Fat Chance (4 page)

Tamara waves her arms over her head as if to clear the air.

“Girl, you are a pushover. Barsky is head and shoulders above you in the pranks department. You are just not up there in his league. Boy, do we have to bring that boy to his knees, make him pay. Oh, I love this…it's gonna take some thinking, but we can do it, we—”

I stare at her unflinchingly. “Barsky was out on assignment.”

One perfect eyebrow arches up, then her whole body slumps. “You mean…?”

“Yes…it really was—”

“Mike Taylor?”

“Mike Taylor.” I take an Internet picture of him out of my desk drawer. We both stare at it for a moment. “How could anyone not want to help that?”

“Lord have mercy. What are you going to do, Maggie?”

“After I have my heart massaged? What do you think? I'm going to give him the name of a diet doctor I know out on the coast, and then go back to my column and forget the whole thing. Do you think I'd just take off because I get a call from a smart-ass in Hollywood? Yes he's gorgeous, but out there they're all gorgeous—”

“Well, they're not all THAT—”

“They're plaster casts created in operating rooms. The plastic surgeons out there can carve George Clooney's face out of Danny DeVito's behind. Tight skin, nipped eyes, shaved noses, chins, cheekbones, six-pack abs. The only thing they don't do yet is head transplants. That is one sick universe. So that's your answer. That's what I'm going to do.”

“Good for you, Maggie.” She high-fives me. “You are your own person.” She walks toward the door, and then does a 180-degree pivot.

“Want me to arrange transpo?”

“Done.”

“Huh?”

“DreamWorks booked it. How's that for a perfect name?”

Tamara turns again, but I'm not done. “One more thing. Of course you have to swear on your life—”

“What life?”

“—not to tell another living soul.”

She shuts the door, then stands there, the other eyebrow raised.

“When I got home last night, I stripped off all my clothes and took a long look in the mirror, and let me tell you there's a reason my bathroom mirror is the size of a postage stamp.”

“Amen.”

“I stared at a body that I wanted to divorce, uncontested. I saw someone who didn't look like the real me that was
trapped inside. So I declared war. The Maggie O'Leary who's going to L.A. in eight weeks will be nothing like the one that this world knows and loves.”

“You lost me.”

“I'm going to do something utterly heretical, and I need you to be my partner in crime.”

“Maybe you better just tell me.”

“You have to swear,
swear,
not to tell a soul, otherwise I'm going to be burned at the stake, excommunicated from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. They'll haul me before them, like Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms—”

“Never tried
that
diet, any good?”

I drop my head in prayer. “The Maggie who's going to L.A. is going to attempt something more far-reaching than ever before.”

“Like?”

“With my motivation at an all-time high, I'm embarking on a stealth-bomber food plan and will emerge my thin twin.” I hold up my fist triumphantly. “Chiseled, whittled down, tight, taut, tantalizing, terrific and T-H-I-N!”

“Say it,” Tamara says. “Say it.”

“THIN.”

She smiles, then suddenly her eyes cloud over. “But how? You can't
diet,
you don't, you won't. Diets are a sham, a lie, a trap to undermine the empowerment of liberated twenty-first-century women, enslave them mentally and hold them politically hostage. Your whole theory of who you are, self-love and acceptance and all that bologna that you've made your name by, not to say a career out of, is going out the window because some movie maharaja calls you up and asks for a little advice? Keep it together, Maggie—we're talking just another M A N—so maybe you want to think this one
through a little more. Maybe you're bein' just a trifle rash, you know what I'm sayin'?”

“I'm doing it, Tamara—total body and fender work. This is just a short leave of absence from my public persona. And it will surely be my last attempt to shake my booty and get it together. I'm doing it because if there was ever a motivation for me to recreate myself, this is it. If the thought of coaching Mike Taylor can't fire me into a body makeover and be successful where legions of others have failed, then there's no hope for anyone—EVER! This is the acid test, Tamara. BIOLOGICAL WARFARE! I can't ever really and truly accept the concept of self-acceptance unless I know what my capabilities are. I need to do this. You with me?”

“Spreadsheets are starting to call my name again,” she says, going out the door.

“Now, that's aberrant. C'mon, Tamara,” I yell as she leaves. “This is going to be fun!”

 

“So you're heading home?” I look up from my column to see Tex carrying his briefcase. He looks like he could be a poster boy for my article on stress.

“Mitchum's on the late movie,” he says, as if that explains it all.

Tex, the movie buff, worships Mitchum. I'd heard it all before. Mitchum, the sadistic ex-con in
Cape Fear;
the American destroyer skipper in
The Enemy Below;
the cool American up against Japanese gangsters in
The Yakuza.
The heavy-lidded, laconic Mitchum.

