Marilyn Bieber

and Rose McGowan stole all my sunscreen after we broke up.

  “So…” Josephine took a minute to get settled. She needed it seeing as how she practically brought her whole office with her. She placed her tablet, her iPhone and her Steve Madden sunglasses down. Steve Madden. God, maybe I should give her a raise already.

  “Okay…” she took a deep breath before she continued. “You want to hear the latest?”

  “The Devil Has Risen?” I crossed my arms and noticed how her eyes fell to my muscles popping up under my t-shirt. I’d been working out lately - and thank god, now that I was starting to get attention again. At least no one on Twitter had called me fat. Just Creepy Old Man, but not Fat Creepy Old Man.

  “No. MTV wants to do a reality show starring the two of you - they’ve already made an offer.”

  “HUH?”

  She nodded calmly. “Justin’s all for it.”

  “I’m sure Justine is. She wants attention - that’s what all of this is about! I’m the one being

  called creepy.”

  “This could be a chance to rectify yourself,” Josephine was quick to point out.

  “Where would we live?” I asked. Because that was important. “I’m not living in his Barbie Mansion, that’s for sure.”

  “They already have a place picked out.”

  I stared at her for a minute, before I noticed that guy in the blue coat staring over at us. IT WAS 90 DEGREES, WHY WAS HE IN A COAT?

  “I’m going to push him off,” I muttered, nodding at him before Josephine turned to stare at him.

  “You would meet at an undisclosed location,” Josephine remained focused on the topic at hand, turning back around. “And you can talk about things. MTV is already working with what to call the show. Marilyn Mansion is their top pic.

  Really? I couldn’t get over any of this.

  “Anyway, meet and discuss things first,” she again advised.

  “Things? Like what? His penis and t-shirts? I don’t even know why this is happening.”

  “I think it could be a good thing.” Josephine had this positive ring to her tone of voice that personally gave me the creeps.

  4

  Okay so maybe I had a man crush on him, whatever that meant - whatever the difference was between that and me having a crush on someone, I guess because he was a man so okay a MAN crush, but it was hard to see Justin Bieber as a man - I saw him more as a cute squirrel or some kind of weird exotic creature people couldn’t figure out why they liked.

  After my so-called meeting with Josephine, she advised me to go home and pay some attention to my new, poor neglected kitten Rose, and I guess finish organizing my vinyl collection and figure out if I wanted to do this STUPID reality show.

  She also advised me to not let this “get boring” or MTV might decide to cancel the reality show idea altogether. So now this absurd “twitter war” had become some kind of strange responsibility. I felt like I had to take care of it, as well as give Rose attention. I felt like I had two pets now - Rose and that stupid SQUIRREL SQUIRT OF A POP STAR.

  I parked and before I got out of the car, I saw the new disaster that awaited me.

  5

  I had to push the front door of my house hard, so that all the stuff that had collapsed on the floor moved with it and I could actually enter my house. My entire racoon bone and charred wood vinyl shelves had collapsed!! I’d spent seven months putting this thing together. I was just angry over this, until I saw the blood spilled on the floor and my anger turned into complete panic. ROSE!

  I rushed over, but to my relief there was no ball of fur by it, just broken glass because it had been a jar of fake blood and a fake fetus that had broken. My kitten was still alive - although I had no idea where she was at the moment.

  “Oh my god,” I groaned, standing back from the absolute nightmarish mess. Some of my precious vinyl records had broken in half and I was too scared to find out which ones. So many things were broken. Just...this mass thing of a mess I’d worked so hard to put together. Like your rock career, you creepy old man.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”

  I collapsed into the sofa. What a monstrosity. What next? I just sat there, maybe if I just sat there nothing else bad would happen.

  After a while, I found myself in my car again, unable to face the mess. I decided to just drive. It was what my friend Josh Devin always did when life took a big dump on him. He just got in his car and disappeared. Nine Inch Nails-influenced band The Dead Joneses had their fifteen minutes of fame about a decade ago, before Josh Devin simply vanished.

  I ended up in Beverly Hills UGH to talk to Justin Bieber about the stupid reality show. He was sitting in some chair much bigger than him, BUT NOT BIGGER THAN SATAN, and though he looked relaxed, he stood up like he was amped up all of the sudden and about to throw the party of the decade and I was the first to arrive.

