by Karyn Bosnak
On Friday, I received an e-mail from the Howard Stern Show asking me to be a guest. Anyone’s initial response would be yes, but I didn’t want to. For one, they wanted me to come into the studio, which I didn’t want to do because I was anonymous. And I know that they tape all the shows to air on E! When I said no, they offered to “mask my face” with a hockey mask. Seriously. They still wanted me to be a guest, E! would still tape it, but my face would be covered with a mask. Like Jason from Friday the 13th. I had to decline. They finally agreed to allow me to call in, but changed their mind after I refused to give them my phone number. I didn’t want it to end up on air. I didn’t want them to do a search and say my first and last name or something. So that was it. Oh well.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Tonight I scored on my neighbor’s tomato plants. Just as I suspected, he was growing too many tomatoes for one guy to eat, and brought some over. They were good. All you need is a little salt, and you got yourself a meal! (See Friday, July 12th’s Daily Buck for the story behind the tomatoes.)
Everything seemed to be going great. Until it happened.
Beep, beep, beep, and nothing. My computer went blank. I pushed the Start button.
Beep, beep, beep, and nothing. It wouldn’t turn on. I pushed the button again.
Beep, beep, beep, and nothing. The screen stayed black.
Yes, it seemed that Claire had bitten the dust. Two days before the Sunday New York Times article was going to be published, good ole Claire died. In a panic, I ran over to Allan and Diane’s apartment to borrow their phone book.
“My computer died,” I said. “I need to find a computer fix-it place.” By now, I had explained to them what was going on. I had to tell after the New York Post article, I loved it so much.
Allan pulled out his phone book and lent it to me. After searching through it, I found a place to call that said they had weekend hours. Since it was almost 10 P.M., I decided to call in the morning.
ON SATURDAY, I woke up and called the computer place. An answering service took my phone number and said someone would call me back in about an hour. Because I was getting antsy waiting, I decided to run to Pack-Man and pick up my mail. When I got there, Pack-Man was proudly holding up his New York Post opened to the article about the website.
“So, Save Karyn…,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I replied. “It’s a secret, though, so you can’t say anything.”
“I won’t,” he said. “But you have to sign my copy.”
“Okay!” I said. Cool. My first autograph! When I was done, I opened my box, and lo and behold, Pack-Man had jammed forty-six letters into my PMB! I quickly gathered them up and took them home.
The computer dude still hadn’t called, so I opened up all my letters. After reading them all, and adding the money up, I’d received $285 that week alone! Not even including the PayPal money! One woman gave me a $100 bill, with a note that said “Hope this helps! Never buy retail!” When I was done the phone rang.
“Hi, is Karyn there?” a man’s voice said.
“This is,” I said.
“Hi, this is Steve. You called about a computer?” he said.
“Yeah, my computer won’t turn on. It’s just making these beeping noises,” I said.
“Beeping like a long beep, like a ‘beeeeeeep’?” he asked.
“No, more like a ‘beep beep beep,’” I responded.
“And you’ve tried to reboot it and turn it on?” he asked.
“Yes, but nothing is happening,” he said.
“Sounds like I’m gonna need to take a look at it,” he said.
I wrote down the address of the place Steve told me to meet him at, grabbed Claire, and headed out the door. He told me that it was going to be about $90, plus the amount of any parts he had to buy to fix her. Luckily, I had the money in my checking account. It was for my rent, but I had it. About forty-five minutes later, I arrived at a midtown building and waited for Steve to show up. A few minutes later, he did, with a woman.
“This is my cousin,” he said. “We were just eating lunch.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, I’m on call,” he replied. “It’s okay.”
I followed Steve and his cousin into the building, and after checking in with security we took an elevator to the offices on the twentieth floor. Steve was probably in his thirties and was incredibly friendly. Quiet, but friendly. His cousin was a woman in her fifties. Steve took Claire into a special room to work his magic and I hung out with his cousin and talked.
After about an hour, Steve delivered the terrible news: Claire had indeed passed. The day before the New York Times story was scheduled to run, with a few thousand e-mails inside of her, she died. She was only a year old too. Just a young comp.
Of course I, the eternal crier, cried because I had so much stuff on my hard drive. When Steve asked me what was wrong, I told him the story of the website, and the New York Times, and how Claire had all sorts of stuff inside of her belly. I needed that computer to update my website, to check my e-mail—for everything. And I definitely couldn’t afford a new one.
“Well, I can probably retrieve most of the hard drive for you,” he said.
“How much is that going to cost?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not going to charge you for today either. People need to help each other out in this world.” I cried again.
How nice was that? For the next hour, I waited as Steve sewed Claire back up and put all her screws back where they belonged. All the while I talked to his cousin. We had a nice conversation about debt.
