by Helen Ellis
F’in Tiny says, “You’re working, honey. Get to work.”
From deep within the yard sale comes the fan-like shriek of the Scientologist.
F’in Tiny jerks in its direction. He tamps his hat on his head and elbows through browsers. Mitzy drags me along. It’s a middle-aged mosh pit. But then a cameraman gets in front of us, and folks clear a path as if he’s an ambulance.
The Scientologist is trying to contain himself. The booth he’s in borders the auto area and is run by a gentleman with a braided beard who sells spare parts. The man’s wife sits on a stool by a cashbox, where she’d been reading until the Scientologist asked to buy the book out of her hands.
The book is an Amy Madeline.
“Come on,” says the Scientologist. “You’re not even ten pages in. I’ll double your money. How much did you pay for it?”
The woman says, “Fifty cents.” She closes the book, saving her place with a finger. She studies the glossy rose-colored cover. She asks, “What’s it to you?”
F’in Tiny says, “Yes, tell us all. What is it to you?”
I know what it is.
It’s a rare first edition with a typo the size of Texas. A copy editor got fired over that typo. A hundred thousand copies were pulped because of that typo. Riding the surprise hit of Amy Madeline’s first novel, her rose-colored second novel was rushed to print. Her main character was a pastry chef, and an autocorrected joke wasn’t reversed, so that every time the nice lady stuffed her face with cake, she ate cock. Reprints were published with a lilac cover. Finding a rose-colored cover is as hard as finding a real-life sixty-hour-a-week pastry chef who’ll perform fellatio with the frequency and gusto that Amy Madeline’s character did.
The Scientologist wife tells the lady, “He’s just joking with you, girl.”
Disappointment flashes across the Scientologist’s face, but he masks it with a marriage chuckle. He must be a closeted fan of Amy Madeline’s: a Mad Hag. Only Mad Hags know about this particular book. I wonder if he knows that this book is dedicated to me. I wonder if the producers know. I wonder if they planted it for me to find. Judging by their interest in the auto area, where Mitzy is riding a rusty tricycle like a sexy toddler, they didn’t.
I am as invisible as I am at Amy Madeline’s readings, where I sit in the front row, holding her purse. In literary circles, I’m not known as Amy Madeline’s peer anymore. I’m her wing woman. As a Mad Hag, I’d think the Scientologist would know about her campaign to get me on the show, but he hasn’t mentioned it. Nobody else on this show had mentioned it either. To Dumpster Diving with the Stars, I’m just the writer. I could be any writer. I could be Amy Madeline. They don’t know Portnoy’s Complaint from Pet Sematary. Cardinal Reality Rule #4: Appeal to a new audience. I’m a novelty—like a disabled vet or a little person—cast as a new way to breathe new life into an old show.
I say, “I’ll buy it.” And I whip out my fifty.
The biker’s wife snaps up her quick hundred percent profit and hands me the book, which turns out to be worth six hundred dollars more than I paid.
Mitzy’s trike is worth seventy-five. John Lithgow suffers a thirty-five-dollar forgery penalty because Herman Melville never signed a book with a ballpoint. Mario Batali’s music box is worth a hundred. The tennis player breaks even with her “folk art” (three stuffed animals sewn together like a totem pole). Verbena comes in a close second to me with a cigar box full of Rat Pack–era casino matchbooks. The Scientologist wife comes in third with a musket.
She pouts about her loss but throws a tantrum about her husband’s low score. She demands that the local appraisers get a second opinion on his Harley Davidson bicycle crank. “I mean,” she says directly to the camera, “it’s a Harley. We know it’s got to be worth more than that.”
The Scientologist says, “Baby, let it go. Enjoy your own score. We’re cool.”
“We are?”
He says to the camera, “Hey, all we can do is buy what we like.”
What they’ve bought is extra camera time to show the world that the Scientologist millionaire movie star is just a “regular guy.” Just like a regular guy, he passed up six-hundred-dollar chick lit in favor of something he can slather in grease. But I know he’s a Mad Hag. And I know that he knew the value of the rose-colored book. So I figure, he threw this challenge. As he is going to throw every future challenge to look like a regular guy. No wonder his wife’s face doesn’t have a line on it. It’s not Botox that’s kept her young looking, it’s lying.
