But Enough About Me

by Jancee Dunn

  His eyes flicked to my forehead and he abruptly stopped talking. “What is that?” he asked, frowning. “Did you hurt yourself?” He examined me from the side. “I hate to tell you this, but it actually shows up if you’re in profile,” he said in a low voice. “Listen, when you’re talking to Bono, it might be best if you faced the camera.”

  “But doesn’t that look strange if he’s answering one of my questions and I’m staring at the camera?”

  Lou gave me a meaningful look.

  “I look like a unicorn, don’t I?” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s a little distracting.”

  The band arrived with no entourage except for their publicist. Bono, at about five feet seven inches, was much shorter than I expected—you’ll notice that he usually wears shoes or boots with a platform on them—but his charisma was like a crackling force field. He introduced himself to and shook hands with every member of the crew before making his way over to me.

  Paul David Hewson! Born May 10, 1960, sleeps four hours a night, allergic to red wine, a chess whiz, owns two German shepherds! My mind whirred with arcane fan questions: Why have you never sung “Elvis Presley and America” in concert? Is it because you improvised the lyrics in one take? Would you ever put “Boy Girl,” a track about bisexuality never released in the States, on a compilation? Did you really take off your clothes during an interview in a London restaurant in 1992 because you were bored? You mention in “Angel of Harlem” hearing something on BLS—is that the New York R & B radio station WBLS, by chance? Didn’t you get the idea for “A Day Without Me” from a friend who tried to kill himself? Well, where is he now? Didn’t Larry once get injections of bull’s blood from a holistic doctor, and if so, what, exactly, was up with that? What did your wife, Ali, think of “The Sweetest Thing,” allegedly written after you forgot her birthday during the Joshua Tree recording sessions?

  I didn’t have time to ask any of these questions as Bono smoothly commandeered the conversation. When he talks to you, he is utterly focused. In the ten minutes I was able to chat with him while the crew frantically rejiggered the lighting in that murky bar, the floor dropped away and the room spun around as we had a quiet, intense chat that touched on literature and politics and music and poetry. Well, mostly he talked, as I struggled to hold up my end.

  As he was summoned to sit in front of the TV cameras, he made a self-deprecating joke that he had the face of a Welsh coal miner. “Oh Bono, that’s not true,” I tittered like a horse’s ass. Lou, from his post behind the TV monitor, shook his head in disgust.

  After I asked my questions, I stared straight ahead at the camera as they responded. Don’t turn to the side, I kept telling myself. They must have been wondering why they had to address my ear, but they gamely went along with it, presumably figuring that I had some sort of showbiz tic.

  As our interview wound up, Bono kissed my hand. I blushed, while Lou’s eyes rolled so far into the back of his head that he could probably see his spinal cord.

  It Can Be Done: Manipulating Your Way into the Kitchen Cabinet

  If, despite your best efforts, you must meet your famous person at their production company or the office of their publicity firm, there are still methods to capture that all-important “color.” Can you find a way to get a lift from the celebrity after your encounter? Cars can provide all kinds of notable details, particularly if your celebrity is messy. Stuck in a conference room? Try to get your celebrity to show you what is in their purse.

  That said, when I heard that my chat with Dolly Parton was going to take place at her Nashville production company, I didn’t worry. First of all, an American original like Dolly Parton does not need any extra “color.” And I had a distinct feeling that her office would not be some barren cubicle warren. People with hard-core country roots cannot leave a bare surface be, and this is a woman who is drawn to all things that sparkle and gleam.

  Even so, I knew that she kept a small apartment alongside the building, and I was determined to see it.

  An assistant met me at the door of the low adobe building at nine a.m. sharp (Dolly, like Madonna, was known for being exceedingly punctual) and told me that Dolly would be along momentarily. The office was done up in a southwestern motif—lots of turquoise and peach, a cactus, a howling coyote statue. A life-sized cutout of Dolly in a tight red, white, and blue sparkly uniform stood by the entrance. The place was appealingly homey, so much so that the coffeepot was boiling over on a ledge and dripped languidly on the floor.

