Every time I try to order a drink at a bar, I have to wait at least twenty minutes, sweating it out over whether someone is going to cut in front of me, forcing me to suck it up or, sometimes, to abandon that spot in agonizing defeat and go to another part of the bar and start all over. My greatest fear is I’ll stand up for myself and yell, “I’m next!” and then get beaten up. But, Bruce thrives with utter ease, endless confidence. I hate him.
Moments later, Truth in hand, I’m heading through a crowd of drunks, Bruce leading the way and turning back to me now and then to fill me in: “The so-called Assistants Club is less a club and more like an endless email chain,” Bruce says. “It’s basically like thirty or forty email forwards in front of the subject line, because whenever an assistant sends some request, everyone just replies to the same old thread.”
“What do you email about?”
“Whatever you need, bro. Like, ‘Any recommendations for a high-end stereo-system tech?’ Or, ‘Who do you guys use for at-home tailoring?’ Or, ‘Where’s the best spot for an abortion?’ You get it. The email chain dates back years—a veritable Yelp for the best colonics, caterers, cocaine. Everyone’s on it, new assistants, old assistants, dead assistants.”
I stumble my way past a table of drunk Hollywood types—a lady wearing sunglasses inside, a man wearing a scarf with a short-sleeve T-shirt.
“Yesterday,” Bruce says, “I opened my email to one that read, ‘Who wants to have work drinks with Kathi Kannon’s new assistant?’ I was like, Yeah, my boy!”
We pass the kitchen, the bathrooms, and slip into a back room decorated with black fabric walls and polished brass sconces casting a golden glow upon everyone inside. The crowd is waist deep in conversation and neck-high in alcohol.
“Time to revel,” Bruce says, putting his arm around me, spilling some of his drink on my pants. “Time to recover from the salacious thing that binds us, the common thread that links all of us together, which is not so much having famous or powerful bosses but being fucked by them every day, amirite?!”
“What?” I ask, wiggling out of his half hug.
“Not literally—” he starts, his face turning sour that I’m not following his every bro-ism.
“Baby!” Jasmine yells, approaching me from behind. “Don’t talk to Bruce too long. You know, he’s an executive assistant, so he thinks he’s better than you. Come.” She pulls me from him. He waves goodbye easily, knowing I’ll be back, that he’s curated himself an orbit. Beautiful people, they’re never really alone. Truth.
“Who needs him anyway,” she says, she lies.
“Yeah. Him and his talk about silt and all that, right?”
“What the fuck is silt?” Jasmine asks.
“Oh. Oh, nothing.”
Jasmine takes me to the only corner of the room—the other walls are rounded—leaving us at the point of a teardrop. We sit on a crushed-velvet oversized sofa, crushed by what—big Hollywood deals, first loves, breakups? We’re shoulder to shoulder as she whispers into my ear all the dirty details of the many members of this secret club, zeroing in on her targets like a sniper and popping off shots of critical information about each assistant and, more important, about each assistant’s employer. Jasmine points brazenly to this one and that: a guy carrying two drinks, a woman with an Hermès scarf, a bro in a suit jacket with shorts. She flicks her hands and rolls her eyes, commenting on each of them while they’re just feet away, though it could be inches—it doesn’t matter; they’re all in their own networking universe.
“That’s West,” Jasmine says, pointing to a dowdy brunette wearing a man’s sport coat and nursing a flute of champagne. Her body is actually shaped a bit like a W, her torso thick and her arms long and thin. “Her boss is an iconic singer with an even more famous drinking problem. And this singer, she actually hired an assistant on each coast, but she can’t remember their names so she just calls them East and West. West loves being a posh assistant. She only drinks champagne. She’s a lifer.”
“A lifer?” I ask.
“West will be an assistant forever. It’s her calling.” Jasmine turns to another curved section of the room, pointing her chin at a guy wearing all white. “He doesn’t want to be a lifer but probably will be. We call him House. He was hired by a certain divorced Real Housewife, who really can’t afford an assistant. So this so-called Housewife, she uses her kids’ child support to pay his salary.” I look at House and his brand-new white sneakers, which match his white belt and the white bandanna tied around his neck. “That drink House is drinking is paid for by money intended for two cute kids’ school supplies, sports equipment, class field trips.”
Shaking her head, looking at a dimly lit twenty-something across the room, Jasmine says, “We call him Titanic, that guy over there, swathed in Gucci and acne. His boss was a big teen heartthrob. Titanic got hired because, with all that acne, he won’t steal women from the boss, and the Gucci is all from the boss’s scraps. Also, Titanic’s boss, he only hires male assistants who are his exact same size. This way, the assistant can be a perfect stand-in during dreaded wardrobe fittings or shopping sprees. Titanic also shares the boss’s sense of smugness and entitlement, if you ask me.”
Turning to the right, Jasmine points fearlessly to a woman in a wheelchair. “She was hired by an aging handsome leading man who is now a leading has-been, a former James Bond type. The rumor is he wanted a physically disabled assistant to soften his celebrity image, to make him look kind, but then he had to hire another assistant to assist the wheelchaired assistant, and now it’s a living sudoku of who’s carrying the luggage to the car, does the limo have a handicapped lift, who’s making sure the red carpet has a ramp?” Jasmine shakes her head. “Both assistants are here tonight, one occasionally rolling the other across the room. It’s nuts, but they’re nice. We call them Bond 1 and Bond 2.”
The crowd of assistants lingers and sways back and forth like seaweed in a current, like a palm tree farm in a strong wind. Besides personal assistants, there are executive assistants here, as well, but they don’t sway like the others. They’re sturdy and grounded, or look that way. “The assholes,” Jasmine calls them. “You already know Bruce. The other assholes you can identify by their suits.”
Clustered with Bruce are a couple other guys and one lady, all in some version of navy with loud shoes—loud not from color but from the click-clack they make while crossing the bar.
“That guy works for the head of a failing studio,” Jasmine explains. “The other guy assists an attorney for famous rapists. And the woman is an assistant to a top agent at you-know-where.”
“No,” I say, “I really don’t.”
“Very good,” Jasmine says, winking.
“No, no,” I say. “I have no idea. I studied journalism in college.”
“Guys!” Jasmine yells. “Come meet our new baby!” She stands and motions toward me. I stand, and I brace myself as a sea of greedy faces approach to see what my life may yield for them.
They all come at me at once, these assistants, my new teammates, jutting out their arms for handshakes or fist bumps. I hardly catch any of their real names, not that it matters. All of them go by some twisted version of their employment, all of them strangely, proudly using their nicknames, their Hollywood identities—maybe the only identities that matter—West, Titanic, House, Bond 1, Bond 2.