Starfucker
by Helen
You show up at seven o'clock, and he's half-dressed, and mumbling something about a silk Versace t-shirt. He kisses you on the cheek and says "Oh, you're wearing. um. okay," and then he wanders off, and you sit down and start eating your burrito. You've only had two bites when he shows up again, looking hopeful, and asks if he can have some.
"You said you weren't hungry," you say, because it's your burrito, and when you phoned him a half an hour ago to ask if he wanted you to get him something, he said he didn't want anything, and he always always does this.
"I wasn't hungry then," he says.
"God, JC—"
"well, sorry," he says, "I just wanted a bite." and then he looks so hurt that you have to let him have some.
It takes him another half an hour to decide on an outfit, and something like fifteen minutes of peering anxiously at his hair while you tell him it's fine, and you like it, and that you think it looks like a lion, but not in a bad way, and that Chris is one to talk about shitty looking hair. You're the last ones to get to the hotel where you're all meeting. Joey is tickling Dani, who's laughing and begging him to stop, and Britney and Chris are play kickboxing, and you stand there for a moment, JC's hand in yours, before they see you.
"oh," Joey says, letting go of Dani. "Bobbie. hi."
Britney gets to walk with them, but the rest of you have to stay back at least six feet any time that there might be photographers. Dani doesn't like you, and doesn't talk to you. Sometimes you talk to Joey's dates, but they're nearly always aggressively stupid girls with large breasts, who squint at you until they decide they're prettier, and then ignore you. Lance's dates are sometimes slightly better. You're still friends with one or two of them. This time, it's Meredith, who's decided she'd rather have Chris and Joey like her, so she snubs you. She looks at Britney, tilting her head back and smiling at Justin, and you can tell she's thinking that in six months, maybe, she'll get to walk with them instead of behind them.
When you sit down, you can see Chris making a face at Justin about having to sit next to you.
"Having a good time?" JC says.
"Fabulous," you say, but you mean that he owes you big, and he nods and runs an apologetic finger down your arm.
"They're my best friends," he says, later, hooking his chin over your shoulder.
"They're assholes," you say, but you're not mad anymore.
"That too," he says, his fingers sliding down your sides and fiddling with the hem of your shirt, as though he's asking permission, and he always asks for permission, which is one of the things you like best about him.
Lance pretends you don't exist, and Chris really doesn't like you because you pinched him viciously on the shoulder once when he was making fun of JC, and he winced and muttered "what the fuck is your problem," but couldn't quite bring himself to pinch you back, or hit you, although you could tell he wanted to. "What the fuck is your problem," you said, before he edged away.
"She did porn," you hear Joey say once, hissed, in the next room. No one else says anything, that you can hear before you yank open the door.
"You have something you wanna say to me?" you say, gripping the doorknob tightly in your hand while Joey swings around, a guilty hunch to his shoulders, shielding the computer screen. Lance presses his lips together, and looks away. Justin blushes. You stand there a moment longer, and Joey looks at you with undisguised loathing and shame, and you can see the computer screen behind him and it isn't even you, just your head on some other naked body. You close the door hard behind you.
You did porn. It was soft core, and you needed the money, and it was a hell of a lot better than going down on creeps and psychos in their cars, which you could have done, too, but didn't. You did that in high school already, without getting paid for it, and then you got halfway through community college before dropping out to live with your boyfriend. He said college was stupid anyhow, and you should go to cosmetology school like his cousin, who had a bad dye job and and was as friendly and stupid as a cow.
You tried to get jobs, but the best you could get was the late shift at Arby's The manager was eighteen, and getting ready to go to Smith, and she thought you were tacky, and you heard her talking with her friends about how you looked like a slut when you were cleaning the grease trap in the fryer. The job made your back hurt, and the thick humid greasy air in the back made you break out. You were allowed to take home the left over sandwiches after closing, but even the smell made you lose your appetite. Someone told the retarded kid who worked the register that you liked him, and he kept asking you out, even though you tried to explain to him that you had a boyfriend. He forgot, in between times, and so you had to watch his face crumple over and over again when he realized that you wouldn't go out with him.
By now, you'd realized that your boyfriend was cheating on you, and had been, possibly, all along. You didn't have the money to move out, and you had lost weight because you didn't even have the money for food and you were sponging off your boyfriend, who bought hot dogs and potato chips and bacon and fish sticks. You promised yourself that as soon as you got a job you were going to be vegetarian.
"I'm not fucking anybody," you said, the first thing when you figured out it was porn they wanted you for, and not "modeling". You weren't particularly surprised or disappointed. Modeling agencies didn't usually advertise in the back of free weekly papers, but you'd finally had a screaming fight with your boyfriend and you'd called him a cheating motherfucker and a liar, and he'd called you a clingy bitch and a user, and said that he wanted you out of his apartment, and you said you couldn't stand to look at his ugly face for one more day and packed your stuff, and after only eight days in a motel where the walls were so thin that you could hear the domestic squabble on one side of you and the screams of children on the other, you found an apartment you could afford, if you could only make the deposit.
