Chapter 7 The Orange Curtains #2
Because I feel I am going to die tonight; everything in me feels that.
But the power of my sad eyes fails me. She cannot understand what my eyes are trying to say.
This is not a language any mother can, or should be able to, understand.
Her daughter is walking away toward a fifty-buck-a-night motel with this man.
What can she do? She has seen the future, and it can’t be stopped; she has lived this in the past, and for many years couldn’t stop that either.
I am an adult now. I can make my own choices.
This is the choice I’ve made, though perhaps just as she understood once, it’s something that was no choice at all.
Incredibly, my mother starts up the car and drives away. My eyes couldn’t reach hers. It is not her fault, just as it is not mine.
The motel room is as disgusting as you might imagine: brown, mottled, unkempt carpet; a gross bedspread that has God knows what living in it; a TV that’s mostly static; a single broken brown chair in the corner; a yellow rotary-dial telephone; orange, too-thin curtains; a Gideon’s Bible in the side table…
Actually, the room was so bad it was probably a Jeff’s Bible.
I don’t know why a joke about a Bible comes to mind now when I think about that horrible moment. Perhaps I’m still trying to save that girl with funny.
The man throws his shit down on the floor, takes a step toward me. My body hits the bed, hard. I’m paralyzed there. I know I’m doomed, that I probably won’t live through this.
This is the end.
He sits down in the chair and looks at me. He smiles, a sick, evil smile.
“Another evening ruined by you,” he says.
I can’t move. My body feels like concrete, like a great lost weight falling to the bottom of a six-thousand-fathom ocean.
“Can I call and say I’m here…?”
I think of it this way: if I call my mom, perhaps the waver in my voice will communicate what my eyes couldn’t convey—that I need help.
They say a new mother can tell the cry of her child above all the others in a packed newborn nursery.
Perhaps mine will hear my cry in the quaver of my voice, in the words I don’t say, in how far I stray from what I would usually say to those words I do choose to share.
I have to tell her. I have to tell her to get me out of here…
“No!” he shouts.
Then he reconsiders and says words that still haunt me; they will always haunt me.
“Actually, you can call whoever the fuck you want,” he says quietly, firmly, nastily. “It won’t matter.” I see in his eyes that I’ll be dead before they even get here. “I really don’t give a shit.”
I watch him walk across the room and go into the bathroom. I hear him punch the mirror, hear the shattering glass. I watch as he brings out a shard. He comes toward me. I feel something cold on my neck.
My newfound sense of the possibility of survival falters. I realize with horror that he’s not going to kill me yet, that in fact something worse is going to happen before he does so.
I am so terrified I realize I’m calm. Time moves imperceptibly, crawling along like a sloth. My blood stills. My mouth, dry from terror, loosens as though my mother has passed me my morning juice to wake it up. Is there an edge to me now, suddenly, the first flickering of a survivor?
Something about his threats rings hollow, and the cold edge of the broken mirror sparks a surge of adrenaline, as though my kidnapper has brought me a warm meal after weeks of abandonment. No, I’m not going to die tonight. It’s in my hands now.
I reach for the phone, but it’s a mistake.
“I told you no. I told you if you went to the phone you’d be fucked,” he says, holding my face to the bed while with the other hand he yanks the cord out of the wall. I can’t breathe.
From behind my eyes, I feel a torrent, and suddenly I’m crying, hard, uncontrollably.
I want to be strong, to kick back, but this man is stronger.
Do I still hold out, deep in my reptilian brain, the hope of redemption for us, for everyone?
This is the curse and the power of women: we can find forgiveness even in a place of irredeemable violence.
Then his tone changes again.
“You know what, I’m not going to kill you,” he taunts. “Take off your clothes.”
I think I’d rather die than have sex with this person right now.
He makes me get in bed, makes me get on top of him. I am crying so hard.
I think I’m going to throw up.
I’m lying on top of this monster that I’m supposed to love. And the weirdest thing is that the smell of him, a smell I have come to associate with home, overpowers me… and yet now its source has promised to kill me, and I fear he’s going to rape me.
“Please, please, please,” a voice is saying. “Let me go. Please let me go.” It is my voice, a famous voice, one known to millions of TV viewers, but unrecognizable in its fear, and heard by no one save this man who I have told myself I love.
