Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (4 page)

The GIRL puts her cigarette out in the sundae
and finally speaks.

GIRL

So—do you want to fuck me, or what?

(
Pause.
)

GUY

What?

GIRL

I said do you want to fuck me, or what?

GUY

I (pause)—I...I mean...well, becau—I...you know there was a—

GIRL

Look, babe—let’s just be real: we are here now because you saw me at the
thing
and you wanted to fuck me and I am here because I thought, yes, that seems like it would be excellent. That’s what I thought.
(
Pause.
) Thinking empirically. (
Pause.
) When we met. (
Pause.
) And, forgive me, I don’t (and I’m not being, I don’t think, presumptuous in my postulation), but I don’t think we need to
waste all this time with niceties and all that crap. Why all the talk?
We know what
this is
. Am I right?

GUY

Well—

(
Pause.
)

GIRL

Yes?

GUY

It’s not only that—I mean, I think you are lovely and I—

GIRL

What? I’m sorry—I can’t hear you. Why the fuck are you whispering? (
She leans in.
) You know, only people who are full of shit whisper, and I would hate to think you were full of shit.

GUY

Well, I’m not. I’m—

GIRL

Yes?

GUY

I’m very, very—

(
Pause.
)

GIRL

What?

GUY

Sincere.

GIRL

Excellent. Then, what are we waiting for?

There was giggling from the moment the guy started his longwinded monologue, but when the girl uttered her first line, “So—do
you want to fuck me, or what?,” the room exploded with laughter and applause. I couldn’t believe it; I had been getting laughs
as an actor practically my whole life, but nothing ever compared to the sound in that room and the way I felt. I was extraordinarily
moved. From across the room, Mamet nodded to me—a sort of touché nod—then stuck out his tongue and grinned. My eyes burned
a bit from the tears that were brewing, and I sat in the back, listening to the laughter.

2. Ball and Chain

One of my
first jobs out of school was playing a rotating succession of floozies—some dumb, some angry, all crazy—on MTV’s first-ever
nonmusical program,
Remote Control.
The parts were tiny, but
Remote Control
, the cultish late-eighties game show in which three college kids confined to EZ-Chairs answered trivia questions about television
and pop culture, was a big deal. Often presented in mini-sketch format, the questions were posed by comics, who’d pop out
in different characters when their “channel” was selected.

My friend Sam from NYU, already a semiregular, had suggested hiring me as a replacement for the sole female spot on the show,
a Carol Merrill/Vanna White type who stands around looking foxy in Body Glove swimwear, mutely waving toward prizes. I knew
I wasn’t right for the job. I had way too big of a mouth to ever just stand around as set dressing, and though I looked OK
in skimpwear, I wasn’t exactly
Sports Illustrated
material. But Sam had come up with what the producers thought was a wonderfully novel idea: what if the Body Gloved Babe was
funny
; what if she could create and play characters, like the guys, thus making her more like, you know, a real person? “Great
idea!” the producers cried gleefully, before telling Sam to have me show up for the audition in a bathing suit.

In the past, this might have set off alarm bells, but at this point, I was so excited I didn’t care, and all the way over
to the MTV offices, images of being the new Goldie Hawn go-go danced through my head. The audition itself was fun: I improvised
shtick while reading commercial copy with one of the show’s comic cohosts, after which I did a few of my impersonations: Debra
Winger, Nancy from
Sid and Nancy
, and a lovesick Dino Flintstone. The fresh-faced producers, who were all very casually sitting on the floor sharing Chinese
food, looked up when I was finished and with mouths full of dim sum said, “You’re hired.”

I jumped up and down when they told me, then ran around the room like an idiot (“YAY!!! WHEEEEEEEE! I LOVE YOU-UUUUUU!!”),
throwing my arms around everyone.

“Hired on the spot,” I whispered incredulously to my reflection in the darkened subway window all the way home. “What a great
story!”

And it really would have been a great story, except that the next day, the producers had a change of heart, decided I wasn’t
“hot enough,” and hired a model instead.

I didn’t have an agent at the time, so Sam was dispatched to relay this news.

“They thought you were real cute,” Sam told me, sympathetically. “They just wanted someone a little bustier, is all . . .”

