Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

Ooo-woo…

. . his stomach had that perfect, empty, racy feeling, & the flit, skipping beats. Ooooo . The reason being, the reason why, because what he did was put the crystal in a sheet of toilet paper, a little mound, & then he swallowed it. Swallowed the little biscuit. What he was doing now was, he got a tweet from a trusted twat that Renée Zellweger was at Peet’s — Montana & 14th — sitting in a chair at a farthest-away outdoor table, reading. Hunched over, deglammed, in a North Face vest. No makeup. Incognito . (Same Peet’s frequented by the over-the-hills: Molly Ringwald, Marcia Cross, Kate Capshaw.) Though Renée’s time was over (her cognito place in the sun), she hadn’t quite entered the Where Are They Now? newstand magazine cycle; but was definitely in the Fast Track To Washed-Out Hagdom internet rinse n spin. Not so wonderful a place to be, because any missteps came across as global FAILS.

730AM. . got the tweet, swallowed the speed, & waited. Then, BLASTED out of bed & into his 2002 grody-interior’d Range Rover, rocketing to Peet’s (she wasn’t there, might be in the head), then over to Whole Foods — Montana & 15th — to wait. Radio on: hip hop. Frank Ocean. Hip hop could actually make good white person morning music, if you played it lowish.

The women darted in & out of Whole Foods like exotic luminous fish in an aquarium castle: to and from the Yogaworks above the Starbucks across the street, to & from Peet’s, Caffe Luxxe, & Sweet Lady Jane’s. . they didn’t have to wish they were California girls. They were insanely preserved & insanely rich, and if no longer in the zip code of beautiful, they were residents of the posh, gated community of Old Town — most were in their 50s. Lotta divorcées. No need to cry for em either, cause on Montana adjacent that usually meant a $25 mill+ settlement.

Sometimes if things were slow & Jerzy wanted to hang at the beach, he’d hit this very spot. Last week he got Phoebe Cates pushing a shopping cart & turned it around to one of the STARS — They’re Just Like US! dillios. In these parts, you got people like Madeleine Stowe, Jamie Lee Curtis… or Renée. An older crowd, so he usually avoided the area. Come to think of it, lots of stroller-pushing pussy today tho maybe they’re au pairs… he swung back to Peet’s but still no sign of—— here she comes . She looks so un-Renée , he almost missed her. Whips around & parks residential, so he can telephoto. Got her. . . . she looks dumpy, shitty, preoccupied. Not a complete disaster — what the business calls a “gasper.” There were “hooters” and there were “gaspers.” Kirstie Alley at 600 lbs was a gasper. Clint Eastwood’s disgusto-looking vericose veins on the golf course in Carmel was a gasper. A hooter would make you hoot aloud, like, say, when Jerzy took a perfectly photogenic image of Katie Holmes and advanced it forward or backward frame by frame til she looked zombily scientologized and/or disheveled, weird-eyed, blinky-weepy, psycho or whatever. By the same means, he made Gwyneth look homely & bag lady-bitter, cellu-lumpy, age-spotted. Jerzy was good ; he sold a pic of Michelle Obama looking wild-eyed indigent that really made the supermarket shoppers hoot.

But the Renée he got was neither. More of what they call a page-turner— filler between the Hooters and the Gaspers, you stare at it, you take it in, you register the shittiness and dumpiness of it, you get that quick, pleasant little hit that reminds you, stars can be dumpy & shitty-looking, just like you & me . Stars can be dumpy, shitty-looking, plastic surgery-deformed, sad, binge-eating cunts, but they’re just like you and me, only with more money.

Like a million times more.

Jerzy had his own Smarmy Army of twittering sickos — he called them shitters, twitfarts, twittiefucks, what have you — on the payroll, some of them bonafide bottomfeeders but most just 14 & 15 year-old kids who got a (small, very small) % whenever Jerzy sold a pic they had tipped him on. They were easy to cheat. They were middleschoolers (one was his weed connect), fucking sk8trs who were in it for the sport — just another computer game. Stalking the wild celeb gave em that GPS spy-high…

More tweets now as he rolled down Sunset toward Beverly Hills. Paula Abdul was at Fred Joaillier on Rodeo (go, Paula!). . Trent Reznor @ CB2, Santa Monica Mall (why would anyone give a shit)… Piers Morgan ( hate that dipshit) b-fasting at the Polo Lounge w/Carl Bernstein (you needed to be 70+ to know who Bernstein was). . slow morning. Fuck it. .

He parked on Burton Way, across from the L’Ermitage . Nice green grass, in the island between lanes… Burton always made him feel peaceful. He snorts some coke, leaves the truck, & strolls to the “park” (10 yards away). Sits down cross-legged in the sun. My place in the sun. Feels nice. All buddha-buddha.

The stars will never be. . . . . . . just like ME.

Harry Middleton “hired” him but that didn’t really mean a thing. H around the M would buy pics from anyone , you could be a serial childkiller or a Muslim shoebomber, Harry didn’t give a honeyshot! badger shit, as long as you delivered, Harry would pay the long green. The man had “hired” Jerzy because he liked the idea of staff , he liked playing the big pasha, the poobah, the grand vizier commanding his Smarmy of papsmearazzi, all that horseshit appealed to the freak’s baroque sense of e-trepreneurialism. What being “hired” really meant was that Jerzy could hang at Harry’s apt (an awesome thing) & use it as a pitstop, a place to smoke a joint between Olsen twins, do his meth in the john while H was in the middle of spieling pussymania. But man could not live by honeyshot! alone.

All in all, being a Hollywood paparazzo suited him. Jerzy liked the perpetual motion. Before Mom was MoMA, she lugged him along on photo expeditions (so she said; he was too young to remember) on the Floridian coast; maybe that had something to do with it. O right, of course! That explains why I’m a paparazzo & a speed freak. It’s all because MoMA hauled my diapered ass along on her lame, peripatetic excursions! Then she ditched him for New York. Jerzy was left in Ocala with his grandma & her Banquet® TV trays and muy depresso ways. And just so Jerzy wouldn’t forget her, MoMA left a shoebox of warpy, sun-drenched Polaroids, some with her & the Professor— his father — in that rathole-looking place she always called “the bungalow,” a few with the three of them — Jerzy, MoMA & Dad— (dad, her married lover) —one had Jerzy in the curly-haired arms of the professor— the name he still called his father in his head (that’s what MoMA called him). . MoMA & the Professor all squinty-eyed and happy, staring down the camera in the white-out FL sun. He wondered who took the pics. Maybe a neighbor. . when he entered toddlerdom, the Professor dropped dead; more Polaroids now, with Jerzy, MoMA and the grandparents staring down the camera, MoMA squinting no longer smiling into the once-paradisal unbearable brightness of Sunkist Florida sun. Then Gramps collapsed & died, and MoMA left. There were no pics from that time.

He fought a lot in school, they called him a bastard, like the cliché goes, the kids and teachers always find that shit out, & everybody finds a way to torture you about it. Jerzy fought hard, but all he learned was, when you fought you lost. Never a correlation between fighting & winning/only fighting & defeat & humiliation. That’s what he learned. At least they didn’t call him bastard in New York, everybody was probably a bastard, even though he became a rechristened bastard because MoMA forgot to marry Ronny the DP — Ronny Vomes. “Vomes”—what an assholish moniker. . MoMA used Crelle-Vomes as her “professional name,” but never married either one of them. What a load . So now he was a bastard two times over, and his baby sister was a bitch.