I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (2 page)

The bottom line is that the choices we make often make sense to us but can confuse others. Somebody is always
going to be disappointed with your life choice, and my rule of thumb is that as long as
I’m
not the one who is disappointed, I can live with that. If you’ve ever been thought of as selfish and immature or told “you’ll change your mind” about anything, I hope this book can be your card from Mr. Bergen. “Get out while you can”—get out of that mentality that there is a “right” way to live. (Well,
technically there is, I believe it’s called the Golden Rule, and you can find it either in the Bible or on a coffee mug, I forget.)

I know some people think that not wanting kids means I’m cold, but I’m not totally without baby urges. I felt something when I saw my friend Grace’s baby all swaddled in a blanket on the couch. She looked like a yawning peanut. She was just a content little lump,
drooling and going in and out of sleep. And I got that feeling deep down inside that almost brought tears to my eyes. I got an urge and I thought,
Oh my God. I want to . . .
be a baby.

1. Welcome Back, Kirkman

After graduating from Boston’s Emerson College in June 1996 with a bachelor of fine arts in “theater arts,” I moved back into my parents’ house. (There are few to no well-paying jobs available to a girl who minored in rolling around on the floor collecting dust bunnies on her sweatpants—otherwise known as “modern dance.”) I wish I’d had a really good reason for moving
back home, like my friend Jayson from freshman year in college. It was rumored that Jayson took too much acid and also became possessed by the devil on the same night—this rumor started because he dropped two tabs while doing a séance around a pentagram that Mick, his practicing Satanist roommate, had burned into their dorm room rug. After the devil possessed him and/or the bad trip never wore off,
folklore has it that Jayson was forever unable to speak but couldn’t stop laughing—like some kind of demonic hyena. Jayson left school during his first semester and moved into his mom’s basement, where he sat staring at the wall and listening to Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
most of the day, except for the time he spent at his part-time job at his hometown library. I know that story sounds
implausible—what library would employ a loud laugher?

Anyway, I didn’t have an excuse for moving back home that I could pin on my mom and dad either, such as: it turned out that my
mom wasn’t just a hypochondriac and she actually did have a fatal heart murmur and it was her dying wish for me to move back into my childhood bedroom that was still covered with floral psychedelic wallpaper from the
1970s. That would have been a good one (except for the fatal heart murmur part).

It’s not like I hadn’t made plans for my postcollege life. I had. My plan was to become a famous television actress, the type who could play younger, because as a twenty-one-year-old, I still looked sixteen, just like everyone on
Beverly Hills 90210
(well, except for Andrea). Always a realist, I also had a backup
plan and that was to become a famous actress on Broadway. I’d certainly put in some semiquality time training to be an actress. I spent every morning in acting class, putting my hand on my solar plexus to find my emotion and then breathing from my diaphragm. I usually found only a cough when I breathed deeply from my diaphragm because I’d developed a pack-a-day habit of smoking Camel Lights. I inhaled
the acting class air like a young, hopeful girl, then hacked and wheezed out phlegm like a longshoreman whose emphysema gets exacerbated by his seasonal pneumonia.

I was convinced that simply because I attended college and majored in acting, I would walk out of the not-a-serious-acting-conservatory Emerson College and straight into my own trailer in Hollywood or some backstage door on Forty-second
Street. The details were not mine to work out! That’s what acting professors were for! This was before I realized that my acting professors were themselves actors who also thought at one point in their misguided youth that they’d be famous. I don’t think any of them ever got offered a role in
The Godfather
and told Coppola, “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m going to have to turn this role down.
My real passion is to wake up every morning and teach a bunch of hungover college kids the concept of sense memory.”

In all my years of college, I never really sat down and got to thinking,
Okay, so how do I take this class where I do monologues from
Equus
and turn it into a career?
I was usually busy thinking about the cute
Kurt Cobain look-alike who was always sitting alone in the cafeteria
near the cereal. (Turns out that the reason he looked so much like Kurt Cobain was that he was also a heroin addict. I recently looked him up on Facebook and now he’s a chubby, short-haired, button-up-shirt-wearing computer programmer—married, with two kids. I mourn this outcome more than if he had OD’d.)

