra, waving stiffly while someone pulled my skateboard in slow motion across the background.
I learned otherwise when the script was emailed to me the night before. The episode is called “Memoirs of an Invisible Dan” and the scene is a book party thrown in honor of the book’s author, Dan Humphrey, the scruffy Brooklyn-based progeny of a former rock star and, as such, a distastefully pedigreed outsider to the Upper East Side world of Gossip Girl. Dan, because he attended an exclusive high school and dated one of its queen bees, has snuck an insider peek (thus the title of his book, meant ironically: Insider) at a life he is doomed to distantly watch. This condemnation becomes increasingly hard to swallow as the series unfolds, given Dan’s social, carnal, and claustrophobically familial connections to this cloistered world. His father marries his girlfriend’s mother. None of these ties deters him from jotting down his spiky observations. And observe he has done. After scoring a short-story publication in The New Yorker as a high school junior (a “dream on” incident of implausibility that’s become increasingly plausible in these days’ youth-prized scribes), Dan, in true Truman Capote fashion, writes a roman à clef about his tony friends and the socially stratospheric family into which his father has married. He is then embarrassed by the publication because he fears they will confuse fact and fiction, as they definitely should.
Which is where I come in. In my scene, a snappily dressed young woman playing a literary agent escorts me to a group of actors. These include Dan’s father and stepmother (Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen, played by Matthew Settle and Kelly Rutherford) and their stepson, a dastardly but lovable peer of Dan’s (Chuck Bass, played by Ed Westwick). Chuck is the motherless son of a ruthless business scion; his broody eyebrow acting is a triumph. Gossip Girl is not so much about teenagers with grown-up problems as it is about New Yorkers with Dallas problems.
According to the script, I am to be presented in a manner reminiscent of Wikipedia: The Movie—
“And this is Sloane Crosley,” says the literary agent.
She is instructed to step aside and gesture at me before helpfully adding, “The bestselling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”
Then the whole group is meant to ooh and ahh as if I had invented the cheese grater.
As one of the many people who go through life not being Bono, I was grateful for the plug. I just didn’t want to be standing right there, the camera zooming in on my face as I watched the plug enter the outlet. At a real book party, such information would be encased in a quiet murmuring and the subject would be far across the room. If at all. Talking about an author’s book at a book party isn’t quite as gauche as talking about an artist’s painting at a gallery opening, but it’s up there. What people really talk about at book parties is a mixture of small talk and smack talk, making the occasional meal out of whatever morsel of scandal has fallen into their laps. They drink free wine and look for warm bodies with which to flirt. In other words: Gossip Girl without the plot.
Perhaps if I were playing a version of myself instead of myself, I would have had less of a flushed reaction to the line. I was conversant enough in the show to know that a decent number of New Yorkers had made cameos on Gossip Girl, among them Cynthia Rowley, Michael Bloombe
rg, and Lisa Loeb. A motley but expensively shampooed crew. This roster of past guest stars is part of the reason I was excited. Gossip Girl has been unusually good to Manhattan-based people and industries via name drops, guest appearances, and product placements. Being invited into this world (even as a backup choice) felt like a minor local knighting conducted on national television.
More than that, a surprising number of book-publishing figures and authors have appeared on Gossip Girl. Further reconnaissance taught me that over the course of several seasons, Jay McInerney plays a once-young-’n’-famous writer named Jeremiah Harris. Jeremiah gives advice to young Dan, then interning at a Condé Nast publication and struggling to become young-’n’-famous, too. Jonathan Karp, an editor and publisher at Simon & Schuster, appears several times on the show because S&S is publishing Insider whether Dan is ready for it or not, goddamn it; Blair, another private school queen bee, is close personal friends with Lorrie Moore and invites her to a party; Jeffrey Eugenides and Jennifer Egan get shout-outs; editors at The Paris Review are clamoring to get a look at Dan’s prose.
The thing is, all these people’s roles are proportional to their relevance to the Gossip Girl world. If they are recurring and substantive enough, they have separate character names. When Wallace Shawn plays Cyrus Rose and dates Blair’s mother, it’s difficult to get past his Wallace Shawn–ness, but, in a way, we’re not meant to. Normally we judge an actor by how quickly that actor can make us forget reality. However, the Gossip Girl producers know a significant swath of their fan base will recognize Wallace Shawn and Jay McInerney on sight. So why bother with forgetting when we can appreciate the clever meta-ness of the show’s writers and experience pride at our own cleverness for getting the reference?
Whether you’re playing yourself or a wink-wink persona, the law of cameo syllogism goes as follows (stay with me, here): If you spend a certain amount of screen time playing yourself, you are no longer yourself but a version of yourself—a stereotype of you. Add a bonus layer of confusion if you are playing a stereotype of you in a scene in which all the characters are outraged by the possibility that the fictional characters in a fictional book published by a real publishing house might be based on the real fictional selves they’re playing.
What falls off the conveyor belt? Sloane is the bestselling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, I worked for many years as a book publicist. As someone who used to cart around awkward literary geniuses for a living, I tried to imagine a scenario in which introducing an author as “bestselling” wouldn’t go off like a bomb. Deep down, I knew the Gossip Girl writers were doing me a favor. They were trying to introduce me to the people watching the party, not at the party. As we’ll surely recall, I was no one’s first choice. But my appreciation for this kindness was diminished by my next line: “Which I am still in search of.”
