The Sex Was Great But... (2 page)

“Well, according to the average women in the poll, sweetie, you exemplify the type of girl they love to hate. Out of touch and skinny.”

“I am
so
not skinny,” I argued. “I even ate a carb last week. What is wrong with these people?” I spotted a parking space on Melrose Avenue, right near Effrey's dry cleaners. I told Nancy to wait. My car slid into the space easily, which gave me an unreasonable kick because I'm so bad at parking. Just as I was about to climb out of my car, though, I noticed I was being given the finger by a guy in a beat-up old pickup, who seemed to think I'd stolen his parking space. He was yelling and gesticulating wildly, and I had to believe that whatever he was yelling wasn't generous.

“Nancy, there's this guy giving me the finger,” I told her.

She told me to take a deep, cleansing breath and ignore him, but instead I gave him the finger back. I'm no Grace Kelly, nor was I meant to be. Giving him the finger seemed to inject fresh fervor into his abuse, though. Oops. Follow
ing Nancy's original advice, I pulled my orange-framed Jackie O sunglasses over my face and, head down, clambered out of my car, grabbed my latest Hermès Birken (no, I didn't have to queue) and stepped out of the car, clicking the auto-lock on my keys without turning.

In the dry cleaners I handed over my tag to the model-cum-actor-cum-dry-cleaner at the counter. He took it semi-reluctantly and headed off down the rails.

I figured he hadn't recognized me. He probably thought I was an assistant or something… I mean, who picks up their own dry cleaning in L.A.?

I was signing my Visa slip when Nancy called again.

“According to the poll,” she began, without so much as a hello, “your face—merely by the arrangement of its features—berates other girls for not coming up to scratch. It says here that you are the impossible ideal!”

Okay, this was now officially making me angry, and I only have room in my life for sixteen mood changes a year. At this rate I'd use up my entire annual quota in one day! “Me?” I shrieked, hitting a note I hadn't heard since I was a cheerleader. “An impossible ideal? What about that crease where my thighs join my ass? What about my ears that you said might need pinning?” I asked, noticing that my dry-cleaner-cum-actor-cum-whatever was pretending to scrutinize my signature as if he wasn't listening. Great. My ass/leg crease and flappy ear details would be all over West Hollywood by lunch.

“The title of the piece is, ‘Every Day, In Every Way, Holly Klein Is Driving American Women To Obesity and Misery,'” Nancy read.

I couldn't believe this. “You're kidding right? What about
Gwyneth Paltrow? What about Cameron Diaz or Kate Hudson?” I asked, as the model-cum-actor-cum-dry-cleaner grinned madly at me. He'd worked out who I was and I just knew he wanted to turn me into a “Hey, guess what Holly Klein said today?” story for his buddies. I give him a cold, hard,
you-so-don't-know-me
glare.

“Hey, I've seen you on that show. You're—” he began, but I held my immaculately manicured finger up to silence him.

Nancy was breaking it to me. “Gwyneth comes thirteenth in the poll. And Cameron and Kate aren't even on the list, Holls.”

I was staggered. “Let me get this straight. I am making the women of America more miserable than Gwyneth-perfect-Paltrow, the so-called Audrey Hepburn of our times?” My model-cum-actor-cum-dry-cleaner looked at me oddly as he passed me my cardigan. I regretted berating Gwyneth in his presence. She's actually one of my dearest and closest acquaintances.

Does he think I'm shallow? I was wondering as he started scribbling on a pad. I mouthed the word “thanks,” and rewarded him with one of my
real
smiles, but he was already punching numbers into a phone. I know it's pathetic, but even though he was a
sell-his-own-mother-down-the-river
creep, I still wanted him to like me.

Outside, pickup guy was still waiting behind his wheel to menace me. He wound down his window, but only halfway, because it jammed, then he stuck part of his head out in order to yell the words, “Cock-sucking bitch!”

Behind the protective screen of my glasses I ignored him. Head down, I rushed to my car, threw my freshly dry-
cleaned cardigan onto the back seat, climbed inside and switched on the air-conditioning. Pickup guy stuck his head out the window and started barking at me like a dog. People all over the area came out of their shops to stare.

