As Seen on TV (23 page)

“D
oes your father ever mention other women to you?”

“Carrie, my father rarely talks to me.”

We’re having Tuesday brunch at The Cupping Room Café in Soho. We’re sitting in the back, where, she says, all the celebrities hang out.

I’m not sure if we’re here to see celebrities or because I’m supposed to be one.

Carrie lifts a spoon of granola and yogurt to her lips. “What do you think? He sees other women?”

“Are you exclusive?” I feel silly saying
exclusive.
Do you wear his pin? I take a bite of my salad.

“I think so.” She looks worried. “Or I thought so. Do you not want to talk about this? I shouldn’t be talking about this with you. I’m making you uncomfortable, aren’t I?”

“No, I just don’t know enough about my dad to help you.”

The problem with this discussion is that I like Carrie more
than I like my dad. While I have no knowledge that my father is seeing other women, I can’t say I’d be surprised. I have to admit, the man’s a sleazebag. And if he were any other man besides my father, if I were having lunch with just a girlfriend, I would tell her to dump him immediately.

But he’s my dad, and I want him to be happy. I’m hoping that this time he’s really in love. This time he means it. This time he’ll keep himself zipped.

“Were you two ever close?”

“Not really. I think he’s missing out on the give-a-shit gene.” Immediately after I say it I feel bad. What if she plans on marrying him? What if she plans on having children with him? Did I just pop her love bubble?

“He loves you, you know,” she says, and I think she believes it.

Time to change the subject. “Are you and my dad doing anything fun for Halloween?” I take another forkful of salad. I’ve been watching my carbs lately. The camera adds ten pounds.

“No,” she says. “You? I wonder why I haven’t heard anything about a Halloween
Party Girls
special.”

“Halloween’s on Friday. By Saturday all the Halloween parties are over.”

“Why didn’t you girls dress up last week?”

I thought I did. My buzzing comes to mind.

“Anyway,” Carrie continues, “I’m sure people will still be celebrating.”

“You don’t celebrate Halloween after Halloween. Do you have a Christmas party on the 26th? No. Once the day is over, it’s over.”

“That’s ridiculous. They can have Christmas parties every day in December, from practically the first of the month, but they can’t have one the day after?”

“Right. Life’s too short for mourning holidays past. No one has that much time on her hands.” I motion to the waitress that I need more coffee.

“Some people do,” Carrie says, and laughs. “Have you ever seen the Web site theworldofrealitytv.org?”

Yeah, I’ve come across it. Only about every twenty minutes. “Do you think I have yellow teeth?”

“What?”

“Someone on the Web site said my teeth were yellow, and at first I thought she was crazy, but now I think maybe she’s right.” I smile wide.

She squints at my mouth. “They’re not perfect. You don’t smoke, do you?”

“Never.”

“Coffee?”

Damn. “A lot.”

She reaches into her purse and takes out a card. “Call my dentist. He’ll bleach them.”

“With lasers?”

“If you want, but that’s a fortune. Just get the trays. That’s what I did.” She smiles a fake smile and her teeth gleam.

“Our first available appointment is December sixteenth at nine twenty-five,” the bitchy receptionist tells me.

That just won’t do. “There’s nothing earlier? My schedule is wide open. I can come at any time.”

“Yes, you mentioned that already. But that’s still our first available appointment.”

“Well, that’s not soon enough. Sorry.”

The show will be over by mid-December. I search through sites on the Internet until I find some new names and finally get a dental appointment for Thursday, tomorrow.

While I’m online, I might as well check the community.

I’m so full of crap. I check the community twice a day, even when I have no reason to be online, like looking for a dentist. (The Yellow Pages? What’s that?)

My favorite heading this week is Sunny Scores with Matt! (18 messages.)

Chickita doesn’t understand why I didn’t go home with
him. Um…because I’m not a whore? Even if I didn’t have a boyfriend, I wouldn’t go home with a celebrity just because he’s a celebrity. Yes, you get bragging rights, but that’s all.

LSAngler thinks I played it perfectly. I flirted but I didn’t drape myself all over him like every other girl at the bar and therefore he’s most likely to remember me.

I totally agree.

Does Matt?

