I have a skill for magnetizing public figures into my peripheral. Or more likely, I’m just observant. They are everywhere if you open yourself up to spotting a familiar face on a stranger. They are, I believe, simply omens; they have the same effect as angel numbers. “11:11” flashing across a screen must mean the same as spotting Lily Rose Depp on Canal Street.
But really, it’s just that I work in customer service. If you do that for long enough in a neighborhood where the average monthly rent for a one-bed is $5,000, you’re sure to see (quite) a few. Some are random, F-list figures to be thoughtlessly flipped past on Reels. Others are True Stars. And all of them are not as dazzling as you’d imagine. Yes, I have seen many Famous People melt away from the glamor of their image and into their true embodiment as a Regular Person.
That was how I met CL, pretending as if we were the same, that his Normal Human Body actually corresponded equally to mine. As if he was Just Shopping, and I was Just Shopkeeping. As if he wasn’t famous, and I wasn’t a Nobody.
Famous People either feel a great, burning excitement in spotting recognition in your eyes, or they feel a great, burning excitement in the absence of it. It’s impossible, sometimes, to tell which type they’re going to be. I thought CL was the latter. It turns out he may have been the former, so that was my greatest folly in trying to Get Him to Like Me. Apart from my own Bad Acting.
It’s also important to note I have a particular skill for magnetizing someone into Asking Me Out (this is not to mention my other skill for repelling them with a sure swiftness; we’ll get to that later). So when CL mosied his way into The Shop, I figured I’d try to work my Magnetism on him. I was wearing my favorite t-shirt and my hair was particularly voluminous that day. I was basically invincible. And it worked on dear CL, who likely had too much time on his hands between shoots.
We complained about the bankruptcy of the budget gym we both went to. I agreed that the Gucci blazer he tried on wasn’t quite right. He asked me about my art. He asked about my name. First and Last. And I didn’t ask him a thing. You see, I thought he saw that absence of recognition. I thought that, yes, that’s why he told me we should hang out sometime, and handed me his geriatric, undersized iPhone. I typed my number into his contacts amid a blind sense of shock.
I knew I’d have to keep up the Act of Not Knowing Who He Was when he arranged for us to meet the following week. That was the issue. My Magnetism didn’t work out well for me long-term. Not at all.
All the while, I wondered if I’d maybe confused him for someone who looked unbelievably similar to CL. That’s really the thing with Famous People: the sense of uncanniness they hold to their own resemblance. They never quite look like themselves unless they’re on a Big Screen. But when I saw him, looking like Any Regular Boy, leaning against a wall kitty corner from the Bedford-Nostrand G, tote slung over his shoulder. He looked just as he had in his teen years, when I had first seen him onscreen, thinking one day, I too would Come of Age.
Those teen years were probably the pinnacle of his career. He was nominated, back then, for many Major Awards and was a favorite to star in any independent film produced around the inception of A24. He was an Indie Darling. If you Google his name now, one of the first autofill suggestions is: what happened to—? It’s only natural to be assumed obsolete every once in a while. It’s not like he was a Superstar.
As we walked through one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn, he asked me a whole lot about myself. I avoided asking him What He Did. I likely came off badly, given the terrible nerves I had about the whole thing. I seemed bitter and rather uncool, and highly neurotic. (I am possibly all these things, but it’s best not to reveal them all up front.) But eventually, the conversation had turned itself to me for too long, and I was forced to ask him about His Job. And then I felt sure that he must be one of those Famous People who didn’t want to be recognized, because he responded that he was A Dancer. Then after telling me all about his tango classes he admitted that, well, to pay the bills, he was actually An Actor.
He spoke in terms that aligned himself a bit more with me. He was writing a short film. Just a project with a friend. I was curating an art show. Another project with a friend. Except I was doing so in the backwaters of late night coffee shops in Bushwick, and he was doing so in beautiful historic theaters he rented out for the night in Search of Inspiration.
He had gone to St. Anne’s in Brooklyn Heights. Lena Dunham had attended there, he noted while sipping bone broth at the restaurant he took us to (He could sense I was someone who would be impressed by that). I, on the other hand, had gone to public school in Boise, where our most Notable Figure was Miss Teen Idaho: an electric orange wisp of a girl, who trailed an overpowering eau de sweet pea in her wake.