In the back of my mind I just assumed that there existed a special red phone in the dean’s
office at Emerson. In my limited knowledge of how the world actually worked, I decided that this phone I made up in my head existed solely for placing and receiving calls to and from Hollywood. I pictured a kingmaker with a Santa Claus–esque workshop running Hollywood, who kept a master list. Instead of who’s naughty and who’s nice, his list had names of who’s talented and who’s not. I pictured
my acting teacher calling this Hollywood Santa and saying something like, “Hi. This is Judith Renner. I’d like to report that Jen Kirkman just made herself cry in my Acting 101 class. Yes, she was doing a monologue about being a single mother but she used the image of her favorite dead pet as a catalyst for the tears. She was also speaking from her diaphragm and not mumbling. Oh, and she also nailed
this really difficult Fosse dance move that involves crooking her pinky finger and sitting on a chair. Can we move her up on the ‘talented’ list? Great. We’ll be in touch once she nails a Scottish accent—specifically the Shetland Isles.”

A FEW WEEKS before I graduated from college, in lieu of a realistic life plan, I decided I’d get a life-altering haircut. I didn’t even plan the haircut. It
just came to me as I walked by a Supercuts. I went in, plopped into an empty chair, and told some girl to give me the “Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
” pixie cut. What I really wanted was the “Winona Ryder in
Reality Bites
” pixie cut, but I was too self-conscious to ask for that one. I’d always been told that I resembled Winona and I didn’t want people to think that I was aware of that fact and
trying to be like her. Of course, all I wanted was to be like
her—mainly because she was dating Johnny Depp at the time and always got to play characters in movies that smoked cigarettes. Two things that thrilled me about the possibility of becoming an actor were (1) having an excuse to smoke if “my character” called for it and (2) doing love scenes with hot guys.

Within three minutes of walking
into Supercuts, my hair was on the floor like a slut’s thong and what was left of it was sticking straight up off the top of my head. The woman with the scissors said, “Whoops.” Who knows whether she was even an actual employee. She could have been a sociopath off the street who carried scissors and wore a red-stained apron that she swore was just “hair dye.” I looked stupid but I felt strangely
liberated. I’d just done a really spontaneous thing that I could not take back or correct for a long time—sort of like getting pregnant or having an abortion. It gave me an immediate Zen acceptance of who I was.

Nevertheless, the haircut looked like shit, so I went down the street to a real salon where I had to confess to an about-to-combust gay guy that I’d been careless enough to trust Supercuts
to get the
Rosemary’s Baby/Reality Bites
pixie cut correct. He did a dramatic pinwheel with his arms and brought his fist to his chin like the statue
The Thinker,
then took a deep breath and placed his hands on my shoulders. He cried up to the ceiling, “Hon. What
are
we going to do?” Then he moved back and, with tears in his eyes, waved his hand in front of his face like a lady about to faint
on her porch from either humidity or a sexy gentleman caller.

He took another deep breath.

“Hon, I have no choice but to nearly shave your head and leave a few pieces of bangs in the front. And you’re going to have to act like you meant to do this. It’s going to be very runway and you just have to promise me that you’ll never wear this hairstyle without product or . . . an attitude.”

I agreed—anything
to get him to stop grabbing me so hard and behaving like he was a character from a Tennessee Williams play.

I went to a college party that night and when I climbed out the
window onto the fire escape to smoke a cigarette, my favorite acting teacher was already sitting on the steps about to rip a bong hit. She exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face and said to me, “The hair. I like it. You’re not
hiding anymore. You’re really you now, aren’t ya, Jen? Aren’t ya?” I had no idea what she meant, but I was still under the impression that she was going to pick up that red phone as soon as she was done getting high with a bunch of twenty-one-year-olds, to let Hollywood know that I was no longer hiding. I held out hope that something would save me from my credit card debt. I’d just added another
couple of hundred bucks to my MasterCard to have that queen at the chichi salon shave my head.

