Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  –She’s so mean! I love what she said about Angelina! She & Jennifer are tight, & that is so loyal. And her fuckin body rocks.

  –Who else, who else!

  –The kid from The Big Bang Theory.

  –I will never watch that shit.

  –Got Michael Douglas, at lunch.

  –O, he’s cool! How’s he doin?

  –OK I guess.

  –Sick again?

  –I don’t know. He looked OK.

  –There’s a gal with a vlog somewhere, someone sent it to me—I think she had cancer. She was saying if you had bread, you could fuck with it. With cancer. But I mean seriously fuck with it. I mean that’s no great newsflash, right? Cause everybody knows that if you got money for a good lawyer, you aint goin to prison, right? But obviously if you have bread, you can fuck with the cancer or the whatever by delaying it. Delay the inevitable. Like, Steve Jobs got a new liver, remember that? Had a Whipple first, they take out the pancreas, cut off its head, then stuff it back inside. But with the liver the internet chick said he got around the list, cuz there is a shitload of people on the list in California, she said he couldn’t buy the top spot cuz too many people would’ve found out so he went to Tennessee & bought their top of the list & had it done in Tennessee—all in, like, a week, he was in&out . . . Do you want to know what I think, Jerzy? I’m a nurse, right? And we sell private information to the media all the time. I mean, we don’t talk about it but we do, cuz everybody’s hurting. Everyone’s pockets are fuckin light. & they know they can’t regulate that shit. There’s just no way. You just need to be careful, cuz man it is hard times, & you cannot regulate people and stop em from doing what they need to do to feed their families. Well I don’t think people are different in Tennessee. Human nature don’t change from state to state. People in Tennessee are—how do they say it?—‘just like you and me’! So here’s what I think. I think Apple went in there, to Tennessee, whatever city, I think Apple went in and bought a whole hospital and everyone in it! How else could you get away with that shit without anyone finding out? I think Apple was planning it for a longass time, I mean he was sick for, what, like 10 years, right? But he didn’t need the liver til later. Right? And the money for all the hospital workers had to be big enough so no one was going to pick up the phone to TMZ. What they did—I’ve thought about all this—they probably paid everyone X and told em, you know, if it doesn’t leak, everyone’ll get Y. Like half now, half when the deed is done. As an incentive to keep their mouths shut. Makes sense, right? They bought a little private hospital with 200 people & Apple gave em, say, a million each, which they could do without even feeling it. $200 million aint shit to them—300, 400, five hundred aint shit—they’re big as Russia & bigger than all the oil companies put together. And it’s not really the doctors you need to worry about leaking the shit, it’s the RNs and the LVNs and all the techs, but if you give the techs a quarter of a mill & you give the LVNs 500 thou & the nurses a million each, then you got to give the doctors probably 5 million each, again, not because they would be the source, but because they would be pissed off when they heard everyone was getting the bucks from Apple but them. Human fuckin nature. If Steve Jobs didn’t have the long green, he’d have been up there dirty dancing with Patrick Swayze a long time ago. That man really touched me. I bawled when he was on 20/20 with his wife & they were walking around their beautiful property . . . David Crosby had two fuckin liver transplants, right here in LA! And that was before they were throwing livers around like they was fuckin Vicodin. I think Charlie Watts had the same thing Michael Douglas has—in the throat. Probably when cancer got to Keith Richards, it said: “Uh-uh. Fuck that!” Even cancer don’t want to fuck with Keith Richards! And Nurse Jackie? What’s her name? Mrs. Soprano?

  –Edie Falco.

  –You’ve gotten her, right? Taken her picture?

  –Yeah, a few. You mostly get her at award shows.

  –She’s so great. She don’t have tits no more, but she don’t whine or talk about it . . . Blake Lively got new tits, but she don’t have breast cancer. But Michael Douglas is rich, dude, & money never sleeps. Money compounds daily & nightly! The dufflebags are always waitin at SunLife!

  He started for his room.

  –You know what I saw on the Internet about Jobs?

  –What.

