Others trickle in during the night. Crooner works for a pop star, and you can tell—he’s got hot-pink hair extensions and glitter nail polish, like he’s ready to be in a music video. Friend is a big older guy who works for a former star of a must-see TV show—Jasmine says he got hired as half assistant and half security. Red works for a fiery comedienne and may as well take the stage herself the way she rants as if she’s doing a one-woman show.
“Clean their closets every week,” Red spills, whipping her large head back and forth so vehemently in an effort to make her point, I’m scared it will snap off her thin neck. “Take their name-brand shit, the good stuff they don’t want anymore, the swag they’ll never use, and sell it at recycled-clothing stores, online, on street corners. It’s like printing money!”
“Always use your personal credit card to make purchases for them and then get their accountant to reimburse you,” Titanic tells me, his sweet face flushing from either the acne or the excitement of talking about low-grade embezzlement. “That way, you get all the credit-card points. Like, I book all of my boss’s private planes with my Visa and now I have 976,000 miles racked up. I’ve also got points for hotels, rental cars, Yogurtland.” He holds up his glass of champagne as if saying, Cheers, but he’s mostly met with blank stares, Titanic not being one of the more popular assistants at our séance, our conjuring of the secrets of the dead-souled living celebrities who help us pay our rent.
“When you order from the personal chef,” Friend says, pulling up on the waistband of his size-36 pants, “always order a little more than the family needs, and then there’s extra for you to take home and you’re eating gourmet cooking for free.”
Their advice, they all give it freely, but they also want to take. They want to know not how I got the job with Kathi Kannon, or even why, but what I’m getting out of it: What’s the pay, what are the hours, what are the perks? They’re like sharks circling my position, as if they think I may not survive, as if they may want a bite if I don’t quite cut it in these first weeks. Hey, Siri, I want them to be wrong.
No one is interested in the minutiae of Kathi Kannon herself. None of these bleary-eyed modern assistants care about the details of her celebrity. They already know the big picture: mansions, money, mess. They get it. The broad strokes are apparently the same at all these jobs. Instead, they want pity, attention, to make sure the hard edges are just soft enough so they can amuse the world with their stories of martyrdom at the hands of beloved cultural rulers (for better or worse), back-dooring compliments as reminders that they’re important, their existence imperative, and they’re ostensibly a coveted arm’s length from the spot the rest of the world would die for: sitting at the right hand of the Holy Star.
Friend grumbles of his employer, “She once asked me to have a water softener installed in the house. I found the best brand. I spent thirty thousand dollars of her money. The next day she told me, ‘Now the water is too soft.’”
West takes another sip of champagne and rats on her boss: “I’ve never seen her drink a glass of water. Never. She pees straight champagne—and the good stuff, not this crap,” she says, with no sense of irony as she guzzles another gulp.
House elbows into the conversation: “I have to go to Whole Foods every day and text my boss pictures of the salad bar so she can pick out exactly which items she wants me to include in her lunch.”
Red, not to be outdone, whips out her tale of martyrdom: “Well, I cook chicken and rice for her dogs to eat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. I feed them; I walk them. They’re so happy to see me on Monday mornings that it makes me think there’s a chance she doesn’t feed them at all over the weekend!”
Crooner stops biting his glitter nails for a moment and shouts, “You get weekends off?! I was getting so many text messages from my boss on my days off—‘What’s the Wi-Fi password?’ ‘Can you unclog a sink?’ ‘Where’s my hair gel?’—I literally just moved into one of his guest rooms. For real. I gave up my apartment, sold my furniture, and now live in a mostly empty wing of his mansion, and I don’t even think he knows I’m there.”
These other assistants, they’re all sharing their horror stories with a slight smile, these weary travelers, who wink to their knowledge that they’re complaining about the weather in paradise, their wallets full and their arms outstretched; I wonder how many of them are like me, wearing bribes from their bosses, little gifts to encourage them to work harder, keep secrets, stay drunk on a gatekeeper’s power. All these people complaining, they’re also in awe of their own lives beside their golden idols. I’m thinking, How much am I like them?
“How do you know what to do all day?” I ask the group.
All these eyes stare at me and all these jaws drop—not with wisdom but with shock.
“No one told you?” West asks.
“Told me what?”
“No one left you an Assistant Bible?” House asks.
“A what?” I wonder aloud, a fool at the bottom of a well.
“An Assistant Bible is a document that tells you everything about your boss,” Jasmine says. “It includes their likes, dislikes, passwords, allergies, medications, important phone numbers, airline frequent-flier miles, rules and policies, et cetera, et cetera. Every time an assistant leaves a job, they hand the Bible down to whoever is replacing them. You don’t have that?”
“No,” I say, playing a victim. “I think I replaced one of her fuck buddies.”
“Work on an Assistant Bible right away,” Crooner says.
“And the rest should be easy,” Red says, bobbing her head so intensely I’m not sure if it’s how she likes to make a point or if it’s a medical condition.
“Easy? Am I missing something?” I ask. “Once I have a list of her passwords, what am I supposed to do all day?”
“These jobs are not about doing,” Jasmine says, touching my knee. “That’s not the hard part. These jobs are about being. Rule number one is simply being there the second they need something. Of course, they want the daily tasks done and whatnot but never at the expense of—nothing is more important than—being there for them.”
Smiles break across all of their faces. They all nod. They are living these tales, these unverifiable tidbits of tawdry, these little living anecdotes who ease the pain of their boss’s celebrity, who dose their famous employers with the cures of commonality, banality, of the everyday.
“Just be there for her, baby. Cheers,” Jasmine says, and this time everyone lifts their drinks.
“Cheers,” I say, shoving my drink toward theirs, and among the ringing of cheap barware a bell goes off inside me. I’m thinking, the thing Kathi wanted while I was trying to eat a cheeseburger and fries at Mickey Fine, the thing I failed to give her that upset her, I now get it. She wanted me to be there. I realize that being, the thing Therapista says is hardest for me to do, is exactly what’s needed at this job. I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that “good things” include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers.