Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  “All the same,” I practically spit, “I wish I didn’t have such a clear picture of my dad’s dick in my mind. He was blind. We were not.”

  The therapist looks a little taken aback, but she asks me to continue.

  “Was your father ever sexual with you?”

  “Oh my God, no!” I say.

  But, I confess, there was always that sexualized electricity in the house—where that energy just seemed to be swirling around him. Maybe it was the women he flirted with, who always seemed to be so enraptured by the alpha-war-hero energy he put out. I remember one woman who would call our house frequently, and when I answered in my clearly teenage voice, she would speak breathlessly, as if she was in the middle of masturbating, and simply say, “Jerrrrrrry.”

  I hated her so much. “YOU WANT TO TALK TO MY DAD?” I’d say, my voice pinched with anger. “IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?”

  Cheating happened early in my parents’ marriage. My dad would always employ various “readers” to help with his paperwork, and, as my mom candidly told me, one time a reader was doing a lot more than reading. My mom heard the sound of my dad’s belt unbuckle. My mother went in, mortified. My father said, “We weren’t going to have sex.”

  This all happened in what was to be my room—before I was born.

  “So you have resentment against your father,” the therapist says.

  “No,” I say. “Yes. I don’t know. Sometimes. The resentment is muted out by overwhelming love. Does that make any sense?”

  As I grew older, I could feel the way my dad’s friends looked at me without my father’s knowledge. At the LA premiere for a documentary my dad was featured in called Vietnam, Long Time Coming, one of the high-ranking officers talking to my father began stroking his finger slowly along my shoulder blade as my dad stood there, continuing to tell his stories, grinning and rhapsodizing, with no idea what was happening.

  Even earlier at that same movie screening, a woman got up to speak after the movie, and since it was a pretty heavy film about disabled veterans, she figured she would tell a lighthearted anecdote to cut the tension. In front of this packed auditorium, which included me and my eighty-something-year-old great-aunt, she smiled and proceeded.

  “To lighten the mood,” the attractive woman said, laughing, “I’ll tell you what Jerry Stadtmiller told me right before the plane took off from LA to Vietnam. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t feel too sorry for me. I’ve got a fourteen-inch cock.’ ”

  I slunk down into my seat, so embarrassed.

  When my father, who became a licensed massage therapist during one of his many careers, told me as a teenager that he could no longer give me massages because his shrink had told him it was “inappropriate,” I felt ashamed. I know it wasn’t his intention—my dad was simply doing the responsible thing. But everything was always so confusing. I was bad? I was inappropriate? I was sexually desirable? Why was he giving me massages in the first place? Why was he telling me any of this?

  Let me be crystal clear right now, as I was with my therapist: My father never did anything unseemly with me—ever. Both my parents are wonderful human beings. But there were things lacking in my childhood—namely, boundaries. They were raised with none themselves. It makes sense, in a way.

  “Do you still talk to your parents?” the therapist asks me.

  Every once in a while, I tell her, but our calls usually go something like this . . .

  Me to my mom: “A doctor told me I was anorexic.”

  Mom: “Well, Jane Fonda was anorexic her whole life, and she was a successful actress.”

  Me to my dad: “I think I may have a drinking problem.”

  Dad: “I find having a drink at the end of the day really takes the edge off.”

  They don’t read any of my stories in the Post, and when I try to talk to them about it—about what it’s like to have to write a cover story in under an hour that the entire city will be reading the next day and how much pressure that is, my dad responds by bringing up a really great email he wrote someone recently.

  I feel so dismissed when they act like this. I don’t feel cared for or nurtured or seen.

  Moods and loyalties changed often with my parents growing up, and they still do. Like unwitting practitioners of the 48 Laws of Power, my parents embodied Rule 17 to a T: “Keep others in suspended terror: Cultivate an air of unpredictability.”

  Because there was no status quo in our home.

  When my dad first received his Purple Heart, he threw it in the trash. Twenty years later, he became active with veterans’ groups and reversed course, getting a new one to display at home. One week we were religious (my sister was born on a day my dad was feeling Catholic, so she was baptized at birth). The next we didn’t go to church anymore.

