Story of My Life Read Free Page B

latest squeeze, staying at the Stanhope. If I was the management at that establishment I’d hide all the valuables, tie everything else down and stretch a tarp over it. Last time she was in New York they actually threw her out of the Sherry Netherland, and Rod Stewart and his band used to practically live at that dump. Like, I’m sure those guys behaved themselves, right?—TVs out the windows, groupies out the wazoo. . . . So you can imagine what my sister can do to a room. Becca uses things up quickly—cars, credit cards, men, drugs, horses, you name it. The men and the credit cards are sort of mixed up together—after she’s totally burned out some guy she usually asks if she can have a credit card, which he’ll wait for five days and then report stolen. I don’t know, she must give greathead is all I can say because these guys always say yes, even when she’s done something really horrible like sleep with their best friend. The best way I can think of to describe Rebecca is to say she’s like the Tasmanian Devil, that character in the Bugs Bunny cartoons that moves around inside a tornado and demolishes everything in his path. Or else she’s like an entire heavy-metal band on tour—all wrapped up in this cute little hundred-and-ten-pound package.
    What really worries me is the combination of Becca and Didi. When those two get together it’s like—what were the two things you were never supposed to mix in chemistry class or you’d like blow up the whole school? You know what I mean. Not oil and water—something else. So much for my education. Blanks that never got filled in. None of the above. Story of my life. Anyway, I know several drug dealers who are going to open bottles of Cristal and buy new Ferraris when they hear that Becca’s back in town—I’m talking about guys who bought their
first
Ferraris out of profits from Didi’s trust fund—but for the rest of us it’s basically like hearing that a hurricane’s cruising across the Gulf toward your brand new uninsured beach house. Just when I was getting my acting together.
    But the main thing is I’ve met a guy and I’m totally in lust, so who cares about Rebecca? What’s really amazing is that his mind is what I was attracted to first, and I wasn’t even thinking about the other thing.
    I’m at Nell’s, as usual, hanging out. Me, Didi, Jeannie, Rebecca and my friend Francesca, who I haven’t mentionedyet—she’s practically my best friend, we used to show horses together, no one else could stand her because she was Super-JAP, her Dad’s a big movie producer and her mother is some sort of Rockefeller, so she had a stableful of the best hunters and jumpers in the country, she was always throwing tantrums and screaming at the judges and the other girls but we got along great from the word go, and now she supposedly works for William Morris although I’ve never been able to reach her there. She has one of those incredible jobs that you just hate the people who luck into them, the kind of job I’d have to have if I was ever going to become a member of the work force. So she works for William Morris, but when I say
works
I’m being a major philanthropist. I mean, she gets this job as an assistant to a high-powered agent and the next week her boss gets diagnosed with AIDS and of course everyone is totally sympathetic and enlightened—I mean, come on—so of course the agency keeps him on even though he’s in the hospital half of the time and three-quarters of his clients bail out for ICM and CAA and Triad, so all Francesca has to do is show up once in a while and answer letters of condolence. But meantime she’s got this sort of credibility and access from being with William Morris, not to mention being her father’s daughter.
    So Francesca, she knows everyone, right? Partly because of her family and also because that’s her great passion in life, meeting rich and famous people. A lot of people think she’s a snob or a starfucker