HOLLYWOOD, CA––The elusive Robert Denby, well-known catalog model and face of the recently published novel, The Amish Spaceman, disappeared from his loft apartment in West Hollywood yesterday. According to alleged girlfriend Carol Alt who was living in shame with Denby and wished to remain anonymous, Denby left the apartment at 11 a.m. to purchase a box of wine and three cases of Pedialite from a colorful local cooperative called “Seven-Eleven.” When Denby failed to return seven hours later, the ex-model girlfriend contacted authorities.

Denby’s dazzling, meteoric rise to fame as cover model for the bestselling book, The Amish Spaceman, has plunged ironically like a meteorite in the last few weeks. The actor was offered starring roles by at least three studios and most recently recorded a guest spot on Hello Faceboy (a live-action Chinese remake of The Simpsons), but a spate of drug arrests and declining physical health have dimmed his value to Hollywood’s most powerful. The night before he disappeared, Denby was arrested for public intoxication, stealing food from a teenager, and urinating within 500 feet of a police dog. A late-night patron of a Sunset Boulevard Jack in the Box found the lower half of Denby hanging from a dumpster behind the restaurant, his legs plastered in taco wrappers.

“It didn’t look human,” said the pudgy and sad woman, who from the look of her subsisted entirely on cream pies. “And when it started screaming Mexican, I called the police.”

Several dark-suited individuals milling about the entrance of Denby’s apartment refused to be quoted or identified in this story as Denby’s friends, and repeatedly claimed to be from something they called “Eff-Bee-Aye.”  They were either photographers or just morbid fans of Denby’s, waiting for the debauched star to appear with a bag over his head, dropping a trail of used tissues, shoes, or hair samples behind him like a golden brick road to Ebay.

Blocked from entering Denby’s apartment by a line of these celebrity hounds, I ran to the local Internet cafe intending to give these “Eff-Bee-Aye” charlatans the worst Yelp review of their lives, but it was obviously a fake name.

Watch this space for updates!