Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (21 page)

13. The Girl in the Peacoat

During my last
year or so in Los Angeles, I discovered, like the characters in
The Day of the Locust
, that “the sunshine wasn’t enough.” Life wasn’t lived, just halfheartedly tolerated, day in, day out, the same complacent
languor masquerading as equanimity until five or so, when we’d all drink lots of wine, get hammered, have dinner, and go to
bed.
Kerouac
was over; despite all the promising reviews, the meetings,
the buzz
. . . I had nothing to show for it except a handful of clippings.

One of the associations it did yield, however, was with a tele-vi sion producer–slash–writer’s manager from a major management
company who wooed me into writing something to which he could be attached as a producer. We had many meetings at his office
overlooking the verdant courtyard’s cascading fountain, which was full of flower petals and the tossed pennies of writers
hoping to become the next Alan Ball. I agreed to take a crack at writing an original spec pi lot. I figured, hey, this guy
has connections; it might help open some doors for me acting-wise. All I need, I kept thinking to myself, was one good thing
to happen—that’s all I need. So, even though I’d never written a teleplay before, I decided to give it a whirl. And what a
whirl it was: I was miserable and uninspired, and dreaded facing it each day. My heart would race every time I sat down to
work, so I would write a line of dialogue then reward myself with a cigarette and a Klonopin. I’d write a bit more; then pour
myself a glass of wine. Then another and another, then have another smoke; then I’d take a nap. When I would wake, I would
make some black coffee and start all over again. This went on almost every day for two months. I was turning into Carson McCullers.
In the midst of all this, I flew east to meet with a director interested in working on a New York production of
Kerouac
, who suggested that if I did a rewrite, we could mount it at one of the venerable downtown theaters with which he was associated.
I readily agreed, taking his notes with me back to California. Then I heard from an off-Broadway producer who had produced
the solo shows of some amazing performers whose work I idolized. He, too, was interested in my show, and he was hooked into
those same downtown theaters.

Shortly thereafter, I turned in an appallingly bad pi lot script, got notes telling me that it was appallingly bad, and felt
no interest in revising it.
The script had issues
, the producer said, it
needed to be reworked
, blah-blah-blah . . . I just didn’t care anymore. I don’t know what about all this made me snap, but it did. I was done.
The arrows were pointing me toward New York. Though I had initially thought I would go back and forth when the time came to
do a production of my show, after consideration, Joel and I decided instead to leave L.A. and try living in New York, at least
for a while. As much as it made sense, it felt so weird and sudden. “Wait—I love living in California!” I thought to myself.
“Don’t I?”
Do I?

How many times during those eight years did I think to myself, Dorothy-like, “I wanna go home,” and wish that all I needed
was just a pair of bitchin’ shoes? Nevertheless, when the time came to actually leave L.A., I was consumed by a tremendous
sadness. Our last day in town, I wrote a free-association list of things that made me think of L.A. on a scrap of paper to
keep in my wallet:

Coyotes, car exhaust, Apple Pan, In-N-Out, Chateau Mar-mont (for drinks), Chateau Marmutt (for dogs), Santa Anas, bergamot,
Coffee Bean, Burton Way, heli copters, Beachwood Canyon, Erewhon, Chalet Gourmet, Pink’s, Ralph’s, Hal’s, Joe’s, Lola’s, Art
deco, dead palm kernels . . .

My parents greeted the news of our leaving L.A. with a shock and disappointment I had both dreaded and anticipated. I had
known that they wouldn’t view our move to New York—despite its proximity to them in Connecticut—as a positive thing, that
they would see it as throwing in the towel, even with my confidence that a New York staging of my show was imminent.

“What about your agent?” my father asked when I initially called to inform them. “How can you leave
him
?”

“Yes,” my mother said, joining in on the other extension. “You seem to be making some headway—finally! Changing directions
midstream seems like not the best idea, if you ask me . . .”

“What agent? I don’t have an agent,” I told them quietly. “That’s . . . that’s kind of the whole problem.”

There was a pause; the sound of a sitcom’s canned laughter crested in the background. When you’re disillusioned with yourself,
can there be anything more unbearable than the weight of other people’s chagrin?

