About Face by About Face (retail) (epub)

Author:About Face (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

V.

Face’s assistant had a text message tapping its foot at me when I sputtered from sleep at ten the morning after the Addison debacle. This text told me that Face’s buses would retrieve us all from the hotel at noon in order to vector everybody the two hours north to Portland. Face’s buses were what you’d get if you crossbred a limousine with a submarine. There were two of the things, their brontosaurian bulk taking up the block nearly in toto between Newbury and Commonwealth. And the sidewalk in front of the hotel? It was off limits for the hour the buses grazed there.

“Mario,” I said, when everyone was at last getting seated, “what might be your thoughts about these windows?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean the thoughts. You might be having. In your head. About these windows.”

“What’s wrong with the windows?”

“Why are the windows so windowless? You can’t see out of them.”

Incapable of saying what he should, he succeeded in saying what he could, which was nothing much but better than nothing at all: “What’s to see?”

The second bus was for the lower-grade team members, the movers and haulers, the assistants to the assistants, the interns and their interns. To that bus was tethered an enclosed trailer which hauled, Vip the manager told me, the many electronic furnishings required to make the show go.

On Face’s bus were: Face and Nimble, Mario the bodyguard, Vivienne the lawyer, Vip the manager, Veronica the agent, Valerie the assistant, Violet the publicist, Shitsy the squirrel, and at the wheel perched the Israeli martial artist who’d piloted us to Addison the day before.

“Paisan,” Face said to me when he and Nimble finally climbed aboard. “You ready for Portland?”

“I’m ready, paisan. And I’ve got a fresh supply of questions for our interview on the way up. Let’s do this!”

“I don’t do interviews before a show, Seger. Maybe after,” he said, and he touched my shoulder in a way that seemed to say You sad thing you. Then he moved on to the suite at the back where he looked prepared to remain for the duration.

I had my own preparing underway: preparing to seethe about this. What was I supposed to do on this bus for two hours if I couldn’t be with Face? This is part of what makes the celebrity profile such a trial for the writer: I was never more disappointed in Val Face than when he was behaving exactly as you’d expect a celebrity to behave. And it was a minor woe for me not to be able to say anything about it. Such self-muzzling is bad for a writer’s morale. Never mind what you hear about some wicked prince’s silencing of this or that writer; the most pernicious, most persistent censure is the writer’s own, that constable in his head swinging a stick down his mental boulevards and whispering through tight teeth Don’t say that.

I couldn’t fully get into my seething, couldn’t really put all my weight behind it, because when Nimble

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