I’D PASSED MY college years spending money on important things like tapestries for my bedroom walls and cigarettes for my lungs and now it was time to tighten my belt buckle—or at least to get a belt. The good thing about moving back home with my parents was that they weren’t the type to try to teach
me a lesson by charging me rent. They probably had more fun just silently judging me.

My original life plan had been to graduate and then move in with my boyfriend, Jamie. The only problem with that was that Jamie had dumped me a few months before graduation. (That also could have been a catalyst for the haircut, now that I think about it.) Jamie lived with his friends Adam and John, in the closet
of Adam’s bedroom. We’d lay in his single bed, watching his shirts hang above our heads, listening to Adam snore through the closet door and making plans for the day when Adam would move out and Jamie and I could take his room. When we weren’t fumbling to get each other’s pants off on a thin mattress on the floor of his closet, we were in the same college sketch comedy troupe called This Is
Pathetic, which actually would have been a great label for our relationship.

Jamie and I were opposites. The only thing we had in common was our comedy troupe. Jamie was a beer-drinking, sports-loving fraternity guy. When I wanted to go see the Ramones play at a rock
club in Boston on Valentine’s Day, that was the beginning of our end. He didn’t like the same music I did, yet he didn’t want me
running around to concerts by myself on such a Hallmark holiday. He said it “embarrassed him” that his woman attended a show alone. I never got the chance to ask him before he died, but I don’t think Joey Ramone gave a shit that I went unaccompanied to see his band play.

Jamie always told me that I reminded him of his best friend from high school, Paula, for whom he’d always had unresolved feelings.
He and I would take long, romantic walks through the Boston Common and he’d just stop and smile at me. He had a fantastic smile. He was like a shorter, greasier-faced Robert Downey Jr. I’d say, “Yes, Jamie?” waiting to hear him profess his love for me. And he’d say, “Sorry, you’re just so . . . Paula right now,” and then hug me tightly. I was too young to realize that if your boyfriend has
feelings for his unrequited high school love and high school was only four years prior, you’re not just a pleasant reminder of his youth; you’re a Second-Place Paula.

Jamie dumped me after running into Paula when he went home for a weekend to visit his mother. He said they fell in love that weekend and it just “happened.” As I type this I realize that he probably didn’t “run into her” but had
been talking to her all along, and his visit with his mother was really just his planned rendezvous with Paula. Oh my God, I was so stupid back then. But at least today I don’t have lopsided boobs after two kids, like Paula does. Oh, and she didn’t end up with Jamie. He was just a detour on her way to marrying a
different
guy from high school.

I’d just assumed that Jamie and I would be together
all summer and our love would be my backup plan in case the getting-famous thing didn’t happen right after graduation. I definitely didn’t want to have kids with him—we were both professionally undiagnosed but in my opinion clinically depressed. Any offspring of ours would probably fight to stay in my womb because it would be too despondent and tormented to want to be born. I didn’t necessarily
want to get married to Jamie either; I just wanted to continue to be
distracted by him. When he broke my heart, it felt like he stole my future or, alternatively, was making me face it. I was devastated and unable to get out of bed, like a mom, somewhat ironically, with an unfortunate case of postpartum depression.

I swore I would never love again until a few weeks later, when I went to a party
and met a junior at Emerson named Blake. I know his name makes him sound like a rich kid from
Pretty in Pink
but he was actually the son of a single mom from a working-class town in Massachusetts, which is way more hot—it’s like getting the dude from a John Cougar Mellencamp song who’s going to make out with you in the back of his truck.

Blake was an actor (still is) and a damn good one. He was
skinny and small with a slight underbite and watery blue eyes, and he dressed like he was wearing someone’s hand-me-downs from the Partridge Family. One of my friends once told me that she thought that he looked like a mouse, but when Blake was onstage—he was a man. He touched off something in my DNA that craves and lusts after very skinny guys in bell-bottoms with 1970s-inspired shaggy haircuts.
It probably has something to do with all of those full-color booklets inside the Led Zeppelin albums that my sister had in our bedroom. I love outgoing and gregarious men who want as much attention as I do. I’ve always had a thing for guys who make a living doing something in public (with the exception of someone who hands out sandwich shop flyers or dresses up like Pluto at Disney World).