“No one came close,” he said. He had seen every one of his movies three, maybe four times. “That swaggering stride,” he says, “the great laid-back antihero. So completely his own man, no matter what the role. And so cool.”

I bought Tex Mitchum's biography and we laughed over the part about the end of his life. When Mitchum's emphysema worsened, he had to be put on oxygen. His droll comment: “I only need it to breathe.”

 

When Tex walked into the office the next morning, it was clear that his moviefest had included a six-pack, maybe two.

“You okay?”

“If you don't count the fact that the back of my head feels like it was slammed with a brick.”

Before he opens the mail, he reaches into his bottom desk drawer and shakes out two extra-strength Excedrin. He grabs his University of Texas mug, and goes over to Metro's Mr. Coffee and fills it too full. Coffee starts to flow over the rim.

“Shit,” he says, trying to sip it down, failing miserably, not to mention scalding his tongue. “What a piece of shit this is,” he says, slamming the coffeepot.

Tex puts on a good show. I sit down to enjoy it. I consider telling him he's cute when he's mad, but decide against it.

“With Brauns, Toshibas and Cuisinarts, what MORON spent the company's money on a Mr. Coffee?”

The secretary's back becomes his target.

“Not that nine-tenths of the idiots in this office know the first thing about good coffee anyway.”

He picks up a coffee can bought at the supermarket and looks at it mockingly. “I should shove the poor excuse for a coffeepot—and the swill that's in it—off the shelf, but as sure as day follows night, it will be magically replaced the next day with another one, a clone, that makes the same weak, lousy, piss-poor excuse for coffee.”

The moment he sits down at his desk, he reaches for his prop: the black cowboy hat that he wears when he wants to disappear. He pulls the brim down, nearly covering his puppy-dog eyes. It looks good, actually. What is it about the cowboy mystique? He glances at the slew of mail that always greets him.

“Releases, releases, more releases,” he mumbles, tossing a pile of them in the garbage. They land with a thwack that makes the secretary turn and give him a stern look.

“What a job it is to sit in an office all day and write pumped-up garbage about your client and their great new innovative product. NEWS. EMBARGOED UNTIL…” He laughs weirdly. I should be going, but I stay.

Larry Arnold, the number two man on Metro, sits down at the desk next to him and peers under the brim of the hat. “So, who are you doing? What news from down under?”

Tex massages his temples. “Actually, I feel like complete shit.”

“PMS?”

“Caught it from you, sucker. What's goin' on?”

“The mayor's holding his press conference at eleven to put the rumors to rest about his affair, so now we're more convinced than ever that he's getting it on the side…. There's a school board meeting tonight that we have to cover because it's rumored that the chancellor's going to be ousted. The police commissioner is holding a press conference this afternoon about the police brutality investigation in the Bronx.
The Lion King
is opening in yet another theater, a murder in Brooklyn and your mother called to tell you her ‘dawg's' vomiting.”

Tex closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Get somebody down to hammer the mayor. Payback time. And send someone to get a quote from his wife. See how she's reacting to the mess. Let's do a man in the street, too. We'll give it a full page.”

“Boy, you really are in a pissy mood,” Larry says, heading back to his desk. “Sharon dump you for a fatter guy?” Sharon was Tex's latest flame.

Tex pulls the hat down lower. That's my cue to get to work.

 

Instead of research, I do something that shows my true colors. I log on to Google, opening one after another of the Mike Taylor entries. I want to see the pictures, read interviews, hear his words. I can't help looking over my shoulder. Not a smart move to be caught by the publisher while gawking at movie-star pictures when all of America is waiting for my next column. I open up one of “Melanie's pages,” a picture gallery of “gorgeous Mike.” There's a shot of him in a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket at a movie premiere; hair gelled back, dark eyes sparkling, dressed in a tux at the Emmy Awards; shirtless in a tight bathing suit playing basketball at the beach. I enlarge it.

In another, his arm is locked around the waist of his cur
rent flame, French model Jolie Bonjour. Clearly, she is having many
bon jours
these days, thanks in large part to the fact that she's probably the one broad who fits into those stupid size 0 clothes, or worse still, 00, that always piss me off because they're made to fit only anorexics or eleven-year-old adolescents, in which case they belong in the children's department. To boot, Miss Bonjour is barely drinking age, and has luminescent blue eyes, and poreless skin. Was there even a word in French for
zit?
And that platinum hair. No wonder hair color manufacturers offered five hundred shades of blond that were used by more than a third of the women in the world. Now, brown hair, on the other hand, came in something like three shades. Light brown, medium brown and dark. End of story. Dullsville, really.

The plastic-Barbie image of perfection never died. No matter that if Barbie's body were translated into human scale, her measurements would be 38-18-34. So what if no one on the planet had those proportions, women still wanted them.