  –What they did was—and it’s totally legal, Apple found a way to make it legal—they broke down a patch of Jobs’ skin into cells & started putting the cells in all their new shit. iPhones, iPads, iPods, i-whatever. So that like in 10 years, maybe less, there won’t be any Apple products that literally don’t have his body in em. Isn’t that a trip? And they say that if you see anyone with a t-shirt that says, “Create JOBS,” it aint about the economy. Nuh-uh. If you see that t-shirt, that means whoever’s wearing it was a part of that special team. The Internet has some whack shit, but that, I totally believe.

  –Hey, goodnight.

  Tom-Tom shouted after him:

  –I put those pictures on your bed!

  . . .

  There were some pages torn from magazines, with red marker circles drawn around the abs of Perez Hilton, Rick Rubin, & Marc Jacobs, and there was one of Matthew McConaughey taking his body for a walk at the beach . . . on slow days, the beacherazzi set up Camp McConaughey, for that US Weekly dog/Frisbee/young son on-the-sand shot. Let them eat beefcake. Mostly though you just hung out, gossiped & smoked weed/crack with your fellow fellows. But you could get lucky, & get collateral shit—last month Jerzy got Brooklyn Beckham romping with dog/bodyguard; Hailee Steinfeld (pre-Harry) walking at the edge of waves in deep conversation with Ron Howard; a frail-looking Charlie Rose. He had fond memories of Charlie—Jerzy spent a week in scrubs, hanging in the back of the hospital after the surgery, hoping that when he was released, they’d wheel Charlie out the rear entrance. Which they did. The magazines paid a higher price than he thought they would because Charlie, always the gent, was kind enough to cooperate by looking like warmed-over shit.

  He snorted some meth & sat in front of the laptop. The image was frozen where he left off, a website called http://behindthecastingcouch.com. Each “casting” session began with a note to the viewer that the women they were about to watch were all there looking for a job but there was no job. The crawl said tuff titties, the poor bitches ended up fucking and sucking for nothing. The way it worked was this guy sits at his desk in an office in a business park. He has all these appts set up with women who answered an ad saying they could make fifteen hundred to 5,000 a day as models in the adult film business. Cameras are hidden all over the office, the guy even holds one the whole time, keeps it trained on them kind of dufusly because eventually he’s naked, with this camera strapped to his wrist. So they come in, he interviews them, he says, Why do you want to be a model, they usually say it’s for the money, but sometimes they say it’s for the experience. They’re (usually) nervous, he asks do you swallow, most say yes, do you do anal, most say yes or at least they’ve tried w/their bfs or if they haven’t tried that they’re willing (probably) to, then he asks them to strip. After they strip he tells them to bend over, which they do, hands bracing the wall, brownishpink unprofessional unpowdered ingrown-hair privates ready for their (extreme) closeup, manicured or shaved (most the time), pimply ass (some of the time), whatever. Some ugly, some fat, some petite w/big-toe-size nipples. The ones without the tatts make Jerzy the horniest because they’re the ones who are easiest to imagine being hoodwinked. The guy has em spread everything with their hands, & he leans over with the camera to look, like a trader looking at horse- or slave teeth. Then he just says it, lays it on the line, What I want you to do now is suck my cock. In the one Jerzy just unpaused, the chick was taken aback. Not a tattoo on her, a real hottie. The guy had to like talk her into it. “Am I going to get money for this? Today?” The guy just says “NO but this is how they do it, & if you don’t do a tape you’re not going to get the opportunity to make fifteen hundred to 5,000 a day.” Says
there’s lots of pretty faces out there but the producers want to see if you can take direction. I’ve been doing this for 5 years. It’s pretty much what I do. I can guarantee you work, but you don’t get paid for today. Then he hardballs em, says they can go home right now if they’re not up for it. They agree, because they’re already naked on the couch of an office in a building in a business park, it’s like already being on the burro halfway to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, & he tells em to unbuckle his pants and fish it out. And they’re suckin him like real pros while he dufus-holds the camera so we get that nice POV of the b.j., the old death-from-above shot, then he says “Well, I guess you know what’s coming next.” & he fucks em right there on the creepy nut-creamed couch. Or sometimes on the hard desk. He even has them hold the camera while he’s fucking them! You know, hold it on their own action. Then he says he’s going to fuck them in the ass, no one ever asks for lube & no one ever asks him to put a condom on (Jerzy loved the COMMENTS this is fake people get real no girl in her right mind is gonna do what you just seen with all the sexual std’s we have these days & a guy wrote under that last girl I took home from a bar didn’t ask if I had any stds and I didn’t ask her about stds. Welcome to reality) There’s a fixed camera on the table, he tells them to look in the lens. At this stage of the tape, most are rectalwincing in pain as they get pounded. If he pulls out, he comes on the small of their backs, but mostly on their faces, the “facial” was what men wanted to see, a guy pulling it out of slut ass & shooting on & into the mouth, on & in the nostrils, straight into the eyes.

