Girl Act (8 page)

So here I was with this good-looking Tennis Actor gliding in and out between my legs. There is a God!

But my Aunt Helen had been the one who taught me to believe again, after my manic depressive mom ran away when I turned fifteen. My mom used to be an activities director at a senior center—basically she chose fun things for the seniors to do. She’s mildly dyslexic, as in not as much as me. She met a cook at a burrito joint in Porter Square not far from the senior center, who was moving back to Panama to start a coffee plantation, and he invited her to join him. The ‘love’ story goes that the Panamanian man had started shaking when he sat across from my mother, that he felt his heart pounding and couldn’t help but tell her, “My heart beats for you,” in broken English. She was so struck by his natural, pure way of speaking, she practically drooled. He had about a year of English under his belt, a slow year, and it moved her to tears. So she packed up her stuff and headed off with him, promising to keep in touch with me and my workaholic, academic, father.

Only a few half-page letters came now and then, and my Aunt Helen said, “You have two choices: number one, blame your mother, get down in the dumps and be a victim of loss, or number two, forgive her, grow up, and create a joyful life of your own.”

She was like that, always tossing the coin up. If the toss ended up heads, it was, “I’ll volunteer today,” tails it was, “I’ll make something interesting.” Those were her typical choices. My Aunt Helen had sewn words of inspiration across my jeans and on a winter jacket and a raincoat.

“Your mother couldn’t spend her whole life with an academic. She had a quest to fulfill herself, and she did her best with the family for as long as she could. And that’s all you can judge her on,” my Aunt Helen had said, just before I went off to college to be crazy and wild. And it was because of her that I moved to Los Angeles.

I had already graduated from college, only to end up working as a waitress at Dojo’s in the East Village and an usher at BAMM, and as a tarot card reader at upscale holiday parties, where I promised the world for a flat fee of a $130.00 per party. I’d always get the females—the confessional types worried about their marriages, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, and their careers. I would just flip the cards and say stuff like, “You’re a high priestess and the rods spells out adoring love approaching; get ready for the best passion in bed of your life,” if that’s what she was worried about. If it was health, I’d turn the coin images up, to show healing and the circle of life, and with career concerns, I’d lay it on thick, “The cards showed hardship and suffering, but now they reveal the rebirth of financial bliss, the promise of continued opportunity, even a Swiss bank account, blah, blah.” They would return to the party with their heads high, their shoulders straight and I could tell that they believed me.

I had had Aunt Helen sew the word “BELIEVE” down the right thigh of my favorite pair of black dress pants. I wore a burgundy Indian cloth around my head and a black silk blouse, all because I had met a Gypsy girl named Nancy on 14th Street who told me I had fortune teller eyes, and that party gigs were a quick way to make extra cash and that people always tipped. There was no resume needed, and she and her mother taught me tricks, like how to moan as if a vision was coming up my foot into my eyeballs; how to sigh; how to ask what was wrong without sounding fake.

I made a vow on the flight from New York to Los Angeles to never, ever read tarot cards or tea leaves or palms again. I had kept my promise until the Tennis Actor stared at me with that, ‘you’re abandoning me’ look—the one that previously I gave to guys. So I found myself picking up his left hand and rubbing his palm, and saying, “The doctor TV show is going to give you all you want and need, just stay open.” And then he said, “Shut up, I’m going to miss you.” And a lump came up in my throat. No one ever tells you how to get rid of that kind of a lump, but I tried to swallow it away. FYI, emotional lumps can’t be swallowed. Sometimes moments end like this, and there’s no movie director around to shout, “CUT, SCENE CHANGE!”

Going forward with my decision to leave LA was what I had to do for my Aunt Helen. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have stored my stuff, what with all the local ‘first month free’ storage places—it was just that I knew, somewhere inside me, that I was moving away—maybe not permanently, but at least for a few years, or, then again, maybe for good. I felt a mix of excitement along with the fear of leaving my LA friends, my LA acting career, and my LA way of life. Added onto that was guilt, guilt for leaving a guy I wasn’t deeply in love with, but whom I had grown fond of being with. Ugh!

Okay not easy to do, but if I was to find my own Mr. Darcy (AKA Romeo) and a career less built on someone else saying, “yes” to me, then I had to go. There were a few days when I wished I could have found an open-24-hours-shrink—maybe they have those in Las Vegas. The trouble was I kept having ‘abandonment issues’ and pangs in my stomach. The Tennis Actor didn’t bring it up, but he looked at me like I was leaving because of him, which I wasn’t. At least I don’t think I was! So he came over every night to screw the longest goodbye over and over again. Better than the way most movies end. Go figure!

