Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (16 page)

On the way home I thought I saw Matt Dillon’s stand-in, but it turned out to be Johnny Depp’s alternate stunt double. He said he believes he’s the reincarnation of James Dean’s stunt double, but people mistake him for the movie version of Dondi, the later years. I didn’t give him my number. He seems to have a few things to work out.

The corner stationery store doesn’t carry autograph
books anymore. The clerk said they went out with culottes. I told him culottes were back, but I was shaken.

Dreamed I went to Hell but no one was there, not even the Devil. Is that the point?

THURSDAY:
 

I saw Sigourney Weaver on the street
again.
Maybe she isn’t so famous after all.

FRIDAY:
 

Big date last night that went bust. I met a British-sounding guy in Tower Records’s Accounts Overdue line who turned out to be a distant cousin of Sting’s. He calls himself Chafe. Anyway, he suggested dinner later on, and in my nervousness all I could think of was the Chinese place near work. He was late—something about a conference call to rehearse his band—so I’d gone ahead and ordered. We chatted for a while about England (he’d like to go there someday), but he started getting impatient for the food, so he threw a tantrum, which isn’t attractive if there are no paparazzi around. He even tried storming out, but there was a party of six coming in and he had to wait for them to get by.

I sat there having a career crisis for a second. I’m sick of dating entry-level celebs and will-have-had-beens. Maybe I should move to a small town and
follow the career of the local livestock. Anyway, Chafe came slinking back in to get his knapsack, and he must have sensed my disenchantment, because suddenly I was attractive to him again. He invited me to go to Fata Morgana with him—this was the night the club was going from hip to unhip, so we could watch the dance floor empty. I said no, and he got desperate and said he was also Meat Loaf’s estranged brother, Casserole. I could feel the eyes of the unknowns burning into me from the framed glossies, and I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I didn’t tell him it was the bathroom back at my house.

Had a rough night. I woke up reciting Mr. Blackwell’s “Best Dressed” List. That was odd, because I dreamed I was naked and had no place to put my autograph book.

SATURDAY:
 

I shouldn’t have, but I let Maurice take me to this reception in the Van Leeuwenhoek Room at the Sheraton, the NSF’s annual ceremony to honor the Element of the Year—“that building block of matter that has most touched the hearts of the scientific community in the past twelve months.” I guess I’m as corrupt as anyone, because I ditched Maurice right after the shrimp cocktail arranged like the space embryo in
2001.
I said I had to phone my Gabor Update Service. I soon regretted it, because basically the scene was a bunch of bald guys throwing objects in the hotel pool and predicting the ripple effects.

The award itself seems to be totally unrelated to merit. Hydrogen was up for it—you’d think it was a shoo-in, being in air and water and all—but somebody said it was perceived as too lightweight. Boron was nominated, but it has no publicity machine at all, and a lot of people think it’s a compound. Maurice’s friend from Toxics said Krypton was hot, with all this Superman mania, but I bet him my sherbet in the shape of a Necker cube that Carbon would get it, since that basis-of-all-life thing gives it some human interest. But you know what won? Gold. It made me sick.

I was too ashamed to go sit with Maurice again, but he found me by the cold-fusion table and said he’d drive me home. We didn’t talk the whole way. The stars were out, but I’m tired of them. Balls of gases—that’s all they are.

SUNDAY: