There’s no way to pinpoint which of my celebrity obsessions were the most fervent, because they all were. Everyone was a Beatle.
But then I met Ryan, and for three years the Hartnetts and Phoenixes took a backseat to a real-life slice of adulation. I hoped that finding actual, tangible love would end my teenybopper fever, and for a while it did. I no longer skulked incognito around Barnes & Noble to buy every Tiger Beat or Bop magazine and had removed (almost) every Jude Law RSS feed from my laptop.
But like Axl Rose’s ill-advised hair extensions, things fell apart. We broke up and I moved to New York, a city that has a way of undoing your sanity, bit by bit.
I can’t say for sure why I fell in love with Alex. He was nineteen, had a huge nose, and lived in the NYU dorms. Not exactly the knight in shining Varvatos I’d envisioned as my debonair New York suitor, but after two dates I was ready to marry him. Alex had swooped into my life at exactly the right time, like Dumbledore’s phoenix, saving me just when I needed it the most.
I had been in Manhattan for a year and finally climbed out of the minimum-wage tar pit that was my waitressing job at Houston’s. I was six weeks into my job at FHM as assistant editor and had just scored a book deal for my first book, Hot Mess. By all accounts, my dreams were coming true.
And yet, something felt … missing. Something was beginning to stir within me, like there was another Shallon waiting to get out. Maybe it was the bittersweet restlessness that came with reaching a goal and realizing it wasn’t enough to keep you happy forever. Or maybe my newfound success was unearthing dimensions of my personality that had never felt confident enough to come out.
Once upon a time, I discussed politics and books and art, things not involving fake boobs whatsoever. But the deeper I got into FHM’s world of beer and porn, and the more time I spent crafting bubblegum fiction, the more hungry I became for real conversation.
It was like I had intellectual scurvy and was slowly rotting without proper nutrition.
That’s when I met him. Yes, he was young (very, very young), but he struck me as an old soul. His mother wrote magical realism novels and had dinner with Joni Mitchell. Alex and I talked about our dreams and our goals and where we hoped New York, and life, would take us. It had been months since I’d had such deep conversations with someone, and my malnourished mind gobbled it up.
But some things that feed you can also be bad for you, like a tuna sandwich that’s been sitting out too long. After a few dates I could feel him pulling away, catching whiffs of my scary, restraining-order-type love. I knew I should tone it down, but I just couldn’t. God wanted me to love him, I told myself. Well, I was half-right. God wanted me to love him, but more importantly, God also wanted him to not love me back.
I had definitely loved other boys deeper and longer, but for some reason, Alex’s departure hit me like a ton of bricks.
“Muuu-hu-hu-hu!” I sobbed to my friends at brunch. “Alex is gone! Gonnnnne! Wuuu-hu-hu-hu!”
They patted my hand and went back to their mini muffins, assuming that this was just another melodramatic faux breakup with a faux boyfriend. But after three months of mourning, no one knew what to do with me.
“I’m no mathematician,” said Klo, “but you realize that you’ve been crying over him four times longer than you actually knew him, right?”
Marcia pointed out that I hadn’t even been this upset when John cheated on me six months prior.
But there was a difference. I had always known John was a square peg in a round hole (more like a three-inch peg, but that’s another story); I knew in my heart we were never meant to work, I just kept trying anyway. But Alex had felt right from the very start. Since my friends clearly weren’t going to indulge me, I sequestered myself in my apartment for yet another night and sulked.
I flipped on the TV and landed on Fuse, an alt-music channel playing a block of videos from a screechy band called My Chemical Romance. And just like that, my world began to look bright again. It was as if an angel floated into my living room. A pale, stringy-haired, pudgy-around-the-middle angel named Gerard Way, the band’s lead singer. He was a cross between Jack White and Dracula and utterly perfect in every way. After thirty seconds I knew that this celebrity fascination would trump all others; it would Bieber where the rest had merely Jonathan Taylor Thomased.
The band’s funeral-themed video for “Helena” was morose, bizarre, and self-indulgent … and the most magical thing I’d ever seen. Gerard’s intensity, his hopelessness—it all just spoke to me. In rapt awe, I watched all six videos on TV, then again (and again and again) on YouTube.
