Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  “I hadn’t thought of that. You might have a point.”

  I headed downstairs and mooched a True Blue from Mom.

  “Honestly.” She took a puff and watched a large gay man move past us with his Lhasa apso. “A birthday cake with a piece missing? I could kill him.”

  “Or you could stay somewhere else . . .” I offered up.

  “Yeah, Mom, you don’t have to put up with his shit. Men are ridiculous,” Julia said.

  “Right, and, well, you don’t have to put up with anything you don’t want to because you are, in fact, no longer married,” I said, trying once more to convey the basic concept of divorce to these two, who seemed not to understand that a significant part of divorce entailed not seeing each other. They were like slaves who didn’t know where to go once they had been set free.

  “The man bought a cake with a piece missing for his daughter’s birthday, Jeanne. Now, I ask you, is that normal?”

  “No, Mom, it’s not but the thing is . . . you don’t have to eat the cake or look at the cake or anything. Unlike the four of us, you can just walk away.”

  “It just irritates the hell out of me is all.”

  And then my mother revealed that she had signed a lease on an apartment on Greenwich Street a few weeks earlier. She could have moved into her own apartment weeks before Eleanor’s birthday, weeks before she put Dad in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.

  “I can’t possibly stay here one more minute.” She lit a new cigarette and exhaled defensively. “I’m not married to the man, you know.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  I squished my cigarette on the step and looked out at West Fourth Street. The guy who owned the bookstore across the street was throwing some boxes onto the curb. It was past ten and he was still open. The place was totally disorganized and dusty and small. It had no regular hours. The neighborhood had so many guys like this one. People who seemed like they had fascinating lives, a lot whose best moments seemed behind them. Gays whose ’70s were over, models whose Hep C was what remained from the ’80s, elderly actors who spent their days on the phone with Equity, trying to get a little assistance.

  Once my mother was finally settled in her new apartment she and my father still liked to hang around the neighborhood together, go to the Biography Bookshop, people-watch on his stoop.

  “YOUR MOTHER AND I have a failed divorce,” my father said to me over greasy eggs a few days later at La Bonbonniere on Eighth Avenue. “We gave it our best shot. We really did. It just didn’t work out.” The waitress, a character-actress brunette in her early thirties, parked her cigarette in an ashtray and came over and filled our cheap porcelain coffee cups with more coffee.

  “My God, what timing! Terrific. Thank you very much,” Dad said to the waitress.

  As she walked away he leaned in ever so slightly and said, “Now, there’s a stunner, huh?”

  I AM NOT AN IDIOTE!

  I HAVE BAD JUDGMENT, or no judgment. Like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, I pet things too hard and then hide the evidence. Around the time my parents were dating in the West Village, Katharine and I got an apartment together in Brooklyn and I got my first post-college job. I was temping at a law firm, a white-shoe law firm. (I have no idea why people still use this expression—it should just be called a white-people law firm.) A group of about twenty of us “coders” sat in a large room, jacked up on terrible free coffee, coding documents. “Coding” meant that we marked documents containing any mention of this one particular case. It was really just high-level word jumbles. “I see the plaintiff from the case’s name, okay, circle that, move on to next document.” I got fired because after about four months the firm calculated that I was finishing something like 1.2 docs an hour when most people were doing somewhere around two hundred. My new work friend Kristina was fired, too. We both lived in Brooklyn and had no idea what we were going to do for work. Nineteen ninety was a shitty time to be out of work and skill-free. I had also been fired from my second job as a “trainer” at the New York Sports Club around the corner from my house. I had no knowledge of physiology or exercise or sports medicine, but they gave me a special shirt and called me a trainer. On my dinner break I’d walk the two blocks to my house and smoke a couple cigarettes and go back to work. I was fired for smelling like smoke even though I denied being a smoker and blamed it on my sister Katharine, who did not smoke. “It’s terrible,” I told my boss. “We share a closet and my clothes end up smelling like smoke. Disgusting.” She didn’t buy it.

