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AN EXAMPLE OF HOW NEAL POLLACK HANDLES FAME
By Jamie Allen, Ph.D

     Let’s say Fame comes knocking on your door one day. Week day. 2 p.m. You’re just sitting on the couch in your unwashed shorts, your sweaty t-shirt, your white socks, watching MTV, munching on a bag of Cheetos.

     You don’t work, except as a freelance writer, and that's hit or miss. Besides, you'd rather write fiction. You’ve had some funny short stories published on the Web and you’ve gotten some good feedback. The goal, of course, is to become famous, a famous fiction writer, because what is a fiction writer if he doesn’t know Fame, except a fiction writer who is very, very poor.

     You’re sitting there on your couch, thinking of focusing your next piece on Cheetos and how the caked orange dust on your fingers can be symbolic of --

     And Fame raps very loudly, rudely, on your front door. This is not Opportunity knocking. Opportunity taps with a golden touch; Fame’s a bitch.

     When you open the front door, that’s what you see: a real bitch, with frizzed black hair and pale skin and dark eyeliner and skinny-ass arms with tattoos and a dirty black concert t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and scuzzy black jeans and imitation leopard fur flip-flops with black toenails. She carries a purse cut from the backs of a dozen rattlers. She’s just the kind of bitch that could scare Courtney Love.

     But then she smiles at you and she’s got nice teeth and the smile does wonders for her face. A breeze blows that witchy hair just right and she looks, really, very sexy.

     ‘Hi, I’m Fame,’ she says in a sooty voice.

     ‘Hi Fame,’ you say, thinking she might be lost. ‘Can I help you?’

     ‘Yeah, I just need 15 minutes of your time. But whatever,’ she says, turning away. ‘I can come back; or maybe not.’

     ‘Oh, no. Don’t leave. Come in. Please.’

     You’ve heard all about Fame, of course, but you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You let her in your house that you bought with your wife two years ago, because it was the best you could afford. Fame strolls through your front hall and says, ‘You’re going to have to get a new place. You can’t hang out with me and live in this.’

     She leads you into your own living room, where she plops down on the couch in the spot where you previously sat. She grabs the remote and turns off MTV.

     ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ you say, still standing.

     ‘Sit down, sit down,’ she says. You do, in the recliner next to the couch.

     She pulls a pack of Pall Malls out of her rattler purse, offers you one, which you decline. You don’t even allow your mother to smoke in your house, but you don’t want to be rude to Fame, so you let her light up.

     Fame takes a drag from her cigarette, blows smoke from her nostrils.

     ‘So, tell me about yourself,’ she says, picking a piece of tobacco or something from her tongue. She searches for an ashtray to flick her ashes, decides to use an empty cup on the coffee table.

     You start to tell Fame about yourself, but she interrupts: ‘Have you noticed how self-centered people are these days? I mean, at least it makes my job easier. That’s for fucking sure.’ She belches a laugh.

     She looks around at the decor, at your wife’s black and white pictures taken on your honeymoon, the color ones taken of your son on his first birthday, the most recent ones of your family on vacation.

     ‘Where’s your wife?’ Fame asks.

     ‘Uh, she works full-time at --’

     ‘So, tell me, what do you want to do?’ she asks.

     ‘Um, you know, I’d like to write some cool novels, raise a good family, have a house on the beach --’

     ‘Ha! You fucking idiot!’ Fame says. ‘I mean, what do you want to do right now, me and you? Sex? Maybe a little Toot?’

     ‘Huh? No. No. I’ve got a family.’

     ‘Listen, we all have to make sacrifices,’ she says. Her voice sounds so old. She takes a drag from her cigarette. ‘You wouldn’t believe the sacrifices people make to sleep with me.’

     ‘I can imagine,’ you say. ‘I mean, I’m not imagining anything. Just an expression. I mean, not that you’re not beautiful enough for me to imagine, just that I shouldn’t imagine something --’

     ‘You’re so fucking cute,’ she interrupts. ‘God, I’d love to eat you.’

     She watches as your face reddens. You’re about to melt into the recliner, and also you think you might want her to leave.

     But then, suddenly, Fame’s face darkens. She turns her forehead into her palm, cigarette millimeters away from lighting a bonfire made of her black hair.

     ‘Oh, fuck. Shit. Fuck. Fuck!’

     You flinch at the outburst. Your suddenly remember that your son is taking his afternoon nap in the other room; you don’t want him to wake from his light blue dreams to the sound of such vile chaos coming from Fame, someone he doesn’t know or care about.

     ‘Are you OK?’ you say, still trying to be pleasant. ‘Would it be OK if you kept it down a little? My kid’s asleep.’

     Fame reaches in her rattler purse for her Palm Pilot.

     ‘Fuck you, keep it down,’ she says. ‘I just remembered I forgot to call Neal. Oh fuck. He’s gonna kill me.’

     ‘Neal,’ you say. You want to be helpful, anything to keep Fame calm. ‘Call him on my phone. Is he long distance? We have free long distance. Neal who? Is he your pimp?’

     ‘No, you fucking idiot,’ Fame says. ‘I don’t have a pimp.’

     Fame pulls out a silver cell. She reads her Palm, dials her cell, blows smoke as she waits.

     ‘Neal, baby, how are you?’ Fame purrs into the cell.

     A pause. Her face falls.

     ‘I know, I forgot,’ she says into the phone. ‘I forgot. Look, don’t be mad ... I want to see you ... I’m working ... I am too working ... This guy ... He’s kind of cute ... I know. Look --’

     She covers the phone, looks at you, smiles that special smile. ‘Is it OK if Neal Pollack comes over?’

     You know all about Neal and his work. In fact, you admire and envy him. You imagine him coming over and chatting about writing, laughing at your grand humor, giving you his agent’s phone number. This is clearly a benefit of knowing Fame.

     ‘Um, sure, yeah.’

     She tells Neal your address, hangs up.

     ‘You got a bathroom?’ Fame asks, standing. ‘I’ve gotta freshen up.’

     You show her to the bathroom. As she’s walking there, she says, ‘Fucking Neal Pollack acts like he’s my goddamn probation officer sometimes. I gotta look good.’

     Fifteen minutes have come and gone, and then some. You begin to wonder if you should ask Fame, still locked in the bathroom, if she’s OK.

     That’s when Neal arrives, using the key to his red convertible Lexus to tap quietly in the front door. You open the door. Unlike most famous people, he looks bigger in person. You note how he fills the doorframe with a suede peacoat, jeans and construction boots. But he’s polite; he removes his skullcap as he walks in. Firm shake.

     You tell him that you admire his work, that he opens doors for writers like you. He’s modest; he says he thinks he remembers reading something you wrote online somewhere.

     Then, he asks where Fame is.

     ‘Bathroom,’ you say.

     You ask him if he wants something to drink; you show him to the living room. You no longer really care that Fame’s been in hiding out for much too long. In fact, you’re not even really thinking about her. You’re thinking about things like: showing Neal your computer and judging his reaction; telling Neal you’re working on a novel and maybe trading some writer talk, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald did; asking him if he wants to play you in ping-pong out in the garage, feeling confident you could whup him handily and brag to your friends.

     But, standing next to the couch in the living room, Neal starts talking. He doesn’t speak too loud, but with a hushed authority, a sureness that sounds more like thoughts carefully formulated and presented on paper.

     He says he’s sorry about all this, but he’s been having trouble with Fame. He says once she comes into your life, as everyone knows, she’s really hard to handle. But Neal says he’s the caring sort. It’s his biggest weakness: He can’t pass up a dog running along the side of the road without taking it home to his farm house.