  Years later, on another religious upswing, my parents decided on a nice Lutheran church, and at eight, I was excited to finally be saved. In fact, I so couldn’t wait to be the embodiment of a good Christian congregant, I signed up to be an altar girl. On Christmas Day—the most important Mass of the year—I stood in front of the entire church, and when I couldn’t get my oversize altar girl lighter to work, I just stood there, paralyzed and weeping, until I was pulled off the stage, Catholic Gong Show style.

  During the sermon that night, the pastor bellowed, “I think we can all say we’re grateful for little Amanda, the altar girl who tried so hard to light the candles tonight.”

  After the service, my dad took me aside and congratulated me.

  “Look at it this way,” he said, laughing. “Pastor Dave only mentioned three people in his sermon tonight: Jesus, Mary, and little altar girl Amanda.”

  I laughed, too, and this lesson registered in my brain: Laughing at pain meant you didn’t have to deal with it. When everything was wrecked, nothing was. When the worst had happened, the worst was over.

  “So, you use humor,” the therapist observes. “Humor is deflection.”

  I can feel the rage boiling up inside of me. This always happens with therapists. Because I can’t take looking at it—any of it. My childhood makes me feel so many toxic and conflicting emotions, it overwhelms me. It causes me to shut down. It makes me want to drink. It makes me want to overeat. It makes me want to fuck.

  After I am quiet for some time, the therapist changes the topic. She brings up the subject of the New York Post, where she saw I put down that I worked in my inventory.

  “Does that mean you agree with its politics?” she asks.

  I hesitate, looking at her. What?

  “No,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’m a liberal.”

  “Oh good,” she says, and I hate that. So much. If I were a conservative, would I be less deserving of her help?

  “Now, how many alcoholic blackouts have you had again?” she asks.

  I don’t need this shit, I think. I never see her again.

  * * *

  AS A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD woman, I am all about laughing at pain.

  I do not want to look inside myself while working at the Post, so instead I look everywhere else. Every day is not only heart-racing (“You’re going to the Dakota because Jared Leto is re-creating John Lennon’s murder—get reaction!”), it is also the most fun at a job I’ve ever had.

  You want extremely dark comedy to get through crushing pain? Working at a tabloid, you have it in spades. “Oh yeah, I think I just felt another egg die,” one female reporter would joke. Another would go darker still, with the line, “Don’t worry, you’ll be spared”—meaning, if someone comes back for a shooting spree. “Best to get a picture of you on file,” one editor suggested, “in case you die or something.”

  It is honestly the perfect place for me.

  So many share the same wonderfully warped sense of humor befitting a city as warped as New York. The closest I’ve ever seen to anything capturing the pitch-black, anything-goes barbs is in the most brutally funny episodes of Veep. When daily suffering is coming at you nonstop just by virtue of the daily suffering of the n
ews cycle, you either laugh or you cry. We choose to laugh. A lot.

  Mackenzie emails me helpful updates about how many times the word perv and the word fiend have been used in Post headlines as the year progresses. (In case you’re wondering, in 2006, there were 271 instances of perv, and fiend took the lead at 283.) When things are feeling scary, Mackenzie and I counteract our fear by going even more gallows, theorizing as to “who is going to finally murder me” among all the unsavory characters I either date or do stories about (like the former pimp who tells me that in every situation there is a pimp and a ho—and I make a point of implying that he is the ho in my story). Our conjecture is further supported by handwritten letters I get sent from prison, and some sweeter ones, like the one from the trucker who asks me for a picture, because the one he put up in his truck has faded with sunlight.

  I and my closest friends at the Post develop a language all our own (sometimes writing Ibsen-like non sequitur Post headlines when we shoot emails to each other, like “Sex Perv Fiend Tragic Tot Mom Slay?”).