Why didn't I let one of my assistants do my errands for me? This was what happened when I tried to live a normal life.

“Have you got a dog with you, Holly?” Nancy is asking.

“No, it's that guy who was giving me the finger earlier. He's started barking at me.”

“What is it with you, Holly? You really seem to be getting people's backs up. Jack is so not going to like this.”

The intersection on Melrose was bottlenecked and I had to focus more because I'm not that great a driver. “Jack? Who's Jack?” She'd lost me.

A red Mustang pulled in front of me and I narrowly avoided ramming it.

“Are you even alive, Holly? Jack! The head of the network! The guy who has the power to can our show when it comes up for review at the end of this season.”

“Oh. Yeah…” The enormity of the situation dawned on me.

Jack owns me. I exist because of Jack. Well, that's what Jack is always saying, anyway. Jack is one of those cliché network bosses, right down to his obesity, his baldness and his illegally imported Cuban cigars. His sense of his own importance trumps all his flaws, though, because, in his own words, he can make or break any girl in this town so why should he give a flying fuck what he looks like or how he behaves?

I'm dead.

“So this is very bad, right?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Well, erm, no, actually. I mean, well, we still have a hit show. The ratings are still high. I know we've been going through a rough patch, but—”

She cut me off. “Do I think Jack will go into a rage when he sees this poll and weighs our falling ratings up against the cute bit of ass sitting on his knee this week? Gee…let me think. You bet your sweet ass back to Connecticut I do!”

My car stalled and the drivers behind me all leaned on their horns. Why does everyone hate me so much?

“I'm really sorry, Holls, but as your producer I have to be realistic. This couldn't have come at a worse time.” Her words stung.

Nancy is always saying “This couldn't come at a worse time!” when she doesn't mean it. It's her gag. When something brilliant happens—like, say, a waiter placing a perfect dessert before her, or marvelous ratings coming in, or a cute guy with fathering potential asking her out. Anything nice, basically—Nancy will declare, “This couldn't come at a worse time, darh-ling,” in an OTT fake English accent.

She loves to talk in her English Voice. She says it's on account of how English people are smarter and better at everything than we are—or at least they think they are. Her English Voice makes me laugh, because she sounds like Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins.

But she didn't use the E.V. then. I wasn't giggling, and nor was Nancy. This really
couldn't
have come at a worse time. I mean, obviously I could retire now and never need
to work again, but I'm twenty-six! Twenty-six. I'm too young to be this unpopular.

“We need a gimmick,” Nancy added.

“The whole show is a gimmick,” I reminded her. “One big marketing gimmick.”

“Well, a different gimmick, then. Something distracting. Something totally different. Something with heart. Something
real.
”

“A
real
gimmick you mean?” I suggested—trying to be funny.

“Yes. A makeover that will make real people think that Holly is deep and meaningful and real. We need to do a makeover on someone adorably needy.”

“Another New Betty?” I proposed, referring to a makeover we did on an Afro-American woman from the projects who ended up getting a cool job in PR and leaving her deadbeat husband just weeks after we reconstructed her. The show made headlines. And it wasn't even much of a set-up. Betty was our triumph. She had bags of personality and everyone loved her. She was everything that makes human interest interesting.

After we aired the New Betty show, ratings soared. We tried to recreate the effect with another makeover from the projects but it blew up in our faces. The woman turned out to be a crack dealer with a nasty habit of recruiting schoolkids. Unlike television audiences, New Bettys don't grow on trees. At the end of the day it was safer dealing with ex-celebs. Or so I thought.

“Oh, my god, Holly, you're right! What we need is another New Betty!”

I drove into Cell Hell again and our connection died.
I'd call her back later. In the meantime I wanted to forget how shallow I was. Forget about my agent and Jack and my ratings. Forget New Betty. I needed some retail therapy, and so I drove in the direction of Los Feliz to my favorite shop of the nanosecond, Mona Li.

I had to focus on positive thoughts.

“Attack negativity—harness positivity,” Wilhelm tells me. He also tells me to use any weapon I have to hand in my fight to bring down my insecurities. “It's a war!” he cries. “Them or us!” He looks kind of crazed when he stands up on his desk and shouts stuff like this.

