Superstar Excerpt – Emily K. Sipiora

August 19, 2025

Rick Durand is 29 and his music is going to be in a movie. The world was supposed to be his oyster. The pearl was the internet. A waiter at a restaurant in Orange County told Rick that pearls are actually an immune response. It’s formed in reaction to what the oyster believes to be a threat. The waiter emphasized that a lot of people didn’t get that and it was obvious from the TMZ and Perez Hilton websites that no one would get Rick, either. Ever since all of that shit went online a few years ago, he found new pearls of wisdom every day. On a Friday, one site claims that he’s spending thousands of dollars on coke, a drug that he didn’t even really like. If it was around, it was around. He wasn’t going to go out and buy it. By Monday, another publication reports he’s thirty days clean. A third website’s headline claimed that he couldn’t get it up. What the websites did not know is that today is supposed to be the happiest day of his life. He signed a contract to put his music in a movie. Nobody writes about good news in LA. The world only cared about what was wrong with him and it pissed him off because that thing on the third website only happened one time. Anyways, the movie’s supposed to win an Oscar. Rick didn’t know how they knew they’d win before things had even started, but in the twilight years of his late twenties he noticed that some people already knew where they were going.
        He squeezed his iPhone 3GS in his hand, wondering if he could bend the titanium out of sheer contempt for everything that had happened since he moved here. He pressed his thumb down hard on the screen, just above where he would touch it to hang up. Rick watched the screen turn purple and black like a bruise through the Otterbox. He knew this wasn’t the happiest day of his life. When he died, and God showed him everything, Rick would point to today and ask what happened in the command room. If the happiest day of his life ever came, it wasn’t right now. Rick was not pleased with how they were using his song. He was sick of being called sad and the movie wasn’t going to help that at all. Rick was sick of the headlines. He was sick of the allegation of impotency, which he took great care to prove otherwise to the women drawn to him. While Rick considered all of his unhappiness, the director Brandon’s faggy little assistant prattled into his ear. All of the lies traveled up the wired headphones to Rick’s brilliant skull. 
        As he listened to the Weho Jew assistant sing half-truths into his ear, he grew more agitated and considered breaking his no-cigarette streak. But he knew that he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t disappoint the beautiful female employees at the Santa Fe rehab that the label sent him to. He didn’t graduate from rehab, but ended up with some good pointers to take home. He couldn’t let down his assigned therapist that insisted, for some reason, on turquoise gauges. When the therapist told Rick that he had to decolonize alcohol from his body, Rick avoided addressing his problem by pointing out that the therapist could be interpreted as not only a colonizer but also gentrifier due to the color of his pasty white skin. “Are you even from Santa Fe?” Rick asked the therapist, and he was swiftly informed of the relationship between the increasing housing prices in Colorado and “displacement” during the initial forty-five minute intake appointment.
        After they had checked him in, Rick was escorted to a very Southwestern dorm. He took note of the Kiva fireplace that had been modified for electricity. The musician regained a little bit of his old self out there in the desert. He had seen a glimpse of the man he used to be in the unit mirror. His blonde roots rebelled against his box dye. Even though he could have asked one of the staffers to purchase his dye for him at a convenience store (it was Revlon ColorSilk #12, Natural Blue Black, purchased in the women’s section. But he was above caring about that.) he decided against it. The blonde was a strange halo against his inky and cheaply raped hair. In the dim light of the electric Kiva, the assigned therapist asked him if refusing to dye his hair had emotional significance. Rick had replied that he wasn’t a woman and changing his hair meant nothing. He woke up very hard the next day, like putting the therapist in his place had boosted his T.
        Despite the temporary lift his morning erection had granted him, he still felt bad for belittling the therapist. As grating as the guy was. He remembered asking the therapist how old he was, and when he had responded 22, the past seven years of Rick’s life flashed before his eyes. The boy-therapist probably just barely lived in a world where you had to be 21 to buy cigarettes. Or maybe that was never a rule out there in the desert where rattlesnakes and scorpions and Native American people want to kill you. Rick wondered how he was supposed to believe that this childlike therapist would fix him. The kid’s patterned shirt was buttoned all the way to the top. He had what appeared to be a semicolon tattooed on his wrist. As the therapist spoke to him, Rick ignored him and tried to remember his life when he was this guy’s age. It reminded him of his second serious girlfriend. That relationship ended the night he blacked out on gin and screamed and yelled and cried. He would never speak to her again. After she had moved out, he tried amphetamines for the first time and brought as many women as he could back to his apartment. After the women left, he would take the Ativan again to fall asleep. “Mr. Durand,” the boy-therapist had interrupted his thoughts: “I am still a licensed mental health professional. You didn’t say anything. Where did you go just now?”
        Rick found it difficult to open up to the childlike therapist and didn’t end up getting anywhere with him. The therapist provided some insight into his relationship with his mother, but it wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking. He knew that she was bad, and that he would probably never talk to anyone in his family again. Rick explained to the therapist that he wasn’t a fan of rehashing the past and that was part of what he hated about the online rumor mill— that there was a permanent record of every fake idea about him, a gallery of false representations of who he was. The therapist respected the transition, wrote it down, and asked him how all of the things written about him online made him feel. Rick said that he felt misunderstood and that he wanted to be understood. He wanted to be understood so badly. Brandon’s assistant spoke him back into the here and now, inquiring: “Rick, do you understand what you’re obligated to do?”
