Stupid and Contagious Page 2

  First there’s Sarah, a particularly severe case. But we’ll get to her later. She was only the most recent in a series of troubling episodes.

  My mom says it’s temporary, but looking at her and my dad, I sometimes think my romantic problems are congenital. Their idea of a good time is finding the thousand ways they can spend entire evenings in separate rooms without saying a single word to each other—though the house I grew up in had exactly five rooms spread across 1,400 square feet. My dad says it’s because I haven’t met the right girl yet, but sometimes I think maybe I’ve met her five times already but ended up staring at her friend all night and asking her out, the one who would eventually steal eighty dollars out of my wallet to pay for a bikini wax, which I never got to see.

  It’s not all my fault, though. I’ve had a substantial selection of the crazy and the cruel. There was Jill Perczyk, who broke up with me on New Year’s Day and then called me three weeks later to ask how much the DVD player I bought her for Christmas was, because she couldn’t determine a fair price to ask on Craigslist.

  There was Courtney Goodkin, who scolded me good-naturedly about paying more attention to my dog than I paid to her, then revealed her true nature by leaving a twenty-four-ounce bar of dark baking chocolate in her purse by my dog’s bed one night—a gift he eagerly consumed. A sleepless thirty hours and five hundred dollars in vet bills later, Courtney was but a bittersweet memory.

  And then there was Wendy Richtor, whose name couldn’t have been more fitting. If a devastating earthquake measures an eight on the Richter scale, the Wendy earthquake of ’92 registered a twelve. She was beautiful. She had long, wavy strawberry-blond hair and milky-white skin. Her long, willowy arms were like stretched-out vanilla taffy, and to be lost in them was better than any sugar high I’d ever experienced.

  I met her at a Pearl Jam concert, which made me feel like it was destiny. I loved Pearl Jam and she loved Pearl Jam, and I loved her and she loved me. It was perfect. Like Eddie Vedder brought us together. Eddie sang the words I wished I could tell the girl I thought I’d never meet. And there she was . . . singing along to every word. And it’s not that Pearl Jam was any more amazing than anyone else. I think we just liked who we were when they were who they were. If I could stop time at my last moment of purity and innocence, it would be right then.

  Wendy warmed my heart, earned my trust, touched my soul, and then touched me in a lot of other places. And right after we’d slept together for the very first time she looked up at me with her chocolate-brown, trustworthy doe eyes and said, “I’ve got herpes. I thought you should know.”

  “I guess this is me,” the interloper says, and I nod as he sits himself down and gets situated. “I’m Marc.”

  “Brady.” We shake hands. His hands look like oversize pancakes. Did I mention I also hate germs?

  Now I want to wash my hands. I’m not obsessive-compulsive, and I don’t mean to come off sounding like a wuss, but there’s like zero air pressure in here, and the air is all recycled. It’s basically a germ factory, and I can’t afford to be sick when I get home. Not because I have anything important going on. In fact, that’s just it. Nothing’s going on, and I’ve got to get some things going on. God, I want to wash my hands. We haven’t even backed away from the gate, and already the bathroom thing is coming into play. I’ll just suck it up and wait.

  Heaven

  I’m not a list-maker. I’m not overly organized. I’m not what some people would call “anal retentive.” And I’m definitely not the kind of person who makes air quotes when she says “anal retentive.” That said, I’ve made two lists in my life that give a little insight into who I am. Not much, but a little.

  One list is the “People I Hate” list. The other is the “People Who Are Not Invited to My Funeral” list. I used to update and revise the “People I Hate” list regularly, but truth be told, it hasn’t been updated in years. It’s been so long I don’t even know where it is or who was on it. Except for G. E. Smith. I know he was definitely on it. So I can safely say it hasn’t been updated since G. E. Smith was part of the Saturday Night Live band. I don’t know him personally, in case you were wondering. I just always hated the way he mugged at the camera like a skeleton in heat.

