by Jancee Dunn
“Bur-gers!” we heard Daniel holler.
“Forty-five minutes and we’re out,” I whispered to Tracy.
“An hour,” she countered as we pushed open the bathroom door.
Dirt-Gathering: Shortcuts to Finding the Least Loyal Person in an Entourage
If you are dispatched to a film or TV set and need to do a little sleuthing about your subject, forget the hair and makeup people. Yes, they love to gossip, but it’s usually about everybody else, not the celebrity they are currently fussing over. Even if it’s clear that they can’t stand their charge, the most that you will get is eye-rolling, because painting a famous person’s face can yield a day rate of thousands of dollars, and working on a set means a steady paycheck, so it doesn’t behoove them to tell you anything.
Ditto the crew. They are usually loyal to “the talent” because they won’t want to be blackballed for future work. They want to remain firmly in the union, and who can blame them? And film sets are so incestuous that loose lips will swiftly be discovered. Production assistants and interns will flee from you in terror, chauffeurs often have to sign confidentiality agreements, and the catering people are never alone because someone is always hanging around the craft services table.
You need someone nonunion. You need someone who is completely mercenary.
You’ll be needing the van driver.
Usually on a television or film set there is a scraggly guy who ferries various items or people around in a van. Often he is a local who does not work on sets for a living. He is your man.
I learned this unsavory fact when I was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina, to the set of Dawson’s Creek for a rendezvous with then-rising star Katie Holmes. I had spent the day with her and found her to be sweetly wholesome. She told me she had grown up completely sheltered and happily naive in Toledo, Ohio, in the protective shadow of her older brothers. She attended an all-girl Catholic school, where the nuns told her that sex means love to girls and love means sex to boys.
In normal circumstances I would have liked her (although she had a grating habit of pronouncing “especially” ex-specially), but Rolling Stone wasn’t Ladies’ Home Journal. The cover images that sold the most briskly were of half-naked starlets, and we were encouraged to inject as much sex, drugs, and rock and roll into the text as we could reasonably get away with. Racy, she was not. I left our first interview with mixed feelings. Why did I have to tart everyone up? On the other hand, our chat had not been compelling.
Afterward, a bored Dawson’s rep showed me around the set, then pointed at a brown van that was parked on a road near the entrance. “He’ll take you to your hotel,” he said.
A guy with a thin mustache and a tank top greeted me unsmilingly. He grunted, tossed his cigarette out the window, and turned on the ignition. Remembering my father’s assertion that most unfriendly-looking people are actually shy, I cleared my throat.
“Not much action around here, huh?” I asked. He grinned.
“Nope,” he said. “Most days I just sit around, have a smoke. It ain’t so bad.”
“How long have you been working here?” I said. After a while, I could ask questions on autopilot, and supply smooth follow-ups, without actually paying attention to what was said. It was all about modulation. Like a dog or a cat, I would snap into focus only if a voice abruptly raised or changed tone.
“About a month,” he said. “I’m done next week. Got some business to take care of in Winston-Salem.”
I nodded, gravely but sympathetically, as if I knew what he was talking about.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
“No, go ahead.” I hated cigarette smoke but wanted to appear breezy and hip.
He sparked one up and chuckled. “The only action I saw was with that little girl Katie and Josh.” I sat up. That would be her costar, Joshua Jackson. Easy now. Clearly, he didn’t know I was a reporter, but just assumed I was one of the many people who streamed in and out of the place. “They’ve been at it for a while, now.”
“Oh?” I said lightly.
“It’s the worst-kept secret on the set,” he said. “Ask anybody.” A Grinchlike grin crept across my face and I restrained myself from giggling. Thank you, my good man, and best of luck with your endeavor in Winston-Salem!
The next day as Katie and I had coffee together, I told her that I learned from a well-placed source that she and Jackson were an item. My conscience pricked me when her soft smile died and she buried her head in her hands. She whimpered a confirmation. I got my story. Everybody wins! Well, sort of.
