“Hey, JJ, how’s it going, man?” His tone is jocular as he maneuvers for his shot. “Is this your girl?”
JJ ignores him and I angle away, but the guy holds his ground, his shutter clicking over my shoulder, and his lens so close that I could reach out and swat it if my hands weren’t full.
“What are you doing down here?” he continues. “Hey, man, did you forget your shoes? Big night last night?”
He’s wedged directly between me and Tyler’s Carrera, which he let me take home, probably not expecting that I’d illegally park in the passenger zone in order to load my food. I glance over my shoulder at JJ, who has pasted a bland glaze of affability across his face and is still completely ignoring the rapid-fire questions.
“Hey, why you gotta be like that?” the pap asks, his tone getting increasingly antagonistic. “I’m just trying to say hey, you know.” He keeps clicking while he fumbles in his bag for a little video flipcam. “Who’s your friend? She’s a little thick to be your date, boss. Is she your sister? Do you have a chunky sister you’re hiding from the world?”
“That’s enough, bro,” JJ says, without breaking his expression at all.
Paparazzi are like schoolyard bullies, by turns obsequious and cruel. The money shots are the ones that involve high emotion. If they can provoke a shove or a swing or a gob of spit, all the better.
“Just go, JJ,” I say. “I’ve got this.”
“Not a chance,” he says. “I’m on a feta mission.”
I scuttle closer to the car and JJ reaches to open the passenger door for me. His bare body brushes up against me and he feels like marble wrapped in cashmere. I shiver involuntarily, even though it’s already pushing eighty degrees.
I flinch away—must not lust for Megan’s boyfriend—just as the pap swings his video camera into place and our arms collide in what would be a comical tangle if this were a Farrelly Brothers movie and not my life. The trays of vegetables go flying and my purse and canvas knife bag spew everything onto the pavement: my prized Wüsthof carbon-steel knives, my Henckels kitchen shears, my tampons and American Spirits all falling to the ground amid chunks of red bell pepper and mushrooms.
“Back up, fucker!” I scream into the pap’s face. “Step the fuck off!”
He’s a little taken aback, but he does just that, putting three feet of sidewalk between us without lowering his camera, which is blinking a little red dot that lets me know he’s got this for posterity. I don’t give a shit, because footage of some nobody screaming at him is less than worthless, just a waste of his time and battery life.
I kneel and survey the damage. Half of my marinated and skewered vegetables are ruined, and there’s a gouge in the paint on Tyler’s car where my chef’s knife julienned it. I’m already ten minutes late for Scout’s and now I’m going to have to come up with more food before guests start arriving and there’s no time. And I’d wanted everything to be perfect for her. For me. And, I’m not going to lie, for Eva, too.
I shoot a glance at JJ. “Dude, just go. Tell Megan we had an incident.”
“I was going to make her breakfast,” he says, sort of forlorn.
“Grab the feta and run.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” JJ kneels to clean the mess. “Let me help you.”
I start scooping items into my purse. Bamboo skewers, my cigarettes, a chunk of zucchini. My hand brushes JJ’s as we both reach for a cleaver, and a sizzle of electricity runs up my arm. Holy crap, I’m so fucking inappropriate.
The pap, who’s been muttering into his Bluetooth headset, blurts out, “Hey, JJ, is it true you hooked up with Megan Campion? I hear she fucked her director on Stones.”
There’s no truth to the pap’s accusation, but it’s exactly what it takes for JJ to snap. He leaps to his feet. “Why don’t you say that again, asshole?”
The pap pales but keeps the camera steady.
“Go on, shitbag,” JJ says. “I fucking dare you.”
“I heard,” the pap says, “that she took it up the ass to get her first job.”
JJ raises his hand like he’s going to shove the guy and that’s when we all see—oh, holy shit—that he’s still holding my Wüsthof Trident Classic 20cm cleaver in his right hand, the steel blade gleaming in the early afternoon sunshine.
