Chapter 2 Lala Land #2
This is where the story darkens almost to black, and though I wish I could draw a veil across these pages, I also owe a debt of witness to that little girl who lived at 8723 Lookout Mountain Avenue, the house you could reach from both Lookout and Crescent Drive.
But either way you found me, there I was, left to the whims of girls who were already promiscuous and unmoored from basic levels of morality and appropriate behavior.
Because. One day. One of the older ones. Well, she forced me. She made me.
I don’t want to say it.
Fuck this.
She made me eat her out.
I was five years old.
I knew every part of it was wrong. I felt sick and scared and sad.
I owe that abused five-year-old this witness.
It’s not as if the adult I’ve become can effectively disassociate from what that girl went through either.
It’s not so much ripples on a pond as a great tsunami through life, the abuse leaving me in the thrall of shame when it comes to my sexuality.
And it wasn’t just my sexuality that was shattered; I have spent a lifetime with such incredibly low self-esteem I have put up with repeated ill use by partners and others.
But no, I never fully felt comfortable being touched, and that’s true still.
I have never felt comfortable with it my whole life, really, and all because of that girl forcing me to do something I barely understood but that I knew was shameful.
This is how abuse works: the shame should have been hers, and lord knows, perhaps it is to this day.
But it’s damn sure mine. I already lived in a world where my safety was jeopardized every single day.
I never knew if Lala was going to burn the house down, or beat one of us, and now the safety of being looked after by girls in the neighborhood was entirely compromised by this heinous, ruinous act forced upon me. Hurt people hurt people.
Damn a world in which a five-year-old girl is subjected to this kind of degradation. How I wish I never had to give words to what happened to her, but she is owed that at least.
In looking over my life, I’m reminded of a recent study suggesting a link between childhood trauma and an increased chance of developing MS. The 2022 study of eighty thousand Norwegian women, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery Lala had fled.
Leanne was one of the girls on the street who looked after me, though she was a good one.
Sensing, perhaps, that something was amiss, or sent there by forces I’ll never understand, Leanne had showed up and found me dazed by that wall, my mother beaten unconscious, sprawled out on our couch.
My mom would be out for the next day and well into the next night. I placed myself firmly at my mother’s feet, hoping, I guess, to be a barrier to any further violence.
I would not be moved. I didn’t care what anyone said: I wasn’t leaving my mother’s side.
“Christina,” Leanne said to me at some point, “you have to go to bed.” Night had already slipped up through the Canyon, the streetlights casting an odd glow across the room, as though this was the most peaceful scene imaginable, rather than a place of violence.
I kept my gaze fixed on my comatose mother.
“I’m not going to bed,” I said to Leanne without looking at her.
I had a little purple tumbler that I’d stolen from my grandmother back in South Bend.
I loved that thing; I kept my toothbrush in it.
Leanne, recognizing that there was no way I was moving anytime soon, kindly went and found it, and put some water in it for me.
I just sat there, next to my unconscious mother, brushing my teeth over and over again, trying to clean away the stain of my five-year-old life, just waiting for her to wake up, waiting, waiting, brushing, waiting, the only sound in the room the dull clink of the toothbrush as I dipped it in the water over and over and over and over.
The fights between my mother and Joe Lala were terrible and violent, and I witnessed many of them.
He would beat the shit out of her and then later, when the dust had settled, he’d say, “I love you so much, I was just drunk…,” and she’d accept his excuses—I won’t call them apologies—and on they would go.
But it wasn’t just the fighting. A whole bunch of circus freaks came by all the time to score and do drugs.
I would watch all these kooky weirdos and my mom snort heroin in the house.
I even had a babysitter who stole cash from me because even though I was just a little girl, I was making a lot of money doing radio ads.
I first got my SAG card in 1975, on the back of a series of Kmart radio ads I’d done before I’d even turned five.
I often went with my mom on auditions, and in the case of the Kmart ads, she had a couple of friends who had been contracted to create them.
One of them was the father of Josh Richman, who was making radio commercials at the time, and as I was young and had a cute little voice, they would use me, too.
Kmart was one of the first major stores to process photographic film in bulk for regular consumers, and as part of the promotion for this newfangled service, they promised to refund amateur photographers if their pictures were bad.
This promise—“goof-proof”—was to be advertised via the sweet, cherubic voices of Josh Richman, playing Jeffry, and a little young me, playing Chrissie.
We were the goof-proof kids, and those ads ran for years.
We even won a Clio advertising award during their run, and I earned enough from being cute and goof-proof that my mother could invest my income in property in the Canyon.
In one of the ads, Josh says, “When I say ‘Action!,’ you say, ‘You get a goof-proof guarantee on picture processing at Kmart.’ ”
“I can’t say all that,” I reply. “My mouth is too little.” And though it was a cute line, it was also true: the producers had to splice together consonants and vowels to make my toddler burble sound like actual, comprehensible English. But it worked, and suddenly I had a SAG card.
By the time I turned seven, I was earning real money for my mom and me—in fact, I have never stopped working since that time, at least until I got MS. I did ads for cat chow and canned ham, and then I started doing episodics, including classics like Family Ties and Charles in Charge.
(It was in those days that I met dear, much-mourned Matthew Perry.) When I wasn’t working or in school, I was in acting classes, and I still tell people to never stop training because you’re never going to be as good as you think you are, a lesson I learned early and often.
From a very young age, working was my identity, my everything.
Being on set was where I felt most comfortable.
I had to be someone I wasn’t, and I found that in the guise of a character I could protect the little scared me.
When I was working, I had to be on time and respectful and professional.
That world was organized and had rules. I got to escape into someone I wasn’t.
From the start, working was survival. I was pretty much always the sole breadwinner at home.
That’s been a bone of contention my whole life.
I love my mom; she would do little acting things here and there or get the lead in a commercial, but the truth was, I was making all the money.
It was hard for her—my dad never paid child support, meaning there were times when we were on food stamps, and other times when we had nothing at all.
So working was never a conscious decision I made; it was how we survived.
I got good at it because I had to do it. I had no choice.
That working kid bought a house, a place we rented out until I moved into it when I was seventeen.