A l’alta fantasia qui moncò possa,
ma già volgeva il mio disio e
l velle
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa.
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre
stelle
.
— P A R A D I S O, XXXIII. 142–5
EXPLICIT [Tom-Tom]
What’s Your Favorite 
Got In The Bank?*
*www.celebritynetworth.com
Tom-Tom
had a feeling about it in her gut, a feeling she’d grown to trust, an extrasensory feeling about Rikki & The Treasure of Sierra Leone from the beginning. How could she not?
There was no way to ignore the facts—that Rikki shared that battered fosterchild thing with Antwone Fisher, and had even read his memoir (over & over!); that the inspiration for the character Rikki was auditioning to portray was none other than Ishmael Beah, who had visited his middleschool; & that Rikki had thoroughly read/iPod’d Mr. Beah’s book as well. It all amounted to a heavy dose of what Tom-Tom called the propinquity of providence. She was especially convinced of the importance of her seductive ministrations during the making of the video that one day would have hundreds of millions of hits because people would watch the audition tape as an historical document/debut, like they did Bieber’s first youtube or Susan Boyle’s I dreamed a dream. She was certain their juices & commingled ch’i had set the stage for Rikki’s brilliance, even moreso that their coupling was, with direct obliqueness, the actual cause of three outlandish pieces of recent good fortune: 1) Rikki’s “accidental” read-through with Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne; 2) the bizarre, unexpected call from an old friend asking her to take up free residence in an empty, Greek-columned minimanse high atop Mt Olympus; 3) the unheralded arrival of a reality show convention in downtown LA, whose convenient appearance, as if custom-made, presented itself not merely as a gathering of like minds, workshops, hook-ups and industry connects, but as a one-stop casting shop for the washouts & almost-were’s who would form the cornerstone and fountainhead of Tom-Tom’s Big Idea.
. .
What happened with the whole Mt Olympus thing is that Tom-Tom’s friend Cherokee was a hair & makeup gal who Tom-Tom used to run with and Cherokee called out of the blue just like everything lately seemed out of the cosmicorgasmic blue, saying Double T you gotta help me, I’m fucked. For the last 5 yrs Cherokee pretty much exclusively worked for Betty White, Betty wouldn’t let anyone touch her face & hair cept her. Sometimes when her boss was in New York or wherever but not working, Cherokee housesat Ms White’s rundown still very groovy house on Mt Olympus, which was far groovier than Cherokee’s shack in Studio City.
From what Tom-Tom heard, Mt Olympus used to be chichi but was kinda frayed now, counting dope dealers, pimps & MMA/cagefight promoters among its denizens. Its entrance was right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, you turned up the hill on Mt Olympus Drive, took Mt Olympus to Electra, Electra looped into Hercules, then hung a right on Jupiter, a left on Hermès, & you’re there. Betty was on hiatus from that show she did with Valerie Bertinelli, she was in NYC getting ready to come home and suddenly got cast in an Adam Sandler movie shooting in Paris, Spain & Poland. (Boo-yuh!) It kinda sucked not being Betty White. Anyway, for ten fucking weeks Betty’d be flying back and forth to the States, but only to New York, LA was just too far. She bought her pad 40 years ago when the Mount was the spanking new playground of Southland gods, more Trousdale at the time than Trousdale lite (which it quickly became), gone much further to seed in the interim. Betty told Cherokee she probably should have sold it before the bubble, now that would almost be impossible, the truth is she didn’t mean a word of it because she adored that house, it reminded her of a certain lovely time in her life, it was a living museum of nostalgia and gave her a kick plus it wasn’t like she needed the money from a sale. She was frickin rich. According to Cherokee, she didn’t want to do a big makeover on it either, a decision Ms White was positive added 20 years to her life. Plus she liked that whenever her makeup & hair doll housesat, Cherokee made helpful, practical, incremental improvements such as putting in a new water heater or recaulking/resealing bathroom tiles or even just (as Cherokee reported back) walking around with a can of WD40 unsqueaking the squeaks. The thing of it was, Cherokee was now going to have to go with Betty to Europe, the doll was wonderful at making her look wonderful but aside from that, Betty out and out enjoyed her, she raised her spirits and (mysteriously) made her laugh. Kinda like the daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter she never had. The doll was a hoot. Betty had it written into her contract that Cherokee was her doll, they had to pay for her travel, per diem, hotel, all that good stuff. It kinda sucked not being Cherokee.
Cherokee did h&m on Season 3 of Idol and was the only one who even called Tom-Tom when she got kicked off. (Fantasia and Jennifer were such cunts about Tom-Tom’s failed subterfuge, which might even have been looked at in a humorous, forgiving light if they so chose. Clearly TT was coming from a desperate place, and one should always demonstrate compassion for desperate people, but no, they were in full-scheming skeevydiva mode. Tom-Tom never really told anyone except Cherokee but she was happy when Jennifer’s family got killed and she was happy when TMZ said that Fantasia was getting random death threats & hoped she suffered when there was a rumor she made a sextape with a married man, that’s what happens when you think you’re above empathy and treat your peers with ill-respect.) So Cherokee called Tom-Tom after they threw her off A.I. and pursued her because she liked bad girls. They became lovers and running partners, they were all about smack and candyflipping. After 2 years of untold drama (long preceding the arrival of the angel Betty White in her life), Cherokee checked herself into Serenity House, upscale Laurel Canyon rehab, where she commenced to take inventory of her life and compose a long list of those whom she owed amends, Tom-Tom being foremost among them. The h&m doll grew rife with fantasies of red roses and white picket fences, audaciously reaching out & asking Tom-Tom to join her in trudging the road of happy recovery, which amazingly, Tom-Tom audaciously did. Sadly, T2 was asked to leave (before Cherokee even had the chance to make formal amends, and before Tom-Tom began her own 4th Step) for failing a urine test and sleeping with two of the former-patients-turned-counselors, a 27 year-old male & a 62 year-old female, separately but within a 2-hour period. More amazingly and audaciously, Cherokee had remained sober in the 84-odd months since, all of her drug cravings/energy handily refocused on a wild animalistic sexual obsession with TT, which always clouded Cherokee’s already unimpeccable vision, forcing her into a cyclical destructive dance of fight and flight, merging and separation, and who, by bestowing money and favors, manipulated Tom-Tom, at least thought she did, into agreeing/pretending/promising they might really have a future together. And now the gal was going away to be with her Angel, she’d been doing pretty well lately in protecting herself from the madness of her obsession but when the housesitter she arranged for (a friend of Amy Smart) bailed, & there was Cherokee leaving in 36 hours, & knowing Betty would be very unhappy if the house were left empty — it was an emotional thing, as long as she knew someone was staying there Betty was chill — knowing that however gracefully her angel reacted, anything short of a house sit would be a disaster.