Bonita Avenue (35 page)

“Not since I was born. Why?”

“Two things.” He walked over to the small conference table, pulled one of the heavy chairs into the middle of the room and sat down. Just like me, he crossed his left leg over the right one, but reconsidered, and planted his cowboy boots firmly on the carpeting a few feet apart. “First: why don’t you do that interview.”

“Oh?” I gathered my hair, twisted it into a knot, and pulled a rubber band around it. “If I feel like it, you mean.”

“If you feel like it, I mean. Anyway, you’ve earned it. I’d do it myself, but I think you deserve it. And of course you feel like it.”

The very opposite of feeling like it coursed through my nerves, a pre-programmed aversion to showing my hand, to being asked things by someone whose job it is to infringe on my privacy.

“Do you think I can mention the Barracks?”

“Difficult not to. Besides, it’s for the magazine. Before they’ve printed the thing even Belfast will know about it.”

“What if they pick the newsworthy bit out?”

“The
New York Times
? They won’t. Too local. They’d sooner ditch an entire issue than publish a West Coast news item. What they’re interested in is the phenomenon, the lifestyle, the success.”

“Are they coming here? I mean, to Coldwater?”

“That girl’s gonna be sitting in this very chair tomorrow morning at ten.”

“What’s her name?”

Rusty looked at me, concentrated, stuck two fingers in the air. “Double name. Wait a sec … Mary Jo something.”

“And the other thing?”

He got up and walked over to a side window. He slid open the window sash, smeared thick with blue paint, and stuck his head outside, giving me a view of the worn-out seat of his jeans. Rusty must have read somewhere that a “founder,” a genuine dot-com guy, should dress as casually as possible. (“Do I have a
suit
?” he said when I first broached the subject. “Yeah, my birthday suit.” He did have one suit, a weird cobalt-blue thing with cactuses embroidered on it, a suit made especially for him by somebody named Nudie. “Who’s Nudie?” “Don’t you know?
Nudie
. Nudie Cohn. Hank Williams’s Tailor. Nudie made Elvis’s gold suit. Gram Parsons’s Marijuana suit. She doesn’t know who Nudie is.”) And I have to admit: it worked. If Rusty and I went to an advertiser together, me in Gucci or the like and he as a freewheeler in one of his artistic shirts, we complemented each other and exuded just the right
combination of anarchy and business sense. Now he belched. He brought his head back inside and went over to his chair. “I want to start filming in the Barracks in two weeks,” he said. “Should be possible.”

That was typical Rusty: he’d dig in his heels for months on end, procrastinate, run up against hurdles, then the about-face and, finally, overshoot his target.

“Are you kidding? No way. There’s not even electricity.”

“Then we’ll improvise. Emergency generators. You just watch. And that journalist’s name is Harland. That’s her name. Mary Jo Harland.”

I typed in the name on Google, 162,000 hits in twenty-four hundredths of a second, and the first was her own website. “She writes for the
New Yorker
,” I said. “And for
Granta
.”

“Great,” Rusty said, “I’m going right out to
not
buy them and then I’m going to
not
read them.”

“Is she pro or con, do you think?”

“Joy—we’re gonna get shit either way. With your Barracks. Who do you think PR had on the line this morning? Louis Theroux.”

A strange vibration high in my windpipe told me I should not do that interview: don’t do it, why should you. Just as I was about to say that to Rusty, my telephone rang. An inside line. “Theroux’s an asshole,” I said, and switched the phone to speaker. “Hi, Steve.”

Rusty made a gagging gesture. He had something against Steve, said he was “dry shite.” I had snatched him away from Google, where he had obviously done good work for human resources.

“Joy,” his voice echoed metallically through the room. “I’m just calling to say that Kristin called me to say you’re scheduled for Wednesday, June 11th.”

Rusty smiled and nodded at me.

“Why doesn’t Kristin call me herself?” I asked. Yesterday at
the Gold Digger, Kristin Rose took me aside and said that Isis had psychological problems, nervous tension, identity crisis, God knows what, and would be out of the running for at least a month, and would I consider filling in now and then. “You’re my last resort, sweetie. And you’re so
good
.” What irritated me was that I still hadn’t answered and now Steve was on the line. Kristin was a director about my age and was there when Rusty had scouted me, and she’d started right in with that sweetie stuff. Her strategic friendliness worked wonders on Rusty.

“Because I need to know if I can book you for the usual fee,” Steve answered.