I told him that half my income went toward my rent. He told me: same. I figured it was likely true, given The Cost of Living in Cobble Hill. And it’s not like he’s that famous. (He was only ever nominated for an Oscar.) But he was just famous enough that I desperately, egotistically, hoped someone I knew (for God’s sake) would see us winding our way down Lafayette Avenue.
I told him one of my best stories about jury duty, because I could sense he was someone who would be impressed by that. And he teared up at the part where the defendant took the stand. He is Deeply Empathetic, I thought to myself, like an idiot. Almost crying is likely a common occurrence for someone who pretends to do so for a living. He had me fooled. Whatever his Act was, I was thoroughly convinced. He had been at Sundance Film Festival that same month, premiering a movie that everyone seemed to be watching around the time we got our lunch together (which I avoided at all costs afterward, lest I be reminded of my own poor performance in The Girl You’d Actually Want to Date).
The real difference between us was that he was an Artist Working Full Tme. I was not. He had achieved. I had not. He took trips to California for things like dream workshops. He had a shaman. He had narrowly avoided indoctrination into a wellness cult. He referred to his friends by First and Last Name. He was leaving soon to film a movie with Pamela Anderson. And I was just skirting around the edges of Bushwick, without anyone knowing my work at all, never able to afford the things he didn’t have to think twice about. Even though half our incomes went toward The Cost of Living, his went toward Beautiful, Serene Tree-lined Neighborhoods and Eighteen Dollar Smoothies and Burberry Trenchcoats. Mine went to less exciting places.
I wanted to know what it must feel like to be him. To have the power of a Lifetime of Success. To drink expensive beverages and refer to all my friends by First and Last. Just like anyone else, I wanted to Be Seen. I was probably wrong, I knew, but I figured that if somehow I Was Known, I would then Be Happy; I could pull myself into a form of wholeness through Excellence, or Being Liked. Maybe he too, could understand that. But he could never conceptualize what it was to Not be Successful. He had been so since childhood. And I could Never Understand That.
Maybe that’s why he asked out random girls he met in shops. He craved the opposite of what I did. Maybe he wanted to imagine what it would be like to be A Nobody. To create without money or success or shred of recognition. And I just wanted to fantasize about what it would be like to be Somebody. To be recognized and celebrated. To have An Income and a beautiful apartment in Cobble Hill.
He was only a funnel to something greater. And it’s is not often that you have a chance to be in the company of someone who has that. Hence, the nerves. And my terrible theatrics.
Even though CL is the professional actor here, I was the sorry soul who was putting on the performance, acting as if I had Not a Clue who the person I was eating some half-warmed grain bowl across from was. He probably saw through it. He had the training to do so.
That’s just the double-edged sword of Acting, which was all I knew how to do around anyone I actually liked, pretending as if I was unbothered by any of their stories about their exes and more successful lives. I knew what a fool it would make me to let it show on my face. It was these miscalculations that led me to the wrong places with the wrong people. Like eating at baba cool with CL.
They led me to where I was at the end of lunch: getting an awkward goodbye and clumsy dismissal, as CL gave me, after I had smugly trailed behind him departing the restaurant, exchanging a knowing look with my customer service peers. It led me to gaze with a foolish expectancy toward someone who had likely been bored by all my overly arched questions about Filmmaking. He had eventually caught me in my own lie, when I unthinkingly mentioned how I adored the director AW, and he said: Well, you know I’ve been in his films, right? Oh, I said, acting as if the recognition was just then dawning on me, I thought you looked familiar!
And then he perfectly quoted a line from one of those films, and told me I looked a lot like the character SB, and that he did still email with AW on occasion, and I realized that I had been wrong. He was the type of person who wanted to be recognized. I should have known this by all the mentions of First and Last names, and the videos of him performing dance routines on vast, empty stages in famous auditoriums. I had been playing the wrong part the whole time.
He never texted me again. I was entirely unsurprised. He had given me a glimpse of that thing that was bigger than either of us. And I had given him the grounded understanding that a Shopgirl was just another type of Bad Actor.
And then, a week or so later, amid the depletion of my Failed Performance, he was suddenly everywhere again, acting in a music video for the solo act of One of the Greatest Rock Bands of the Twenty-First Century. And now every time I just want to listen to a soulful song about the length of love, there his image is, reminding me that he is the Real Actor here. I’m just an amateur.
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