by Jill Soloway
As Luisa turned this way and that, her miniature hip bones jutting out from the shiny violet waistband, she explained to me exactly how we would get to meet the Cars.
“We get their last album, then look for the name of their tour manager. Then we call the big hotels—Drake, Whitehall, Ritz. If you ask for Elliot Easton, they’ll know what you want, but if you ask for Rod Howell—he was the tour manager last year—they’ll connect you right away.”
We paid for Luisa’s new clothes, then went back to her smoke-sodden apartment. First, Luisa made me pick my Cars boyfriend off the album cover to assure her I wouldn’t try to steal Elliot Easton. All five of them had mullets, which actually looked hot back then. Ric Ocasek’s imposing nostrils intimidated me, so I chose Ben Orr. Luisa picked up the phone. We tried the Whitehall first, and the operator put us right through to Rod Howell’s room. Luisa hung up quickly.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I found them.”
In her tiny vomit-pink and gold-speckled bathroom, Luisa lit a match to melt the end of her eyeliner. The smoke from the sulfur danced as she shook it out, then blew on the tip and drew the liquefied brown into cat-eye extensions of her little girl eyes.
“Don’t act like a dork, okay?” she said. I promised I wouldn’t embarrass her. She changed into her new clothes, pinned on a few buttons—PIL and one with red script on black saying Police (who were still a punk band)—and we headed out. I didn’t have the street cred to wear punk clothes yet, so my Calvins, Candies, and a striped angora sweater had to do.
We walked the three blocks to the tony Whitehall hotel. My apartment, her apartment, our school—everything was in superclose proximity. When we moved here from the rambling south side with its train tracks and rail yards, it was like landing in a wee, lovely version of Manhattan—tall buildings, taxis, hustling and bustling stores, but on a small scale. We had our boundaries— never go south of Randolph, north of Armitage or west of Wells, with the east being the lake—so our entire sophisticated world lived within a one-and-a-half-mile radius.
When we got to the Whitehall there were some greasy, autograph-seeking weirdos waiting outside, clutching 8 x 10s and markers. We certainly weren’t with them. We were different. We sat on the couch in the lobby, chatting like out-of-town guests. The elevator doors opened, and out they came. We resisted the impulse to jump up and tackle them. They passed right by us—goose-like Ric Ocasek, Luisa’s one true love Elliot Easton, and my one true love Benjamin Orr, whom I couldn’t pick out of a lineup tomorrow if you threatened murder, or something even worse, like cancelling my In Touch subscription. We followed them through the foyer and onto the street.
Jesus. Now, there were groupies outside—little girls, mere children. Nothing like us. The little girls screeched as Ric, Elliot, and Ben brushed past. We followed close behind, rolling our eyes at the inconvenience of the screaming fans, amid a faux conversation about which was the fastest way to the Art Institute—a taxi or the L train. Luisa remarked that perhaps walking to the Art Institute on a day such as this would be lovely, quite lovely, and I agreed.
In a moment we were inches behind them, and Luisa loudly remarked that the Buzzcocks show at the Park West was killer. We stayed close on their heels, Candies clacking, satisfied that our first encounter allowed them to see us as equals and left them wanting more, so much more. We were sure they were blind to our mouthfuls of braces and our glasses with oversized frames that can only be described as pink tapioca tortoise shell.
Our husbands took a right on Michigan Avenue, also known as the Magnificent Mile. And this was indeed magnificent, for they were going to Water Tower Place, our mall! Once in, they made a beeline straight for Fiorucci—our store! We had so much in common with them already! At Fiorucci, we hovered nearby. A salesgirl, who obviously thought she was a real friend to the Cars instead of a fan like us, pointed to us and laughed. This was humiliating. We were Fiorucci shoppers, not stalkers! To prove our point, we walked out without even turning around. Ha. We sure showed the Cars.
As eighth grade continued we got better at our game, meeting Cheap Trick, The Knack, Rod Stewart, and, climactically, Van Halen. For Van Halen, we’d snuck into the upstairs hallway of the Ritz-Carlton by following a tourist into the elevator. We asked him if he had seen a band. “I think I saw some people from Van Heflin on the tenth floor.”
