Fame. Justine Bateman

maître d’.

      “YES, that one. The one I refused when you mentioned it to me weeks ago. NOW, I’ll take it. And I’ll wear it now, because it’s CHANGED.”

      Yeah, you get those. You get those. You get it all. It will get worse. When you’re in a bar and some guy, drunk, wants you, wants to be with you, takes the “control” road and tries to rip you a new one for smoking. Your regular habit, the one you’ve had since you were 17 in high school, trying it out, getting used to it. Anyway, now, for years, a regular thing, not a change from who you were. But this guy, this guy is on the “control” road of getting at you and says, “Ew, I didn’t know Mallory smoked.” Trying to be controlling. Like you’ve disgusted him; he had such high hopes for you, thought so well of you. You had that! You had this guy thinking so highly of you! There it was and there it goes. You just fucked up. You disappointed him, drove him away, this approval, affection that was so freely yours. You blew it.

      Yeah. It will get worse, but for now, oh man, the attention is kind of weird, kind of exciting, kind of feels like an accomplishment, acknowledgment for your work. That’s what it is, right? OK. Maybe there’s some formula here, a correlation. Success = Fame = accomplishment. Just correlation or causation? Whatever, correlation, they’re related. You learn this. You’re 16. Seems right. They keep rising, your ratings and your Fame. They keep going up, both of them, together.

      Anything

      There was this photo shoot. Me and actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Me, 18 or 19, Sarah, the same. Photo shoot for Tiger Beat. Teen fan magazine. Harmless. Photo shoot with some clothes we had in our closet. That’s all.

      “What are we doing today?”

      “Let’s do a photo shoot.” Grab some crap in our closets—T-shirts, jeans, NOTHING. Belts, hats, and crap we had bought at army surplus stores. Whatever.

      “We want to do a photo shoot.” Of course for publication. No question. Never a question/doubt. Wide-open doors. Somehow a photo studio, somehow a photographer, somehow immediately printed in the magazine. No question. Here. Here, for you. Whatever you want. Two teenagers with whatever out of their closets; shit you couldn’t get rid of at a garage sale. No questions asked, photo shoot and publication provided. Open doors, open smiles, open, open.

      * * *

      Concerts, backstage passes, cops letting you go when pulled over for a ticket (not always, but half the time), Super Bowl game. Super Bowl XXI, maybe XXII, I don’t know. Hosting MTV’s halftime show. Limo pickup, always a limo pickup, then in a helicopter. A helicopter because of the traffic. Skip the traffic, fly over the traffic. Let down anywhere. On the grass right there, in front of the stadium. It’s the Super Bowl, we have celebrities in the helicopter, we land wherever we want. Usher you in. Here are your free tickets, your free impossible-to-get, only-for-sponsoring-entities, 50-yard-line, you-made-not-one-effort-to-get-these-tickets Super Bowl tickets. Sure, you’ll host the halftime show later in a room where you cannot hear yourself talk into the mic because of the screaming, the cheering, the volume. But man, you don’t give a shit. THIS IS AWESOME. Like sitting in in an effortless, delicious orange custard cloud of favor all the fucking time. All the time. Everyone wants you, to be with you, be near you, give you things, do you favors, LISTENING INTENTLY TO EVERYTHING YOU ARE SAYING.

      Yeah, that was a big one. Everyone was listening intently to what I was saying. A circle of people. Around me. Adults. Me, a teenager, or early 20s. Done nothing, really. Traveled, OK. Was a good student, OK. Showed up to work on time, OK. Worthy? Worthy of being listened to as if a river of holy wisdom is pouring through my mouth? No. NO. But, the feeling. Oh, it felt good. At that age, to be heard, to be taken seriously. Shut up. OK. Listen to the Fame. The way these people, or why these people, were listening to me so closely. So careful not to bring up anything about themselves and risk ripping my interest from this circle of people. Keep me from wandering off. Keep me there. We love to hear ourselves talk. Best way to keep someone engaged is to ask them about themselves. Keep a celebrity there, let them talk, hear them, REALLY hear them, show you hear them. Nod your head somberly when they make an “interesting” point, laugh quickly and heartily when they say anything amusing. KEEP. THEM. THERE. OK. So, here we had it, I had it, in spades. Spades. Everyone would stop and listen.

      * * *

      You see? You see what happens? The celebrity, the famous person, gets used to this. They get used to it and come to expect it. They have to because it happens all the time, every day. OK, so you expect it and you then stop asking anyone else about themselves. You just forget. It’s not part of the exchange anymore. You talk and talk. You pontificate. It seems to be what people want. They want to keep you there, and you, the famous, what are you doing? Why do you keep talking? What are you doing? You are delivering. They need something, this group, this circle of people, and you are reading the group and making an assumption. You’re right, your guess is right, and you perform, deliver. You want to make sure you aren’t trashing all this goodwill being handed to you. You don’t want to be like Justine Bateman when that guy in that bar was so disappointed in her smoking a cigarette. She trashed all that goodwill, all the adulation he was just handing her. You don’t want to be like that, right? So you give it, you deliver. And you get used to this performance to such an extent that you forget to behave any other way. So there’s that.

      Circle

      I’m going to tell you about something that happened the other day. I mean now, you know, present day. I was meeting some new friends, people in the business, and there was this one woman, actress. Well-known, yes, but not overly so. Where am I, on the Fame scale there? I don’t know. How famous am I? How do I rank compared to her? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, but she’s somehow ALIVE. You know? Alive and magnetic and ON. Not in a bad way, in a good way, in a magnetic way—she’s just in that zone. And I mention the “where do I rank” question because I found myself doing that leaning-in-and-listening-to-whatever-she-was-saying thing. That thing I told you about a couple of pages ago. I’m doing that thing. We’re all oriented around her. I think we are, I can’t tell because we’re in a circle, you know? Anyway, I don’t feel myself. I’m fucking DIVESTING. I feel like I’m “divesting myself in front of Fame.” That’s why I’m asking myself about the “ranking,” the Fame ranking, because I’m trying to reason with myself.

      “C’mon. She’s not more known than you. You should be able to keep your sense of yourself. This is easy. WHY ARE YOU NOT FEELING LIKE YOURSELF NOW?” I try to jolt myself back into “being myself” by talking more energetically and loosely when I see a chance to speak. It doesn’t work. I try again. I try to focus on someone else. Fuck. She’s great, this actress. I like her a lot, but fuck. She has that thing on her, that sheath. OK, we all did, in that group, to some extent, sure, but hers was turned ON. It was plugged in and I felt it. That magic thing. Fucking weird. We’ll figure it out. Maybe by the end. Maybe on the last page here in this book.

      Ship

      This Fame was given, bestowed. Energy that cannot be destroyed, only changed. Not removed, only paused. This Fame must continue for the professional machine to function. Work booked, money paid, commissions paid, by the performer. A business. Fame as the fuel. You’ve got your team: your agents and managers and publicists. And you fill your support group. Not the work team, but the population of your world: those who will be on this plane of existence with you. There are other famous people who also live on this plane, and then there are people who live in the “real” world who can transition back and forth through that membrane to the Fame plane. They are cool enough, chill enough, don’t lose their shit when in front of the famous. They can travel back and forth between the two worlds. They can do it. Not that many. Hold onto those, get them in your group. They make it comfortable. You can “be yourself.”

      Aw shit. What is that?

      Who are you? Are you this famous person? Are you the person you were before the Fame? Or are you something else? OK. How old were you when you became famous? If you became famous later in life, when you were an established, full-grown