Fame Intermission

Ugh. It is contemptable. These people are fawning over her. These camera flashes are excruciating. The whistles…nauseating. The same questions repeatedly.

Who designed your dress?

What is the best advice someone has given you?

How does it feel to be nominated?

Blah. Blah. Blah.

The dress is from a rack. On clearance for 5.99. Not Christian Dior.

First lie.

“My mother told me to live in the moment.”

Haven’t talked to your mother in five months.

Second lie.

“It is such an honor to be recognized for this work.”

An hour ago, you were mapping out your best escape route.

Third lie.

The room smells of money. You know the smell? When if you make the wrong move, and hit a table centerpiece, the hawks will swarm and ask if you know how much that was. Let me just write that check real quick out of the imaginary checking account that I have and not the locked box in a secret location that holds my small life savings.

More people came to congratulate her. Tell her what a fascinating piece of work it is. She pretends to love the attention. Accepts all the tiny bags of gifts. Gifts that she will hawk at a pawn store in about two hours. Then she’ll take that money and buy more canvases and more paint. And spend a countless number of hours locked away and ignoring phone notifications.

They serve champagne. Serve something that resembles beef but is surrounded by so much sauce and vegetables…resembles doesn’t mean it is. About an hour in, the champagne has lost its allure. Like it ever really had any to begin with.

The awards begin followed by bland acceptance speeches, as if everyone wrote the same speech together one day over coffee. Then…the final award. The best of the best. “And the winner for best modern painting goes to…Harley Walls!” The crowd erupts into applause and before the flash of fabricated excitement, I see a flash of uneasiness.

She rises from her seat and heads to the microphone. The small shiny trophy is placed in her hand, and the audience patiently awaits. I lean over in my seat, to make sure I am filming the moment from the right angle. That’s what social media is all about. Right angles. It seems like eternity before she speaks. “I just want to say one thing.” Cameras are flashing at a rapid pace. “I don’t belong here.” Then something unimaginable happens. The trophy goes crashing to the ground and within seconds, she disappears behind a magical curtain. There is so much silence in the room, you could hear a mouse pee. I grab her phone from the table, and I run to the first exit I can find. Somehow, I land near a door that leads down a hallway that leads to a door that opens to an alleyway covered in graffiti. How can a place be beautiful and fractured in the same sense?

I find her, leaning against a trashcan. I handed her the phone, and she dials a number and within minutes her driver appears. One perk of being mildly famous. We jumped in the car just as a crowd of photographers swarmed us. The driver, Ralph, pounds the horn and then barrels down the road, skirting into city traffic. After a few moments, she speaks. “I left the gifts.” I glance at her, and her face is expressionless and that is the only thing she says the rest of the way through the city.

Somehow, it takes an hour for the incident to hit everyone’s newsfeed, and the calls come crashing in. Business partner. Journalists. Low level clicks bait people. Mother. Father. Brother. On and off again lover. She ignores them. I field some of them. She likes her father a little more than her mother. Her brother is the only person who she still buys Christmas gifts for. Business partner is relatively calm but insists the publicist be the next phone call after her. She isn’t.

Her apartment looks to the city skyline. There is minimal furniture. There are more books than anything. Enough to fill a bookcase if one existed. A half-eaten sandwich lay haphazardly on the table with a glass bottle of water. Probably from days ago to be honest. The only thing of note is the vinyl player with a locked case full of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin records. She sits in the chair, that she always sits in when she is slightly bothered by something. A chair that she found at a flea market but has a chance at being the most expensive in this place.

I glance at the person before me and for the first time, in a long time, I wonder if this person has any resemblance to the one, I met five years ago. Struggling poet. Struggling painter. Some ads on Instagram we had both responded to. A room full of people who wanted to find their first big break and their fortunes in the hands of some big-time magazine editor who wanted to break the next big thing. Neither one of us was picked but we had a hamburger and fries at a rustic diner after. We had bonded because we were the oldest ones in the room and we were only in our 30s. Two months later, I caught a break, and my self-published poetry was being majorly distributed. I wanted her artwork added to the new collection and we never looked back. It seems like ages ago.

“How much do you think that will cost me?” Her words interrupt my far-gone thoughts. I shrug. “Probably a written apology and a donation to a charity.” She laughs. Mostly, knowingly, because of the absurdity and realness of my statement. I sit on a pile of books and look at the woman, who is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a best friend and ask her the question that all the journalists would clamor to ask. “Why did you do that?”

She sighs and looks me straight in the eye. “When was the last time any of this was fun for you?”