  Other Post friends teach me “gossip math”—Paula Froelich, specifically, is so helpful. (She also writes about it in her excellent book It! if you want to go deeper.) The lessons include:

  1. “Two items for a favor.” Meaning, if you want a shout-out for your event or client or whatever, you best have “paid your rent” in passing on some juicy dirt to help Page Six out first.

  2. “Don’t try to sell a favor as a scoop.” Meaning, if you are a reporter or a publicist, don’t try to pretend a plug or an item that benefits you is somehow really benefiting the Page, and that you’re doing them a favor. Nope. This is also known as “don’t bullshit a bullshitter.” (In discussing this principle one night with the Post’s much-storied columnist Steve Dunleavy, he suggests another good gossip corollary: Be incredibly careful with the assistant staff. Or as Dunleavy phrased it—with far more linguistic flair: “Never lose a number, kid. Because today’s junior cocksucker is tomorrow’s senior motherfucker.”)

  3. Last, and most crucial of all: “Do not ever double-pitch.” Meaning, only pass along exclusive info to one publication. If you double-pitch a story and both newspapers end up using it, you will be blacklisted—sometimes for life.

  Equipped now with a knowledge of how the gossip game works, after writing a piece declaring that we are currently living in “The Golden Age of the Insult,” I decide to request a press pass for the William Shatner roast in LA. I can’t exactly write another story, since I’ve already covered the topic in the paper, but I might be able to submit a gossip item and get it published, which would validate the trip beyond mere stargazing from the sidelines. There’s just one problem, though: I’ve never even had a proper introduction to Page Six editor Richard Johnson, and I know he’s far too important to be bothered by some lowly features writer like me. But I still decide to go for it—nervous, stumbling, and overthinking—cold-emailing him like a slavish, wide-eyed farm girl, asking essentially: Dear Mr. Johnson, if I were to file a gossip item, do you think you would, um, maybe, possibly, pretty please consider using it, I’m so sorry and thank you so much? I don’t quite realize how out of my depth I am in contacting the man who helps puppet-master the entire gossip stratosphere. So of course, Richard ignores my first email. And . . . my second one, too. But finally, after one last note, I somehow manage to sound slightly less like a malfunctioning robot, and he responds to say yes, he will use something I file if it’s good.

  I cannot believe my luck. I am so psyched.

  When I’m finally out in Studio City, cattle call–style checking in at the not-glamorous-at-all asphalt-covered CBS lot where the roast is held, I get to experience firsthand all the celebrity-gossip sausage being slung. Cordoned off with the rest of the braying media zoo behind the constructed-that-day red-carpet step-and-repeat, my eye is immediately drawn to the painfully high-def smears of peach-, chocolate- and vanilla-colored makeup melting on the faces of minor celebrities everywhere I turn. It’s educational—the way a steamroller is educational in teaching you all about the fine art of getting run the fuck over. My favorite part of the spectacle is the hush-hush theatrics of publicists approaching you before the star arrives, whispering their advance-prep essential-detail notes with Tony Hale levels of obsequious devotion. Seriously, even if the publicist is representing someone as obscure as Offensive Female Stereotype #9 on Drunk Housewives of Embarrassing County, a good flack will still solemnly deliver to you all the pertinent details (did you know so-and-so has their own lip gloss line now?) in the same exaggerated hyper-confidential tones of reverence normally reserved for Kennedy Center Honors.

  Attending the roast itself is equally shudder-rendering and insanely entertaining. After a few hours of taping, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that comedian Andy Dick is beyond wasted. Out of nowhere, he leaves his dais post to just straight-up, unprompted, lick the faces of Farrah Fawcett, Patton Oswalt, and Carrie Fisher. Throughout the night, his performance is riveting and off-kilter, with the kind of too-delayed timing that betrays a very serious level of pregame beforehand.

  So, when the show is over and the after-party starts, I know Dick is the interview to get.

  When I see Andy walking past a gold-tinted-rock-star-glasses-clad Patton Oswalt, I bob and weave in between agents and handlers to approach him, immediately identifying which outlet I’m with and asking if we can talk. As the sounds of “Brown Eyed Girl” bleat in the background, Andy first tries to lead me off to a restricted-access area where it would just be the two of us, but a security guard turns him away. “You can’t go in there, Andy.”