Michelle is pissed off, but not as pissed off as I am.

“You can’t not come,” she says. “There are going to be tons of celebrities there. You’re going to leave me alone with Erin and Brittany?”

This sucks. “I can’t. I promised Steve I’d spend the evening with him.” Steve’s ex-roommate is throwing a housewarming/Halloween party and I already RSVP’d.

“What are you dressing up as? A prisoner and a warden?”

Matt Rowler is having a Halloween party at his bar and I’m invited. The other Party Girls are invited, too, but I know the e-invite that was sent to Howard was meant for me.

Since I can’t get out of the stupid housewarming, and I can’t bring Steve to Matt’s party, and I can’t tell Steve I’d rather go to Matt’s party than to his friend’s party, I have decided that I am entitled to be highly cranky about the entire situation.

I mope around the apartment. I talk to myself. I grumble. I disparage Steve for leaving his towel on the bedspread instead of hanging it up.

“PMS-ing, are we?” he says, eyebrow raised.

“I had my period last week, don’t you pay attention to anything?”

He makes a cat-scratch sound and pats me on the head. “You should have dressed as a cat, not a schoolgirl.”

At Steve’s suggestion, I’m wearing pigtails, a short pleated skirt, thigh-high stockings and a white shirt tied at my waist.

“A cat’s not really perverse enough for you, is it? You like little girls not bestiality.”

“I thought you’d be extra nice to me today since I cut my hair the way you suggested.”

“You look very handsome,” I say, feeling a little bad. He does look good. It’s cut short, a little longer than a crew cut. It brings out the sharper lines in his face, makes him look a little more masculine.

While walking to Greg’s new place on Fourteenth and Ninth, we get trapped trying to cross Sixth Avenue because of the West Village Halloween parade. Stupid New York Halloween. I’m wearing a coat. Tell me, what’s the point of dressing up if you have to cover up because of the cold? Who wants to wear a coat when they’re in costume? How do children trick-or-treat in this kind of weather? Do they have to pick costumes specifically to go over coats? Should I have dressed up as a skier?

Hundreds of people are squished together, waiting for a temporary respite in the parade so a policeman can usher us across the street.

“Hey, little girl,” Steve whispers, his breath cold against my neck. “I’ve come to suck your blood.” He’s dressed as a vampire.

He’s already sucked everything else out of the night.

The party is not as lame as I expected, mostly because the conversation revolves around me, and really, when you’re all anyone can talk about, how can you possibly be bored?

“I can’t believe you met Matt Rowler,” Monica, Greg’s fiancée, says, pouring the bottle of wine I brought. Their apartment is a small one-bedroom. You can tell it was a girl’s apartment before it was a couple’s apartment. The couch is purple, and there are vases of flowers and picture frames everywhere.

“Crazy, huh?”

She’s petite, with small doll-like features. She and Greg are
an odd-looking couple, with Greg about twice her height and three times her weight. She must always have to be on top when they have sex, otherwise he’d crush her for sure.

Right now she’s wearing a red wig because she’s dressed as Raggedy Ann. Across the crowded room, Greg is dressed as Raggedy Andy.

All the fifteen or so married and engaged couples in the room are dressed as a team. Ernie and Bert, Beauty and the Beast, an angel and a devil.

Steve and I are the only ones not dressed as a set. Come to think of it, Steve and I are the only ones not married or engaged.

Ruthie, Steve’s ex-girlfriend is here, too. I don’t understand how, since I thought she was supposed to be religious. It’s Friday night, when Jews aren’t supposed to go out. And aren’t religious Jews not supposed to celebrate Halloween because in the olden days they used to be sacrificed on October 31 or something?

Ruthie is wearing a big, fat engagement ring.

“Congratulations,” Steve says, hugging her. He has a strange expression on his face.

Ruthie is dressed as Queen Esther and her fiancé is King Ahashverosh, the stars of the Jewish holiday Purim. On Purim, Jews dress up and are supposed to drink until they can no longer tell the difference between the hero and the villain. I bet Ruthie and company were too lazy to come up with new costumes and decided to recycle their Purim ones.

Still hugging her.

Still.

Okay, enough already.

