by David James
“Well, Amanda . . .” Aurora tried to cut in.
“Wait! I’m not finished! And what’s the thing with fitted sheets! How the hell are you supposed to fold the goddamned things until you’re ready to use them? And last, but not least, why am I supposed to care about Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton? I really don’t care!”
“Thank you, Amanda, for that wonderful mental meltdown with a touch of Seinfeld near the end,” Aurora interjected. “I hope you had a good catharsis.”
As Aurora tried to move things along, no one else moved a muscle for what seemed the longest time. No one spoke. Anyone who was still standing near me had a trapped look on their face and slowly made their way out of the room, as did the rest, slowly trickling away.
“Since we were on the subject of assholes a minute ago, this one”—I pointed at Aleksei, who had passed out—“needs to be put into a car, driven home, and put to bed. If I could get a little help from one of you guys,” I pleaded, but the men in the room were holding their hands over their noses and turning their heads away in disgust.
“He’s covered with vomit. Eewww!” David exclaimed in disgust. “I’m not touching him. Maybe if you let him sit in his own vomit, that will teach him a lesson.”
“I’ll do it!” I said. “You guys are all supposed to be such icons of masculinity, but you’re all a bunch of big pussies,” I said, getting up and wiping Aleksei off with several napkins. “You get the legs, and I’ll get him behind his shoulders,” I instructed Aurora.
Despite the fact that Aleksei was exactly six feet one inch tall, he weighed close to nothing since he was a model who found eating a necessary evil in life. I also took several outdoor survival classes with Alex and learned how to carry a wounded hiking partner if necessary.
Aurora and I carried Aleksei out to my car, whereupon I drove him home, with Aurora and Darryn gallantly volunteering to help me carry him upstairs and down the long hall to his room. Aurora suggested that we leave him seated in a wing chair.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“From the look of the table downstairs, I think he’s purged just about everything in him . . .” Aurora said.
“You mean entire Mondavi vineyards?”
“Yes, but there’s no guarantee he doesn’t have more coming. I say we leave him upright. I’m afraid if he sleeps on his back or side, he runs the risk of choking on his vomit.”
“One Jimi Hendrix is enough,” I agreed. We took his shirt and pants off, and left him sitting comfortably in his chair, putting a bucket from a nearby bathroom in his lap, just in case, and closed the door. We started down the hall, when I grabbed Aurora’s arm and stopped her.
“What?” Aurora asked.
“I’m not sure I can go down there.”
“Because you gave them all a much-needed kick in the groin? Honey, if I worried about what everyone thought about what I said, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
“And where is that?” I asked.
“Splattered in vomit, but a rising star in the field of relationship counseling.”
CHAPTER 20
Amanda Thorne, Incorporated
My filming schedule had become too much for me to take care of my real-estate business, so I turned everything over to Alex. My rising stardom was lassoing clients in right and left, and Alex took on the extra work himself with his usual otherworldly ability to handle a hundred things at once.
I stopped at his house and was signing some paperwork when he looked up at me and asked, “Do you have a publicist? I got a call from a Naomi Ballington wanting to know if you’d seen the Web site yet.”
“Well, yes, Alex. I’m having someone handle my publicity. I’ve got a blog, Twitter account, and a possible upcoming book deal.”
“A book? About your experiences on the show?”
“No, not yet. This is a how-to.”
“How to get on the show?”
“No, a You-Know-You’re-a-Fag-Hag-When . . . book.”
“You’ve got to be joking!”
“I am not, Alex. My publisher thinks it will be a big seller. Think of the all the straight women who married gay men. Constance Lloyd to Oscar Wilde. Linda Lee Thomas married to Cole Porter. Liza to Peter Allen. Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera.”
“Diego was straight. It was Frida who had affairs with women.”
“Okay, but you get my point. Maybe Fran Drescher will buy a copy.”
“So when did this publicity machine crank up? I didn’t even know you were working with a P.R. firm.”
“An agent, actually. Vanessa Plant. Naomi is my Web site strategist.”
“You have an agent? This is shocking. You never mentioned it to me.”
“It happened just a week ago.”
“So how did you find this agent?”
“She found me, Alex. That’s why I went with her. She’s on top of things. A real shark. You gotta have an agent like that nowadays. Someone who wants to win. Aren’t you glad that I’m making all these changes in my life? Being assertive. Taking what’s mine.”
“Wow, I had no idea you had all these deals going on.”
“They’re not all definite, but my agent is working on them. Oh, and I’ve got a few product endorsements in the works.”
“Product endorsements?”
“You remember when I had the wardrobe malfunction with Gilles?”
“Booby Nights?”
“Yes, it turns out that several companies that make breast enhancement exercise devices want me to endorse some of their products. I could be the celebrity spokesperson for the BusterAll. It’s a bust-enlarging secret from Lithuania, heavily guarded for centuries and now used by the hottest fashion models from Lithuania.”
“I didn’t realize that your grandmother’s homeland was such a hotbed of fashionistas.”
“It is now. At least that’s what the advertising manager for this bust thing said. I’m not going too far with this stuff, am I?”
