Chapter 7 The Orange Curtains #3
I couldn’t believe I’d been through all of this yet again. I hate even recounting it. I want to shake that twenty-two-year-old, wake her up. But that’s too easy to say now—she was bound by a situation from which she couldn’t escape.
I have to forgive her. I do forgive her.
I would wake up every morning with my stomach on fire from all the stress I was going through.
On a break from shooting, I headed home to L.A.
from the desert, only to find him stinking drunk.
The next day as I was leaving to go back to set, we got into yet another terrible fight, so bad that I just lost control of my body entirely and fell halfway down the stairs on my way out to my car.
Seeing the state I was in, he offered to drive me the two hours back to Palmdale.
But on the freeway, he kept driving toward the center divider, like he was going to kill us.
I know now that he wanted to see the fear in my face; it seemed to placate him every time. But how much longer could this go on?
A few nights later he called to tell me that he’d met someone.
It felt like a tiny chink of light in the darkness. Now I didn’t have to decide. Now I didn’t need anyone to save me. Now I could finally escape.
He was to move out immediately, take his stuff and be gone.
At the time, a dear friend of mine, Gary, was dying of AIDS. I went to his house with a bunch of his other friends to say goodbye while my boyfriend was supposed to pack up his shit and leave.
We were all there, loving on Gary, drinking wine and celebrating him as he lay, his eyes open, but not there, not in any real way.
I had bought Gary a crystal ball years before, and at one point, I put it next to him on the bed.
And even though he was far gone, we all watched in amazement as he reached out his hand to the crystal ball. His fingers moved around it.
“Oh, honey,” I whispered. “I love you, Gary. Goodbye.”
When I got home that day, once again I could see it and taste it, that scent of malevolence, of something so far off normal that no words could save it.
Far from having left, my boyfriend was lying asleep on a futon in the living room.
Next to him was a bottle of tequila and a bottle of Vicodin, both seemingly left open, I realize now, for me to think he’d swallowed a whole bunch of pills.
But I was just so exhausted from being with Gary that I heard myself very quietly say, “Okay, all right, whatever.” I poured myself a shot of tequila and lit up a cigarette.
I sat there, watching him sleep, hating the fact that he was still there. As I smoked, the phone rang, and when I answered, my mom’s voice came through.
“Gary’s gone.”
I started to cry, and as I did, this creature rose up from the futon and looked at me with that familiar stare, the look that seemed to say, “You’re dead.”
Here we go, I thought. I was used to it now.
What happened next was like a dream. Something was off, as though he had indeed taken a bunch of pills and tequila. He picked up my car keys and started to walk toward the door. But he was stumbling around, walking at an angle.
“Don’t take the car,” I said. “You’ll kill yourself.” I was trying to physically stop him from leaving. “You can’t drive right now. You can barely walk…”
But he was too strong for me, and he pushed past me out to the car and drove away. I immediately called the cops, telling them what kind of car and the license plate.
“You have to stop him,” I said. “He’s going to kill someone.”
They said there was nothing they could do.
I was desperate and called a friend of his in San Francisco to see if he’d contacted them to say he was on his way. As I was on the phone, he suddenly appeared in the doorway. He wasn’t falling around anymore. He seemed sober now, focused, like he had a mission, like it had all been a ruse.
I was relieved, and not. A part of me wished he had gotten into a car accident and died. The truth is, in my mind, I planned his death every day—that’s why I never had a gun. I used to think, I’ll put a bullet through his head if he doesn’t put one through mine.
I’m fucked, I thought. I’m fucked.
“How much did you have to drink tonight, Christina?” he said.
“Not that much…”
“You did too. You’re a fucking alcoholic.”
“No I’m not. Fuck you. My friend was dying. I’m not drunk. I drove…”
Before I could finish, a cigarette lighter flew across the room and split the skin above my eye wide open. I still have the scar. Blood was shooting out of my face, splattering all over a sleeping bag I’d grabbed.
“Oh, you want to be a little drunken whore?” he said, seething.
