Verguenza: Tell us more! It’s obvious that you have the *real* inside track! Private message me!
Oh, and Honorio’s way overrated, fan boys notwithstanding.
Belinda B
Whatever, Watchate and Nacho Macho. Lori’s cute but I definitely wouldn’t kick Sandy S out of bed for eating jalapenos! Sandy, whether you dumped him or he dumped you, you can call me to console you, girl!
The Wild Juan
47
Sandy sat in a kitschy diner in South Austin, miles away from the university and Daniel’s stomping grounds, where she read the latest string of anonymous commenters’ vitriol and her loyal readers’ defense. Earlier that morning she had parked her car at Calypso to get an iced latte. Right before she’d entered the coffee shop someone across the street had shouted, “Hey, Sandy S.!”
When Sandy turned she saw two frat types waving at her. “You suck!” one of them yelled. They weren’t waving, she saw then. They were throwing her the finger.
Unsettled, she’d gotten back into her car and driven away. At that moment she had almost felt afraid. Now, however, she was just perturbed. And annoyed.
She couldn’t tell if things had gotten worse since the big announcement that Nacho Papi was going to be on TV, or if the poison-pen letters had increased since she’d seen Daniel that day at Calypso. Maybe he had told his friends his own version of their breakup and they’d taken it upon themselves to avenge him publicly. Or maybe Honorio Mendiola was posting the comments, she thought with a rueful smile. Or any one of the other celebrities or demi-celebrities she’d written about over the past several months.
V for Verguenza was her friend Veronica, of course. Sandy was grateful for her support but sometimes got annoyed when Veronica dropped personal details into her comments, as if to show off to the other readers that she had inside knowledge on Sandy and the other Nacho Papi staff members.
Feeling the need for another ally, Sandy closed her laptop and called her friend Jane, with whom she’d been playing phone and e-mail tag for a couple of weeks now, figuring Monday at lunch time was as good a chance to reach her as any.
“Hello?”
“Jane, it’s me. Hey, are you reading this stuff on the site?”
Jane paused for a second. “On your work site, you mean? Or on your personal site?”
“On Nacho Papi. All the comments under the post I wrote about Honorio Mendiola.”
“Oh. No, I haven’t read that one yet.” Jane sounded the tiniest bit weary, as if she thought Sandy had called specifically to find out if her friend had been keeping up with her posts.
As soon as she’d said it Sandy remembered with brilliant clarity that, back at UT, Jane had been one of the students mesmerized with Gilberto Gonzalez during his visit. And that, sure enough, Jane had also tried her hand at writing some Gilberto-esque sonnets, although not for any creative writing class. She’d only shown them to Sandy and Veronica.
Sandy realized then that she’d been partly inspired to write that post, totally subconsciously, by Jane’s temporary infatuation with Gilberto Gonzalez. She wished suddenly and fervently that she hadn’t called Jane and brought it up. Because Jane probably wouldn’t have read the post on her own. She didn’t seem to read most of the site.
Sandy decided to change the subject. “Well, yeah. No, don’t worry about it. I was just going to tell you something one of the commenters said, but it’s not that interesting. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing much.” Jane’s short tone made Sandy worry, then, that maybe she had read the post in question and was upset about it.
“What’s wrong? You sound… annoyed or something,” she ventured.
“No. Not at all,” Jane said, definitely sounding annoyed now. “Just busy. Listen, let me call you back, okay? I have to do this thing real quick.”
“Okay.” Sandy hung up, feeling defeated and regretful. Obviously Jane had read it, and there was nothing Sandy could do about it now. But she really hadn’t remembered that stuff about Jane and her poems until after the fact. She couldn’t help it if that had been in the back of her mind while she was writing, could she?
There was nothing she could do, she told herself again. Especially if Jane wouldn’t even admit she’d read the piece. She’d just have to wait for her friend to get over it.
