by Byron Lane
I leave Kathi’s bedroom and sit back down on one of her Chinese Parisian chairs. I can feel my hair growing by the second. By the minute. By the hour. Sitting, hungry, empty, still not knowing exactly what Kathi Kannon, film icon, really expects of me, still not knowing exactly what I need do to make her happy, what I need to do to keep this job, this suddenly fragile new lifestyle.
Hey, Siri, I need help.
I pull out my phone and see my pathetic reflection in the glass. A push of the home button pulls up the colorful apps, and the cheery designs seem to mock me. I look at my voicemails—three new messages from Dad—all surely deletable. His timing has always been perfect. I call him back.
“Just get rid of whatever you want,” I say.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Nothing matters,” I say, my other hand clutching my keys, my thumb rubbing, squeezing, nearly crushing Mom’s locket.
6
I’m about to lunch with film icon Kathi Kannon and Rita Wesson, a former child actor—Kathi worked with her many times in the early years—now turned go-to crisis publicist for emergency (and celebrity) cases only. She’s actually more like the opposite of a publicist: Her job is to keep her clients out of the press. That straight heartthrob caught with his gay lover—he paid for Rita’s house in Montauk, and you’ll never know he’s a happy queer. That bleached-blond Disney star photographed smoking a joint while driving down Sunset Boulevard—she paid for Rita’s Bentley, and those scandalous pictures will never see the light of day. That beloved Oscar-nominated grandpa accused of embezzling from his charity—he paid for Rita’s newest face, and, well, every mysteriously missing dime is now enthusiastically accounted for.
“Please drive faster, Cockring,” Kathi says.
“Sure,” I say, pushing the gas harder.
Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade.
I’m nervous to meet Rita, sure. But I love an outing. I’m grateful for the few moments in this job where I have a clear objective, a clear task to accomplish. Step one: Drive Kathi to our lunch. Easy. I mean, easy enough. I’m still anxious having to drive her Lexus, the first one I’ve ever been in, much less behind its wheel. I’m careful with her in the car, as I would be if carrying glass, flowers, puppies. I yield to everyone. I let other cars ahead of me at STOP signs. I stop at yellow lights.
“If you stop at one more yellow light, Cockring, you’re fired.”
“You are precious cargo,” I say. “I’m trying to keep you safe and—” I look over and she’s glaring at me. “I mean to say…” I correct myself, “sure, got it!” I nod to her and to myself, reassuring me that clear instruction is good and helpful and an antidote to my floundering, my wondering what on earth to do, what on earth Kathi Kannon wants from me.
The lunch outing plays out exactly as one would imagine—valet parking, escorting Kathi into Katsuya in Brentwood, eyeballs turning toward us, fans looking at her, looking at me. We pass through the glass doors and there’s Rita, in leather pants and hair that only looks so perfect when it’s treated to a blowout at least three times a week. That producer accused of peddling child porn—he pays for her hair care.
Kathi and Rita make eye contact and are drawn together like magnets, Rita awkwardly complimenting Kathi’s figure and Kathi curiously observing Rita’s hair, pinching a clump of it between her fingers and mumbling something through gritted teeth like, Don’t you look pretty.
I’m waiting for my moment to be introduced to Rita when the Katsuya hostess gets my attention. “May I help you?” she asks kindly, unfazed by the mini-spectacle brought on by our entourage convening before her.
“Table for three, please,” I say. The hostess looks down at her iPad and starts tapping away, entering numbers and swiping to reveal a map of tables, the layout of the bar, and, finally, a lower-level area with a few booths.
Kathi reaches out and grabs my forearm, softly squeezing it—squeezing it or wiping her hand on it, who can be sure. “It’ll just be a table for two, Cockring,” Kathi says to me, her other arm still entwined with the lovely Rita’s.
The math is brutal—a subtraction, a cut. And the one severed is mercilessly me.
“Right, of course,” I say, blushing, learning my place in a painfully hot instant. I turn back to the hostess, shrugging like it’s something that happens all the time, me being surgically excised from a lunch that has been living its life as an elaborate fantasy in my mind over the last twenty-four hours, now dead in a fraction of a second.
