Chapter 6
Long Island Girls
Bits of brown locks float around Susan like feathers as the cool evening air licks the back of her neck. With every snip, she feels lighter. She fights the urge to look at herself in her phone’s front-facing camera.
She’s in her backyard with her hairstylist, Sal, getting a haircut.
She can’t believe she has a backyard, not to mention her own house, which is a rental but still larger than anywhere she’s ever lived, on a palm tree–lined street in a hilly neighborhood called Highland Park.
It has a main drag that reminds her a little bit of Bed-Stuy, in terms of the gentrifying mix of overpriced coffee shops, corner stores, scrappy young queers, and older families of color.
But she also tries not to compare it to Brooklyn, because it’s very much its own place.
Her yard is small, but it has a view of the San Gabriel Mountains, and she spends most of her free time sitting in it, gazing at the rocky peaks as they turn blue and pink in that famously exquisite California light.
Not that she has a lot of free time. Work has once again consumed her, though it feels different now that she’s on the other side of the creative equation: a creator, not a marketer. It’s easier to justify her obsession when she’s the one making the thing.
In this new neighborhood, she tries not to be just another white person taking up space while guiltily paying the exorbitant monthly rent that’s partly responsible for driving people out of their homes and into poverty.
She’s been trying to convince her neighbors not to call the cops on the unhoused people who occasionally wander down the block.
There’s one guy in particular who sometimes sleeps at the edge of her fence, and she’s taken to bringing him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
It is, quite literally, the least she can do.
If Susan can’t believe she has a backyard, she really can’t believe that the reason she’s having her hair cut and styled today is that tonight is the premiere of a documentary she has a producing credit on.
It was an easy phone call, in the end, to ask for Heather’s help.
Heather quickly agreed to do whatever she could, and she kept her word.
She helped Susan and Eliza write a pitch and then she got it in front of the right people, whispered suggestions into powerful ears.
It worked. Everyone was interested in early aughts nostalgia, in revisiting the recent past with a new lens.
And the suits loved the idea of Eliza on camera: the face of the film, the voice of the story they were telling.
They were charmed by her beauty and her dry wit, just as Susan once had been.
Contracts were sent, redlined, sent back, and signed, and then HBO Max acquired the rights and paid to produce it.
Screen Time is an HBO Max premiere; there will be a red carpet, press, a celebrity guest list.
There’s a bespoke black suit hanging in Susan’s closet, created specifically for her and the post-pandemic curves that she decided to stop trying to get rid of.
She likes this rounder version of herself now.
She feels sturdier, more commanding than she did in her twenties.
She likes how the suit fits, how it lays over her hips in a masculine sort of way. She’s excited to wear it.
The only wild card has been her hair. One morning Susan woke up and realized that she’d had the same hairstyle since she was in high school, which at one point had been a source of pride and suddenly felt pathetic.
She called Sal and said, “Do you want to cut all my hair off?”
Sal laughed. “I literally thought you’d never ask.”
Now, in the yard, watching the birds consider taking her hair to their nests, her forehead is suddenly cleared of the weight that’s been resting on it since she was seventeen.
Sal cuts it close on the sides, leaving it longer on the top, and she feels like a ’90s heartthrob, like Leonardo DiCaprio in the poster of Romeo + Juliet that Katie used to have hanging in her bedroom.
“Let me know how much to Venmo you,” Susan says, as Sal buzzes the baby hairs on the base of her neck.
“No, no,” Sal says. “It’s on me.”
“What?” Susan says. “Why?”
“I have a favor to ask.” Sal puts the clippers down and faces her. “My little sister is graduating from college and she wants to work in entertainment. Would it be okay if I give her your info? She really needs someone to talk to. She doesn’t know where to start.”
“Oh my god,” Susan says. “Sal, duh. I would love to talk to your sister. I’m still going to pay you for the haircut, though.”
Sal grins. “I mean, I can’t stop you.” They pick up the scissors and resume cutting her hair. “Thanks, Susan. It really means so much to me. And it will to her, too.”
“I can’t wait,” Susan says.
It’s an honor to be asked to mentor someone, and Susan doesn’t take it lightly.
She hopes she has the answers that Sal’s sister needs.