My roommate Holly came home and I asked her if she’d heard of My Chemical Romance.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said, taking off her J. Crew cardigan. “They’re that emo band with that vampire singer, right?”
“But they’re so much more than that!” I blurted before I could stop myself. Seeing Gerard had been a religious awakening, a beacon to some promised land.
This creepy little band from the New Jersey badlands had tapped into a part of myself that I hadn’t even realized existed: the dark, dreamy, gothic Shallon that lurked beneath my peppy surface. In retrospect, perhaps the appeal of it was that it seemed forbidden; I was supposed to be fun! And bubbly! And blond! I wore pastel, not crushed purple velvet. In high school, the only kids who ever got teased were the Goths, a pathetic collection of fat, pasty freaks in black dresses who drifted around the campus looking like deranged nuns. No one could ever understand WTF they were so ticked off about anyway. Being unattractive? Big deal! The world is full of other ugly people for them to date and hang out with—statistically, they’re on the winning end.
Maybe a Goth makeover was just what I needed! At first my preppy self recoiled at the idea of this whole Goth/emo thing, but after weeks of weeping over Alex, I had wrung all the consolation I could from my depressing Beyoncé playlists. I had to try something. In my youth, I didn’t have the means to transform my personality with every new celebrity crush; it’s hard to afford that Garth Brooks Stetson, rawhide boots, and belt buckle on a $10-a-week allowance. But now, as a freewheelin’ adult, I could pour every cent, minute, and breath into my new true purpose in life: My Chemical Romance.
I threw myself into the band with a zeal I hadn’t felt since my Guns N’ Roses days. I learned lyrics and stats, joined discussion groups, and drained my office’s color printer to cover my bedroom with pictures of Gerard and his smoking-hot guitarist Frank Iero.
Then there was the issue of my wardrobe. My closet full of frilly tops and sundresses suddenly repulsed me, as did the sunny disposition of my roommates. I wanted to be around my depressed equals but was never going to find “my people” if I didn’t make a break (at least temporarily) from my crew of ex-sorority girls.
“Ladies,” I announced to my friends during our weekly get-together to watch The Bachelor, “I have an announcement. I am no longer preppy … I am emo. I am going to start wearing a lot of black, and hoodies and skinny jeans. So there.”
“So you never want to have sex again is what you’re saying?” quipped Pfeiffer.
Holly chimed in. “Yeah, I’m not sure that making yourself as ugly as possible is going to help you find another dude.”
“I don’t care,” I said indignantly. “Maybe I do need a break from guys. All I know is that I’m unhappy and this makes me feel better. I want to be as ugly on the outside as I feel on the inside.”
“Well whatever,” Marcia said. “Just don’t start shopping at Hot Topic.”
The truth was, I’d tried to shop at Hot Topic but didn’t have the guts to actually go in. I could sashay into Chanel just fine, but in Hot Topic, I felt the rare, humiliating sensation of being an outsider. And I didn’t like it one bit.
Finally, after pacing back and forth past the Harry Potter jewelry, studded corsets, and hot-pink fishnets in the front window for twenty minutes, I mustered up the courage to enter—well armed with a lie, of course.
; “Hi,” I said nervously to the pierced guy behind the counter. “I’m looking for some stuff for my little sister … who is exactly the same size as me. But she isn’t me. Really.”
I shopped skittishly, constantly eyeing the door expecting someone I knew to walk in and nab me like on an episode of To Catch a Predator. After fifteen jumpy minutes, I left with two My Chem shirts, a Fall Out Boy hoodie, and several bits of Twilight paraphernalia. And … a fake lip ring. I’d wanted to pierce my lip for years, but Pfeiffer said she’d call my grandma Gigi if I did, so this was our compromise.
That night, I debuted my new emo look, lip ring and all.
“Oh, Shallon, it’s so ugly!” Pfeiffer gasped, but I didn’t care. I felt more like myself than I had in months. Every ounce of sullenness that had been buried beneath pep rallies and sorority parties was at last allowed to blossom in all of its black glory.