The Scientologists aren’t here to revive her career. They are here to disprove gay rumors about him. So, why would he come on a show that promotes the most stereotypically gay pastime? Easy. It’s like me writing a novel called How I Murdered My Husband and Got Away with It and then murdering my husband.
————
As a reality game show fan, I understand that I’m manipulated to root for certain contestants. Cardinal Reality Rule #5: Play favorites. Producers make nice people look nice and not-so-nice people look evil. You think you don’t have a foul mouth? Well, here’s a reel of the twenty-three times you called your wife a bleeping slowpoke. When my season of Dumpster Diving with the Stars airs, I’m guessing that the Scientologist will be cast as the handsome dope, his wife as the smother mother, Verbena as the hillbilly, Mario and Lithgow as good sports (aka themselves), and the tennis player as the bitch.
The tennis player is a lovely woman, but our entire cast is lovely, so our producers are scrambling. In my interviews they’ve asked me what I think about the tennis player’s four suitcases, one of which is entirely filled with red-soled Christian Louboutins. They’ve asked me to compare her loud voice to some type of machinery that is equally loud. When I answer that her shoes are her business and her tone of voice is fine by me, the producers are annoyed.
“We thought you were supposed to be the writer.”
“I am a writer.” My voice cracks.
Damn. I know this will be the audio clip they play over my ravine-water-stained face or big beige panties reveal every week in the opening credits.
I say, “There’s more to life than writing.” And wish they’d pick that audio clip. But they won’t. I feign traveler’s diarrhea and excuse myself from the interview before I start to weep and am cast as the premenopausal washed-up emotional wreck.
The thing is, we’ve got one more challenge (our tenth) to go and I’m winning—by a lot.
On our third challenge, when F’in Tiny sent us to treasure hunt in Tori Spelling’s convoy of moving vans (to coincide with the start of her new reality show in which she and her husband try to get their kids into private school in Manhattan), I picked the oil painting of her mother Candy in a Halston dress because I knew the frame probably once held a Renoir. On our fourth challenge, when we spent the night in a colonial house, I bagged the porcelain doll that wouldn’t stop staring at Mario. Sure, I lost later challenges to Verbena’s thousand-dollar bill that she fished out of a cuckoo clock, and John Lithgow’s Confederate sword, and we were all shocked that the Scientologist’s motorized Barcalounger was worth fourteen hundred, but my profits have put me way out in front.
The producers aren’t happy about it.
Looks like, unless we’re raging drunkards, writers are boring. Who’s going to root for me, a woman who, in her downtime, reads fat Russian tomes under the low lights of B&B sitting rooms?
Mitzy, a much more desirable champion for the show (little girl lost turns family-friendly decorator, and think of all those tank-topped running shots), had an equal chance of maintaining our original rocking horse lead, but her enthusiasm has waned. She’s left a trail of press-on nails along the Atlantic seaboard. She is the youngest among us, but she lags behind. She stoops. She’s put on weight. She has night terrors about contracting Legionnaires’ disease in the Playboy Mansion grotto.
She tells me, “It happened to Bitzy. She says you feel like you’re a hairless dog in a mohair sweater trapped in a car.”
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I say, “That’s so specific.”
Mitzy says, “My sister’s smart like that.”
I say, “I’m sure she’s okay.”
But I’m not.
Producers still haven’t told Mitzy how Bitzy’s surgery went.
If it were my husband who might be lying somewhere comatose from anesthesia complications, I’d have quit this show a month ago and risked a lawsuit to find out. But I’m a grown-ass lady with savings, mutual funds, and property in my name. All Mitzy has is a room and her looks.
For our final challenge, which takes place at the Pennsylvania estate auction of Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III, F’in Tiny saunters into the dead woman’s crowded ballroom wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot. He (or the costume department) is under the impression that old money dresses like Professor Plum. He holds his pipe to his face like a monocle.