  Jerzy watched free, shorter versions of the auditions; you could view the unedited original if you paid to join, but he made a habit of never paying for sexsites. He got close to paypal/ing tho, with backroomcasting. No shit. He tweaked on it for days, & from everything he’d read on the internet & the feeling he got from having watched so many of them he fully believed 1000% the shit was for real. No way could these lame chicks be acting, you’d need to be Meryl Streep. Plus the guy’s face was always fuzzed out, which Jerzy felt was too subtle a game to be running, whoever was behind the site would have to be, like, “These are fake but to make people think they aren’t, let’s take the time/expense to fuzz out Ed’s face in every single frame.” Like why would they even give a shit if you didn’t believe they were real? They probably liked to keep em guessing, better for biz.

  Jerzy clicked on another one. A superMILF redhead. Before you see her come in, the camera in the office shows the scammer already on his cellphone telling an associate he’s about to interview a soccer mom, he tells his friend that he went on facebook & she’s definitely a fuckin soccer mom who’s into her children & her marriage, the guy’s almost breathless, Jerzy never saw him excited like this before in any of the other videos. The office phone rings & it’s the mom & the guy hangs up his cell & gives her directions how to find him, which walkways and whatever, because it’s a business park. The mom comes in & she’s a total fox. He asks if she told any of her friends where she was going & she laughs and says no, she told them she was going to the mall. He asks why she came and she said sometimes she got tired of soccer mom life & wanted to explore “the naughty side.” The guy goes thru all the bullshit, the take your clothes off & bend over, the now-I-want-you-to-suck-my-cock, & BAM he’s fucking soccermilf—a ceiling camera shows him pulling out and coming, he was only in there about 20 seconds, a premature ejack. In case you missed it, the producers drew a red PowerPoint circle around fearless leader’s dick (and cum, now Elmer’d on her lower back) then wrote an OOPS!!! above the circle, with little arrows pointing to the cum. The guy kept fucking soccermilf anyway, but Jerzy thought there probably was some editing there. Had to be.

  He didn’t have any meth so he ate 3 orange sweet-tasting addies, did a little coke, & masturbated to the casting sessions (a school friend of Rikki’s texted him that a guy who helped recruit chicks for the castingcouch just got busted for kiddie porn. Plus the friend texted that the internet said the guy with the fuzzed out face had major Herpes), sampling/toggling between Related Videos til 4AM. Then he snorted some of Tom-Tom’s H, nodding out in front of the castingporn til the alarm woke him: Shade 45, slowly getting louder til it twitched his consciousness:

  I just wanna talk, and conversate

  Cause I usually just stalk you and masturbate

  And I finally got the courage to ask you on a date

  So just say yes, let the future fall into place . . . CUNT.

  CLEAN

  [Jacquie & Reeyonna]

  MILF-to-be

  “I

  didn’t see you on the couch!”

  “What is that? Is that a nametag?”

  “O! Yeah—”

  “O my God, it says Sears. Did you get a job at Sears?!?!”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “O my god! Mom, are that bad?”

  “It’s—I’m doing it for work. For my work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I had this funny idea. For some images—photographs. Then it got less & less funny and more just interesting.”

  “What!”

  “Well, Sears has a portrait studio. Whole families come in.”

  “O my god, it’s getting worse—”

  “You’ll get a prom queen, or newlyweds, or new moms bringing in their babies . . .”

  “So, like, you were like an art photographer, & now you’re taking pictures of families at Sears?!”