I rewatched all of Angelina Jolie’s interviews from her Gothy period, feeling just like her—deep and misunderstood, having no choice but to conceal any sort of natural beauty under too-pale makeup and dark lipstick. I felt a special kinship with her lower-belly tattoo reading “Quod me nutrit me destruit”—That which nourishes me also destroys me.
But a girl cannot survive on Angelina alone. Miraculously, my friends were still letting me hang out with them, hoodie and all, but I needed a partner in crime—an emo boyfriend.
Obviously my first choice was Gerard, but I didn’t really have the time or energy to find his house in Jersey and sit outside it until I could kidnap him. A substitute would have to do.
“Attention, gentlemen!” I hollered to the dudes in my office, and held up a copy of AP magazine with Gerard on the cover. “I demand to be set up with someone who looks like this!”
After explaining that Gerard was neither a girl nor a character from Harry Potter, I demanded that they cull their circle of friends to find me a doppelganger.
“Why don’t you just date the intern?” said Tom, our web designer. “He kinda looks like him I guess. And he’s young, just how you like ’em—he turns nineteen next week.”
“Gimme.”
It was our summer intern Keith’s first day, and as an initiation, someone had sent him on a run to buy the latest issues of Penthouse and Hustler. I hadn’t met him yet and waited like a sexual predator in the lobby for him to return. He walked through the door, the porno mags peeking out of his messenger bag, and took my breath away. He looked exactly like Gerard—dark shaggy hair, blazing green eyes, and a mischievous smile. Keith was thirty pounds lighter and had a bit of a tan, but I was willing to overlook it. This teenage dreamboat was clearly a gift from a kind, benevolent God, and I was not about to get greedy.
Nor was I about to play it cool. Even now, years later, Keith loves to remind me of how I first hit on him in the elevator.
“You know,” I said, trying to sound offhanded, “you look an awful lot like that guy from My Chemical Romance. Has anyone ever told you that?”
He just laughed nervously and shrugged, saying that he didn’t know who that was. Within five minutes of being back at my desk I had sent Keith a few of Gerard’s (relatively) less weird pictures and videos and we struck up an e-mail exchange. Beneath his adolescent nervousness, Keith actually had a tremendous amount of game. He was smart and cavalier and hadn’t yet learned how terrifying girls can be, so he had no fear when it came to pursuing me. For the next couple of weeks we flirted constantly and e-mailed all day long. But as the only girl in the office, I was not about to flush my hard-won reputation down the toilet by shagging some teenager in the fashion closet, so for once, I bided my time.
On the interns’ last day we took them out for celebratory Irish Car Bombs, and that was when Keith, fueled by Baileys and Guinness, finally made his move. I was regaling the boys with tales of my many sexual calamities when he staggered up, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and said, “You’ve just never been with a real man!” and planted a kiss on me.
The guys high-fived him as I feigned offense and embarrassment, but really, I was delighted—I loved aggressive boys. I’d targeted Keith to sublimate my desire for Gerard, but maybe I’d found something even better! That weekend, I let Keith take me on a date. We ate spaghetti and then went for a drive; I hadn’t been in a non-taxi car in months, and I was in heaven the minute I scooted into his SUV.
“Where do you want to go?” he said softly, slipping his hand into mine slowly and meaningfully, the way I used to before I devoured boys like kebobs.
“I don’t care,” I purred. “Let’s go get lost.”
We zigzagged across the city in the cool summer twilight and meandered out to his hometown in Jersey to look at the massive houses. It was a simple date—dinner and a drive, holding hands and listening to the radio—but the simple life can be hard to come by in Manhattan.
When I told him about my emo revolution, he gently mocked me.
“Who are you kidding?” he laughed. “You’re the girliest girl I’ve ever met! You can wear ten hoodies but it’s always going to look phony on you. You’re meant for pink and dresses.”
“I am not!” I said like an indignant four-year-old. “I am so gloomy and Gothy!”
“All right, princess.” He smiled, stroking my cheek. “Whatever makes you happy.”
As unlikely as it was, Keith and I just seemed to fit. He, like Alex, was boyish and exuberant yet wise beyond his years. We spent as much time together as we could, but two weeks later, he was packing up his Toyota and heading back to school.