"No fucking," the guy said. "Just soft core stuff. Nice stuff. You wear some lacy panties and roll around with the guy. maybe two guys."
"Topless," you said flatly. It wasn't really a question.
"Topless pays more," he shrugged. "You're a beautiful girl."
"Thank you," you said, and that was the next five days, wearing tiny underwear and letting guys touch you, and having the guy tell you to stick out your tongue. "sexy," he kept saying. "That's very sexy."
You spread your legs and touched your breasts and stuck out your ass, and put your fingers just under the elastic of your underwear and tried to look naughty, and wore high heels and rubbed your ass against guys' erect dicks in their underwear while they pinched your breasts roughly and breathed on your neck.
The assistant director's name was Mark and while you were waiting for them to set up for new shots, or while they didn't need you, you'd go outside with him and chain smoke. Once he even bought you lunch. You almost didn't take it, even though it was delicate rolls of sushi, in a little plastic box, with chinese noodles on the side, and it was expensive, and you wanted it.
"I don't want to fuck you," Mark finally said, and then he said it twice more, and you mostly believed him, and the food was delicious. Mark called you "Roberta" and thought it was funny. Mark had a computer, and he helped you fake half of your resume, and said that you could put him down as a reference, and that he'd say that his firm had a lot of contact with the 'entertainment industry', and that it wasn't lying. Then he touched your ass and asked if you wanted to fuck, and when you said no, he shrugged, and said you couldn't blame a guy for trying. He said you had a beautiful body. You thanked him for helping you with your resume.
You regretted it when you got back home, because what were the chances he'd give you a decent reference now, and it wouldn't have killed you to give him a handjob. You were kind of glad you didn't when you got the job anyway, and all you had to do was smile and lie your head off about being editor of your college literary magazine. You didn't expect to like the other people who worked there, and you didn't expect them to like you, because people didn't very often like you, because you were pretty, and you didn't take anyone's shit, but you almost liked them. You shared a small office with Anna, who was determined to someday work for Vogue, and considered J-14 a stepping-stone, and said "oh, you're so thin," but didn't mean "you're thinner than me." Anna was sweet and small and rotund, and she had dangerously listing stacks of magazines and photographs and half-proofed articles on her desk where yours was neat and perfectly organized. She smoked a pack of Marlboros a day, and when she quit she made you quit with her, both of you eating tic-tacs and cursing at each other.
Anna was late a few times a week and you had to cover for her, but she read all your copy, and typed about a hundred times faster than you could, especially at the beginning, and when you had a deadline she'd drop everything and let you dictate the article to her. She'd take off her shoes in the afternoon and you'd sit around and eat corn chips and make up quizzes. She got a job at YM six months after you started, and you helped her pack her stuff, and she gave you her futon. When the first photograph of you and JC was printed in a tabloid, you got an e-mail that said "holy shit, Bobs." You missed her.
At first you thought JC would just be a temporary thing. You kind of thought maybe he was gay, and you wondered if he would pay you to pretend to be his girlfriend, which seemed like it would be a good deal. He was quiet, and he didn't try to fuck you on the first date, or even the third, even though you would have slept with him because he was famous, and because he was cute. On the fourth date, after dinner, in the car, you asked if he wanted to come up. JC was whippet-thin without his clothes, soft skin, sharp cage of ribs, and he touched your breasts carefully, and took so long fiddling about once you got your clothes off that you finally realized he was waiting for you to tell him he was allowed.
He called you the next day, because as you got to know him better you found that JC was nothing if not dutiful, and always did what he thought he was supposed to do. You liked him, which hadn't mattered at first, but it started to when people began to recognize you. Or not people, exactly, but fourteen year old girls, and the little fat ones looked at you with envy and admiration, but it was the pretty ones, smooth blond hair and smooth pale skin, slender little hips, who looked at you with loathing. You looked like a bitch, they thought, and you remembered the year you were fourteen, the year you lost your virginity in the backseat of Ben McLaren's car after he gave you a cigarette and a wine cooler and told you to loosen up, and thought that those girls were probably right. That night you held JC's wrists above his head while you fucked him, bit the soft spot underneath his jaw, wouldn't let him touch you, kissed him hard enough to leave bruises on his shoulders, his neck, his mouth, and he whimpered and struggled underneath you because you'd finally figured out what he liked.