  Her voice made itself known first—she was singing the old hymn “Peace in the Valley” as she tapped over in her five-inch stiletto heels. She stopped to greet me, put her hand jauntily on her hip, and patiently allowed me to gawk. She was wearing a spectacular platinum wig, a clingy black velvet two-piece pantsuit, big silver earrings, multiple shades of purple eye shadow, and shiny, bubble-gum pink lip gloss. “Well, hello,” she said with a big grin. Who is like her, in all the world? Who is her successor? That mind-bogglingly small waist! Those glorious knockers! This glitzy getup was—hand to God—all for her trip to the chiropractor later in the afternoon. She cheerfully explained that most people would be frightened to look “this cheap and whorey,” but not her.

  I saw her take me in, too. Uh-oh, I thought. From her point of view, I must have looked like an uptight New Yorker—black clothes, preternaturally pale skin, reserved manner. Better establish my southern roots right off the top. But how could I do it in a way that wasn’t completely obvious? Aha.

  “I just ate the most delicious meat and threes at the Belle Meade Buffet,” I told her, patting my stomach. “Cleaned my plate twice.” I shook my head. “That’s the kind of food I grew up with, and you just can’t get it in New York.”

  She brightened, asking me if I was from the South.

  I smiled. “Well, my mama is from Citronelle, Alabama.” Suddenly she was my “mama.” “We used to spend our summers there.” I assumed a faraway look. “My pappy used to listen to your music on the radio when he was working in his toolshed.” OK. Rein it in a little. It was true that I called him my pappy. His name was Hershal Ray Corners—where else could he be from but Alabama? But best not go overboard. Maybe later, I would name-check my aunt Eunice and my uncle Bud.

  Dolly, sufficiently warmed up, came breathtakingly to life. She talked about her early years touring as a “girl singer” with the Porter Wagoner Show before breaking to go solo, the controversy over her 1968 song “Just Because I’m a Woman,” which lamented the double standard between men and women, and her myriad business ventures (beneath the folksiness, she is a sharply intelligent woman).

  I was captivated by the staunch adaptability that had enabled Dolly to thrive after decades in the music industry. Each story was better than the last, but after a while I could barely pay attention, because I had drained the bottle of water she had offered me and, on top of the muy grande latte I had tossed back that morning, I really had to visit the facilities. Usually I never interrupt an interview for a bathroom break because it can waste a precious four minutes, but my concentration began to waver during a point when she was saying something especially interesting about her early days in a log cabin in Sevierville, Tennessee, when groundhogs and turtles and frogs were often on the dinner menu. Her father would lope off into the woods with a shotgun in order to feed his twelve children. My leg was jiggling. Think of something else. Think…of…something else.

  “I have to use the facilities,” I burst out miserably.

  Not only did she shrug, but as I ran over to a nearby bathroom, she kept talking, even hollering through the door, just the way your girlfriend would if you were at her house. When I returned, she reminisced entertainingly about meeting her husband, Carl Dean, at the Wishy-Washy Laundromat in Nashville. Emboldened by her frank manner, I asked her if it bothered her that she had never had children. She was one of the few performers I had interviewed who did not, and since I myself had never been overwhelmed with maternal feeling, I wondere
d if she felt any sort of void.

  She considered this for a moment. “I just think, you know, that it ain’t meant for some people to have kids,” she said. Instead, she felt like Carl was her child, and she was his. Besides, they took care of all of their nieces and nephews, sending them to college and buying them cars when they graduated.

  Now that she had answered a question I was always curious about, I had to see that apartment. I wanted to see what was behind the curtain. Behind the wig, if you will. So I concocted a strategy. I had read that she still snacked on Velveeta, as she had for decades. Maybe if I challenged her on it (it’s fightin’ words to accuse a country star of abandoning her roots), I could work my way into that apartment’s kitchen.

  “I heard that you still like Velveeta,” I said, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “I have to say that I don’t believe you. First of all, you have a child-sized waist. And secondly, at this point in your career you’ve got to have a personal chef.”

