Chapter 4 Quit
FOUR
QUIT
“I did another episode of Charles in Charge this week. It was great. I get the best feeling when I’m on that lot.”
THINGS IMPROVED ALL OVER the Canyon after Wonderland. Except in my brain, that is.
My mom has said that when I hit my teens, she loathed me, the only time in my life that she actively hated my guts. I was so depressed, and such a horrible little asshole because of it. I can hardly blame her.
Whenever I sneak into my secret metal box and read my diary from those years, an image crystallizes of a sad, innocent, complicated kid.
I find that at age twelve, I’ve described myself as “5' 5", 110 pounds, white blonde with green eyes.” Under “In Case of Emergency Please Notify,” I’ve written, “Please let me die!,” although at some point later I had scribbled out that particular plea. There’s my home address, and there, under “Business Address,” I’ve written “20th Cen Fox.”
Amidst all the usual teen angst about friendships and love there are the first signs that I’m incredibly hard on myself, especially when it comes to my physical appearance.
In 1984, I write in regard to a guy named Mike, “I wish he would like me, but I’m too ugly.
” Ten days later I tell my diary, “You won’t believe who I’m going out with…
Mike.” I read these pages now and can see how my mind was catastrophizing.
My fling with Mike doesn’t save me from my inner critic, though.
I was hell on my mom in those days. By early 1985, I’m writing, “I love my mom very much, we just haven’t been getting along very well.
” As my teen years went on, it was as if my mind became like a witch’s mind, fighting against me half the time.
My mom caught me smoking in front of the teenage dance club, Hot Trax, on Van Nuys Boulevard.
It wasn’t just the two of us against the world anymore.
I was sneaking out and rebelling. I got in so much trouble.
I was desperate to be that “normal” rebellious high schooler from all those John Hughes movies, although in my case my hair was shaved on both sides, and I was wearing combat boots, fishnets, and a pillowcase for a skirt.
Instead I was always working. Even though I wouldn’t admit it at the time, I think it was work that ultimately got me through.
I don’t know what would’ve happened to me without work. Given the world I grew up in, I’m guessing that, for a start, I was a candidate for some serious addiction issues, although my mom always said to me, “If you ever do drugs, I will kill you and I’ll kill whoever gave them to you.”
But working saved me because I had one clear thing to do: I had to show up on a set, be an adult, and nail the scene. I never look back and wish I’d had a different life, at least in regard to working from such a young age.
Though maybe once…
When I was thirteen—probably only a few weeks after that diary entry above about how much I loved Charles in Charge—I told my mom I was quitting acting.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said. “I want to just hang out with my friends.”
Recently, my mom found my passport from those years.
I still look at my photograph sometimes, trying to see something, trying to understand who that person was, and maybe who she has become.
We are all an accretion of experiences, like silt at the bottom of a lake, our selves constantly writing new selves on top of the old.
What could I see in an old passport photo, and in years and years of diaries?
In the photo, one side of my head is shaved, and despite the wide smile, this was at around the time I was done with work; for a short while, at least, I wanted the kind of life any thirteen-year-old had.
I wanted to make bad decisions; I wanted to smoke cigarettes.
I just wanted to listen to the Cure. (Duran Duran were so last year.)
So I quit.
My mom said, “Okay, I’ll call your agent.”
Proud of my newfound status as “just a kid,” I went upstairs to my room. But quickly, the panic set in. Working was my stability, and it was quickly becoming my whole world. Just twenty minutes later, I ran back downstairs.
“Don’t call my agent,” I said. “I’m good.”
I’m sure my mom had been downstairs just waiting me out—she knew me. And that was that. I worked from then on, until the day after Dead to Me wrapped.
At age eleven, I’d gotten a dancing job in a Nestea commercial, directed by a big-time British movie director.
A young David Arquette was an extra in the same ad.
I was dressed in a sweatshirt in the cut-off, Flashdance, Jennifer Beals kind of way.
