Oh! You Pretty Things (21 page)

E
va and I have a loose relationship about money. When I started working for her, she asked me what I needed to make. The way she described her schedule sounded like there'd be plenty of days when she wouldn't need me at all. It was basically a part-time job. So I pulled a number out of my ass: eight hundred bucks a week.

For hanging around with Eva Carlton? People pay ten times that for her to spend a couple hours at their daughter's bat mitzvah.

Eva sipped her caffeine-free peppermint tea and offered me a thousand a week. Fifty-two grand a year. Maybe I'd failed at marriage and sucked as a barista, but goddammit, at least I'd be able to pay my rent.

Of course, it's impossible to keep track of my hours because there's such a permeable line between my job and our friendship. Like, sometimes Eva calls in the morning when she's not working and says, “Let's do Runyon.”

Runyon Canyon is a dilapidated old park in Hollywood that spans one hundred fifty acres from Franklin to Mulholland, with miles of dirt roads and some falling-down amenities behind chain-link fences. There's the ruined foundation of an old Frank Lloyd Wright mansion and a weedy, cracked tennis court that has been off-limits since I was a kid. There's a vista point midway between the Franklin entrance and the Mulholland gates where you can see from downtown to Century City—that is, if you can jockey for position among the actors and models wearing their yoga pants and calling to their ill-behaved and unleashed dogs.

Ten years ago it was a great place to break a sweat and take in the view of the city. Now it's like being on Robertson Boulevard, but with exponentially more dog shit and the possibility of stepping on a rattlesnake. At least the paparazzi are much lower-key, though they're always there, hoping for the money shot of Angelina Jolie or Reese Witherspoon pulling her yoga pants out of her camel toe.

The only time I voluntarily do Runyon is early in the morning, when the fog curls around the eucalyptus trees like smoke and the vermin are still sleeping in their holes. But Eva doesn't do mornings. Her days off usually start at around eleven.

I never say no when she calls, of course. Mostly because I like being seen with her, but I also feel like it's part of my job. What's flattering is that
she
thinks of these outings as a thing we're doing as friends. Of course, this means she won't think anything of asking me to work for the next seven days straight if she has shit she wants done, but that's a small price to pay. Certainly smaller than joining her at the sugar spray tan place that makes me look like an Oompa Loompa with vitiligo, even when she gets me the extra exfoliant thing that smells like Lemon Pledge and Clorox.

Eva lives in a Tudor-style house at the top of Nichols Canyon that she bought with the money from her first show. Two million dollars, and it still needs work. It's three stories, turreted and bricked on the outside and sprawling and Mediterranean on the inside, with decorative half-timbered walls and terra-cotta floors. Everything in Los Angeles is a mutant hybrid. A nineteenth-century architect ghost peers through the leaded windows and weeps into his flounced cuff.

The only room that's fully furnished is Eva's bedroom: king bed swathed in Frette linens; a double wide, full-length mirror leaning in the corner; a scarred wooden dresser she's had since she was a waitress, drawers always askew and spilling wispy panties and bras.

The other three bedrooms serve as closets for her ever-expanding wardrobe. She has a habit of acquiring bags of clothing on memo. She also somehow acquired four tiny dogs—two dachshunds, a Chihuahua, and a bulgy-eyed mutt. They're all named Rosebud, but on the first day, when I made the requisite sled comment, Eva looked so blank that I just pretended I hadn't said anything at all.

None of the Rosebuds are housebroken, so one of my daily duties is to patrol the house for dog shit. You wouldn't think this would be difficult, but the floors are all a deep chocolate brown not dissimilar to the color of at least two of the Rosebuds' shit piles.

Also, Eva is in the habit of disrobing as soon as she walks in the front door, leaving a trail of clothing from door to kitchen, kitchen to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. Ditto for her post-workout routine. As soon as she hops off the elliptical—in a room she calls “the gym” although it's really just a walled-off former garage—she peels off her sweaty sports bra and Lycra yoga pants and drapes them across the iron railings that line the three stories of stairs from the ground floor to her bedroom.

The Rosebuds go crazy over her damp-crotched underwear, gnawing out the cotton linings and leaving their thread-laden poop all over the place. Every time I walk into the house it's like walking across the Uzbekistan–Tajikistan border circa 2004, but instead of losing a limb I end up with a flip-flop full of dog shit and underwear bits.

However, for every tenth shit-flop, there's a Willy Wonka golden ticket into a magical world.

One random morning, Eva sleepily appears in the kitchen doorway and tells me to take the day off because she's treating me to a body scrub/body care combo at Beverly Hot Springs. Of course, she neglects to mention that it's a wet treatment, and the woman who's giving me the treatment is also practically naked, in a black lace bra and matching panties.

At first I think the woman is fucking with me, but it's a quirk of not only that Korean spa but every one I've ever been to since. The distinctive thing about Beverly Hot Springs, aside from their faux-rock grotto, is that they're more of a celebrity draw than Nobu Malibu on a Saturday night. Don't get the wrong idea, though. The décor is still an alarming cross between the break room at a Korean barbecue restaurant and the famously sperm-encrusted Jacuzzi at the Playboy Mansion.

