I've never slept with a celebrity. Not that it matters. The people we tend to celebrate as stars are almost always entertainers. I definitely appreciate the art of performance, and the terrific difficulty. But I don't really understand the continuing necessity of elevating these people to some quasi-celestial status. They're actors, singers, or dancers. They contribute to society in the form of entertainment, by uniting us at our lowest common denominator. They don't create, they make believe. As Ian McKellan put it on Extras, "How did I know what to say? The words were written down for me in a script. How did I know where to stand? People told me."

 

So then, one night last year, when I still lived in Hollywood, I was out for a drink with a friend of mine at the best bar in the world on a Sunday night. The bar was mostly empty. P and I drank Pabst tall boys and listened to the Misfits on the jukebox, arguing about some arcane cinema minutiae. After an hour, two women came in and set themselves at the far end of the bar. There was a pretty blonde who, despite all her physical symmetry, still looked like morning breath to me. The second woman was a skinny brunette in a loose silk shirt with had a hint of rodentia about her face.

Both women were pretty, but I generally don't care about pretty. I try not to think too hard about the people I hit on. Either there's something beyond my power of understanding that compels me to go deliver some stupid line, or there isn't. I appreciate prettiness but, like acting, I don't really see the long-lasting value in it. If there's no ripple in the air underneath the well arranged face then who cares.

So I went back to deconstructing Maborosi or whatever stupendously important film I was in the midst of prancing over, when the rodent lady walked over to us. "Excuse me, I've been dying to have a kind gentleman buy me a glass of champagne all night," she said. Great, the pretty woman in the empty bar is going to spend the rest of the night harvesting drinks from us. Pretty or not, I generally am disinclined to paying for conversation with strangers, even as a demonstration of good faith. If someone wants to talk with you, extracting $10 from your wallet should never serve as precursor.

P, however, is not half the chilly bastard that I can be with strange women and he immediately set about waving the bartender over so that champagnes could be discussed. After some verbal pitter-patter it came out that this woman was an actor and had been in Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj. It's rare enough that a woman hits on me in public (for a free drink or otherwise), but entirely unheard of when the woman hitting on me is a celebrity.

It's debatable whether or not the lead from Van Wilder 2 qualifies as a celebrity or not. Photos of her walking out of a Starbucks with a terrier in her purse aren't burning up TMZ, but in terms of contribution to the world, she's got to be in the same league as any of the more popular starlets clotting up our magazines. To me she's a celebrity.

P played right into her, flirting and asking her leading questions. I listened to them talk and tossed out dismissive one-liners here and there. "You know, your friends kind of an asshole," Lauren tossed off after I made a joke about actors (if Hitchcock can call them cattle, I don't seen why they can't be fodder for jokes in good company). And telling someone you were the lead actor in Van Wilder 2 is a pretty good continuation of a hustle. How many people have actually seen Van Wilder 2?

Anyway, I realized that P was giving Lauren the hard sell and I was probably hurting his chances so I decided to shut up. She had approached me initially, and directed most of her early conversation towards me, but P was going to make a go at it. So I started talking to the bartender and let P and Lauren work things out. That took about three minutes and then Lauren took her free champagne and went back to her friend. Free drink hustle confirmed.

Still skeptical about the whole thing, I looked up Van Wilder 2 as soon as I got home. There was Lauren's face, staring right back at me from the monitor. She really was an actor. A few images down the Google search I saw some naked stills someone had harvested from the movie. Reader, I have no excuse for what happened next, but I confess I masturbated to pictures of Lauren Cohan naked after having derided her in real life an hour earlier. It's strange that I wouldn't spring for a drink for her, but I would still fantasize about stripping down with her. This is part of why I don't trust beauty or celebrity.

There seems to be a Pavlovian connection between the idea of it and the need to compulsively gratify one's sexuality (at least my home-alone-on-a-Sunday-night-sexuality) in the basest way. Celebrities are wonderful cupie dolls to preoccupy our spare mental energy with, but for all the energy we reflexively spend thinking about their love lives, political causes, and career choices, they're just actors in a bar trying to hustle a free drink on a slow night.

 

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive 

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders 

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down 

Date Night: Two Women in One Night 

Date Machine: Kissing on the First Date 

Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size 

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles 

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle