Beg (Songs of Submission #1)(5)

Performance school rote bullshit. Get out and play. Keep working. Play the odds. Teachers told poor kids they might be seen if they busted their violins on the streets if they had to. Dream-feeders. Fuck them. Some of those kids should have gone into accounting, and that line of shit kept them dreaming a few too many years.

I looked at Gabby and her big blue eyes, pleading for consideration. She was mid-anxiety attack. If it continued over the coming weeks, the anxiety attacks would become less frequent and the dead stares into corners more frequent if she didn’t take her meds regularly. Then it would be trouble: another suicide attempt, or worse, a success. I loved Gabby. She was like a sister to me, but sometimes I wished for a less burdensome friend.

“Fine,” I said. “One time, okay? You can find someone else in all of Los Angeles to do it next time.”

Gabby nodded and tapped her thumb and middle finger together. “It’s good,” she said. “It’ll be good, Monica. You’ll knock them out. You will.” The words had a rote quality, like she said them just to fill space.

“I guess I need it too,” I said. “I got fired last night.”

“What did you do?”

“Spilled drinks in my boss’s lap.”

“That Freddie guy?”

“Jonathan Drazen.”

“Oh…” She put her hands to her mouth. “He also owns the R.O.Q. Club in Santa Monica. So don’t try to work there, either.”

“Did you know he’s gorgeous?”

A voice came from behind me. “Talking about me again?” Darren had shown up, God bless him.

“Jonathan Drazen fired her last night,” Gabby said.

“Who is that?” He sat down, placing his laptop on the table.

“He didn’t do it. Freddie did. Drazen just offered me a severance and referred me to the Stock.”

“And apparently he’s gorgeous.” He raised an eyebrow at me. I shrugged. Darren and I were over each other, but he’d rib me bloody at the slightest sign of weakness. “I haven’t heard you talk like that about a guy in a year and a half. I thought maybe you were still in love with me.” I must have blushed, or my eyes might have given away some hidden spark of feeling, because Darren snapped open his laptop. “Let’s see what kinda wifi I can pick up.”

“I don’t talk like that about men because I prefer celibacy to bullshit.”

Darren tapped away on his laptop. “Jonathan Drazen. Thirty-two. Old man.” He looked at me over the screen.

“Do not underestimate how hot he is. I could barely talk.”

“Earned his money the old-fashioned way.”

“Rich daddy?”

“A long line of them. He makes more in interest than the entire GDP of Burma.” Darren scrolled through some web page or another. He loved the internet like most people loved puppies and babies. “Real estate magnate. His dad was a drunk and lost a chunk of money. Our Jonathan the Third….” He drifted off as he scrolled. “BA from Penn. MBA from Stanford. He brought the business back. Bazillionaire. He’s a real catch if you can tear him away from the four hundred other women he’s getting photographed with.”

“Lalala. Don’t care.”

“Why? It’s not like you’ve had sex in….what?” Darren clicked around, pretending he didn’t care about my answer, but I knew he did.

“Men are bad news,” I said. “They’re a distraction. They make demands.”

“Not all men are Kevin.”

Kevin was my last boyfriend, the one whose control issues had turned me off to men for eighteen months. “Lalala…not talking about Kevin either.” I scraped the bottom of my ice cream cup.

Darren turned his laptop so I could see the screen. “This him?”

Jonathan Drazen stood between a woman and man I didn’t recognize. I scrolled through the gossip page. His Irish good looks were undeniable next to anyone, even movie stars.

“He has been photographed with an awful lot of women,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s been a total f**k-around since his divorce, FYI. If you wanted him, he’d probably be game. All I’m saying.” He crossed his legs and looked out onto Sunset.

Gabby had a faraway look as she watched the cars. “His wife was Jessica Carnes,” Gabby recited as if she was reading a newspaper in her head, “the artist. Drazen married her at his father’s place on Venice Beach. She’s half-sister to Thomas Deacon, the sports agent at APR, who has a baby with Susan Kincaid, the hostess at the Key Club, whose brother plays basketball with Eugene Testarossa. Our dream agent at WDE.”

“One day, Gabster, your obsession with Hollywood interrelationships will pay off.” Darren clicked his laptop closed. “But not today.”

***

I think one could be at Hotel K, get blindfolded, taken to the Stock, and believe they’d been driven around and dropped in the same place they started: same pool, same chairs, same couches, same music, and same ass**les clutching the same drinks and passing off the same tips. What was different was that there was no Freddie. the Stock had Debbie, a tall Asian lady who wore mandarin collar embroidered shirts and black trousers. She knew every superstar from just their face, and they loved her as much as she loved them. She could tell a movie mogul from an actress and sat them where they’d have the most professional friction. She coordinated the waitresses’ tables according to the patron’s taste and coddled the girls until they worked like a machine.