In the music world, the tour-bus driver can be another rich trove of information, provided that he is a mercenary hire for a band’s summer tour and not a regular driver with a decade of loyal employment. During a trip to Boston to spend time on the tour bus with the now-forgotten band Days of the New, I chatted up the bus driver while the group was outside arguing with their manager.
“Do you always work with these guys?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he said cheerfully. “It varies.” Aha. I put my notebook and tape recorder down, signaling that I was off duty.
I smiled eagerly, like a fan. “Who was the wildest group that you’ve ever driven?” I asked breathlessly.
He considered for a moment. “Well, the strangest thing I’ve heard lately is about that fellow from Alice in Chains. A buddy of mine told me about it, he’s a driver, too. That fellow—”
“Layne Staley?” I prompted. “The lead singer?”
He rubbed his chin. “Yeah. Him. That fellow does a lot of drugs.”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, my buddy saw him recently, and says that the guy shot up a lot, and sometimes he used dirty needles. Got gangrene in both wrists. Had to have both hands amputated.”
My heart quickened as a familiar sensation flooded me—equal parts excitement and self-loathing at the discovery of a lurid story. “Are you sure about that?” I asked.
He swigged from his Styrofoam cup of coffee and allowed a small belch. “My buddy doesn’t lie. He saw it with his own eyes.” He looked at me pointedly. “When’s the last time you saw a photo of him?”
I scanned my mental archives. “I don’t know,” I admitted. Staley hadn’t been at any shows lately, but I assumed it was because of his drug jamboree, which was hardly a secret.
The bus driver shrugged. “That’s because they want to keep it out of the papers. Although it’s not like his career’s over because he doesn’t play guitar. I’m telling ya. The guy doesn’t have any hands.”
The next morning I flew back to New York and hastened to the office. I threw my bag down and speed-walked over to the cubicle of my editor, Karen. She was in the midst of closing a story and was staring intently at the screen.
“Listen,” I said quietly. “I have it on good authority that Layne Staley has no hands.”
She squinted up at me as if I had a bug on my face. She had long ago become inured to most of my dramatic schemes but I could see she was curious. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I think I need a cigarette for this.” She grabbed a pack of smokes. “Come downstairs with me.”
I told her the story while she puffed furiously. Then she took me into the managing editor’s office and made me repeat it. “Well,” he said. “If it’s true, then you’ll have to do a story on it. Let me just check with photo to see if there is anything recent on him.”
My heart leaped. Breaking news, and I was at the front lines! I trumpeted my report to a couple of the younger staffers, reveling in their satisfyingly shocked reaction, then walked purposefully back to my desk to commence my research.
Five minutes later, Karen dropped a photo of Layne Staley—both hands perfectly intact—on my desk.
“That was taken last week,” she said. I could see she was holding back laughter, but she softened when she saw my crestfallen face. “You shouldn’t be so disappointed to learn that a person has hands,” she said. “It’s good news, not bad news, that the poor gu
y isn’t an amputee.”
Then I started to laugh, too. Although I wasn’t laughing a week later when coworkers were still greeting me by hiding a hand in their sleeve and waving a cheery hello with their “stump.”
11.
I met Sean at an East Village roof party. He was standing off to the side of a knot of art-school types who were animatedly talking—the males in cutoff fatigue shorts and Chuck Taylors, the females with girly tattoos (fairies, a flower chain around the ankle) and hair adroitly piled on their head in that careless knot I could never quite approximate. Did they use bobby pins?
Sean was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans that were spattered with paint. Unlike everyone else at the party, he didn’t look self-consciously hip. He just seemed vulnerable with his sad brown calf’s eyes and tumble of honey-colored curls as he attempted to break into a conversation monopolized by a guy in a T-shirt that said Total Dick. To me, his skinny shoulders said “underfed” rather than “fashionably slinky.” He needed to eat, but the only vittles were some soggy ruffled potato chips still in the bag. There was never any decent food at these hipster parties. I would have happily settled for some “ironic” onion dip.