     When he met Fame, they did the dance, and Fame seemed like she was in love with him and she was really good and sweet and the whole affair was pretty humid. The beginning is like that with Fame: blind, blonde, blurred by so much emotion coursing through your veins, the kind of emotion you feel only when someone loves you so much and you can’t figure out why.

     You’re nodding as Neal says this, unaware of the silly look on your face.

     The honeymoon is always like that, he says. But then Fame fell into her old habits. It wasn’t long before she started smoking and drinking again; and then the illegal stuff started: the pot, the Ecstasy, which Neal could take, no problem, if it didn’t lead to the inevitable heroin and LSD.

     Good God, did Fame have her addictions. And, Neal says in his own subdued analogies, there’s no one to stop her from falling into those horrible vices: There’s no governor on her go-kart. She just mashes the pedal and heads for the nearest curve, head and black hair free of helmet, any and all passengers clawing the insides of their hands. If you don’t want to go along for the ride, she slams on the brakes, pushes you off. You never hear from her again. No explanation, no phone call, no letter.

     But again, Neal is the caring sort. He says he saw Fame engaging in this mad behavior, but he refused to crash with her.

     But he couldn’t walk away, either. Not clean. Neal saw the good side of that girl-woman and wanted to help her find it consistently. So he started calling her. She tried to ignore him, but Neal kept calling, kept inching his way in, asking her about herself and then really listening when she finally talked. And soon, she was calling him again, but not for the initial reasons; she was calling just to hear his voice, something authentic in her world, a real person who finally was not affected by her charms and dangers, a rock who would be home at 3 a.m. and would come pick her up on the corner of God Knows Where after doing God knows what.

     Neal wants to make Fame right. But sometimes, he says, he thinks she’s beyond help.

     This whole time, you’re trying to keep up, to pretend you can relate; but deep down, you know nothing about Fame.

     Speak of the devil, she stumbles out of the bathroom, looking made up but undone, mascara running a bit, hair tangled a bit more.

     ‘Hey, Neal, baby,’ she says, swaggering towards him, snake purse dangling from her wrist.

     She hugs him around the neck, lifts her leopard-thonged feet off the floor like a princess.

     Neal hugs back, but then holds her at bay to have a look at her. He smells her hair, asks her if she’s been smoking pot.

     She turns away, flops on the couch, all loose and silly.

     ‘No, I haven’t, Dad,’ she says, and she sounds like Dolores Haze.

     He sits next to her, asks her to look him in the eyes.

     Fame refuses, but suddenly turns to him, like a flirt, peepers wide open. Her eyes are pretty bloodshot.

     ‘You like what you see in my eyes, baby?’ she says to Neal.

     Neal says no, he doesn’t like what he sees, because he sees signs of narcotic use. Has she been taking narcotics?

     Even as Neal says this, it’s obvious that Fame is totally in love with him. She pushes her hair behind one ear, smiles.

     ‘Maybe little bit,’ she says in a little girl voice. ‘Tiny, itsy bitsy bit.’

     She giggles. He asks how much.

     ‘Too much,’ she says. She giggles again. ‘Too too muchy.’

     It’s hard to tell if she’s falling hard into the high, or just flirting with Neal.

     Neal looks at you, sitting on the edge of your recliner, and he asks where your kitchen is located.

     ‘Do you want something to drink? I can make lunch,’ you say.

     He shakes his head, says he needs something else.

     While he’s gone, Fame smiles at you, licks her lips, mouths the words outlining something filthy and sensual.

     Neal comes back, holding a bottle of olive oil. He says he hopes you don’t mind, it’s not what he normally uses but he didn’t have time to get the castor oil this time. He sits next to Fame again, who’s reacting poorly to the sight of the bottle.

     She cowers to one corner of the couch, covers her mouth with her black-nailed fingertips, pulls her knees to her chest. She shakes her head, mumbles, ‘Uh uh, Uh uh. No Nealy, no.’

     Neal doesn’t move closer; he stays put, unscrewing the cap, facing Fame.

