“In Hell with Maya” (part 1)

I don’t know if y’all keep up with trashy celebrity tell-all books, so maybe you don’t know that today some meanass bitch named Jill Ramos came out with something called In Hell with Maya. She was Maya’s personal assistant before Sandy…and did one heck of a hatchet job on her old boss.

Since Sandy was Maya’s assistant when I first got involved with the Sharpmans, I kinda assumed – the way you do – that she was always Maya’s assistant. Turns out she hasn’t been working for Maya for all that long – only a year when I first met her, and that this Jill chick had the job for about two years before that. I’m not completely sure, but the way I understand it, Jill she wanted more money than Maya was willing to pay her (and remember that Maya is a generous employer…me, Sandy, Belen and Dr. Peterson will all testify to that.) When she didn’t get the raise she wanted, she threatened that she’d write a book and ‘spill’ everything she knew about Maya Bedrossian.

So Maya apparently told her “fine…go write your book…see if I care.”

And she did.

And everyone around here kinda does care.

They ordered a bunch of copies from Amazon and I got a look at one this morning. I think Maya and Robert wanted us all to know what this Jill chick wrote about them. There was a bunch of reporters outside the gate this morning too, and they hung around all day. I also kept getting calls all day long from other reporters asking me about the book. I did what I reckoned you’re supposed to do in a situation like that and said “no comment” and hung up. That went against the grain, since Mom taught me you never hang up on someone because it’s the rudest thing you can do. So I apologized to the reporters before hanging up on them. That seemed an ok compromise lol.

So what’s in the book? I didn’t read it cover to cover, since I don’t need to waste my time on trash like that, but I reckon a lot of it is the kind of bullshit you’d expect to find in a book like that. The ‘author’ talks about what a terrible person Maya is and how bad she treats her employees, something y’all know couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m an employee…and she let me move into her pool house. That’s not being a boss from hell, if you ask me.

The book tells stories about how Maya made her stay and work late without giving her dinner, even though Belen was there to feed the boys. She said that once – and only once – Maya gave her a pack of jelly beans and a bottle of water for dinner. That was better than starving, she wrote, but only just barely. She writes a lot about how Maya would scream at her all the time, threatened her with physical violence…and even slapped her once when she dared talk back.

All that shit is one thing. Maya’s tough and I’m sure she can handle that kind of bullshit criticism, especially as I’m sure that the jelly beans and the slap were made up. But it’s another thing altogether for that Jill bitch to have written about the boys and what a terrible mother Maya is.

Y’all know that I never was onboard with Matteo’s diet, and that it really sucked that Robert could have said what he said about Matteo when he was five, but no parents are perfect. I think mine are pretty great, but we’ve had our disagreements too, and, yeah, they probably made a few mistakes along the way raising their five kids…although I think me and my sisters turned out pretty good irregardless.

Of course, when Jill was here, the boys were in school and life was still normal, but she makes a lot of accusations in the book. She writes a lot about Matteo having food issues and candy bars under his bed and then making himself throw them up, and about how Maya and Robert fucked up his self-image by calling him fat all the time. Ok, I know from Matteo that Robert’s line about saying he looked like he swallowed a basketball wasn’t something he said all the time – it was something he said as a joke to the other adults who were there at the time. That doesn’t excuse it, but it’s not a pattern of long-term abuse either.

So it’s all lies.

She does a number on Jacob, too. She makes it seem like Jacob’s the golden boy and the only one Maya and Robert care about…and that they neglect Matteo as a result. She says that Robert always wanted a jock for a kid and he puts a ton of pressure on him to excel at playing sports…which we know isn’t true. I’m the boys’ baseball tutor, after all, and Robert’s never said anything to me about turning Jacob into the next Corey Seager. It was Maya who hired me, and she hired me because she wanted a sports teacher for both boys, not because (let’s be honest here) she wanted intensive baseball coaching for one of her kids and not the other. Far as I can tell, nobody puts pressure on Jacob to become a super athlete. He’s doing a dang good job of that on his own. Like I’ve told y’all a bunch of times, the challenge in working with Jacob is reining him in. He’s the one who’d be playing sports all day long if he didn’t have to go to school and make his bed.

Oh yeah…there’s something else that the book says that isn’t true. That Jill bitch wrote that the boys are terribly spoiled. I mean, yeah, they have pretty much all the shit boys their age ever could want, but I think that’s what happens when you have rich parents. Look at how Maya and Robert gave the green light to the base path and gave us that pitching machine for Christmas. (It’s a plenty deluxe pitching machine, too. I just realized I haven’t told you anything about it yet…but it’s pretty dang cool, trust me.)

So, yeah, the book says the boys are spoiled and Belen is their slave. That’s so not true, I get pissed off thinking about it. Robert insists that the boys be partly responsible for their rooms. They have to make their beds and hang up their towels, just like normal kids with regular parents have to do…and pick up their stuff and keep their rooms neat. They even have to fold their own laundry (and Belen taught them well…I even asked her to show me her trick for folding tshirts.) And the boys have a few chores around the house too, like taking out the trash. Their parents are doing their absolute best to make sure that they’re not a couple of jerkoff spoiled rich kids who are used to having everything done for them…so I can promise you that there’s nothing true at all in that part of the book.

There’s also a whole chapter about Maya’s tailor – the one who fitted my baseball pants back in November – and how she’s an illegal immigrant that Maya pays slave wages and work on a sewing machine in a room in the basement with no windows.

