Fiction Ruined My Family (18 page)

“Lauren Hutton said that?”

“Yes!” Kristina was yelling now.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said. This was the best ever.

“Yeah. So I told Anthony what happened,” Kristina said.

“You WHAT?” I yelled.

“I told Anthony what she said. I went into his office when they got back from lunch and told Anthony and Michele the whole thing. They're livid.”

“What the fuck did you do THAT for?”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? Let Lauren Hutton go down on me just because we're in a recession?”

“But, but—”

“Jeanne! It's the principle! You can't let people talk to you like that just because you're a secretary!” Kristina had a lot of principles.

“They're going to call her and confront her in a minute, so I can't talk long.”

“They're what? Oh my God,” I said. “Fuck, Kristina.” She was my new friend. We were having so much fun. “That was me.”

“What was you?”

“On the phone.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That was me pretending to be Lauren Hutton.” I was the worst person in New York.

“What? That was you? Jeanne! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I flashed to my childhood insistence: “I am not an ID-I-OTE! Do not call me one!”

“I thought it would be . . . funny,” I said.

“Funny? You thought it would be funny? I just told my boss that Lauren Hutton said she wanted to eat my pussy! Do you have any idea how uncomfortable that was? Mr. Mazzola is in his sixties! God. Now I have to go in there and tell him and his wife that it was my friend, my friend who called pretending to be Lauren Hutton wanting to eat my pussy.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Jesus Christ, Jeanne. Why didn't you tell me it was you?”

“I was going to call you right back but then Marty came over and made me do a bunch of stuff. I . . . I meant to call you right back. I didn't think, I mean I never thought you'd tell your boss about it.”

“I was really upset! Really upset! Jesus Christ, I told Anthony I'd been sexually harassed, those words, ‘sexually harassed' by Lauren Hutton!”

“Oh, boy.”

“Yeah. Oh, boy. I gotta go. I gotta go make sure they don't call her and yell at her. They're definitely going to fire me.”

My friend was now about to be back out there, eating Tuna Peewiggle every night, looking for work in a terrible economy. All thanks to my unparalleled sense of humor.

They didn't fire her, but she must have felt like a total asshole for the rest of the time she worked for him. As in, Yes, here I am typing a letter for you, longtime esteemed editor-in-chief of
Harper's Bazaar
, and here I am wearing appropriate office wear, but when I leave here I'm going to go hang out with my super-sophisticated friends—people who prank-call their friends at work pretending to be celebrities in search of some office carpet.

I, however, did get fired. A few weeks after the Lauren Hutton incident, Marty told me as he was leaving the office that some air-conditioning guys were coming to fix the AC downstairs in the large workshop.

“Don't let those motherfuckers downstairs alone! They'll fuck me so hard!”

I didn't have a chance to ask Marty why they weren't allowed downstairs, why they would fuck him so hard. I assumed he thought they were going to steal from him—tools from the workshop perhaps. The guy was wasted on Slim-Fast, rushing around and yelling at everyone. Everybody was out to fuck him and always quite hard.

When the AC guys came I was playing cards with Margo and smoking cigs, learning about her fascinating older-lady sex life. I buzzed them in and told them which AC was broken, letting them go downstairs to work on it while I hung with Margo.

Marty came back from his meeting early and walked up to my desk, where I was ordering paper for the fax machine.

“The AC guys are finished?” he barked.

“No, they're still working,” I said, smiling.

“You fucking crazy woman! You're trying to kill me, too?” He ran at full speed in his suit to the stairs and I followed. “I told you not to leave them here alone!”

We reached the lower floor, where the guys were working on the big unit, and Marty turned to me and yelled, “You're trying to kill me!” He picked up an eight-foot-long piece of metal tubing and swung it around his head repeatedly, lasso style.

“I forgot! I forgot!” I said, ducking and weaving away from the metal pipe.

 

 

 

Marty never apologized for trying to decapitate me with a lead pipe. He suspended me and Lois for a week for “moronic behavior during work hours,” and the first day of my suspension he called me and fired me.