The following day, the New York Times article came out both in print and online. And of all the stories in the whole paper, the story about my website was the fourth most e-mailed story of the day by Monday. The story also came out in the Sunday Herald Sun in Australia. Allan and Diane offered to pay for a new laptop for me until I could afford to pay them back. That Sunday, I was so emotional because I felt so grateful and indebted to all these people, from Steve the computer guy to Allan and Diane to all the people who gave me money. I felt very lucky.
That week, I received 40,493 hits and $617. I received over one thousand e-mails. On Scott’s computer, I did my weekly update and wrote all about Claire’s passing. But I think there was a reason for why it happened. I wrote the following in my weekly update:
You know I’ve heard the saying “Things happen for a reason” before, and today as I dropped Claire off at Steve’s I think I know why Claire went kaput. While at Steve’s, I met his cousin, a woman in her 50s. We talked for a good two hours, and couldn’t be more different. She has been married, is now separated, has two kids, etc. We got to talking and I told her about the website and why Claire is so important to me right now.
The woman proceeded to tell me that she too has debt. At one point she said she owed $35,000 to about 20 credit card companies. She too joined a credit counseling service, and it’s actually the same one that I belong to. She said now that her children are grown, she wants to go back to school, but feels like she can’t get on with her life until her debt is paid off. Debt has paralyzed her and is preventing her from moving forward and that is bad.
I think if I take anything away from this website ASIDE from the money, I hope that it’s the understanding that we all make mistakes in life. Some mistakes are big, some are little, but no matter the size, they can paralyze your life, make you feel not worthy, and can stop you from living. I’m not going to let my mistakes do that to me. There comes a point when you need to forgive yourself from the stupid mistakes that you make, and today with the help of that woman, I forgave myself. I think Claire went kaput because I needed that woman, and she needed me.
So ’til next week, forgive someone who did you wrong, apologize to someone you did wrong, and quit being so hard on yourself for doing yourself wrong. Peace.
Once again, I believed what I wrote. Just a few days prior to this, I was feeling like the person be
hind the website wasn’t the person that people expected her to be. I began to realize that I was wrong.
People liked my website because they liked what I said. It was only a bunch of words. It didn’t have a fancy outfit to hide behind, or Gucci purse to make it seem cooler than it was. It was a cheap low-budget website that made people laugh. I made people laugh. I wasn’t “Karyn the girl with the cool lip gloss and highlights” or “Karyn the producer with the cute clothes.” I was becoming “Karyn the funny girl with lots of crazy shit running through her head” and “Karyn the emotional wreck with very human flaws and humorous view of the world.” I was really revealing myself, and people were accepting me for who I was. I put all my words and thoughts out for others to see, and they were accepting them. I’d moved to New York to figure out who I was, and I was slowly figuring that out through this website.
$18,431.05 TOTAL DEBT July 21, 2002
-$100.00 my money
-$617.51 your money
-$156.00 eBay sales
$17,557.54 TOTAL DEBT July 28, 2002—WEEK 5
SIXTEEN
THE DAILY Me-MAIL
E-MAILS TO ME ABOUT ME—UPDATED DAILY!
DATE: August 6, 2002
FROM: Matthew and Victor
TO: Karyn
SUBJECT: I’ll send money
Dear Karyn,
I am sending this all the way from Down Under, if ya put a picture of your breasts on your website I’ll send ya $50.00 and a pet kangaroo.
Regards,
Matthew and Victor
FROM: Karyn
TO: Matthew and Victor
SUBJECT: Re: I’ll send money
Dear Matthew and Victor,
While the idea of receiving $50 excites me, I am going to have to pass on the offer to “show you my breasts.” However, I do want to applaud you on your choice of words. You see, I’ve received numerous requests to see my “tits,” “jugs,” “boobies,” “hooters,” “rack” and “bazoombas.” If I were going to show my breasts to anyone, it would be you two nice boys from Down Under, because of your fine choice of words. So kudos to you! And in regards to the kangaroo…I’d LOVE to have a pet kangaroo, but I’ve had a talk with the cat and he says it’s a no-go.
Karyn
WEEK 6: NOT EVERYONE WANTED TO SAVE KARYN
I should have realized that the death of Claire was an indication that things were about to change. First of all, I lost my job. Yep. It ended on Friday. The Dog Days series finale, Cherry and Atticus’s doggie wedding, was finally edited and Randy and I were out of a job. From engagement-collar shopping, to the proposal on the Brooklyn Bridge, to finding a place to have the wedding, to the $1,200 Elizabethan wedding dress, to picking a doggie maid of honor and doggie best man, to the ceremony, to the honeymoon at the Loews’s Regency Hotel—it was finished. Yes, that was my job. It was supposed to go another week, and then there was talk about moving me to another project, but it ended early and that second project didn’t happen. And I found all of this out two days before my last day.
