Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [59]
I was terrified that if I stayed with Jed I would lose something I wasn’t even sure I had. Focus? Drive? Talent? I can’t concentrate if it’s just gonna be fine and dandy around here all the time. How can anyone think in all this peace and comfort?
I moved in with Jed and got a waitressing gig in Manhattan at a café called Le Gamin on Twenty-first and Ninth, and at the one in SoHo. The owners, Robert and Hervé, were completely bonkers, partiers, fun, super-French—they always took the staff ’s side against a customer. “Get ze ell out of ear. We doan need your bullshit, lady!” They were awesome. I liked to think waitressing at a French place had more, I don’t know what—je ne sais quoi?—than other restaurants. Besides the French owners, there was a cook from Mali and his wife who spoke no English, and many of our regulars were French. People speaking French around me made it less like regular old waitressing. I could be myself there because I felt like everyone who worked there was unhappy and had a good time being that way. Unlike an office atmosphere, where I felt I couldn’t wear something as daring as a bright orange cardigan—ooooh, bright!—at Le Gamin during a heat wave I waitressed in my vintage Betty Grable green bathing suit. The owners seemed to hire people because they were wild and funny and didn’t take any bullshit.
Katharine called me one day and asked if I wanted to be on this late-night TV show she was producing called Last Call. There had been a law passed that it was now legal to be topless in New York State parks, beaches and the subway system. The woman heading up this change called it the top-free movement. The producers of Last Call wanted to do a segment on it and were sitting around trying to figure out who they could get, a normal person, someone who wasn’t in the sex industry, to ride the subway topless.
“My sister will do it,” Katharine said.
“How much?” I said when she called me.
“A hundred and fifty.”
“What? A hundred and fifty. No way. Five hundred.”
“Jean, I’ve got to do this segment as cheaply as possible.”
“You’re my sister. Aren’t you supposed to be pimping me out for the most money possible?”
“I’m also the producer here, Jeanne. Two hundred.”
“Four hundred.”
“Three hundred. Final offer.”
“Done. Oh, I want a bodyguard.” Not that my boobs were going to cause anyone to go insane, but boobs are boobs, you never know.
“Fine. One bodyguard.”
I met my sister and the film crew at the uptown E train at Fiftieth Street. A svelte brunet man ran up to me and waved a small lead pipe in front of my face like a sparkler.
“Hi! I’m Craig! I’m your bodyguard!” and he did a little fancy dance step right there on the platform. I felt so safe. Katharine walked over.
“Hi!”
“Katharine—”
Craig was dancing and jabbing his pipe into the air. Rehearsing. Katharine turned to me.
“Okay, look, I called some bodyguards. No one was available. Craig is awesome. He’s danced for some really good companies.”
“Brother. Fine.”
The shoot went off without too much trouble. We had to duck the New York City police as we didn’t have permits, and we couldn’t film on a train with kids or a train that was too full. But it went fine.
Jed wasn’t too eager for his family to hear about my shenanigans, particularly his grandmother. Jed’s family was so out of the regular work world that his mother, Diane, thought it was adorable that I was a waitress and said to me one day, excitedly, “So do you say, ‘Hi, my name is Jeanne and I’ll be your waitress?’”
These were people who didn’t even ride the subway, let alone without clothes on national television. While Jed’s family lived on Fifth, my parents were living in filth.
One day Dad was going for a run in his neighborhood in his grungy running uniform: holey T-shirt, jogging shorts à la 1971, red-white-and-blue sweatbands on his wrists and also around his head. He was on his corner waiting to cross