by Jaime Clarke
Maybe because of the equipment or maybe because Elliot and Hunter knew how to produce, our singing didn’t sound all that bad and even though we were fried out of our gourds we managed to each come up with a song. Daisy wrote ‘I’d Kill You if I Thought I Could Get Away with It’ and I wrote one with Elliot called ‘Do Fuck Off,’ a love song.
Elliot and Hunter kissed us goodbye and promised to make copies that we could send around to record companies. ‘They’re good guys,’ Rick said as we pulled away. Rick had to catch a plane back to Chicago but before he left he told us we should probably think about finding an agent to represent us. We liked the idea of having an agent, someone who could get us parts in movies and who could arrange to pick us up in limousines and take us anywhere we wanted to go. ‘An agent looks out for your interests,’ Rick said. We said we wanted Rick to be our agent because he seemed to be looking out for us but he told us no, he wasn’t an agent, but he’d try to find someone to represent us. Maybe we’d see him in a month or so, he said. Goodbye, girls, he said. He looked sad.
Daisy’s mom could get us tickets to fly for free, and when Daisy’s brother Chuck called from New York and said he wanted us to be in a film he was making, her mom came through with two roundtrip tickets. Chuck is Daisy’s identical twin. He’s a film student at NYU and Daisy loves him like a brother.
Neither of us had ever been to New York City before, even though we’d seen it on TV (we love Letterman). Our plane tipped its wing and the black night outside the window was suddenly lit with a million lights so bright we thought we were landing on the moon. Daisy said, Look, there’s the Empire State Building and I followed her finger towards the skyscraper lit yellow.
Chuck met us at LaGuardia and we got a cab into Manhattan. Chuck lives in the West Village and the cab driver let us off right where Sally let Harry off in When Harry Met Sally, at the Washington Square arch. ‘You were the only person I knew in New York,’ I said as the cab drove away and Daisy laughed.
Chuck’s roommate, Bertrand, was a film major, too. Bertrand was a lot older than Chuck. He said he had four degrees already: a bachelor’s in creative writing and another bachelor’s in philosophy; he also had an MFA from Vermont College in poetry as well as a Ph.D. in American history from a college he kept calling Ball State. He had another year to go at NYU. Daisy asked him why he had so many degrees and he said, I have to stay in school until I get my big break so I can pay off all my student loans. Plus, he said, you get all the great connections in school.
Where Chuck wanted to be a director, Bertrand wanted to be a screenwriter. Together they were working on Chuck’s student film, Plastic Fantastic, which is also the name of Chuck’s all-time favorite Flesh for Lulu album. Chuck and Bertrand’s friends were helping on the film. A girl named Chloe, a sociology junior from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was playing the lead, a girl whose name was also Chloe and who was also from Mississippi and was also a sociology major at NYU. Chloe’s friend in the movie was a character named Melinda, whose name was really Melba. She was a film major too and me and Daisy suspected she was Chuck’s or Bertrand’s girlfriend, we couldn’t tell which. The film took place inside this New York night club called XOXO in the movie but was really called The Cellar. It was in the meatpacking part of Manhattan. Bertrand knew the owner who let us film while the bar was open. Me and Daisy played friends of Chloe and Melinda’s at the club and the movie was about how men see women in bars and, as Bertrand explained, ‘how that translates to life.’ We liked Chloe and Melinda a lot so it was easy to act like we were their friends. Chuck said it was okay if our characters were named Paque and Daisy, so we went with that.
Because the owner was letting us film in his bar, Chuck had to give the owner’s son Jeff a part so Chuck made Jeff one of a series of assholes who were to appear throughout the film. In the scene at The Cellar me and Daisy are dancing together and Jeff comes up and starts dancing with us and we innocently dance him into our circle. But when the song is over and me and Daisy have said thanks, Jeff won’t let us alone and he harasses us out of the club, onto the street and into a cab. Chuck and Bertrand wanted Jeff to follow us in a cab, but Chuck decided that was too difficult and expensive an idea to shoot.
