You’ll get a kick out of this, Dad. I got a job in Hollywood. Doing hair and makeup for a find-your-soulmate reality television show. All our contestants are bisexual: you wouldn’t believe the plot twists.
I’m thinking you might have been the kind of American, if you hadn’t died, with the potential to come around on the issue of homosexuality. Certain clues lead me to this conclusion, including the nineteen seventies, the marijuana, the Earth Shoes, Hotel California.
Mom, by the way, has announced she’s moving to Paris. She’s no longer the person you knew. In my opinion a sixty-two year-old widow with a decimated retirement fund and one kidney has no business relocating to a foreign country. Her therapist has introduced her to the concept of enmeshment. She’s become empowered.
“I wasted time with your father,” she says to me on the phone. “Now I’m reclaiming my own self.” In the background I hear her radio. Adult contemporary top-forty. “I have a three-hour layover at LAX. Let’s have a latte.”
“I thought you had that lactose thing.” I say.
Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: one summer vacation, at a rest stop without flush toilets outside of Abilene, Kansas, Mom took your Dark Side of the Moon cassette out of the car stereo, cracked it to pieces with her bare hands and let me drop it down the hole. I was eleven years old.
My job is to make normal people look abnormally attractive. I stand ready with eye shadows, hairbrushes, curling irons, makeup sponges, gels, mousses, tweezers, powders, mascara, hairspray, hot wax, nail polish, cotton balls, perfume, barrettes and lipsticks. I sleep in the miniature bedroom located at the rear of the hair and makeup trailer. With all the hot-tubbing that goes on around here, I’m pulled out of bed with great regularity to handle late-night grooming emergencies.
The show is on Bravo, which is supposed to be an arts-and-culture network but lately has been heavy into gay life and hidden cameras. The plot works on a system of elimination: contestants cast Desirability Votes for each other. Those with the most votes earn the privilege of remaining in the house, with the ultimate goal of creating one Winning Couple. Contestant Jennifer (red-headed, nose-jobbed, unafraid of a thong bikini) is currently at the top of the game. All the contestants are after her. In my chair she sips coffee from her Disneyland Gay Day mug. She drinks it strong and black and is reliant upon an elaborate teeth-whitening system. When I’m doing her hair, my primary objective becomes resisting the urge to rest my forehead at the base of her neck.
A detail you should know: I am Jennifer’s anonymous informant. Under cover of computerized secrecy I’ve been yahooing insider information to her. Secrets gleaned from the beauty chair. I am the one who told her about the pantry incident involving Jason and Timothy, revealed to the entire crew thanks to one of the sixty-three cameras hidden in the house. The furtiveness of my prohibited communiqués to Jen makes me queasy with desire. Especially when she replies. Who are you? How do you know these things?
About the pantry reference. Gay sex wise, that’s about as explicit as I’m going to get here, so you can relax. Ponder this: do you suppose your hero George Orwell could have imagined an America in which forty thousand people would stand in line outside a Hollywood studio to compete for the privilege of being spied upon? Or this: when the show’s in the can and the editing process begins, how many more hours of airplay do you guess the girl-on-girl hot tub action will get, versus boy-on-boy?
