Brushes With Fame

On some level, we're all obsessed. It's OK, you can admit it. I can admit it.

I saw Denis Leary walking out of a Burger King near my house.
I saw Imelda Marcos on the Great Wall of China.
I saw Dudley Moore leaving a tube station in London.
I stood in front of the most glorious lamb chop sideburns in all the land at an Avett Brothers show.
My kids' dentist is a roadie for the Avett Brothers.
I see Christopher Walken everywhere. Or maybe it's just my reflection.
I asked the Governor Richard Snelling of Vermont for his autograph at a Black Watch performance when I was 8.
Ditto the Commander of the Black Watch.
I saw Justin Townes Earle walking down the street in front of Pike Place Market, drinking a cup of coffee.
I see Gary Busey everywhere. Or maybe it's just a homeless man.
My dad sat next to Cokie Roberts on a plane and told her all of his thoughts on international politics.
Kylie Minogue tried to "bum a fag" from me at a club in Hong Kong.
A girl at my school who was a year ahead of me dated the drummer from INXS and she dumped him.
I am pretty sure I saw Jim Broadbent getting off the bus the other day.

Did you hear Whitney Houston died?

I went out to lunch with the Chief Lou the other day and there was a giant TV in the middle of the restaurant tuned to CNN. I have never had cable, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that stands for "Cable News Network", no? For some reason, I thought that meant they showed news. While we were waiting for our food, we listened to the coverage of Ms. Houston's death that played on a continuous loop the whole time we were there. It was three days after her death and they had no new information to broadcast, so instead, they interviewed (I am so not making this up) the guy who worked in the gift shop of the hotel where she was staying when she died.

When I go, I want to go out in a blaze of glory. That's what I always tell the Chief Lou. I want a big New Orleans style funeral with parades and dancing and zydeco. What I don't want, however, is some pimpled kid milking his Warholian 15 minutes and saying things like: "Oh, she was so nice and she smiled a lot, but she seemed kind of out of it. You know? Just out of it. I don't have any specific examples, really, it was just a vibe. She may have been a little twitchy and she scratched her nose. You know, out of it."

I don't want the contents of my stomach at my time of death to be of public record. (I can tell you now it will  contain at least one, and probably all, of the following things: refried beans, sushi, hummus, chips and queso, and lots of coffee.) I don't want people to whom I haven't spoken for years to show up and give tearful interviews about "everything she's been through". I don't want theatrically sympathetic people to analyze every bad choice I ever made in my life and  to speculate about whether I was still haunted by something I did in 1986 or not.

I get it. She was a celebrity, so she was "ours". We have this seemingly contradictory passion for celebrities: the tongue-tied idol worship combined with wanting to think of them as one of us. We have access to so much information about personal lives and intrusive photos and gossipy speculation that it seems sometimes we forget that these aren't actually people we know. But these people we worship, they have people in their lives who actually knew them. Who will go through the very real and heartbreaking stages of grief and the adjustment to life on this planet without their loved one. I cannot imagine how that is compounded by Gift Shop Boy and CNN and their hours of idle speculation, multiplied by the tens of thousands of media outlets doing the same thing.

When I go, I want the sales of my collected works to skyrocket. I would love for people to turn up out of nowhere and publicly claim what an impact I had on them in formative years. I want there to be readings in cafes across the land as weepy hipsters mourn my passing. I want fans, and I want them to miss my work when I'm gone. I don't want any of them to act like they knew me. Those are creepy fans.

I would, however, tolerate a sea of flowers and notes and photographs and stuffed animals on the street outside where I lived.