A girl I don’t know in a
Playboy
Bunny outfit (her partner is dressed as Hugh Hefner) taps me on the arm.

“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “I am so excited to meet you. I love your show. I’m totally addicted.”

“Thank you,” I say. “That’s so sweet.”

“Are you an actress?”

I laugh. “No, just a regular person.”

“Wow. What’s it like?”

I describe the makeovers, the other girls, the cameramen and anything else I can think of that these women will find interesting. They listen enthusiastically the entire time, constantly asking questions.

Over my shoulder I’m watching Steve deep in discussion with Ruthie. Maybe he’s wishing he was the one marrying her. A nice normal girl, with a nice (probably) normal job. Not someone as self-absorbed as I am. As I’ve become.

About thirty minutes later Steve interrupts because he wants to introduce me to a college friend of his, Nolan, and his wife, Patricia.

I shake their hands and ask them polite questions about what they do. They’re lawyers and they tell me about their boring jobs and about their clients, droning on and on, and then they start a discussion about the mayor and the economic state of the city. I’m not sure why they don’t ask me what I do. Not to be a bitch, but my life is so much more interesting.

I try to think of ways to bring it into the conversation, but really, how does reality television flow from “financial depression”?

Why doesn’t Steve bring it up? Isn’t he proud of me?

Am I really this self-centered? Do all conversations have to revolve around me?

But wouldn’t Nolan and Patricia be interested in learning about the world of television? About the world of
me?

What’s wrong with me?

Yawn. I look at my watch. Is it time to go home yet?

I wait for Steve to fall asleep and then sneak into the bathroom to put in the teeth-bleaching molds. The dentist told me that if I slept with them for five nights I’d have a new, sparkling smile.

There’s a top one and a bottom one. They’re gummy and
clear and they remind me of when I used to bite into foam cups at camp to see the imprint of my teeth.

I squirt the gel into my two mouth molds. Then I try to fasten them over my teeth. The instructions say to make sure to wipe away any excess gel. No problem. I wipe it away with a damp tissue. Then I rinse and spit. Perfect.

I climb back into bed. Yuck. I can taste some of the gel. That can’t be good for me. The instructions said to swallow as little of the gel as possible. I obviously didn’t wipe away enough of the excess. I carefully climb out of bed and return to the bathroom. Sure enough, there is spill-over-gel on my gums. I wipe it away. I wait a few minutes to see if there’s more spillage. There is. Why won’t this damn gel stay where it’s supposed to? I can’t swallow the gel. It’ll for sure give me throat cancer or something equally horrible. Like gum cancer.

I have to go to sleep. I’m going to be on TV tomorrow. I can’t have bags under my eyes because I was up all night trying to de-gray my teeth.

But my bags can be covered with makeup and my teeth can’t. I sit on the toilet seat and wait.

I spit in the sink. I don’t swallow. It’s not so easy not to swallow. The spit is overloading in my mouth. I spit again.

I’ll have to just swallow and suck it up. I need to sleep. I swallow. If I die of throat cancer, I die of throat cancer. Something has to get us in the end. I climb back into bed.

Instead of sleeping, I obsess about poisons infiltrating my body.

At ten the next morning Steve is still sleeping and I get out of bed, close the door, spit out the molds and anxiously look at my they’d-better-be-white teeth in the mirror.

They’re whiter! It worked! But what’s that? Is that a white blotch? It is. Why is there a white blotch on my eyetooth?

I’ve lost it. When did I become so crazy? My teeth are fine. What I need is Prozac.

How many hours till TV time?

I call Michelle from the living room. Her machine picks up.
I leave a whispered message, begging her to call me back with details about the party.

When I don’t hear from her by the time the car service pulls up in front of my apartment, I assume that Matt has fallen madly in love with someone else and Michelle feels too bad to tell me about it.

She doesn’t mention anything when I open the car door. She’s blabbing with Erin and Brittany, talking a mile a minute. She spends one night with them and they’re all best friends?

As soon as I pull her away from Brittany and Erin in the lobby of the bar, I shake her by the wrist.

“Tell me, I’m dying here.”

“Tell you what?”

“About Matt, what do you think?”

“Right, right. Guess who asked about you…”

My heart stops. “No. He did?”