61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
These friends of Max's invite us out to East Hampton, and we think, Oh cool. Oh chic. Oh smart. But all anybody talks about there is Lizzie Grubman, that tacky publicist who countered a bouncer's request to remove her dad's Mercedes SUV from a fire lane by yelling "Fuck you, white trash!" before backing up into him and fifteen other patrons of the Conscience Point Inn.
"Oh ghoulish, oh vile, oh low," says Max, which is how one wants one's husband to react to a tale of irresponsible passion and carnage. But me, despite my dutiful expressions of sympathy for her innocent victims, I am one hundred percent turned on by Lizzie's precipitous fall from New York Magazine "Power Girl" to "flack" on the cover of The Post. I want to wallow in her humiliation, sniff it, roll in it. And I know what this hound-dog itch for celebrity scandal makes me: White Tray-ash, tha's whut.
Which is how I suddenly turn into the very person at whom Lizzie hurled that epithet: Scott Conlon. Grubman might not want her clients Britney Spears, Wu Tang Clan or Jay-Z to see her with a "security supervisor" like Scott, but in their sudden-money milieu he's but a twenty-seven million dollar lawsuit shy of equal. In fact Mr. Conlon could easily emerge from his ordeal as the modern analogue of Ewan McGregor's wunderkind in Moulin Rouge — a romantic arriviste with a shabby apartment and an enormous sense of entitlement.
So that's how I picture myself now, only with liver and leg damage from the crash of course. I'm also someone who "continues to vomit," as my lawyer helpfully informed the press. But all that aside, I'm a natural-born love machine who has just "met cute" and now finds himself inside a lavishly appointed piece of architectural whimsy in the shape of an elephant with the courtesan (publicist) that all of Paris (The Hamptons) is mad for (at). Only my love interest is Lizzie Grubman instead of Nicole Kidman, and instead of being in an elephant, we're in Lizzie's new $2.1 million dollar Sixty-First Street apartment that her decorator Ralph Harvard did in blues, "modern country" style. The ceiling of her bedroom, like that of the Pierre at her '95 wedding, is covered in wild smilax dendrobium orchids. I'm stroking her tan and inhaling the scent of her Jennifer Aniston hair and I'm crooning to her about love while planning to ruin all her worldly dreams.
The greatest guy whom you will ever fuck
Is one called Scott you injured with your truck
I sing. And I hold her in my arms tenderly like she was some well-connected but cantankerous coked-out drunk who needed to be packed into a limo to keep her from wiping out in her Daddy's Benz.
And she's responding in spite of herself. She left the scene of carnage "unintentionally" like she says, only because her body has a mind all its own. It's a mind that now pulls her to me like hell on wheels. Her breasts strain to press against my pumped-up pecs. Her hands reach to grip my working-class ass. She's beginning to feel how running over me in that ML-55 was no "accident" as she has claimed, but destiny. Her snooty little cooze wants my self-important sense of injury and my overwrought diction all up inside it, and I feel a song coming on:
Back up to my bumper, Baby.
Slick, Grace Slick. Lizzie's yorkies, Peanut and Crunch, start howling along, which gets her so jiggy she "unintentionally" does back up, floors it fast and hard, and, man, it's like the crash all over again, I'm breaking skin; there's screaming; I'm in, and I feel like I'm in a Cronenberg epic full of gorgeous, sophisticated litigants kinked out in Helmut Newtonesque prosthetics. She's thrashing so hard I think she's going to Bobbit me, so I come in about five seconds and vomit, too, then must apologize: "Aw, I hit the accelerator instead of the brake." ("Pedal error," The New Yorker calls it.) Like she told the Post, "I'm really sorry."
All boo-hooey, she begs me to admit it was all an accident. Her dad's insurance won't cover intentional acts of destiny and she'll be broke because thanks to me she's now dead in the business.
Don't sweat the dead part, I tell her, taking my cue from Moulin Rouge: after I sell the story of our love to the world, you'll end up immortal like Nicole Kidman. Only you'll be perfectly cast.
