During the day, Sarah Tressler works as a society reporter for the Houston Chronicle. By night, she’s a stripper. She’s like Clark Kent, if Clark Kent changed out of his normal clothes into his Superman outfit in front of a large group of horny men. She combines her two talents into a blog, “Diary of an Angry Stripper” (amazingly not the name of a made-for-Lifetime movie…yet), which deserves ALL the blog awards (Bloggies?) for a post she wrote about her time spent with Jeremy Piven while she was an intern at Us Weekly. It confirms everything we thought about the “Entourage” star: namely, that he’s a douche. Here are some choice excerpts.
I had probably talked to him for less than ten minutes, and in that time he had managed to insult the wait staff, several of the people who were trying to get his attention, the magazine I was reporting for, and, indirectly, me. “My assistant taped the UFC fight on my DVR at my apartment. You’re more than welcome to come join me.” My D-Bag meter was ringing like a fu*king cowbell. Abort, abort!
“I’m working on a very emotionally exhausting show right now, and I really need something more nurturing – so if you’re looking for someone to spar with,” – here’s the really good part – “we can put you right back out on the street.”
I alternated between being nervous that I was not as hot as his last hookup, being amazed that I was looking at “Entourage”’s Ari Gold eat my pussy, and being bored with how mundane it was. It was all somewhat disappointing, frankly.
The full post is below. Feel free to make your best Jeremy Piven fish jokes in the comments.
I wrote this for one of my NYU profs at the end of my last semester. I feel like you can get a pretty good feel for my personality from it (in case you’re not getting enough of that already from the blog).
I HAVE MY WEAKNESSES
The experiences I’ve racked up as a stripper don’t always save me.
Sarah, don’t fu*k Jeremy Piven.
That sentence crossed my mind last summer after spending an extraordinary amount of time watching seasons one and two of Entourage on OnDemand. I was staying in L.A. with my then-boyfriend, who spent all day at the office (he’s a CFO for a film production company) while I ogled The Piv.
I could tell this was the beginning of some trouble, because I had to consciously give myself a rule about it. If you have to tell yourself not to do something –
Look, you don’t go into a liquor store telling yourself not to rob the place, and you don’t go visit your neighbor thinking, “Better not stab this guy. That could be problematic.” (I mean, I don’t know you, but I assume that you don’t feel compelled to rob liquor stores and stab people, so you should get my point.)
The moment you have to start making rules about not causing others bodily harm and not fu*king people – well, you’re halfway there already. So when I thought, Must not fu*k Jeremy Piven, my second thought should have been a personalized version of the cautionary words of fortune teller Oda Mae Brown in Ghost, played by so brilliantly by Whoopi Goldberg[1]:
“Sarah, you in danger girl.”
If being a stripper has taught me anything, it’s that I can spot a grade-A douche bag a mile away, and that those people aren’t worth the amount of energy it would take to walk across the room to get away from them if they manage to morph into your personal space, so it’s best to keep your distance. I’ve also learned that any guy interested in getting to know a girl in more than a Biblical way will not do certain things:
1) He won’t openly insult the wait staff while you’re having a conversation.
2) He won’t Look Deeply Into Your Eyes like no one else is there and then get distracted by his BlackBerry for five minutes.
3) He won’t ask you to come to his house ten minutes after having just met you (with five of those ten minutes spent text messaging).
And while I didn’t know Jeremy Piven last summer while I was Googling him like an excited schoolgirl, I could tell that he was something of a prick just by how well he played one on TV. The bloggers didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about him either.
I also knew that if I ever came in contact with him, I might be able to weasel myself into his bed, despite my better judgment.
So when the celebrity magazine where I was doing my internship sent me to a nightclub to interview the Piv, a.k.a., “The Pivert” and “The guy who rubs cat piss onto his head to keep from going bald,” I was not startled to soon find myself in the back of his chauffeured SUV, with him leaning in on me while simultaneously asking the driver if he had any gum.
GOD HELP ME, I’M STAR STRUCK.
He was sitting at a private table in a section of the club cordoned off with velvet ropes when I finally got to interview him. His publicist took me up to the table and made me wait while he chatted with his friends and pretended not to see us. I was both mildly annoyed and whimsically excited. Ari Gold! Aces Israel from Smokin Aces! Three-time Emmy Award winner Jeremy Piven! Ignoring me!
When I was eventually granted access (and a seat), he focused his attention on me, and was flirting like he has flirted with a million hot girls; he had developed the little-bit-more-than-casually-interested air that I find intriguing and maddening. Within the first sixty seconds he told me, “Do what you feel.” I already knew I was fu*ked, and I hadn’t even turned the tape recorder on yet.