At least, to their credit, Barbie's manufacturers were now giving the dolls wider waists, smaller busts and closed mouths, a far cry from “Lilli,” the prototype for Barbie—dating back forty years—who was a German doll based on a lusty actress who was in between gigs.

This
poupée
smiles widely in every shot. No wonder. Mike Taylor's arm was hooked around her waist.

I open up interview after interview with Taylor. Thank God for the Internet. Actually, his life was an open magazine—just this past month the six-page cover story in
Architectural Digest
with the headline: “Perfection in Pacific Palisades.” It began with a double-page spread showing the cobalt blue of the Pacific as a backdrop to the bright Southern California sun glinting off the polished steel of the Nau
tilus machines in his sprawling home gym. Fifteen behemoths in all, each with a precise function, either to tone and strengthen a specific muscle group, or offer an aerobic challenge. A trainer visited as often as the postman, the story said, to take him through the routine.

Sotto voce,
Taylor admitted that he loathed exercise, but his romantic roles made it mandatory that he stay in shape. Legions of fans just waited for the moment when they would glimpse his contoured physique as he pulled off a snug T-shirt and fell into an embrace with a lush-lipped nymphet.

“Part of the job,” he said.

According to the cover story, Taylor had been in Los Angeles for twelve years, but had quickly gained fame and fortune after a TV pilot based on the lives of a group of elite NASA astronauts was picked up for a regular series on CBS.

In
The High Life,
he played womanizing Scott Bronson, a rocket scientist who joined the space program and rose to become one of its top advisors, a job which had come to define who he was. His exalted standing didn't hurt his appeal to the nubile NASA recruits—whom he had a reputation for quickly bedding—or the thirty-million fans who watched—captivated by Mike's work—his long-term relationship with a curvaceous fellow astronaut, his secretive one-night stands, and all the bizarre twists and turns that his life took on this earth and beyond. In addition to the show, he told the writer that he spent weekends and vacations making films.

“Exhausting? Sure, but my career's on a roll, and that's not something you take lightly in Hollywood. I started out doing some awful TV work, and now, finally, at age thirty-eight, I feel that I've hit my stride.”

“Where would you like to see yourself in the next five years?”

He shrugged. “No clue, man. I just take it from day to day, and I've no idea where this frantic roller-coaster ride is headed. All I know is that I'm holding on tight, and enjoying the ride.”

His day started at sunrise, and his bedroom, the story showed, was a marvel of simplicity—a gray granite floor and a king-size bed covered in gray linens. He worked out in the gym, showered in a glass-walled bathroom with a panoramic ocean vista and had coffee in a cavernous granite, concrete and stainless-steel kitchen. The story followed him through the gardens outside the house, where he chatted with the writer about his future projects. One of them, he said, was a movie called
Dangerous Lies
.

 

My stomach is growling. It's almost one o'clock. I bookmark the site.

“How about some lunch?” I call out to Tamara.

“What's your pleasure?”

“Greens,” I whisper pathetically.

“Can't hear ya.”

Would she hear beef goulash? Fettucini Alfredo? It reminds me of the painful day that I went to buy my first bra. The hearing-impaired saleswoman walked to the back of the store toward the stockroom and yelled out for every New Yorker to hear, “What size bra did you want again, honey?”

And my pained whisper. The trainer, 34 triple A. Was that how it felt for a guy who bought his first box of condoms?

“Hey, big guy, you want the ribbed for extra stimulation? And what size? Small, medium? Behemoth?”

I get up and go over to Tamara's desk.

“A double order of gale-force greens,” I mouth, “with balsamic vinegar and a large mineral water.” Then I can't stop myself and shout, “Ahh, screw it, put an order of potato salad on top.”

 

Wilhelm's sandwich shop. I adore it. Never a wait. Never a tie-up. It's run with military precision by a highly trained staff of beefy Bavarians who stand elbow-to-elbow behind a thick wooden cutting board where they prepare football-size sandwiches. German heroes, as it were. Despite the long line snaking around the glass-covered counter, there's never more than just a moment's wait, the piercing cry, “WHO'S NEXT?” serving as a cracking bullwhip that keeps patrons rhythmically goose-stepping up to the counter.

Wilhelm's has become an institution in the East 40s, and I am one of their cherished patrons. Who else but yours truly is intimately familiar with every one of their thirty-three sandwiches? Who else calls on them to cater parties? An autographed picture of me with my chunky arm around owner and sandwich meister Wilhelm Obermayer is mounted on the wall as if I'm a visiting dignitary. It says, “To Wilhelm, my hero.”

There is a reason for my devotion. A sandwich from Wilhelm's isn't a sandwich, it's an indulgence. Who doesn't wake up at night hankering for the smoked chicken salad, a marriage of white chicken, chunks of tangy blue-veined Stilton, ruffles of bacon and slivered red pepper, all lovingly dressed with a dollop of mayonnaise mustard sauce?