 

 

 

 

I'M LAZY. I'm forgetful. I go too far. I don't know when to stop. I need to grow up. I am not a people person, nor am I organized or highly organized, enthusiastic or responsible. I'm not a self-starter or a problem solver. I don't have good phone or computer skills. I can't multitask or work well with others. And yet I maintain: I am not an id-i-ote.

C
ARMEN, my best friend and writing/performing partner had joined this theater company that went to Maine for two weeks every August to work out ideas for the upcoming season. Being a native New Yorker and not someone that familiar with the woods or white people and definitely not the combination, Carmen asked if she could bring me along. I saw this as a free Maine vacation, the summer tennis camp I never had, and gladly went. I wasn't doing much, just waitressing at this place on Montague Street called The Leaf and Bean. I don't know if I could be described as a “good” waitress. Eleanor and her husband came in for brunch one day and there was a long line and a couple came and stood behind them and she heard the guy say, “Well, I don't know. Why don't you go check?” and the woman walked to the front of the café and then came back and said to her boyfriend, “Yeah, she's working today,” and they walked out. I had a certain style. Either you got it or you didn't.

Almost before I stepped out of the car I met this actor named Jed and became a company member of the Irondale Ensemble Project. Back in New York, I began doing the outreach work of the company, part of which was teaching acting in high schools in the Bronx and way out in Brooklyn. I also commenced being the girlfriend of the young, handsome, funny, rich, charming, talented Mr. Jed Clarke.

The guy was about as nice as they come. Nicer. Always the first one to show up for a cleanup day at his building or offer his Westphalia van to someone who needed to move. The kind of no-fuss guy who shopped for khakis at EMS on Broadway even though he was retail royalty, his great-grandfather having started the swankiest clothing store in New York. The way he saw it, EMS was around the corner, easier than going above Fourteenth Street. People who do things because they're easy drive me nuts! Hard! Hard is what you want! That's what makes it mean something. That's what makes it real, dummy! His attitude toward my writing was similarly oppressive.

“I think you should do whatever makes you happy. You're an amazing writer. You should go for it.”

Go for it. Go-for-it. I was doomed. My writing . . . doomed.

Jed's conversation was packed with clichés. Some of his most oft-used were: now you're cooking with gas, let's get down to brass tacks, and there's more than one way to skin a cat. Jed would drop them casually and I'd think, What are you doing? Jesus, keep it down, looking around to make sure no one had heard him. He was a big reader but he read so goddamn freely. This looks good. My brother gave me this, I'll read this next. No thought about what he should be reading. He just read.

Part of my life was cohesive: waitress, member of a serious downtown theater company with a social conscience that taught AIDS education in prisons, schools, homeless shelters. We performed Brecht and Büchner. And then there was my after-work life, which involved a big loft in SoHo and fundraisers with his parents and dinner at ‘21.'

Jed and I got our food from Dean & Deluca. Deep down I knew Dean & Deluca was not a grocery store. We watched TV on his big screen. This was terrifying to me. His couch was big and comfortable. Comfort? I'll never be a writer. He had cable. Cable! Not one word will I write. He wanted to get married. He wanted kids. I loved him a lot. We laughed constantly. But just what kind of life was this guy setting me up for? I would go to the corner every day and buy the
New York Times
and read it with my coffee. By that time Jed had flipped on his big TV and was watching CNN. I'd try to block out the headline scroll, the dramatic language, the graphic photography but you can't. TV is TV—it can't be blocked out. It's TV. Clenching the paper every morning I'd think, I'm trying to do something here! It's TBA, but still.

I was terrified that if I stayed with Jed I would lose something I wasn't even sure I had. Focus? Drive? Talent? I can't concentrate if it's just gonna be fine and dandy around here all the time. How can anyone think in all this peace and comfort?