Supposedly their water—Beverly Hot Springs's, not the Playboy Mansion's—comes from an artesian well, the only one in L.A., originally tapped by a wealthy oil baron in 1910. That's exactly the kind of marketing that appeals to the celebrity mind-set: something rare enough that it's difficult to obtain. There are a hundred Korean spas in the three-mile radius of the part of Hollywood called Koreatown, but Beverly Hot Springs is the only one where you're likely to see Liv Tyler with her perfect tits bobbing in the rarefied alkaline water.

Which is exactly what happens when Eva and I take our first trip there together a few weeks later. I'm trying to play it cool, but I can barely contain myself. Of course, before you start imaging porntacular scenes of Eva and Liv and the underwear ladies, I should mention that the women who do the body scrubs—all of whom have adopted uber-American names from decades past, like Rita and Helen—are well over forty. And they're on their feet all day, slinging buckets of water, so if you're picturing every Asian woman in every film Quentin Tarantino ever made, or even Tila Tequila, you're completely off base.

We're running late, so we quickly change out of our street clothes and trot into the grotto, wrapped in the tiny, coarse towels they dole out at the front desk.

And there's Liv in the steaming water, hair piled in a sloppy bun on top of her perfect head. She's used the stretchy cord attached to her locker key as a ponytail holder, and the large brass key is dangling from her topknot like a Christmas ornament.

Eva grabs my arm with both of her hands and gestures minutely with her head.

“I know,” I say, and Eva leans in to mouth an almost silent scream in my ear. I don't care how inured you are to the idea of celebrity, Liv Tyler naked in a steamy grotto is too awesome to ignore. We pause at the steps to the large, rock-encrusted hot pool. Liv is five feet away, sitting on the smooth stone ledge, submerged in the bubbling water up to her delicate collarbone.

Eva drapes her towel over the metal bar at the top of the pool stairs, an oddly utilitarian touch in all this steam and rock and nakedness. She pauses for a moment and everyone in the room, including Liv and me, take in the splendor of her body: her skin taut and creamy, her proportions perfect, her breasts lush and teardrop-shaped, her ass full and high above lean, sculpted thighs.

I get a really good look at the tattoo Scout told me about, the sloppy purple-and-black monstrosity. Jesus, it's big, like the size of a baseball, which might be less tragic on a supermodel, but Eva isn't even five-foot-three and her hips are smaller than my waist. It looks like a giant bruise and I'm not going to lie, there's something about the unsightly self-inflicted flaw that makes me love Eva a little more. And helps me get comfortable with dropping my own towel.

Eva delicately edges into the water, holding her arms out like wings to skim the steaming surface, then sinking in up to her neck in one swift motion. I lumber down the steps after her and hit like a cannonball.

We file past Liv, who catches Eva's eye and gives a subtle nod, which Eva returns. Liv's gaze skates over me then flickers away, pausing for an instant on the two scripts with their bright red CAA covers that I'm holding at shoulder level to protect from the water and steam. They are members of a club I don't belong to, but before I have time to contemplate exactly how that makes me feel, a wrinkled Korean woman in droopy black lace underpants whisks Liv to the back room, which is where the brutally invasive scrubbing happens.

Eva and I watch with fascination as Liv Tyler's naked ass sways away from us. It's pink from the water and creased by the uneven blocks of the stone ledge she's been sitting on.

“Dude,” Eva whispers. “Liv Tyler.”

“Dude,” I whisper back. “I know.”

“Are you kidding me?” Eva says. “Her body is sick.”

I glance at the remaining women in the pool, a couple mid-forties women who are not being subtle about their interest in Eva, and a skinny blond girl reading a giant hardback copy of
Infinite Jest
and twirling a strand of hair in the manicured fingers of her free hand.

“Three o'clock,” I murmur, flicking my eyes to indicate the nosy women.

“What's at three o'clock?” Eva says, not quietly.

“I'm noon,” I say, even lower. “One o'clock, two o'clock, and
three
o'clock is very interested in what you're doing.”

I give another eye flick and Eva slowly turns her torso toward the women, then snaps her head at the last instant. It's a dramatic
Did-you-need-something-ladies?
maneuver, and the women avert their eyes and fall silent.

“Impressive,” I murmur.

Eva slides down in the water and closes her eyes, resting her head on the stone lip of the pool. “It's my squid ink,” she says, and it takes me a second to realize she's talking about defense mechanisms. It's a snappy little rejoinder that catches me off guard after the three-o'clock debacle. I honestly can't figure out how much of Eva's wide-eyed ignorance is deliberate.

I close my eyes too, and listen to the hum of the women chatting in Korean in the scrub room. There's a strict no-talking policy at Beverly Hot Springs, fiercely enforced by the most decrepit of the underwear ladies, who rides herd on the room from a white plastic chair by the cold pool, shushing anyone who dares raise their voice above a whisper. The rule doesn't apply to the employees, who chat nonstop while they're administering their special scrubby torture, and when Eva's lady comes to collect her, she and Eva squeal with delight and carry on about how long it's been in a mixture of broken English and Eva's overly loud compensatory lack of Korean.