  The whole funeral thing isn’t as morbid as it sounds. I don’t have a disease or a death wish. In fact, I plan on living a very long life. It’s just that in the event some freak accident happens, I want to be prepared. And I want to make sure certain people don’t show up and pretend they were my friends and act all sad and so forth. I have to assume I’ll have a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, and watching people I dislike feigning sadness at their loss would just bug the hell out of me. I want to be able to enjoy my own funeral. I think I deserve at least that.

  Life doesn’t always work out the way you think it will—sometimes you walk into the restaurant thinking salad, and end up with nachos and a greasy Reuben. I went to Emerson College. I double-majored in economics and political science. After graduating with a BS degree, I got a job with one of the top PR firms in New York, which specializes in entertainment.

  What public relations and economics/poli-sci have to do with one another is absolutely nothing, but during my last semester I got rejected for an internship at the governor’s office, and ended up interning at the PR firm. They loved me there and offered me a job at graduation. A job I gladly took. Within three years I was dealing with all their major clients. Within four years I was making six figures and living in a kick-ass apartment with rooftop access.

  And as I prepped myself for a major book signing with one of our clients—Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe—I had every reason to believe I was one more “attagirl” away from being made a partner.

  So there I was. Twenty-five years old. Soon-to-be-married almost PR mogul.

  Brady

  As it turns out, Marc and I both flew out for the South by Southwest Music Conference. This is the one place where everybody who’s nobody in the business goes to realize just how small we really are next to the true luminaries and visionaries, who seem to be stacked like cordwood about the place. And this is an indie conference. It’s not like the Rolling Stones are there performing. Still, it’s the people who rule my world and I always come away feeling like a peasant, wishing I had more than my slop bucket to peddle.

  “Leaving a day early, huh?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “First time at South by Southwest?”

  “I’ve been every year since they started,” I admit.

  “Cool, man. See anything good?” This is the exact conversation that I do not want to be having with a total stranger. Especially a stranger that looks almost identical to me. Thirty-something, hair slightly thinning although neither of us has admitted it yet, and dressed like a teenager. Band T-shirt, ugly-yet-cool button-up shirt over it, Diesel jeans, and sneakers.

  “Couple good shows,” I say. “Mostly letdowns.”

  “I hear ya.” I desperately want to get out of this conversation by putting on my headset and becoming one with my trusty iPod. “MyPod,” as I call it. I don’t want to talk to Marc about bad-joke bands with one great song, who all suck live but get good press from assholes who don’t know shit about music but think they’re supposed to like it. No, that is not what I want to talk about. I don’t want to talk at all, in fact.

  So here we do the classic dance of not wanting to be murdered in your sleep by an irate seatmate but not wanting to be too friendly so you can’t zone out and ignore them for most of the trip. “Wasn’t Cat Power amazing?” he asks. Here it goes. “I saw Liz Phair at the Cat Power show. She was standing in front of me in the tightest jeans you’ve ever seen. All of a sudden she feels herself up. I swear to God, dude. It was unreal. Like I’d willed her hand to grab her own ass. It was truly a beautiful thing.”

  I just don’t feel much like dancing. I pull out my iPod, pop the headphones on my ears, take a quick glance back at the hot chick, and settle in for the ride. And then .
. . Marc pulls out his iPod.

  Right then I take a good look around the plane and start to freak out. Everyone else on the plane looks just like me. Except the hot chick. The closest thing to compare it to would be a complete and utter Malkovich moment. The entire plane is filled with twenty-eight- to thirty-something guys who undoubtedly fancy themselves the lead characters in a Nick Hornby novel.

  They all look the same, dress the same, talk the same. They all have their iPods on and Q Magazine in their hands. And worse—I know most of them or know who they are or know someone who knows them. They probably all think they have a chance with the hot chick, too.

  Suddenly I get this vision of the entire plane full of geeks re-enacting the scene from Say Anything, except instead of boom boxes they’re holding iPods over their heads à la John Cusack, blaring “In Your Eyes” in an earnest attempt to win her heart.

