They have a saying in Bethlehem, Montana that you get the celebrities you deserve.
For Oscar, that meant Harvey fricking Keitel in his kitchen that morning, hiding under the table but trying to pretend as if he wasn’t hiding, more like he just happened to be crouching there more or less out of sight. Oscar hated eating breakfast with someone watching, but he’d gotten used to it.
Just last spring one of his buddies had been driven to slaughter his entire heard of sheep with a Sawzall, because Paris Hilton kept following him around trying to convince him to get something done about his teeth.
Oscar remembered his childhood fondly, running around the crick with an overweight Mark Hammil, who usually had alcohol on his breath and never seemed to be having any fun, but would from time to time do one of his Star Wars lines and set Oscar racing through the trees lasering Ewoks and storm troopers alike, it was get out of his way or diiiie.
That afternoon he settled in at the bar for dollar Pabst Tuesdays, and he asked Jillian, the bartender, how she did it. She had somebody different back there with her almost every week, but it was always a mild-mannered b-lister, or maybe a state senator, someone not too squeamish to help out washing glasses at the evening rush.
“You just, you know, you have to open yourself to universe,” she said.
She always said shit like that, and Oscar never had the first idea what she was talking about. But maybe that was why Steve Buscemi was eating pistachios in the back seat of his damn Buick, smacking his lips and flicking shells at the back of his head while he was driving.
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Daniel Heath is a San Francisco playwright.
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