Moments later we found David Lee Roth coming out of his room. He assumed we wanted autographs, and so autographs it was. It seemed a little late to convince him that he should consider marrying one of us. He had a ballpoint pen and grabbed my arm, writing his name on it.
“David… Lee… Roth… there,” he said, handing my arm back to me roughly. “When you get home today and your mom asks you what that means, tell her it means… (dramatic pause) ROCK AND ROLL!!!!!”
Excuse me? MOM? What in the world made him think we had moms? We were tiny ladies! Yes, in shiny pants! Well, one of us anyway. I was still too chicken to make a fashion statement outside of my Gloria Vanderbilts. But Luisa was shiny enough for the both of us. We scowled at stupid David Lee Roth’s insult and decided that, as long as we had nothing better to do, we may as well go back to school so Mrs. Smeriglio wouldn’t make us take the spelling test over on Monday. We figured we could blend in when the after-lunch bell rang and all the kids were coming back from Bagel Nosh.
In the following years Luisa got angrier and started wearing more black eyeliner and actually going to punk shows. My parents didn’t let me do that, but I kept up my stalking ways with my new high school friends. My friend Angela and I moved on to actors, searching out Brooke Shields, Christopher Atkins, and Matt Dillon. Why Brooke Shields, you might ask. Clearly, she would never be your husband. But it wasn’t autographs we craved. We just knew that a day where you had seen Brooke Shields up close was better than a day you hadn’t.
One afternoon, we were hanging in the lobby of the Hyatt so Angela could meet her boyfriend Sean Penn who was in town filming Taps. When it looked like we’d missed him, we adjourned to the game room for some Ms. Pac-Man to cheer us up.
A shy, pretty boy was in there playing Galaga. Angela asked him if he had seen Sean Penn, and he told us that he hadn’t but he hoped to meet him soon—it was his very first ever acting job and he was going to have one line in Taps. “Cool,” Angela said. “Well, give me your name and number, just in case you’re famous one day.”
The boy got out a scrap of paper and wrote down his name and home phone number. He smiled big white teeth at us, then left. Angela remarked that he was a loser.
“What was his name?” I asked. She got out the paper and read it. “Tom Cruise.”
“Huh,” I said. “Maybe if he wasn’t so short we’d call him.” And yes, one day, a few years later, I asked Angela if she still had that paper, but she couldn’t find it. Oh well.
As I got older, I kept trying to meet stars. I had read in the Sun-Times that Billy Dee Williams was in town to film a movie. I had always thought he was sexy, so I called the old stalwart, the Whitehall, just to find out if he was there. He was. I put on the fake husky voice of a lady, to see if he would talk to me. He invited me to come right on over. I said I’d probably better not because I was sixteen. He considered this for a moment and then agreed it would be better if we just talked on the phone. Right before he hung up, he checked again, “Are you sure you’re just sixteen?”
Every time famous people came to Chicago, I managed to find them. After Angela switched to horses, I switched to Neille. My relationship with her started like she was the star and I was the stalker. She was the most beautiful girl in our school—a cheerleader and a teen model, the lost sister of Jessica and Nicole Simpson. When we met on the first day of my freshman year, her opening line to me was, “What are you, some kind of a prep?” I didn’t care that she was insulting me, I just wanted to be in her aura.
When I was with Neille, famous people wanted to be in our aura. (And just so you hear it right in your head while you’re reading, Neille
is not Nelly. It’s pronounced like a boy’s name—Neal. Except when guys didn’t get it, she would say, “Neille. Like on your knees. Kneel!” She was that cool.) Bill Cosby came over to our table at a restaurant and asked if he could join us. After lunch, he offered us a ride home. Craig T. Nelson offered to buy us drinks at a restaurant in the middle of the morning. Reggie Theus, who was, at the time, a Chicago Bull, invited us to join him at some pro-basketball parties. Once I got to college, even without Neille at my side, I knew who the celebrities were. I made sure to “date” the football players and star basketball player, even though I’m sure they never knew my last name and possibly may not have known my first.
