Captains of Industry
You're supposed to play it cool when you meet celebrities. This much I remember from my time in New York. Which was a summer, about six years ago.
I became adept at rapidly averting my eyes, then rocking them back halfway, in case the initial aversion was too obvious, then rocking away, in case my rapid back and forth head movements looked too much like a double-take. This accomplished, I felt safe rolling my head back in the direction of the celebrity and passing them slowly through my field of vision as I, more often than not, inspected a Chase Manhattan Bank façade to their left. Years later, upon meeting Yoko Ono, she told me she was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have any sort of neurological disease that caused my vicious head jerks and apologized for the one particularly earnest attempt to put change in my hat, which happened to be on my head at the time.
Luckily, the rule is, for sisters of a rock star is that you can get insanely drunk, leer at, get chased by their rock star brother's on-loan security guards, and shout taunts about how their "brother's band doesn't really rock, if you know what I mean," which, of course, will sound vapid once you finally sober up and have the good fortune to remember your behavior. Which is what I did.
I met Julie when she was just 19, and I was a strapping young 22. In that caterpillar to butterfly state in which I still ate Ramen noodles for a shocking majority of my meals, spent newly discovered quarters from the recesses of a futon on the value menu at my local fast food joint for a good portion of the other meals I might eat, stayed out all night, and it was a toss up whether I was staying up and out at work (rather than studying or writing papers), or at a club or two. She was the brother of legendary front man of Led Zeppelin, Guido Netzpah.
Now, and by 'now' I mean the present time, I understand that most of the previous sentence is false, and in many different ways. The legendary front man of Led Zeppelin was not Guido Netzpah. And Guido Netzpah, whomever he may be, nor Robert Plant were Julie's brother. Julie was an only child from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, with an overactive imagination. I have reason to believe that isn't true, either, but you can only go so far before you end up like Descartes, and you'll only be famous for something fatuous like "I think, therefore I am," when in reality you were probably a bit deeper than that.
At the time I met her, at the time of the ogling, drunkenness, and taunting, she was the sister of Guido Netzpah, front man of Led Zeppelin in some alternate universe, and, once I found myself sobering up somewhat the next morning huddled in a seat on the "A" line out near Coney Island with her number scrawled on my arm, I called her, because how often is it you get to hang out with the sister of a famous musician?
Going by my track record: not often.
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