  She was indignant. “I do!” she hollered. “You want me to show you in my apartment next door? I fried up some SPAM yesterday morning!”

  Yes!

  She was up in a flash, racing purposefully through the office in those insane five-inch heels. She opened the door to a small apartment that was attached to the larger building. I was in! It smelled like incense, which was surprising for some reason. Racks of clothes lined the walls in an explosion of sequins, satin, and spangles. A dressing table was crammed with lotions and makeup. I wished I had time to inspect the clothes, but she kept going toward the kitchen.

  It was cheery and comfortable, with blue Mexican tiles, notes and magnets on the fridge, and a Tupperware container on the counter filled with corn bread. Then Dolly triumphantly threw open the cabinets to show the most magnificent vista. There was a bomb shelter’s worth of tinned SPAM, cans of corned-beef hash, loaves upon loaves of delightfully spongy white bread, and a giant brick of Velveeta.

  Then, the pièce de résistance: She opened the fridge and fished out a ceramic pig. Inside was a bag of bacon grease, labeled with a date. It was a fancier version of my mother’s ever-present jar of bacon grease in our cabinet at home. The thwap of bacon grease in a skillet—sweet music!—meant that we were having chicken-fried steak for dinner. Dolly, however, had her grease skimmed for her by the people who cleaned her house every Thursday. Dolly may have been worth three hundred million, but she was the absolute real deal. Who else could credibly say, as she did to me, “I have to have bacon grease in all of my houses”?

  The trip to her kitchen was the high-cholesterol icing on the cake. She thoughtfully hacked me off a big hunk of Velveeta as a snack for my plane trip home. Then she pressed a bag of tomatoes in my hands that she had grown at the house. I carefully toted the bag home and ate every bit of the tomatoes. The Velveeta slab, meanwhile, stayed in the paper towel she had wrapped it in, which had a print of an old-fashioned country girl on it with a bonnet and calico dress. I just couldn’t bear to throw it out. I proudly showed that Velveeta to the hotel porter, my cabdriver, and a flight attendant. How could I not?

  “Well, of course she still eats Velveeta,” said the hotel porter with proprietary authority. “Of course she does. Ms. Parton hasn’t changed.” A week later, my Velveeta was the same size and consistency, but I put it in the freezer, just in case, and there it remains.

  10.

  After a two-week period of flying to Los Angeles, London, and Paris for interviews (the best being the Spice Girls, which took place while all of us lounged on a bed in their cavernous suite at Hotel Le Bristol), I was feeling like a devil-may-care citizen of the world. This was a state of mind so foreign to me that I had to capitalize on it and hastily make the move out of my Hoboken apartment into Manhattan. The whole process of breaking the bonds to Jersey had to take place quickly before I reverted to my regular owlish persona, and what made it tougher was that Dinah and Heather had also moved to Hoboken after they graduated college. Their apartments were mere blocks away, so close that I would sometimes run over to see them in my pajamas. Dinah, the first of us to get married (to a genial chef named Patrick whose main passions in life were barbecue, the Giants, and Dinah), commuted into the city for her publishing job.

  Heather, meanwhile, had also become a chef, having nicely parlayed her profound love of food into her livelihood. When she was on the job, she had met the man that she, too, would eventually marry. He was—to the everlasting joy of the family—yet another chef. If you couldn’t work at Penney’s, reasoned my food-obsessed family, this was the next best thing.

  Heather’s first job was at the Weehawken branch of the Chart House, a feel-good chain restaurant where the waiters wore Hawaiian shirts and a sign with a hook hung outside the employee entrance that said HANG YOUR BUMMER HERE. When Heather was promoted from the salad assembly line to the more coveted prime rib carving station, she developed a ferocious crush on a tall, handsome cook named Rob. Unfortunately, he was just as shy as she was, so they mostly communicated through group conversations.

  Every night she would pop over from her apartment with a progress report. Finally, after a few suspenseful weeks, a breakthrough. “He talked to me,” she said in a rush, bursting through the door and flopping dramatically on my couch. “He’s so thoughtful and smart. He’s going to cooking school and he wants to work in the city. He’s so cute. His dad is from Puerto Rico and his mom is from Hawaii, so you can only imagine. He says he’s going to give me his notes from class.”

