caitraft:

Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala
A Short Story by Cait Raft

Kim Kardashian sat on a toilet in the 2nd story bathroom of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and cried. She liked to take photos of herself crying. There was something about the way her tears rolled down her face. ”People think I’m ugly…

Adam Levine lay in bed at 2:30 AM as his roommate, Gene, screamed in the living room. Gene had broken a glass and couldn’t find the broom. Adam and Gene didn’t have a broom. Gene didn’t know this because Gene was drunk. Adam could get up and help him but Adam could also do a lot of things. He rolled over and hugged his pillow tight to his chest. Adam had smoked a joint and watched a few episodes of Saturday Night Live earlier but he stopped a few hours ago feeling that he really ought to go to sleep. The problem was Adam couldn’t sleep. It had been a long time since Adam had slept without the aid of booze and Xanax. He was trying to get into better habits. So, tonight Adam lay awake regretting smoking weed, wondering why he smoked weed in the first place, because all it did was make him uncomfortable in his own skin.

Adam often wondered why the socially acceptable form of courtship was going to an overpriced bar and having a few drinks with a stranger as they assessed if they wanted to bang each other or not. Sometimes a girl would say something Adam didn’t like such as “Why would you want to drink a 40 on your porch?” or “I love the website College Humor!” and Adam would immediately dismiss them. He told himself that not everyone could be like him but deep down he wondered: why couldn’t they?

Adam wished he could get to know a girl without the pressure of sex and intimacy. Adam couldn’t face rejection in any form. Adam got upset when girls he didn’t even like in the first place rejected him. It sent him in a tailspin of calling them at 5 AM until they broke under his overwhelming fame. Adam genuinely felt that everyone ought to like him and if they didn’t he would make them like him. This was how he woke up in bed next to some model named Irina last night with a pounding headache and a profound sense of remorse.

Adam had read in a fucking gossip magazine of all places that Miranda Lambert had told Blake that he was a “bad influence” and that Usher was a “great role model.” He knew it was probably a lie but Miranda was such a horrible bitch that it might be true. Adam liked to think he had a good head on his shoulders. So what if he and Blake sometimes snorted ADHD medication before the battle round episodes of The Voice? Who didn’t? He had to keep on his toes and he had a disease, okay? He and Blake were prescribed to ADHD medication. So what if he wasn’t technically supposed to snort it. You only live once. Miranda was just a judgmental whore. He hated having dinner with her because after his second glass of wine she would go “Oh! Another? Really? Don’t you have to drive home, Adam?” Adam was a fucking millionaire. He’d call a car if he had too much to drink. Jesus fucking Christ. If there was something Adam couldn’t stand it was when people were passive aggressive. Usher a great role model? Usher had fucked every single intern on the show and insisted he shouldn’t have to wear a condom because it felt like “slapping a Big Mac wrapper on his dick.”

Gene was calling Adam’s name now. He had just been in the bathroom vomiting up the nice French meal Adam had treated them to earlier. Adam lay motionless in his bed feigning the deepest sleep he could muster. If he got out of bed he knew he would never go back to sleep and Adam detested the thoughts he had after 2 AM. After he was sure Gene was passed out on the bathroom floor he opened his laptop and navigated to the “Adam Levine is so hot” facebook page and flipped through various pictures of himself shirtless. At least somebody loved him unconditionally.

This is what happens when it hits 5:30 PM on weekdays.

My first crush was Jeremy Irons in Die Hard 3. I remember watching it over and over again as a 10 - 12 year-old on a tiny TV on my way to Arkansas. It was only years later I found out he’s definitely supposed to be some Nazi villain in Die Hard 3.

Adam Levine liked watching teen cam girls because he liked the little teen objects in their bedrooms. He liked the neon bras hanging over the backs of chairs and pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal cut out of magazines taped on their bureau. He liked the half-eaten burritos sitting abandoned on the desk next to their shitty laptops. He liked watching a life in motion more than he liked watching pixelated girls twerk poorly to obscure Ace Hood songs.

It had been a long day. Adam went to work, smoked weed and said things on TV that made absolutely no sense but nobody called him out on it so it didn’t really matter. He sometimes played a game with himself where he would purposely spout non-sequiters to see how long it would take for Carson Daly to stop him.

Adam sat up in bed. He had been watching a British TV drama about people who couldn’t be together because of tragic, heart-breaking reasons. He hadn’t had sex in a month. He could feel the blood churning beneath his paper-thin skin. He wanted to sleep beside someone at night. He fantasized about perfect women meeting his parents and having to answer a slew of Spanish Inquisition questions from his mom. He also fantasized about having sex with one of the interns at NBC. He would push her up against the wall of the private unisex bathroom and shove his hand up her shirt. He wanted to fuck someone forbidden. He hugged his pillow to his body. He wanted to do something. He snap-chatted a picture of his balls to CeeLo Green to see if that would help cheer him up. It didn’t. 

He took a swig of nyquill and a swig of tussin. He had a cough that wouldn’t quit so he rationalized abusing over the counter drugs as self-medication. Plus, he had ran out of Promethezine and was too lazy to call Josue and get more. It was easy to send his bitchy assistant to Duane Reade. She gave him a Look when he did drugs. He would fuck her too if she wasn’t such a judgmental cunt. She made him want to take a shower. He closed his Mac Book Pro and laid down on his side. He enjoyed the peaceful lapse of time between being sober and the horrifying half-conscious dreams the nyquill wouldn’t let him wake up from. He deserved to be unhappy.