  KRISTINA AND I WORKED briefly for NYPIRG (New York Public Interest Research Group), canvassing Park Slope on environmental issues. We would knock on a few doors in the November cold and then, despite being paid on commission, decide to hide out at her house, where she would make her Tuna Peewiggle (fusilli pasta, capers, tuna and olive oil) and we’d smoke a billion cigarettes and talk about how much NYPIRG sucked and what we really should be doing. Kristina had studied filmmaking at NYU briefly, before dropping out because of some kind of pressure to live up to the work of her great-uncle, Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

  “I would stand on the corner of University and Tenth trying to set up a shot with other students and my teachers would stop by to watch what I was doing. Luis is obviously this legendary figure at the film school. I, uh, what do they say in baseball?”

  Kristina started to giggle and her eyes were tearing up. I start laughing maniacally also.

  “Choked. I choked.”

  “You’ll get it back,” I said.

  “No, I won’t. I’m a half-artist. I’m smart and talented but I’m not tough enough to go the distance. It’s a curse being a half-artist, caught between being a normal person and a real creative person. I’m nuts like a good artist, but I don’t have anything to show for it.”

  I wasn’t exactly going the distance with anything. Carmen and I smoked a lot of pot and talked about doing another two-woman show. I was a quarter-artist at best.

  KRISTINA AND I GOT the idea to start a housecleaning business together, one with some pizzazz. Around this time, Leona Helmsley was sentenced to jail for tax evasion and Zsa Zsa Gabor had been sent to the slammer for slapping a cop. So Kristina and I decided to call our new business “Leona and Zsa Zsa’s Big House Cleaning Service,” and we made a flyer with images of diamond baubles, tiaras and prison pantsuits. We lasted for two houses—a giant old cluttered dungeon of a brownstone in Park Slope and a pity job on Thirty-first Street from Kristina’s friend—before we realized we weren’t cut out for housework. It was back to regular jobs for us. During all this, Kristina and I had become good friends.

  Our luck turned when I landed a job as an office manager for a company that made signs where I could wear my running shorts to work. Kristina, even less fashiony than I, got a job as the secretary to the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Anthony Mazzola.

  One day we were on the phone at our new jobs and Kristina mentioned that she had spent the morning opening RSVPs to some big gala Mr. Mazzola was throwing and that she had just left a message for Lauren Hutton asking whether she would be attending.

  “Kristina, I gotta go. I’m getting a fax.”

  A handwritten fax from my boss (sitting four feet away in his office) came through, addressed to me and his wife, Lois, who was the chief financial officer of the company. It read: YOU TWO ARE GOING TO BE LOOKING FOR WORK SOON IF YOU DON’T GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND START DOING THINGS MY WAY, THE HIGH WAY, THE RIGHT WAY, THE ONLY WAY. SHAPE UP, MORONS.—YOUR BOSS.

  Marty sent out these threatening faxes a couple times a week, but I thought it was strange that he included his wife. Couldn’t he yell at her in private, apart from the twenty-twoyear-old in jogging shorts who ordered pencils for the office? Marty was the kind of guy who was always on a Slim-Fast diet but couldn’t grasp the idea that you don’t drink a Slim-Fast and then eat a big lunch. That it’s one or the other.

  I went to the supply room and tried to find something to do that would get Marty o
ff my case, something that would prove to him that I, at least, was not a moron. In the supply room I ran into Margo, a graphic designer who lived in the East Village and was slumming it at this sign company. We decided it was time for a mid-morning cigarette, so we went back to her desk. All the production managers and graphic designers had tilted drawing desks with ashtrays on them.

  After the cig I headed back to my desk and decided to prank-call Kristina.

  “Harper’s Bazaar. Anthony Mazzola’s office,” Kristina answered coolly.

  In a breathy, super-deep voice, I said, “Is Anthony in?”

  “No, he’s not. Who’s calling, please?” she said in her stiff office voice that let me know she didn’t know it was me. Jackpot.

  “It’s Lauren. Hutton.”

  “Oh! Hello, Miss Hutton. My name is Kristina. Anthony and Michele are out to lunch.”

  “Well, then, I suppose that leaves us a little time to get to know each other.”

