JAIME CLARKE
WE'RE SO FAMOUS
Me and Stephanie have always wanted to be famous.
In the fifth grade, we lip-synched a Beatles song for our entire
class and we loved the attention. Before we dropped out of high
school, we were famous as party chicks, known famously as Masterful
Johnson. No one in high school could appreciate the irony.
We have famous names, too. I'm Paque and she's Daisy.
You've probably heard of us. The guy who discovered
us saw us dancing in a bar and told us he liked our moves. We
thought he was just some perv who wanted to take us back to his
place in a big car and make us fuck each other and him too, but
he turned out to be a really sweet, sad kind of a guy who just
wanted to make us famous.
We started out doing these gigs for his friends.
He knew a couple of guys with a recording studio in their house
and we started partying with those guys. One night we were all
sitting around fried out of our gourds and one of the guys says
why don't you guys record a few songs. Me and Daisy thought that
was a pretty good idea so we recorded eight songs that we just
kind of made up on the spot.
Music was something we never practiced, so we found
out that night that neither one of us could play an instrument
and our voices caused everyone in the room to bring their hands
to their ears in a weird, involuntary reflex. But we got the songs
down (my favorite was one Daisy wrote called "I'd Kill You
If I Thought I Could Get Away With It" and I also wrote one
with this dude Jeffrey called "Do Fuck Off," a sort
of mellow love song).
One of the dudes who owned the recording equipment
made copies for everyone and me and Daisy played it for a few
friends who told us frankly they didn't care for it. We were hurt
at first, of course, but we never really wanted to be musicians
anyway. Only famous.
We went on crashing local events, sometimes going
to other cities to hang out and pose with people who knew the
people we hung out with last. We'd practically forgotten about
our record until we climbed into this limo paid for by these really
cool Japanese girls in L.A. When I heard Daisy's voice, I looked
at her thinking she had broken out in a little ditty; but her
lips weren't moving. Suddenly the Japanese girls cranked the tune,
one called "We Love Goo," a sort of rock anthem that
I didn't particularly like. We all started bobbing our heads and
me and Daisy didn't say anything about the fact that it was us.
Well, that was only the beginning of our recording
careers, but it was pretty close to the end, too. Some people
from R*O*C*K magazine came to our apartment and took pictures
of us on our yellow vinyl couch. Before we knew it, we couldn't
go anywhere without seeing that picture, me leaning back on Daisy,
our platinum hair all mixing together. They made posters for the
bus stops, billboards; I even saw it in a friend's dorm at school
when we went to visit her.
And the magazines. That picture was on every cover
in the supermarket, it seemed. There was only one problem. Me
and Daisy noticed that the articles in the magazines didn't mention
anything about us being a band. The stories were about us doing
all these things we'd never done.
Like we were supposed to have slept with all the
guys from Hey!, some gay-ass punk band from New York; and one
said we trashed a hotel in Paris and had to pay ten thousand dollars
in damages. The one we liked the best was how we both were in
kiddie porn movies when we were, like, seven or eight. We cut
these out and stuck them under the fruit magnets on our refrigerator.
Now everyone wanted to hang out with us wherever
we went. We'd go out to see a movie and people waiting in line
would come up for our autographs. The same thing happened if we
were at McDonald's, or at the record store, or if we were just
walking back from the grocery store with a sweating gallon of
whole milk and a carton of half 'n' half (Daisy makes these killer
dairy drinks called Whiteys).
One day the dude that said he wanted to make us famous
invited us over to his condo for dinner to tell us that he was
leaving town. Me and Daisy were sad about this and we asked where
was he going. He said he had to go take care of some things and
that we were going to be taken care of. That's when he told us
about this corporate sponsorship he set up. He said we were never
to tell who it was because the company didn't even know they were
sponsoring us; he said he set it up through a friend of his who
would keep it a secret as long as we would.
We asked him why he was doing all this for us and
he got too drunk and admitted that it started out as a line to
try to fuck us like we first thought, but then he said it was
a "great joke," and then he got super drunk and started
cackling in our faces in a mean way and me and Daisy left without
saying anything.
At first we started getting these checks in the mail
from the corporation, mailed from Dallas. Then these shiny gold
plastic credit cards came, engraved with my and Daisy's real names.
Right after we got the credit cards, something really
awful happened. Daisy went back to Ohio to visit her parents,
who called after they saw our picture in the supermarket, and
when Daisy got off the airplane, this girl screamed out her name
and she whipped around and looked just as this rush of teenage
girls surrounded her on all sides. She called me that night sobbing
into the phone, telling me she couldn't breathe very well with
all those people around her and no matter which way she tried
to walk, there they were, blocking her way. Since then, Daisy
has not been the same. She gets very quiet when people yell out
our name and she stands close to me when people come up to us
in public.