And when I got out of college and into advertising, it was in hopes of meeting famous people. When we shot commercials on location and looky-loos would come up to watch, we’d call the camera the Asshole Magnet. But the joke was on us. They wanted to check it out for five minutes, but we were the assholes who couldn’t live without it, had to be right next to it every single day. After considering making that documentary about searching for Eve Plumb’s humanity, I fell into directing and producing The Real Live Brady Bunch, a play that was a TV show. And now, finally, I write on a real TV show.
There are all kinds of renowned, smart playwrights working with me on Six Feet Under. When we walk to the cafeteria together, people think we are all the same— people who say they love the written word with rolled r’s. And maybe on my good days I approach that. But most of the time, I know that being a TV writer allows me to do something I’ve always longed to do—stick my hand up the crotch of that giant TV and make those dolls talk. It’s my deep dark secret—that the actors are my big Barbies and it’s all just a dolls game. I may never lose the twenty pounds I would need to lose to be on TV. But at least for now, I’m in the TV.
And luckily, my thirst for star proximity has been somewhat eased as I’ve grown up a little. These days I generally won’t leave my house simply to meet a star at a party. My job at Six Feet allowed me to stalk Ellen De-Generes by writing her into an episode. Plus I have to act cool around stars, what with the fact that I have to talk to them about the script sometimes, so I pretty much keep that part of myself to myself. Fortunately, by the time this book comes out we’ll be wrapped and I won’t run into Lauren Ambrose, Peter Krause, Rachel Griffiths, Jeremy Sisto, or Michael C. Hall. God forbid they should read this and know that every time I ever spoke to them I was secretly schvitzing.
It’s weird. I’m not like this with most people. I can talk my little brain off with fancy famous directors about ideas. I could meet writers I love; I could meet Jonathan Ames, the man who I would want to take me to the prom if there were a high school called Humorous Essayists North, and not be nervous, just excited to share my personality with him, my personality that I am certain he would love. I could meet anyone recognized for any intellectual pursuit, and I would not be intimidated. But I get nutty and nervous, just nutty-ass nervous, around stars.
Surely most have heard the maxim that we fear what we secretly love. Perhaps this is why I fear the Celebrity. Maybe, behind everything I do, every word I write, even those words you just read, and, now, slow down… this word—WORD! there’s the wish to be known by millions. Why else would I obsessively Google myself? Remember when, if you had a few minutes to spare, you might engage in secret diddling? No more. Now, when no one’s around, I shamefully masturgoogle. I’ll type my name in, with and without quotes, even misspelling it to see if anyone else has. Even if people write mean stuff, I like it. It’s like staying in the bathroom all day long in high school reading the walls to see if anyone has written “Jill Soloway is a bitch.”
Google gives me a hard number (today it’s 1,560)—a real measurement of my reach. Sometimes I e-mail a quick thank-you-for-increasing-my-googlability to a blogger, hoping they’ll mention the thank you, adding another page to my number. This obsession completely confounds me. The circularity of my arguments that I’d hoped to pass off as holistic and feminine is even more apparent here. You may have noticed I’ll do that—wave a flag, then frantically run across the street, yelling, “Hey! I’m over here now!”
Remember, for example, in Introduction A, when I postulated an entire theory that the pain of being a woman is really the pain of being Seen before getting a chance to See? Now that I’m writing a book, albeit one articulating how everything I do is a cry for recognition, I endanger the non-object status for which I’ve worked so hard. I even have a publicist in this literary exercise in crying for attention on a grand scale. The potential result? Sure, people may not objectify me as a pair of tits, but if I ever get as famous as I seem to desire, they’d see That Book Writer Chick before anything else, the magic of the moment of possibility gone forever.
And why in the world would I desire fame so much anyway? All of the people I knew before they were famous changed after they made it so big that they got recognized in public. Much like Eve Plumb, they seem just a little—scared. Of everything. All the time. It seems like a horrible life, really.
Okay, who am I kidding, if I could lose twenty pounds I’d love nothing more than to have people know me everywhere I go, maybe even have a camera follow me around all the time. So, if I can get a trainer then fine, I’ll be famous. I could use the enormous wealth. I could earn a wealth so unmanageable I would have to use a company that specialized in Wealth Management Services. I could be so rich that I’ll get one of those boyfriends like Kevin Federline, keep him on my payroll so he can dedicate every moment of his life to making me happy.
