The Game

he never leaves his bed. What’s the point?”
    He’d say, “She never shuts up. She’s constantly yapping about something pointless and bouncing off the walls.”
    She’d say, “I’m getting wasted every night because I don’t want to be in a reality that’s so sad.”
    Mystery needed a more passive girl. Katya needed a more active man. And it saddened the rest of us; after living in a house full of men for so many months, we’d grown attached to her positive energy and high spirits.
    Mystery had taught himself everything there was to know about pickup, but nothing about how to maintain a relationship. He had this beautiful creature, full of sparkle and life, and he was just throwing it away.
    Soon, another woman, with a very different kind of sparkle, would move into Project Hollywood.
    I received the text message at 11:39 P.M.: “Can I stay at yr house? They repoed the car and worse. U don’t wanna know. Need to not be alone.”
    It was Courtney Love.

I knocked on the door of Courtney’s corporate apartment in West Los Angeles.
    “Come in. It’s open.”
    Courtney sat on the floor in the middle of a sea of American Express bills and bank statements with a yellow highlighter in her hand. She wore a black Marc Jacobs dress with buttons running down the side. One was missing
    “I can’t look at these anymore,” she moaned. “There are so many loans here that I never knew of or approved.”
    She stood up and slammed an American Express bill on the table. Half the items were highlighted, with notes in black ink scribbled in the margins. “If I stay here, I’ll do drugs again,” she cried.
    She didn’t have a manager, and taking care of her own affairs was proving to be more than she could handle.
    “I don’t want to be alone,” she begged. “I need somewhere to stay for a couple days. Then I’ll be out of your hair. I promise.”
    “That’s fine.” I guess she didn’t have a problem with the story I’d written in Rolling Stone. “Herbal said you could sleep in his room. I just want to warn you, though, that you’re not going into an ordinary house.”
    “I know. I want to meet the pickup artists. Maybe they can help me.”
    I walked her downstairs and strapped her sixty-pound suitcase to the luggage rack on the back of my Corvette.
    “You should also know that Katya’s brother is staying with us,” I said. “And if he seems a little off, it’s because he has Tourette’s.”
    “Is that like when you yell ‘Shit! Balls!’ uncontrollably?”
    “Yeah. It’s sort of like that.”
    I parked in the garage and dragged her suitcase upstairs to the house. The first person we saw inside was Herbal, who was coming out of the kitchen.
    “Hi shit balls,” Courtney said to him.
    “No,” I told her. “That’s not Katya’s brother.”
    Her brother walked out of the kitchen a moment later, sipping a Coke.
    “Hi shit balls,” Courtney said to him.
    She took a step backward and stepped on Lily, who yelped loudly. Courtney turned around. I assumed she was going to apologize.
    “Fuck off,” she told the dog.
    This was going to be an interesting couple of days.
    I showed her around the house and then bid her goodnight. Two minutes later, she marched into my room.
    “I need a toothbrush,” she said as she breezed through to my bathroom.
    “There’s a clean one in the medicine cabinet,” I yelled after her.
    “This will do,” she snapped back, grabbing my gnarly used toothbrush off the sink.
    There was something endearing about her. She possessed a trait nearly every pickup artist desired but lacked: She just didn’t give a fuck.
    The next morning, I came downstairs to find her in the living room, smoking a cigarette and wearing nothing but a pair of expensive Japanese silk panties. Her body was covered with black marks, as if she’d been rolling around in charcoal.
    In that state of dishabille, she met the rest of the house.
    “I used to ride horses with your dad,” Papa told her when I introduced them.
    Courtney scowled. “If you call that man my father again, I’ll punch you in the face!”
    She wasn’t trying to be mean—she just lived in and reacted to the moment—but Papa didn’t take well to aggression. All Papa had wanted from the day he’d signed the lease to Project Hollywood was to hang out with celebrities. But now that he was living with one—in fact, the most notorious woman in the country at the time—he was petrified of her. He avoided her from that