Chapter 4 Quit #3
I’m really down on myself and my body… I have decided to not eat anything and to just drink water and such (other liquids).
I feel that in no time at all I will be the skinniest of all my friends, and people will like me more.
I strive to be beautiful, but nothing seems to work.
My mom said that I might be able to suck the fat out of my thighs.
It’s a new form of plastic surgery and it is great.
I just hope that I can do it soon. The only problem is I might have to be full-grown and maybe I am or maybe I’m not, but I still hope I can do it no matter what it costs.
Let’s have a toast to being skinny and me getting the fat sucked out.
It breaks my heart to read this now. The extremity of it all scares me—the pressure I must have felt as an actor to conform to the weird Hollywood “perfection,” not to mention that I was already conflating being thin with being liked.
No one pointed out that I was dangerously skinny, that my idea of self was warped and I did not need to change myself further. In fact, it was the opposite.
I was a young woman on the precipice of adulthood whose body was already her greatest enemy, not her ally.
My mother, all too knowledgeable about the pressures of being a woman, had seemingly done enough research to give me damaging ideas about how to brutalize myself with liposuction, how to reach for a “perfection” that was neither obtainable nor even real.
I was thirteen. I can only imagine that this was a projection of her own struggles, of a bond that went beyond mother and child into something closer, intermingled in ways that were both more meaningful and more codependent.
It would take me years to understand that “perfect” was a chimera, a falsehood, and a life-threatening falsehood at that.
That I could be a size 0 and call myself a “fat blob” signaled the failure of so many things: my own ability to see clearly, my mother’s guidance, the culture of not just Hollywood but the wider world.
Was it any wonder that when I looked in the mirror, I saw not beauty but the opposite?
Still, I saw beauty in others. I had been fortunate to meet a girl on the set of Charles in Charge named Samantha Smith, who stood out as an incredible role model.
I had appeared in two episodes of the first season of Charles in Charge, which was then a smash hit show.
In one I’d taped—episode 6, “Slumber Party”—Samantha had also appeared, playing one of the girls who shows up for the party.
(Each of the girls arrives with something to contribute to the evening’s fun.
One brought a poster of Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran and I can only imagine that was my idea.)
Samantha was already famous before her brief cameo on Charles in Charge.
In November 1982, she had written a simple letter to the then leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov.
In the letter, she had revealed to the Russian premier her fears about a nuclear war between the U.S.
and the Soviets, imploring him to commit to avoiding a catastrophe.
Andropov eventually wrote back; on the back of his very public response, Samantha had become a symbol of hope for the two Cold War superpowers, had subsequently spent two weeks in Russia, and had become a significant celebrity on her return stateside.
When she and I met, none of that really mattered. We were just two sharp kids working on a TV show, and we quickly became firm friends; she was sweet and interesting and wise beyond her years.
Then one day I was sitting on the steps outside the set of Washingtoon, having a cigarette, when someone found me to deliver the news.
“Can you believe that little girl who wrote that letter to the Soviets just died in a plane crash?”
My heart stopped, and my head fell into my hands. There had been a crash in Maine as Samantha had been returning home from shooting a TV show, and she and her father, along with four other passengers and two crew, had died.
I couldn’t breathe. One of the older actors on Washingtoon, seeing me crying, asked me what had happened. I could barely get the words out.
“My friend just died,” I said.
The actor took out a piece of yellow paper, and with a blue pen he wrote, “Here’s to the tears of friendship. May they crystallize as they fall and be worn as gems in the memory of those we love.”
I still have that piece of paper.
I sometimes turn to my journals from back then to try to connect with Samantha. I can hear my fourteen-year-old self in the exclamation points and emotion on the page.
May 17, 1986
Fuck she was special. I miss her!!!!!… I am scared that if I get too depressed, I might kill myself. Which is something I don’t really want to do, but when I throw a frenzy, I am capable of any kind of destruction to myself.
