“Carolyne. I am not your boyfriend,” Sam said.
“Oh yeah. You’ve just slept with me about twenty times. What about last time. That hand job at System?”
“You gave someone a hand job at a club?” Cici asked.
“Carolyne. I have a girlfriend,” Sam said.
“She got deported. And now you can’t keep your greedy little hands off me.”
“She’s back,” Sam said. “She’s living in my apartment.”
“You have a girlfriend?” Cici asked.
“You mortify me,” Carolyne said to Sam. “Get out and take your cheap little slut with you.”
“You have a girlfriend?” Cici asked again. She kept repeating it, all the way down the stairs until they were out on the street.
Two weeks later, Carolyne ran into Cici in the bathroom at a club.
“I just wanted to tell you that I saw Sam,” Carolyne said, applying red lipstick. “He got down on his hands and knees and begged me to go back to him. He said I was beyond.”
“Beyond what?” Cici said, pretending to check her mascara in the mirror.
“Did you fool around with him?” Carolyne asked. She snapped the top back on her lipstick.
“No,” Cici said. “I don’t fool around with anybody.”
Sure enough, Carolyne and Cici became best friends.
“I HATE MIAMI”
Carrie met Cici around this time last year at Bowery Bar. Carrie was sitting at one of the booths, it was kind of late and she was kind of fucked up, and this girl bounced over and said stuff like, “You’re my idol” and “You’re so beautiful” and “Where did you get your shoes I love them.” Carrie was flattered. “I want to be your best friend,” Cici said, in a voice that rubbed up against her like a cat. “Can I be your best friend? Please?”
“Now listen, er . . .”
“Cici.”
“Cici,” Carrie said, a little sternly. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been in New York for fifteen years. Fifteen years and . . .”
“Oh,” Cici said, slumping. “But can I call you? I’m going to call you.” And then she bounced over to another table, sat down, turned around, and waved.
A couple of weeks later, Cici called Carrie. “You’ve got to come to Miami with us.”
“I hate Miami. I will never step foot in Miami,” Carrie said. “If you ever call me again and mention Miami, I will hang up.”
“You are just so funny,” Cici said.
In Miami, Cici and Carolyne stayed with some rich-guy friends of Carolyne’s from the University of Texas. On Friday night, they all went out and got drunk, and Cici made out with one of the Texas guys, Dexter. But she got annoyed at him the following night when he followed her around, putting his arm around her, trying to kiss her—like they were a couple or something. “Let’s go upstairs and fool around,” he kept whispering in her ear. Cici didn’t want to, so she sort of started ignoring him, and Dexter stormed out of the house. He came back a couple of hours later with a girl. “Hi y’all,” he said, giving Cici a wave as he passed by the living room on his way upstairs with the girl. The girl gave him a blow job. Then they came downstairs, and Dexter made a great show of writing down her phone number.
Cici ran out of the house screaming and crying just as Carolyne was spinning up the driveway in a rental car. She was also screaming and crying. She’d run into Sam, who just happened to be in Miami as well, and he had wanted her to have a ménage à trois with some blond, stripper bimbo, and when Carolyne said, “Fuck off,” he pushed her down on the sand at South Beach and said, “The only reason I ever went anyplace with you was because we always get our pictures taken at parties.”
PAGE SIX!
Two weeks later, Carolyne ended up in the Post’s “Page Six” gossip column. She went to some party at the Tunnel, and when the doorman wouldn’t let her in, she started screaming at him; he tried to escort her to a cab, she punched him, he wrestled her to the ground, and the next day she made the publisher of the downtown publication she worked for call up the Tunnel and try to get the guy fired, and then she called up “Page Six.” When the item came out, she bought twenty copies of the paper.