And by the end of week, UPS had shipped all of my boxes to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to my father’s cluttered, two-bedroom apartment, which was wall-to-wall books in every room—books he actually had read.

Shadow and I stayed with the Tennis Actor for our last Hollywood night, while he looked over sides for his TV show part. The landlord was relieved that I was moving out because he could now raise the rent. After all, Los Feliz had rapidly become the trendy place to live.

I gave my beat-up Volvo with about a year left on it to a woman who was raising two kids without child support. I had put an ad on Craigslist to drive somebody’s car back East and by perfect fate, which is always the case with that site, I got not just any car, but a super stylish red BMW. Hell, Craigslist should have been paying me yearly to do commercials for them, or at least radio spots. The site is amazing. The BMW belonged to an up-an-coming fashion designer who needed it driven to New Haven, Connecticut, to her parents’ house. Oh, of course I lied about Shadow and told her, “Yeah, I’m driving across the country all alone.” Naturally, I bought a few drop cloths from Home Depot and covered the backseat with them and for all intents and purposes it worked: no mutt hair landed on the seats or in the plush panels.

The morning before I drove off, the Tennis Actor booked his fourth national commercial.

“I’m going to really miss you,” he said, with his arms stretched around me like we were in a shampoo commercial.

“Yeah, for maybe a month, until some sexy guest actress arrives and you fall hard for her,” I said.

“Vivien, you might not want to believe this, but I like you and if you would stay in LA, I would live with you. We’d rent a new place. You’re good luck for me,” he said.

Not much you can say when someone wants you and you’ve always wanted to be wanted. And you also realize that they like you in bed, which just adds ‘icing’ on the relationship. Maybe sex is a metaphor for icing. I couldn’t open my mouth, because it was time to go and that suddenly hurt. I could have borrowed a good-bye movie line, but instead I said, “You’d better become a major, Emmy-winning actor, so I can beat myself up daily with regret.” I tried kicking my ass to illustrate my remorse. After a long kiss, a pat on the butt—him patting my butt and then me patting his, I drove over to my agent Ray’s office.

Ray was in; he had his back to the door and he was packing boxes.

“So, you’re walking out on me? What about my Academy Award?” I asked, with a smirk on my face.

Ray turned, gave me his famous Italian-American hug and started explaining “I’m done here. I gotta get out of show biz, but you, Vivien, got fat talent, fat talent,” he said. I plunked myself down in his desk chair and swiveled around.

“Ray, no worries, I’m going back East, so don’t think a thing; I was just teasing you.”

Ray had represented, among others, Aldo and his late son, the actor Alonzo, and he liked to talk about it—the story goes that Coppola was seeking Italian-American actors for his Godfather movie. Ray submitted them both, since Aldo was fluent in Italian and Alonzo wasn’t. Coppola asked Alonzo all sorts of questions, while Aldo had to watch. Later that day Ray got the call; Alonzo had booked himself a movie part. He shot his scene opposite Robert De Niro. Aldo was ecstatic for his son.

Incidentally Ray no longer managed them, but they stayed friends. The last time I saw them both was a month before Alonzo died. He and his father were in a four-door classic Cadillac. Alonzo was behind the steering wheel, and pulled to the curb, so they could say hello to me. They had that authentic father and son bond, absolute love and respect for each other. Not everyone gets that in life. I felt the urge to jump in and hang out with them for the day; to soak up their affection. To ask for life lessons.

Ray took me to Alonzo’s memorial at the Writers Guild Theater on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. “That was some memorial, a lot of laughs,” Ray said, reading my mind, which was easy because I was staring at photos of Alonzo and Aldo on Ray’s wall. “Alonzo knew how to befriend anyone and everyone,” I said.

“You’re good at friendship, too, Vivien,” he said, like he thought I needed validating. All of sudden I felt like crying, like breaking down and sobbing uncontrollably, but fortunately Ray interrupted my thoughts.

“Hey, you’re not giving up acting? You better be going into indie filmmaking and weird theater projects. I get it; you’re going back to New York City. You’re going to make it huge there, right? I’m right, right?”