Over the din of hundreds of antique dealers, interior designers, mom bloggers, and looky-loos, F’in Tiny says, “For this challenge you will have FOUR hours and FOUR HUNDRED dollars to bid during this small AMERICAN ESTATE AUCTION. The WINNER’s find will have the BIGGEST difference between what you pay for it and market value. Currently, THE WRITER has the lead. But an estate auction like this is full of surprises. Any one of you could pull ahead and win. Even you, Mitzy. Mitzy! Hello?”
Mitzy is huddled in a back-row auction chair. She cups her stomach as if her belly button might pop out like a turkey timer. The girl is sick with worry about her sister.
We contestants are sick with worry about Mitzy. We sit in front and to the sides of her protectively. If there is such a thing as twin sensory perception, it is radiating off Mitzy like a third-degree burn.
“ARE. YOU. READY? Dumpster divers?”
We are not ready.
“I SAID—”
From the front of the ballroom, which is packed to the stained-glass Tiffany windows (each available at starting bids of $150,000), the auctioneer taps his gavel. He directs his gaze at F’in Tiny. Dumpster Diving with the Stars is a guest in Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III’s palatial country home. The auctioneer is the gentleman with his name in the catalog, which means that he is the host, not F’in Tiny. With his tap, the auctioneer is giving F’in Tiny and his band of interlopers one and only one do-over to get what will surely be our bridled fervor on tape.
F’in Tiny clears his throat and slips his pipe in his pocket. He ignores a boom microphone that a producer has ordered to be dangled above his blond highlights. He asks, “Are you ready, Dumpster divers?”
We nod like a secretary’s desk edge of bobbleheads. Out of respect to Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III and for Mitzy’s sake, we are not going to whoop it up.
The auction begins.
Verbena is the first Dumpster diver to raise her paddle. She thrusts it up like the Day-Glo flag she waves to signal worm pits in the woods on Nightcrawlers. She wants Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III’s mismatched sugar bowl, and I think she may go so far as to stand on her chair and jockey across the heads of other bidders to get it.
The auctioneer says, “Do I have a hundred? One-twenty-five? One-fifty? Two?”
He most certainly does. And how. The sugar bowl is snatched from Verbena’s grasp and sells for three thousand, two hundred and twenty-five bucks.
Turns out, the sugar bowl has a story behind it. As the auctioneer drove up the price, he revealed that the reason it is mismatched is because it is the only piece from its set that Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III did not hurl at her husband when she found him under the dining room table “clotting the cream” of the then Earl of Sandwich.
As the auction continues, we discover that everything has a story. Lithgow is outbid for a Cole Porter Playbill because Cole Porter composed one of the musical’s numbers on Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III’s grand piano, and while he composed it she pretended not to hear her husband cry out from a maid’s room for his epilepsy pills. Mario loses a ceramic soup tureen shaped like a pumpkin because Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III used it to mask the lime green hue of the vichyssoise she poisoned when her husband gave her HPV for Thanksgiving. Suffocating needlepoint pillows, bludgeoning candelabras, and a fountain pen used to fake a suicide note are all lost (along with three-fourths of the lots) because bidders with more money to bid with than us want to own something that belonged to an eccentric.
F’in Tiny demands the producers give us bigger allowances. He says, “I’ll dub over the intro in post. You know: ‘UNLIMITED TIME and FOUR THOUSAND dollars.’ Give it to them.”
The producers agree.
Four grand opens up more of the small remainder of the catalog. We flip through the back quarter-inch of stiff high-quality gloss pages we hadn’t dog-eared. We sneak peeks at what other contestants are pausing to look at. The auctioneer never stops auctioning. The rest of the audience never stops raising their paddles. We are awash in the anxiety of new possibilities. But these possibilities grow fewer and farther between and with every passing moment they are going, going, gone!
We squirm in our seats. F’in Tiny paces behind us. A potbellied cameraman tries to keep up with him. Other cameramen circle the room. Producers grip and gripe into iPhones. Their finale is more frenzied than they’d expected. Only Mitzy is as motionless as she’s been since the start.
I slide my catalog onto her lap. I flip and lift photos of jewelry. See? Here’s a ladybug ring that can hold a teaspoon of cyanide. See? Here’s a charm bracelet of lab test subjects, or as the lady of the house called them, her babies (gigantic cats). It kills me that Mitzy doesn’t respond. There are so many things that should make her say, “Cooooot!”
