Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

But still —

Forty of em!

Sheesh. . . . . . . ….

Reeyonna was uncomprehending and shocked, oblivious that Tom-Tom & her half-brother were getting off on watching her trip. Suffice to say that by now the cretinous, kneeling, whitetrash white-thrash’d blond was drenched. Jerzy was in the speedball sweetspot. He even jacked a little over his trousers making sure his sister wasn’t looking. He went on an extended fantasy, like, the cops arrive on Mulholland but the others disperse & only White Girl is arrested. She’s a runaway. The police call her parents who live in Utah. Super Mormons. Morm & dad fly in to bail her out, they’re not really understanding what was her crime, & a cop starts to tell them what she was doing at the time of the arrest but decides that a picture’s worth 1000 words. & Jerzy imagines himself gathered with the snickering cops on the other side of a huge 2-way mirror watching Morm & Dad look on as Tina & her Amazon sistuhs firehose their precious baby——————Reeyonna now saying she heard about something like this, but never actually saw it — Jerzy saw the wheels beginning to turn, Tom-Tom’s strategy already working, the brilliance of it being that half the battle was getting ReeRee to start talking about the pervy shit instead of just walking away in repulsion — ReeRee said a friend said Larry Fishburne’s daughter did it in a movie, squirted, & then Reeyonna’s eyes mesmerically wandered back to the screen and she said, “This is so completely gross!”

Jerzy, sinuses burning, took in the lovely pastoral scene, his ½sis still glued to the set in spite of herself, even tho the rest of her body was simultaneously trying to back itself out of the room&out the door, Tom-Tom’s eyes goo’d to ½sis, & glazed over too; he was afraid he might do a little gushing himself.

. .

Bristol Farms over on Beverly Boulevard & Doheny was always very good to him.

He sat in his car & got em like sitting ducks: Lily Collins… Jon Cryer… Alyson Hannigan… Tyler Perry (with bodyguards).

He drove back to his spot on Burton Way and parked.

Walked to Sprinkles for cupcakes.

Wandered into Gagosian. . ….

Oh!

. . . . . large fotos on the walls snapped by a Jap named Sugimoto — b&w pre-tsunami seascapes— + pics of empty movie theaters. (All you saw were seats & screens, also pre-tsunami.) It was spooky, especially the seascapes, because when Jerzy looked all he could see in his head was the tsunami porn he watched on youtube after that shit went down, it really did a number on him, he was high in his room for 2 wks watching that 10-story blackwater tube of water breaching the sea wall, trapped japs fluttering like moths in sealed tombs of swept away cars. The big wave still gave him the creeps. One of the things that he still thought of at least one time a day was the people on the roofs of five-story buildings, which is exactly where he would have gone, he knew himself, he’d have totally thought “I’ll be safe on the roof of this 5-story building” but when the camera came back the building was underwater & gone. That always hit him in the gut because he knew that kind of denial/fantasy life/poor planning — an erroneous feeling the story will have a happy ending, of overall safety stemming from the childish view that reality can be regulated by thought/wish/need, that everything that happens is all a big dream he can choose to wake up from whenever he desires — Jerzy knew this feeling he carried around in daily life was nothing but a terrible bullshit weakness in character, a spineless character flaw born of pathological lassitude/inertia that would prevent him from ever becoming an adult, from becoming a man, from taking responsibility for his actions, he knew that he was missing whatever that thing is that fully grown men had, probably the same trait that would allow him w/o compunction to turn in friends & family if the fascists ever took over. He felt the familiar twinge at the end of this train of thought, & felt queasy.

Looking at the calmness of the eerie seascapes was sort of like looking at a chimp an hour before (or after) it tore off the zookeeper’s face. Maybe that was the artist’s point. The chimp was chill. It didn’t take a giant leap of the imagination for Jerzy to see his pix on the walls (his “abstract” snatcherazzo c -scapes hahahahaha ) and that instantly made him feel better. Reputation did not precede him, but revelation would. He had already begun to comb thru his image bank — thousands of verité celeb pix taken over the last 5 years. He was looking at the little batch of honeyshot! s too, taken to date.

A soft alarm went off in his head: time to leave the gallery.

(Bad karma to overstay his welcome.)

He was just on his way, when canned-sounding laughter raucoused the air, growing echo-louder as it attached itself to the flurry of bodies walking thru the entrance. A white-haired man of sunny disposition & ruddy, play-doh features emerged from the back & strode briskly toward the entourage as it entered the main room. Jerzy had a Special Moment: it was the man himself: Larry G .

Larry around the Gagosian. Larry Gaga…

Jerzy instinctively rapid-shrunk into wallflowered loseraazzo invisibility as Gaga greeted Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, & a close-shaved middle-aged black in button down shirt & Mr. Freedom jeans. King Larry shook hands with Zeta-Jones, Douglas & the black but did not with the two who hover/dangled on the nervous periphery. (They of the Serfdom/Personal Assistant Class; they of the Disposable Intern fortunate enough in these times of financial hardship & gluttonous starfuckery not just to be employed {even if paid nothing or next to nothing} but lucky to be breathing the same fucking air as the celeb employers who rescued them from the shame of their go-nowhere lives; they of the Indentured Class who sign contracts forbidding them to disclose via lawsuit or memoir whatever lame, embittered, perceived perceptions of the famous hands that fed them they might claim to have conjured, enumerating said benefactors’ rudeness, frivolities, unsanitary habits, sexual quirks, unsolicited come-ons, sadistic vulgarity, et alia whilst in defamatory pursuit of financial gain or plain revenge by leakage to TMZ, the DMZ, the NAACP, Triple A or any other outlet including of course blogs & webloids, print tabloids & dying pub houses still trafficking in the hardbacks & paperbooks of yesteryear. They of the parasitical Tolerated Class who eat the chores & errands bacterium that colonize hourly around the mini-industry of any celeb: dry cleaning fetchery, stopped-up toilets, party e-vites, phone sheets, sending of flowers, packing of suitcases, ghost-twittering &tc. For accomplishing those very things, their congenital purposelessness is {amply} rewarded by being lent purpose & {more importantly} identity via the privilege of being allowed a priceless, special education wherein they may vicariously experience what it’s like to have an actual life , meaning one that is fuller, richer & more exciting— more lifelike —in every way than theirs could or ever will be.*

Jerzy, skulking in a corner, watched the sexily muzzled, panicked-obsequious intern-lice crawl upon the skin of whatever host they were grooming, now & again lifting covetous heads to pause in their feast of bacteria, to observe with gimlet eyes the skilled quadrille of the gallerist & his visitors, the easy chummy social network of the rich, famous & powerful; that certain way they have of being googoo gaga for each other, each anticipating the others’ emotional needs. Douglas said he was in town filming, adding that Catherine was shooting a Glee . (Gaga told them he & Shala were googoo for Glee .) From his post, Jerzy quickstudied Larry ’round the Gagosian as best he could, because one day he would be selling himself to the Man — to the impresario, ringleader & tastemaker, to the one-man Gagosian’s 11.