It was strange because the phrase indie filmmaking made me think—maybe that’s what I had been missing out on all along. After all I don’t really look like most of the actresses in LA, nor do I get the auditions, jobs and parts they do.

So I said, “I’ll never be done with acting. Hollywood’s not for me right now, I can’t keep on contemplating liposuction,” in spite of the fact that Ray probably knew a few plastic surgeons that didn’t charge as much as the Beverly Hills kind.

“Yeah, then you have to go back East; you’re wonderful the way you are. You don’t need plastic stuff done to you,” he said, like an agent and father-figure all in one.

“Ray, you need to be singing. Cut a CD and sing in nightclubs; it’s time you have your ‘Frank Sinatra’ night life,” I said, knowing Ray was a part-time singer and that he had done it full time before becoming an agent.

“I’m no Sinatra, but I do like to sing. Hey, you know what? My son’s living in Arizona and he’s got a girlfriend now,” Ray beamed.

In my opinion, there is handful of great fathers, and if I had my way of changing the world, I’d rotate them, so that everyone would have one of these great fathers at least every other year, to be adopted even temporarily by these great, loving fathers. Why not! I’d be the first in line, although my father is not on the ‘bad’ dad list at all. He’s just a workaholic, who is emotionally awkward. He can’t show mushy love, where dads like Ray and Aldo say things like, “Damn it, you’re my kid; you’re my flesh and blood and that’s the best thing there is in this crazy, messed up, beautiful world. Anything you do right makes me proud.” Those kind of corny, cheeseball lines last forever. Being the Italian-American gentleman he is, Ray walked me downstairs, and whistled at the red BMW.

“Not mine. You remember Shadow?” Ray nodded at my dog.

“You gonna be safe enough?” he asked, like an agent/father.

“Yeah, Shadow has a mean stare and a serious bark, and when anyone who is even half crazy approaches this car, he’ll snarl like he eats human meat,” I said, which was true.

“Vivien, you ever think back to the night you were held at gunpoint?” he asked.

“Not much, because I’m too busy enjoying being alive,” I answered.

He gave me one of those pretend knock-out punches on my chin that affectionately means, ‘You’re good stuff’. Then he knocked on the hood, giving it the official drive- off salutation. I got in and headed toward the 101 Freeway, leaving Hollywood and all the one-liners, all the almost-movie-parts, all the commercial ‘smile’ auditions behind me. Shadow had taken his last wiz on a patch of grass near Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. Off and away we went!

The freeway is open, wide and designed for screaming at the top of your lungs, for feeling the freedom of adventure and for driving a little bit past the speed limit. Just a little bit. The red BMW came with cruise control and I took full advantage of it. With Shadow in the back, I felt safe and energized. This was my first trip across the country. America had been just a map of names memorized from places in movies. Lots of movies! There were no vegan or vegetarian ‘hot spots’ on the GPS for going from the West Coast to the East Coast. Something somebody ought to do something about. So I was forced to stop in health food stores and refill my cooler with soy products, tofu and raw vegetables. Might not sound yummy, but it is.

My first state after leaving California was Nevada. Wow. I have to say, there is nothing like driving across a desert landscape. There is a lot of it to see, and it’s not just bare, dry land. It’s beautiful in an un-lush non-green way. I had Googled doggy motels before leaving LA and, so far, the Super 8 motel chains were going to be the best place to stay the night.

Heads up, when I first moved to LA I bought a large box of used VHS movies and a small TV that only played VHS at a yard sale in Burbank, near the horse stables. So FYI, the movies that I can quote lines come from that pack—none of them are current movies. So, my drive across country was about to be filled by visiting some of those fantastic film locations. Incidentally, at the yard sale I paid only forty dollars and that included the TV. I felt lucky—go figure!

Las Vegas, to me, looks like it does on all the postcards and in the landscape photo books. You can’t help but laugh that some money-making-organized-crime guys got together to create it. Or maybe it was all due to Bugsy Siegel. Who really knows? I felt a rush driving into it, almost a fear, and a giddiness that I could get stuck and become a Las Vegas showgirl, or a high-paid whore with my name monogrammed on thigh high-boots. It was easy to see that if I wanted to, I could create a new life in Las Vegas. The buildings are high and advertising is everywhere. The neon lights are art in themselves, designed to get your attention and it got mine. This was where scenes for
Godfather 1
and
Godfather 2
,
Clear and Present Danger
, Casino, and
Top Gun
were filmed.