Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,74

moment forever.

Tara Reid and Her Friend

Also at Spring Break 1999, Tara Reid and Jerry O’Connell joined us to promote their new film Body Shots, which I never got around to seeing and neither did you, but any day spent around a shirtless Jerry O’Connell is a day well spent. This was the Spring Break at which Tara and Carson began their short, intense courtship by Motorola Two-Way Pager; they met on swings as reluctant judges on a morning shoot of a beach Say What? Karaoke, shouting morning-drunk affirmations at each other over a young Joseph Gordon Levitt, who sat in between.

Tara had come down with a friend from Los Angeles, a woman who we guessed was a few years older, not because of her face or body—she had the lineless face and emaciated form of the Los Angeles wannabe fameball; whether she was twenty-five or forty-five was unclear—but because of her eyes. She had the jaded, weary look of one of the dime-a-dance girls in the Pat Benatar “Love Is a Battlefield” video that the Candy Store Boys and I had scrutinized in our youth. We guessed she was around thirty, but, like, a hard thirty. We’d introduce ourselves like “Hi, my name’s Dave,” and she’d just look back at us expressionless, like “What do you want me to do about it?” Since we never got her name, among ourselves we called her Hard Thirty.

Tara and Hard Thirty wanted to be where the cameras were. They’d stumble out from the hotel, still drunk from the night before or getting drunk for the night ahead. They’d spot our camera setup, and they’d run toward us. What they would never do is learn that you can’t really run in high heels on sand, so they’d fall down over and over on the way to us, a Pig Pen cloud of dust and glitter. And then they’d reach us, sand in their mouths and cigarette butts in their hair, and send an intern to Fat Tuesdays to get them daiquiris. (And God help anyone who brought them the wrong flavor. On day three, Hard Thirty accepted a drink—a big one in a two-foot, hot-pink plastic goblet—took a sip, grimaced, and said: “No. Different,” before giving it back to the intern. “Different,” she repeated, in the low, lazy drawl of the day drunk—vocal fry before we had a name for it. Duffrunt. Which I guess meant: “Go get me a different one,” because an intern ran off to get her a new frozen cocktail. No please, no thank you, no Oh, wow, it’s 11:00 a.m. and maybe I shouldn’t be behaving this way, just Duuuuffruuuunt.) But when we would go out at night and kids would take pictures of us, Hard Thirty knew where the camera was, and she would pose: hip flexed, chest out, lips pursed just so. Hard Thirty knew what she was doing.

About a month later, a bunch of us were in the green room, and someone ran in with a copy of the New York Post: “You guys, look at Page Six!” He threw it down on the coffee table, and there she was, in her signature pose, on the step-and-repeat at some museum gala or another. Hard Thirty was a sixteen-year-old heiress and socialite named Paris Hilton.

Mark Wahlberg

I cannot claim to know Mark Wahlberg well, but he would come around the studio a lot, and if we passed each other in the halls, he would pull me aside for a private moment and say: “They payin’ you yet, bro?” I would assure him that they were payin’ me, and he would say: “Good. You got to make sure they payin’ you, bro.” I would say: “Yeah. Yeah, no, I will,” and we would go our separate ways, and then the process would repeat itself three months later when he had something else to promote. I have no idea where he got the idea that I was volunteering at MTV—that I carried myself like someone who absolutely would have worked for free probably had something to do with it—but his concern warmed my heart. Much later, three or four years after I’d left MTV and moved to Los Angeles, I ran into him at Saturday evening Mass, and at the sign of Peace, he leaned into me and whispered: “Yo, they payin’ you yet, bro?” It’s possible that this is just a thing he says to everyone.

Johnny Depp

The 1999 Video Music Awards were held in the Metropolitan Opera House, which