The white chair patrol just nods, but the blond girl chuffs in irritation, and I realize that she's a model I've seen on billboards. I smile and shrug, but she doesn't acknowledge me.

Hollywood is full of rules that apply to some of the people all of the time, some of the people some of the time, and some of the people none of the time. I sink deeper in the water and wallow in the knowledge that I've possibly moved up a notch.

W
hen I was twelve, I got a scholarship to the Eastcove School. Donna was so overjoyed, you'd have thought I'd gotten into Harvard Law. Eastcove is—or at least was—a luxurious dumping ground for celebrity offspring, plus a smattering of working teen actors whose parents wanted to maintain the illusion that they were giving their kids a normal life.

I went to school with a couple kids you'd still recognize, working child actors who shilled for pudding cups and board games. Twelve-year-olds with charismatic gapped teeth and freckled noses who made more from one national commercial than their parents made in an entire year. It completely skews the balance of power, when your kid out-earns you in a single afternoon, just by welling up with tears because no one got pet insurance for poor Buster. It makes things awkward when little Jimmy wants to have his thirteenth birthday party at the Peninsula, goddammit, and he doesn't give a shit that they have a twenty-five-thousand-dollar catering minimum for a Saturday night, and no, Mom and Dad, you can't invite your friends from the old days, because that would be completely humiliating.

There were other garden-variety rich kids, the sons and daughters of bankers and lawyers and CEOs, but no poor ones. Except for me and two other scholarship kids, one of whom was an Olympic hopeful and one a math wunderkind who ate her lunch alone in the girls' bathroom every day and was, for all outward appearances, completely okay with being a total misfit.

I, on the other hand, was just the poor kid with no special skills. And to all outward—and inward—appearances, I abjectly pined for acceptance, which was in short supply at Eastcove. And that was before I tried out for cheerleading. Not that I wanted to.

Donna had just returned from another failed engagement, this time to a man she met at Chez Jay. His name was Bob and he sold paper for Boise Cascade. Or something. I never knew the truth about my mother's suitors. Before she met Bob, she'd been talking about taking me away from Gloria's for good, getting us an apartment by the beach where we could smell the ocean from our windows and walk to Patrick's Roadhouse for biscuits in the morning before school.

I was all in. Then she met Bob and there was a whirlwind of dinner dates where they'd drag me around to clubby steakhouses like a chaperone. I ate filet mignon every time, because my mother said it was the best. I cut it into tiny bites with my oversize utensils, chewing the small pieces until they were liquid in my mouth.

Once they took me to the pier and I stuffed myself with popcorn and cotton candy while they made out on the wooden benches like teenagers. I ate a soft pretzel dipped in mustard, then puked yellow sludge all over the beige leather of Bob's Cadillac Seville. I remember the electric blue of Donna's bra straps sliding down her tanned shoulders while she held my hair back and Bob smoked and paced the weed-choked paths between cars.

She moved to Idaho with him a few days after that. She wasn't gone long. When she came back, she had a renewed purpose.

“You're never gonna get ahead if you don't get your shit together. You need to meet the right people in this town,” she told me.

At Eastcove, the right people were everywhere. Like Carrie Newcastle, whose parents owned practically every magazine on the newsstands. My mother had tipped me to her importance from reading the school roster, and I dutifully ingratiated myself.

Carrie was kinder than I'd expected. Meaning that unlike most of the kids, she sometimes talked to me.

One morning, after my mother dropped me off in the beater Dodge Dart she'd picked up in Idaho, Carrie asked, “Is that your housekeeper?”

“My father's secretary,” I said.

When I slid into the passenger seat after school, my mother asked, “Was that Carrie Newcastle?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She asked about you.”

“About me? Like, how?”

“Like, she wanted to know who the pretty lady was who dropped me off.”

My mother's eyes glittered. “Stick with me, baby.”

I looked out the window as we pulled away down the wide, residential street, where a uniformed gardener was trimming a box hedge with what looked like a pair of cuticle scissors. There wasn't really anything else to say.

After ingratiating myself to Carrie didn't pan out, my mother's attention switched to cheerleading. Suddenly
that's
how I would move up a notch. I'm not sure why she thought I could do it. I'd failed miserably at her previous attempts to make me an athlete. There were a few ballet lessons from a man with a droopy mustache in a storefront in a strip mall in West Los Angeles, and a halfhearted season of gymnastics at the YMCA on Sixth Street. I barely made it past the first week of somersaults before I faded into a role as water bearer and towel girl.

And then cheerleading. A poster appeared on the corkboard outside the headmaster's office:
COME ONE, COME ALL,
it read, the Big Lie of fake Hollywood egalitarianism.

There were eight places on the squad, but after my tryout, when the roster went up on the headmaster's corkboard a few days later, there were only seven names. I never stood a chance.

Well, look at me now. Look at me fucking now.