The hostess turns to Kathi and Rita; I no longer exist. “This way, ladies,” she says pointedly, the air from her movement toward them blowing my hair back like a fart scene in a campy comedy. She leads Kathi and Rita to their subterranean table, this entitled hostess, her perfume mixing with the smell of the sushi and my humiliation. My stomach growls as I look down at the coral-colored valet ticket still in my hand, that ticket to an event that will never come.
PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS DISAPPOINT YOU! I hear my father yelling, the same way he yelled it on the soccer field when I was a kid, not to me but to my teammates, while pointing to me and teaching the other boys that I was their weak link. That I was the person who would always let them down. That I was the reason we lost the game, that I was the disappointment, that they couldn’t count on me to move the ball up the field. And yet is he right? Just as I constantly disappointed him and my teammates, do I disappoint Kathi Kannon? Is this our human curse, all of us forced to share a planet and none of us satisfying one another? I wish to prove my father wrong, to prove that there is an order to this chaos. Therapista says I only need to prove it to myself.
I step outside the restaurant and take a seat near the valet stand, on a wood bench that looks as out of place as it is uncomfortable. I imagine some designer architect balking at it, screaming, What is that doing here outside of my beautiful restaurant?! I don’t care if people need a place to sit! Tell them to go eat at Wendy’s!
I make eye contact with a young woman sitting beside me and I force a smile, wondering if she’s judging me, if she saw my recent rejection, if she’s going to ask me about Kathi and Rita and my new, fancy life.
“You must be Charlie,” she says, in her bright-yellow tank top and black leather pants, shockingly similar to the ones Rita is wearing. I give her a look up and down, racking my brain to figure out her identity, when she catches me staring. “Oh … yeah, these pants. Such an awkward coincidence. Rita bought two sizes of these and this pair didn’t fit her, so she gave them to me. When I showed up to take her to lunch today, she was wearing hers but there was no time for us to change, so we’re kinda twins. Sick, right? Hi! I’m Jasmine. I’m Rita’s assistant.”
“Oh,” I say, pulling myself together, wiping oil off my forehead, arching my shoulders so my anxiety back-sweat doesn’t wick onto my shirt.
“You and I emailed about setting up this lunch today,” Jasmine says, almost mockingly.
“Yeah, of course. Nice to meet you.”
“Did you think you were having lunch with the two of them?”
I look at her with intent, irritation that she would bring up my embarrassing moment, a spoil that now makes it impossible to pretend it never happened.
“Just now,” Jasmine continues, almost belligerently, “I thought I heard you ask the hostess for a table for three and then Kathi said two—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, defeated. “You heard correctly. You are accurate. Yeah. I was cut out at the last moment.”
“You were always cut out. You just realized it at the last moment,” Jasmine says. “I can tell you’re new. How’s it going?”
“Great. Fine. Yeah,” I say, wondering if she can read that lie on my face, too. “It’s just, I’m mostly in a stasis of constantly asking, What’s happening?”
“When I first started, I went to Rita’s closet to start cleaning. I was taking initiative, you know? And she had all this shit in there, like dusty old garbage, a
disgusting backpack, like homeless-people shit. I started unpacking the backpack and found filthy clothes and candy wrappers and ticket stubs for Burning Man—I figured she must have gone and not wanted to deal with the mess so she just stuffed the dirty bag in her huge closet. So I emptied the bag, sorted it all out, put the junk in a trash bag, and was about to throw it out and wash the clothes when Rita stopped me. The bag belonged to her dead brother. He passed away a few months after he went to Burning Man, and this was the bag he took there. It was like a time capsule of a treasured life and I was about to destroy it! Thank God she stopped me.” Jasmine shakes her head, reliving the moment. “It happens. We don’t know what to do so we do what we think is best and it’s a fatal error. Having initiative can be deadly.”