I asked him the stupid questions celebrity gossip magazines ask, which is always sort of humiliating, but some people make it less so because they know they’re dealing with a magazine that caters to the lowest common denominator. Jeremy was not one of those people who made it easier. To wit:
Me: “What’s your favorite Thanksgiving dish?”
Him: “Wow, you’re really asking the hard-hitting questions.”
And later:
Me: “Where are you staying while you’re in New York for the show?”
Him: “You really want me to answer questions about where I live for your magazine?”
Me [thinking]: Uh, well that’s the kind of crap people like to read about in Us Weekly, asshole.
And because the Us reporter I was working for didn’t give me many questions to ask him – it was like, one – I was asking him random stuff that I thought would still be relevant to the publication so I could continue sitting next to him at his private table. I asked him who he was dating. He danced around that for a while by way of directing his attention to a completely different person standing behind him, and then agreeing to be photographed with a random fat man, who he promptly told me was too fat to be around his table. Finally, he told me that he was “married to Speed the Plow,” the Broadway show he was starring in.
“See you later?” he said as he was preparing to leave. He looked at me inquiringly. I had probably talked to him for less than ten minutes, and in that time he had managed to insult the wait staff, several of the people who were trying to get his attention, the magazine I was reporting for, and, indirectly, me. “My assistant taped the UFC fight on my DVR at my apartment. You’re more than welcome to come join me.” My D-Bag meter was ringing like a fu*king cowbell. Abort, abort!
But even after all this fu*kery, I was more than happy to accept when he offered to give me a ride to my friend’s house party in the East Village. I was playing the coy reporter: “Oh I simply can’t go to your house! You barely even know me!” Meanwhile, I was figuring out the best way to break the news to one of my closest friends that I would be ditching her in short order to go fu*k Jeremy Piven, which I think he probably knew also.
Or did he? This wasn’t a guy who’d never struck out by any means. In fact, he had struck out rather publicly on several recent occasions. Celebrity blogs, the most reliable source of news[2], reported that he had hit on Hayden Panettiere after the Emmys – he’s 43, she’s 19, and she wasn’t into it. In fact, Star magazine reported that she “escaped” him. The New York Daily News reported that he was at the Spike TV’s Guy’s Choice Awards, hitting on Megan Fox in the Green Room. And everyone who reads anything with pretty girls in it knew she was engaged to Brian Austin Green[3].
From the Daily News:
“I don’t know you, but I should,” said Piven, staring at her like she was a lamb chop. He went on: “I know you’re getting an award.” Said an unimpressed Fox: “Do you even know which one?” The “Entourage” star was ready to answer, but she’d already walked away.
Now why couldn’t I be more like that?
And then, earlier this year in New York City, he had tried to pick up a couple of models at a Microsoft party, and was moderately successful in that he was able to acquire their phone numbers. But then he went booty grazing and got busted. He texted them each the same message – “Come meet me” – not knowing the two girls were friends, and were comparing notes. They turned him over to Page Six, the police for this kind thing. His response: “It was my hope that in texting both ladies, I would make it onto Page Six, so everybody wins.”
So that’s the kind of guy I was dealing with, and I knew it, and I didn’t care. Being star struck is a serious affliction that can result in poor judgment, bad hookups, lowered self-esteem, and if you’re particularly unlucky, VD[4].
LET THE DEGRADATION BEGIN
After I had ditched my friends and gone back to the club to retrieve my belongings from the coat check (I had abandoned my Carolina Herrera trench coat in a frenzy of Piven possibilities), Jeremy called me.
I told him I wanted to see him. “I want to see you, too,” he said. I was there, like instantly. I would have beamed myself into his apartment if I could have. I hailed the first gypsy cab I saw like a mad woman who had suddenly realized that she had forgotten to feed her eight cats.
When I got to his Tribeca apartment, he had to come down to let me into the stairway because the building’s elevator was busted. So I had to walk up seven flights of stairs in six-inch YSL heels to get to this guy’s apartment, which I was unhappy about, but not so unhappy that I left. Hey, I was about the fu*k The Piv. I considered this the obstacle course needed to win the prize on a bad reality TV show.
Inside the apartment, which he was paying a “friend” $10,000 a month to stay in, he set me straight when I started getting too lively with the conversation[5].
It went something like this:
“I’m working on a very emotionally exhausting show right now, and I really need something more nurturing – so if you’re looking for someone to spar with,” – here’s the really good part – “we can put you right back out on the street.”
WOW. Anybody else on the face of the planet who said something like that to me after I’d decided to answer a booty call would have been met with something that resembled this:
“Nurturing? Oh, well, call your mother. I’ll be getting the next cab home and you can fu*k your hand tonight. Goodbye, and enjoy.”
Instead, my response was this:
“Oh, ok. I’ll crank it down a notch.”
And yes, I really did say that. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was doing this on his terms, and that sex would not be fun.
