Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [31]
Opening the issue to the page featuring Ken Stinson—man, is he not beautiful—I look at what we’ve listed as his height and weight and remember that he’d given me different numbers than the DMV had listed for him. Ha! I feel a rush of simultaneous redemption and outrage over having been accused of making a mistake when I didn’t.
And then I examine his friend’s quote: “He was a dork, just like the rest of us.” And I know without even having to call Amy back exactly what happened. The slightly scrawny and definitely short Ken Stinson opened up his issue of Absolutely Fabulous, excited to get his ego fed by relishing over his placement in an issue with actual beautiful people when he noted that his height and weight weren’t the figures he gave me. Reading further, he saw his friend’s quote, and, rather than laughing at it the way any person with normal self-esteem would, he got pissed, called the friend to vent, and the friend simply claimed he’d been misquoted.
I call Amy back and explain the “mix-up” about Ken’s weight and height, and assure her that I have the tape with Ken’s old friend’s quote. Even though I know I’m right, I’m semi-hysterical and guilty over Amy’s accusation, kind of like how I always feel like I’ve stolen something whenever I see a sign in a store that says they prosecute shoplifters. And being right while feeling guilty is never a good combination for me.
“If you’d like to avoid these types of exchanges in the future, I’d advise you to tell your clients to be honest when they’re being interviewed, and not pass on the phone numbers of friends they’re not comfortable with speaking on their behalf,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Amy says after a hostile pause. “Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?”
The fact that she’s getting snippy with me, rather than apologizing for accusing me of making mistakes when I hadn’t, pisses me off even more.
“It seems like in this case, you need to be told,” I snap back.
“Jesus Christ,” she says, and just as my blood starts pumping for a real knock-down-drag-out fight, she slams the phone down and I’m left hanging. I’m always so surprised when I get hung up on that I’m usually still holding the phone by like the fifth time that computerized female voice informs me that if I’d like to make a call, I should hang up and try again. I’m tempted to devil-dial Amy right back to yell at her for hanging up on me but part of me knows I’ve just done something terribly wrong.
Everyone who does celebrity journalism knows that personal publicists in Hollywood are insane, and that the important thing is to act like they’re not. Brian told me this on my second day at work, after a publicist called and yelled at me for telling him that the Jim Carrey write-around story I was doing was a cover story, even though I’d never said any such thing. Would you let a crazy woman yelling at you on the bus make you cry? Brian asked at the time, and I shook my head, even though this fictional crazy woman probably would make me cry and anyone who has to ride the bus in L.A. should surely be continuously crying anyway. Tears start to stream out of my eyes, which I don’t really understand, seeing as I’m the one who won this fight.
I decide to pull it together and not go running to Brian and tell him about what a crazy bitch Amy was to me. So I spend the rest of my time at the office that day blasting Kane’s and Linda Lewis’s music from my computer CD player and thinking about how it’s a shame that Amy Baker doesn’t understand how important I am—that I hang out with important British magazine editors and am invited into the homes of extremely famous musicians, even when they’ve already denied the magazine that right.
10
Kane has one of those video camera doorbell things that everyone who makes more than half a million dollars a year in L.A. has, where you look into this black box—which surely distorts your face completely, like a rearview mirror—and the person decides whether or not to let you in. I’m a