I drop my face into my hands. “Yes! I feel like I’m the boss to my boss and no one is managing me. And then I get a job review and I’m sucking at it, but all the job responsibilities seem written in invisible ink in a notebook that no one can find.” I look back up at Jasmine. “I’m like Alice in Blunderland.”
Jasmine smiles and shimmies her head so her bangs reset perfectly. “You’ll get the hang of it. This job is mostly crushing humiliation and, based on what happened with the hostess back there, it looks like you’re able to handle that just fine.”
I’m now feeling the sharp edges of the bench cutting into my thigh, marking my skin red with the pattern of my jeans, wishing that the elitist restaurant architect had conceded to putting a designer bench out here, one that’s more comfortable than the one I’m resting upon right now.
“The job, I love it. And I hate it,” I say, quickly adding, “Sometimes! I only hate it sometimes. And hate is the wrong word. I mean, I always love it and sometimes it’s … tricky. You know?”
Jasmine’s eyebrows rise. I can’t tell if she’s busting me—ready to tell on me, throw me under the bus to advance her own standing with her boss and mine—or if she’s just heard me utter some kind of red flag.
“You love it and you hate it?” Jasmine asks.
“Don’t you?”
“I think you’re ready,” she says.
“Ready for what?”
“We all know how you feel,” she says.
“We?” I ask, as if interrogating her, as if my worst fears are confirmed and I’m on camera, on a reality show broadcasting my many mistakes to a laughing world audience.
“We, as in other assistants,” Jasmine says.
“What, is there, like, a celebrity-assistant union or something?”
“No! A union? Don’t be ridiculous.” She leans in close to me. “It’s more like a secret club.”
I smile, warmed with a hope that I’ve found a tribe, a team, a tether to which I can cling and find answers and guidance. I flick the valet ticket between my fingers as if it’s a winning card at a casino, like it’s an ace and I’m the coolest of guys, about to slap it down on the poker table and clean house.
I say, “Tell me everything.”
* * *
Mother. Fucking. Bruce. I see his perfectly shaped haircut from afar and regretfully recognize it instantly. I’m standing outside a bar on Melrose called the Village Scribe and can see him through the windows—that broad back, that dark hair, that unmistakable fade. First I thought it could be a mirage, someone else, what are the odds he’s here? But then, the math. I’m here to meet Jasmine. I’m here to meet her Assistants Club. And, who could forget, Bruce is an assistant, an executive assistant, to be exact.
Bruce turns to see me enter just as I check my fly to make sure it’s zipped up.
“Hey, baby!” he yells. “Your dick okay in there?”
“Thank you, yes.”
“So you know Jasmine?”
“Yeah. Are you in—I don’t know what you call it? Do you call it an assistants club?”
“I call it the ‘network the fuck out of your life day and night so you can get ahead, because it’s proven the more you work the net, bro, the more options you have to slip and slide into that big-money office’ club.”
“God,” I say disgustedly, aloud, uncontrollably. “Been promoted yet?”
“Not yet, baby,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here if I was. Soon, though. Meantime, welcome to work drinks.”
“Welcome to what?” I ask.
“Work drinks. It’s basically networking and comparing cock sizes, but no one wants to call it that. And it’s better than calling it just ‘drinks,’ because that could imply it’s a date, which it’s not, although, who are we kidding, we’re all young and horny, right?”
“Yes. All of us. Right. Definitely,” I say, my body stiffening with anxiety.
“Get you a drink, Frodo?”
“Please call me Charlie.”
“Oh, shit. Nicknames not your thing? You might be in the wrong business.”
“Where’s Jasmine?” I ask.
“They’re all in the back,” he says. “I’m just getting a drink. What can I get you? Dignity? Integrity? What do you need? Intelligence? Looks like you could use some self-respect?”
“Bruce, screw you, okay—” I start to walk away, and he grabs my shoulder.
“What, what?” he says. “Those are the drink names.” He points to a chalkboard of overpriced libations with, sure enough, names like Self-Esteem and Awareness.
“What’s your poison?” he asks.