“What about your house?” my father continued. “And the
weh-thuh
? You gonna leave
awl
that nice
weh-thuh
to go back to that shithole city?”

He didn’t wait for my answer; he just hung up, and I was left listening to my mother breathing and the forced gaiety of a
television show on which I would never appear.

Joel and I decided to drive across the country instead of flying; I told myself that this was because we had a dog and two
cats, but I had another reason for wanting to leave Los Angeles by car: I couldn’t bear the idea of getting on a plane and
exiting in a flash. I needed to pull away carefully so that the vistas I’d come to know so well could recede slowly, just
another drive on just another day. It was, as usual, a lovely, temperate afternoon: sunny, seventy-five degrees, “unhealthy
for sensitive groups” air quality. I took one last look toward the mountains before climbing into the car, remembering how
my first roommate, Jeff, had told me to look for them when I drove in all those years before. Face the mountains and you are
looking north; take a left and you’re at the beach. If you can keep those things straight, he’d said, you will never lose
your way. Funny how you can know where you’re going but end up lost all the same.

It was autumn when we arrived in New York, the day before my thirty-seventh birthday. The light had changed over from summer,
and the air had just the faintest whisper of crispness. Walking around those first few days back in the city, I kept thinking
of a charcoal gray J. Crew peacoat I once had that would have been the perfect weight for the season. The coat had been a
gift from my mother for Christmas the year after the Jazz Musician and I split. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen
it, let alone worn it, but it was gone forever, that I was certain of. A few years prior, my brother and his then girlfriend—another
actor—had undertaken a redecorating project of the apartment that was my former home. In the midst of this, someone had tossed
the ill-fated peacoat, along with several other articles of clothing and a smallish box full of pictures and other mementos.
In fairness, I hadn’t been too terribly aggressive in pursuing those belongings and ensuring their safe return; I seem to
recall we spoke, the girlfriend and I, on the phone about the issue of my “crap,” but whether it was clear that I didn’t want
the stuff thrown away, I don’t know. Thinking of that peacoat aroused thoughts of other possessions I had tucked to the far
right and back of a small closet in my former digs: a long, rayon, bias-cut print dress from the forties, found in a thrift
store in Vermont in the eighties; a black spandex catsuit and two very sexy jackets from Charivari, gifts from the Jazz Musician
when we first met. The small box had had some marked-up scripts and notebooks, a few bootleg jazz cassette tapes, but mostly
it had contained photographs of my life from NYU up to the time I left for L.A.: in costume as the Psycho Ex-Girlfriend from
Hell on
Remote Control
; in the decadently formfitting aubergine Edwardian dress as Madame in
The Maids
; in the fat suit as the
Funnyhouse of a Negro
landlady; as Helen of Troy, wearing something tattered and vaguely Grecian, straddling my Paris. There had been some production
stills from the
After School
Special
; photos of me holding Jane’s birthday cake while she blew out her candles; photos of the Jazz Musician, us lying on a bed
together, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, laughing.

What had made me so cavalier about that stuff? Even after my brother had taken over the apartment with the proviso that I
could come collect my things later, why would I have left them to the whims of others when the responsibility for those effects
was really mine? I’d had enough therapy by that time to suspect that in some ways the doomed fate of those relics was fully
intentional, that I’d kept them out of sight, far from review, for a reason. Perhaps seeing fragments of the person I had
been before the last eight years in L.A. would only attest to how beaten down, how fruitless I felt, after all. Unencumbered
by these remainders, maybe I could be more flexible in how I viewed myself and where I had come to since being the girl I
had so long ago stuffed into a box and left behind. Conflicted though I was—about both the girl and her memories—I couldn’t
help feeling sad to have lost them both.

In time, L.A. faded into the distance, and in the year that followed, I finished the revised script, got a theatrical agent,
and cocreated a reading series called
Cause Celeb!
, which would ultimately go on to have a four-year run. The theater director with whom I was going to work on
Kerouac
ended up having far too difficult a schedule to plan around, so the off-Broadway producer set up meeting after meeting with
other directors, as well as designers and dramaturges, all of whom had opinions. There were visits to theaters and communications
with theater companies; there were conversations with general managers and other producers about additional financing. I would
emerge from these meetings thinking they had the same level of pointlessness as the ones in Hollywood.