  “Yo man, ‘sup.” He gave me a high-five. I was planning on a handshake, but okay. I sat down. Was I sweating?

  He sat back down too, and I had to admit he was even prettier in person. His skin was flawless - I had acne at his age. He was wearing sweatpants. I don’t think he was wearing a shirt, but it was hard to tell beneath the bulky designer jacket that was meant to look like a messy collection of graffiti art.

  “Hey yo man…” Justin seemed like he was about to say a ton of stuff but stopped and gave my assistant a weird look. “She gotta be here?”

  “Uh...uh…” I looked up at Josephine, who looked hurt by Justin’s rude behavior. “No…?” I looked at her and tried to apologize with my eyes, which I was never good at. Then she slipped out of the room.

  The room smelled like champagne and some crazy expensive cologne or maybe fancy deodorant spray men used - like that Axe spray stuff but more expensive. I couldn’t believe how much I liked the scent.

  “Yo I wanted to talk to you about something…” he took a minute to adjust the giant gold chain he was wearing around his neck. “If I can,” he gave what the kids called a Kanye shrug.

  “Uh, sure, the show?”

  “Nah, not that, though we gotta talk about that I guess.” He sounded like he didn’t care about the show, which made me emotional - I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE SHOW.

  “Okay what?”

  “You know that guy that just died, that everyone’s been talking about, you know?” He shrugged and gave me that sweet smile of his before slyly running his finger down the side of his face. “The guy with the makeup.” It was very sexy the way he just did that.

  “David Bowie?” I guessed.

  “That’s it!” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me and gave this cute laugh.

  “So yo, I was thinking about doing a song about him - but I wanna do a song the kids can relate to, you know?” His voice actually got deep just then. Well, deeper. “I wanna call it Yowie, what do you think?” Yowie so it rhymed with Bowie.

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  He stared at me as if no one had said that to him before, but surely…

  “I just think the people that are Bowie fans wouldn’t...get it, and the kids wouldn’t care.”

  “Yeah,” Justin smiled after a minute in response, but I could detect a sadness in his brown eyes.

  “And Yowie actually, if you look it up now, it’s this creature that only eats peanut butter.”

  Justin laughed again, in this cute way that made me want to squeeze him.

  “That’s me sometimes!” He snickered.

  “So maybe you’re the Yowie.”

  I had no idea what I was saying anymore.

  “So anyway, we should discuss…” I moved my tattooed hand around. “The...incident.” Incident? I didn’t know what to call it.

  “Look, I like you, dude, that’s wassup,” he simply stated, tugging on his jacket.

  “I thought you hated me because I didn’t wave back at you?” I said. OH MY GOD WAS HE NOT GOING TO DO THE SHOW NOW? SHOU
LD I HAVE SAID I LIKED HIS BOWIE SONG IDEA EVEN THOUGH IT WAS THE DUMBEST THING EV…

  “I don’t hate you, bro, hate is not in my vocabulary,” his voice was as sweet as icing. “I’m all about the love…” then he did this thing with his hand, beating it against his hard, beautiful chest before holding it up towards the ceiling, but I guess he was gesturing towards something higher. Uh, Heaven, I guess… “Bigger than Satan,” he winked. “I feel you, bro,” he added. “You’re a lost angel. You walk into a place, people notice. Like they would notice Jesus, but Jesus is different, you know what I mean.”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, but people didn’t notice you that night at the club though - was that why you was mad?”

  “No.” Ugh, I wanted to go now. I realized I was folding my hands into tight fists.

  “So MTV wants us to do this show, huh?” He got this childish grin on his face AND FINALLY brought up the show and I was about to say something when he held a hand up for me to wait and he punched a button on the speakerphone. “Yo Annie, I need my medicine.” He sounded so beautiful when he said that, like it was a new song he was writing - no wonder his songs were so popular.

  “Are you sick?” I asked after another long, quiet minute. “Because you need medicine…”

  “Sick yo, yeah.” He nodded and smiled.

  Okay, I’ll just move on.

  But before I could ask my next question, he leaned over the shiny black marble table and shared something.

  “I take Adderall. Anyway, so you wanna live with me? I mean I have crazy parties, yo, but then like some nights I can be chill - I can be real chill, yo.