Sometimes I think Wilhelm may have taken too much acid with Tim in the sixties. He says all it did was open his doors of perception, but I think while he was opening all those doors some of his neurotransmitters escaped. But then nobody's perfect, I guess.

The drive to Los Feliz passed without incident, and I parked the car at a meter on the same block as Mona Li, outside Y-Que Trading Post.

I
hear the announcement as I enter the Ministry of Sound. “Mix Master Monroe is in the house.”

I've got two gorillas on either side of me, helping me with my gear and clearing the crowd. They've filled me in on the mood tonight—who's in the house, the pills being dropped, all the general things I need to know in order to create the perfect set. One of the club suits is doing his rag about how he's had to pay for an extra fifteen-minute set to cover me, but I ignore him—everyone knows there's always some wannabe willing to lay down a fifteen-minute set just for the kudos.

I make my way to the decks, soaking up the euphoric
atmosphere and spotting some of my idolisers in the crowd. I'm still on a high from my last set, which is why I'm ten minutes late, and I'd like to say it was my driver's fault but the reality was I was having it large at Fabric, my last venue, giving shout-outs to DJ mates and vibing.

Nothing beats that feeling when you're at your decks, spinning, scratching, mixing—that feeling when you can hear the club in one headphone and you're lining up the beats in the other, holding the power in your fingers to create a transcendental trance.

In the booth Cassie J passes me the headphones. “I've laid one down for you, Leo.” She's a babe.

“Sorry I'm late. It was stomping at Fabric.”

“Are you mad, Leo? It's me who should be thanking you,” she says, and we stand there surveying the crowd we both know has come to listen to my music, not hers.

“And look, Leo,” she says, searching my eyes with hers, “about last night—sorry I was all over you like that. You know you're the best DJ in the world now, and it's hard not to force blow jobs on you all the time…”

My dream ends as most of my dreams do lately, with Kev kicking me awake.

“Wake up, man. We're out of beer,” he shouts, shoving my sleeping form with his foot. I tell him to fuck off, despite knowing from experience what a persistent bastard Kev can be when he wants beer.

The reality of my circumstances hits with a thud as I yawn, inhaling the spicy mix of old socks, cigarettes, enchiladas and cheap home improvements that is my Los Angeles gaff. Kev chucks my jeans and shirt on top of my face.

Across from me there is a wall-sized photograph of Las
Vegas, which is the only thing about this apartment I wouldn't change. If I had the money I'd really like to get to Vegas. My dad lost thirty thousand bucks there one night on craps. He sent my mum and me a postcard:

I was ten at the time, and my mum and I were living on a London council estate. Mike left us when I was two to “focus on his music,” and apparently the focus paid off. He moved out to L.A. where Mike “Bad Ass” Monroe and the Evil-Doers enjoyed a few album successes in the eighties.

My auntie Lucy was always playing his records, but out of loyalty to my mum I never asked about him. Mum viewed Auntie Lucy's fondness for my dad the way other mothers viewed drug pushers that hang around their kids' schoolyard.

“I don't want you talking to my son about that arsewipe,” my mum used to say. But Lucy did anyway. Talked that is. She was always going on about his nice eyes.

Despite Mike's success, he never shared his wealth with us. Like most of the mothers on our estate my mum was on benefit; although with the money she made on her market stall in Islington, selling “antique” mirrors made in Indonesia, we didn't do too badly. We always had the latest stereos and televisions, and we went on holiday to Spain most winters during term time, when fares were cheaper.

The best part of my summer was Glastonbury. We used to drive there for the music festival in Mum's latest bomb. Auntie Lucy used to share the driving while I rolled joints
for them in the back. When I was older I used to bring my mate Liam along, and we'd bait hippies and talk about how we'd be wiping the stage with these bands once we were famous.

It was at Glastonbury that I first got into music. One year I bought an old Vox with a broken neck off a junkie with one leg. I fixed it up over the next few months, and had a new Stratocaster neck fitted using the money I made selling hash bits that I picked out of butts left in the ashtrays at Auntie Lucy's place. It wasn't until I went clubbing, though, that it hit me: I didn't want to strum away on a guitar and argue with a band all my life; I wanted the alchemical high of tailor-making the music to create a specific high. I wanted to be a DJ.

