Going Off Script (7 page)

At lunchtime, Donatella would have her male assistants don white gloves to serve her greasy Chinese takeout on exquisite Versace dinnerware. One time, I witnessed one of Donatella’s infamous nuclear meltdowns when she accidentally locked herself out of her smoked-glass office. It began with a scream that brought the whole office running. “My cell phone is in there!” she shrieked. “I need my fucking phone!” Everyone instantly started scrambling to find another key to the sacred domain, but the still-shrieking Donatella merely stood there and pointed at one of her huge security guards. “Go!” she ordered him. “Get me in there!” There was a sudden shattering of glass as the guard kicked his way in. The whole office froze, and we all gaped in stunned silence. She had been locked out of the office for all of thirty seconds, tops. “What are you all looking at?” she snarled. “Get someone to fix this fucking door.” I see Donatella at the Met Gala all the time now, but I’m too nervous to say anything. She’s a crazy gangster diva. There is absolutely no one else like her. I think she’s fabulous, but I know the firepower of an Italian temper, and with Donatella, you do not want to wander across
the shooting range. She wouldn’t remember me, anyway: my stint as a fashion industry receptionist lasted about as long as a cheap knockoff, and I quit after just a few months before they could fire me. It turned out that I had very little aptitude—and even less motivation—for taking phone messages. If it’s that important, they’ll call back, right?

Things were equally tense at home. I was living with my sister and her roommate in their tiny apartment. Every night, Monica and Larissa would go out barhopping. Occasionally I would tag along with my fake ID. Larissa would wear some hot little dress, which she accessorized with a concealed weapon. I thought Larissa was awesome. The feeling was not reciprocated. When you’re a sexy, single twentysomething, having your roommate’s teenage sister camped out on the couch can get old pretty fast. Plus, I’m a slob by nature, so I wasn’t exactly trying to ingratiate myself by being helpful around the apartment. I finally wore out my welcome when the phone rang late one night. I pounced to answer it, because I was waiting for a call from a hot guy. I could barely hear the voice on the other end.

“Larissa,” the voice whispered urgently. “Larissa?”

“No. Can you call back in the morning?”

“Larissa, it’s me, I have information for you…” At that moment, the call waiting beeped, and I clicked over; it was Hot Guy.

“Sorry, she’s sleeping,” I told Larissa’s caller. “Call first thing in the morning, okay?
Gracias!
” I hung up on her and went back to flirting with Hot Guy.

Larissa was up by then and came charging out of her room to interrogate me. “Did I just get a call?” she demanded.

“Yeah, it was some young girl with an accent but it’s cool, she’s gonna call back in the morning!” I replied with a dismissive wave.

“IDIOT! THAT WAS MY INFORMANT!” I felt bad. I had assumed it was some relative who could wait. Who gets urgent work calls at midnight, anyway? (Answer: FBI agents do.)

New York and I just couldn’t find our groove, and I left before the summer was up. I hated how hot and loud it was, and how rank it smelled. I fled back home to my Laura Ashley bedroom and enrolled in community college. I was starting to grow up a little, and knew I had to get serious if I wanted a future for myself. I made the honor roll for the first time in my life and got accepted to St. Mary’s, a small public college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There was no journalism or communications major at St. Mary’s, but I was thrilled to land a gig at the campus radio station. I hosted the after-midnight show, when every student within listening range was either asleep or getting wasted. Since I had spent my childhood broadcasting to nonexistent audiences in front of my bedroom mirror, I was a natural for the job. Between songs, I would talk and talk and talk, with no one listening. Then I would convince myself that they were out there, and just too star-struck to engage with such a big-time deejay. As the lonely minutes ticked by, I would start begging people to call in. “If you’ve ever been in love, call me, let’s talk,” I’d coo into my mike, waiting for the phone to light up. Nothing. “If you have ever taken a breath of air, call me.” Silence. “If you have lips call me. Call me even if you have only one lip!” Nothing. “If you’re at St. Mary’s College and hear this, for the love of God, please call me!” Nada.

