Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) Read Online Free PDF Page B

world
    made up of 6 vital souls
    that is the deal i made
    my promise wish prayer
    how selfless people think—say
    no—i know—purely selfish
    life perservers
    each one
    i took 4
    knowing with them i could never drown
    my boy will remember this day
    his two mommies there
    when terror shook all 49 pounds
    soft songs sung
    chances are i would have missed this
    had i not jumped
    i would have been at 30 thousand feet
    hovering speeding across
    to important and validating
    saving strangers righting wrongs
    lay down the cape
    two and 1/2 years now
    i have been back here
    at sea level
    present panicked and plain
    a mom
    with watery eyes
    nodding at the others
    my sisters my friends
    take care of your children
    as i will mine

CHAPTER 4
    Barbara’s Show
    I n the right story, which is not the real story, my first day on
The View
is noteworthy, a grand return to daytime television. In fact, though, I don’t recall much about it. What sticks in my mind are the precursors. I remember Bill Geddie, Barbara Walters’s producer, coming to my apartment in New York City sometime during the summer before the season started. We have a little apartment and Bill is a very tall man, he’s six foot five or something, a big guy, and a Republican. I’d hosted
The View
in the past, when I’d had my own show, so I knew what his politics were. I knew they were different from mine. Sometimes in the past I had even called him on them, in a sort of friendly way, like, “Why are we talking about lip liner when twenty-seven marines were killed in Iraq this week?” And he would say, “Because that’s what we do on this show.”
    So, going in, I knew that we had very different politics, and this was a concern for me. I wanted to meet him first, to talk, and to make sure we could agree on how to make good television. After all, I’d never had a boss before, never in my life, in my career; certainly not in any traditional sense. There’s real freedom in that but also real risk; you’re on your own. No one owns you, and you don’t own anyone. Those days are long gone, and while for the most part I’m grateful at how far I’ve come, how lucky I’ve been, I sometimes miss, or maybe just remember, the days way before I became who I am, the days when I had no worth, and yet, oddly, maybe more worth, because there’s a purity to beginnings, to being unbossed, outside of any contract, your years your own.
    I wondered what it would be like to be part of a team—that’s what
The View
was, after all, a team—and as I wondered these things I recalled other things, the radical aloneness of being eighteen, in a time far before fame. I remember going up and down the East Coast, crisscrossing the country, making my way. Unbossed, radically free, and also alone, I did club after club. I got to know every airport. I’d land in a city and look for the guy with my name on a white sign. He’d drive me to the hotel, or the condo that the nightclub rented for the comics. Those condos, you can’t forget them. They always smelled stale. They always had fridges with one leftover bottle of beer and a devilled egg with someone’s mouth marks on it. Usually, the comic before, who’d been doing the city’s circuit for a few weeks, hadn’t paid the phone bill, and I’d lift the receiver to nothing.
    The condos were lonely, and made more so by the smattering of personal stuff the prior occupants always left behind. I’d find the last actress’ shirt in the closet, belted with sequins, or a used condom. Once I found a wadded up note, which, when I unfolded it said, “
Richard, go left out the drive and keep going straight till you fall from the cliff. Fuck you. Michelle.
” Michelle who?
    But I wasn’t depressed. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I had the sense of making it, doing it on my own, getting as much as $300 a week, which was more than I ever could have asked for. God, the gratefulness. Is it all gone now? I had two credit cards. I rented my own