Dead Stars (13 page)

“
Jerilynn is your point of view! ça va?
Take courage, Jacqueline!

“And you
must
have a cold, hard look at Sally Mann. She is the Ideal—
the
class act. That's what you want to shoot for. Sally's the template, the Gold standard. She lives in Virginia. She was thrown by a horse & broke her back. A terrible thing. We spoke
every week
of her convalescence, for 2 years. I called from wherever I was in the world. Sally made her bones with those family shots—the Huck Finn nudies.
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.
Can't beat that for a title, can you? I'm telling you, titles are everything. That was something Sally knew very well . . . now, I don't believe they ever went after Sally in the
courts,
not as far as I
know,
but she was
banned in the media
. (Which is what we hope for
you.
) Banned by Artforum—
Artforum!
Can you imagine? A superstar! She worked in wetplate collodion. Used a very old camera, an
antique
, an 8 × 10 bellows. Which I think is very shrewd. You see, when you
embark
on this sort of thing, it is my
strong feeling
that it is a
very
good idea to approach the work via a
defunct process
or
difficult-to-use camera
. Don't go Goldin. And the most
important
part of Sally's example—listen closely, Jacqueline!—was that she shot her children, then
moved on.
She didn't make a fucking
career
of it. Take a lesson from that, Jacquie! She's doing
wonderful
work at this time, she's in her prime, hasn't a
thing
to do with naked kiddies . . . &
that's
where you want to land, Jacquie dear. Sally Mann showed there can be light at the end of the vulva!

“In summary:

“A gallery shows your pics. Someone
complains—
& if they don't, pick up the phone & complain
yourself
, just don't tell em it's you! The gallery gets raided
—
by
gendarmes
or even better, the FBI. (Scotland Yard's a coup.) Then: the tiresome wave of fascists & libertines. A celebrity speaks out in your favor, crying ‘It's just a mom keeping an innocent diary of her babies!'—they're always good for a sound byte. Because it's important in this
phase
that you stay out of the fray. An articulate celebrity gets you lots of mileage, that's money in the bank. They're First Amendment
whores . . .
but it doesn't really matter, because that storied ‘fierce debate' will follow, & if you're lucky—a media firestorm!
Jacquie, there's one thing that is guaranteed—people will know your name.
Your supporters will invoke Caravaggio and Degas; there'll be sidebar editorials in the
Times
on Nabokov & Charles Dodgson; ‘chilling effects' and ‘landmark rulings'; the sound & fury of grand juries, signifying nothing
 . . . sales, sales, sales!
”

 

Cherry ripe, cherry ripe,

Ripe I cry,

Full and fair ones,

Come and Buy!

CLEAN

[Jerzy]

Stars Without Makeup

Ooo-woo . . .

. . . his stomach had that perfect, empty, racy feeling, & the
flit,
skipping beats.
Ooooo
. The reason being, the reason why, because what he did was put the crystal in a sheet of toilet paper, a little mound, & then he swallowed it. Swallowed the little biscuit. What he was doing
now
was, he got a tweet from a trusted twat that Renée Zellweger was at Peet's—Montana & 14th—sitting in a chair at a farthest-away outdoor table, reading. Hunched over, deglammed, in a North Face vest. No makeup.
Incognito
. (Same Peet's frequented by the over-the-hills: Molly Ringwald, Marcia Cross, Kate Capshaw.) Though Renée's time was over (her
cognito
place in the sun), she hadn't
quite
entered the Where Are They Now? newstand magazine cycle; but was
definitely
in the Fast Track To Washed-Out Hagdom internet rinse n spin. Not so wonderful a place to be, because any missteps came across as global FAILS.

730AM . . . got the tweet, swallowed the speed, & waited. Then,
BLASTED
out of bed & into his 2002 grody-interior'd Range Rover, rocketing to Peet's (she wasn't there, might be in the head), then over to Whole Foods—Montana & 15th—to wait. Radio on: hip hop. Frank Ocean. Hip hop could actually make good white person morning music, if you played it lowish.

The women darted in & out of Whole Foods like exotic luminous fish in an aquarium castle: to and from the Yogaworks above the Starbucks across the street, to & from Peet's, Caffe Luxxe, & Sweet Lady Jane's . . . they didn't have to wish they were California girls. They were insanely preserved & insanely rich, and if no longer in the zip code of beautiful, they were residents of the posh, gated community of Old Town—most were in their 50s. Lotta divorcées. No need to cry for em either, cause on
Montana adjacent
that usually meant a $25 mill+ settlement.

