“I know that’s not the answer you were looking for,” she says, “but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Danna’s been staying with me for the last six months. She’s been getting run down a lot lately, but with her here, at least I can try to get her to slow down.
When I told Emma that family’s important, I meant it.
If there’s one way in which I’m boringly normal, it’s my attachment to my twin.
“You know,” I tell her, “keep ta
lking to me like that and I’m going to have to ask you to start pitching in around here.”
“What are you talking about?” Danna asks. “I’m the only one that ever does shit around here. You just pop by every once in a while to check your bank account and make life difficult for me. If anything, you should start pitching in around here.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I tell her, “but this is my house.”
“Whatever,” she says. “Look, people are not going to be interested in you every moment of every day you’re an actor. This sort of thing ebbs and flows. After your movie comes out, I bet that you’re going to be swamped with people trying to get close to you. We both knew that taking that extra time between movies was going to make things dip for a little while, but you’re already filming. You just need to get over it. I’ll make a couple of calls and get you set up with a couple of feel-good gigs to get you back in the public eye, since it’s so fucking crucial for you to feel that salty stare moving over your body at all times. Maybe you can christen a boat or something.”
Danna, apart from being my sister, is also my agent.
“I’m telling you, Danna,” I answer, “this wasn’t just ‘we haven’t seen you in a while,’ this was ‘oh hey, you’re that guy who used to be famous.’ I really think my career’s on its way down.”
“Oh, we’re years from that,” Danna says. “With my skills, I should have you working well into your late 30s, possibly your 40s.”
“Thanks,” I tell her. “You’re really giving me a long career to look forward to.”
“Well, I hear that a lot of women go through menopause in their 40s, and I think it wouldn’t be fair to you to make you work during the big change,” she says.
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to process when a woman calls a man a woman?” I ask. “You’re using your own gender as something derogatory.”
“Don’t care,” Danna says. “What you need to do is quit being scared of every little thing. This is going to be Emma Roxy’s breakout movie, and I know how you pout when you’re not the big dick on campus—”
“Seriously?” I interrupt.
“Don’t worry about that, though,” she says. “You should be able to ride her coattails all the way to your next film.”
“You’re not helping,” I tell her.
“I didn’t think I was,” she says. “I was just trying to get through your little bitch session so we could get back to more important things.”
“You’re my agent,” I tell her. “What am I supposed to do?”
She says, “If it was something we could do anything about—even if it was something we couldn’t change, but was an actual problem—I would jump right in and cheer you up, but you’re throwing a fit because people who were at a TV station for someone other than you didn’t immediately drop their drawers when you came into the room. I’m just trying to decide whether it’s more annoying or more pathetic.”
As twins, Danna and I have always been close, but we’ve never been the ones that make up their own language or wash each other’s hair or anything like that.
For all intents and purposes, Danna is just another sibling trying to tell me how to run my career.
Okay, she’s also my agent, and thus actually has the right and responsibility to do that, but still, it gets frustrating.
“I’m going to go grab the mail,” she says. “You stay in here and think of ways to hide the fact that you’ve got a big vagina or turn it into a promotional thing.”
She leaves the room, and I’m just irritated.
I got Nick the autographs, but the confusion and hesitantly uttered thank you hardly brightened my mood at all.
I can see the end coming, but I don’t know when or how it’s going to happen.
There was never any misconception on my part that I’d end up one of those lifelong actors who’s doing their thing on the screen until they’re dead. No, unless I die in the next few years, I’m going to live a good portion of the rest of my life as an ex-celebrity.