Problem is, I fall into things rather than aspire to them. Take my trip to the States last month. I hadn't even planned to come here. This girl I'd slept with a few times won tickets to Los Angeles in a competition at her work. I can't lie. She was okay, but I wasn't exactly devastated when she changed her mind about me on the flight over and declared that we were mismatched.

I'm pretty sure she shagged the guy from the row in front of us in the toilet on the plane, but I kept my suspicions to myself. Basically I don't like confrontations, and after her lecture about my lack of the type of qualities she was looking for in a man I agreed we should call it quits. I wished her luck at LAX airport, totally forgetting that she had all our money, passports and tickets in her Hello Kitty money belt.

In Hollywood the only passport you need to cross the border between dreams and reality is denial.

I spent that first night vibing in a club in East Hollywood where I met Tifanie, the girl whose sofa I still inhabit. Maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking about tracking my dad down when I came here, but it wasn't a priority, and three weeks later I still hadn't done anything about it.

Kev gives me another shove with his foot. “Come on, man. Wake up you dozy bastard,” he cajoles, sitting down on top of me. “I need a beer. You gotta go out on the crack with me, man. Come on. You know you want to!”

“On the crack” is Kev's term for begging. I'd never met a beggar before, especially not a career beggar. I thought “on the crack” meant scoring weed when I first arrived, so I joined him on a rare wet L.A. afternoon on Melrose. I was imagining how a nice mellow joint was just what I needed, only to find myself dressed in a wool hat with earflaps, collaring passersby for money for a “cup of tea.” It isn't an experience I ever intend to repeat, especially this morning—if it is still morning. Lately I haven't been getting up before dusk.

I'm well pissed off to find, as I open one eye and look at my watch, that I only went to bed two hours earlier. “Shit, Kev, I only just crashed. Go on the crack by yourself.”

He grabs my wrist and peers at my watch; only he's not after the time. My watch is all I own of any value these days, and Kev is always at me to flog it. It's a Rolex. A fake from Brick Lane Market. But my mum gave it to me for Christmas a few years back so I feel a bit sentimental about it. Besides, knowing I have a watch at all gives me hope that one day time might matter to me again.

“No,” I tell him firmly. “You're not having the watch.”

“Come on, man, who gives a fuck about time when what we really need is beer? Let's flog it and get trollied.”

I know my chances of sleep are doomed, so I sit up and press the base of my hands into my eyes to wake up.

Actually, I guess it's about time I got it together to sort out my passport so I can finally get out of this dive and go home. Maybe this is the shove I need to make it to the bank in time to see if the money I asked my mum to send is there.

“So are you coming or what?” Kev asks.

“On one condition,” I tell him. “The first money goes on coffee.” I know this will never happen, but I tell myself it will.

I pull myself out of my sleeping bag and into my jeans, suddenly psyched about the prospect of getting my shit together and going home. I'm not even fazed by Snore, who as usual is crashed out on the other sofa, one arm lolling on the floor, resting next to an old dried-out bowl of cereal. A trail of saliva is traveling down his cheek. And they call this place the City of Angels.

I'm so ready to go home.

Kev starts pacing again and tells me to hurry up. Snore tells him to shut up and we both tell Snore to shut it. All three of us pay twenty bucks apiece to share the lounge room of Tifanie's flat in the Hollymount Apartment building. Tifanie is a perky girl from Maryland who always dreamed of becoming an actor—always pronounced with a hyphen, as in ac-tor. She hasn't actually done any paid acting work, though, and the Screen Actors' Guild card grail still eludes her. The highlight of her career is the day she
worked in the mailroom at William Morris. It features up there with the time she told Drew Barrymore where the rest room was at the Standard. At least, she thinks it was Drew Barrymore.

I'd never even heard of William Morris before I got to L.A.—an ignorance that physically hurt Tifanie to imagine. “It's like not having heard of Audrey Hepburn,” she gasped, holding her head as if it might explode with the horror of it all.

Who is Audrey Hepburn anyway? (Just joking.)

