Diamond Girl (28 page)

I left about a half million dollars in clothes and shoes for the clean-up crew at the apartment, and two cars in the downtown garage for whoever stole them first. I was taking mother’s advice to start over. Besides, I didn’t think I would be able to stand seeing even one reminder of my real life where I was going. Suddenly everything I had owned and collected over the years felt as unwanted as I was.

Part 4

RICH GIRL

Chapter 30

People always say stuff about how nobody walks in L.A., like a car is the number one most important survival tool that you can have here, but I think it’s a cell phone. Of course right now, in my present rather Sunset-Boulevard-on-steroids situation, I don’t have either a drivable car or a working cell.

My leased Porsche S.U.V. is hiding in the garage with a below empty gas tank and my cell phone, what a shock, doesn’t run either. Cars need gas and cell phones need electricity, and since my parents' whole tough-love-cutting-me-off strategy didn’t make me rush into the immediate pursuit of excellence, like say joining the McDonalds management training team, let alone figure out how to deal with those issues, I seem to be screwed, not that I need to worry about it anymore.

Ever since I got to L.A., there have been a billion details of daily life that tended to escape me. The funny thing is that there is anyone, especially my parents, who ever thought that I would suddenly morph into this super-capable young California woman about town.

How that would happen is a mystery - maybe through osmosis? I guess the feeling was that I would get on a plane in New York and disembark knowing how to run a house, deal with monthly bills, drive a car and do a few dozen other things simultaneously. I guess I can see how they might think that. After all, I grew up in thirty thousand feet of the most expensive square footage on the planet, surrounded by so many staff that I think they must have fought between themselves over
who could pick up my socks or drop off my dry-cleaning, or make me a cappuccino, just so they would have something to do.

Moving into my own little apartment in New York when it was just Petal and
me hadn’t changed anything. I hadn’t picked it out or furnished it, and the stuff that I left lying around got put away or replaced. The daily maids were also responsible for keeping me from starving, or getting scurvy from living on Doritos. They stocked my kitchen, filled my insulin pump, and left small nutritionist-approved meals in the refrigerator. When I blew up the microwave heating foil-covered food, it was magically replaced the next morning. They threw out things before they got moldy and hung fresh towels in my bathroom, and every morning brought me my coffee with a handful of multi-vitamins.

I hadn’t arranged any of that. I don’t know who did, maybe George, our family’s butler. I think he was the one who hired my daily staff and gave them their instructions, I don’t know.

I do know there were a few basic things I lacked when I arrived in lotus land, little things. For example I didn’t have a doctor or a nurse who would deal with obtaining insulin and filling my pump, and I didn’t have a car or a driver for that matter, since it would be years before I had the nerve to drive myself anywhere. I didn’t have a vet for Petal. I didn’t have any clothes, or any idea on where I could go to buy them, or even how I’d get to where the clothes were if I did know. I didn’t have a place to live, or again the slightest clue how you went about finding one. And if I were to find one, I didn’t know where the things houses needed, like furniture and plates, came from. I was so untrained in basic survival that I didn’t even think about other things houses needed, like water and electricity. And later on, when I did understand that houses needed that stuff, I still didn’t realize those things could just be taken away.

I have actually figured that last one out now. Fat lot of good it does me because here’s a shocker: those things I never thought about are things that cost money.
Which is pretty circular when I think about it, because I did not, not even once, imagine not having money. Money, like water and electricity and gasoline, are things that were just there, not something you needed to deal with. And here’s another surprise: people who have money, lots and lots of money, tend to be pretty much like me, pampered, which can be loosely translated into 'useless'.

Rich people think they control and run everything around them. What a joke; we can’t even figure out how to turn on the on switch on a sprinkler system. We think lawns just magically appear green and lush for us to walk over. We may know that steaks come from cows, but the whole transition thing of how they get from raw meat at a grocery store to Steak au Poivre on our hand-painted Flora Danica plates is a mystery that none of us have ever given a crap about.

I get it now. We are incompetent and every other rich person alive would probably end up just like I am tonight, given my same circumstances.

I’m going to die because my own family is too rich and too stupid to understand that leaving your sick child down and out, with an emergency cell phone to call for help, might accidentally end up killing said child. Cell phones don’t run if they’re not charged with electricity
and I totally get how you might not understand that if your maid always makes sure yours is charged up. It’s all about cause and effect, and we don’t know shit about mundane stuff that might cause a bad effect like, and I repeat, accidentally killing off someone, me being a prime example. We are careless with everything - possessions and even lives - because we expect the people we pay to be careful for us.

After a little while in L.A., well a month, during which I stayed in my safe suite at the Hotel Bel Air, all of it spent in bed, people were finally hired to take care of me. Bed was my go-to place when I was scared and I have never been more scared than during that time, until now, and anyway, I didn’t have any clothes. The hotel became my new family. The maids kept bringing me fresh bathrobes, room service took care of my and Petal’s food needs, and the hotel doctor provided my four times daily insulin after the maid who did my turndown service found me unconscious. That’s one thing L.A. has over New York; people are always being found unconscious at the better hotels and the staff are trained to always call the hotel doctor before they call an ambulance.

I could have at least gone downstairs to one of the boutiques in the lobby or eaten a meal in one of the restaurants, and I would have liked to have used the pool or the spa, but during that first month none of that was possible for me. I was paralyzed by shock, I was crushed by depression and I think I developed some short term agoraphobia as well.