Alex hesitated for probably a nanosecond before he responded—something that would have gone unnoticed by anyone else, but to me it was like getting slapped across the face. “Uh, sure. It’s great. Milk it for all it’s worth. Make hay while the sun shines.”
I got it. The disappointment . . . a look I was used to all my life. From my parents. The nuns. From teachers. Countless dates. I could have found the cure for cancer, but all it took was one look from a disapproving scientist and I would have thrown the life-saving formula into the trash. I didn’t say a thing to Alex, but we were still soul mates: I could read his mind and he mine. A few words with just the right, but almost imperceptible, inflection spoke volumes to the other. He had telegraphed his concern to me about the direction my life was taking and I got the message loud and clear. But would I listen to it? That was the $64,000 question.
“Thanks, Alex. Thanks,” was all I could say.
CHAPTER 21
I Now Pronounce You Empress Dowager
When I took Knucklehead to the Bark Park behind city hall to see his dog friends and chase a tennis ball ceaselessly, people gathered around me. Celebrity was infectious. People who hadn’t seen Things Are a Bit Iffy on television or the Internet had been told by friends to watch it, or sent e-mails with links in them. It wasn’t just during the day either that I was really getting attention. On the Internet, hundreds of men seemed to have gotten hold of my e-mail address and flooded my mailbox with everything from well wishes to disgusting and gross proposals involving everything from watching me wrestle another woman in a pen of whipped cream to eating sushi off my body and vomit sex. On top of that, I started going out to the bars every night with Regina in tow. And on those nights when Regina’s seemingly endless energy level began to ebb—or I didn’t want her to cockblock me—I went out by myself, with gay men flocking around me when I went to gay bars and straight men circling when I hit the straight ones. And the men really started hitting on me. Men who had never given me a glance before were now trying to pick me up. Or marry me. One night, a b
usinessman from Taiwan asked me to marry him, come back to Taiwan, and live like a Tai Tai—a privileged lady of means who spends her time lunching and indulging herself while the husband works himself to death to support the Tai Tai. It sounded like a good plan to me. He said he made over $4 million last year (I asked him, “In U.S. dollars?!”), not including bonuses, and I didn’t doubt it when I said good-bye to him at a Mercedes SLS that must have set him back hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe me, being underwater and in debt with four nonperforming condos, a mortgage on my main house, and credit cards maxed out, I gave this proposal a lot of thought. A lot. But in the end, I turned the guy down. After all, I didn’t speak Mandarin, was repulsed by the idea of raw clams (soaked in any sauce), and felt I would get stir-crazy living on such a small island. Of course, I could fly over to Hong Kong to go shopping or Macao for gambling, but Taiwan was just too uncertain to me. What I was sure of was that my constant barhopping to give my ego a boost was really kicking my ass and body when it all came down to it. I looked in the mirror, and I was looking haggard, worn-out, and old. If it’s true that television cameras put ten pounds on you, I feared what it did when it came to years.
CHAPTER 22
Here, Let Me Help You Tie Your Tie
Another day of shooting. There were still weeks and weeks of shooting to go. It was exhausting, starting at the crack of dawn and working until late in the evening at times. I had a newfound appreciation for television stars.
As usual, we were sitting in Iffy Central, Ian’s cavernous living room where the bulk of the scenes from the show were filmed. We were made up, meticulously but casually dressed, and ready to go. With one small change in the scene to be shot. Darryn’s presence on the show had caused all the others to “lose their edge,” as Jeremy stated. With the exception of the welcomed debacle of the memorial luncheon the day before, Jeremy was getting pissed off that the drama was ebbing out of the show. He needed more drama, more catfighting, he stressed. He wanted to keep the ratings on their rocket trajectory.
“Jeremy,” David stated. “You want us to be dramatic, but we end up suffering for it since Aurora is grading us on our behavior. This is putting us between a rock and a hard place.”
“The only hard place you have been lately has been Ian’s bedroom,” Gilles snapped.
“There!” Jeremy exclaimed. “That’s the toxic behavior I remember. I want more of that—just wittier lines than that. Okay, guys, let’s get started.”
The cameramen got into position and started. Lights, action, attitude!
“David,” Ian started. Could you go upstairs and see what’s keeping Aleksei?”
“Ian!” he complained. “Every time I go to fetch someone, they end up dead. I’m not doing this again,” he said, putting down his Diet Coke on a priceless end table without a coaster. He got up and plodded upstairs like he had a 1,000-pound weight on his shoulders.
The moment this observation slipped from David’s mouth, you could see that everyone was thinking the same thing: something bad has happened to Aleksei. You saw the concerned faces shooting glances at each other to see if they were thinking the same thing. You saw hands tapping on chair armrests. A nervous cough or two.
“It’s weird. I haven’t seen Aleksei all morning,” Drake mentioned. “I at least get treated to hearing him vomiting before he goes to bed at night, then in the morning after he has a yogurt, coffee, and a cigarette.”
“Breakfast of Champions,” I added. It was a good line, but it had none of the zing of some of my earlier precision strikes. I was getting tired. My lines were getting tired, too, I feared.
Presently, David came back downstairs and flopped himself on the couch, picking up his Diet Coke and fashion magazine.