I look up at the options, and say, “Truth.” It’s a pineapple-and-rum drink with grenadine, a splash of soda water, and a very gay cherry on top. Apropos.
Bruce raises his hand. “Yo!” he yells, the bartender turning to him instantly, smiling and rushing over. Beautiful people have it so easy. “Truth!” he shouts, and the bartender nods and gets to work.
Every time I try to order a drink at a bar, I have to wait at least twenty minutes, sweating it out over whether someone is going to cut in front of me, forcing me to suck it up or, sometimes, to abandon that spot in agonizing defeat and go to another part of the bar and start all over. My greatest fear is I’ll stand up for myself and yell, “I’m next!” and then get beaten up. But, Bruce thrives with utter ease, endless confidence. I hate him.
Moments later, Truth in hand, I’m heading through a crowd of drunks, Bruce leading the way and turning back to me now and then to fill me in: “The so-called Assistants Club is less a club and more like an endless email chain,” Bruce says. “It’s basically like thirty or forty email forwards in front of the subject line, because whenever an assistant sends some request, everyone just replies to the same old thread.”
“What do you email about?”
“Whatever you need, bro. Like, ‘Any recommendations for a high-end stereo-system tech?’ Or, ‘Who do you guys use for at-home tailoring?’ Or, ‘Where’s the best spot for an abortion?’ You get it. The email chain dates back years—a veritable Yelp for the best colonics, caterers, cocaine. Everyone’s on it, new assistants, old assistants, dead assistants.”
I stumble my way past a table of drunk Hollywood types—a lady wearing sunglasses inside, a man wearing a scarf with a short-sleeve T-shirt.
“Yesterday,” Bruce says, “I opened my email to one that read, ‘Who wants to have work drinks with Kathi Kannon’s new assistant?’ I was like, Yeah, my boy!”
We pass the kitchen, the bathrooms, and slip into a back room decorated with black fabric walls and polished brass sconces casting a golden glow upon everyone inside. The crowd is waist deep in conversation and neck-high in alcohol.
“Time to revel,” Bruce says, putting his arm around me, spilling some of his drink on my pants. “Time to recover from the salacious thing that binds us, the common thread that links all of us together, which is not so much having famous or powerful bosses but being fucked by them every day, amirite?!”
“What?” I ask, wiggling out of his half hug.
“Not literally—” he starts, his face turning sour that I’m not following his every bro-ism.
“Baby!” Jasmine yells, approaching me from behind. �
��Don’t talk to Bruce too long. You know, he’s an executive assistant, so he thinks he’s better than you. Come.” She pulls me from him. He waves goodbye easily, knowing I’ll be back, that he’s curated himself an orbit. Beautiful people, they’re never really alone. Truth.
“Who needs him anyway,” she says, she lies.
“Yeah. Him and his talk about silt and all that, right?”
“What the fuck is silt?” Jasmine asks.
“Oh. Oh, nothing.”
Jasmine takes me to the only corner of the room—the other walls are rounded—leaving us at the point of a teardrop. We sit on a crushed-velvet oversized sofa, crushed by what—big Hollywood deals, first loves, breakups? We’re shoulder to shoulder as she whispers into my ear all the dirty details of the many members of this secret club, zeroing in on her targets like a sniper and popping off shots of critical information about each assistant and, more important, about each assistant’s employer. Jasmine points brazenly to this one and that: a guy carrying two drinks, a woman with an Hermès scarf, a bro in a suit jacket with shorts. She flicks her hands and rolls her eyes, commenting on each of them while they’re just feet away, though it could be inches—it doesn’t matter; they’re all in their own networking universe.
“That’s West,” Jasmine says, pointing to a dowdy brunette wearing a man’s sport coat and nursing a flute of champagne. Her body is actually shaped a bit like a W, her torso thick and her arms long and thin. “Her boss is an iconic singer with an even more famous drinking problem. And this singer, she actually hired an assistant on each coast, but she can’t remember their names so she just calls them East and West. West loves being a posh assistant. She only drinks champagne. She’s a lifer.”