Now he was coming at me, the bottle of tequila in his hand. He grabbed me, pulled my head back by my hair, and, rather than beat me with the bottle, as I thought he might, pushed me to the floor, where he held my nose and poured the entire bottle of tequila down my throat.
The liquor burned. I felt the room sway. Was this really happening? I gagged on all the liquid in my stomach, hoping I could throw it up quickly, before I got severe alcohol poisoning.
But despite my almost instant and debilitating intoxication, I wasn’t stupid; I knew how to work my shit.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I deserve it. I’m sorry. Deserve it. I’m sorry.” I was sitting up now, placating him, playing him.
“I need to call my mom back, tell her everything’s okay,” I said. “She heard some of this, so…” I was insinuating that she might be on her way already.
He sat off to the side, his fervor yet again dissipating a little once his behavior seemed to have had the desired effect.
I called my mom, and I said to her, over and over, “Oh, no, I deserve it. I’m sorry you had to hear that. I deserve it, I deserve it…”
But it wasn’t my mom I called—it was my security guy. As my fame had grown, it had become imperative that I have someone who would keep the crazies at bay, and I’d found a guy who once worked in an L.A.-based SWAT team. He was even part of the team that arrested O.J. Simpson.
He was a seriously badass motherfucker, and because I kept calling him “Mom,” he knew.
That guy got into his car, put a light on top, and made it from Canyon Country, more than an hour away, to my log cabin on Lookout Mountain in less than twenty minutes.
When he arrived, he ran up the eighty steps as if in one bound.
Coming through the back door, through the kitchen, and into the living room, he found my boyfriend sitting on the couch as though nothing had happened, and me mostly unconscious, in and out and incoherent.
Each of my breaths was apparently separated by an eternity, he told me later.
“Almost dead,” he said. “You were almost dead.”
I was fading, but when I was awake, I was whispering, “Pretend I’m sleeping. Pretend I’m sleeping.”
My security guy didn’t need any more information.
“You need to leave now,” he said to him.
“Who the fuck are you to…?” he started to say, making as if to fight him.
Bad idea. It didn’t take my security guy long to get him the fuck out.
For the next couple of months, SWAT guys sat outside my house twenty-four hours a day with all the artillery you could possibly imagine in their trunks.
One of them, a guy named Bob, kept saying, “I keep seeing that asshole drive by. Can’t I just shoot him?
I have a license to actually kill a person. ”
I realized a license to kill a person was not a thing, but still, I found it comforting.
“Do whatever you want to do,” I said.
I’m sorry if I keep leading you to believe this is the end of the story. You’d certainly think that it would be… alas.
After I kicked him out, the guy moved into a place in a really nasty part of L.A.
It was so bad that he was sharing a room, sleeping on a bunk bed.
I felt awful, yet again. I even brought him Christmas presents.
I was still trying to be the best girlfriend.
I showed up as a surprise at his apartment, dressed in a full Santa suit with the beard, the long white hair, fat tummy, boots.
I was carrying a huge satchel of presents over my shoulder.
Because that’s something he had never had: a real Christmas. He had ruined mine every fucking year before that, but still I couldn’t fully see that, or really know it. I wanted to be looked at as an amazing friend who did all these great things.
And yes, I can hear the bargaining in my words. This is how the cycle works.
That man never took full responsibility for anything he ever did.
I think I was partly brainwashed for years, somehow thinking that what happened between us was my fault.
For years I thought, As much as I sit here and ridicule him, and blame everything on him, there’s this little part of me that added some fuel to the fire in those situations.
My mind would say, You did, Christina, you did.
I have always had a strong sense that I need to take responsibility for everybody’s pain, and I never want to place responsibility or fault on anybody else about anything.
It’s fucked up—I know that. I can’t bear thinking that I’m too bold or think too highly of myself.
I will forever be that girl passing the 20th Century Fox lot and innocently saying, “Oh my god, that’s so weird.
That’s where I live!,” and there will always be that silence, and then my friend will always be saying, “You’re doing it. ”