Pamela Anderson - Star Struck

“Persistent.”

“I think you’re worth it.”

“You do, hunh?” she said, at last intrigued.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Ninety-nine percent of success is showing up.”

“What’s the other one percent?” She giggled.

“Truly amazing talent,” he said with a rumble of husky laughter.

“Are you talented?”

“You have no idea.”

“No, I don’t, actually.” Star giggled.

And so it began.

It just wasn’t possible to tell him no.

After talking with Jimi on the phone for three hours that first day, Star agreed that she and her friends from the shoot would meet him and his friends for drinks at the hotel bar. It seemed like innocent fun, and it was, at long last, something to do on her vacation that involved leaving her room besides work. Star had had just about all the rest and relaxation she could stand, and a little tequila and a lot of dancing sounded like just what her holiday needed.

Best of all, it was the first offer she’d made the others on the shoot that had drawn any interest at all. Missy, her makeup and hair girl, three of the other models—Diane, Cindy, and Kat—and Roberto, one of the boys on the crew who was also one of the girls, all jumped at the chance to come along to see what would happen that evening.

Just knowing that they were going out that night enlivened Star on the next day’s shoot. She’d made quite the hit learning to windsurf for the cameras. Afterward, she’d snagged some of the summer line they were there to model and enlisted Missy, who’d been doing her makeup for the shoot, to help her get ready so she could make a real entrance at the bar that night. She made quite the project of it.

The truth of it was, Star hadn’t been all that interested in Jimi. She didn’t even intend to see him after she got back to L.A.

“Okay, Missy,” Star said, making like she was cracking a whip as she emerged wearing a bikini top, Gucci short shorts, and stilettos. “Bring on the eyeliner.”

“I’m sorry, but the señor will not be permitted in the hotel bar,” the maître d’ said with a little sniff. “You are not dressed properly for the Ritz. Perhaps the Hilton will be more to the señor’s liking? They have no standards there that I can detect.”

Star, Missy, and the others were enjoying the show from their table inside the Land’s End, the bar to which the maître d’ was attempting to refuse entry to Jimi and his scruffy lot. Clad more or less identically in saggy jeans, black Frankenstein shoes, and wife-beaters, they looked like someone’s backup dancers.

“Which one is he?” Diane, one of the other models, whispered to Star.

“I honestly don’t know,” Star confided with a tiny shrug. “They all look alike. They’re all hot.”

“I noticed that. Is he in a rock-and-roll band or a marching band?” Missy teased, laughing at her own joke.

“I’m not so sure.” Star shrugged. “But it looks as though he’s not going to be in here anytime soon.”

“Look, Jeeves,” Jimi shouted loudly enough to be heard at Star’s table. “We are supposed to be meeting guests at your foofy, uptight place. You should be happy we’re here. Look around.”

“That’s him, the belligerent one.” Star nodded disgustedly, recognizing the attitude from the fight he’d gotten into when he’d broken into her trailer only a week earlier and surprised yet another intruder who’d beaten him to it.

She smiled at herself.

She had broken up the fight in her trailer and gotten Jimi to leave by promising to go out on a date with him when she got back from Cabo if he stopped stalking her. She also agreed to read a movie script that the other intruder, Steph Golden, had broken in to leave for her. And there she was going out with Jimi in Cabo and she’d not read a word of the Hy Voltz script. Not my most successful negotiation, she thought ruefully.

“He seems very, um, persistent,” Cindy fished for a compliment as she sipped at the straw in her fruity drink. “That’s always a good sign, right?” Her head bobbed back and forth like a tennis spectator’s as she watched Jimi trying to outflank the implacable maître d’.

“Yeah,” Star said, bemused as security stepped in to prevent Jimi from coming to her table. “You’ve got to admire his determination.”

“Sure, what the fuck?” Kat said, toasting with her coconut shell.

Star rose to rescue him before he wound up in some seedy Mexican jail.

“A man will follow his dick off a cliff.” Diane shrugged, stirring her drink with the straw.

“Is there a cliff nearby?” Star called over her shoulder with a little laugh and a toss of her head that brought both Jimi and the security guards up short.

“Hi,” Jimi said, twisting his goatee nervously, unable to manage much more than an adolescent croak. “You look fucking amazing.”

“Is there a problem?” Star asked without addressing Jimi directly.

“Señorita e’Star,” the maître d’ fawned. “I am so sorry I did not realize, is this man a guest of yours?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid that the Ritz has a very strict dress code,” the maître d’ said with an obsequious bow. “I can offer you and your guests a table by the pool perhaps? Or in the cabana? But I cannot allow gentlemen without jackets in the Land’s End Club after six. My sincerest apologies.”

“No worries,” Star said, waving the nervous man in for a landing with a gentle gesture. “Tell you what. I haven’t gotten to see much of Cabo. Perhaps you could recommend a nightclub. Something local and not too touristy? Where we could go for a little drink in the company of gentlemen without jackets?”

“I’m sure Miss e’Star could get in anywhere in the world she cared to call,” the man said with another bow. “But, perhaps Madre de la Perla?”

“What?” Star asked. The name brought her up short. “What’s the name of the place?”

“Madre de la Perla,” the man repeated. “In inglés, Mother of Pearl. It’s an open-air cantina de la ostra —oyster bar.”

“I’m home,” Star said, flinging her arms around Jimi’s neck and hopping up and down as she spun him around. “Shuck me, suck me, eat me raw!” she shouted.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Jimi said, grinning as he took her in his arms.

“They’re actually supposed to be a ‘hypochondriac,’” Star explained to her mystified party as she drained the oyster shell of its contents and chased it with a shot of tequila. “That means they’ll put lead in your pencil,” she added with a confidential giggle. “Who wants an oyster shot?” she asked as she dropped the hollow shell into the gold, spray-painted coffee can that had been placed on their table to collect the empties.

The whole place had the same sort of makeshift feel to it. Formerly a dockside gas station and general store catering to local fishermen, with a little imagination and a lot of spray paint, the place had been converted into a dockside gas station, general store, and a bar. There were a few rough wooden tables, benches, and an odd assortment of old webbed lawn chairs, where local fish and seafood were served fresh off the fishing boats that bought gas and shopped for supplies there.

The fiberglass had been stripped from the old red-and-white promotional gas station awning, and the rusty, bare frame had been wound with old, loudly colored Christmas tree lights. Brightly hued scraps of cloth hung from the rafters to separate the cantina de la ostra from the Texaco. Local musicians serenaded Star and her party with their brassy music from the deck of a small pontoon boat, lashed alongside the dock.