Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [13]
We’d play that way for months, and then she’d stop returning my calls, and then she’d start again, telling me how much she needed me, that I was the only guy smart enough to converse with her about the topics she considered important, aware of the fact that if she name-dropped a guy she’d met who’d written for The New Yorker, I’d both know who the guy was and be competitive enough with him to feel jealous. She’d get the satisfaction of having a good conversation and making me feel miserable at the same time.
One night, I went to see her play a gig at some place in Chicago where people played gigs back then; there were a lot of women who’d hung out at the same clubs with Liz Phair and were trying to replicate her success. Because I hated myself, I took a date along. Inevitably, the Crazy Girl saw me from the stage with my date and uncorked some half-thought-out insult toward me. I stood up, shouted, “FUCK YOU!” and stormed out of the theater. My date didn’t appreciate this.
That, I determined, was the last time I’d ever see the Crazy Girl. I didn’t need the hate and the manipulation. Crazy Girls made me tired. They didn’t mix well with Melodramatic Guys.
Soon enough, I met my decidedly not-crazy future wife, and managed to make good on my Crazy Girl abstention vow. A while after that, I got a call from another of the Craziest Girl’s pawns. She’d gone legitimately crazy, he said, and was locked up in a low-security home for Crazy Girls. Right now, he told me, she really needed people from her past to call her and make her feel better. So I did.
We talked for a while, mostly about the poetry she was reading. Finally she asked the question:
“So, are you seeing anybody?”
“I’m getting married next year,” I said.
“Oh, that’s too bad.” She sighed. “I really think that when I get out of here, we can have a chance together.”
My life would have gone very differently if I’d agreed.
The Crazy Girl, in the end, just wants security, love, and a settling of drama. But she lacks the gene that allows her to mellow with age. That’s another reason this type compels: many of us have a deep desire to find something permanent and meaningful in a cruel, dirty, uncertain, and chaotic world, but the Crazy Girl is unable to fulfill that desire. That’s why Billie Jeanne weeping on the floor of the closet struck such a resonant chord. She’d hit existential bottom. We watched as the cruel randomness of the universe enveloped her, and hoped we’d never see those depths ourselves. In the end, most of us want true love, or at least some sort of calm satisfaction instead of turbulent waters. We’d rather be Married by America than weeping in the back of a limo.
What, then, became of Billie Jeanne? I soon found out, along with everyone else. Few things dispirit a professional writer more than getting beaten to the punch by Entertainment Weekly, but there Billie Jeanne was, along with Joe Millionaire’s Evan Marriott and a bunch of people from shows I’d never watched, in a “What Were They Thinking?” feature in the summer of 2008. Oh, Billie Jeanne, you wouldn’t even let me have my scoop! Here’s what she had to say for herself:
“They told us we were gonna be famous, and I had a hell of a run for a while. I got a call from Playboy magazine, and I got a call from Maxim. I was on hold for a Playboy cover, but they did the Women of Starbucks instead. After the show, I moved to LA. I went on some really good auditions, but it wasn’t for me. I came back to New York, where I met my husband.”
The arc started promising. It looked like Billie Jeanne was going to bare all, but the Women of Starbucks usurped her. Then, in another example of the fickleness of celebrity, she