“JJ! Just walk away.” I try to inject a calm tone into my voice. “Dude. Just walk away.”
JJ squares his shoulders, then turns and heads back inside, my best cleaver still dangling in his right hand. The pap keeps the camera running until JJ’s gone, then sprints across the street to his Escalade and peels off with a tire-squealing flourish.
Disaster. I grab my phone from the debris on the sidewalk and call Megan.
“There was a shitstorm down here,” I say, and tell her everything.
She starts laughing halfway through, so I don’t think she really gets what just happened.
“You need to tell JJ to call his publicist,” I say. “There’s gonna be footage of him holding a fucking cleaver on YouTube in three minutes.”
“I know, Boof,” she says. “He’s right here, he’s already on it.”
“Here’s the thing,” I blurt, then fall silent.
“What thing?” she asks.
“I’m going to need help at Scout’s. That asshole tanked some of my stuff and I have to make more on the fly.” Like I said, Megan and Scout aren’t exactly tight, so it’s weird that I’m going to press her into service at Scout’s party, but I’m out of options. “I’m doing a quick grocery run, then can you meet me over there?”
“You’re killing me,” Megan says. “You know my kitchen skills are nonexistent.”
“I don’t need you to make soufflés,” I say. “I just need some extra hands.”
“Fine,” she says. “But only if there’s going to be feta.”
“Five pounds of it,” I say. “The good French kind too.”
“All right,” she says. “Text me the address.”
“Done,” I say. “See you there.”
“I’m bringing JJ,” she says. “He’s good with his hands.”
“Tell him to keep his shirt on,” I say. “And bring my murder weapon.”
Twenty
I thread between a dozen Harleys on my way to the front door of Scout’s building. The sidewalk looks like a holding pen for the extras on Sons of Anarchy, all beater American bikes and denim vests barely covering biceps tattooed with partially disguised swastikas and cartoon-titted girls on candy-striped poles.
This is so not my tribe, and I’m more than a little uncomfortable as I slog my eco-friendly bags stuffed with artisanal cheeses and rustic breads and dips up the stairway to Scout’s third-floor apartment. We’re half a block from the ocean, on the alley that locals call Speedway. I guess everyone calls it Speedway, but if you’re a tourist and you Google it, you’d think it was a street. It’s not. It’s a drunk-ass, crack-smoking, bike-stealing alley, fifty feet from the sandy shores of Venice Beach.
It has a certain Endless Summer-y cachet, but it feels a little shady when I’m pulling up in a one-hundred-thousand-dollar car, loaded down with party accoutrements. And the truth is, I’m already nervous because of Scout’s boyfriend, Weston. He’s a six-foot-four, recently released ex-con with long hair like a wood nymph. Here I’m supposed to say that on the inside he’s a cuddly teddy bear, but he’s so not. On the inside, he’s a domestic disturbance. And even though Scout and I are tight, I don’t know her nearly well enough to ask the question that’s on the tip of my tongue every time I’m within a quarter-mile radius of Weston, which is What the fuck are you thinking?! Weston’s not a bad boy with a gentle side, he’s a bad boy with a sociopathic inner child and a mile-long criminal record. But Scout is totally smitten.
A thick clot of bikers in the living room makes Scout’s cramped one-bedroom apartment feel exponentially smaller.
As I shoulder my way through to the kitchen, I glimpse a familiar face sitting on a faux Eames chair that Scout salvaged from a Dumpster on Electric Avenue on her way home from a meeting. How do I know that guy?
Because it’s Billy Idol.
Scout is nine years sober, which has a weird way of obliterating the fences in the Hollywood caste system. Her ex-con boyfriend is digging into the same bag of Tostitos as a musical icon from the 1980s—Hey, bro, great meeting at Chinatown the other night, amirite? Billy and Weston are both working a very similar vibe, in fact, in their ratty denim vests and armloads of tattoos. It’s just that one of them is worth forty million dollars, and the other is waiting for the balance of his prison earnings account to be released in the form of a money order and sent to his halfway house in the city of Downey.