To soften the blow, I suppose, they said they might, at some point, be interested in having me do some characters, though
there were no guarantees, and it wouldn’t be something regular. And that was it. Everyone had moved on, and some other girl
was, at that very moment, being fit for all that glorious spandex.

But I took that bone they threw me and wouldn’t let go. While I may not have cared all that much about the job before I auditioned—it
wasn’t exactly Shakespeare in the Park—the fact that they didn’t want me because of my rack, or lack thereof, sent me into
spasms of fury. This was to be my first “big” job out of school; I had spent the two prior years alternating between being
completely sure I was about to be plucked from obscurity to become the next Julie Harris and thrashing about, bitter and angry
that I was getting nowhere fast. All through my years of NYU—and even before—I was cast constantly. I never even considered
that I wouldn’t find work; I just knew I would. I was
that
confident. More than just having an enormous, pampered ego, I simply had no experience with rejection as far as acting was
concerned. At least once during every show I was involved with at NYU, some theater professional or other would come up postperformance
to praise me, flatter me, assure me that “if you want it, you can have it.” Once when I was taking a curtain call, I heard
someone screaming “Brava!,” only to discover that it was my idol and total heartthrobbing crush, Mikhail Baryshnikov. Afterward,
“Misha” came sweeping backstage to tell me, “Your eyes make me cry, but your hands make me laugh!” I didn’t know what the
hell he meant, but he was so hot I couldn’t get over it. During those years, I felt the kind of invincibility that is truly
only possible in the hermetic environs of art school, where we heard only about “The Work,” and that “The Theater Is a Temple.”
To go from that rarefied place of exultation to the instantaneous struggles of not being able to get a job, or even an audition
or an agent, was a crushing blow for my ill-prepared, puffed-up self. My whole identity was wrapped up in being an actor.
It was something that I was good at and, at times, seemed like the only thing I could ever be good at, the only way I could
feel worthwhile or lovable. What kind of cruel world wasn’t
allowing
me to do it, I wondered over and over. What else could I even do? I had just spent my childhood, teenage, and college years
devoted to one thing: being an actor. I wasn’t trained for anything else.

“No luck, huh?” various
concerned
relatives would cluck over warmed-over deli platters at get-togethers, each event an extended exercise in abject humiliation,
replete with unsolicited admonishing that I “find something to fall back on.” Spacing out, I’d nod, listlessly staring into
cheese spreads, whose gaping, stabby holes seemed to wink at my shame. I became violently depressed and took it out on anyone
and everyone until I hated myself so much that I begged my father for money for therapy, something he vehemently didn’t believe
in (he always insisted that my depression was the result of not eating “three square meals a day”).

Around this time, there was an audition for a movie, something I had fought hard to get, believing I was so right for the
part that the powers that be could not help but cast me. All I needed was a chance to be seen. But after I read the scene,
instead of saying “Great!” or “Thanks!” or “Meh . . .,” they said, “Turn around.” They needed to see my ass. And as I followed
this instruction, racking my brain to remember the part of the script where something about this character’s ass was an essential
plot point, I slowly turned my head around to see the casting director and his assistant exchanging glances. Unable to discern
whether the glances were
good
or
bad
, I settled on
horrible
, and promptly stopped eating, at one point subsisting only on carrots until I actually started to turn orange. This certainly
didn’t help my moods or my mental state; it’s awfully hard not to be pissed off all the time when you’re starving. And I didn’t
want to go anywhere since there might be
food
and, well, that would be weird and too hard to be around. So, within a year of graduation, I was isolating and starving myself,
alienating friends and family, and bickering endlessly and finally breaking up with my actor boyfriend, who, unlike me, never
got cast in anything at school and, also unlike me, postgraduation got tons of auditions and jobs, even landing his admired
ass on a gigantic jeans poster.