  “Oh, uh . . .” Kristina stumbled uncomfortably. My God, she was an easy target!

  “You’re new, I suppose? Because I haven’t heard a thing about you.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I’m brand-new.”

  “I like new,” I purred.

  “Being new is awkward, yes, well, for me it is.”

  “I’ll help you, dear.” I cackled a little.

  Kristina laughed nervously.

  “First thing we’ll do is spread your legs and I’ll lick that beautiful pussy of yours,” I said, stifling a laugh.

  “Oh my goodness, Miss Hutton, I, I . . . I think you’re trying to shock me, I, I . . .” Kristina was remarkably polite and, well, adorable.

  “Now, what time is that party again? Oh, this will be a lot more fun than I thought . . .” I said.

  “Eight o’clock, I, um,” she sputtered, and ran out of etiquette.

  “Tell Anthony I can’t wait to see him and I really can’t wait to see you . . . Kristina.”

  I hung up and almost fell off my cheapo office chair in my little cubicle. I’d been prank-calling people for years, this is just the kind of simple pleasure I never tire of, but Kristina was a level of gullible I hadn’t encountered. Wow, that was fun, I thought to myself. I can’t figure out why nobody ever hires me for an acting job.

  Marty came up and leaned on the carpeted wall that was my cubicle divider.

  “Uh, Miss Office Manager–slash–Carwash Worker—you look like something out of that movie Car Wash, you remember that movie? Follow me, I want to go over some things with you and that other numbskull.”

  “Lois went to get lunch.”

  “Okay, then make me a Slim-Fast shake quick and meet me in my office. And don’t tell Lois I had a shake when she comes back.”

  About two hours later I made it back to my desk alive from my meeting with Marty. There were no messages from Kristina, so I guessed she hadn’t figured out that I was the genius who’d pranked her. I grabbed the phone and dialed her.

  “Good afternoon, Harper’s Bazaar. Anthony Mazzola’s office.”

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  “Oh my God. Hi.”

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “Holy Fucking Shit is what’s up. You’re not going to believe this,” she said.

  Try me, I thought to myself.

  “Lauren Hutton called earlier today to RSVP to Anthony’s gala . . .”

  “Yeah.” I was now giggling quietly.

  “And she said the most disgusting thing to me, Jeanne.”

  “She did? What?” I asked, looking around the office to make sure nobody was going to interrupt the fun.

  “She said she wanted to eat my pussy at the gala!”

  “She SAID that? Are you sure she wasn’t just being nice’cause you’re new and everything?”

  “JEANNE! She said, ‘I want to spread your legs and lick that beautiful pussy of yours!’”

  “Lauren Hutton said that?”

  “Yes!” Kristina was yelling now.

  “Holy fucking shit,” I said. This was the best ever.

  “Yeah. So I told Anthony what happened,” Kristina said.

  “You WHAT?” I yelled.

  “I told Anthony what she said. I went into his office when they got back from lunch and told Anthony and Michele the whole thing. They’re livid.”

  “What the fuck did you do THAT for?”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do? Let Lauren Hutton go down on me just because we’re in a recession?”

  “But, but—”

  “Jeanne! It’s the principle! You can’t let people talk to you like that just because you’re a secretary!” Kristina had a lot of principles.

  “They’re going to call her and confront her in a minute, so I can’t talk long.”

  “They’re what? Oh my God,” I said. “Fuck, Kristina.” She was my new friend. We were having so much fun. “That was me.”

  “What was you?”

  “On the phone.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That was me pretending to be Lauren Hutton.” I was the worst person in New York.

  “What? That was you? Jeanne! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  I flashed to my childhood insistence: “I am not an ID-I-OTE! Do not call me one!”

  “I thought it would be . . . funny,” I said.

  “Funny? You thought it would be funny? I just told my boss that Lauren Hutton said she wanted to eat my pussy! Do you have any idea how uncomfortable that was? Mr. Mazzola is in his sixties! God. Now I have to go in there and tell him and his wife that it was my friend, my friend who called pretending to be Lauren Hutton wanting to eat my pussy.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jeanne. Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”

  “I was going to call you right back but then Marty came over and made me do a bunch of stuff. I . . . I meant to call you right back. I didn’t think, I mean I never thought you’d tell your boss about it.”