I blow past them and dump my crap on the counter in the minuscule kitchen. It’s nine cubic feet of Formica countertops, a three-quarter-size electric stove with crusty heating coils, and a refrigerator that looks like it came from the set of a ’70s sitcom where a plucky mom doles out platitudes and meatloaf.
As soon as I finish unpacking—before I’ve even seen Scout, who must be in the bathroom primping—I get a text from Megan that says: We’re out front. WTF, it’s like the Rock Store with all the bikes. Come get us?
A curling finger of dread in my stomach tells me that everything is about to go off the rails entirely. And that’s before Scout comes bouncing into the tiny kitchen dressed like a Harajuku Girl from a vintage Gwen Stefani video: her red hair in two high ponytails fastened with black fabric flowers; a white button-down shirt tied under her giant breasts and a blue plaid schoolgirl skirt riding low on her ample hips; her wide, tanned belly with its leaping koi and mermaid tattoos exposed unself-consciously. She’s wearing enormous platform shoes and towers over me when she sweeps me into a sweaty hug, even though I’m taller when we’re both barefoot.
“I was starting to get worried about you,” she says, and I hear a slightly elevated tone in her voice that makes me wonder if she’s fighting with Weston.
“Long story,” I tell her. “I had to make a last-minute market run.”
Scout eyes the bags on the counter. “Is this everything?”
“Not even close,” I say. “I’m going to the car for another load right now.”
“I’ll help.”
“No need. It’s just one more load.”
“That’s crazy,” she says. “I’m coming with.”
“Seriously, I’ve got it,” I say, with forced offhandedness. “I asked Megan to help me do some prep. She’s downstairs too.”
Scout gives me an exaggerated head turn, like she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “You invited Megan to my birthday party?”
“Not invited. Pressed into service.”
Scout stares at me with one arched eyebrow and a motionless everything else.
“Dude,” I say. “You’re welcome.”
Scout gives a grudging smile. “Yeah. Thanks.”
But it’s her party, so I say, “Listen, if you want me to tell her I don’t need her, I totally will. This is your day. It’s no big deal.”
It’s a huge deal, because I’ve got four man-hours of prep to do and the party is already getting under way, but I’m not going to argue.
“No, it’s fine,” she says.
Then Weston slouches in and leans against the kitchen doorframe. “I’ll help, babe,” he tells Scout without making eye contact with me.
“You will, baby?” she says in a little-girl voice I’ve never heard her use before. Jesus, all she needs is a lollipop and she’s ready to shoot some kind of submissive, big-girl alt-porn.
“I’m good,” I say, and bolt for the front door.
Before I get there, a wave of girls I assume are Scout’s friends come bursting in, tittering about JJ.
“Did you see that girl he’s with?” says one who is sleeved in tribal ink and wearing a pair of Halloween cat ears in her dyed-black bob.
“I know, right? Like, honey, I can see your nipples from here.”
This from a pale girl who looks like Marilyn Manson’s little sister. She’s marginally ruining the effect with a battered pink Hello Kitty lunchbox she’s got slung over her shoulder like a purse, but still. Glass houses.
I brush past them with a chirpy “hi” that makes me hate myself, and run downstairs. Out on the street, Megan and JJ are sitting on the fender of Tyler’s car, kissing like they’re getting paid overtime to do it, as a touristy-looking middle-aged woman unabashedly uses her phone to record the event.
I bump into her, hard, and the phone clatters to the ground.
“Oh, jeez,” I say, scooping it up. “I am so sorry. I really need to watch where I’m going. Here, lemme make sure it’s still working.”
She’s still gaping at Megan and JJ as I’m mashing buttons, trying to find the delete key. It’s a fucking Android. I have no idea.