We had a drunken shag that first night, and she said I was welcome to surf her sofa if I helped with rent. She needs all the money she can get for her acting classes. She omitted to mention, however, that the sofa was currently already being surfed by two other guys; but as they didn't seem bothered by me squeezing in who was I to make an issue of it? Besides, I didn't intend to be around long.

Kev has been at the Hollymount Apartments with Tifanie from the beginning of her lease, and although she's sure she's never slept with him—“I do have some standards, Leo!”—she doesn't remember how she ever agreed to let him stay.

That's Kev all over.

He's from England, too. Only whereas I grew up in the relative normality of a London council estate, he's been begging and drinking since he was a fetus—it's all he knows. He says he tried to make those cloth bracelet things in 1998, but someone nicked his thread and that was that. He's pretty good at knitting, but not at making stuff people might actually want to buy.

He's always saying that he could make a fortune selling
his life story, which is one of the grimmest I've ever heard. He says the only thing that stops him is the fear of becoming rich. Actually, I think he means it. Money wouldn't suit Kev. His mum is one of the original Brew Crew, a section of a convoy who are more boozers than New Age travelers. Kev came out to the States with a bunch of the Brew Crew in '99, for some riot or other in Seattle, and stayed.

Compared to my other sofa surfer companion, Snore, Kev is a king among men. Snore has a dream of becoming a star in the B-grade porn industry—if he can ever wake up long enough to do anything about it. Tifanie has a soft spot for him on account of the fact that it was him who got her the day's work at William Morris.

While I've been getting into my clothes, Kev has been emptying all the dregs of the beer cans around the flat into a mug. “Waste not, want not,” he says, grinning evilly when he notices me curling my lip.

Kev looks like a nasty bit of work when he grins—a combination of his missing teeth and the small black spider tattooed on his upper lip.

I've seen the Brew Crew around Glastonbury over the years, and think they're a bunch of nutters. Well they
are
a bunch of nutters.

Kev is a nutter too, I guess, but at least he's
my
nutter.

Out on the street I hold my arm up as a shield against the intense glare. Kev compares living in London to living by candlelight, whereas the L.A. sun blazes with the force of a thousand paparazzi flashes. Kev grabs my sunglasses off me as I'm about to put them on—warning me that the punters don't trust beggars in Ray-Bans. Which is probably true.

Standing outside the liquor store next to the Hollymount Apartments, he pulls a woolly hat, a scarf and a pair of fingerless gloves from his donkey jacket. “This is your kit,” he says, passing them to me.

“Do I really have to?” I plead, sounding like a kid complaining about eating Brussels sprouts.

Kev shakes his head at me like I'm a lost cause. “Gees, Monroe, you're such a whiny girl.” He walks off purposefully, striding through the heavy traffic, his hands in the air to alert the cars that swerve dangerously to avoid him.

I follow him as he takes up his regular post outside Y-Que Trading, a shop that sells stuff like faux fur lamp-shades and computer mouse pads in animal prints, as well as bongs, chillums and various other drug paraphernalia. I pull my hat with its naff little earflaps over my head. It's the same as Kev's—he knitted them. Knitting is one the skills he picked up on the convoy. The other one is how to roll joints out of wet bog roll.

In the L.A. heat, the hats, along with the gloves, scarves and donkey jackets, make us stand out. Kev's big on standing out—“Makes the punters think, see,” he explained once. “You gotta make the punters think, man! Get 'em wondering 'bout what the fuck's going on, yeah?” When he said this he contorted his face, so that I laughed. But in the sun, sweating like a pig in this get-up, I'm the one wondering what the fuck is going on. How did I end up here, like this?

I wander down the block a bit farther to my favorite record store, Vinyl Fetish, which usually has a load of free magazines outside that I can scan for gigs. There aren't many people out on the street yet—a few skateboarders
wending their way through the traffic and some shop staff rolling up for work—but I know Kev would go ballistic if I started reading at this early stage. I nod to familiar faces as they pass, and try and summon the nerve to do what Kev expects of me, but my embarrassment defeats me.

Normally Kev goes on the crack on Melrose, where a younger crowd can usually be relied upon to bestow a few bucks on him, but he clearly can't be bothered trekking off to Melrose without a beer to fortify him.