“Have I said yes yet? Who’s it with?”

“With, um … just a sec.” Steve coughed, which the speaker translated into an ear-splitting grate. I wondered if he could tell he was being amplified.

“It’s for girlslapgirl. Bobbi …”

“Bobbi Red,” I offered.

“I think so, yeah,” Steve said.

Rusty nodded wildly and gave a double thumbs-up. “Steven!” he shouted.

For a moment, only a hum. And then: “Rusty?”

“Steve—she’ll do it, man. You should see her face. Joy’s crazy about Bobbi.” He sent me a warm smile. He was right, I was crazy about Bobbi.

“Steven,” he continued, “as long as we’re talking: have you drawn up that contract for Vince?”

“Almost,” Steve said. “I mean: it’s nearly done. In fact, I was just waiting for your answer. About my salary suggestion.”

“Just make it seven,” Rusty said. “Sweeten it up with secondary conditions.”

“In Cleveland he got a percentage,” Steve said.

“Sales?”

“Uh … profit. Half a per cent.”

Rusty looked at me, I shook my head. “It’s a deal, Steve,” he said. “Print it out, send it off. Yeah? Do it. Bye, Steve.”

He got up without putting back the chair, and leaned in the doorframe with his hand on the doorknob again. “OK, what are you up to?” I said after I hung up.

“Sorry,” he said, “but that Vince—I’ve got to have him. You do too, take my word for it. By the way, did you know that Bobbi’s gonna be on Tyra Banks next week?”

I was so taken aback that I forgot I was angry. “Really? What for?”

“Exorcism. Satan sent his daughter and her name is Bobbi Red.” He glanced at his Rolex. “Feck! Joy, I’ve gotta go. Now. In two weeks you and the world-famous Bobbi will be shooting in the Barracks. That’s a promise.”

Bobbi Red—I let her stay at my place for a while in 2007, my hospitality tweaked by what you could call an atypical job application. It started with an open solicitation she sent to Rusty, not the usual slipshod e-mail we normally got, but a neatly folded, printed letter in a sealed envelope that out of fascination I’ve kept in my desk drawer. We got ones like this at McKinsey: a top-heavy letterhead, a Re: line and the textbook young-entrepreneur format that made you wonder if Bobbi, who still called herself Meryl Dryzak, was pulling our leg or really meant it, whether she was incredibly naïve or incredibly funny. “You gotta read this,” Rusty said.

“Dear Mr. Wells,” her letter began, “It has been my great pleasure to view your productions on the Internet over the past few years. I would very much like to join your company as an actress.” The paragraph continued with the fact that she was attending a
junior college in Denver, Colorado, where she studied voice and acting, film history, and modern literature, and while she found it all “extremely interesting,” ever since her eighteenth birthday, the same age as the Federal Obscenity Statute, she thought the time was ripe to follow her heart. And her heart, she believed, lay in making pornographic films, preferably the kind of porn films we produced: “robust, realistic, and creative.” The second paragraph began as the classic personal sketch. “I am generally considered reliable and a person with excellent communication skills. I have studied state-of-the-art X-rated films since I was twelve. I have extensive experience in anal sex, deep-throating, squirting, etc. During coitus I take pleasure in submission, but am equally comfortable playing the dominant role. Moreover I have many creative ideas to enhance your range and repertoire. In five years I would like to see myself directing; perhaps your company offers advancement opportunities? In closing, let me assure you of my capabilities as a team player and one who values a positive working atmosphere. I would very much like to visit your premises for a personal interview. Sincerely, Meryl Dryzak.”

Rusty just about lost it. And that was even before he had seen Meryl’s résumé. That she was poking fun at a genre, poking fun at Rusty himself, was obvious once you read her CV, which was constructed with the same pseudo-earnestness as her cover letter. Between her personal data and hobbies (sports and film, she admired Werner Herzog, Kurt Russell, Rocco Siffredi, and Michelangelo Antonioni) she inserted a section entitled “education and lessons,” but where you would expect to find elementary school and high school, she listed her romantic relationships, including the exact dates, each entry in boldface, followed by concise accounts of what exactly she picked up in bed with “Rich” or “Josh” or “LaToya.” She offered, if we so desired, three references, and to
check whether the telephone numbers really existed Rusty, grinning from ear to ear, called someone she gave as “Joey F(ucking) Bastard.” When he got an answering machine (“Joe Lightcloud Landscape Architects, for all your backyard decks and ponds”), he broke into a slow chuckle that carried on until well after the beep.