Somehow the story got out that me and Daisy made
a movie called Sprung. We gave an interview to this movie
magazine and the interviewer was a real dipshit chick who kept
calling us Masters and Johnson. I don't know where the idea got
into her head that we were actresses.
So agents and then studios started calling about
making a sequel to "the wildly popular cult movie."
Exactly three weeks after that article appeared, a script for
Sprung II arrived at our apartment. Me and Daisy had a
good time acting out the parts for our friends Anthony and Kurt,
a couple of skater guys we met hanging out one night.
Those dicks Anthony and Kurt wanted to act out the
love scenes with us, but we told them no way. We noticed that
there were a lot of love scenes, or scenes where me and Daisy
were naked, and we laughed pretty hard at this. Anthony and Kurt
kept trying to talk us into just one scene and finally me and
Daisy told them we had boyfriends so they'd leave.
Sometimes we wished we had boyfriends. It's been
difficult for me and Daisy to keep them, though. Most guys get
jealous about our fame, always wanting to know where we're going
and who we're going with. I dated this guy, Jim, who wouldn't
take me to his house because he was afraid his parents would find
out he was dating "that disgusting girl." He told me
that.
Daisy dated this real sweetheart, Daryll, who used
to bring her a present every time he came over. He'd bring her
little things he made out of scraps he'd find, and always he'd
spell her name on it somewhere. He was heartbroken when he found
out Daisy wasn't her real name. He called her a filthy liar and
never came back. Daisy cried for a few days, until she cleared
all his gifts off her dresser. They're in the bottom drawer now
and sometimes I walk in and Daisy has the drawer open, just staring
down at all the little things.
Daisy thought it might be Daryll when the door buzzed.
We were surprised when the mailman had us sign for an invitation
to the L.A. premiere of Sprung II. The studio sent a movie
poster for each of us, and these two chicks that looked like me
and Daisy were standing there, about eight feet tall, with knives
in their hands (my knife had blood dripping from it).
The movie studio flew us in from Phoenix and sent
a limo to our hotel. When we got out at the theater, we got mobbed
by reporters and people just standing on the street. Daisy ducked
back into the limo and just sat in there until everyone went away.
Which everyone eventually did.
The movie was pretty dumb, but the girls who played
the main chicks were dead ringers for me and Daisy. We noticed
that those chicks weren't at the premiere and that's why everyone
thought we were them. We didn't meet any of the studio people.
On the way out of the theater, this guy rolled up his shirtsleeve
and showed me his tattoo of me and Daisy.
For a long time after that, things were pretty quiet.
Me and Daisy bought records and listened to them, bought clothes
and wore them, bought food and ate it.
Then one day Daisy told me she didn't want to be
famous anymore. She said she liked not doing anything, but it
was a drag to have everyone staring at you all the time. I told
her I agreed, but that there wasn't anything we could really do
about it. We were famous and that was that. We couldn't become
unfamous.
A doll company sent us a contract along with a check
for fifty thousand dollars. They wanted to make Paque and Daisy
action figures and wanted to get them out for Christmas. I asked
Daisy what we should do and she said we should cash the check
and not sign the contract. I tried to read the contract out loud
to her, but we had trouble understanding it.
Finally we decided not to do it. Daisy thought it
would only add to the problem of people recognizing us on the
streets. We didn't cash the check, and it expired.
That Christmas the stores were filled with Paque
and Daisy action figures, but they didn't really look like us,
so we weren't too worried about it. We even bought a few for our
relatives and sent them back home. We tried to buy some other
things for Christmas, but the cashier told us our credit cards
had been canceled. Me and Daisy wondered what to do, but we knew
we couldn't call anyone.
The checks quit coming in the mail, too. We didn't
really notice until the first of the month, when the rent was
due. We waited for the little yellow envelopes to arrive, but
all that came was junk mail and late Christmas cards. The situation
got worse when we started to run out of food.
So me and Daisy decided to get jobs. I applied for
this job as a secretary, and Daisy found an ad for cashier in
a record store. At my interview, the guy, Harry, couldn't get
over the fact that I was "that girl from Masterful Johnson."
He asked me for my autograph.
Daisy came home in tears and told me that the manager
brought out old copies of our album and asked her to autograph
them while he played Combat on an old Atari in his office.
Our landlord gave us a thirty-day notice thirty-one
days ago. Daisy has packed all her things in milk crates she stole
from behind the grocery store. We've been living off stolen produce
and water. We called home for money for plane tickets, but no
one seems to believe we really do need money. My parents laughed
and Daisy's parents thought it was a joke, too. I wonder what
our options are as me and Daisy sit at the kitchen table, Daisy
drawing SOS in spilt salt with her fingers.
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