June 12, 1986
I hate this world!!!! The other day at school, I tried to kill myself.
I just wish I would have succeeded! Every day seems to get worse.
Dying sounds better and better. Ever since Samantha’s death things haven’t been too good…
Fuck I miss her! I just want to be with her.
My sweetheart. My love. Her picture is on my wall looking over me like a guardian angel.
I want to go back and find that fourteen-year-old girl, the one who was determined to be modest to the point of self-effacement, the one struggling with her body image, the one fasting, drinking only water, the girl who had survived so much and who now had to deal with the violent loss of her friend.
I want to wrap her up so tightly and tell her everything will be okay.
I often think about how MS is exacerbated by trauma. My current stomach problems act up if someone starts to stress me out. I start vomiting, almost like my body is trying to stop the noise, too. Then I end up in the hospital again.
I just want everything to stop.
But it won’t stop. I’ll be stuck in this bed, my brain lesions sparking like a downed wire. I’ll be poring through my journals from when I was young, trying to find the key to something. Perhaps I saw into the future in ways that are hard to believe. This from, again, June 1986.
The bright days that I so looked forward to are turning to gray.
Why is life for me more of a chore than an experience?
Each time I awake I dread the day that will follow.
I wish that the pain I feel inside would terminate.
I hate it here. But I suppose that I should “look on the bright side.” My heart says what bright side and my mind says that there is joy on the “long and winding road” ahead.
I just don’t know if I should follow that road.
Who knows what it’s leading to. Either happiness or sadness.
I think that I should just give it a try.
I suppose I did follow that road, but did it lead to happiness or sadness?
Just as for everyone, for me it led to both. It led me here.
With everything turning to gray, I thought comedy was beneath me. My world was punk and the Canyon and Melrose and three hours of school every few weeks between jobs. Committing to a comedy show like Married… with Children, which was billed as an antidote to the smarmy charms of The Cosby Show?
No thanks—comedy was for suckers. I had a shaved head and a gnarly attitude.
I was sure that I was destined for a career filled with dramatic roles, like the one I’d won an award for on Heart of the City. Comedy was so not what I was.
I hated myself.
And I hated Kelly Bundy.
But there was more—the hair band generation as depicted in the character of Kelly?
It was so not my thing, so not my style.
I was from the Canyon, from Joni-land. Stephen Stills was my godfather.
By fifteen, I’d discovered Janis Joplin and I rued the fact that I’d missed Woodstock every day.
I wore patchouli, which some people told me meant I smelled like goat BO.
(They were not wrong.) I was the child of a real hippie.
I was not comedy; I was not Kelly Bundy.
Some days my friends and I would walk all the way down to Melrose from Lookout Mountain.
Back then, Melrose was a scene. There were clothing stores like Aaardvark’s, grimy and grungy and awesome.
Those stores smelled like crack. Sure enough, I found out later that a friend of a friend was smoking crack in the back of one of them.
Out on the street, homeless teenagers slept and waited and begged for change.
They were mostly runaways, or kids who had been kicked out of their homes.
There they were, lounging around on Melrose with their mohawks, in tattered clothes covered in zippers, smoking cigarettes and waiting for something good to happen.
It felt like we were all punks back then: on Melrose, at Aaardvark’s, in the alleys sniffing glue, at Fairfax High School, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers would come from one day soon.
I didn’t go to Fairfax HS. I went to Excelsior HS, just off of Highland Avenue in the very heart of Hollywood.
Excelsior was a school for working kids. We went there from 9 a.m. till noon only, leaving us plenty of time to do our real jobs.
Excelsior claimed to be a “college prep” school.
In reality, it was so lax that we would regularly get away with changing the clocks so the head of the school would think we were done for the day.
He’d go to the bathroom or to the office, and we’d immediately nominate someone to go up and move the hands of the clock to read noon.
When he returned, he’d look at the clock and announce, “Ah, looks like we’re done!
” He was probably as relieved as we were.