Sandy felt more alone than she had before calling Jane. She was sitting in a diner, surrounded by strangers, mulling over things strangers were saying about her. She couldn’t talk to her two best friends about it, and she no longer had a boyfriend to talk to at all. She didn’t want to call her mom, because every time they’d talked lately it’d been about her dad’s upcoming wedding. Sandy’s mother kept demanding that Sandy not attend as a show of loyalty to her, and then demanding that Sandy go to the wedding, after all, and act as a spy on her behalf. It was driving Sandy crazy—crazier than her mother usually drove her. Hence, she was sitting in a diner on the edge of town, avoiding her mother’s company.
For the hundredth time that week alone Sandy thought about moving out of her mother’s garage apartment. She wished she’d considered it more seriously before quitting her tech-writing job. Yes, Nacho Papi was paying her well right now—a pretty good salary for someone with only a token rent payment each month. But if she was ever going to move out of her mother’s she’d have to find a way to make quite a bit more. Maybe the TV show would take care of that. Angelica had explained the latest, greatest salary and bonus structure, but it’d been too confusing for Sandy to take in during the meeting. She’d been planning to get Philippe to explain it to her over lunch when he got back into town.
Sandy felt a pull within her. A strong pull, starting in the area of her chest and radiating out toward her fingers, which drifted to her notebook computer’s keyboard of their own will. She recognized the motion. It was a temptation to blog, to type her woes into a bottle and throw it out to a sea of unseen strangers who would send back their own messages of understanding, of sympathy, of resonation.
But that avenue was no longer open to her. The people who used to hang on Miss TragiComic Texas’s every word were being replaced with people who knew her to be Sandy S., Journalist-slash-Gossip Writer and TV Star. They would no longer go to her site to read about her—the real Sandy, née Dominga Saavedra. And Sandy had to protect that self more than ever now. No longer anonymous, she could no longer trust strangers.
48
Time: Thursday, May 25, 9:02 AM
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: You don’t know me, but
Dear Miss Texas,
My name is Ronald Green and I have an opportunity for you. I have an idea for a novel based on my life and I think you are the perfect person to collaborate with me on writing it. You have a pretty good style on this diary and I would like to see my ideas told in this style. I will pay you a reasonable fee once my book starts making profit.
If you are interested, please contact me immediately. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.
49
The next day Sandy found herself sitting at yet another restaurant table alone. This time, at least, it was swanky. Luna de Miel, the new tapas restaurant in the medical center, was a former house, now all done up in carnations and candles. Afternoon sun slanted through the slatted blinds and onto the glossy walnut table where Sandy sat and resisted the temptation to pull out her laptop and get some writing done. She wished she were home, working, or even at work, working. Her boss, Sandy knew, rarely called one-on-ones in order to share good news.
Angelica was late, of course. By the time she strutted in, texting on her Zoom Phone and simultaneously talking on her old purple cell, Sandy had already demolished a pile of lavash with its accompanying plate of spiced olive oil. She set down the last corner of bread and waited for Angelica to give orders to the waiter. “Just a glass of chianti, please. Well, go ahead and bring me the smoked scallops with chorizo, too. And bottled water, with lemon.
” She turned to Sandy. “Have you ordered?”
Sandy requested the Moroccan chicken pie and an iced tea. The waiter swept away and Angelica, as always, got right down to business.
“Did you talk to your goat man? Did he agree to do the show?”
“No, he wasn’t interested.” Sandy said it calmly. She’d learned over the months that Angelica preferred to deal with people as direct as she was, and unconfident people made her suspicious. So she always told the truth without making excuses, whether or not she had the answer her boss wanted to hear.
“Okay.” Angelica sank back into her booth seat with a sigh. “You’ll have to try again, then. You’ll have to convince him.”
Sandy said nothing.
After a few moments Angelica went on. “The issue is, Sandy, that we need content. And by content I don’t mean each of us sitting at a desk reading aloud the posts we’ve written for the week. It is cable, but we can’t throw together just anything.”