We had to admit that we were bored much of the time. Chuck would spend a half an hour fiddlefucking around with the lights and microphones while me and Daisy just stood there. Finally we asked the DJ to play some music so we could dance, just to keep warmed up. Chuck said, OK, let’s shoot and we went in front of the camera but had to stop right away. You’re dancing out of the frame, Chuck said to Daisy. But that’s how I dance, Daisy said. Chuck explained to us that with the one camera if we danced too far apart he wouldn’t be able to get us both in the scene. So the DJ started the music again but this time we were so nervous about staying close to each other that we didn’t look natural and Chuck made us stop. He told Bertrand to tape a square this long by that wide on the floor. Just stay in the box, he said. That helped us out and we got a glimpse of how good a director Chuck is going to be one day. He already knew what me and Daisy learned, that it isn’t so easy to be a movie star. You have to worry about a lot of things that people who see your movies sort of take for granted. We didn’t talk about it, but after spending hours just to get two or three minutes worth of film, we felt a deeper appreciation for what Bananarama had to go through to make all those wonderful videos.
Chuck told us we were really great and me and Daisy decided to go out and celebrate. We hopped in a cab and told the cab driver to take us to Times Square. We felt like Alice in Wonderland when the cab let us off right by the giant, flashing Cup-O-Noodle and the big screen TV showing the news. Even though it was after midnight the sidewalks were jammed with people. We passed a guy selling nuts but didn’t get any because some of the nuts had burned and it smelled like shite. We had to put our hands to our mouths in order to get by him.
Daisy grabbed my arm and said, Look. She pointed at the numbers 1515 on the building in front of us and it gave us the goosebumps. We were standing in front of MTV, the all-time best channel on TV. We tried the doors but of course they were locked. We put our hands to the glass and peered inside but couldn’t see anything. Neither of us said anything as we silently thought about all the famous people who had passed through those doors. Daisy touched the handle again and just held on to it. I started singing, ‘Video killed the radio star’ which made Daisy laugh.
Our next cab driver was a little bitter when we asked him to take us to the Ed Sullivan Theater but we didn’t know it was within walking distance. We were amazed at how it looked exactly like it does on TV. Standing under the glowing yellow and blue neon sign we had a past-life feeling, a feeling that we’d stood where we were standing a hundred times before. We have to get tickets, Daisy said. The sign taped on the door told us to try waiting in line early in the morning, that we had to write in six months in advance if we wanted guaranteed seats.
We agreed we would come back and stand in line around 2 A.M. but until then we should go out and see more of New York. We went to Rockefeller Center and pressed our noses against the Today Show studio glass window. It looks like a small apartment, someone walking by said. The flags around the ice skating rink flapped loudly like applause.
We walked up Fifth Avenue. Daisy pointed out Tiffany’s and we stood in front of the sign and said ‘oh dahhling’ over and over. Daisy’s neck is long and smooth like Audrey Hepburn’s, which we noticed on our ten millionth viewing of that movie (Daisy’s mom owns it).
Me and Daisy skipped the block between Tiffany’s and Central Park when Daisy stopped cold. Look, she said. She pointed at a hotel that looked like a castle. What is it, I asked. It’s where Gatsby confronted Tom, remember, she said. Then I figured it out. The Plaza Hotel. The Great Gatsby is Daisy’s all-time favorite book; she’s read it more times than some people have read the Bible. She was in the middle of reading it the first time when we dropped out of school. Sometimes guys accuse us of being dumb and if
they do, Daisy starts right in talking about how many times she’s read The Great Gatsby.
Me and Daisy gawked at the chandeliers in the lobby, which was like looking up at stars. Because it was so late there was no one around. Daisy asked the waiter if we could please please please sit at a table and he smiled and said sure. The waiter’s eyes were sunk in so far his head looked like one of those Halloween skull masks. We ordered Cokes and sipped them, imagining all the shiny people who must have passed through the lobby of the Plaza and wishing we were them.
Our waiter, Mel, made sure our Cokes were bottomless. We got the feeling he liked having us around. He kept walking by our table and making funny comments about people who were walking by. Better give them the penthouse he said about an enormously fat couple. Things like that. We found Mel more amusing than handsome and it was fun just to sit and watch and laugh. Finally Mel came to our table and didn’t say something funny. You guys have to go, he said. I’m getting off now if you want to go get a beer or something, he offered. We said sure, we could do that, and Mel took us back to the West Village, to a dark wood bar called Minetta’s. Mel knew the manager, Taka, a squarely built man with a friendly smile. While Mel and Taka shook hands me and Daisy looked around at all the great pictures on the walls. They had old-time cartoons up with real pictures of people we didn’t recognize. Daisy pointed out a small picture on the wall. It was a picture of the actor Alec Baldwin and his actress wife, Kim Basinger. What was funny about the picture was that it was hung right where it was taken so you could see Alec and Kim sitting next to each other in the spot you were standing in front of. Daisy sat where Kim was sitting in the picture and said, Oh Alec, in a southern accent that was so funny Mel and Taka started laughing.
