Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

“Gross! What is this?” I cried.

“What? What?” said Evelyn. “What is WHAT?!?!” She was half pleading, half castigating. You should know that my mother has a hair trigger that allows her to go from calm and cheerful to things-falling-from-the-sky shrieking in the space of a breath.

“Oh, nothing, I guess. I thought something was in the laundry.”

And then we got back to the story of what her friend Harriette did. And again I’d interrupt.

“Gross—what is this stuff? It’s everywhere!” I yelled.

“What is it? What STUFF?!”

“It’s like—squishy and mushy a little, and all over my clothes! Gross!” I amped up the drama. “In the pockets of these pants! Damn! All in this shirt!”

“I don’t understand what that could be! Is that from the laundry detergent?!”

“No—I can’t … I have no idea. GROSS! Wait—it’s like, it’s like a banana.”

“A BANANA!?” she screamed. Now I had her. Full bedlam. It was time for the turn.

“OH! I know what this is from … Oh, gross!” My voice loosened as I began laughing. “Oh, I know.”

“What?! What could that possibly be from?” I’d hooked her. She wanted in.

I sighed. “Oh … I was just at a party the other night and Grac convinced me to put a banana in my pants. So of course I did and I guess when I took the pants off, the banana got into the laundry.”

“GOT into the laundry? Andy? Graciela made you do that?”

“She didn’t MAKE me, Mom … She just—it was funny. Don’t worry about it. Wait ‘til I tell her what happened. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to do all this laundry again…”

There was a long pause. And then: “Andy?”

“What?”

“Be your own man,” my mother said.

“What? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying ‘BE YOUR OWN MAN!’ I’m serious!” And she was.

“Okay, but it was funny, Mom! I mean, you should’ve seen it.”

“Yeah. I bet.”

The laughter in my apartment started the second I hung up the phone. “Be your own man, Andy!” Grac squealed. “Be your own man!”

My mom thought Grac was pulling my strings like a marionette and that on my own I would act with some level of common sense, or even (gasp) judgment. But wait: My whole life, when I was being my own man, or my own boy before that, I was one hundred percent clown. I’ve always loved playing meaningless pranks on my parents, specifically my mom. I don’t even know if “prank” is even the right word. Maybe fibbing? Long-drawn-out elaborate lies?

Once, as a kid, I went to the dinner table and told my parents that Richard Nixon was dead. According to my TV Guide memory, Hart to Hart was on in those days, so Nixon was long out of office, but it still came as a big shock to my parents. “When? How?” they sputtered.

Grac, looking like the cat that ate the canary, with my parents

“This afternoon. I just saw on the news.” I let it go on a few minutes and then told them I was kidding.

“Kidding? I don’t get it,” my mother said. “Is that funny? Do you find that funny?”

“Sort of.” I chuckled.

“How? How is it funny if Richard Nixon died?” She turned to my father. “LOU—do you UNDERSTAND this? Lou?”

I knew it then but I didn’t say. It wasn’t Richard Nixon dying that was funny, it was the notion that I could march in, make up a bold-faced lie, and get a genuine, sometimes horrified, but always true, reaction out of my parents.

When I met Graciela, though, she helped me take it to another level. After all, what kind of fun is being “your own man” when you can conspire with a like-minded accomplice to achieve a higher plane of stupidity?

“Tell them we had sex,” Grac said once. We were smoking pot and trying to think of new ways to disquiet my parents.

“That’s just mean.” Even the gays know which lines aren’t crossed. “It’ll get my dad’s hopes up too much. And you’re already on thin ice with my mom. Too risky.”

“You want another hit?” Grac knew the herb would get us thinking.

“Okay. I know. I’ll tell them I sprained—or broke?—my arm because I was dancing in a tub full of corn oil. And that you told me to do it.”

“Too much of me telling you to do stuff,” reasoned Grac. “I need to be involved but not totally responsible. Especially since you’ve been warned—”

“To be my own man. Okay.”

*   *   *

When your life and job are a little twisted, it’s easy for plots to just appear. “Okay, so I told you that Queerdonna was a no-show at Bank last night,” Grac said on the sixteenth minute of our fourth conversation of the morning. Even though we both had busy jobs, it was amazing how much time we were still able to spend on the phone with each other.

“Yeah, so who’d you get to replace her?” Queerdonna was the three-hundred-pound hairy Madonna impersonator who was just one of the colorful characters in Grac’s life working for Kelly Cutrone.

“Lady Bunny did two numbers. Anyway, Queerdonna came by the office today and thought tonight was the night. And still wanted to get paid even though she missed it, the fat fuck!” And, without missing a beat, Graciela said: “Hey. Tell your parents you’re an Indian.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tell them that you’re convinced you’re, like, an Indian.”

I can guarantee that at that time we weren’t the only two jackasses who still didn’t know you were supposed to say “Native American.”

“Okay … What kind?”

“A Shawnee?”

A scheme was hatched. An ill-advised, politically incorrect scheme. “I’m gonna tell my mom that you introduced me to some guy at a club who looks just like me, and that he’s an Indian. An actual Indian, a Shawnee.” My mind was spinning. “And that, wow, do we really look alike. That’s all I’ll say, but I’ll mention him in a week or so and keep bringing him in and that’s maybe how I’ll eventually be convinced…”

“That you’re a Shawnee, too,” said Graciela.

We put our work aside for much