Free Shooting Stars by Jennifer Buhl Page B

your story are spotted and jumped in town, there’s not much you can do.
    Once a pap is jumped by another pap, the risk of the story being jumped again goes up exponentially. The more paps on a story, the more likely it is that other paps will spot it, or call in their friends. Once jumping starts, it doesn’t take long to accumulate a gangbang.
    Here’s what it’s like to run across a celebrity gangbang, which I will become quite familiar with in the ensuing months:
    You’re trolling. Neil George, a trendy Beverly Hills salon, is on your troll route. Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, Cameron Diaz, and other celebs get their hair done at Neil George. Every time you pass the salon, by instinct, you look for celebrities’ cars that are parked or paps standing outside. If a celebrity’s car is there, the paparazzi are going to notice. And if you spy paps, you know you’ve found a story.
    You park, pay your meter, grab your short-and-flash, and walk over. No one says hello. No one looks at you. No one smiles. You see these people every day, but you’d prefer never to see most of them again.
    You stand around (you never sit) for one, two, three hours (hair extensions, which the celebrities love, take forever). All the while you try to ignore the buzz from loudmouth paps cackling at one another’s juvenile jokes.
    Eventually, Bozo Bystander walks by. He insists on knowing who’s inside.
    â€œWho you waiting on?” he says. He addresses the group as a whole but tries to make eye contact with one of us.
    Our first tactic: ignore him. We avert our gaze. No one wants to respond. A group of twenty acts as if they don’t hear the guy.
    He asks again, louder this time.
    Again, we ignore.
    Sometimes he leaves, which is good for all of us. But sometimes he persists. He repositions like a gnat, from one ear to another. “Who’s inside?” he keeps saying.
    Someone can’t take it anymore. The pap who breaks responds with a made-up celebrity name: Kate Brando, he might say. Bozo is confused. Should I know who that is? Maybe I’m the idiot?
    The reason we don’t tell the pedestrian the truth—“Christina Applegate, Sandra Bullock, Natalie Portman”—is not because we’re being obstinate; rather, it’s because we’re conditioned for Bozo Bystander’s response. We know what he’ll say. He’ll call us either “losers,” “bottom feeders,” or “parasites.” Or he will sneer, “Get a real job.” And then, as we’d only hoped in the first place, he will leave, feeling he’s done his good deed for the day by making us feel stupid.
    The ground you stake at the gangbang is crucial, and you don’t move around a lot. Like a lion, you’re fully dialed in to where everyone is in relation to everyone else, and “the prey”: Where are the holes in the crowd? Where is the competition? Which way will the star walk? A strong undercurrent is flowing, and everyone is taking it in. The reason you know this is because the minute you infringe upon someone else’s space, you feel it. It might be subtle—a look, a growl—or it could be more—a shove—but one way or the other, you’ll be told you’re in another’s territory.
    By this time, the sun has moved a million miles over your head. You may have waited half a day already. You’re exhausted.
    Finally, the star exits. Everything goes down in about fifteen seconds. The guys closest to the star make themselves as dense and sticky as possible, blocking out anyone they can. They try to keep their bodies close together and between the star and the rest of the mass. They use ultra-wide-angle lenses (16mms), which have the ability to snap a full-length from about three feet away but often distort the image into a banana shape.
    Once the star drives off, the paps take flight in a matter of seconds, getting on the follow or