I moved in with Jed and got a waitressing gig in Manhattan at a café called Le Gamin on Twenty-first and Ninth, and at the one in SoHo. The owners, Robert and Hervé, were completely bonkers, partiers, fun, super-French—they always took the staff 's side against a customer. “Get ze ell out of ear. We doan need your bullshit, lady!” They were awesome. I liked to think waitressing at a French place had more, I don't know what—
je ne sais quoi?—
than other restaurants. Besides the French owners, there was a cook from Mali and his wife who spoke no English, and many of our regulars were French. People speaking French around me made it less like regular old waitressing. I could be myself there because I felt like everyone who worked there was unhappy and had a good time being that way. Unlike an office atmosphere, where I felt I couldn't wear something as daring as a bright orange cardigan—ooooh, bright!—at Le Gamin during a heat wave I waitressed in my vintage Betty Grable green bathing suit. The owners seemed to hire people because they were wild and funny and didn't take any bullshit.

Katharine called me one day and asked if I wanted to be on this late-night TV show she was producing called
Last Call
. There had been a law passed that it was now legal to be topless in New York State parks, beaches and the subway system. The woman heading up this change called it the top-free movement. The producers of
Last Call
wanted to do a segment on it and were sitting around trying to figure out who they could get, a normal person, someone who wasn't in the sex industry, to ride the subway topless.

“My sister will do it,” Katharine said.

“How much?” I said when she called me.

“A hundred and fifty.”

“What? A hundred and fifty. No way. Five hundred.”

“Jean, I've got to do this segment as cheaply as possible.”

“You're my sister. Aren't you supposed to be pimping me out for the most money possible?”

“I'm also the producer here, Jeanne. Two hundred.”

“Four hundred.”

“Three hundred. Final offer.”

“Done. Oh, I want a bodyguard.” Not that my boobs were going to cause anyone to go insane, but boobs are boobs, you never know.

“Fine. One bodyguard.”

I met my sister and the film crew at the uptown E train at Fiftieth Street. A svelte brunet man ran up to me and waved a small lead pipe in front of my face like a sparkler.

“Hi! I'm Craig! I'm your bodyguard!” and he did a little fancy dance step right there on the platform. I felt so safe. Katharine walked over.

“Hi!”

“Katharine—”

Craig was dancing and jabbing his pipe into the air. Rehearsing. Katharine turned to me.

“Okay, look, I called some bodyguards. No one was available. Craig is awesome. He's danced for some really good companies.”

“Brother. Fine.”

The shoot went off without too much trouble. We had to duck the New York City police as we didn't have permits, and we couldn't film on a train with kids or a train that was too full. But it went fine.

Jed wasn't too eager for his family to hear about my shenanigans, particularly his grandmother. Jed's family was so out of the regular work world that his mother, Diane, thought it was adorable that I was a waitress and said to me one day, excitedly, “So do you say, ‘Hi, my name is Jeanne and I'll be your waitress?'”

These were people who didn't even ride the subway, let alone without clothes on national television. While Jed's family lived on Fifth, my parents were living in filth.

One day Dad was going for a run in his neighborhood in his grungy running uniform: holey T-shirt, jogging shorts à la 1971, red-white-and-blue sweatbands on his wrists and also around his head. He was on his corner waiting to cross the street and begin his run when a homeless guy at his side said to him, “It's murder out there today.”

And my dad said, “What do you mean?”

“People don't want to give anything at all. You getting much today?”

My dad realized the guy thought he was a fellow homeless panhandler. My father thought it was funny but the story was met with some silence from my sisters and me when he told it. It was just too close. It's one thing if some rich person thinks you're homeless but when a seasoned pro thinks you're one of them that's another thing.

My father blew through the house money in approximately two years. When you're fifty-five years old with no job, no retirement money, no pension, you'd think you might want to at least buy a little apartment in Montclair, New Jersey, or somewhere, to live in. But he was going to hit it big with Stylebook. And now it was a nonfiction book on Fitzgerald. He was now taking temp work, borrowing a few bucks here and there. He borrowed twenty bucks from Katharine when she was a brand-new peon at a publishing house making around $12,000 a year, and after she gave it to him she got up in the middle of the restaurant and screamed, “You are the worst father ever! I hate you!” and walked out.