Technically agoraphobia means fear of the marketplace which is hilarious for a girl who pretty much ruled the marketplace before she
lost her baby teeth, but that was at home, where I had been understood and cared for. In this foreign land, the only place I felt safe was my hotel room and, until Herbert decided that it was costing too much to let me sink under my own terror, I didn’t even have the nerve to go out into the hallway.

Milan called me almost every day but I couldn’t admit to the strongest girl in the world the truth about my new life. She had tried once to talk me into staying with her parents until I found “Some too fabulous place of your own”, but I didn’t w
ant them to see me like this - or admit it to her either - so I made up stories about what I was doing. That part was easy. I just watched the ‘E’ channel and  told her about whichever club or party I had seen some drunken celebrity stumble out of and said I had been there watching it in person the night before.

It’s hard to say for sure, but if Herbert hadn’t nearly choked on his imported tea when he received the Bel Air’s first month’s bill for me, I might have never left that room. I’ve never been brave or well adjusted, I guess, but, until I was sent to L.A., I didn’t know how I’d react to fear.

Turns out it paralyzes me. I’m just like one of those little animals, maybe a desert rabbit. I saw a show once on Discovery. The little guy came out of his bunny den and there was a snake there, and the rabbit didn’t try to run away or save himself, he just stayed where he was, shaking, and waiting to be killed. If Hotel Bel Air was my bunny den, I guess that makes Herbert the snake.

He wouldn’t see it that way, though. He would just very reasonably point out that eighty-two thousand dollars is a lot of money for a bed
and food for one month, not counting the hotel doctor and damages from Petal who had to use the carpet in our suite.

Herbert, like always, was just continuing on his apparently endless quest to make me responsible and therefore a normal productive member of society, albeit an heiress version. I am proud to say, though, that for a while there I even stumped him, because no matter what he said, I refused to budge from my room.

In desperation he sent out one of his associates on the next plane to sort me out. Her name was Amanda and, after meeting me, she could see I was an unusually stupid helpless version of a human, even for a blue blood, so she took charge of my life for me.

I was very grateful at first and for a long time, about three years actually. That sums up how far down I was, how totally destroyed I was by the move. When I finally found a drug regimen that worked for me - you can order anything off the internet - I woke up and realized I was living in a small, hideous, badly built McMansion in Beverly Hills and being taken care of by a staff of non-English speaking illegal immigrants. What passed for my waking life - ordering clothes and drugs off the internet - was handled by the assistant Amanda had hired.

*  *  *

If I was sleeping beauty, then Milan was the prince who rescued me from my three years of self-imposed bed rest house arrest.

Milan had been offered her own reality show and impulsively decided to move to Los Angeles since she had conquered the East and needed a new challenge.

She showed up on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday I had danced at my first L.A. club and had my picture taken for one of the gossip web sites. When the photographer screamed out Milan’s name, he also asked her who her pretty friend was. She pulled me close and gave him her billion watt smile. “This is
my bestest bff in the world, Carey Kelleher. She just moved out here too so I’d have someone to play with.”

I flashed the man my dimple and a peace sign; Milan’s story sounded so much better than the truth.

Chapter 31

Milan had long been a local New York legend by the time she followed the advice of Horace Greely and 'moved west young woman', but, to the wider world beyond a few brief snaps in People magazine, she wasn’t well known.  All of us pretty socialites in New York think we are already super famous and simply hounded to death by the paparazzi, all one of them, the guy that works for Rupert Murdoch’s über-popular New York Post.

That’s the paper everyone in the city really reads every morning. They won’t admit it, and they would never subscribe to it, no way. They subscribe to the great and venerable New York Times and furtively buy the Post at news stands. While they tell everyone they would never ever read such trash, there isn’t a New Yorker alive who couldn’t quote you verbatim a daily socialite scandal, complete with commentary on the unflattering pictures that he or she just read from their copy of the Post.

Those of us who are targets of the Post’s coverage say we hate it. Hell, I went one further than that and gave harassment by Page Six as my public reason for leaving New York but, come on, we didn’t hate it. What I’m trying to explain here is that Milan had for years been the most covered uptown girl that New York had ever seen. She was in Page Six almost daily and, while that made her famous, or infamous, to other girls who were manor born and who said they would rather die than be in the Post every day - girls who said that the only decent place to have your photo seen was W or Vogue - they didn’t mean it. They wished they were her, or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they did mean it because, after all, Page Six had gotten me exiled and while it had helped bring Milan to the notice of Hollywoodland, it had also kind of gotten her exiled too.

All of us who were born with everything were also born with the expectation that we would maintain our ruling class birthright and pass it along to the next generation. To do that there had to be a next generation, and for that to happen we had to marry one of our own kind in a lavish St. Patrick’s ceremony. This would be followed by an even more lavish reception, all of which could be most properly covered in W and Vogue, and then you wouldn’t hear much about any of us again, save for a small pic here and there in Vanity Fair’s parties section.

Babies would eventually come and be raised by a starched team of nannies, just as we had been, and our lives would continue in apartments  and weekend estates that were hopefully as fabulous as the ones we had been born in. That was always almost a sure thing, since old money means old trusts, and eventual massive inheritances, that would allow us to live lavishly, but not so lavishly that the next generation wouldn’t be able to continue on, and that’s the circle of life, the gilded life to which only those born in the right place - New York -  and with the right name were entitled.

The girls were, by my generation, almost always beautiful, and so were the boys. The boys, that’s a funny thing. The boys might party like it’s nineteen ninety-four all through prep and college - indeed it was expected of them, that was also a birthright - but, and it’s a big one,
we, the girls, could party too, discreetly, during high school, and maybe a little at college, but some things never change; we weren’t supposed to be seen partying in the newspapers.