Sometimes if things were slow & Jerzy wanted to hang at the beach, he'd hit this very spot. Last week he got Phoebe Cates pushing a shopping cart & turned it around to one of the
STARS—They're Just Like US!
dillios. In these parts, you got people like Madeleine Stowe, Jamie Lee Curtis . . . or Renée. An older crowd, so he usually avoided the area. Come to think of it, lots of stroller-pushing pussy today tho maybe they're au pairs . . . he swung back to Peet's but still no sign of————
here she comes
. She looks so
un-Renée
, he almost missed her. Whips around & parks residential, so he can telephoto.
Got
her . . . . . . . . she looks dumpy, shitty, preoccupied. Not a complete disaster—what the business calls a “gasper.” There were “hooters” and there were “gaspers.” Kirstie Alley at 600 lbs was a gasper. Clint Eastwood's disgusto-looking vericose veins on the golf course in Carmel was a gasper. A
hooter
would make you
hoot
aloud, like, say, when Jerzy took a perfectly photogenic image of Katie Holmes and advanced it forward or backward frame by frame til she looked zombily scientologized and/or disheveled, weird-eyed, blinky-weepy, psycho or whatever. By the same means, he made Gwyneth look homely & bag lady-bitter, cellu-lumpy, age-spotted. Jerzy was
good
; he sold a pic of Michelle Obama looking wild-eyed indigent that really made the supermarket shoppers hoot.

But the Renée he got was neither. More of what they call a
page-turner—
filler
between
the Hooters and the Gaspers, you stare at it, you take it in, you register the shittiness and dumpiness of it, you get that quick, pleasant little hit that reminds you, stars can be dumpy & shitty-looking,
just like you & me
. Stars can be dumpy, shitty-looking, plastic surgery-deformed, sad, binge-eating cunts, but they're just like you and me, only with more money.

Like a million times more.

Jerzy had his own Smarmy Army of twittering sickos—he called them shitters, twitfarts, twittiefucks, what have you—on the payroll, some of them bonafide bottomfeeders but most just 14 & 15 year-old kids who got a (small,
very
small) % whenever Jerzy sold a pic they had tipped him on. They were easy to cheat. They were middleschoolers (one was his weed connect), fucking
sk8trs
who were in it for the sport—just another computer game. Stalking the wild celeb gave em that GPS spy-high . . .

More tweets now as he rolled down Sunset toward Beverly Hills. Paula Abdul was at Fred Joaillier on Rodeo
(go, Paula!) . . .
Trent Reznor @ CB2, Santa Monica Mall
(why would anyone give a shit) . . .
Piers Morgan (
hate
that dipshit) b-fasting at the Polo Lounge w/Carl Bernstein
(you needed to be 70+ to know who Bernstein was) . . .
slow morning.
Fuck it . . .

He parked on Burton Way, across from the
L'Ermitage
. Nice green grass, in the island between lanes . . . Burton always made him feel peaceful. He snorts some coke, leaves the truck, & strolls to the “park” (10 yards away). Sits down cross-legged in the sun.
My place in the sun.
Feels nice. All buddha-buddha.

The stars will never be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . just like ME.

Harry Middleton “hired” him but that didn't really mean a thing. H around the M would buy pics from
anyone
, you could be a serial childkiller or a Muslim shoebomber, Harry didn't give a
honeyshot!
badger shit, as long as you delivered, Harry would pay the long green. The man had “hired” Jerzy because he liked the idea of
staff
, he liked playing the big pasha, the poobah, the grand vizier commanding his Smarmy of papsmearazzi, all that horseshit appealed to the freak's baroque sense of e-trepreneurialism. What being “hired”
really
meant was that Jerzy could hang at Harry's apt (an awesome thing) & use it as a pitstop, a place to smoke a joint between Olsen twins, do his meth in the john while H was in the middle of
spieling
pussymania. But man could not live by
honeyshot!
alone.

All in all, being a Hollywood paparazzo suited him. Jerzy liked the perpetual motion. Before Mom was MoMA, she lugged him along on photo expeditions (so she said; he was too young to remember) on the Floridian coast; maybe that had something to do with it.
O right, of course! That explains why I'm a paparazzo & a speed freak. It's all because MoMA hauled my diapered ass along on her lame, peripatetic excursions!
Then she ditched him for New York. Jerzy was left in Ocala with his grandma & her Banquet® TV trays and
muy
depresso ways. And just so Jerzy wouldn't
forget
her, MoMA left a shoebox of warpy, sun-drenched Polaroids, some with her &
the Professor—
his father—in that rathole-looking place she always called “the bungalow,” a few with the three of them—Jerzy, MoMA & Dad—
(dad, her married lover)
—one had Jerzy in the curly-haired arms of
the professor—
the name he
still
called his father in his head (that's what MoMA called him) . . . MoMA & the Professor all squinty-eyed and happy, staring down the camera in the white-out FL sun. He wondered who took the pics. Maybe a neighbor . . . when he entered toddlerdom, the Professor dropped dead; more Polaroids now, with Jerzy, MoMA and the grandparents staring down the camera, MoMA squinting no longer smiling into the once-paradisal unbearable brightness of Sunkist Florida sun. Then Gramps collapsed & died, and MoMA left. There were no pics from that time.

