Everyday Psychopaths Page 25
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I want to take a minute to talk about one of the frustrations with living and working in the celebrity world, at least as an assistant. It’s the problem to meet women. You see, I used to work all the time, pretty much every day and there wasn’t a lot of space for dating. And if I did meet a woman out in a bar or at an event or wherever I might have been, I didn’t know where to “conclude” the evening since I was living with the Johnsons and the mansion rule was not to bring any outsiders there.
It’s pretty logical when you think about it, but once during my first year I broke the role and learned a valuable lesson.
The name of my lesson was Loreena, a chocolate dream with colorful clothing and a big butt to go with it. I love big butts (and I cannot lie - as the song goes), always have and always will, so I was of course ecstatic to meet someone like Loreena with a jovial personality, beautiful eyes and two firm watermelon butt cheeks. I was probably too hypnotized by her appearance to realize her ulterior motive for dating me wasn’t because she was interested in me - like most women she thought I was funny, which is good to draw them in, but apparently not a strong enough incentive in the long run - but because she wanted to get close to the Johnsons. She wasn't a stalker or a lunatic fan or anything like that, but I should have realized something was wrong by how big her eyes grew every time I mentioned them. I of course knew I needed to be careful with yapping about my employers, but when you find someone you like it's not always easy to be modest. Working with celebrities surely helps to make you more interesting. For a while.
In the end, my clouded mind decided it was fine to break a rule and to try and sneak her into the house without anyone seeing her. So one night when my employers were out having one of their romantic candlelight dinners, I brought Loreena up to my room, carefully avoiding other staff members. As soon as we entered the house, Loreena's head was going back and forth with the excitement of a fat kid who had just stepped inside the Charlie Chocolate factory, while I was preoccupied with not being seen. She soon followed her deranged look up with questions about the Johnsons - where in the house they stayed, where they were right that minute, what my relationship with them was like, what a typical day would look like for them and so on. I had answered some of them before, but here they came again at an alarming rate of brain-diarrhea. A voice in my head started telling me that these questions had nothing to do with me, but her huge, juicy butt completely obstructed my otherwise logical thought-process.
Loreena ended up spending the night in my bed, but when I woke up at five in the morning by my bladder calling me, she wasn't there. I knew I wasn’t a Casanova, but could the sex have been that bad? It was hard for me to place an objective judgement on it, especially since it was over in a couple of minutes.
I dressed in my shorts and Nuke “Just Done It” t-shirt and went out to look for her. I walked downstairs and I was so tired I almost slipped on the marble stairs, polished into a death trap by an eager Elena. I walked around quietly not to wake the other staff members and was just about to text her when I spotted her and her chubby ass sneaking around by the pool. What the hell? I thought, got myself over there and started wheezing: “Loreena! Loreena!” When her face finally turned my way she looked like a deer caught in the headlights of car. For a second I thought she would try to run away or something equally crazy, but instead she came up to me and said with a slight quiver in her voice, “I was just taking a walk around the house.”
“A walk around the house? I saw you, that wasn't walking, it was sneaking around! I implicitly told you not to be seen! You could land me in a lot of trouble you know.”
“I couldn't sleep and wanted to take a look around. Relax a little will you?” Like an attacked animal, Loreena thought the best defensive was offensive. I didn’t care a whole lot for her tone.
“Relax? This is my job on the line, how can you tell me to relax?”
And then I saw it. The necklace she definitely wasn't wearing the night before. It was a butterfly in gold and blue stone and looked far too expensive to be hanging around Loreena's neck, if you know what I’m saying.
“What's that around your neck?” I glared at Loreena, my adrenaline at a peak. The date was rapidly becoming a very bad idea.
“It's a necklace. I had it in my bag.”
“That's B’s necklace! You're a liar and a thief!”
I could see in her face how Loreena was waging an internal war; it was a gated property so making a run for it wasn't an option.
“Ah, fuck you, Darryl! I just wanted some glamour in my life! I wanted to see a celebrity, maybe wear an expensive necklace for a little while! Would she care about one little necklace? They have millions, billions!”
I was impressively calm considering the situation and told her: “Give me the necklace back and I won't call the police. It's time to go home.”
That was the only time I brought a girl to the mansion. This didn't make me a monk, but I would have been lying if I said I was close to a meaningful relationship with any other woman than B.
Slugs got more action.
And B was, like you know by now, not herself. When it came to the many good times we had shared together, I had to rely almost only on older memories.
Speaking of which, I do recall many great moments, often ending in massive fits of laughter since humor was our strongest denominator. While I’m taking a stroll down memory lane, I can’t help but smile and think about the cover shoot in Paris, ridiculously romantic with the sun going down behind a beautiful French 15th century castle, and the hilariously parodic photographer, stereotypically complete with a comical Anglo-French accent, a t-shirt-blazer-scarf-combo, unruly hair and his dark-haired assistant Annelié, silent, but cute and making lots of eye contact with me. I returned the looks from time to time, when I wasn’t watching the French bastard give B, for the shoot dressed in a rather slinky Arabian Nights-inspired outfit, directions to a better pose. Is all that touching really necessary? I remember thinking.
The moment, the setting, the atmosphere, everything is so sharply carved into my memory tree that I can summon it in an instant, close my eyes and travel there like Scotty on the Starship Enterprise.
For a second I thought B was charmed by Pierre, giggling too much, giving him her famous flirtatious smile. I was jealous and worried about her, but then I noticed Annelié again; her dark eye-brows, small head, beautiful chestnut eyes and I lost concentration.
There was a pool not far from where we were standing. A glorious, lit swimming pool, fit for a king.
Fit for a Pierre.
And then, during our break, it happened. Pierre was walking towards the catering section, head leaned backwards, his long, slightly wet-looking hair, bouncing behind him. He held his huge camera casually in one hand and was taking large, relaxed strides towards us, looking like a guy so sure of himself it was ridiculous, while we were standing at a white bar table, drinking a glass of wine and admiring the view. He called something out to Annelié, who was hovering around us again, a bit too shy to talk but eager with the eyes. I think she preferred to look at anything but Pierre, who treated her like she was the Ringer of Notre Dame and not the petite and beautiful woman she was.
On the floor there was a light cable that I had stepped over a couple of times, carefully avoiding a slip and a tumble. But Pierre had his eyes to the sky and managed to put his pointy patent-leather shoe under the wire, got snagged in it and fell backwards, the camera left his hand (all this happened in slow motion) and I saw Annelié somehow managing to catch it, but nobody was catching Pierre, he was tumbling, slipping and with a splash he was in the pool.
There’s no way you could witness this and hold back laughter and we all laughed so hard we cried. Even Annelié. Poor Pierre was in the pool, soaked, miserable and humiliated. I don’t know if I’d been able to see the fun in it, being in the water, but the Frenchman for sure couldn’t. He looked like he had put his face in a bowl of sour cream and cancelled the rest of the sh
oot.
B and I laughed about the pool incident the whole evening (A was filming in Germany) and we still think back to it at times, and talk about Pierre with the accent, Pierre the stereotyped French artist, Pierre in the swimming pool.
But that was the past and the past was past and no matter how much of a golden shimmer you add to it in your memory bank (using some mental photoshopping), you can’t live there. You need to live in the present and that was what I intended to do.