Eighteen months after we arrived back in New York, I discovered that I was pregnant. It was agreed that the show would be
put off until after the baby came; there was talk about a production in late spring, the following fall—something. But as
the baby grew inside me, so too did the nagging suspicion that the
Kerouac
show would never see production. The off-Broadway producer could never fully commit; each encounter with him was accompanied
by the slightest whiff of bullshit. But even that wasn’t why I knew for almost certain that I would never perform my show
again. All of a sudden, it seemed like a past moment: something done, finished, and not worth revisiting. Strangely, I didn’t
feel like doing it anymore, even as a way of getting attention as an actor.

There were other revelations: at first, I thought of the pregnancy as a little detour in my career progress; everything had
to be put on hold until I could get my body “back.” But in fact, I had it backward. For years, the only thing that had really
been on hold was me. Getting pregnant gave me time to focus, time to reflect. I grew bigger and bigger, and as I did, I would
take off my clothes and stand naked in front of the mirror, studying my tits, my ass, my roundness, from every angle, awed
by the magnificence of my soon-to-be-thirty-five-pounds-heavier self. “Pregnancy,” I would marvel. “Preg-NANCY.” Making a
whole person inside gave me an unqualified opportunity to consider the whole person outside. I was finally
exercising my will
, in my own life; there was nothing stalled or ambiguous about it, and even if I didn’t have all the answers, I knew one thing
for damn sure: I never wanted to hate myself again.

We moved a few months into my pregnancy; the one-room furnished loft we had been renting wasn’t baby-friendly. I needed a
place with walls, even if it was only one. We found a place, got our stuff out of storage, and began to slowly unpack. One
day, I was pulling things out of a box when I came across a black-and-white photograph in a Plexiglas frame, taken in the
winter of 1994 by the fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. It was from his Sunday
New York Times
On the Street column, a picture of me, wearing the lost peacoat. I had no idea my photo had been snapped that day in 1994—right
around the time I was meeting with Lorne Michaels and rehearsing
Troilus and Cressida
—and happened upon it only by chance as I sat in bed with my coffee and cat. I remember looking at his column that day (a
study in the sudden inclination toward peacoats!) and seeing a girl whom I initially thought looked pretty cool, until, of
course, I realized, holy shit—it’s . . .
me.
Once I had that figured out, I seized the moment as yet another occasion to pick my looks apart, wishing I was thinner, chicer,
prettier . . . whatever. I didn’t even pause for a second to feel good about being one of Cunningham’s subjects in the first
place, nor did I keep my copy of the paper. It was only later that evening that I frantically called my mother, who had, thankfully,
already found it, torn it out, and stuffed it into the Plexiglas frame from CVS.

“There she is,” I thought, standing there almost eleven years later: the girl I had left in the box, in black and white, captured
by a stranger. Perhaps not the most flattering photo, but it was “the truth of the moment,” as Mamet would say: wholly accurate,
depicting a young woman confidently striding along a city street, arms swinging, jaunty, sauntering, a bit insouciant. She
is wearing all black (except for the peacoat), all baggy, and of course, her long dark hair and bangs mostly obscure her face.
She is, after all, “the girl with the hair in her face.” To the casual eye, she looks self-possessed and confident. But there
is something off and perhaps deceptive about her assertive glide. While her gait advances her forward with seeming gusto,
her torso leans back and away, suggesting reluctance, circumspection. And yet her gaze to the left, even covered with all
that messy hair, suggests expectancy, eagerness, and all kinds of fun. But here’s the part I missed all those years before,
when I was so hasty to sleuth out flaws: she may have been a bit too angry, too quick to say “fuck you,” too easy (or too
difficult) to get into bed, or too vacillating about what she wanted or thought she wanted, what with all her big ideas about
art, but her enthusiasm, her devotion, her willingness to try—these were there too. She was afraid—deeply—and yet,
she did it anyway
. And, despite all her misgivings, life propelled her forward, even as she hung back. Looking at her, I decided that I still
thought she was cool, only this time without qualification. And more important, I realized that the girl in the picture wasn’t
lost at all. She was there all the time, only now sharing space with the other girl, the one I was carrying inside me.