As the editor of WhooNoo, Monica does not herself conduct the interviews for her magazines. An appointment is made for Nico to meet an entertainment reporter, Emily, at the margarita bar on Santa Monica Pier. Nico starts off by telling Emily about his music, but she is an entertainment journalist, not an audiophile. She doesn't care about music at all, just famous musicians & actors & what they are wearing & who they are sleeping with.

She tells Nico outright that she's not interested in hearing about him or his goals. She wants the dirt on Jackie so she can do the cover story for her magazine. Why did Jackie flee her tour? How long has she been seeing Nico, is it very serious? What is it like to be a big nobody but still be able to attract a hot star like Jackie? Is she really as tough as her image, or is she really just a sweet little girl that needs to be loved? Nico doesn't want to answer any of these questions, but there's 5000 simoleons on the line here. And Jackie hasn't called or contacted him in any way since she returned to touring. What else can he do?

This obsessed weirdo's behaviour gets creepier by the day. Nico is awakened every night now by the sound of him rummaging through their trash, his weird chortles & cries as he runs around the apartment yard. Nico has called the police several times, but they say there is nothing they can do.

Nico's interview with Emily becomes part of a feature story about Jackie in the next issue of WhooNoo magazine. Nico of course reads the whole thing: his quotes are all taken out of context, mixed in with biographical details about Jackie's life that he didn't even know. She never told him her parents were famous country musicians, that she ran away from home as a teenager to escape her alcoholic father & his abusiveness. If he knew that, he wouldn't have told Emily how much Jackie likes her whiskey. They took what he thought would enhance Jackie's rock-n-roll persona & made it sound pathetic. But it doesn't matter much what he said: reading the interview, all his words seem twisted & wrong, not what he meant at all. He knows Jackie will see, has probably already seen it by now. Any chance that she was ever going to call him again is long over now, he thinks. So when he gets a call from the Late Night with Charlie Chatterbox show to do a TV interview, he goes along readily enough. At least the show is live & they can't twist his words the way the magazine did.

Nico's been on stages many times before, to sing, to play guitar and he's never felt the slightest nervousness or stage fright. The TV set is a little different, there's no guitar, no microphone, to stand behind, the audience's attention is fixed on him, and they have no drinks or flirtations to distract them. And no one is here to hear him play: he's not even the musical guest, which he could more than handle. He's here to be asked about Jackie & Charlie is even more relentless than Emily, who could patch all his answers, no matter how reticent or vague, into her own version of the story for print. Charlie needs the goods in an immediate way & he lays the pressure on Nico. And as a comedian, he also pulls no punches in mocking Jackie and her odd disappearance from her tour, asking Nico crazy questions like did Jackie force him up to the mountains at gunpoint, does she keep more than one Italian lover around to satisfy her, or does she have a collection of men from different European countries?.....And when it is all over & Nico feels like the biggest piece of shit to walk the planet, Charlie tells him what a great job he did. "Listen, kid, I like you...I think we could work you in as a regular character, you know, like 'the Italian Stallion', something like that...." Nico never thought it was possible that any kind of fame could be a bad thing, now he is starting to realize there are some things you just don't want to be famous for. Being a weekly caricature on the Late Night show is not in Nico's plans. He'd rather starve & go homeless than be a joke. But it may all ready be to late to save what is left of his dignity........and, he dreams of Jackie every night, though he knows she'll never speak to him again. He aches for her like he ached for his home when he first moved to L.A. He starting to think about taking the money he got from the Late Night show & buying a plane ticket back home.