Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (7 page)

“Next Wednesday? Three o’clock? Sure I can get up to L.A.”

Of course, I couldn’t get up to L.A. on a bus or in a taxi, so I stole my mother’s car. Up until that point I’d been allowed to borrow it to drive down the hill to school and back, and occasionally to the beach. So on the appointed Wednesday I skipped school and drove to Los Angeles. Halfway there I hit something on the freeway and it ripped up the entire underside of the car and totally wrecked it. I had no money to get the car towed. The police ended up taking me to a pay phone so I could call my mom. She took the fall for me, telling my dad that she was behind the wheel. But my luck held out; I was able to set up another meeting with Joan Green.

The next time I played it smarter and convinced my brother Vincent, who already lived in L.A., to take me up there, and I crashed on his couch.

Joan was totally professional but high-strung and slightly neurotic. She weighed me on a scale in her office, decided she liked the way I looked, and asked if I would come back and do a scene for her. “No problem,” I replied and then walked out of her office wondering where on earth I was going to find a scene. I didn’t know there was an actor’s bookstore called Samuel French; I didn’t know anything. I’d done plays like
Oliver
and
Annie,
but I sure as hell wasn’t going to do a scene from either of those oldies, so I wrote a monologue about an eighteenth-century female musician who wasn’t allowed to play the violin because she was expected to get married and just shut up. I brought my violin along and played a few notes and then launched into this monologue about a girl whose father didn’t understand her passion for music and who was forcing her to marry against her will, and I cried and beat the violin and did the whole bit. Joan must have seen something in me because she signed me on for a three-year management contract right there. I went back to Laguna Beach and started packing.

With the extra credits I received from working at Cappuccino and two other jobs, which involved selling surf wear and shots of tequila on the beach, my guidance counselor managed to cobble together enough credits for me to graduate from high school at the age of sixteen and a half. I wasn’t cut out for school, and I knew it.

I’d arranged to split a little apartment in L.A. with my gay friend Michael, who was moving up there to be a makeup artist for Christian Dior. I’d saved enough to allow me to pay rent and bills for three months. It was time to stand on my own two feet.

By then Tre had already commenced his kamikaze dive and I knew it was time to move on. For a grown man, he didn’t take rejection well. “If you try to leave me I’ll take from you the person that you love the most.” I believed him. I didn’t count on him being quite so calculatingly vindictive, but I believed him. We both knew he was talking about my mom. She and I had the same sense of humor, the same practical way of looking at the world. My dad had been absent for a lot of my childhood. My mom was my rock; I relied on her for support and encouragement. Tre’s cheap threat didn’t stop me from leaving him. I was done with men trying to pin me down. I went to my mother and warned her that Tre would come knocking on her door. She laughed it off. I felt better about the whole thing. I knew Tre was a smooth talker and that he was determined, but I trusted my mom. Problem solved. But that wasn’t the end of Tre’s run.

Shortly after that, my parents moved into separate places and started divorce proceedings. I was sad about the split and put it down to Patrick’s death finally taking its toll. One day I drove out to Santa Monica, to my mom’s new house. It was early in the morning; I was planning to surprise her. Parked out in front of her house was Tre’s Porsche. There was no mistaking it for anyone else’s car; the corny vanity plate read AAWILDERIII.

Was my mom having an affair with Tre? Was Tre the reason for the divorce? She knew I was trying to get him out of my life, and she’d still chosen him. I imagined him wining and dining her, helping her through the split from my dad. I was livid. My mom was the most important thing in the world to me. I’d assumed that the feeling was reciprocal, and yet there was the Porsche, proof that I didn’t matter as much as I thought I did.

It was the latest model, a 911 Carrera that he’d bought just before I left him. It was his baby. I walked over to it and without a second thought keyed the shit out of it. I scarred it right across one side, both panels, in long, unbroken lines, like a bad Matisse painting. If art is an expression of emotion then this was the ugliest fucking piece of art you’ve ever seen—but, by that definition, art it was. Then I took out the notebook from my purse, wrote a note to my mom, and stuck it to her door.

How could you? Don’t call me. I don’t want to ever speak to you again.

I ran into Tre about ten years after we’d broken up. He came up to me at the pool of a swanky hotel.

“Claudia. I’m so sorry about what happened. Can you ever forgive me?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I replied. “I will
never
forgive you.”

The way I saw it, he stole my mother away from me and engineered my parents’ divorce, and he did it deliberately and with malicious intent, just because seventeen-year-old Claudia didn’t want to see him anymore. My family fell apart, and I wouldn’t talk to my parents for another seven years; they didn’t even attend my wedding. It was the event that would close the door on my old life, on my childhood world, and there was no going back.

If I had stayed at home and dumped Tre when my dad told me to, who knows what would have happened? I ran into my friend Kara years later. We were so alike at school; we’d both dreamed of becoming actresses, encouraged each other to go for it, but there she was, wearing a hippie dress, gorgeous as ever, and pushing a baby stroller, a swarm of kids buzzing around her. She’d married a mountain man and moved to a small town in Colorado, so I guess it’s true, we are shaped by our choices.

Looking back on those traumas, they stand out as fairly grim landmarks in that formative part of my life, but there was something positive that grew out of them. Patrick’s death, my rape, and my troubled relationships taught me that no matter how tough the world gets, you can’t give up on yourself; you just have to keep taking that next step. That lesson manifested itself as a voice in my head, driving me forward, and it was stronger than self-doubt or fear or the pain of betrayal. At the worst times in my life I would cling to it like a piece of driftwood after a shipwreck. But back then, at the start of my new life in L.A., I felt as if I’d left all the difficulties of the past behind me. I was buoyed with enthusiasm. I’d trusted that inner voice, had faith that I could be an actress, and it had paid off. Now, as it carried me up to L.A., I felt unstoppable, unsinkable. But then, they said the same thing about the Titanic.

My school photo, 1970

With my mom in Glendale, California, 1967

With Jimmy and Vincent at Monarch Bay, California, 1967

With my playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, 1968

My family minus one. Westport, Connecticut, 1973, after Patrick’s death.