So in addition to all of the excitement of the previous week, I had also been looking for a job on Thursday and Friday. I didn’t want to file for unemployment because I wasn’t sure if what I was doing would be considered income, so I started doing random things to make some cash. My friend Judi the psychic (she really is a psychic—a celebrity psychic) was having a séance to bring Marilyn Monroe back from the dead at an ice cream shop called Serendipity 3 on Friday, which was the twentieth anniversary of her death. It was also twenty-five years after Elvis died and she was going to try to talk to him too. There was a Marilyn look-alike contest planned and everything. But any who, she asked me to do a bit of publicity work for her, so I did and made some extra cash.
It was actually kind of good to be home, though, because I had a lot going on with my website. I used Scott’s computer until Allan and Diane bought the new one. And every day there was more traffic, more e-mails, and more interview requests. I got television requests from CNN and CNNfn, but only agreed to be a call-in guest. I also started getting a lot more international requests from journalists all over Europe.
The nature of the rest of the e-mails stayed the same. Every time I’d open a nice one, I’d get a mean one.
“You’re brilliant! I wish I thought of this!”
“You are so fucking stupid! You idiotic moron!”
“You go girl! I’m rooting for you!”
“How dare you make a website like this!”
Then I opened some more…
“I’m going to call the FBI on you!”
“I can’t wait until you go to jail for fraud!”
“You should be arrested because what you are doing is illegal!”
And then another one…
“I’m a producer for a film company in LA and am wondering if you’ve sold the movie rights to your story?”
Another movie company! It was like a roller coaster! And the truth was, I still wasn’t sure if it was legal. A ton of attorneys gave me free advice and told me that I was fine, but I was still kind of nervous. One day I ran to the corner store to get something to eat, and when I came out there was police car parked outside my apartment and I was sure they were there to arrest me. So I waited around the corner for forty-five minutes until I realized they were just “hanging out.”
I also finally made a decision that week about the checks I received. Most of them were made payable to just “Karyn” so I just wrote in my last name. I didn’t know if that was legal either, but since the doctor’s office always wrote in their name, I didn’t see the harm. And I thought that if someone liked me enough to send me money, then I doubted they would out me.
On Wednesday, I met with my friend Jodi the agent again, but this time about a possible job for a style show on cable. I didn’t know what was going to happen with my website, and if all the hype died down the following week, I wanted to be prepared.
When I left Jodi’s, the reporter from the New York Post called again because they were going to do a follow-up story about the site the next day. Apparently, someone created a website called Savekarynnot.com, which discouraged people from donating to me, encouraging them instead to give to charity. She asked me what I thought about it, and since I hadn’t seen the website I said it sounded like a lovely idea because it raised money for charity. How could it not be? After I hung up, I ran some errands and ate.
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
I’m trying to get my life on track, so today I went to a grocery store that I recently bounced a check at to “make good on the money.” I didn’t bounce the check on purpose. When I wrote the check I actually had money in the account. But when the check got to my bank, that money was gone. Oops. I thought their bank would send the check through twice, like the phone company does when you bounce their checks. But they didn’t, so I had to go and find out how to make good on the money.
While at the grocery store, I decided to partake in the free samples, and counted it as dinner. I had bread, olive oil, cheese, and a small piece of a deli sandwich. While at the deli counter, I asked if I could sample a few salads as well. I opted for the vegetable salads because aside from my neighbor’s tomatoes, I haven’t eaten any veggies in a while. The salads were good, but I pretended that I didn’t like them so I wouldn’t have to buy any.
NOTE: I do not make a habit of bouncing checks. I do not owe anyone else any money anywhere for a bounced check. It was an accident.
Later that night, while reading more e-mails, I opened one that said “You’ve hit the Midwest!” in the subject line. I clicked it.
I just read about your story in the Chicago Tribune and want to tell you that I know how you feel.
Chicago Tribune? Oh my gosh! My dad! I still hadn’t told my dad and the story ran in Chicago! I knew that he preferred to read the Chicago Sun-Times over the Tribune, but what if for some reason he read the Tribune that day? I had to call him. I had to tell him before someone else did. After procrastinating,
I finally called him later that evening.
“Dad?” I said when he answered.
“Honey!” he said.
“Hi!” I said. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” he said. We continued to talk for a bit because I was nervous about telling him. It wasn’t just the “I owe $20,000” part that was difficult. On top of that, I had to add, “And I have this crazy website.” Finally, after about five minutes, I spit it out.
“I have to tell you something,” I said quickly.
“What?” he said, realizing I was serious.
“It’s a secret,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“This is kinda weird…,” I said. “Um…I owe some money to some credit card companies. But before I tell you how much I want to tell you that I think it’s going to be paid off soon. So I don’t want you to worry.”
“Okay,” he said, a little leery. “How much money?”
“I don’t want to tell you yet,” I said. “Basically I owed all this money, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I got creative and made this website.”
“What kind of website?” he asked.