“I really need to have sex right now,” Adam Levine said as he watched Maria, his elderly Venezuelan maid, scrub the dried vomit off his fireplace. “It’s been too long.” Adam put out his cigarette and sat for a long time, thinking about nothing.

Adam Levine was lying down on a California King in Cabo San Lucas. He was sipping Patron out of the bottle and watching reruns of The Voice. Caroline Glaser was singing and Adam didn’t turn his chair around.

“You fucking idiot,” he said aloud, “Look at those blowjob lips!” Adam knocked over a plate of egg rolls as he swung out of bed. He was surrounded by half-eaten plates of room service. He thought he couldn’t decide on what to eat but after some under-cooked Chicken Quesadillas he decided that it wasn’t his indecision that made him re-order plates and plates of food, it was just that this food fucking sucked. He had called the fifteen year-old concierge and told her that multiple times. He had screamed and screamed at her until she wept but that was hours ago and it was just a vague memory now.

Adam stepped out onto the balcony of his bungalow and watched the many lights of boats dotting the horizon. They must be fishing boats making their morning runs. He remembered what Blake and Shakira had said when he told them he was going to Cabo this weekend. Blake scoffed and asked “Why are you always going out of town, Adam?” Adam wanted to tell Blake to go fuck himself. He went out of town because he was rich and famous and he could do whatever he wanted. He never said that though. He just laughed and said it was for his fragrance  or he was taking a special lady out. Adam had no special lady and he could give a shit about his goddamn fragrance  Women wanted to fuck him but he wasn’t interested anymore. He remembered Jane and the way they’d smoke weed in his shitty apartment in Echo Park and watch episodes of Gilmore Girls. She’d laugh until she cried and he would put his arm around her and kiss her hair. He loved the way her shoulders shook when she laughed. He couldn’t think about that now though. Jane was gone and Adam was famous. Now his weekends consisted of doing cocaine in club bathrooms with vacant looking supermodels. It had its perks but he missed feeling warm inside.

Adam didn’t want to tell Blake that he went on vacation all the time because he was so profoundly lonely. Adam felt like he didn’t particularly like anyone in LA. He liked strangers. He liked shooting the shit with young people who worked for NGOs in dour hotel bars. He hated that Blake teased him though. It made Adam feel like he didn’t have a home. Adam sometimes worried he liked traveling so much because he couldn’t commit to one person, one home, one job. Adam supposed he technically had two homes. One in Beverly Hills and one in Hollywood Hills. Why did he have two homes in the same fucking city? He wanted to find somewhere real: a place where he felt comfortable, but Adam was afraid that place didn’t exist. Adam hit a bowl of weed laced with the tiniest hint of PCP. He had to remind himself that it was the drugs that made him rethink his life and thats not what he really thought when was sober. He stared at the boats receding in the gloomy pre-dawn mist. He hoped that was true at least.

red-band:

Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, was accosted by topless protestors in Germany and made an EXCELLENT face because Putin doesn’t give a fuck. Here’s the equally hilarious thing he had to say on the matter:

“Regarding this performance, I liked it,” grinned Putin at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, adding that it had helped to promote the trade fair though he suggested that the security men could have been “gentler”.

“I did not catch what they were shouting, I did not even see if they were blondes, brunettes or chestnut-haired … I don’t see anything terrible in (the protest), though I think … it is better to be dressed if one wants to discuss political matters.”

LiKE A BOSS. Putin: the man, the myth, the legend. Watch a video of the entire topless extravaganza here.

Adam Levine sat in the greenroom of The Voice hours after the last interns had gone home. He changed white t-shirts until he felt comfortable. Sometimes, late at night he would stumble out of bed. Leaving Amanda or Anne or Behati or whoever and step into his large, granite shower. He’d turn the heat up until it hurt to stand there and stare down at his dick. He’d pull it this way and that. Would it look any different if he was sick? Adam’s therapist told him that he didn’t really have an STD, that it was just society telling him he should have one because Adam slept with a lot of models. What Adam didn’t tell his therapist, though, was just how many models he slept with. He slept with more than a lot of models. He had lost count of the women (and sometimes men) he slept with years ago.

From the beginning of The Voice alone it had to be over 5,000. The entire concept of The Voice gave Adam the opportunity to gather several desperate, fame-hungry women together and “coach” them. Oh, Adam “coached” them alright. He “coached” on how to suck his dick. Don’t worry, Adam already hated himself.

He stayed up and read the Reddit subthread where people posted pictures of ingrown hairs and asked if it was herpes. Adam had a skin-tag on one of his balls. Was it actually herpes? The skin-tag didn’t hurt or swell but some women mentioned it’s existence. Once they did he threw them out of his mansion at 5 AM without cab money or their cell phones. Adam hated that his own body was a mystery to him. He could be walking around with HIV all day and not even know it. The feeling he might have an incurable disease would make Adam curl into a ball and cry on the white tile surrounding his indoor hot tub. Afterwards,  he would watch Oscar acceptance speeches to make himself feel better. Three 6 Mafia’s cheered him up. If things got really awful— he’d watch reruns of the first season of The Voice. Rebecca Loebe did this great thing with her tongue. Adam was a huge fan.

Sometimes he felt a tight, balled-up fist where his heart should be. He has come to recognize that feeling was crippling loneliness. What did it matter if America loved him if he didn’t love himself? These are the things he thought lying in the green room of The Voice late at night. He took four sleeping pills and rolled over. Whatever.