Skinnydipping (10 page)

I watched Donna and Susan in particular with jealousy, but tried to get past it. Time would be my ally, I told myself. My day would come. I caught Donna looking at me sometimes, and I tried to ignore her, but sometimes I couldn’t help holding her stare with a cold stare of my own. She always looked away first—one of my small victories.

I quickly developed a routine. At three, I headed back home. I tried to nap until six, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. In either case, I was chronically sleep deprived. Then I would get up, shower, have some dinner in or out, flip through the trades looking for auditions, circle anything promising, then go out to the clubs.

Most often I went with Brooke. We would go to bars or go dancing, and she was always trying to find me the perfect guy. She also advised me on the L.A. dating scene. For instance, she told me to watch out for what she called “trick guys.”

“They look pretty plain,” she warned me, “like they wouldn’t be an obvious catch. But that’s the trick. They tend to be short, maybe balding, maybe Jewish or maybe not, but clever and articulate. They have a lot of money and power, and they’re charming, but because they aren’t flashy or obviously handsome, you think you’ve found a diamond in the rough, someone that no other girl has noticed. You think you’ve got the secret winner, disguised as a guy without any flash.”

“How is that a trick?” I was thinking about a guy I’d met the night before who almost perfectly fit her description. His name was Joshua Levin. He was about five foot seven, had a receding hairline, and a great sense of humor. I’d talked to him all night, thinking I was doing him a favor, and I was surprised at how charming he turned out to be. When he’d asked for my number, he’d been so embarrassed that I gave it to him, and had actually been hoping he’d call me.

“Because the whole ugly duckling thing is a lie.
All
the girls are after him for the same reason you are, and he knows it. He lets you
think that he’s this great undiscovered guy, that he so appreciates that you’ve lowered yourself to date him when you’re so beautiful, but he’s secretly a player, ready to screw you and dump you for the next oblivious girl who comes along. He’s the guy who was a nerd in high school, and who now resents all the women who will have sex with him now but wouldn’t then. He hates women and he doesn’t respect them because he thinks they are only after his wallet.”

“Wow,” I said. “Duly noted.”

Occasionally, I went out with the irrepressible and mysterious Sandra and Babette and some of their friends, the gorgeous women from the party with all the expensive jewelry. They apparently continued to find me amusing and often introduced me to some of the richest men I’d ever met. I had high hopes of becoming a gold digger, especially of Sandra’s caliber, but I just couldn’t ever quite get myself to flirt seriously with the paunchy, balding, misogynist men, many of them foreign, whom they introduced me to, no matter how rich. I envied the girls’ Versace dresses and Gucci bags and Bulgari jewelry, but not enough to go to the lengths I suspected they went to get that stuff. I never asked the specifics, and they never offered.

I also kept auditioning, although not as often as I probably should have. It was so frustrating because I was always just one of hundreds of hopefuls trying for some small part in a television commercial or indie film. I never seemed to be able to crack the code. Nobody ever called, and I never quite felt like I knew what I was doing. Still, I kept trying. I wanted it so badly … even though I still wasn’t entirely sure what
it
was. Fame? Money? Recognition? Validation?

Once I had my first paycheck, I got the required actress headshots taken. Everybody told me that a headshot is your business card in L.A., so I spent $500 on a big stack of 8x10s of me with my hair and makeup done, smiling like I thought an actress was supposed to smile. I sent them out with a carefully constructed cover letter to a list of a hundred agents. Nothing. No response at all.

“This was a huge waste of money,” I complained to Brooke one day, after checking the mail.

“Just get your face out there,” Brooke told me. But what did she know? Her life was at the racetrack, not trying to get in front of the camera. I wasn’t comfortable being alone and was always looking for Mr. Right … or at least Mr. Right Now. Although living with my father kept me from ever bringing any of my dates home, I occasionally went home with them. Older married men seemed to be particularly attracted to me, and they always wanted to talk, talk, talk about their problems, dumping them all on me, maybe because I didn’t look or act like the typical Hollywood bimbo. Maybe my opinionated attitude was off-putting, so they didn’t know what else to do with me but talk. I wasn’t “wife” material. That was obvious.

There was one older guy whose mother had produced a popular series of spy movies from the 1960s, so he’d had early success as a director, specializing in cheesy sci-fi movies. I met him at a VIP reception for the network executives. We struck up a conversation. It turned out he knew my father, so we talked about the racetrack all evening. Then I went back to his place and we made out, but it never went further than that. I found out later he was married. Typical.

Then there was Ian McGinnis. Ian was the editor of one of the largest entertainment magazines in the country. After meeting him at the gym where I liked to work out, I’d hung out with him a few times. He was that uniquely L.A. personality: an over-fifty bachelor who drank excessively, was addicted to fitness, and was also completely unable to fathom the meaning of the word
intimacy
. But Ian was a sweet man and I enjoyed his company. He liked to buy me things, and he sometimes invited me to sleep over in his guest room and use his home gym in the morning. He loved to talk to me, but beyond a fatherly peck, nothing ever happened. He was nice, although I’d been relieved when he eventually stopped calling. He was much too old for me, and his proximity in age to my father made me uncomfortable.

Sometimes I went out with casting directors I liked, telling myself that this would be a good way to find out about the really great acting jobs, but then I could never get myself to admit to them that I was an actress. It just sounded so cliché. The few times I did mention it were
to the wrong people—the lecherous ones whose eyes lit up the second they heard the word
actress
. One of them was even blatant enough to tell me he could get me a starring role in his new film if I would be his girlfriend. I admit, I gave it a few seconds of thought, but I just couldn’t get past the big fleshy mole wedged between his nose and upper lip.