     He tells Fame, in his own sweet, heavy voice, to come on baby, let’s not get messy, let’s not do this the hard way.

     ‘NoNoNoNoNoNoNo,’ Fame says, shaking her head, covering her mouth, cowering, starting to cry.

     But Neal starts to sing softly, a lullaby that he’s making up on the spot, about opening your mouth wide, taking your medicine like a good little fry. It’s such a good song, so soft and gentle, you want to sing it to your son when he wakes up. You’re sitting there, with your mouth open, trying to will Fame to open hers.

     She likes the song, too. She turns to Neal, smiles.

     ‘I like it when Nealy sings to me,’ she says to him.

     He says he’ll sing to her forever and ever; then, with surprising force, he rams the bottle of olive oil into her mouth, tilts her head back, and empties the thing down her throat. She chokes, struggles a bit, but Neal’s thick hands are much too strong.

     Fame turns the color of olive oil.

     Neal looks at you and says that Fame is like a cat: If you give her something she doesn’t like, she’ll puke up her insides. A moment later, this is clearly illustrated for you. Fame vomits, the olive oil tinted with pink from the half-dissolved pills, about 25 of them, now lying in a grotesque stain on the beige living room carpet.

     Fame starts crying, wiping her face on a throw pillow.

     Neal tells you he’s sorry about that, and he’ll have someone come out and clean it up. He tells Fame to stay put; he walks to the kitchen.

     But Fame uses the opportunity to escape. She runs back to the only place she knows she can be alone: your bathroom. She slams the door, locks it.

     Neal comes out of the kitchen, looks at you, realizes what has happened. He heads for the bathroom, and you follow. On the other side of the door, there’s the sound of running bath water, light thumps of movement.

     Neal speaks softly through the door, tells Fame to come out before she does something silly and makes Nealy sad. He says she doesn’t want to make Nealy sad.

     Nothing.

     He tells you, still calm, that he needs permission to break down your bathroom door. Heart racing, you give him a short nod. He raises his right boot and kicks the door in.

     Fame is lying in the bathtub, fully clothed in the filling water, a needle jabbed in her right arm. She’s practically unconscious.

     Neal moves to her, turns off the water, takes out the needle, puts it in his peacoat pocket. He leans down and lifts Fame out of the water, not caring that his clothes are getting wet.

     She wakes, moans, eyes still closed. She rubs fingers over Neal’s goatee, like a bombing victim who’s blinded by the blast and is trying to identify the face of her rescuer.

     ‘Oh, Neal, baby, I’m sorry,’ Fame says. ‘I did it again. I’m so sorry.’

     Neal walks out of the bathroom with her. You stumble ahead, walking half backward and half frontward. You open the front door for him and follow him out as he carries her. He places Fame in the backseat of his red convertible Lexus, which is backed in the driveway next to your gray 1986 Volvo 240 DL.

     Neal says he’s sorry about all this and, again, he’ll have someone out to clean up. He shakes your hand.

     ‘Why do you think she came over and did this?’ you ask. ‘Am I supposed to be famous?’

     Neal says he doesn’t mean to be rude, just honest: Fame has been doing this lately, showing up at random houses, half high, pretty lost, not really knowing where she’s at, just looking for company.

     Neal says that’s what happened with Kid Rock and Fame. She was finishing a 20-day humdinger of a binge and happened upon his doorstep. No one was there to rescue her.

     Not that you’re Kid Rock, he says. Neal likes your work; he thinks he’s read it somewhere online. But he’s gotta go. He’ll be talking to you.

     Neal jumps in his convertible Lexus without opening the door, peels out of the driveway, maybe heading to the ER, or probably to his farm house where he has lots of lost dogs and a special care unit set up for Fame.

     When you walk back in the house, you’re wondering what you’re going to tell your wife when she gets home from work and sees the puke stain and the broken bathroom door. You’re wondering when your son is going to wake from his nap.

     But mostly, you’re thinking about Neal Pollack and your strange brush with Fame.