The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
Angelenos spend a lot of time in their cars, but Jose, a thirty-nine-year-old former helicopter-parts salesman from Brazil, has more to complain about than most. He has spent almost all of the past three days in the rented white Jeep Cherokee in which he is now parked a hundred yards from the entrance to Los Angeles' celebrity-infested sushi restaurant, Matsuhisa. He has not changed his clothes in three days, nor has he slept more than four of the past twenty-four hours, having spent the previous night parked on a block of expensive homes in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, relieving himself into a bottle and enduring periodic harassment from suspicious neighbors and the police. Fortunately, Jose is well-paid, if not always well-liked by those he hunts. He is a paparazzo.
He's slunk low in the driver's seat, concealed like a zoologist in a nature blind, just out of sight of the valets waiting on the cold sidewalk outside. He chatters away in Portugese on his cell phone. All I recognize are the two names he mentions almost continually: "Penélope" and "Jake."
As soon as he gets off the phone, Jose looks at me cautiously. He's a blonde beach-bum-looking type, wearing a sweatshirt and shorts, despite the November chill. We've only met a few minutes earlier, and he studies me as if I might be a spy from a rival agency, here to spoil his scoop.
"You know who is in the restaurant?" he asks.
promotion
I nod, having already deduced that Jose's quarry, actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Penélope Cruz, are his targets. A few days ago, someone tipped off Jose's agency, X17, that the two have been dating. If so, the story could be particularly juicy: Cruz was previously linked with one of Gyllenhaal's best friends, Matthew McConaughey. Or, if you are a member of Jose's profession, simply Matthew.
"You can't tell no one," Jose tells me, but then smiles and lets me in on a secret. "I have a source inside."
No sooner does Jose tell me this than the "source" appears, a dark-haired woman he introduces as Sabrina.
"It's too difficult," Sabrina says breathlessly, jamming herself into the front seat amid Jose's gear. She opens her black leather bag, which has a hole cut from it just large enough to accommodate the lens of the video camera she pulls out. As she and Jose review the footage on the camera's playback screen, she explains the problem: the stars are seated hidden behind a wall in Matsuhisa, and that the restaurant is too dark to pull off a decent shot anyway.
"They know there are paps all around," says Sabrina. "But they're going to come out soon."
As Jose readies his camera and leaves the car to hide behind a wall closer to the restaurant entrance, I feel myself succumbing to the desire to see Penélope Cruz in person — something I can honestly say I've never experienced before. Neither has Sabrina, who claims Penélope is "fucking another A-lister to keep her career alive." Still, if the shot is worth a bundle, why doesn't Sabrina follow Jose to get her own photo?
"I'm the spotter," she explains, meaning that she doesn't specialize in taking pictures. Instead she drives around all day, and uses what she says is a photographic memory to recognize celebrities. "I know every face from the A-listers to the Z-listers. It helps that I'm a TV freak."
"Where do you look for them?" I ask. "The Chateau Marmont?"
"No, I just run my own errands. I see them in places like Target," she tells me. I think she's kidding, but she isn't. "Eva Longoria is a Target freak. So is Avril Lavigne."
"What did you do before this?"
Penélope weaves through traffic, stopping hard at the next light, then darting between pedestrians as she drives into the Grove, an upscale outdoor mall built in the grotesque effigy of a small New England town square.
"I was Madonna's nanny."
For someone who spends her days in close proximity to the famous, Sabrina seems surprisingly star struck. She is "in love" with Prison Break star Wentworth Miller and Al Pacino; not so much Keanu Reeves, who she claims doesn't know how to pump his own gas. When I ask Sabrina how she knows that, she tells me about the time his motorcycle ran out of gas, and she pulled over to give him a ride. He didn't recognize her until she introduced herself. He begged her not to photograph him, swearing he would give her the chance the next time he saw her.
"Did he?" I ask.
"He didn't even recognize me," she says.
Jose comes rushing back to the car.
"Did you get it?" asks Sabrina.
Jose shakes his head.
"They're leaving," he announces, and Sabrina has barely enough time to jump out of the front seat before Jose guns the engine and whips a U-turn across La Cienega. I buckle my seatbelt as we pursue Penélope's Range Rover north. She's obviously aware that we are in pursuit, and barely stops at the red light ahead of us.
"They're taking separate cars to throw us off," Jose says, explaining that a third photographer is following Jake's black Mercedes.
We hang a right on Wilshire, and I find myself pressed against the door, reaching for something to hold onto. All the sudden we're on a street I don't recognize, despite having lived in Los Angeles my whole life. We swerve into the left lane, back into the right, back into the left. The partygoers cruising this upscale neighborhood gawk as we fly past, but we're still not making any headway. Apparently Penélope picked up some driving lessons on the set of Vanilla Sky, I think. As adrenaline blinds my senses, I feel a primal fixation on the luxury automobile three cars ahead.
She weaves through traffic, stopping hard at the next light, then darting between pedestrians as she drives into the Grove, an upscale outdoor mall built in the grotesque effigy of a small New England town square. Suddenly we are all stuck in traffic, and Jose could practically hop out of his car and sprint up to the Range Rover if he wanted.
But a police car is waiting ahead, which means Jose has to be careful. While he's never been arrested, he has been handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car. For Jose, a non-citizen, his is an especially dangerous business. A felony conviction could get him deported, and California now has the toughest paparazzi laws in the nation. Last year, a Los Angeles paparazzo was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after crashing into Lindsay Lohan's car. The charges were subsequently dropped, and many paparazzi blame Lohan for the crash. But if there's anyone the public hates worse than an obnoxious celebrity, it's the person who takes their pictures.
At the moment, Jose couldn't care less what people think, but suddenly there's another problem. Penélope's lane has cleared up, and she zooms up into the parking structure while Jose is still stuck in traffic. When we finally get to the entrance, Jose doesn't know whether she's used the garage's valet entrance or the regular one. He gets on his phone and tells Rafael, one of his colleagues en route, to search the valet portion of the garage. Jose sighs, as we drive slowly around the parking level, peeling our eyes for Penélope's license plate.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