What happened next was the subject of an argument the next day about what exactly Mel said. It started with us noticing how Mel seemed to be a sort of big shot in Minetta’s. The bartender, Donna Marie (who is herself an actress—she played De Niro’s girlfriend in that movie about the mob guy who goes to the shrink; we asked her if Bobby D. liked that Bananarama song about him but she said she didn’t know), sent drinks over without Mel having ordered them. Mel looked different out of his all-white Plaza outfit too. Less of an angel. At some point Daisy asked what time it was; it was after one. Remember we have to go line up for Letterman, she said. I said, Yeah, that’s right. I noticed Mel didn’t say anything and I thought he would at least ask us about it. He pretended like he didn’t hear us. We’d seen that look before, the look some men get when you say you have to get home at a certain time, or that you have to get up early the next day. Suddenly there was a buzz in the bar and people craned their necks to look out the window. We looked too and saw the big white limo idling at the front door. It must be Alec and Kim, Mel said. But the doors didn’t open and we saw Taka go out and talk to the driver and come back in.
I’m going to A.C., Taka said. Who wants to go?
Mel laughed. How about it girls, he asked. Want to do some gambling?
Me and Daisy communicated with our eyes how much we wanted to ride in the limo. But we didn’t necessarily want to go to Atlantic City. Once we went to Las Vegas to party with these friends of Rick’s who were in commercial development. We thought he meant making commercials but it turned out they had something to do with construction and building offices. These guys had another girl—Veronica something—with them at the hotel. After a night of watching these guys gamble we all went up to the suite and partied. The office guys had some coke and we did it. They had a bar and we drank. We partied pretty late with them and at some point Veronica something said she had to go. Me and Daisy were surprised because we thought she was the black guy’s girlfriend—she spent the whole night hanging off him and she partied with him back at the suite—but it turned out she was a hooker. The black guy, I think his name was Hank, said he’d drive her home but the hooker smelled something fishy and wanted to be paid. Hank said, Relax, bitch, I’ll pay you and he smacked her across her face. Me and Daisy closed our eyes but we heard that sound in our ears. The other guys just laughed and Hank pushed the hooker into the bathroom and slammed the door but we could still hear him punching and kicking the hooker, whose crying became less and less until it just stopped. Me and Daisy ran out of the hotel when the others weren’t looking. We had to call Daisy’s mom to get home and what we told her was that we got really sick on some food and thought we might have to go to the hospital. It was the best story we could come up with.
So we didn’t want to go to Atlantic City because we didn’t even know Mel or Taka but we really wanted to ride in the limo. What about Letterman, Daisy asked.
I know someone who works there, Mel said. Of course we weren’t surprised later—after we’d gotten separated from Taka and Mel, who disappeared from the blackjack tables—that Mel was lying. (We even went straight from the Port Authority to the Plaza the next morning looking for him but the manager said no one named Mel worked there.) But Mel convinced us to go and we followed him out to the limo as Taka grabbed two bottles from behind the bar.
Mel and Taka sat by the doors of the limo and me and Daisy sprawled out on the leather bench in front of the bar, which had a long electric blue neon strip running across the top. A little TV built into the bar stared at us like an eye that never blinked. Daisy unsecured one of the glass tumblers. Don’t drink their booze, Taka said, it’s too expensive. He produced the bottles of wine he’d taken from Minetta’s and we toasted our impending success in Atlantic City.
Veterans that we are, me and Daisy drank almost a whole bottle between us. Men will let you drink all the liquor you want; we learned that a long time ago. Without saying anything we stood up and stuck our heads out the moon roof. The limo accelerated to pass a slow car and our hair blew into our eyes. We’re flying, Daisy said. She stuck out her arms like Superman and laughed. I laughed too and then suddenly Daisy’s laugh turned to choking and then she vomited over the side of the limo. The wind caught the chunks and blew them against the limo, scattering the vomit in a yellowish-orange spray across the trunk. Daisy coughed twice and then smiled, mouthing, Sorry. We ducked back into the limo and she passed out. Mel turned on the TV and we sat and just stared, transfixed by the flickering images no bigger than the size of a hand.