        Rick digested what Brandon’s assistant told him. He did not care for being told what to do. That therapist had taught him something called box breathing, where he was to breathe in for four seconds and then hold it and then breathe out for four seconds. It was supposed to be a failsafe in times of great stress. That was the only thing he truly learned there and the only thing he took with him after he quit rehab early to return to LA. So while Rick listened to Frenemy of Dorothy talk about their contract and his obligation to the film and the director’s discretion to use his music as he saw fit, he practiced the box breathing. He breathed in for four seconds, held it, out for four. He continued it as Brandon’s assistant continued to describe how they would fuck him if he didn’t listen. Rick quickly realized that the breathing exercise wasn’t working as the assistant used words like “civil suit,” “renege,” “garnishment.” Nothing was working. 
        A single event was usually what kicked off Rick’s anxiety. Deep down, he regretted scrambling his brain over the past few years. The cure for his problem was always worse than the problem itself. The clonazepam then the diazepam took the edge off in these times initially. But it made him creatively useless. He sought out shitty MacArthur Park coke to perk him up in the studio (forget what he said earlier. He did go out and buy it.) but quickly developed a fear of being photographed purchasing it. The realization inspired him to pursue the more refined drug of telehealth amphetamines and now he has everything he needs in his medicine cabinet but he used to be able to do so much until now. “So, ultimately, so what if things have changed,” Brandon’s assistant proposed through the headphones: “Isn’t it nice to even be included?”
        Rick was still pausing before formally responding to Brandon’s assistant. He took “inventory” of himself. His eyes razed across his chipped black nail polish. He ground his nails against each other to chip it more. “I guess,” he replied: “I still don’t feel good about it.”
        In the rearview mirror, he could see the blueness of the box dye he got from the Madang Plaza H-Mart beauty section. Every time he dyed his hair to keep the blonde away, he considered trying a lighter color. In fact, he fantasized about something like a rich brown. Still, the blue black is what he dyed his hair. It’s what worked. In his own personal psychology, the blue black dye represented his career. Everyone else saw him as this sad guy that wrote a bunch of depressing music. He was never red like Tori Amos. He was always having his Britney Blackout moment. Forever and always, the Britney Blackout blue black dye. There was a time in his early career where he had suspected that Britney had asked a mutual friend about him, but he never sought further clarification because shortly after that a Rolling Stone editor called him “limp” and after that came the tabloid stories about sexual dysfunction. Rick knew where these rumors came from. He tended to get absolutely shitfaced around women to withstand the idea of anyone touching him. When it came time to fuck them, one or two times (or maybe more, you won’t know) his body wouldn’t listen to what his dick was supposed to want. That’s where that first story started. When he called his agent and lawyer and maybe he was crying, they coordinated a short NDA for him to present to sexual partners. It didn’t turn them off at all— they quickly signed and Rick hated the entire transaction. It left him with absolutely no satisfaction after the encounter, like most of the things in his sexy Angeleno life.
        Rick hated LA. But LA loved him. His career wasn’t exactly what he had initially wanted, but it made him money. Women of all kinds were interested in him. He had been in a lot of magazines. But with it came the anxiety of tabloids and anonymous blog posts. Rick doubted that he had actually interacted with everyone who spoke about him on the internet, but they denigrated him anyways. As the assistant continued, he thought about what he hated about the city. He hated the salad bar line at Lassen’s and he hated the homeless people that lived in Elysian Park. Every day, all day, he wondered what it would be like to go home, but he didn’t even know where to go. He wouldn’t go home to El Paso because there was nothing there and he didn’t plan on reviving contact with his family, even if there was a little part of him that urged him to around Christmas. They all had fucked him enough and they weren’t going to live on his blue-black sad sack dime. He once saw a beautiful woman smile at him from across Lassen’s and before he smiled back, he imagined her reading one of the tabloids about him. Rick looked the other way instead. He imagined that the Elysian Park bums had forgot how to read in their crack-addled tragedy and thought that maybe he should hang out with them more often. But anyways—  “I don’t want this,” Rick clipped back to Brandon’s assistant. 
        “It’s not really about what you want, it’s about what’s going to happen next if you don’t do what we want,” Brandon’s assistant cooly replied.
      While he continued to prattle off points in their legal agreement, Rick realized that he could always go back to Santa Fe. He COULD always go back to Santa Fe. It wasn’t like he was going back to rehab. He had good control of his problems now. He could rent a house like Julia Roberts. Rick recalled going to the Albuquerque Sunport after quitting the rehab. Nobody cared. He didn’t see any paparazzi or people pointing their iPhones or HTCs at him. When he landed at LAX, the press raped him like Amy Winehouse. The pointing at Lassen’s continued the following day. The color of a pomegranate IZZE he had picked out reminded him of an ambiguously Hispanic rehab nurse’s lips. He longed for for her warm touch and soft accented voice telling him that she was administering the benzodiazepines now. Afterwards, he would sleep for nearly half of a day and wake up feeling amazing. They tried to fix him, stitch by tiny stitch, and sometimes for a little bit it worked. As the day continued, and the relentless questions about his mother and sex life and drug use began, the fixing did not last very long.