Primed for Stardom

By Mike Dreeland and John J. Kaminski

Primed for Stardom is a first-person account of the experience of having your New York City life considered for use on a reality show and the overwhelming rush of conflicting impulses brought on by the easy promise of modern celebrity. The Lower East Side residents of The Building have been told that their lives would make great TV. They just have to keep doing what they are doing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491844243

Mike Dreeland

Mike Dreeland is a pop artist and art director living in New York City. He has been creating art there since 1999. @mdreeland at every social media outlet John Kaminski is a writer and educator living in Northern New Jersey. His first book Mista is available on Amazon.com. Twitter and Vine: @johnjkaminski Follow the Primed for Stardom Facebook page.

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© 2014 Mike Dreeland and John J. Kaminski. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/30/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4423-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4424-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922756

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A special thank you to Mary DiGiulio for getting us started.

Thank you to my loving and supportive wife, and to New York City that inspires me every day.

-MD

Thanks to Ada Coonerty, Doug Eldredge, Danielle Kaminski and Chris Kipiniak. You know what you did!

-JK

"Y OU MENTIONED SOMETHING ABOUT outdoor space?"

It’s through the back two bedrooms, said the broker. They were both a decent size. Then she opened the door.

Oh my God, this is unbelievable! I said. I didn’t even know places like this existed in New York. There was a fully-tiled thousand square foot private terrace bigger than most people’s apartments and most outdoor restaurants. The sun was shining brightly. I thought I could hear angels singing.

There are a lot of outdoor spaces if you know where to find them, she said. She had a one-bedroom in the West Village with a gorgeous, but small, outdoor veranda.

We’ll take it, I said. Our whole lives were in my bag: bank account slips, references, background checks, credit checks, paycheck stubs, passports, everything we needed.

The apartment in The Building was a modern, three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom. We moved in June, and it was prime season to be chilling outside. We got a gas grill before we even got a couch.

Mason and I would be grilling flank steaks and hanging, and people would be peering out of their apartment windows and looking down from their fire escapes into our personal Shangri-La.

We’re cooking food, why don’t you come down for dinner?

What’re you doing? We’re having some drinks.

We’d introduce ourselves, they’d introduce themselves and they told other people in The Building about us until everyone met everyone.

You gotta come over and hang on the terrace.

We were the only ones with an outdoor space. If the Lower East Side was the center of the universe, we had a private deck extending right out of it.

There were people over every night mixing cocktails for a month and a half straight. It was a young and wild building. When you’re living on the Lower East Side with a thousand square foot private terrace, everyone wants to come over, have drinks and hang out.

The terrace grew into one of the most popular places among our friends, neighbors and neighbors’ friends. There were a bunch of girls always hanging around. Relationships formed weekly, nightly and hourly. Not only did people want to party in one of the most popular neighborhoods in NYC, they wanted to be on the terrace in the middle of it all. It was the ultimate for entertaining. We always ended up going out in the neighborhood and always came back with a party. I thought I would be going out for a drink or two, and they would turn into some of the wildest nights of my life.

It was only a matter of time before we started throwing one crazy party after another. There would be at least two hundred and fifty people, a disco ball, a smoke machine, laser beams, video projectors and colored lights shooting up from underneath all the plants, all going until four or five in the morning. It was like a KISS concert meets South Beach. People started calling it Terrace 54.

It was a great living situation, and people had a lot of respect for everyone else. If it was too loud, it was never a problem. You just had to give someone a call and be like, You mind turning it down? Not sure if anyone ever called anyone though.

T WO YEARS LATER, IN September, out of nowhere, I found myself so thirsty and constantly peeing for a week straight. I would take a long whiz and have to pee again. Something was definitely wrong.

I went to the doctor and got a blood test. Two days later, he said, You have diabetes.

It was way out of left field. Nobody in my family had it. I was only thirty-two years old, not sixty. I wasn’t a hundred and fifty pounds overweight. Maybe twenty. Or twenty-five. It was nothing crazy that warranted diabetes. I found this out on a Saturday. On Monday, I had to get more blood tests on an empty stomach. On Tuesday, the doctor called me at work.

Got your levels back. They’re off the charts. I need you in the emergency room right now. Fuck.

There was a transit strike, so I had to take a gypsy cab from Queens to get to the hospital.

I never thought I was leaving. I kept asking, When am I gettin outta here? When am I gettin outta here?

Another hour. Another hour, they would say.

Eleven o’clock rolled around, and I was like, "What’s the story?

Your levels aren’t going down. We need to keep you here for a couple of days.

I stayed for five days getting pricked and prodded every two hours. I thought about how everything had to change: how I needed a new diet, insulin and a new life. No more drinking. No more partying. No more fucking anything. It was a tsunami of information all at once.

How much do you drink? my doctor asked. I never considered myself a drinker.

I just drink socially. There was a short pause. But I’m very social, I said.

How social are you?

I’m like five or six nights a week social.

I was never the guy who came home from work and poured himself a drink. I wasn’t coming home shitfaced every night, but I was out at free parties with cocktails, open bar, ya know, hobnobbing, doing my thing, talking art, getting fat, drinking, partying and eating late. Next thing ya know, I