This isn’t my time. Surely this isn’t my time. Not today, not today, not today.
My prayer is answered, I don’t know how. He relents a little and momentarily lets me go.
“Okay,” he says quietly, “put your clothes on, call a cab, and get the fuck out of here.”
When I look back, I realize something: he seemed to have gotten great enjoyment out of treating me like that.
He seemed to take pleasure in making me truly believe he was going to kill me.
My all-consuming fear appeared to satisfy him.
I felt like he could see the terror in my face, how his anger made my body useless.
It’s as if making me cry, making me feel terror, and my showing him that terror in my eyes had been enough for him.
It seemed as though he’d gained some power, as though that’s what he liked.
Feeling the loosening of his grip, the wilting of the glass in his hand, the sense that something has run its course, I push myself off of him, throw on my clothes, bolt to the door, and run to the front desk.
The place is shut up for the night. I see no one. How long do I have before he comes to get me once again? Surely he’s not going to let me escape a third time today.
I pound on the locked door of the motel office. Nothing. The guy who runs the place, who I imagine also lives here, is probably in a back room, drinking his whiskey in his dirty tighty-whities. Who knows? He might be watching me on TV.
I’m banging on the door, shouting, “Help, help, help!”
Finally, I see a light. A door opens. The guy appears.
“What’s all this noise?” he asks.
“Call me a cab,” I shout. “Please call me a cab.”
He seems confused.
“Hurry—before he comes to get me!” I’m screaming now. “Hurry—before he comes to kill me.”
This new verb, “kill,” does the trick. He bolts back into his quarters and then comes back. He opens the office and lets me sit by the door.
The cab takes forever. As I wait, I realize that my nails are digging into the vinyl chair. Eventually, the man says, “There’s a cab coming.” He seems to recognize me, but perhaps I’m imagining it.
The cab arrives. I throw myself into the back seat and hide down low.
It feels like years, but I eventually get back to my grandmother’s house. Everyone is asleep when I arrive. I ring the doorbell over and over and over and over and over. Finally, my mother opens the door, and I fall, right there in the hallway.
I just fall.
I wish I could say it was the end, but as is too often the case, it was not.
Despite what happened in that motel—not to mention that my mother and the rest of the family were horrified at what they’d seen—we stayed together.
The fact that I couldn’t flee gives me endless compassion for women who can’t find a way to escape.
The day after, he called.
“I have no money and no food,” he said. “And I need some way to get back to L.A.” No apology.
According to him, that night had been my fault.
I had almost ruined his camera film by turning the light on.
I was the one to blame, hence I had to pay for it.
I had done this to him, and I owed him a flight and a hotel and everything else in between.
His luggage had finally showed up, so I sent it over with some cash.
I got him out of there. At least then I knew my family would be safe.
Eventually, he took a bus to Chicago and somehow got back to L.A., back to my house.
Saturday, December 26, 1992
I cannot feel the freedom
Let me touch him—love him
But the chain around my neck is tight.
Tug tug at my soul
Make me love you.
But can’t I love him
He who will not whip me
But feed me flowers
And bathe in wine
And rub my temples
But I get the beating
A lighter to my eye
Blood. Yet I cannot stop!!!
In the early nineties, I made a movie called Across the Moon in between call times for Married…
In it I play the girlfriend of an incarcerated guy, played by Peter Berg.
The film was shot in L.A., as well as in and around Palmdale on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
By now, the relationship had me so broken that physically I was wasting away—during the month it took to make Across the Moon, I went from a size 4 to a size 0, maybe less. I kept it all from the world.
One day he came to the cabin with my friend Bill. The fighting commenced yet again. We ended up in the basement arguing violently. Bill called his sister from upstairs, and she later said she could hear me screaming even though I was nowhere near the phone.
“Bill!” she said. “You gotta go help her.”
“But he’ll kill me,” Bill said.
At one point, I ended up on the ground, and my head slammed into the floor.
The fall left me with a skull that was so swollen that when I went to work, the hairstylist on Married…
had to make my hair bigger so it wouldn’t show when we were filming.
I told the stylist what had happened but kept it from everyone else—professional, professional, professional.