The casino looked like a cafeteria in a shopping mall; the green and beige diamond shapes in the carpet gave us vertigo. The bright light burned our eyes too and made everyone white like ghosts. We arrived sometime after 3 A.M. and pretty much the only people gambling after 3 A.M. were people serious about dice and cards.
Mel and Taka sat at the baccarat table and me and Daisy were like Bond girls, standing behind their chairs, inhaling cigar smoke. We tried to follow the game—we wanted to know how hard a game whose minimum bet was $100 was—but it was near impossible to figure out that shite game. Taka won right away and the others at the table, men with bags under their eyes that looked like coffee cups filled to the brim, shot him a dirty look. Daisy said why don’t we try our luck at blackjack and so we did but we found out we didn’t have any luck and the most fun we had that night was telling this old fart that we were showgirls. When he asked us at which hotel Daisy said, Hotel California. The old fart nodded like he knew exactly where it was.
At a certain point Mel and Taka drifted away from us and Daisy was the one who said, Let’s head back. I agreed with her. On the bus ride back to New York it started to sink in that we probably weren’t going to see Letterman after all but we decided we would try calling the Ed Sullivan Theater from the Plaza pay phone to see if there were any extra tickets, but no one picked up.
After an afternoon nap, we completed a second night of shooting, which was basically us reshooting the scenes from the night before. Then Chuck took us to see the actor Paul Newman at the New School. Paul Newman had started a program there for people who wanted to be in the movies. Me and Daisy have only seen one Paul Newman movie: The Hustler. It was Paul Newman from The Hustler we had in mind when we went
to the New School with Chuck. We were surprised that Paul Newman in person looked like he was a million and a half years old. He reminded Daisy of her grandfather the way he just sort of sat up there and stared like he was trying to contact other worlds.
The event had a moderator, an old bald guy who probably wished he was a famous actor but settled for being the friend of a famous actor. We sat in the back of the classroom because all the ass kissers crowding the front of the room around old Paul made us sick. That’s the thing about all these shiteheads in college; they pay a gazillion dollars to go to film school on the off chance that they’ll rub shoulders with someone, whose ass they’ll kiss, hoping that person will make their career for them. Me and Daisy said fuck that. If you want to do something, you do it. For instance, before they were Bananarama, Keren worked for the BBC and Sara and Siobhan studied journalism at the London College of Fashion. But they realized how much working sucks it out of you and how you can get only so close to your dream that way. So they started spending their nights singing to backup tapes in London clubs, knowing that sooner or later either word-of-mouth would spread or someone would see them and make them famous. Which, of course, is what happened.
Inevitably one of the ass kissers asked Paul how he got started in the movies. How many times has Paul Newman had to answer that one? But Paul was gracious and said what he’d probably said a hundred times or more. Another ass kisser, one positioned virtually at Paul’s feet, asked what advice he had for aspiring actors. The room shushed and everyone stared straight to the front of the room. You have to want it more than anything, Paul said. You have to never give up, never let anyone tell you that you’re no good, Paul said. The crowd of ass kissers clapped like old Paul just told them they were going to live forever.
Chuck asked Paul what he thought the difference was between working in front of the camera and working behind it. Paul made the usual joke about actors really wanting to direct and said something general about how much harder it is behind the camera than in front of it. I looked over at Daisy and she wasn’t paying attention either. We were both thinking about getting home in time to watch Letterman when we heard our names. Chuck was telling Paul about our movie, pointing at me and Daisy as the stars. Paul craned his neck to get a look at us and Daisy just sort of waved, embarrassed. The guy filming the whole thing for the school turned the video camera on us. We could’ve killed Chuck. When the deal was over Chuck rushed to the front of the room to join the crowd of ass kissers and me and Daisy went downstairs to the cafeteria to find a TV but there wasn’t one. I pulled an Almond Joy from the vending machine and we sat at a table in the cafeteria listening to the lights overhead hum, Daisy drawing her name in spilt salt with her fingers.