Sandy nodded. She’d been thinking along that line herself ever since Angelica had made the announcement about the TV deal.
“I’m really annoyed that George left.” The waiter appeared with their drinks and Angelica waited for him to pour a tiny decanter of wine into her glass before continuing. “I’d been thinking that the two of you could do a segment where you argue every week. You know how the readers were starting to pick up on the friction between you and liked to gossip about it. But then he had to run off with Tony.” She meant the editor of Buzz News, the competition to which George had defected. “He’s e-mailed me twice since we announced the deal.” She looked at Sandy suggestively.
“Why? Let me guess—he wants to come back, doesn’t he?” Sandy knew what a narcissist George was, and that he wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to see himself on TV every week, as opposed to just seeing his own name in print. “Would you take him back?”
Angelica gave a ladylike shrug. “Possibly. It depends on what ideas he has to offer.”
Sandy frowned. The idea of working with George again, after a month of enjoying his absence, was annoying. But she had to admit that since he’d left the site was missing a certain element that Philippe and Francisco had been unable to provide.
She got the underlying message in Angelica’s words, too. Her boss was looking for people with ideas for television content. So far Sandy had provided none. Nothing out of the ordinary, at any rate. It was time for her to start brainstorming.
“Sandy, I’m sure you realize by now that you’re my favorite Nacho Papi writer.”
“I am?” Sandy was surprised. She’d always assumed Philippe was Angelica’s favorite.
“Yes. As I’ve told you before, you remind me of myself at your age. Just a little less ambitious.” Angelica seemed impatient as the waiter showed up again with their food, interrupting her again. “And you have to be a little more ambitious, Sandy, if you want to succeed. You have to stay one step ahead. Two, three steps. You can’t just sit around waiting for things to happen to you.”
Sandy listened intently but couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. She wished a fabulous content idea would come to her right at that moment. But her brain didn’t oblige.
Angelica leaned forward. “I’m being pressured to make choices I wouldn’t necessarily make on my own.”
Sandy held her breath. This was it, then. She was going to be fired. After all this time, she was finally losing the dream job. Just as she’d feared, she hadn’t been able to measure up. She adjusted her glasses. She wondered if it was too late to beg for her tech-writing job back.
“I have to hire another woman for the site. Someone sexy.”
“Sexy?” Sandy stared at her boss in surprise. “What happened to good writing? Did you tell them we’re writing cultural commentary here, and not running an escort service?”
“I think if it were up to them, they’d prefer that we somehow do both.” Sandy was struck by the resignation on Angelica’s face. The older woman sighed. “Like you, Sandy, I have bosses. And sometimes those bosses ask me to do things I don’t agree with.”
Sandy exhaled audibly. She wouldn’t have imagined Angelica being pressured or pushed around by anyone, even by the people signing her paychecks. But now that she thought about it, it’d been naive to imagine that Jacob Levy would let Angelica do whatever she wanted with his site.
“We’ve narrowed it down to two candidates,” Angelica continued between bites of scallop. “One is a student from Houston, and the other is one of our regular readers who’s willing to relocate from Boston.”
“What? Which one?”
“She went by the nickname La Sirena. If we pick her we’ll keep that name for her, because it’ll excite the other readers to think that they might eventually be on the show, too, if they give us enough page views. But her real name is Tracy… Trixie something. No—Trisha MacLeod, I think.”
“What? Is she even Latina?”
Angelica shrugged again. “I think her mother’s half or something. Who isn’t Latino, these days? Jacob liked her, though. Just between you and me, that’s who I think they’ll end up picking.” She fell silent then and stared morosely at the window while sipping her chianti.
Sandy was silent, too. At least she wasn’t being fired. Yet. She still had time to think up something fantastic in order to keep her job. She cut up her chicken pie into smaller and smaller pieces and waited for Angelica to say more.
Finally she did. “Sandy, don’t lose this opportunity. I really want you to help prove what I’ve been working to prove all along—that we can be smart and successful without having to be sexy, too. I mean, we as Latinas.”