F’in Tiny leans over her and lifts her paddle from her lap. He says, “Your arms don’t work, Mitzy? There’s nothing you want of Mrs. the Third’s?”
John Lithgow says, “Let the poor girl alone. So what if she doesn’t bid?”
F’in Tiny says, “This is a game, John. Mitzy signed a contract for the love of the thrift. She needs to participate. She needs to be active. The game’s almost over. She plays, and then she gets to go home.”
John Lithgow says, “And what exactly will she find when she gets home, sir? Will she find everything as she left it?”
“Her room at the mansion is waiting for her.”
“And will everyone be there waiting for her?”
“What do you think, John? It’s a twenty-room mansion with a hundred birds on the property.”
I say, “Birds aren’t family.”
“That’s right,” says John Lithgow. “What’s important is family.”
F’in Tiny says, “Mitzy’s family needs her to win.”
A teardrop appears in the corner of Mitzy’s eye, and that teardrop is shinier than any sequin she’s ever affixed to her body.
F’in Tiny offers her a handkerchief, pulled out of his pocket like a magician’s bottomless supply.
Mitzy won’t take it. She doesn’t want anything more to do with him or this show. She shakes her head and her teardrop plummets.
F’in Tiny presses in. The velvet knot of his smoking jacket rubs against the back of her head.
I cringe because I can feel his fingers sinking into her shoulders. I want his hands off of her. And so my hand, gripping my paddle, shoots up and sideswipes his ear.
The auctioneer says, “One thousand dollars from the lady in the cardigan!”
I have no idea what I’m bidding for, but it must be good because F’in Tiny ignores the blood pulsing out of his ear.
He says, “Mitzy, you’re going to let her get away with it? The writer?” He says the word with such venom that he draws everyone’s attention.
I say, “I’m a Dumpster diver. And I’m on to you. You only want Mitzy to win so Bitzy’s surgery will sell your show. If Mitzy wins, people will watch until she wins because they’ll want to see her poor, sweet face when she finds out what you’ve been keeping from her because whatever it is, it must be god-awful. Cardinal Reality Rule #6: Tug heartstrings. The best perso
n to root for is a contestant with a sob story.”
F’in Tiny says, “Cardinal reality rule? What are you talking about? Why are you talking like that?”
Oh, look what I found. I say, “I’m writing.”
“Well, do it on your own time. This is TV.”
Mitzy asks, “Is it true what she said? Is Bitzy bad off?”
F’in Tiny says, “I can assure you that your sister is in the very best hands.”
John Lithgow says, “Shameful.”
The tennis player says, “That’s messed up.”
It is, but it doesn’t stop me from foreseeing that when the opening credits roll each week, the tennis player’s audio clip will be run over a loop of Mario Batali eating a corn dog.
Verbena frowns. We all know Nightcrawlers would never pull something as manipulative as this.
“One-thousand-one-hundred, ladies and gentlemen?” The auctioneer is going on with his show. “Do I have one-thousand-one-hundred for this lovely fishplate by Lewis Straus and Sons?”
He does not. Wait, fishplate?
“One-thousand-one-hundred? It has a lovely painting of a fish on it.”
That’s the best story he can come up with?
F’in Tiny says, “Mitzy, bid, I beg of you. None of you have won anything of this crazy old bag’s. The auction’s almost over. If the writer wins the plate, she’ll win the whole show. We can’t have that. Nobody knows who she is. She’s never been in Playboy. She’s never been in—what’s Playboy for writers?”
Mario Batali says, “The New Yorker.”
“Does she show her tits in The New Yorker?”
The auctioneer holds his gavel extra high for the cameras. “One-thousand-one-hundred going once.”
F’in Tiny shouts, “Come on!” He’s on his tiny feet in tiny shoes with tiny lifts, wriggling his way between two un-tiny cameramen. He charges the auctioneer, who won’t give up his gavel despite the fight he’s being given.
“Going twice.”
F’in Tiny shouts, “I knew bringing a writer on was a mistake! She’s like those Telenovela Mexicans they keep bringing on Dancing with the Stars—but without the abs. This writer has no abs! Mitzy! Somebody! Anybody! One of you Dumpster divers bid!”