I was ecstatic when I was finally promoted to the evening shift. I still wasn’t getting any callers, but the possibility seemed more real in prime time, and the better hours meant my friends could come up and hang out with me in the deejay booth, which resulted more than once in dead air because I was too busy acting cool to remember to play another song when one ended.
Dead air might have been a better choice than what turned out to be my dinner-hour swan song. I love hip-hop and R & B, and on the night in question, I thought everyone else would enjoy my favorite 2 Live Crew hit as much as I did. The catchy chorus was soon thundering across the crowded dining hall:

Me so horny, me so horny, me so horny,

Me love you long time

The song gets a whole lot raunchier after that.

Finally the phones lit up.

So did my boss, who came running into the booth. “Turn that off!” he yelled. I didn’t think he needed to get so worked up over it; this was Maryland, not Florida. Some D.A. in Florida, I vaguely recalled, had successfully prosecuted 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges, and record clerks selling the controversial album were actually arrested. The conviction would eventually be overturned on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court, but that day was still nearly a decade away, and even if I was willing to fight the good First Amendment fight on behalf of horny rappers, my station manager, Me So Uptight, was not. It was time to change schools again, anyway. My transcript was decent enough for me to get accepted at last by my first-choice school, the University of Maryland, where at long last I became a journalism major.

That summer before my junior year, I was hanging out in the little espresso bar in the back of my father’s store one afternoon when I heard a customer come in to pick up some tailored suits. I peered over the little half wall and spotted a handsome guy around my age. He smiled at me, and we exchanged pleasantries before he left. The store manager hurried up, breathless with excitement as he told me who the visitor was. “He asked who you
were! He wanted me to give you his number if you ever wanted to call.” I was flattered, but not willing to show it. “Just have him call me,” I told the manager. He did, and just like that, I had a date with one of the hottest bachelors in town.

The son of a prominent car dealer who was a regular customer of my dad’s, Richard was two years older than I was. He had attended an exclusive private prep school and had his pick of the prettiest debutantes in D.C., not to mention neighboring Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. He was widely known as a party boy who liked to tear around in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, but I was the one who was going to prove to be hell on wheels in this particular romance. Richard picked me up in a grampa boat of a Chrysler off one of his dad’s lots.
Smart,
I thought, realizing immediately that I was being tested. He may have been downplaying what he had, but I wasn’t going that route, myself: if the shorts I wore for our first date had been any skimpier, they would have been a thong.

Richard and I had instant chemistry. That very first night, he asked me what I was doing over the summer before going back to college that fall.

“I just started working at Houston’s,” I told him. I’d been hired as a waitress, but I took food orders the way I took phone messages and had been demoted to hostess after just one shift. I didn’t mind. Better clothes and more opportunity to chat with customers, I figured. Let someone else deliver all those house salads and glasses of Chardonnay.

“Well, I hope you had fun, because you’re going to be quitting that job to spend more time with me,” Richard informed me. His confidence was a more natural fit than the cocky swagger of boys I’d fallen for in the past. With Richard, my “type” did a seismic shift from bad boy to businessman. There was definitely something to be said for grown men dressed in nice suits instead of hoodlums in baggy jeans with three inches of underwear
showing. True to Richard’s prediction, I quit my job that week to spend more time with him. I loved the envious looks from other women when we were out clubbing or eating at the hottest new restaurant in D.C. With his impeccable clothes, olive skin, blue eyes, and seductive lips, Richard looked like he had stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. And he was as generous as he was good-looking: he loved to take me on shopping sprees to Neiman Marcus. It all seemed too good to be true.

When September rolled around, I answered a roommate-wanted ad with Student Housing and moved into a student apartment with three other girls for the semester. On my second night there, I took a break from unpacking to get ready to go out. The new roommates wanted to know more about my boyfriend.

“What’s he do?” one of them asked.

“He works for a car dealership,” I said.

“Oh, that’s sweet, good for you!” they said, exchanging quick stifled-laugh looks that said
loser.

The condescension was cut short by the deafening roar of a motor gunning outside our open balcony door. “What the fuck?” my roommates said in near unison. We all ran to the balcony to see who was causing the commotion. I had a good hunch. Sure enough, there was Richard sitting in a red convertible Ferrari. He smiled up at me and waved.

