Face value

Pretty Lady never really dated any drug dealers. So vulgar. White Jaguars should not come with gold hubcaps.

She never dated her roommate either, those halcyon days in the ghetto cottage. He was so much Not Her Type that when he opened the door to interview her, she nearly turned right round again. Chiseled profile, indeed. He looked just like all those perpetually drunken fraternity scions, who used to take pot shots at her friends from pickup trucks, for fun.

But the cottage was, indeed, halcyon. Gracious, bright, airy rooms, original mahogany panelling, farmhouse kitchen, wood floors, stained-glass built-ins with fireplace, claw-foot bathtub. Palm trees in the front yard, rose garden and goldfish pond out back. Giant avocado tree by the kitchen window. One might have fallen into a wormhole, for all the desperate ghetto outside the picket fence. Really it was quite surreal, and all for $375 a month.

So, when faced with a decision between passing up paradise and rooming with the patriarchy, Pretty Lady did the only thing possible; she sat him down and made him talk. After two hours she concluded that despite his face, he would do. The next two and a half years passed in perfect amity. Men are quite easy to live with, the simple souls.

At first, Pretty Lady regarded her roommate as a study in sociology. Listening to the murmurs in the next room, she felt she was eavesdropping on Normalcy. His girlfriend was a stick-thin former ballerina, with a husband in Italy; when she returned to her husband, the roommate was both heartbroken and broke, the poor fellow. He took a job bartending at the Mission Rock, and drowned his sorrows in lesser stick-thin women with ticking biological clocks.

Pretty Lady soon realized that her roommate had no idea that he looked like the patriarchy. He regarded himself as simply a nice guy, and didn't see why others shouldn't as well. Unfortunately, living where we did, people had a tendency to knock him randomly over the head with beer bottles, in order to get at his wallet, and generally just because. Whenever this happened, he would wake up on the floor of a phone booth, rub the bump on his head, and wobble on home. He really was a good sport.

He was clueless about women, however. One weekend he took a trip with a stick-thin woman, and came home depressed. "She's not April," he opined, and that was that. Unfortunately this particular woman was not only not April, she was psychotic. She soon began showing up at odd hours of the very early morning, returning videotapes that had been put through the microwave. Pretty Lady came across a letter she'd written; "I should have known nobody would want to marry me," it declared. "I'm such a mess." Pretty Lady has mercifully wiped the rest of the document from her memory. It was painful.

However, she now knows what the patriarchy thinks, when he receives a letter like that: absolutely nothing.

A few weeks later, Pretty Lady answered a knock on the door, round about dusk. On the doorstep stood a scruffy black gentleman whom she did not recognize. "That yo' man's truck out front?" he inquired.

"It's my roommate's truck," she replied. "He's not my man."

"Well, some blonde chick paid me thirty bucks to slash the tires. Now, I ain't gonna do it, but I wanted to let you know. Some folks out here, she got five hundred bucks, they'll kill 'im."

Pretty Lady privately believes that the gentleman was looking for a payoff, but he was disappointed. After all, he wasn't my man. She did, however, warn her roommate.

He took it decently; he called the police and the psychotic blonde chick, she confessed and wept copiously. He declined to press charges. They even remained friends, and he was eventually invited to her wedding. Really he was a remarkably nice guy, if a bit thick.

Because one must always be aware of How One Comes Across. If one is a television actress, one must learn to handle paparazzi. If one is white, chiselled and living in a ghetto, one must learn to beware of beer bottles, tire irons and desperate women. This is not racism or sexism, it is Facts.

Meanwhile, Pretty Lady experimented with veganism, inadvertantly lost twenty pounds, and was mildly alarmed when her roommate caught her round the waist one day and called her "honey." She was quick to put a stop to that. Nice as he was, she requires Intellect.