Sandy raised her eyebrows at this. This was coming from the woman who’d made the two females on her staff undergo makeovers in order to retain their jobs. Looking at Angelica’s bleach job, tightly fitted suit jacket, and long fake nails, Sandy wondered if she really meant what she said. Or was she just saying what she thought Sandy wanted to hear? Needed to hear in order to do what Angelica wanted?
“This is only between you and me,” she continued. “I hope you understand that. But I mean it—I need you to come up with something good, as fast as you can. I’ll try to help, but it would be better if you were the one to do it. Try again with the Chupacabra feature—the readers really love that and you’re the only one who could make that work.”
Not that again, Sandy thought. Like a recurring allergy, she was irritated by the fact that she’d never gotten Tío Jaime to sign the release. She didn’t even have that part of it settled, much less any likelihood of convincing the old man to become a regular guest on their show.
Sandy nodded, wanting Angelica to know that she was willing to do whatever it took to succeed in this situation, whether or not it ended up involving the Chupacabra. Because she didn’t want to lose this job. Not with so many people dying to take her place.
She put her mind into overdrive, grasping for other ideas. “Angelica, what if, aside from the Chupacabra thing, we do a charity event? To win the public’s good opinion?” She thought of events she’d seen on television and remembered the yearly public television auction. “What about an auction?”
Angelica took a sip of wine, making a face as if it tasted bitter. “What kind of auction?”
“You know, like the public television station does. We could get our sponsors to donate stuff, and viewers could call in to bid on it. Then we’d make a big show of giving the money to some organization—maybe for Latino literacy or something.”
The older woman frowned. “Do you watch the public television auctions every year?”
“No. But I’ve seen them.” Sandy tried to keep her voice enthusiastic. “Once.”
“Exactly. You’ve seen them. But you don’t tune in specially to watch them. Why would you? They’re boring.”
Sandy felt herself slump a little in her seat. Angelica was right, of course.
“It isn’t a bad idea. It just isn’t very exciting. We’d need to
think of a way to spice it up.” Angelica narrowed her eyes and peered into the distance.
Sandy mimicked her boss’s expression, pretending to join her in deep thought. Really, though, she had nothing. How did you make an auction exciting? With exciting donations, obviously. Maybe with… Lori in a sexy outfit, updating the bids? No, Sandy told herself. That was crass.
Before she could get much farther than that, Angelica’s thoughtful face turned to a smile. “I’ve got it! We can auction off dates with you and the other staffers!”
Sandy’s mouth fell open in horror. “What?”
Angelica hunkered down like a football coach issuing orders and gave Sandy’s arm one of her rough little squeezes. “We need to present to sponsors right away, to pay for the dinner and whatever entertainment… maybe a hotel… maybe evening wear for the staff. It’ll be you, Lori, Philippe for sure, maybe Francisco. God, it’s too bad we don’t have a lesbian on staff, too. Although we could offer Lori to men and women. We could do that with all of you, actually. Yes.” Angelica sat back, her mind obviously rushing through steps far beyond what Sandy would have been able to imagine.
“Angelica, no.” Sandy was surprised to hear herself contradict her boss outright like that. But she had to put a stop to this before it was too late. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean auctioning off ourselves.”
“What’s wrong, Sandy? It’s harmless. We’ll run background checks. We’ll send cameramen along to keep everyone safe.”
“It’s not that.” Sandy struggled to formulate the words that would change her boss’s mind. “It’s just—too personal. Some of the commenters are already getting out of hand, constantly talking about the way we look and their stupid sex fantasies about us.”
“That’s going to happen with any public figures, though,” reasoned Angelica. “They see you as someone above them, something they can feel free to fantasize about. So winning an evening with you guys will be a fantasy come true for them.” She smiled. Then, seeing that Sandy wasn’t convinced, she added, “If anything, it’ll make you more human to them again.”
Lone Star Legend Page 16