  “I am & I’m not. And don’t be such a snob. I don’t really know yet. But I think I can make art—there’s art in there. I just need to find it.”

  “So you’re like going to have an exhibition of the family portraits or whatever that you take at Sears? Sears won’t even let you, they would totally own them.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing, Jerilynn. I’m just following my nose. Going by my lights.”

  Jerilynn/Reeyonna softened.

  “I guess I kind of get it.”

  “All I know is that I’m excited about something. For the 1st time in I don’t know how long.”

  “Then that’s cool. I’m happy for you, Mom.”

  “Thank you, honey.”

  “I just hope none of my friends see you.”

  “They won’t, unless they’re in Valencia.”

  “Mom, can I talk to you about something?”

  “What is it?”

  “Uhm. I don’t know how to—this is really weird.”

  “Sweetie, what is it?”

  Reeyonna/Jerilynn stiffened.

  “I’m gunna have a baby.”

  “No.”

  “I am. I’m almost three months pregnant.”

  “You are? O Jerilynn—”

  “I didn’t tell you—I haven’t really told anyone—because I was afraid I’d get talked out of having it.”

  “Do you know who the father is?”

  “Of course I know, oh my god I am not a slut.”

  “Jerilynn, is it Rikki?”

  “No, it’s the football team.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jerilynn! GODDAMMIT, don’t fuck with me on this, you’re not in the position to fuck with me!”

  “All RIGHT. O-KAY. I’m SORRY. I’m SO SO SORRY——”

  “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to yell.”

  “I am NOT CRYING! God!”

  “O Jesus. Shit. I’m sorry, honey.”

  “You’re so MEAN. I don’t want you to be MEAN to me!”

  “I won’t. I just need to think. I’m just—I just came home & you dropped this on me.”

  “I’m REALLY REALLY SORRY!————”

  “No!—I’m really glad you did, I’m happy that you did. I’m really glad you told me. OK, Jerilynn? Did you hear that? Can you hear that? I am very, very glad. Tho I wished you’d told me sooner————”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “You don’t have to have it. You can have an abortion after TWELVE weeks. A friend of mine’s daughter had hers at FIFT
EEN—— . . . . . .”

  “I AM NOT GOING TO KILL MY BABY!!!!! WHY DID I EVER TELL YOU WHY DID I EVEN EVER TELL YOU I SHOULDN’T HAVE TOLD YOU——————————!!!!!!!”

  “All right. Calm down. Calm down now. Let’s just take—let’s take—let’s take some time here. OK? Can we do that, Jerilynn? Let’s breathe. Can you stop crying & go wash your face? I should have known you were pregnant. The acne . . . and you lost your hips . . . stand straight. Lift your shirt———”

  “No!”

  “What is the matter with me? The throwing up in the mornings . . . I thought you were bulimic—I feel like such an ass.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s not your fault, it’s mine. & would you please stop saying you’re sorry? Can you just STOP?”

  “I’m SORRY! I’m SORRY, I will.”

  “———just let me just think. Let me just sit & gather my thoughts. Can you do that? Can you go wash your face and let me gather my thoughts? Because—there needs—we need, we’ll need to . . . oy. Oy yoy YOY. Oy yoy yoy yoy YOY. The school . . . we have to————”

  “Can we go out for dinner?”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s a good idea. Let’s go out for dinner.”

  “Can we go to Du-par’s for pancakes?”

  “Yes. We can go to Du-par’s.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Thank you. For talking about—for telling me, for talking to me. I really commend you for that. I really do, Jerilynn.”

  “Thanks . . .”

  “Let’s go to Taylor’s—the steakhouse. Do you want to go to Taylor’s?”

  “Can’t we go to Du-par’s?”

  “You can’t get good steak at Du-par’s.”

  “OK.”

  “Dinner’ll be expensive, but so what. You’re eating for two.”

  “Maybe three,” she said savagely. “Maybe it’s twins!”

  “Jerilynn, don’t even—nice to see you laugh anyway. I’ll get there in a minute. Or maybe a day. Or a week. To laughing. O boy. O well. Well well well well well. Go wash your face & we’ll go.”