He fought a lot in school, they called him a bastard, like the cliché goes, the kids and teachers always find that shit out, & everybody finds a way to torture you about it. Jerzy fought hard, but all he learned was, when you fought you lost. Never a correlation between fighting & winning/only fighting & defeat & humiliation. That's what he learned. At least they didn't call him bastard in New York, everybody was probably a bastard, even though he became a rechristened bastard because MoMA forgot to marry Ronny the DP—Ronny Vomes. “Vomes”—what an assholish moniker . . . MoMA used Crelle-Vomes as her “professional name,” but never married either one of them. What a
load
. So now he was a bastard two times over, and his baby sister was a bitch.

After MoMA and the DP broke up, they moved to Brooklyn. Ronny was still in their lives, being Jerilynn's real father & Jerzy's fake one. Sometimes Jerzy worked on the camera crew like his mother once did, that's how he got an aptitude, even fantasized about getting into the union. Jerzy went to Baja on a shoot & Ronny fired him for not showing up on the 1st day of principal photography. Those were (the beginning of) the Heroin Years, now he was in the (middle of the?) Tweak Years (still mix 'n matched with H), Jerzy'd always been way into both but now he was super-grateful into the joyful, joyous
SLAM
Days & GBH/Xanax Nights.

He got loaded in Costa Rica, Belize, BC, Krakow, Colorado, Crete. Detoxed in UK, Rome, Colorado, Crete, Krakow, BC, the Cape. Returned to New York at 28, took all those years just to find his true calling, that of celebrity craphouse
creep.
A creeperazzo makes his own sked. Creeperazzi are
independent contractors
. But the very best part of being a Creeperazzo creeper is you have the wherewithal to do
R
_x
all day long
.

The Master Plan was to fuck with/edit down the
Best of the Best
of Jerzy's vanilla creeperazzi & (still to cum)
papsmearshots!
then assemble them into a gallery show. Oh, that would righteously piss MoMA off! She might never recover from the blow! He'd call the exhibition
Jerzy Shores—
Harry would love that he used his nickname, he'd give him credit for his cleverness in the catalogue. Jerzy would show his work in LA as
Jer-Z
or
Squeegee
or
Jeezy
, or maybe he'd use all three just to confuse people. He was going to shoot for the
top—
he wanted to be repped by the Gagosian. He wanted to be the 1st (& last) one on the block to legitimize/commodify/artworld-monetize the
moneyshots
. Jerzy'd done a bit of late-night tweakstudying about the Gagosian on the web, they had a client that took pics of Lindsay, Sasha Grey, & whomever—made short shitty videos of them too—real dumbass shit—Jerzy thought
no way
could the guy compete with him. Another Gagosian guy named Richard Prince did paintings of nurses & stenciled jokes that went for millions—& Jerzy was convinced that the
reason
it went for millions was because the guy was
Number Uno
, he must have been the
1st
to be totally serious about making a nurse-and-stenciled-joke painting—or if somebody else
had,
then this guy's paintings of nurses & stenciled jokes were the 1st
breakthrough
nurse-and-tell-an-actual-joke paintings, that's all you needed, it was all about
breakthrough
, maybe the other guys who did that kind of painting—paintings of nurses and whole jokes—maybe the other guys blew it because they
used the
wrong jokes, knock-knock
jokes or whatever with
doctors
instead of
nurses . . .
but Jerzy thought: more power to him, more power to this guy Richard Prince
and
to Larry Gagosian—Larry Gagosian was King—all he (Jerzy) had to do was have that
breakthrough
, be the
1st
, or the
1st breakthrough
anyway
,
like Jean-Michel Basketcase was with graffiti, or Arbus & her freakshow folk———
no one
(so far) (to his knowledge) had thought to hang their altered/fucked with/edited papsmeary vulturazzo creepshots in a
major gallery of art
(tho it must be said that Jerzy didn't really do a thorough internet search of it because he didn't want to come across someone who
had
already done or was just
about
to do the very same thing that was his Gagosian Dream) but it was a
fairly safe bet
that no one had. Certainly none of Jerzy's esteemed
colleagues
could in their pathetic minds even come
close
to imagining such a thing. The collective Smarmy Army brain was unfathomably clueless & ill-developed in the realm of this degree of sophistication. How could any of them even know about or understand the genius and the cultural force Larry Gagosian, who was King?