“Be right down!” I shouted over the rumbling engine.

“He works for a car dealership?” one of the roommates asked skeptically.

“Yeah,” I said with what I hoped was supreme nonchalance. “He
owns
the car dealership. And,” I added as a little
take that, bitches,
P.S., “something like thirty others.”

Academically, I didn’t have such an auspicious start at UM. Leafing through the course catalog, I had been on the lookout for sliders, and a class called TV Westerns 101 had caught my
attention. Watching TV shows for college credit sounded like an easy A if ever there was one. In hindsight, I probably should have watched at least one western before committing to an entire semester full of them: they basically pitched me into an instant coma. There were bawdy women of ill repute, but no one ever had sex. There were saloon brawls, but no one ever bled. There were cattle ranches but no steakhouses. The plot lines of TV westerns generally involved the hero and his men giving chase on horseback to the villain and his men, until the latter were caught and/or shot (again without bleeding) or hanged from the gallows (minus any gruesome sound effects or entertaining word games).

I hated westerns. And the one I hated above all others was
Bonanza,
which, in terms of popularity and longevity, was like the
CSI
of its time. So of course
Bonanza
turned out to be the topic for our final paper in TV Westerns 101. Half of my grade would hinge upon my scholarly dissection of life on the Ponderosa. The Ponderosa, in case you are blissfully unaware, was a large ranch in need of a good landscaper and a decent security system: viewers saw lots of dirt and tumbleweeds, but never anything actually being ranched, per se. Nevertheless, rustlers seemed to make off with the off-screen herd of cattle every other episode or so. Maybe it was an insurance scam—don’t ask me, I never stayed awake through an entire episode. Ponderosa patriarch Ben Cartwright spent most of his time organizing posses with his wildly mismatched sons from different mothers. There was big, dumb Hoss and sorta hot Little Joe (where and who was Big Joe? And while we’re at it, why wasn’t anyone investigating the deaths of three Mrs. Cartwrights in a row?). Ben also had a third, prodigal son named Adam who showed up every tenth posse or so. Despite all this galloping, brawling, and gunslinging, the Cartwrights never broke a sweat (or, obviously, bled): Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe wore the same exact clothes on every episode.
And the show ran for fourteen seasons. Where was
Fashion Police
when the nation needed it? I couldn’t find a damn thing to say about Bonanza when I went to write my final.

On the day our professor was handing back our graded papers, he skipped mine. “Giuliana DePandi, can I see you in my office, please,” he said at the end of class. I showed up all smiles, extending my hand and introducing myself—a necessity given the degree of my participation all semester. “Hi! How are you?” I said brightly. He cut right to the chase.

“You’re in trouble for plagiarism.”

“Huh?” I responded. “Plagiarism?”

He then informed me that I would have to appear before some sort of university tribunal the following Monday morning. They were sending me to the college gallows!

“What makes you think I plagiarized anything?” I cried. I was in a state of disbelief: I would never stoop to plagiarism! And I was mad as hell that the geek I had bought the paper from had done so. With reckless abandon, it turned out. The professor pulled out first one book and then another, opening them to giant swaths of text he had marked. There was maybe half a page worth of original material in my ten-page treatise. For three hundred bucks, I had expected originality. That was a good chunk of the grocery-and-extras allowance my parents gave me for the semester, which I had managed to sock away thanks to Richard’s generosity when it came to picking up checks. I wondered if there was a way to report dial-a-cheater for consumer fraud. Lucky for me, it turned out that the professor wanted to avoid the bureaucratic time-suck of an ethics trial, and he offered me a plea bargain, instead: I could accept a D for the full semester’s grade. I gladly snatched it up and rode off into the metaphoric sunset.

I was never one to be scared straight, and the only lesson I learned about cheating was that if you wanted to do it right, you
had to do it yourself. Or, in my case, with a trusted accomplice. I recruited Richard to help me with an elaborate scheme to ace a botany final I was dreading. The reason I was dreading it was because—minor detail—I had never actually gone to botany class. What did succulents have to do with journalism?