Megan is wearing an old white Pixies shirt and short denim cutoffs with a pair of ancient, perfect cowboy boots she’s had forever. She looks fantastic, but I can see what Suicide Kitty Girl was saying about the nipple thing. Whatever. If I had a body like Megan’s, I’d wear a string bikini to the opera.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be fine,” I say, sending the file to the trash. “I’m really sorry. I just didn’t see you there, ogling the celebrities.”
“Sorry, that was harsh,” I say. “But seriously, they’re not zoo animals.”
“Fuck you!” she says loudly. “I was just trying to get a picture for my niece, you ugly cunt.”
Wow, not what I was expecting. I’m getting that buzzy adrenaline rush that happens before confrontations when Megan and JJ descend on me from either side, loaded with food, steering me toward the door to the building.
“Boof,” Megan says, laughing. “You’re a bulldog today.”
“Yeah,” JJ chimes in. “You had Paula Deen shaking in her Crocs.”
I can’t help but laugh. “I love that you know who Paula Deen is.”
“Honey, I’m from Tennessee,” he says, snapping his fingers out in a wave. “She was my mama’s patron saint.”
“Good to know,” I say. As he rounds the corner into the lobby, I mouth quickly at Megan, Uh-oh, racist mother-in-law, and she flips me off, to limited effect, since she’s concentrating on balancing four half pans of savory Greek pastries.
Upstairs, there are at least thirty people in Scout’s living room and even more spilling onto the tiny balcony hanging precariously over the alley. It’s a pretty even mix of ex-cons and manic pixie dream girls. Someone set my thirty-dollar block of feta on a stack of soggy paper towels and one particularly menacing dude is tearing a Bread and Cie baguette into large chunks and piling them alongside in a sloppy heap.
“Shit,” I say to Megan. “This is my nightmare.”
“Boof, please. These people are hardly expecting a five-course meal from Le Bernardin. Just tell me what to do.”
JJ is immediately swallowed up by a group of men who look like they’d carve your heart out for the extra storage space. Except they’re squealing like schoolgirls and thumping him on the back as they recount their favorite scenes from Malibu 90265, which was the show that catapulted JJ to stardom. It’s in endless reruns now, millions of dollars in syndication money for JJ, I’m sure. I’m more amazed that this rag-tag crew of recently incarcerated felons recognizes him from that decades-old show, but I guess there’s not a lot to do in the joint after you work out, right?
“I need that cheese,” I tell Megan. “Do whatever it takes.”
“On it,” Megan says, and she heads into the fray.
In the kitchen, one girl is dumping triangles of fresh pita bread and thin, green stalks of blanched asparagus onto a single platter while another appears to b
e trying to create a yin/yang symbol with hummus and baba ghanoush in a mixing bowl.
“Hey, thanks for helping.” I pluck the slotted spoon from her hand. “We’ve got it from here.”
“Are you the caterer?” she asks reproachfully. “You should have been here two hours ago.”
I’m getting that buzzy adrenaline thing again. “Then you must be my waitstaff.”
Yin/Yang looks affronted. “I’m a guest of Scout’s!”
“Yeah?” I say, like I’m about to get all remorseful about it. “Guess what? Me too. So how about you go throw some ice in the drink cooler on the balcony?”
“You are?” she asks, clearly dubious.
I grab the hummus and baba ghanoush and start deconstructing her efforts. “Go on,” I say. “Shoo.”
She glares at me for a moment before turning on her Converse-clad heel and flouncing away. Her skirt looks like she’s about to compete in the women’s figure-skating finals in 1988. Jesus, Scout’s friends.
I chase off the other one, who is wearing a drum-majorette jacket, replete with brass buttons and epaulettes over a pair of thick Wolford tights that are completely inappropriate for the eighty-degree weather. She’s made a mess of my beautiful asparagus, which is now a tangle of bright-green seaweed on what looks like a leftover plastic platter from a Super Bowl party.
I say a silent prayer that no one fucked with the spanakopita and goat-cheese tiropita I spent three hours layering and wrapping, and when I open the refrigerator I’m relieved to find the trays of geometrically folded triangles untouched beneath the layers of clear plastic.