Men my own age weren’t completely blind to me. One afternoon, after Brooke and I had been roller skating in Venice Beach, we went into a bar because they had a sign outside that said “Nickel Beers.” This cute surfer guy came over to join us. He was tan with sun-streaked hair and he wore a muscle shirt that said
Hang Ten.
He said his name was Tim. He started drinking with us, and I started flirting. After about an hour, Brooke told me she was going home, and I waved her on. She gave me a look, but I ignored it. I was having fun. “I’ll meet you at home later,” I told her.

“Your friend’s kind of uptight,” he said, finishing his beer and waving at the bartender for another one.

“She’s my mother-in-law,” I told him, with a straight face. He didn’t even blink. I was so flattered that he had chosen me over Brooke that I liked him even more. The beer goggles helped, too.

After about seven beers and a Long Island iced tea, I had to pee. I’d been putting it off for as long as possible. The room spun around me, but I stayed on my skates. I looked all the way across the bar to the bathroom, then I looked back at Tim.

“Are you gonna make it?” he said, looking very serious.

“I think you better give me a push.”

He stood up and made a big deal out of giving me a shove toward the bathroom. I rolled about five feet past the bar, then had to roll and clomp and maneuver my way into the bathroom and the tiny stall.

It was a long squat down to the toilet—the skates made me taller than I really was. When I bumped my way out of the tiny stall to the mirror, I was horrified at what I saw. I looked down at myself. I was sweaty, rumpled, and my ugly white sports bra was showing under my once-cute, once-fresh pink tank top. My eyebrows looked like two
caterpillars and I realized with even further horror that I hadn’t shaved my legs in a couple of days. When I’d left the house, I’d planned on getting a workout, never thinking I would meet someone.
When will you learn?
I scolded myself.
Always dress like you might meet a hot guy.
What did this guy
see
in me? Gross. I ran my fingers through my flattened sweaty hair, trying to at least give it a little lift at the roots. I splashed water on my face and pinched my cheeks, trying to bring back some color. There wasn’t anything I could do about the eyebrows. Or the sports bra. I don’t have the type of boobs that can fly free, unless I want to risk an indecency charge.

“OK,” I said out loud, to the empty bathroom stall. “I’m going back out.”

I rolled out of the bathroom and through the bar, and I felt like everybody was staring at my skates. Or maybe it was the hairy legs. Tim was talking to another girl, but as soon as I came back, he turned his back on her and pulled out my bar stool for me. “Nickel beers are over,” he said. “Do you want another Long Island iced tea?”

“Why the hell not?” I said. The more he drank, the better I would look.

Sometime after dark, we both stumbled out of the bar, with me still on my skates. He pulled me down the street for a while, and then I pulled him for a while, skating backward and giggling a lot. He was staggering and we were hanging all over each other. At one point, I think I remember boasting to anyone on the street who would listen, “I can skate better than I can walk!” I think that’s when I did the round-off. On skates. A few people walked by and clapped. Somehow, I didn’t break my neck.

Back at his building, he pointed up the stairs. “I’m on the third floor.” He looked down at my feet. “Are you gonna take those off?”

“No way! That would take waaaayyy too long. I can
do
this!” I said with alcohol-fueled optimism.

Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp—up I went, two floors on my roller skates, Tim nervously following me, ready to catch me if I suddenly pitched backward, but I held on to the rail and made it. Out of breath
and even sweatier than I had been before, I fell into his apartment and onto the bed, and the room was spinning faster than my skate wheels. I’m pretty sure I gave him a blow job, although I don’t exactly remember the experience. After fooling around for a while, we both passed out.

Bright sun through the thin mini blinds woke me up the next morning to a searing headache and a wave of nausea. I looked over at Tim. He was cute, in a rugged way, but for the first time, I noticed his thinning hair and the spare tire under the Hang Ten muscle shirt. In horror, I noticed that his pants were around his knees. What was I thinking?

I scrambled out of bed, trying to be as quiet as possible, my skates still firmly attached to my feet. I adjusted my clothes, smoothed my hair, rolled over to the door, and opened it. Just as I was about to make a clean getaway, he stirred and groaned. I froze. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Hey,” he said, grinning woozily. “Where are you going?”

“I was … I have to get home.”

He looked disappointed. “Can I get your number?”

I sighed. “Really? You want the number of the hairy wildebeest in the bad sports bra that you picked up in a bar last night? Who’s still wearing roller skates?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Let’s just play it like we’re now dreaming, and I didn’t actually blow you on the Starlight Express.” As if my whole life and so-called career weren’t degrading enough …

I shut the door behind me, then carefully, treacherously, painfully worked my way back down two flights of stairs, on wheels, excruciatingly hung over, clutching the railing like my life depended on it. It probably did.

Then a first: the long roll of shame home.

Larry Todd was in and
out of my life, but more in the role of father figure than flirtation. Once, he took me out for lunch. We laughed and talked and I asked about his daughter, and he seemed a little sad. At the end of our lunch, he put his hand over mine on the table and looked me in the eye. “You know you can always talk to me about anything that’s going on, at work or in your life,” he said. “Consider me your friend.”

“Thanks, Larry. I really appreciate it. You’re …” I almost said “like a father to me,” but I didn’t want to insult him or make him feel old. “Your support means everything to me. I think I’m almost ready to move out of my father’s house and get my own place.”

“That’s great,” he said, finally removing his hand. “Do you know where you’ll live?”

“Not yet. Somewhere not too far from work.”

“A friend of mine owns a building in West Hollywood. Do you want me to ask him about vacancies?”

“You would do that for me? That would be great,” I said.

“Of course.”

“How about a roommate? Can you conjure one of those up, too?”

“Let me ask around,” he said kindly. “Mia might know someone.” He looked at me wistfully. “This is an exciting time for you. Are you out there auditioning?”