  “I was really upset! Really upset! Jesus Christ, I told Anthony I’d been sexually harassed, those words, ‘sexually harassed’ by Lauren Hutton!”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Yeah. Oh, boy. I gotta go. I gotta go make sure they don’t call her and yell at her. They’re definitely going to fire me.”

  My friend was now about to be back out there, eating Tuna Peewiggle every night, looking for work in a terrible economy. All thanks to my unparalleled sense of humor.

  They didn’t fire her, but she must have felt like a total asshole for the rest of the time she worked for him. As in, Yes, here I am typing a letter for you, longtime esteemed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, and here I am wearing appropriate office wear, but when I leave here I’m going to go hang out with my super-sophisticated friends—people who prank-call their friends at work pretending to be celebrities in search of some office carpet.

  I, however, did get fired. A few weeks after the Lauren Hutton incident, Marty told me as he was leaving the office that some air-conditioning guys were coming to fix the AC downstairs in the large workshop.

  “Don’t let those motherfuckers downstairs alone! They’ll fuck me so hard!”

  I didn’t have a chance to ask Marty why they weren’t allowed downstairs, why they would fuck him so hard. I assumed he thought they were going to steal from him—tools from the workshop perhaps. The guy was wasted on Slim-Fast, rushing around and yelling at everyone. Everybody was out to fuck him and always quite hard.

  When the AC guys came I was playing cards with Margo and smoking cigs, learning about her fascinating older-lady sex life. I buzzed them in and told them which AC was broken, letting them go downstairs to work on it while I hung with Margo.

  Marty came back from his meeting early and walked up to my desk, where I was ordering paper for the fax machine.

  “The AC guys are finished?” he barked.

  “No, they’re still working,” I said, smiling.

  “You fucking crazy woman! You�
�re trying to kill me, too?” He ran at full speed in his suit to the stairs and I followed. “I told you not to leave them here alone!”

  We reached the lower floor, where the guys were working on the big unit, and Marty turned to me and yelled, “You’re trying to kill me!” He picked up an eight-foot-long piece of metal tubing and swung it around his head repeatedly, lasso style.

  “I forgot! I forgot!” I said, ducking and weaving away from the metal pipe.

  Marty never apologized for trying to decapitate me with a lead pipe. He suspended me and Lois for a week for “moronic behavior during work hours,” and the first day of my suspension he called me and fired me.

  I’M LAZY. I’m forgetful. I go too far. I don’t know when to stop. I need to grow up. I am not a people person, nor am I organized or highly organized, enthusiastic or responsible. I’m not a self-starter or a problem solver. I don’t have good phone or computer skills. I can’t multitask or work well with others. And yet I maintain: I am not an id-i-ote.

  ELAINE MAYBE

  CARMEN, my best friend and writing/performing partner had joined this theater company that went to Maine for two weeks every August to work out ideas for the upcoming season. Being a native New Yorker and not someone that familiar with the woods or white people and definitely not the combination, Carmen asked if she could bring me along. I saw this as a free Maine vacation, the summer tennis camp I never had, and gladly went. I wasn’t doing much, just waitressing at this place on Montague Street called The Leaf and Bean. I don’t know if I could be described as a “good” waitress. Eleanor and her husband came in for brunch one day and there was a long line and a couple came and stood behind them and she heard the guy say, “Well, I don’t know. Why don’t you go check?” and the woman walked to the front of the café and then came back and said to her boyfriend, “Yeah, she’s working today,” and they walked out. I had a certain style. Either you got it or you didn’t.

  Almost before I stepped out of the car I met this actor named Jed and became a company member of the Irondale Ensemble Project. Back in New York, I began doing the outreach work of the company, part of which was teaching acting in high schools in the Bronx and way out in Brooklyn. I also commenced being the girlfriend of the young, handsome, funny, rich, charming, talented Mr. Jed Clarke.