  “That’s a ruse,” I said. “The old notes-from-class.”

  She leaped up, rigid. “You think so? Is it? No, seriously. Is it a ruse?”

  The thought of leaving my sisters in Hoboken was depressing, but a friend of a friend was moving out of a cheap apartment in the West Village and said I could take over the lease. Of course, I called my folks to consult. Why did I do this? I didn’t need their permission. “It’s time I moved into the city,” I announced to my father. A long silence followed.

  “First of all, you’ll have to pay an unincorporated business tax,” he said at last. “And in terms of rental units, you’re looking at a thirty percent increase in price. Maybe double, depending on the area. And right now you’re paying a dollar for the PATH train, while the subway is a buck twenty-five, which means that annually it’s an increase of…” I heard him fumbling around the junk drawer in the kitchen for his calculator.

  “Dad, I already have a place in mind, and the rent is reasonable,” I said.

  “Those leases are full of hidden costs,” he said.

  After twenty minutes of heated negotiation, he accepted that I was determined to do it. “Get Polaroids of all of your valuables before you move,” he advised. “And your mother and I are coming to see this place.”

  Exactly four days after I had moved in, my parents arrived—my mother holding a Tupperware container with a lemon cake inside, my father carrying his Stanley Jumbo Organizer Top Toolbox. Delicately, both stepped inside the door and took in the bleak surroundings: a five-hundred-square-foot studio painted the peculiarly dingy grayish white of all New York rentals. A few weak rays of light struggled through an airshaft window.

  “Welcome, welcome,” I said. They stood, frozen. “Sit down,” I said heartily, pointing to a fatigued pullout couch. There was no room in the place for any other chairs. I glanced toward the bathroom. The john was a companionable two yards from the couch.

  “Please,” said my mother. “I’d rather you didn’t sit on the toilet.” She gingerly lowered herself onto the sofa, still holding the Tupperware on her lap, while my father inspected the windows. “The lock is broken,” he said. “You’d better call the super.”

  “He’s never around.”

  He crossed his arms. “Well, then, how about the owner of the building?”

  “He lives in Israel,” I said. “I don’t know if he even speaks English.”

  My father raised an eyebrow. “Maybe he understands the words Housing Court. Maybe the words New York Cit
y Citizen Service Center will make him pay attention. How about that?” He stalked out the door. “I’m going to go find this super,” he said. “He should be ashamed that he’s not doing his job.”

  “Dad,” I called after him. “Shame is not a motivator in New York.”

  Later, he returned, defeated, and the three of us spent a cheerless afternoon hanging pictures and exploring the neighborhood. When I walked them to the spot where their Buick was parked, I fought the urge to slip into the backseat and speed home to Jersey, as we had after our Bowery trips.

  “I forgot to give you this,” said my mother, handing me a clipping from the Newark Star-Ledger on starting an indoor herb garden and a small tub of peppermint foot cream. “This is my new favorite. It smells so good. Put it on before you go to sleep.”

  “I’m proud of you, kid,” said my father, giving me a hug. “But start saving to buy an apartment. On a rental, you’re just throwing a quarter of your income away.”

  I knew that on the drive home, my parents had a worried conversation about my suspended adolescence. I was nearing my late twenties, but because I lived in the city and worked in an industry that venerated youth, it was deceptively easy to travel in my own bubble of juvenilia, free of the quotidian markers of adulthood: mortgages and car payments and lawn maintenance and sitting on the bleachers on a Saturday morning, drinking coffee and chitchatting with the other parents as you watch your kid kick a soccer ball. I could barely conceive of the idea of getting married, let alone of having a child.

  I barely had time to be lonely in my new apartment because the phone was constantly ringing with family members “just calling to check in.” I had taken the day off to unpack and was balancing on a ladder, trying to clean out some high kitchen cabinets, when the first call came in.

  I heard my mother’s voice on the machine. “Hi, honey. Pick up! Pick up the phone. I know you’re there. Pick up.”