Here I am referring to actual cake. This syntax is complicated and awkwardly phrased, and sounds like I’m contorting myself to express a desire in a grammatically correct fashion, even if the result is not grammatically correct. Which I am still in search of. It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I.
In terms of verisimilitude, however, the line rings true. Which I am still in search of. It sounds like I am saying whatever gobbledygook is required to get me out of a conversation at a party. It’s called method acting.
My next line after that: “So if you’ll excuse me…”
I trail off. So preoccupied is this me-version character by the possibility of stuffing her face with cake, she has no mind for small talk.
“Oh, it is so nice to meet you!” exclaims an impressed Lily van der Woodsen.
And then?
Then nothing.
That’s it.
I don’t have another line.
I look Lily dead in the eye, ignore Dan’s father, Rufus Humphrey, and Rufus and Lily’s stepson, Chuck, and scurry away. Rufus opens his mouth and looks as if he’s about to add a pleasantry of his own. Alas, I have already turned my back to him.
The writers of the episode surely did not realize how strangely this would translate once the cameras were rolling. Or, more likely, they didn’t think twice about it, because it’s an expendable moment of civilian bumbling during a show that’s been on the air for years. I am left holding the bad-manners bag. But I am also a guest in the house of Gossip Girl, afraid to ad-lib. I am convinced it’s on the same spectrum as inquiring about my “motivation.” So I stick to the script and say nothing more.
I hear Lily’s words as I flee the scene.
“Oh, it is so nice to meet you!”
You bet your ass it was.
*
Gossip Girl calls the Upper East Side home, but the day of my appearance, it was being filmed on the Upper West Side; a minor park-width fudge considering all of the far-flung locales Vancouver claims to be. I didn’t care where I was going, so long as I would be lent something to wear. This was the first prediction my girlfriends made, offering an “I bet they’ll dress you!” if they were fans of the show and an “At least they’ll dress you” if they weren’t. The Gossip Girl wardrobe is one of its more preposterous elements but one I could really get behind. Movies and television shows set in New York have a reputation for being visually unrealistic, and they can get away with it because the idea of New York held by real people is so unrealistic. And I’m not talking about someone in a midwestern town watching syndicated episodes of Friends. I’m talking about the people who actually live here.
The city is big and varied enough that it’s always possible that someone out there is leading the life portrayed on-screen. There could very well be teenagers akin to the ones on Gossip Girl, living on their own in the Waldorf Astoria, wearing berets en route to drug deals, sending back plates of spaghetti Bolognese at the Bowery. You may not know them personally. But they’re out there, leading pretty much your same life—just with a few more rhinestones glued to the edges. I’ve seen glimpses of them, or the people I think might be them, at literary benefits that I have rarely paid for when I was acting as escort to other authors, keeping folded copies of their tour schedules in my bag.
These events notwithstanding, book publicity is an unglamorous job. In my time working in publishing, I never once dressed up for a book party. Wearing a nice dress at a book function generally indicates that you are fresh from (a) a job interview, (b) a funeral, or (c) a fake funeral to cover up the interview you just came from. For the handful of fancy events the publishing industry hosts each year, I would bring a change of clothing with me to the office and hop into a dress in the handicapped bathroom stall. But even these occasions were increasingly rare. Cocktails had been replaced by beer, restaurants by dive bars, gift bags by the code for the bathroom door. The big book-launch party itself had become unrealistic, even in reality.
Thus when the Gossip Girl producers encouraged me to bring what I might wear to “a typical fictional publishing cocktail party,” I was disappointed. Yes, I was playing me, but did I have to dress like it? Also, I had never attended a typical fictional publishing cocktail party before. I don’t own any hypothetical dresses.
*
Gossip Girl is taped many months before it airs, so the pressure is on not only to wear something chic, but to wear something that will remain chic in the future. With no time to shop, I threw a few hardly stained dresses into a plastic garment bag and made my way out into the rain. It was pouring by the time I arrived uptown. I met a production assistant outside the apartment building, hangers cutting off my thumb circulation, and exchanged my small umbrella for her large one. She escorted me to a silver trailer and knocked on the door, whereupon two stylists yanked me inside as if I were a spy about to blow my cover.
Maybe the inside of the Gossip Girl wardrobe traile
r is normal. Maybe it’s not objectively impressive if you work in television. But I had never seen anything like it. It had sliding ladders and tiers of clothing racks. The names of the characters were taped to various wooden drawers and they said things like BLAIR: TIGHTS, STRAPLESS BRAS. I wondered if we were the same size and if I could be the kind of person who steals a bra as a souvenir. I did come here to act. Could I play a thief?
The head stylist was chatty and amiable. She led me to the back of the trailer and pulled a heavy curtain behind us.
“Let’s see what we have here,” she said, medically.
As she examined my dated dresses, a Chihuahua pushed under the curtain and began sniffing my feet.
“That’s Humphrey,” said the stylist.
Humphrey stared at me. All the humans he encountered smelled like fine leather goods and aioli and macarons. I must be a stray.
“Is he named after Dan Humphrey?”
This, I assumed, was a self-evident question.
The costume designer studied my face, questioning her own judgment in treating me like a person up until this point.
“After Humphrey Bogart.”
“Oh.” I looked at the dog. “I guess you had him before you started working here.”
“I’ve had him for three months,” she said, “but everyone thinks he’s named after Dan for some reason.”
She pulled the last dress from my bag and called for her assistant.
“This will work,” she said. “But tell you what … why don’t you borrow a pair of these?”
Look Alive Out There Page 3