You never saw each other more than once or twice a week, that first summer, but you'd go over to his house and fuck his brains out, and then you'd sit around in your underwear and drink beers, and it would be sweltering, even late in the evening. You'd press the cool bottle against your face, and let the beer get warm. JC was content after sex, curled up against you, and he always had weird food in his refrigerator. When you said you were a vegetarian, he asked if you ate tapioca pudding. There were eggs in it, or something, he thought, and then he held out a pale yellow tub, and you ended up eating it and then having sex again, JC's cool eager mouth under yours.
He's sweet, and he's kind, and he's nice, and he remembers that you're allergic to walnuts, and he's a fucking millionaire pop star, and you're dating him. It's fucking weird. Your friends from high school think you hang out with Justin all the time, and you don't tell them that mostly you go over to JC's house and the two of you sit around and watch late night television and fool around.
JC can make out steadily through Conan O'Brien and a Golden Girls rerun, concentrating, hands in your hair, and on your waist, and when you slide one eye carefully open, JC's eyes are always closed. He likes to be undressed, and, oddly, to get handjobs.
"I never really got any action when handjobs were the big thing," he admits, sprawled out stickily underneath you on his couch one night.
"I've seen the pictures," you say dryly, but lick his ear to let him know you don't really mean it.
You have the occasional athletic foray, like the time you have sex up against his kitchen wall, your toes scrabbling on the cool tile of the floor until you wrap one leg around his waist and hike yourself higher, the skin of your back squeaking faintly against the painted wall. His face goes red with effort while you pull his hair, and kiss him messily and kind of wish you were doing it in bed, with JC twined around you, because you can't quite move satisfactorily, and kissing him at that angle is killing your neck.
Mostly, though, it's bed, and JC panting quietly beneath you, restless hands skittering over your thighs and across your waist, because both of you like it that way.
They're not even really that famous when you start dating him. The other people at the magazine think it's sort of funny, and can't remember which one it is. They're big on the covers of poor quality newsprint teen magazines, and no one over the age of 14 has any idea who they are, and then one day you turn around and they're fucking huge, and JC is rich as hell, and you haven't fucked another guy in a long long time, and maybe you panic a little, because you tell him he can fuck around on you, because you're pretty sure he already is. You would be, in his situation. You can't bring yourself to say "see other people." He looks sad, but not quite surprised.
"Are you?" he says.
"No," you say, and then wish you'd lied.
Sometimes, your stomach hurts, and you wonder if you're in love. The last time you paid attention to that, it turned out to be stomach flu, though, so you've learned to tune it out.
JC borrows your clothes, your jeans, your shirts, and he looks good in them, slim, and shiny, but he always stretches them out. You tell him that when he wants to borrow your new t-shirt, and he says he won't, and he just wants to borrow it for one night, and you try to tell him that it's not a voluntary thing, and that his shoulders are just bigger than yours, but then give up, and let him take it. He looks better than you do in it anyway.
He can hem pants, and he knows the words to every song ever, and he does your taxes in two hours, without a calculator; but the time you get a flat on the turnpike he's no help at all, and can't get the jack in the right place, and you have to do it yourself so he doesn't bend the axle. You destroy the spike heels you're wearing in the process. JC buys you a new pair, nicer than you would have bought yourself, and when you say you don't have anything that goes with them, says
"What about that green dress you have? With the belt." You haven't worn the dress in six months, but when you pull it out of the back of the closet, it matches the nubby alligator skin of the shoes perfectly.
You hate to ask him for money, so you never do. You've never quite needed to, but sometimes you're scraping by, because J-14 doesn't pay well, and you can't threaten to quit because there are hundreds of people who can write idiotic copy about morons, and will do it on the off chance that they'll get to fuck stars. That's why you did it.
JC seems to have only a vague idea about how you live. The two of you don't spend much time in your apartment, but whenever he comes over, and sees the mismatched futons that are the only furniture in the living room, the filthy stack of your roommate's dishes in the sink, the view of the parking lot out the window of your bedroom, the dark green shag carpet, the worn linoleum in the kitchen, he squints a bit, puts his hands in his pockets. Sometimes he asks if you need money, and then you let yourself say "yeah," off-handed, because you always need money, and JC writes you a check for some random amount, seventy-five dollars, or a thousand dollars, he gave you once, and you held onto the check for four days, feeling weird about it, until you had rent, and a phone bill, and a car payment, and really really wanted a cute skirt. You have a savings account now, and a quarter of your paycheck goes ruthlessly into it.
"So I did porn," you say, as though you're just mentioning it casually.
"um." JC says. He's idly trying on the shoes you kicked off when you sat down, steep strappy platforms, holding out his ankle to see the effect. They're too small, but his feet are narrow, so the shoes fit except that his heels stick off the end. "okay," he says, right as you wonder if you're going to have to say it again.
"porn," you say, because you can't think of anything else to say.
"Are you okay," he asks, curling his toes to keep your shoe from falling off his foot.
"I guess," you say.
He doesn't initiate sex for two weeks, at which point you have to tell him you're okay.