A week later Meryl Dryzak sat across from us in Rusty’s office—not the girl
in
the letter, but a girl
like
her letter: decent but dirty. She wore a long, dark-green Led Zeppelin T-shirt, a wide belt with iron studs wound around her narrow hips. Her skirt was made of frayed camouflage fabric, her feet were packed into Nike high-tops. With her dark-brown braids and placid face, a pleasant mixture of the Mona Lisa, Kate Moss, and a heroine from a manga comic strip, she not only stood out from the typical debauched cheerleader type that overpopulated the Valley (no Botoxed lips, not covered in tattoos, not prone to uncontrolled giggling), but she also acted differently too. Intelligent and serious. She had a sensible, propersounding voice, a bit bored, but
what
she said in that languid tone was self-confident and, just like her letter, uncommonly sincere.

As usual, Rusty did the talking; he didn’t like other people conducting auditions. “Meryl,” he said after a few jokes about the kilo of sugar he dumped in his coffee, “your letter, your manner of speaking, your presentation, tells us you’re an intelligent, talented girl. A girl who undoubtedly has what it takes to have any future she wants. I see you study film and literature, but I can imagine you could just as soon have chosen law or medicine or aeronautics. And yet you want to work for us. Can you tell me a little about your creditors?”

Rusty assumed she wouldn’t catch on right away, but she understood just fine. “I’m not interested in money,” she said without smiling. “Money doesn’t turn me on.”

And as though Rusty were Herbert von Karajan and she a violinist
auditioning for the Berlin Philharmonic, she explained that, first of all, the business attracted her because of the intense pleasure she got from sex, a pleasure she wanted to explore to its fullest: “Pleasure is something very much worth pursuing,” as she so elegantly put it; in close second place was her desire to share the fruits of her personal enlightenment with as many people as possible, she was something of an altruist, she regarded porn—“
good
porn,” she clarified with her index finger raised—as an undervalued source of pleasure for plenty of people. She told us she came from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a small town in the Rocky Mountains, where she spent eighteen years making a detailed study of everything that was boring and everyday and tedious. It was time for something new.

“Do you use meth?” Rusty asked. I could tell from his face this was getting too philosophical for him.

“I’m a fuck-junkie,” she replied.

“Ho-kay.” Rusty pretended to take notes.

We were used to anything here, from morning till night there was dirty talk at Coldwater, especially on and around the sets—but this? Without the vulgar spontaneity of her ilk (and who knows, without their typical snarkiness, their phony kookiness, their fickle unreliability too, which, I had to admit, seemed essential to a person’s survival in this city), without the provocative prattle, the crass chomping of an entire pack of gum at once, it all sounded different, more surreal.
Harder
.

For the entire duration of the interview she held a Houellebecq paperback in her hand, her middle finger stuck in between the pages like a bookmark. When Rusty recommended she take on a
nom d’artiste
—coming from him, an idiotic term that made me laugh and betrayed that he was slightly intoxicated by her artisticintellectual airs—she asked if he had a suggestion. Rusty took his
time pondering it; he had a reputation to uphold when it came to artists’ names. “Gigi Green,” he said.

“How about Bobbi Red,” she replied. That “Green” would typecast her, she saw it coming, she was already worried about it because of her wispy, girlish figure. “I’m, like, not planning to spend the next seven years showing up in white panties and plaid knee socks.
Daddy Fucked the Babysitter
number such-and-such, you understand what I’m saying?”

Rusty stifled a laugh. Normally he wasn’t crazy about pips like her, normally he’d toss a chick with this kind of flimflam a pair of Harry Potter socks. “Good for you, Bobbi,” he said. She was so pretty too. She was seriously beautiful.

After she’d got undressed and done the obligatory pirouette (“OK, kneel down on that chair, yeah, ass facing us, like that, yeah, drop your back, look at us—that’s great”) she told us she had flown to L.A. with $4,000 she’d earned waitressing in a steak restaurant in Steamboat Springs. She was renting a condo way up in the Valley, no air-conditioning, no stove, nothing. I imagined that poky room and the kind of life she was facing, and then pictured her on the sets where she’d be spending the coming months with those scrawny teenage tits of hers. I was overcome by a feeling I’d never had before in this kind of meeting: the desire to take her under my wing.