“Will you come visit?” he asked, and I made feeble promises I knew I’d never keep. With my new look I felt out of place enough hanging out with my own friends in my own city; I wasn’t about to take my freak show on the road.
I gave him a kiss good-bye, but as I watched him inch away through the midtown traffic, a wrenching feeling settled over me.
Quod me nutrit, me destruit.
Hoping it would numb the pain over losing Keith the way it had with Alex, I lay on the couch that night in the dark and watched the video for MCR’s “Helena,” where a church full of mourners dance eerily around a dead woman as the band plays dramatically from the pulpit. What fun! No matter how depressed I was, watching “Helena” would usually cheer me up, if for no other reason than the sick pleasure I get from planning my own funeral (everyone is going to wear white and eat enchiladas). Plus, it reminds me that whatever pain I’m feeling can’t possibly last forever—one day I’ll meet the sweet release of death and then no one can reject or criticize or pester me to please use a coaster because I’m getting water spots on the coffee table.
But that night, Gerard’s yelping melodrama didn’t lift my spirits at all. During the end scene, where they carry the casket out and into the hearse, I had a thunderously gloomy thought: If I died tomorrow, who would be my pallbearers? The only man I could come up with was Keith, if he wasn’t tied up with midterms or an Ultimate Frisbee tourney. The next morning, after wracking my brain for twelve hours, I managed to add my gay friend Sam and his boyfriend to the list. That’s only half as many as you need.
Great, I thought, wallowing around in my sheets, I’ll die and my bulky casket will have to be dragged out of the church. It’ll be like the way you just heave a suitcase down stairs when you’re too lazy to carry it and don’t really know or care if anything breakable is inside. Then you get really nettled when you open it up and find that your Gucci glasses were smashed to bits and blame TSA instead of yourself.
That was no way to leave this world. I would need the full number of pallbearers. I briefly considered the guys in my office, but they were web geeks and not very burly. And our friendships weren’t really at the “Hey, will you carry my lifeless body to the graveyard?” stage yet.
I picked up the phone to call Keith but decided against it. I needed to let him escape while he still could. I called Klo instead.
“I’m confused,” she said. “Do you want to date Gerard Way or be him?”
I
paused, not really sure myself. Yes, I found him insanely, irresistibly, inexplicably sexy, but I also envied his solipsistic vanity. He screamed and wailed about his problems like they were what sank the Titanic.
I wondered if I’d been going about this whole celebrity crush thing all wrong for the last twenty years. Did I really love any of them? Or did I simply envy them because they were famous and drunk on the freedom to be weird, slutty, outspoken, and self-indulgent?
It was about time I found out.
I tried to look at Gerard as objectively as possible and pinpoint our differences. If I could close the gap maybe I could break free from my celeb fanaticism once and for all. Turns out, Gerard and I were very much alike: we had both been dorky teenagers, were oddly close with our grandmothers, and cared a little too much about the X-Men. But the one disparity I couldn’t get around? Our skin tone.
After college, I briefly worked at a tanning salon and quickly got the message that staying out of the sun is your only shot at looking young forever. The patrons of BareTan looked more like saddles than people, so from then on I slathered my French-Italian skin in SPF 70 at all times. Being blond, I looked good pale, like an Aryan propaganda poster. But even at my New York winter whitest, I was nowhere near Gerard’s ghostly pallor. He looked like the underside of a deep-sea fish. I had a lot of work to do.
“If you want to get pale,” said my trainer Reggie, “you talk to the Puerto Ricans. Those girls hate their skin and they’ve got all sorts of creams to whiten themselves up.”
I took a train out to Spanish Harlem that night and chatted up the around-the-way girls at the local beauty shop.
“Mami, whatchu need is this right heeah,” said one, handing me a jar of Nadinola Fade Cream. “Dis’ll get ju white in no time, juknowwhatI’msayin’?”
The stuff smelled like Styrofoam peanuts, but I lathered myself up twice a day, just like Esmerelda and Vivi had suggested. Within a week I had seen a small improvement in my paleness, at least judging by the comments I was getting at work.
Exes and Ohs Page 5