  This actually makes me laugh out loud until I look into my bag and cringe when I realize that I too have a copy of Q Magazine and the latest Nick Hornby book. Fuck me, I think. If I could shred and burn them with my mind, I would.

  I decide to do the crossword puzzle instead. That will surely make me feel superior. Who am I kidding? I’m just another overgrown indie-rock kid, fighting the good fight against the corporate behemoths of radio. At what point should college radio no longer matter? Is there a cutoff? How many years, post-college, do I get to cultivate the whole music snob thing? I don’t want to be thinking about this shit. This is all Marc’s fault. And worse, now I have to pee.

  Heaven

  I worked at Schiffman Morton PR. Affectionately known as S&M PR, it’s one of the top public relations firms in New York. Greg Schiffman and Lisa Morton started the firm two years before I came on board and have an amazing array of A-list clients. You could look at them in one of two ways: as scrappy, brilliant, driven entrepreneurs who cut their own path in a tough business, or as conniving, backstabbing frauds whose ticket to success was Lisa’s dad’s position as senior VP of corporate affairs at Chase. As far as I was concerned, the jury was still out.

  Greg put me in charge of the Tommyland book signing because he knew I had a borderline obsessive affinity for music. And because he had walked in on some interns the day they watched the Pam and Tommy sex tape in the office, and Greg didn’t want to be in the same room as a man he’d seen honk a boat horn with his penis. I, however, was excited about the prospect.

  I got to Astor Place and Lafayette and was struck by the proximity of two different Starbucks. I wondered if I stood at the exact midpoint between the two, would I be sucked into a coffee vortex and emerge a superhero . . . Caffeine Queen—able to wage at least six different arguments simultaneously, stay awake for weeks at a time, and strike down foes with the sheer force of my pee.

  I could tell the book was going to be a grand slam when I could barely squeeze past the groupies and fans lined up around the block. Girls in Mötley Crüe baby-doll T-shirts that barely covered their breasts, and guys with almost forgivable mullets. Almost.

  I walked into the Barnes & Noble and saw the table set up. But there was a pink tablecloth. Pink streamers. Stacks of books, sheathed in pink. Pink ribbons everywhere. What was up with the pink? Tommy Lee dated the singer Pink, but working that angle seemed like a stretch.

  As I stepped closer, I noticed that the pink ribbons were actually the single-fold Breast Cancer Awareness ribbons, and with each step I took toward the table I found it harder to swallow and got that panicked feeling in my gut—the same feeling I got when I was caught stealing bubble-gum-flavor Bonne Bell lip balm from Rite Aid when I was eleven years old.

  The big pink 45-by-30-inch sign read: Farewell My Breasts. Unless Tommy was giving up on women with fake double-Ds, there had been a huge mistake.

  After running around frantically for what seemed like an hour (but was really only three minutes), I found the woman I dealt with on the phone, Jeannie Sayer. She stood in black high-waisted trousers, which left only about two inches for her blouse. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, and her whole face came to a point, like a bird beak.

  “Hi, Jeannie, I’m Heaven,” I said in a saccharine-sweet voice to hide my panic. “We spoke about the Tommyland signing?”

  “Right,” she chirped. “We’re looking forward to it! He seems like a real pip!” she said with a knowing glance. “Did you want to take a look around before the big day next month?”

  The words “next month” were like an air horn going off in my ear. They echoed about seven times before I was able to recover. “No,” I said, sucking the breath in through my gritted teeth. “The big day is today. In one hour, in fact.”

  Jeannie pulled out her Palm Pilot and then squiggled up her face when she realized they’d made a mistake.

  “Fuck,” I said. Jeannie winced more at my cussing than at the mistake, it seemed.

  “Someone must have made a mistake. I guess . . . oh gosh . . . I must have made a mistake. Farewell My Breasts is next month,” she said, meekly adding, “One woman’s struggle with breast cancer.”