Turns out that’s not the first time Maya’s had trouble about the tailor. Over the summer, people started asking where all the color-coordinated masks Maya wears come from. (She’s a little like Nancy Pelosi in that she has a mask to go with every outfit, only she’s hot and Pelosi isn’t.) Someone online made up a story that she had an illegal alien sewing her masks – I only found that out from Sandy today when we were talking about all this shit – and it was kind of a bad story to spread while Trump was still in the White House. Nobody cared too much about the post, though, and it died down pretty quickly.

The important fact here, though, is that the tailor who takes care of Maya’s wardrobe, including her masks…and yours truly’s baseball pants…is in the country legally and owns her own tailor shop in Pasadena, where she employs legal seamstresses. Maya should know very well about that, because she helped set up Lucinda in business as Modiste Tailors…and owns a portion of the business as a silent partner. So there’s no one in the dark basement sleeping on straw sewing masks for the evil Maya Bedrossian. Trust me. First off, I know the house pretty well by now…and, like pretty much every house I’ve seen in Southern California, the Sharpman’s house doesn’t even have a basement. Unless there’s some secret panel you push to reveal a secret stairway…but that’s the kind of cool thing I’m pretty sure the boys would have shown me weeks ago lol.

So that’s more total bullshit.

Of course she also has to say that Maya’s racist, but y’all probably guessed that for yourselves. The book says that Maya doesn’t hire blacks and the only latina she has working for her is Belen. I’ve had plenty of contact with the crew that shoots the show, and it’s a diverse bunch of people. And don’t forget that Destiny is African-American. So I don’t know what she’s talking about there. But I reckon you can’t write a book like that these days without saying that the person you’re doing the hatchet job on is racist.

Ok, so all of that sounds bad…but it doesn’t sound like the kind of shit anyone would bother publishing a book about, right? There’s usually gotta be something with lots of lurid details to get one of those books published, and, yeah, I’m sorry to report that this Jill chick’s book gets pretty dang lurid when she writes about Maya’s sex life.

So what does this angry ex-employee have to say about Maya and sex? Actually it’s what she has to say about Maya and Robert and sex that gets pretty gross. What that fucked up bitch alleges is that Maya used to come on to her to get her in bed with both Maya and Robert, who have this “swinging” sex life that always involves other people. She goes further and said that, when Maya couldn’t get her into bed, Robert started working on her and harassing her sexually with lines like “that bathing suit looks good on you…I wonder what it would look like off you” and reaching up her shirt. Then she says that Maya told her she should bring her boyfriend along so they call could have sex together and lots more shit like that that I feel dirty just repeating.

It gets even worse, at least from my standpoint…since it involves me, too. The book talks about the other people working around the estate who’ve supposedly been to bed with Maya and Robert, and that’s where I come in…although I don’t know how she thinks she knows anything about what’s happened here since she left. She writes that she’s seen on the TV that Maya’s hired someone to work with the boys on sports, but who’s really there to be an “ostentatiously good-looking sex toy” for the two of them. Yeah, she fuckin says that about me.

I may joke about Hunter the Horndog, but the reality is that I’m pretty conservative when it comes to sex. I mean…it’s not like I’m shy about having had sex with 30 chicks in 30 days, although I’ve proven with Joyce that I can also be monogamous…but I’d never get into shit with a married couple. I mean, that’s just gross. In my book, sex is still supposed to be something intimate between a dude and a chick (or, I guess, two dudes…but even that’s kinda gross if I think about it too much)…and I’d never have sex with more than one person at the same time, least of all a married couple whose kids I take care of. And I don’t think that I’d ever get so bored with sex that I have to do a whole bunch of kinky shit just to stay entertained. I’m not even comfortable writing about it.

It’s pretty fuckin outrageous that this Jill chick should be writing things like that about someone she hasn’t even met. It’s pretty outrageous that she’d write it about Maya and Robert, too…since what they do in their bedroom is their own business…but nothing me or anyone else around the house has seen even suggests that what this chick wrote is true. Neither Maya nor Robert has ever come on to me, that much I definitely know for a fact. Truth be told, Maya’s always seemed uninterested in my looks beyond what I can do for the show, and I’ve never had any reason to believe that Robert is anything but straight.

The boys already know about the book, since there was no way to keep it from them, and it bothers me a heck of a lot that two such great kids – that any kids – should have to be confronted with so much fuckin lying filth written about their parents. They’re still boys, and, while Jacob’s gonna be 12 soon, that’s still an age at which a kid deserves to be innocent. I’m not saying that he should be sheltered or anything, and, yeah, 12 is an age at which you start thinking about things you didn’t think about before, but it’s a dang long way from starting to figure out your own sexuality to hearing all kinds of awful things about your parents’. Mom and Dad always kept that part of their lives totally separate from us kids, and that’s good. It’s none of your business what your parents do when they’re alone together…and now this Jill bitch has come around and is rubbing Jacob and Matteo’s faces in things they should never know about, especially as I’m pretty dang sure that none of it is true.

While I was out on the tennis court/batting cage with Jacob, Sandy came out to tell me that there was going to be a meeting for all of us who work in the house after the boys’ dinner at 6:30. Since I live there anyway, it wasn’t much of an imposition for me to get there, but I reckoned it must pretty important if Sandy and Dr. Peterson had to stick around that late. (I figured out as the afternoon went on that the idea was that the boys would be busy with homework while the grown-ups were having their meeting.)