Filthy Dirty Laundry (Filthy Dirty Laundry #1)

Filthy

Dirty

Laundry

Book 1

kailin
gow

Filthy Dirty Laundry #1

Published by Sparklesoup Inc.

Sparklesoup.com

Copyright © 2015 Kailin Gow

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First Edition.

Printed in the
United States of America.

Chapter
1

Sidney

         
Tap. Tap. Tap.

         
Somebody's Manolo Blahniks on the
office waiting room floor. Another girl's Jimmy Choo's. A pair of Louboutins,
belonging to the longest, most tanned pair of legs I'd ever seen.

         
Tap. Tap. Tap.

         
My own flats, battered and worn.
I'm trying not to be nervous, but as I look at the women who surround me, I
find myself biting my lip, looking down, trying not to blush.

         
They're no better
than you are, Sidney,
I tell myself.
You're good at this job. You
deserve this job. You're going to get this job.
I'm almost convincing.

          Almost, but not quite.

         
Tap. Tap. Tap.

         
I look around me at the other
women interviewing. The perfect California blondes. Every inch a magazine
editor. Perfectly highlighted blonde hair – equal parts warm amber and
beach-bleached wavy goodness. Perfectly tailored jewel print dresses, cut to
flatter trim figures that betray sufficient leisure hours spent on a yoga mat
or under the aegis of a buff Pilates instructor. And expensive shoes.

         
People who wear
these must take cabs everywhere, I think.

          Real journalists
sometimes have to run.

         
I tell myself that I'm a real
journalist. That I get the stories other people don't – because I'm willing to
chase them. In flats, if necessary.

          But then I hear my
mother's voice in my head.
Dress for the job you want, Sidney. Looks are the
only way a woman gets anywhere in this world.

         
And my mother would know. Once
upon a time, she was a Playboy centerfold: every teenage boy of a certain age's
fantasy. The works: mod eyelashes, nice and thick, overdone blush, perfectly
straight blonde hair, a voluptuously starved figure. She used her body to get
ahead in more ways than one. She didn't have a lot of skills, my mother – still
doesn't, unless you count perfectly targeted criticism as an art. But she had a
lot of sex appeal, and she knew exactly how to use it to get what she wanted.

          And what she wanted was
my father. You've probably seen him before, at least if you're prone to
flipping through late 1980's TV dramas late at night on rerun channels. Or
maybe you've seen him in those Maxwell House commercials and wondered,
Hey,
who's that guy? Haven't I seen him in something?
To which the answer is
yes, yes you have
.
He's Sam Stone, aka Dr. Ralph Anders, the bad boy
physician with a drinking problem that made
Monroe, MD,
such a big hit.
The show was supposed to be a breakout role for David Boyle, who played Max
Monroe – a charming, do-gooder doctor with golden hair and a heart to match.
Instead, my dad, who played the villainous womanizer Dr. Anders, became a fan
favorite.

At least for a while. The show
was cancelled after one season, due to David Boyle having a jealous mental
breakdown. If you read tabloids between 1988 and 1991, you've probably already
familiarized yourself with my childhood. Sam Stone meets gorgeous playboy model
Marla Hayworth. Sam Stone: spotted partying with Marla Hayworth with a few
lines of Coke in Studio 54. A Vegas wedding, naturally. My mom and dad didn't
have wedding photos, just paparazzi shots, and until I was seven it was a
paparazzi sFILTHY DIRTY LAUNDRYof the two of them, drunk and stoned out of
their mind, stumbling over an Elvis impersonator, my mom in a Victoria's secret
white negligee instead of a wedding dress, that hung on our living room wall.

          But art imitates life
and life imitates art and all that jazz. And by the early 90's, my dad was
making headlines for other reasons. SPOTTED: SAM STONE WITH A YOUNGER MODEL.
SPOTTED: SAM STONE, VOMITING UP HIS GUTS OUTSIDE A LOWER EAST SIDE NIGHTCLUB.
SPOTTED: SAM STONE, PASSED OUT IN AN ALLEYWAY WITH AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD HOOKER.

          Not that my mother was
hurt. Or if she was, she never showed it. She took it like a fighter.

          “Remember, honey,” she
said to me, when I was seven years old. “Men can only do to you what you let
them. Women were given less power than men in this world – and do you know what
that means? If you want something badly enough, you have to go out and get it.
Nobody can protect you for too long. Don't let love blind you to the truth
about somebody.”

          She walked out on him a
few days later.

          TV drama money doesn't
go as far as you'd think. One season, no syndication profits. Up in smoke – or
in bottles of vodka. And my mother didn't have a dime when she left. Neither
did my father. Whatever he'd saved from
Monroe, MD
was long gone on the
hookers with whom he spent his nights. And so my mother started from scratch.
Her body was older – not the nubile fantasy of horny businessmen – but she
found a living as an arm-candy-type for wealthy businessmen who liked to pinch
her ass and make eyes at the cocktail waitresses serving them.