  I took a few deep breaths as I looked at the display. “I understand scheduling snafus. I do,” I said. “And there may come a time in Tommy Lee’s life when he struggles with breast cancer and writes a memoir about his brave journey. And when that book comes out, I’ll be happy to set up a book signing here. But the book Mr. Lee has just written is about sex and drugs and the underbelly of rock and roll. And the hearty yet satisfying soup that you get when you blend the three together. There are two hundred people lined up outside to get that book signed. So if you could get the copies we ordered on or around this table in oh . . . say . . . the next twenty minutes . . .” But her darting eyes told me there was a huge problem.

  “There’s a small problem,” she said. “When we order large quantities for book signings we have them delivered in time for the event. It’s a matter of storage.” She looked out the window at the gathering leather horde. “I wondered why the breast cancer crowd looked so . . . scruffy.”

  I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t—because at that moment I needed heavy metal paraphernalia and two hundred Tommyland books.

  “Here it is . . .” she said. “This is what confused me. Greg Schiffman sent me an e-mail that mentioned the reading, dating it next month. See?” She showed me a printout of Greg’s e-mail, and my eyes grew wide as I saw it in black and white. The wrong month. So Greg screwed up and she screwed up. But none of that mattered right then.

  “Where’s the PA? Do you have a PA system?” I asked. She pointed to the front of the store. And the next thing I knew, I was standing on top of the front counter with the mic in my hand. “Attention, all personnel: Report immediately to the Farewell My Breasts display.”

  I marched over to the display in full drill-sergeant mode and saw the various employees gathered before me. About fifteen of them. All looking bored and annoyed.

  “Hi, everybody. I’m Heaven Albright,” I said in as sweet a tone as I could muster.

  “Hi, Heaven,” one or two of them said distractedly, like an unenthusiastic reply at an AA meeting.

  “There has been a really big misunderstanding and I need you guys to take these books and put them somewhere safe.” Now I seemed to have earned at least a glare from the majority of the group. “These are for next month. Today you’ve got Tommy Lee coming. I need all of these pink ribbons gone and . . . is there anything else we can put up?”

  “We have some black garland left over from Halloween,” offered a malnourished goth girl with a safety pin poking lewdly out of her eyebrow.

  “Perfect. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. When I get back I want this place to look like a headbangers’ ball.”

  I bolted out the door and called Greg from the cab. I told him to send the fifty copies we had at the office over with an intern. I stopped at Borders and bought up all seventeen copies they had, then went to Tower Records and bought up all of their copies. I had Karen, my assistant, doing the same. By the time Tommy Lee
sat his leather-clad self down . . . there were two hundred copies of Tommyland beside him, Mötley Crüe posters behind him, and an extra hot Starbucks latte in my hand, which his assistant requested ahead of time.

  “This is for you,” I said, handing him the Starbucks cup. His tattooed hand took the cup from my inkless hand, and he smiled at me. I watched as he took his first sip.

  “Extra hot,” he said with a nod of approval. And even though I knew he was talking about the coffee, I couldn’t help but hope that he was referring to me.

  I got back to the office, and as soon as I walked in, Lisa and Greg stopped talking. If I were the paranoid type, I’d have thought the hasty hush meant they were talking about me . . . but I’m not. So, as soon as Lisa walked out of Greg’s office, I took it as my cue to go in and collect my praise. Greg saw me walking toward him and got this weird expression on his face. He barely looked at me. He awkwardly turned in to his desk, banged his knee, and tried to cover it up. Finally he looked at me.

  “Anything you’d like to tell me about today?” he asked.

  “Ugh!” I said. “It was a total cluster-fuck. They had the months confused and set it up for another book. But it turned out great, and they sold every copy.”

  “I didn’t hear it was great. Tommy’s assistant was there a half hour before and said the whole place was in a panic.”

  “It was nuts. They had only seven copies in the store and zero decorations, but I got the books in time—”

  “I sent you the fifty copies,” he barked.

  “Fifty wasn’t enough. I had to run out and buy another hundred and fifty.”

  “One hundred fifty hardcover books at full retail? And how’d you pay for them?”

  “I charged them.” What the hell? I had just saved the day! Why was he giving me attitude?

  “On your corporate card?”