  Finally, he leads me to his dressing room, where two guys and a girl are waiting.

  “I work for the New York Post,” I repeat when he asks again why I want to talk.

  “Oh shit, buddy!” one of the guys yells.

  “Oh no, oh no,” Andy says, looking me over. “Page Six . . . how old are you?”

  “I’m thirty,” I say.

  As I stand there in the entranceway, Andy opens the bathroom door, unzips his pants, pulls out his penis, and starts peeing in the toilet.

  “She’ll put this in the article!” Andy’s friend yells. “She’s going to put this in the article!”

  “Don’t,” Andy says, coming out of the bathroom. “I’m fucking serious.”

  “You haven’t been nice,” his friend says. “You guys have been mean.”

  “I’m always cordial,” Andy says. “I’m a nice guy.”

  “One time, buddy,” his friend says. “You hit on the fucking reporter one time, and they fucking hammered you.”

  With a perfectly timed pause, Andy replies, “I’m hitting on the reporter now.”

  He walks over to the couch to chat up a bubbly young woman with a plunging neckline and ample cleavage sitting there, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Did I do good tonight?” Andy asks.

  “Yes, you did,” she says. “I was jealous you didn’t lick my face.”

  He stares down at her breasts. “Are those real?”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” she answers.

  I realize I have only a few minutes to get a quote before this potentially turns into a full-on orgy.

  “Did you party before going on tonight?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, glaring at me. “I always perform sober, and then when the show is over I have a cocktail or two to five.”

  “We have low tolerances,” his friend says, laughing.

  “How did you like my sober performance?” Andy asks.

  “I thought it was funny,” I say.

  “Really?” Andy replies. “Do you want to do some blow then?”

  “No,” I say.

  Things are getting out of control quickly.

  Andy continues, “I went onstage and did my bit real funny and whatnot, and then after that I had a couple—just two vodka cranberries—and then that gave me the courage to talk to Farrah. And me and her have a date. On Tuesday, I’m going to fuck the shit out
of her.”

  “Put that in Page Six,” his friend shouts.

  “Put that in Pages Six, Seven, and Eight, you fucking bitch, that’s how big my dick is,” Andy seethes.

  Trying to combat the situation with logic, I return to his offer minutes before for me to do cocaine.

  “Why did you ask me if I wanted to do blow?” I ask.

  “I don’t have any,” he says. He combats me with logic of his own. “You look like a fucking coke whore.”

  “I do?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Do you want some? Do you want some? Do you want some?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Well then, I guess I was wrong, you’re not one,” he says. “I love coke whores. They’re so easy. I guess you’re not as easy as I thought. What do you want? Do you want me to fuck the shit out of you? What’s your problem? You want me to fuck you. Give me a kiss.”

  “No, no, no, no,” I say squirming away from him onto a chair.

  “I think you want to fuck me,” he says. “I think you want to fuck me.”

  “No,” I say, and at that point, he reaches over and feels my breast.

  I am half frozen, half clinging on to my voice recorder for dear life.

  “Then what do you want?” Andy asks. “There’s nothing dirty here.”

  “He hasn’t even puked himself, look,” his friend says.

  “I’m not the fuckup you think I am,” Andy says.

  “Then why are you, like, pulling out your penis and, like . . .” I begin. This enrages Andy.

  “Oh, that’s good,” he says. “Good try, lady. You’re in my room, and I have to pee. I don’t close the door, and you know why I don’t close the door? BECAUSE IF I CLOSE THE DOOR PEOPLE THINK I’M DOING DRUGS, YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

  “I think she broke in,” his friend says.

  “I’m going to pee again on you if you don’t fucking . . . for real, dude,” Andy says. “You need to loosen up. You need to fucking help me out. You’re either on the team or you’re off the team. You’re either on or you’re off. I’m not a come-and-go kind of guy . . .”