The Plight of the Uber Rube

She was standing by the fax machine, though she didn’t seem to be sending a fax, didn’t even seem to notice the machine. She appeared lost, unsure where she was, maybe unable to believe where she was. A Kinko’s in Studio City? How in the--?!

She didn’t notice me either. Like the fax machine, I was part of the furniture. It took more effort not to notice me, though, because I was flat-out gawking. How could I not? Hours earlier I’d seen her giving false testimony, then cavorting naked in a swimming pool. She was Sandra McCoy, star of “Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough,” an R-rated straight-to-video dud released in 2005.

My friends think the really shocking part of this story isn’t that I saw McCoy just hours after seeing her movie, but that I saw her movie. Why, they invariably ask--”Why, man, why!?”--was I watching “Wild Things?”

Fair question. Honestly, it was an accident. It was late and I was supposed to be packing for an early morning flight to Los Angeles, but instead I was procrastinating, reading, watching TV. Flipping channels, I chanced upon McCoy and her costar having a catfight. Next thing I knew they were kissing. Kissing like there was no tomorrow. Next thing I knew it was tomorrow--3 a.m. and my bags still weren’t packed.

I’m not proud of it. But I’m less proud of the way I reacted to McCoy the following day. Staring would have been uncool enough; I stopped blinking for a full minute. Afterward I needed a Super Soaker filled with Visine.

Of course, such encounters happen every day in Los Angeles, but not to me, because I don’t live in Los Angeles. In fact, this might be the very reason I don’t live in Los Angeles. Los Angeles turns me into a rube. A huge rube. The Ruben Studdard of Rubes. What others take for granted I greet with awe. I’m like a guy in East Texas transfixed by tumbleweeds. Let one star tumble across my path and I come to a dead stop, which makes me a hazard to anyone driving or walking behind me.

I once saw Mick Jagger at a bar. I want to say he looked as if he’d been crying, but to me he always looks as if he’s been crying. I saw Stephanie Seymour years ago at a wedding. She was so iridescently lovely that each woman who stood beside her looked like Dame Edna. I almost saw Madonna at Book Soup on Sunset. The clerk told me she’d been standing right where I was standing not seconds before. “She bought a copy of Vogue!” the clerk said. We grinned at each other and nearly embraced. A couple of fame fiends savoring the fix.

I remember every star I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Worse, I store up my sightings and recount them at the slightest provocation. Pathetic. I say that I don’t live in Los Angeles, but the truth is, I can’t.

I’m barred, disqualified from residency, because I’m a wanton scofflaw who blithely violates those unwritten commandments that everyone else in Los Angeles obeys. “Thou shalt not snap to attention when Beverly D’Angelo is seated beside you at an Italian restaurant.” “Upon seeing a star thou shalt glance, one time, furtively, to see if he or she is drunk, drugged out or fat, then go about your business.”

I’ve often tried to reassure myself that my reaction to stars is innocent, reflexive, like a kid playing the license-plate game on a long car trip. In the car trip of life, seeing Natalie Portman on the StairMaster--she doesn’t really sweat, but rather mists--was like spotting an Alaska. Seeing Johnnie Cochran at my hotel was like seeing a North Dakota. So rare, I had to stare.

Lately, however, as fame becomes cheapened, coarsened, defined downward by Us Weekly and Omarosa, staring at stars has become less forgivable, and not staring has become a way of making a statement. By ignoring the famous you’re striking a blow for substance, for a Thoreau kind of groundedness. I wish I had that kind of inner strength. I want to be the guy who doesn’t care, who doesn’t phone his buddies and tell them he just saw Jason Priestley eating a T-bone at The Palm. (Even Thoreau would’ve noticed how much shorter Priestley looks in person.) But I’m not that guy. And there, now I’ve just told you too. I can’t stop myself.

Liv Tyler brushed past me at LaGuardia. She wore no makeup and yet her lips were still the color of vine-ripe tomatoes. Billy Joel was seated behind me in the bar of the American Hotel on Long Island, making such a racket that I almost asked him to pipe down. Hours later he drove his car into a tree. I went to high school with David Spade.

The strange thing is, I don’t care about stars. I don’t watch “Entertainment Tonight,” I don’t read People magazine unless I have a cavity. I certainly don’t seek stars out, but this seems to be the trick for attracting them. Possibly, like Fame itself, the famous flit about and only light before the oblivious. “Fame,” Keats wrote, “like a wayward girl, will still be coy/To those who woo her with too slavish knees,/But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,/And dotes more upon a heart at ease . . .” Yes, my heart is ever at ease. Until a star appears. Then it goes like Dick Cheney in the Boston Marathon.

“Famous people glow,” wrote Leo Braudy, distinguished USC professor and author of “The Frenzy of Renown.” “It’s a glow that comes from the number of times we have seen the images of their faces, now superimposed on the living flesh before us--not a radiation of divinity but the feverish effect of repeated impacts of a face upon our eye.”

I was pretty feverish that time I shared a ride with Monica Lewinsky. Due to a cab shortage at Kennedy Airport, we had to double up, and I consider it a major achievement that during the 45-minute drive into midtown I never once mentioned--you know. I once sat reading the newspaper in a Westwood Starbucks and within minutes saw Rebecca Romijn, Renee Zellweger and Mimi Rogers. I came close to saying something to Rogers. (“Wow, this Starbucks should be called Star-strucks!”) But I didn’t.

Braudy: “The essential lure of the famous is that they are somehow more real than we and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that immortal substance for support.” I disagree. There is something less real about stars, which is the source of their allure. They provide respite from the real, a timeout from traffic, crime, terror, the electric bill. We know stars orbit in a separate world--why else use the language of astronomers to describe them?--and we know intellectually that their world isn’t all that different from ours, and might be worse, given the lack of privacy and the grinding pressure to remain fresh and talented and beautiful. Still, it’s a world we can’t helping picturing as better, as some cross between Maui and Mount Olympus. And so, like it or not, when one of them veers off course and spins into our world, into a Kinko’s in Studio City, some of us can’t help acting like Richard Dreyfuss confronted by the UFO in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

As McCoy stepped up to the counter at Kinko’s, I scolded my inner rube. At least be more discriminating. It’s OK to stare at Sandra Bullock, or Sandra Day O’Connor, but not Sandra McCoy. And yet, no matter how much I remonstrated with myself, I couldn’t force my eyes or mouth shut. Finally I decided to surrender to my natural impulses, in fact to give myself free rein and actually speak to McCoy, because if seeing a star is transporting, engaging a star in conversation is a hundred times better.

I turned my back, for a moment, to run through some potential openers.

Excuse me, Ms. McCoy, I just wanted to say that I love your work.

Hi there. Really enjoyed watching you . . . work it . . . last night.

You know, hours ago I saw you being kinky, and here you are at Kinko’s--how crazy is that?

You’re such an original, Ms. McCoy, and now I see you’re making copies? That’s what I call irony.

While I was rehearsing my scene, McCoy was concluding her business and slipping out the door. Spinning back to her world, she left me to mine.

I looked around, glum. The Kinko’s was suddenly dimmer, gloomier, though no one else seemed to notice. No one noticed anything. There were a dozen customers scattered around the store, and not one had seen McCoy’s entrance or exit. Save for one hopeless rube.

Did I mention that I once hit the brakes a half second before running over Hal Holbrook? He was jaywalking in Beverly Hills. He really does look just like Mark Twain. Another time I saw Jane Alexander walking her dog. It was a golden retriever, I think . . .