( Jennifer had invented this look when she had wanted to take off her sweatshirt but didn’t want to mess up her hair, instead messing up a generation’s worth of perfectly good sweatshirts.)
During the filming of the ad, I was asked to suck on a straw thrust into the iced tea. As we were dancing, the director said to me, “Suck the straw more sexily.”
I froze. The director was trying to get me to be more into what I was doing, to more obviously enjoy sipping on the drink, but to a child who had been molested, I heard something else.
I had come from somewhere else; I felt uncomfortable around men.
I’m not even sure he meant anything by it, but what was an eleven-year-old supposed to do about it?
My work ethic taught me to push through, always.
You can’t be a blubbering mess when you go to work.
Ever since I was a kid, I knew you couldn’t bring your shit to set.
And because I went to work so early—usually because we didn’t have a babysitter, so Mom would take me to whatever set she was on—that professionalism was ingrained from the very start; it’s just how it was.
And never once have I ever wished I hadn’t been a performer. Because if I hadn’t?
I’d have been dead. I’ve watched my friends struggle their whole lives because of how we were raised in that Canyon, but I always had work, always had some place to go.
I had an appointment to be somewhere, to prepare for something and to show up and do something.
Other people were relying on me, and because I’m an abider of rules, I turned up.
I worked, and I sucked it up, and I went back the next day.
Otherwise, coming from where I came from? Not just addicted. Dead for sure.
Work was discipline.
The day after my thirteenth birthday, alongside other thirteen-year-old accounts of my special day and my friends and a Christmas parade we’d all attended, I’d written in my diary, “PS. I still love Scott.”
I was about to head to my grandmother’s house in South Bend for a week. That Christmas we had made our usual trek to South Bend to see her. For some reason, my then boyfriend, Scott, flew in, too.
My previously adoring tone quickly changed, though.
At some point during the visit, according to my diary, “That’s when I had to give my first blow job.
” It’s a tragic indictment that I felt I “had” to do that, and yes, no great surprise, it was terrible.
It happened on my grandmother’s couch, and frankly, that act was the grossest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
As soon as it was over, I felt myself starting to throw up, so I ran to the kitchen and I drank an entire diet soda, just to get the taste out of my mouth.
Sex was no surprise to me, but still, it grossed me out.
I’d been molested and abused as a young child, and I’d already seen plenty of porn.
By the time I was ten, I had already watched Deep Throat, and my friends and I had also watched Letter to Susan, a lesbian porn movie just left lying around on VHS at a friend’s house.
Watching it, I’d feel tingly, and weird, a mixture of unease and unhappiness and something unknown.
It all got to me, seeped under my skin, and it came out in my diary as anger toward Scott: “Know what? Scott went with me to Grandma’s. I hate him. He is the biggest asshole in the whole world. I’m gonna break up with him tonight.”
I never said no, but I can tell from those pages that I wasn’t ready, that I’d been pushed into a world I was too young for. Still, I soldiered on, my adult work ethic and responsibilities in tow.
At home in the Canyon, I was part of a misfit group of fatherless kids.
We had been smoking since we were nine or ten years old, rolling up our school papers and putting oregano in them.
We had seen our parents do it, whether with joints or cigarettes.
It was just what we knew. We were scrappy, rough around the edges, a bit wild, but never really bad.
My shaved head made casting directors think I was tough, though, and after small roles in various movies and TV shows, I landed a plum character on a show called Heart of the City—a cop drama about an L.A.
detective raising two kids on his own. I played Robin Kennedy, and even though the show was canceled after one season—we were up against The Golden Girls on a Saturday night, which was death to ratings—I still managed to win a Young Artist Award for Exceptional Performance by a Young Actress in a New Television Comedy or Drama Series.
While I was working on Heart of the City, something happened that grew to have an outsize effect on my life.
What others might have taken as just another innocuous comment became for me a Mount Rushmore–size moment of shame.
What that friend said, and what I felt it exposed, ended up setting a precedent for my life that has caused me untold pain.