He caught my eye and smiled shyly. Save me, he mouthed.
I walked right over to him.
We were still talking as the last guest left the roof. Sean was the only child of Vermont professors who enthusiastically supported his career as an illustrator, even after they paid for his degree in Eastern philosophy from Sarah Lawrence. Unlike the tightly strung p.r. executive I had recently dated, Sean didn’t own a suit. He was gentle and shy, and he liked to cook and go on excursions upstate in one of his parents’ castoff Volvos. He laughed at even my lamest jokes. I’m a sucker for a grown man who giggles—not a high-pitched serial-killer sort of giggle, but a lighthearted laugh.
He took my phone number, and the next night we went to dinner and the movies. Some of my friends complain that this sort of outing shows a distinct lack of imagination, but I find those top-of-the-Empire-State-Building dates too artificial. He brought a flashlight to the cinema, tucking it into a messenger bag. When a couple a few rows ahead of us started arguing loudly about whether the leading man had had some work done on his face, Sean walked over with his flashlight and shined it right into their eyes. “The movie has started,” he said in a brisk, official tone. “Let’s keep it down.” The couple gaped at him, confused. Was he an employee?
He clicked off the flashlight and returned to his seat. “Works every time,” he whispered.
Well. I was smitten. Sean had the kind of freewheeling personality that I envied. At home wherever he was, he rebuffed the New York eyes-forward rule and struck up conversations with any schmo in speaking range. Tattered old gals spotted his friendly face at fifty paces and sensed correctly that he wouldn’t edge away from them but would happily chat away, sometimes for hours. When he started to make me dinners in my tiny apartment, they wouldn’t be served until late, because we could never get out of a grocery store. He would end up trading recipes with some lady named Sylvia who had lipstick traveling up to her cheek and a Lord of the Onion Rings T-shirt.
With Sean, no activity was mundane. If we were on the subway, he didn’t filter out the noise as I did but would troll the car for conversations that amused him. Once he nudged me and flicked his eyes in the direction of a gaggle of burly guys of various hues who were intently comparing the merits of cheese fries throughout the city.
“The ones at Brothers Bar-B-Cue have a lotta cheese,” said one guy with a thicket of back hair poking out of his tank top. “A lotta cheese. You really get your money’s worth.”
“There were some good cheese fries at that Yankee game,” his friend broke in. “And the fries had the skins on them.”
Another guy waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t ceh for that,” he said. “I don’t ceh for the skins.”
“What about the ones we had at Rockaway beach, on the boardwalk?” put in a third. “That was some mad cheese.”
“Those cheese fries were three dollars and fifty cents,” said the tank-topped man indignantly. “Them shits was expensive. Yo, for three-fifty I could buy a pound of cheese and make my own damn cheese fries.”
The debate raged on for fifteen station stops. “I love this town,” said Sean as we stepped out onto the subway platform.
Sean told me I was his soul mate two weeks after we met. I felt that the polite response was You’re my soul mate, too. I didn’t know whether this was true, but I didn’t mind when he promptly moved most of his stuff into my apartment. Isn’t that always the way? Is it because women have clean towels? He was never eager to go back to his place in Brooklyn, which he shared with two roommates, one of whom wrote his initials on his particular third of the eggs.
Even though our space was cramped, I loved playing house. It was a tonic to come home from a trying interview to a sunny greeting and some new stir-fry concoction that he had made for dinner. Sean was an avowed vegetarian, and I admired that he had organized his life around his beliefs, while I was largely belief-free. He didn’t eat “anything that had a face” and spent his weekends doing volunteer work for the Earth Society and the Waterwheel Alliance and some organization that worked to prevent “environmental racism,” whatever that was. Most impressively, he didn’t own a TV. “I’d rather experience life than watch it on a little box,” he would say. He was horrified by my viewing habits. One night he clicked off the TV and brought me to Red Hook, in Brooklyn, a semidecrepit port where we peered inside old warehouses and climbed the rocks along the shore. “Wasn’t that better than TV, the opiate of the masses?” he demanded as we rode the F train home.
