The Boy From OZ

I live across from Alvarez. New York city is one of those places where everyone lives on top of one another. The rich among the poor. The crazy among the sane. The famous among the not so much so...

I work in television and every once in a while, I get the pleasure and sometimes even the pain of dealing with legit and semi-legit celebs. When I first started out I would get so nervous because I never wanted to look silly or that I was "fazed" by it all. It didn't help that my friends would always text me with questions like, "Is he short like they say?" or "Are her lips fake?" especially when said "celebrity" was in texting distance. But the truth is, it's hard to get nervous when you are working because everyone is so DAMN nice. Not nice because everyone is filled with that celebrity niceness you see during the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony every year, or nice because they make an obscene amount of cash, but rather an over the top niceness towards you because they don't know who the hell you are. For all these celebs know, you wrote the copy they are trying to memorize in their dressing room or you happen to be Ron Howard's niece...It doesn't matter. You could be somebody important(in their mind).

The thing is, whenever I see Alvarez I freak. It's because I only see him in real life. I'm not at work so I don't have business as an excuse to talk. It's just me and my mind and that's a bad combo. I say some pretty stupid stuff on the fly. Hence why I hated improv classes. I always look at the ground but he always manages to give me a friendly, neighborly, "Hey" or "What's Up?". In response, all I can ever muster up is a barely audible, "Humph..."

What's "Humph.." you may ask? Well I don't have a damn clue. I have no idea where it even came from. The best I can come up with, is that it's the dummy's trifecta combo of three words I explain like this...the first word I'm trying to say is, "Hey", then insecurity creeps in, so I switch it to "Ummm", and then realize what an idiot I sound like, so I switch to "Phhh" which is the phonetic beginning of the word "Fuck" that I'm internally screaming, because once again I've managed to sound like a retard in front of Alvarez.

I think I freak inside because I've seen him naked on TV. So when he says something like, "Trash Day, huh?", when I'm trying to swing my plastic trash bag into the can, all I can think about is that time on OZ when he got thrown into solitary naked and started drawing pictures with his poo on the walls of his cell to pass the time. Thoughts like that creep in, and all I'm left with are responses like, "Yeah, trash day, humph..." When what I really want to say is, "You have the cutest butt. Ever."