When my phone rang, I turned up the TV and pretended that I didn’t have a phone. I figured that if the people at the Real World were finally calling me back after I applied several months ago, they’d have to send a banner plane, messenger plane or something else drastic to win back my affections.
They’d have to beg me, crying, “Justin! We need you to run wild and look pretty on our hit MTV show that’s popular among that tricky 18-34 demographic.”
Unfortunately, they didn’t beg or cry, and believe it or not, it wasn’t even them calling my phone.
“So, how’s your summer been, baby-boo?” boomed the voice of my friend Erl. “Been running wild and looking pretty?”
“Too wild!” I lied before hanging up to “answer the doorbell.”
The truth was too agonizing to mention, and I had to remove myself from her scrutiny before I cracked.
While only a few seconds before I was guzzling down Midnight Potions like water at The Dungeon, grinding on everything like an oversexed lizard, I now spent my days and nights running wild and looking pretty with Angela Lansbury.
For two-hour blocks everyday, I sat like a slave on my grandmother’s couch watching “Murder, She Wrote,” unable to go to the kitchen to grab grapes, lest I miss a clue, or worse, miss a witty line muttered by Lansbury’s character, Jessica Fletcher.
Jessica is the show’s only character: a geriatric mystery writer who is followed by murder as she travels the country promoting her books. While women a quarter of her age would cower at the crime scene, Jessica paws through the evidence with purpose, blessed with the superhuman power to solve mysteries in an hour.
She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it. To Jessica, crime is a game, and she wins every time.
After a few weeks – rather, a few minutes – of crime solving, my grandmother and I began referring to Jessica as if we were her assistants.
“I don’t think the wife’s telling the truth, Jessica.”
“Jessica, check the post office again.”
“Oh, Jessica, don’t threaten me with a good time.”
But she did threaten me with a good time. And I took that threat.
I was an addict. I couldn’t do anything else; there was a “Murder, She Wrote” marathon on the Hallmark Channel.
I refused to abandon Jessica until my friend Caywood demanded that I return to Bourbon Street.
Like a true addict, I abandoned one addiction and embraced another. I had a cigarette in the left and a drink in the right, a Cheshire cat grin plastered on my face and was grinding like an oversexed lizard.
I was on the dance floor when I had an epiphany as NOPD pushed me out of the way to head upstairs. While I found out later that they were only tending to an overdosed girl, at the time I thought that if a mystery was to be found there, Jessica and I would solve it.