“I thought that was religion,” I said.
“That, too,” he said.
There’s something seductive about the whole crunchy lifestyle, with its scented oils and sexy yoga instructors. I soon fell into step alongside Sean. I may have been glitzy on the weekdays, but on the weekends, when I was shopping organic and writing checks to the Save the Manatee Club, my life was rich with meaning!
Sean’s easy disposition made up for the fact that orders for his illustration work weren’t exactly pouring in, but as he often told me, he didn’t need money to have fun. He would laugh at my careful financial planning, the money charts and graphs that would arrive weekly from my father.
His favorite expressions were “No worries” and “It’s up to you,” which I found refreshing after Ritchie, who hijacked every plan and found my friends “boring.” I thought Sean’s willingness to hand over all decision-making to me was actually a confident move. He was happy to absorb all of my friends as his.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I asked one evening after we had finished a chick-pea-and-cumin concoction. “There are a couple of good movies at Film Forum.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “It’s up to you.”
“Let’s go to a movie, then,” I said, grabbing my purse. “Let’s get a big tub of popcorn and some Sno-Caps, and we’ll sit in the air-conditioning and hold hands.” I had picked up this habit of setting the stage from Heather, who liked to drum up advance excitement before any activity with a vivid picture. Let’s go to the mall, and we’ll sit at the counter at the Neiman Marcus café and have their Confucius chicken salad and iced tea, and then we’ll go buy lip gloss, and try on shoes, and then we’ll walk around the bookstore, oh and then we’ll get ice-cream cones. Maybe Rocky Road. Or, if you’d had a hard day: I know what you should do. Go buy a big pile of guilty-pleasure magazines and some slice-and-bake cookies, then turn off the phone, take a bath, and get in your pj’s. Camp out on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and a big fat blanket and a couple of pillows so you’ll be all cozy. Turn on some soap operas, put the cat in your lap, and then just enjoy yourself and flip through magazines and have some nice, warm cookies.
In a short while I thought of the apartment as Sean’s. Somehow he had managed to physically coat the place with his presence.
Even when he wasn’t around, little piles of organic souvenirs abounded: loamy mounds of discarded socks that still held his foot shape, Fritos-like fingernail clippings, crumpled napkins with a smeary mouth print of lentil soup or vegetarian chili. A light sprinkling of his cast-off chest hair seemed to blanket every object in the place, and he wasn’t even particularly hirsute. He had a habit of lounging around the place nude, which I would have found annoying with anyone else. Instead, I would just shake my head and laugh—proof, I felt, that I was adopting Sean’s freewheeling ways.
After a few months, I felt it was time for him to meet the family. I started by inviting Dinah and Patrick to dinner.
“Why do I have to meet them?” Sean pouted. “I can meet them later.”
“You know from all of the phone calls I get that we’re very close.”
He came over and gave me a hug. “I’d rather have you all to myself,” he said. Was that endearing? Or creepy?
“It’s just one night,” I said.
That Friday, Dinah and Patrick burst in the door in their usual typhoon. She was four months pregnant but had as much energy as ever. “Hi, Sean,” she said, giving him a kiss.
“Hi,” he said, hugging her woodenly.
“Hey, buddy,” said Patrick heartily, vigorously shaking his hand. Patrick was the sort of burly, reliable, self-deprecating guy that most men liked on sight—the one presiding over the barbecue that the kids hang all over because he’s not afraid to be silly—but Sean hung back.
“Cute,” Dinah whispered when he went to the kitchen to check on the tofu Mee Grob that he had made. “He looks like that singer from INXS.” When he returned, Patrick was standing by the window to cool off. A self-described “large, sweaty man,” he was frequently seen at family parties out on the deck, swabbing his face with his ever-present bandanna. Dinah, meanwhile, was unpacking a potted begonia and a candle for me. She always brought gifts. “It’s more money than it needed to be, but I know you love candles,” she said.