GIVE ME THE GREEN LIGHT … GIVE ME JUST ONE NIGHT – I’M READY TO GO RIGHT NOW
This is a good song, I thought as his head maneuvered somewhere below my waist. I was kind of also watching TV – a football game was on mute – and finally starting to come to the realization that John Legend was worth all the hype he was getting at the Sundance Film Festival the previous year.
Sex with someone new is always awkward[6], and sex with someone new who’s also the object of my celebrity schoolgirl desire is very awkward and not enjoyable, no matter how much I want it to be. I alternated between being nervous that I was not as hot as his last hookup, being amazed that I was looking at Entourage’s Ari Gold eat my pussy, and being bored with how mundane it was. It was all somewhat disappointing, frankly.
To make matters worse, I caused a minor accident that could have been disastrous. I get a bit lively when I’m being intimate, and I threw a pillow off to the side at one point, which landed on the nightstand. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a flash of light.
“Jeremy! The candle – !”
Candlelight is so cliché, anyway.
NOW I CAN’T ENJOY JOHN LEGEND
The trademark red sole of a black Christian Louboutin ankle boot was all I had to see to know that this little foray into the world of groupie-ism was coming to a halt. She was standing in his dressing room looking at herself in the mirror while he puttered around somewhere in the back after a Wednesday night showing of Speed the Plow. Liz, one of my girlfriends, was with me because I thought it would be fun for her to meet this guy, so after we had dinner in Midtown, we went over to the Barrymore Theater just as the show was letting out.
After the first time I spent the night with him, he had gotten me a couple of comp tickets to see the Sunday matinee. I went with a guy who should be gay, but is not (yet), and is terribly annoying in that I’m from Middle-America-but-went-to-Dartmouth-and-am-now-living-in-New-York kind of way that reminds me of my Libertarian cousin who moved to New Hampshire to start a Libertarian revolution, but hasn’t acquired a job there in almost a year. So we didn’t stick around afterward because I desperately needed to rid myself of the soon-to-be homosexual. Shortly after I had bid him adieu, I got a text message from Jeremy: “Don’t know why you didn’t come backstage after the show.”
He later explained to me over lunch (which was originally a brunch date, but he was an hour and a half late, and yes, I waited), that I just had to tell security that I was his guest and they’d send me up to his dressing room. I tried that a couple nights later and it worked. We walked out together, I waited in his Mercedes SUV while he signed a few autographs for the people waiting in the cold by the stage door, and then he hopped in and we were off to his apartment for another less-than-awe-inspiring romp, which did not involve pyrotechnics this time.
So after Liz and I happened to have dinner a block away from Barrymore Theater the very next night, I thought dropping in to say hi sounded like a great idea, at first.
As I got closer, though, I got nervous. This guy wasn’t my boyfriend, and he hadn’t even been particularly nice. I hadn’t heard from him since that morning as I was leaving his apartment. The night before, when I asked about the nearest train, he said, “The train is right around the corner. It’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Um, I know the train will take me anywhere I want to go,” I said. He looked annoyed.
THIS IS A BAD IDEA flashed across my mind like an airplane flying a banner over all the other sh*t I was using to try to convince myself that this was ok. But now Liz egged me on:
“The Sarah I know wouldn’t be shy about this.”
Well, she’s right.
Security let me in the stage door and I wasn’t even all the way up the stairs to his dressing room area when I saw the bottom of that fabulous shoe.
She was taller, blonder, tanner (much, much tanner), and layered with expertly applied makeup. She was wearing slinky black leggings and holding a Gucci bag that probably didn’t come from Chinatown. I had just come from work at Us Weekly. I think I was wearing Vans.
Later, as we were walking out (me with Liz, Jeremy with hot-shoe girl), he asked his assistant, a petite Asian girl named Jillian, this: “Can we get her a key to the apartment?”
I waved goodbye outside the stage door. He called out, “I’ll talk to you soon!”
About a week later, one of the paparazzi photographers that I meet at these Us Weekly events texted me. “Piven is here with 2 hos at the Tao 8th year anniv, lol.”
I used to be one of those, I thought.
–
[1] Who is arguably the voice of our generation.
[2] Not really, but more reliable than you would think.
[3] Come on, this steaming hottie is engaged to David Silver from the old Beverly Hills 90210? Really? This is the only reason everyone even still knows who her fiancé is.
[4] Which, as far as I and my gynecologist can tell, hasn’t happened to me, thank God.
[5] I happen to be a little condescending to men in general if they’re trying to pick me up, or if they’re not openly gay (but are actually gay), or if they’re gay and snarky. I think it is fun.
[6] Unless it’s with someone who is less attractive or charismatic than I am, and then it’s great because I can do whatever I like without having to worry too much about the fallout. But I always feel like a dickhead afterward.
(Via)