She still feels like a bit of an impostor, playing pretend that she’s a producer in this crazy new industry.
But she also knows it’s her turn to help someone younger, just as Jonny once helped her.
Inside, Susan’s dog starts barking at the FedEx truck. “Cashew, stop!” she screams.
Sal laughs. “I can’t believe you named that dog Cashew.”
Susan grins. “It’s because she’s a nut.”
“How’d she lose the leg?” Sal asks.
“I don’t know. That’s how she was when I saw her at the shelter.”
“Good for you, adopting an old three-legged dog. Not many people would.”
“Really?” Susan laughs. “It’s always been my dream.”
When Susan looks in the mirror, she’s shocked. She’s never seen so much of her own face. For the first time, she’s not hiding behind anything. She’s just herself. She has the odd feeling of seeing in color for the first time, or maybe Technicolor. Everything has shifted into focus.
For a while, producing was all about making phone calls.
Susan called culture writers, sociologists, activists, city offices, entertainment lawyers. She learned about permits, labor laws, unions; light, sound, narrative arcs. She filled her cloud with spreadsheets. She set meetings, she led the meetings, she emailed afterward with takeaways and to-dos.
Susan was disappointed to find that there were some people who remembered her name from the story about Ben Kaplan, and this created several roadblocks.
Certain men were reluctant to take her calls, fearing she was trying to cancel them.
She did not have the patience to reassure them and instead opted to leave their voices out of the narrative.
She knew this would perhaps make the documentary a little unbalanced—there was no one to speak in defense of the boys who’d distributed revenge porn online—but that was fine with her.
It was art, not journalism. It was okay to have a strong point of view.
And then, when everything was in place, Eliza and their small team of camera operators, a sound person, and a PA began to travel the country talking to people about their experiences. Eliza directed it while Susan made sure everything went smoothly.
She loved everything about it: being the person to manage the details, making the final calls on big decisions.
She often felt she was the glue holding the entire project together, and from this she derived a sense of purpose.
She didn’t mind the long days or the late nights or the way everything always felt like an emergency; she liked scrambling to fix problems.
Twice, Eliza had to force Susan to take a weekend off, days during which Susan fretted nonstop about what might have slipped through the cracks.
She had a hard time trusting that things could happen without her, and this made the job harder than it needed to be.
It was the only thing she and Eliza fought about.
Eliza would say Susan was no good to her if she burned out; Susan would reply that she’d sleep when she was dead.
When they had collected enough interviews to fill several seasons of TV, they hired an editor to cut it into a feature-length film, and Susan found herself spending more and more time in front of the screen, helping shape the story they were trying to tell.
She hired Jonny to write the score for the documentary.
A film about the early 2000s set to music written by the person whose melodies were the soundtrack to her own 2005 was the finishing touch that tied it all together.
Jonny’s gentle croon and acoustic guitar accompanied by the occasional violin and horn made it feel emotionally complex and nostalgic.
The job was, apparently, the final push Jonny needed to come to LA. A year after Susan arrived, he followed her, getting a condo in a trendy neighborhood called Los Feliz.
“The great queer migration!” he had bellowed the first night after he moved in while they sat on his balcony drinking champagne. “Go West, ye olde fags and dykes.” In the distance, palm trees looked like paper cutouts silhouetted against the twilight. “There’s gold in them there hills.”
“I will drink to that,” Susan replied, clinking his glass with hers.
“Look at us.” He grinned at her after taking a long sip. “Just a couple of Long Island girls washed up on the shores of Old Hollywood.”
“Who are you calling washed-up?”
They laughed for a long time at that, until Susan wasn’t sure if they were still laughing about the exchange or just from the pure joy of being together in a new place, twenty years after they first met and closer than ever.
Susan’s town car pulls up in front of Jonny’s condo. He’s waiting on the curb in a tuxedo with an enormous bouquet of yellow roses in his arms.
“I can’t believe you got me flowers.” Susan blushes. “What am I supposed to do with these all night?”
“Fucking hold them, milady,” he says, sliding in the back seat next to her. Then he realizes. “Susan Goldstein, as I live and breathe.” He throws the roses to the side and grabs her head. “You cut your goddamn hair.”