"I know what you're doing," you say.
"I'm putting the dishes in the dishwasher," he says.
"You're so full of shit," you say, and he puts another bowl carefully into the rack and says
"Well, pardon me for not wanting to traumatize you," but he doesn't argue when you put your hands under his t-shirt, flip the button of his jeans open.
He calls you from the bus when he's bored, wants to know what you're doing, seems entertained by the mundane things you do with your day. Grocery store, complaining to your landlady about the neighbor's goddamn barking dog, your job. "I'm writing a column about what's going to be hot for spring," you tell him, and he seems content to hear about it, and tells you that all the girls he sees are wearing shiny lip gloss. Sometime in the middle of the paragraph about getting a killer tan without the sun damage, you hear his breathing even out, and slow. You listen for a minute longer, say his name quietly, but there's no answer. You hang up the telephone, and finish the article, and then you go to sleep, too.
Sometimes, he wants to have phone sex, although he's embarrassed to tell you.
"Can you, um—" he says.
"What?"
"I just thought. um. nevermind," he says.
"You want to have phone sex," you half-shouted the first time, startled, and sort of amused.
"What's wrong with that?" he muttered.
"Nothing, nothing," you said, and a half an hour later you were folding laundry and giving JC detailed instructions about how to touch himself, his breath quick and shaky through the receiver. It makes you miss him, the way he pants in your ear when you fuck, the way he yelps if you nip at his shoulder. He strokes your shoulders after, and asks if you came, because he can never tell, and reassured that you did, falls asleep almost instantaneously, a warm heavy arm wrapped around your waist. You don't tell him you miss him.
You think about whether you'd be with him if he weren't famous and rich, and think that you probably wouldn't, since JC doesn't borrow money from you or tell you you're a fucking bitch or tell you that if you don't feel like it you could at least blow him.
In heels, you're the same height as JC, and in some of your heels, you're even taller. JC sings the Amazon song when you wear them.
"what the hell is that—" you say, the first time he sings it.
"I made it up," he says, and grins.
"you. okay," you say, although you do tell him he's a loser when you discover that there is a second verse.
You don't fight very often, which is mostly because he backs down when you get angry, which is so novel that at first, you let yourself get angry at little things that don't actually bother you, just to see the hunted nervous look on his face. You expect him to break up with you after that, but he doesn't. You expect him to break up with you all the time, because you see the kind of girls that he could get, and maybe they aren't prettier than you, but they're a little younger, and they'd be sweetly perfect and nice to him, all the time. You aren't.
"Are you breaking up with me?" he says, the one terrible fight you have about nothing, about how he's too clingy and you're a bitch, about his dumbfuck friends, about some girls who hissed 'slut' at you in Walgreen's last week, about the way that JC could not possibly like you that much, about how he said you wrote about 'women's issues' and it's such a fucking retarded lie you can't even believe you're with him.
"Are you breaking up with me?" he says again, stunned hurt blue eyes, and you want to say yes, and go back to fucking jerk-offs who treat you like shit, not JC, who does dumbass Hallmark stuff like send you flowers 'just because', JC who's wearing a purple faintly shiny top that almost makes you want to beat him up for looking like a fag, who's so fucking pretty you can hardly believe it sometimes.
"I don't know what you're doing with me," you say, and press the heels of your hands to your temples.
"You shouldn't say things like that," he says.
"I'll say whatever the fuck I want to say," you scream, and he winces like it hurts his ears.
"Well, I love you," he says, after a minute.
"Only because you're too fucking spineless to go out and find someone better," you say, and something like recognition flickers in his eyes, and you wonder how many times he's heard that before, from Chris, or Lance, or his mother, whom you've met twice, who bares her teeth at you when she smiles.
"I don't think you even like me," he says, thin flush creeping up his jaw.
"Then why are you still here?" You wish he'd leave, but he only stuffs his hands in his pockets.
"I like it here," he shrugs.
"Then you're stupid."
Both of you sort of give up after that, though. Your voice hurts, and he's been in heavy rehearsals and you can tell he's sore from the way he moves.
"I'm kind of hungry," he finally says. You order a pizza. You remember that you were supposed to have a quiz about summer beauty savvy finished by nine o'clock Tuesday morning, which is now six hours away. By the time the pizza comes, you're both sprawled on the couch, and JC has come up with half the questions.
"Okay," you say, when you've eaten two large wedges of it, and some of JC's crusts, which he refuses to eat. Your stomach is full, and you're starting to feel drowsy, but you only have two more questions to go.
"Okay, what?" he says, picking a sausage off the pizza and eating it.
"okay, I like you."
"good to know," he says, and his eyes crinkle around the edges. He puts the pizza box on the floor and leans back against the arm of the couch, intertwining his legs with yours. He looks really really happy. You wonder if you look the same way.