          She almost found love,
once. She dated a guy I thought she'd settle down with, for a while – all
through my teens. A doctor called Alan LeFleur – a divorcé with a nice big
mansion near Rodeo Drive. From my freshman year of high school until right
after I headed off to USC. It wasn't until right before my graduation that I
found out why.

          “He has a house in
Beverly Hills,” my mom said. “I registered you there. How else do you think I
got you into the swankiest public school in the country?”

          And swanky it was. I
was the poorest kid there, by a long shot. Being the child of a 1988 Playboy
Centerfold and the disgraced star of a one-season wonder doesn't get you
anywhere in a classroom full of the children of top agents, top producers,
big-name movie stars, real A-Listers. But it was a good education, and I kept
my head down and graduated top of my class – though I had my enemies. Alan
LeFleur's daughter from his first marriage, a girl called Kendall, was in my
year, and she made it her personal mission to ensure that everyone at school
knew I didn't belong there. That I was a charity case, the result of her dad
screwing “some hooker” and feeling “sorry for her poor kid, who probably
doesn't even know who her dad is.”

          As I look at the
impeccably dressed women waiting to interview all around me, I'm reminded of
Kendall. It's been a long time since she last made me miserable – with the
maturity and experience borne of being a recent college graduate, I tell myself
it's not her fault. She had issues. She blamed my mom for her parents'
divorce.
But somehow, all these gorgeous, well-coiffed women with their
perfect shoes and perfect hair and perfect clothes are bringing up my high
school insecurities, which not even a perfect 4.0 GPA at USC and two years of
field reporting at FILTHY DIRTY LAUNDRY can eradicate.

         
Who are you,
thinking you deserve this job?
My subconscious is working overtime today.
FILTHY
DIRTY LAUNDRY will never hire you as a celebrity editor. You're a field
reporter. You get coffee and string together puff pieces. That's all you're
good for.

         
I close my eyes, exhaling, trying
to expel my insecurities. Breathe in, breathe out.

          Not that celebrity
journalism's my dream, either. In the long run, I want to be a features
reporter, focusing on in-depth cultural topics: investigating the belly of the
beast, speaking truth to power, all that. But there's no better way to learn
how to deal with powerful people than celebrity reporting. Pooh pooh it all you
want, but you learn quickly some of the most important skills in the business:
how to flatter people whose heads are so far up their own asses they can't see
daylight, how to make people feel comfortable enough with you to divulge
personal information you can splash across the front page, how to dig through dumpsters,
pay off bellboys, get your hands filthy in order to get the dirt you need about
Cameron Diaz or Jessica Chastain. Besides, here in California, the whole world
seems to revolve around Hollywood. And while FILTHY DIRTY LAUNDRY might not be
going to Syria and interviewing refugees, it's the job I'm best qualified for
right now. I've been doing beat reporting for FILTHY DIRTY LAUNDRY since my
sophomore year of college. And now it's my chance to use that experience to get
in the door: to land a full-time gig. With health insurance. Can't forget about
that.

          I take another deep
breath.
It's only Tegan,
I tell myself. My editor at FDL. She's leaving
– that shiny rock on her finger means she'll never have to commission a story
about Jennifer Lawrence's trash again if she doesn't want to. She's always been
nice enough to me – if slightly confused about why I didn't go out and spend
hundreds of dollars on cocktails every night with the rest of the team.
Celebrity journalism attracts a certain type, after all. Girls from expensive
sororities with designer suits and neat hairstyles. Lots of fake tans, but the
expensive kind. Lots of fake boobs, equally pricey. Girls who are doing this as
a glamour gig because Daddy wants them to get
some
kind of a job, but
who don't actually need to make rent. Tegan Snow probably doesn't even pay rent
– no doubt she's the kind of girl whose daddy bought her an apartment the
second she graduated from college.

          I can't fault her,
though. She's a good editor, and she's always been nice to me. And she's a
crack editor, for all her privilege. She manages to turn the normal celebrity
puff pieces into something resembling a look into the hearts and minds of real
life human beings. She cares about her job: even though she doesn't have to work
at all. And right now, she's the one making the decision about who's going to
replace her on the celebrity beat.

          I look at my CV again,
hoping a last-minute go-over doesn't reveal any typos I've missed.
Sidney Stone...skills...attention
to detail....

          Come on, Sidney,
I tell myself.
You can do it.

         
I've stared down more managers
and PR reps than I can count. I've Shanghai'ed Emma Watson at the grocery store
to get her opinion on which member of One Direction would make the best kisser
(for the record, she was polite despite the fact I was being desperately rude,
gave me a quote about how she was sure they were “equally good”, and only
raised a slight eyebrow at the fact that I was essentially stalking her for two
hours to make $100 on an online sidebar. Maybe she felt sorry for me.
 
I'd
feel sorry for me. Go figure).

          So why am I so nervous
about Tegan asking me a few questions/

          Cindy, Tegan's
assistant, comes into the waiting room.

          “Stone, Sidney?” she
smiles down at me.

          Her shoes cost more
than my whole outfit.

          “I'm ready,” I say.