“Between Cockring and Jimmy, I guess I’ll take Jim—”
“Come on, Cockring,” Kathi blurts.
She leads me up the hill, past the pool house, around a bend, passing twirling yard ornaments, statues of garden gnomes smoking weed, a fat Buddha with the face of that boy from Mad magazine. We walk past a pool surrounded by mountains and hills and trees and old Las Vegas–style neon signs that say DINOSAUR HOTEL and TOPLESS DANCERS. There’s an old-fashioned Coke machine and lawn chairs with bright umbrellas. This job, should it become real for me, beats the hell out of my piece-of-shit cubicle in the newsroom with oppressive fluorescent lighting in the middle of the night. In the distance, I see a man who I assume to be a gardener. He looks like he’s pretending to trim a small palm tree. He waves and I wave back like I belong there; I’m pretending, too.
Kathi leads me back into her home, into the red room with its fire and boats and floor pillows. She plops down on a cushion that looks like a Louis Vuitton toilet seat. I stand awkwardly nearby, considering my fate, wondering if I’m to be flushed.
Kathi grabs a TV remote and turns on a television behind me. Gone with the Wind is on, and Kathi turns up the volume. I’m not sure if we’re still in the job interview or if I should sit beside her and watch. I look back and forth between her and the television.
“Do you have any other questions for me?” I shout over the sound of a screaming Southern belle.
“I don’t know.” Kathi sighs. She mutes the TV and looks at me. “I don’t really care for this kind of thing. Hiring employees. I usually just pull people from wherever. I’ve never hired, like, a professional before. There’s the other guy I met yesterday, but he’s—I don’t know. He likes sports. You like sports?”
“What’s sports?”
Kathi smiles openly, naturally, for the first time, seemingly unguarded. Have I amused her?
I try to stay cool, but I’m thinking, The other guy? I try to hide the sting, the reminder that this job isn’t mine yet, there are other candidates, that I’m competing—something that usually doesn’t end well for me.
“Tell me about your award acceptance speech,” she says.
“My—?”
“Everyone has one in their head. The speech you’ll give if you win a big award. What’s your speech like?”
“Uh, you first?”
Kathi Kannon hops up in an instant and approaches an imaginary podium and adjusts an imaginary microphone, into which she says, “They always size these things for someone taller. And thinner.”
I look around, confused, unsure if she’s talking to me or the imaginary cameras or the imaginary crowd. Maybe all three.
Like a switch is flipped, she suddenly starts crying. Her body heaving, the magnitude of the fantastic moment upon her just as real as the oxygen in the room, like a tonnage too heavy to bear. She clutches her heart, as if to find and hold a beat to prove that her body is still there. She turns, takes an imaginary award from an imaginary presenter, they exchange a real moment, whispers, a chuckle, she takes a breath. She reclaims her footing at the nonexistent podium. She looks right at me. She’s locked onto me, onto her target, ready to launch. She’s a goddess. I’m the audience, I’m the world, I’m a million viewers at home.
“My God,” she says, sobbing into the imaginary mic. “This. Wow. Come on, words.” I laugh quietly; she controls the room. She controls the world she just built around me in an easy instant. She’s in my head, in my consciousness. How am I here with her?
She says, “This is the best moment of my life. Thank you.”
As she steps away from the microphone, I applaud. She turns back to me and raises her eyebrows and picks at a piece of something stuck in her teeth, and the illusion is lost.
“Acting,” she says.
My applause simmers awkwardly to a few little claps.
She says, “Now you do it.”
“What? I’m not really prepared for that.”
“Well, that’s a good start,” she says. “Start with that.”
I awkwardly walk to the imaginary podium, to the place where she stood seconds ago. “Uhh,” I say into her imaginary mic. “Is this thing on?”
Kathi rolls her eyes. “We’ll work on it,” she says, and sits back on the toilet cushion.
I feel our time is ending, so I step up. “Can I say something, in case I never see you again?” I say boldly, my face already turning red.
She stares at me, eyebrows raised.
“I just want to say I loved you in…” And I pause. This is the part Bruce did warn me about. “Don’t tell her about the action figures,” he said. “Don’t tell her that you loved her space films,” he said. “Don’t make a fool of yourself and act like a fan,” he said.
With Kathi waiting for me to spit it out, I continue, “I loved you in…”
Don’t do it.
“… Mork and Mindy.”
Kathi stares at me with the kind of comfort that only comes from a person used to being stared at. “Was I in that?” she asks, her expression not betraying whether she’s joking or having actual memory failure.
“Yes! You were a guest star. It must have been one of your first acting jobs. It was one of the only shows my dad let me watch.”
She stares at me intensely, like an old-timey actress staring at the silver-screen heartthrob who’s going to break her heart. Her eyes narrow, squinting as if to put me in better focus. “You have a rich inner life I know nothing about.”
“Thank you,” I say, looking away briefly, avoiding the scrutiny, unsure how to respond, wondering if this is a moment calling for truth on my part—she can get to know me if she wants to, if she hires me—or a moment of uncertainty on her part, calling out the holes in my life and job history, which I know are technically vacant of the specific experience of being a celebrity assistant.
An awkward pause hangs in the air, and she’s done. With a big exhale, she wiggles into a more comfortable position on her cushion and says, “Well, you seem groovy. Nice to meet you and all that.”
“You, too,” I manage, my body swaying slightly with insecurity and uncertainty.
Kathi turns back to her television, switches the sound back on, and I know I’ve lost her.
I put my half-nursed Coke Zero down on her bar.
I smile and turn and leave her, the Southern belle on TV screaming again about fire or food or God knows what.
And I leave that mansion, past the moose and the Chinese emperors.
And I leave that property, past the ball-sac door knocker and floating porpoise.
And I leave that fantasy, that other life, my limbs still fully intact, for now.
3
My screen saver is fucking with me. It’s cycling through exotic, peaceful, lush locations while I’m stuck at my dank desk, back at my news-writer job, stressed the hell out, not because of the workload but because it has been three days since I met Kathi Kannon and I’ve heard nothing.
I’m clutching my cell phone 24/7, in bathrooms, in movie theaters, in desperation, hoping to hear from her. What’s taking her so long to decide? Maybe she has decided. Maybe I’m not good enough. Still, I want her to call. I want to hear that I’m rejected, feel my ear vibrate with the words. I want to feel the pain, my old friend.