“Well?” Drake asked.
“Well what?” David replied, clearly not understanding that the mood had shifted tectonically in his absence.
“What did you find out?” Drake asked.
“Oh, there’s a loose tile in the hallway outside my room. I nearly tripped on it for the second time. Ian, could you get Drake to get that fixed? Someone’s going to get really hurt on that tile.”
Drake leaned forward in his armchair and said through gritted teeth, “David, is Aleksei joining us?”
“Aleksei? Joining us? Probably not.”
“Could you tell us why?” Drake continued.
“He’s sitting upstairs with a tie twisted around his neck. A striped rep tie. Can you imagine? I mean, it’s 2012! Like some kinda fuckin’ Ralph Lauren preppie tie thing . . . sorry, Drake. I know how you like Ralphie, having worked for him a long time ago. Hey, maybe it’s one of your ties!”
“How would you know it’s one of my ties?”
“No one else would wear a rep tie around here but you, Drake.”
Drake and the rest of us went upstairs in what was becoming a regular routine.
“Well, don’t get mad at me, Drake! I hear rep ties are making a comeback for spring!” David added before we were out of earshot.
We gathered at Aleksei’s door like a weary band of tourists, staring but not registering what we were seeing. There in a wing chair with its back to us was Aleksei, sitting naked and upright with a tie twisted tightly around his neck, his face a purple–blue. Since we were all tall, we could see over the top of the back of the chair—all except Marcus, who leaned far into the room to get a good look, holding on to the door molding with veiny, muscular hands.
“Careful, Marcus,” I intoned. “We can’t disturb evidence.”
“I won’t step into the room. I’ve hung on a cross bar like this for forty minutes before,” Marcus said proudly. “Shit,” he said, staring at Aleksei.
Darryn, who stood at the back of the pack, whispered, “This is really freaky. Aren’t you scared?”
“With all these people around, no. Plus, they’re not after me. They’re after you guys.”
“Thanks a lot. You’ve made me feel a whole lot better,” Darryn replied. “I am not sleeping in this house.”
Just then, a voice spoke up from behind all of us. “Now, if you skyscrapers would step out of the way, a short person would like to get a look-see,” Aurora said.
The boys parted for Aurora, who stood in the doorway.
“Jesus Christ! Who is doing this?” she asked, shaking her head. “Wait a minute.... Hey, look over there on the dresser. Drugs!”
She was right. From my vantage point, I could see the pile of whitish crystals on the top of Aleksei’s tall dresser.
Aurora continued, “It looks like autoerotic asphyxiation. He snorted some crystal, wanted to jerk off because he was on a high, and he got the tie too tight and fainted before he passed out. I have a lot of male patients who are into it. But I can’t tell you who. Patient–therapist confidentiality.”
I decided to play detective.
“It seems coincidental, people. We have one murder, and now another person just happens to die in the house, but this time it’s self-induced? It’s all too coincidental. No, this is another murder.”
“I don’t know, Amanda,” Drake said. “Look at the floor in front of Aleksei. He’s sprayed his chowder all over the place. He was cumming just as he passed out from the tie. Happens all the time.”
I looked around to be certain there was a camera on me; there was.
“My question is,” I said like a great detective, “where Aleksei got the tie. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would wear a tie, especially a rep tie. As David said downstairs, those are the kinds of ties that you wear, Drake. Would you care to shed a little light on this development?”
David joined our little group of survivors. He brightened up when he looked at Aleksei again. “I saw an episode of Six Feet Under where a guy was doing the same thing, but you’re supposed to suck on a lemon, so if you start to pass out from the lack of oxygen to the brain, you bite down on the lemon and the shock of the tartness wakes you up before you strangle yourself.”
David’s theory sound
ed plausible . . . if it had come from someone else.
“All we need to do is look around and see if there’s a lemon wedge somewhere in the room. Mystery solved,” David said.
“No one is going anywhere into the room.”
“Or,” David said casually, “Drake was strangling Aleksei erotically and things got out of hand.”
Dead silence. Drake, who normally could frighten the others with a looks-that-could-kill sideways glance, looked more like a trapped animal.
David attempted to enter the room again as I grabbed him by the shoulder and restrained him.
“We’ve got to keep the place clear,” I said sternly.
“Zo who makes you the Hercule Poirot?” Gilles said from behind.
“Nobody, but it’s just good police procedure,” I added.
“You zeem to know a lot about ze police,” Gilles continued. “Maybe you know a lot about murder also. Keeling people!” he said, making a slashing motion with his hand holding an imaginary knife.
“Gilles, as usual, you are being overly dramatic.”
“You . . .” he said, pointing at me with his perfect finger. “You, I get zee restraining order on you. You slap me, now you want to murder me.”
“Gilles, if you’re talking about the number of people waiting to murder you, the line starts somewhere back near the Louvre.”
Finally, a great zinger of a response and the cameramen got it. I was back on top. Since Jerry warned them not to photograph crime scenes or even approach them, the cameramen stayed their distance. But a zoom lens solved that problem. I only worried that because this scene might compromise a murder investigation, the police might not allow it to air. As they say in the theater, the best scene might end up being played off stage.
