The Game

arrived, along with a prospective manager for Courtney and a stylist.
    “I can’t work with her anymore,” the stylist said when it became clear that Courtney wouldn’t be showing up in time for the shoot. “Ever since she’s been doing drugs, she’s become a nightmare to deal with.”
    We hadn’t seen any evidence of drugs in the house, but considering Courtney’s erratic behavior, perhaps Project Hollywood hadn’t kept her away from them as she had hoped. I felt bad for her. She was allowing the problems of the house to distract her from the real-life issues she should have been dealing with. Perhaps we all were.
    I awoke that night to see Courtney standing at the foot of my bed with a Prada shoe in her hand.
    “Let’s redecorate the house,” she said excitedly. “This will be our hammer.”
    I looked at the clock. It was 2:20 A.M.
    “Do you have any nails or tacks?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she ran downstairs and returned with a box of nails, a framed painting for my wall, a throw pillow for my bed, and a smashed pink box that looked like an old Valentine’s Day present.
    “This is the heart-shaped box,” she said. “I want you to have it.”
    She picked up my guitar, sat on the edge of my bed, and played my favorite country song, “Long Black Veil.”
    “I’m going to a friend’s birthday party tomorrow night at Forbidden City,” she said, dropping the guitar to the floor. “I want you to come too. It’ll be good for us to get out of the house together.”
    “I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you there.” I knew how long she could take to get ready.
    “Okay. I’ll go with Lisa.”
    “Speaking of Lisa,” I said. “There were a bunch of people waiting for you here today and you were nowhere to be found. I think they’re pretty upset.”
    Her face clouded, her lips puckered, and tears dripped from her eyes. “I’m going to get help,” she said. “I promise.”

I wore a white blazer over a black shirt emblazoned with a scrolling bank of LCD lights that could be programmed with a message. I input the words “Kill me.” I hadn’t been out sarging in at least a month and wanted the attention. My expectations for Courtney showing up to Forbidden City were low, so I brought Herbal along as a wing.
    We had recently flown to Houston together to pick up the Project Hollywood limousine, a 1998 ten-passenger stretch Cadillac Herbal had found on eBay. Flush with the success of that scheme, Herbal had, against our better judgment, put down a deposit to buy a wallaby at an exotic pets website. On the way to the party, we argued about the practicality and humanity of having a baby marsupial in the house.
    “They make the best pets,” he insisted. “They’re like house-trained kangaroos. They sleep with you, they bathe with you, and you can take them for walks by holding their tail.”
    The last thing we needed was a wallaby in the mix at Project Hollywood. The only bright side to the fiasco was that it made for a great opener. We ran around the party asking everyone for their opinion on having wallabies as pets. Between the opener and my shirt, within a half hour we were surrounded by women. It felt good to flex our skills again. We’d been so absorbed by the drama of the house that we had forgotten the reason we’d moved there in the first place.
    As a tall, stoop-shouldered girl who claimed to be a model pawed at my shirt, I saw a mane of bleached-blonde hair sticking up out of the crowd. I looked closer. Though she was on the other side of the room, she seemed to glow. Her jaw was set, her face was chiseled, her eyes smoldered beneath a half-shell of heavy blue eye shadow. It was Courtney’s guitarist, Lisa. Next to her, all the wanna-be models and actresses I had been talking to seemed insignificant. She dwarfed them with her style and poise.
    I excused myself and ran up to her.
    “Where’s Courtney?” I asked.
    “She was taking too long to get ready. So I came alone.”
    “I respect a person who isn’t afraid to show up at a party alone.”
    “I am the party,” she said, without blinking or smiling. I think she was serious.
    For the entire night, Lisa and I sat side-by-side in a chair, the most peacocked couple in the room. The party seemed to come to us, as if we exerted some sort of gravitational pull together. The couches around us soon filled with models, comedians, reality TV has-beens, and Dennis Rodman. When the various women I had talked to