In fact, if, like Kevin Federline, my boyfriend has two children by his black baby-mama, I’ll pay her child support rather than let my man have to go to work and take time away from his precious duties as Horse #3 on the draught team that pulls Jill, Inc., through the world each day.
Or even better than a horse and cart or a limo, I could be in the back of a van. I heard one of my favorite seventies has-been stars has a husband who drives her around in a big Astrovan, she in the back in some furry cocoon, probably on her cell. I imagine it chock-full of pink pillows, like the inside of Jeannie’s bottle.
Come to think of it, now I realize why I fear the reality star more than the regular star. I must want to be the star of my own reality show. It will take place from the back of a pink van. It would be outfitted with fur and pillows, my boyfriend at the wheel. Most of the time I’d be splayed out, on my cell phone, giggling.
I wouldn’t have to think of witty things to write into my computer, I would just be my witty self while the cameras rolled. And because it was all being broadcast, people wouldn’t have to come up to the window to tell me what a beautiful toof I have, they could do it from the privacy of their own living rooms. I’d be a big special baby, with an endless parade of White Chocolate Dream Frappuccinos (in the big cup with the long green straw) standing by at all times. And all of you would have to watch. I’d be Ashlee Simpson but without the off-key lip-syncing. Ashlee Simpson who writes books, like Ashlee on a book tour, through the college towns of the Northeast. We can call it Look at the Writer, or maybe A Medium-Sized Lady in Shiny Pants. I’ll let MTV—or better yet, Bravo—decide
3
Lotion Bag
“Look at yourself. You’re perfect.”
In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that covered one wall of his bedroom, I could only look for a half of a flash of a moment.
What we were doing was illegal. I was seventeen and he was thirty-six and we had just had sex. But that’s not why I couldn’t look. I was running from the bathroom back to his bed, leaving slivers of myself everywhere: the girl who wanted to be here, the girl who didn’t want to be here, the girl who thought the whole thing was exciting, that he was an idiot, that his apartment was tacky, yet sexy, that I was turned on, that I wasn’t, that this was fun, that it wasn’t. I couldn’t look in the mirror because I would have been one person instead of a million, and that wouldn’t have made any sense.
When I was seventeen, I had br
and-new ginormous breasts that had just arrived, sort of like Growing-up Skipper where you pull the arm down and they pop out. My skin was in shock—what are these? They probably looked like implants, hovering somewhere near my shoulders. The rest of me was miniature, so I’m guessing I looked like any man’s version of a perfect woman. I say I guess as if I wasn’t there, because I wasn’t. Like almost all girls and women almost all of the time, if I looked at my entire body in the mirror, I was horrified. It was never right—even, it turns out, when it was perfect.
It was the summer after I graduated high school, before I went to college. Our family belonged to an urban version of a country club, called the East Bank Club. It had a rooftop pool and chaise lounges and Jewish women in white bikinis shading their eyes from the sun, yelling JESSICA! JEREMY! TIME TO GET OUT OF THE POOL AND HAVE A CHEESEBURGER! JOSHY! JENNIFER! I SAID NOW!
My sister and I spent our teenage summers at East Bank. Faith was a little tomboy jock, actually using the running track and lap pool. I was joined at the hip with Neille, and we looked really good together—she the ultimate Nordic blue-eyed blonde, me the exotic, curvy darkie, big brown eyes peeking out from my too-long bangs. At seventeen, Neille and I owned that rooftop deck, strutting around in our ripped half T-shirts (it was the eighties), string bikini bottoms, white socks and white Tretorns. When people would check us out, we’d give each other a haughty look that said “WHAT!!!???” as if they were being rude.
The Jewish moms would roll their eyes. Husbands would look up from their folded Tribunes a moment too long and get smacked by their wives. We had very busy days: back and forth from the chaise lounges to the bathroom to add blue eyeliner, to the Grill for salads, Banana Boat oil again, then into the water to cool off. Attract stares, sigh, reapply oil, bake, broast, attract stares, sigh, gloss the lips, barely eat, repeat, all day long, for an entire summer. We were finely tuned radios pointed straight to the attraction frequency.