Then, as fate would have it, I met the Jazz Musician. I felt as though I had met my soul mate: another artist, a kindred spirit
who understood. The ease with which I could share my sadness and confusion may not have quelled the turbulence raging inside
of me, but for the first time, I felt heard, seen, and unconditionally loved. We were inseparable from our first date, when,
as we walked hand in hand in the rain, he told me with awe that finding a great girl was even harder than finding a great
drummer. He educated me in how to really listen to jazz, which I had always liked without paying much attention to why. Lying
on his mattress in his teeny MacDougal Street bedroom, he’d fast-forward and rewind tape after tape on a junky boom box, explaining
harmonics, interplay, stride piano, the beauty of broken phrases, how to identify the changes in the solos, and the clever
“quotes” of tunes within tunes. I, in turn, fed his unquenchable appetite for any and all art by handing him a stack of plays
from different eras—a mini-tour of dramatic literature—to devour during his near-constant travels around the world. He would
call from far-flung airports and hotels in Rome, Sydney, Okinawa, or Miami, shouting into the phone, “Nance, this Aeschylus
dude is one
bad
motherfucker!”

We chided each other about our respective love of crap: he’d kindly indulge my love of pop music by playing Neil Sedaka’s
“Laughter in the Rain” anytime we got near a piano, and to reciprocate this tender gesture, I would reenact scenes from the
soap operas he watched while practicing his bowing in the afternoons. He was a brilliant talent, gifted, sensitive, and cool;
he too had struggled, and now he was enjoying a regular paycheck, recording records, and hitting the big time. He got it.
All my awful, angry feelings spilling out everywhere, all the crazy parts of a life in art that don’t make any sense, all
the feeling misunderstood, the jealousy, the unfairness—all of it, he got. I would sob to him over my frustrations as we lay
on my apartment’s parquet floor next to his bass, listening to Clifford Brown’s
Yesterdays
, and he would rub my head with his giant, calloused hands and tell me to hang on, that my time would come.

“Everyone thought Monk was a retard till he was forty . . .” he would say gravely, and we lay there both comforted by this
template and shuddering with the dread that “forty” conjures in the minds of those barely out of their teens.

So, when
Remote Control
came along, suddenly it became The. Most. Important. Job. Ever. I couldn’t bear the idea that I’d had the gig and then, like
sand, it had slipped through my fingers. I
had
to get on that show. For months, it occupied all my thoughts. I wrote the producers letters, called them up, tagged along
with Sam on days he worked, whatever I could do to remind them of my existence. One day, about six months after the audition,
I called up and told one of the writer’s assistants that I was Glenn Close. When the writer (immediately!) picked up, I pretended
to be Glenn as her Alex Forrest character in
Fatal Attraction
, demanding attention from Michael Douglas:

“You don’t expect me to be ignored—do you, Dan?”

Well, it worked. He laughed, then invited me to the office to try out some character ideas I had (provided I left all cutting
tools at home), and within a week I was on the show, playing “Nancy,” the game show host’s Psycho Ex-Girlfriend from Hell.
Costumed in a trench coat with rabbit ears sticking out of the pockets and clutching a large cleaver with which I gesticulated
wildly, I made my entrance to the tune of “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” whenever a contestant chose “the Ex Channel.”
After quizzing the contestant about their knowledge of celebrity divorces, I would beg the game show host, “Tell me you love
me and I’ll go,” repeating this several times rapidly like a deranged mantra before being given the hook.

It’s never great to be the Not Hot Girl on a mostly-male-audience comedy show. Still, I was insanely excited about the job,
even if it wasn’t regular and even if the parts were small. Invigorated by pride in my grit, relieved that I didn’t have to
be the flawless half-naked one, I was thrilled at the prospect of creating characters and being considered for my talent.
I would be just like one of the guys.

The comics on the show were great to me; they were a hilarious group of guys, sweet and supportive, and I adored the babe
they’d hired to be the Chick in the Body Glove Clothes.

All this initial rosiness wore off pretty quickly, however. For one thing, I was booed every time I made an entrance as the
Psycho Ex-Girlfriend from Hell and could never shake how uncomfortable I felt, as much as I reminded myself that it was because
I was “the villain.” I wasn’t used to being heckled; I wasn’t a stand-up comic, and I would get flummoxed listening to the
jeers. I would come backstage shaking and scared, the comics waiting in the wings, ready with advice.

“Don’t let those douche bags throw you off your game. Ignore them!” I was counseled, but the reactions felt so hostile, so
sinister, that it was impossible to brush them off. I also felt responsible for this monster to begin with, as though I had
unwittingly put forth this grossly misogynist archetype, a fright fantasy, so abhorred by men that their only response could
be to want to kill me.

“Don’t overthink it,” one of the comics told me when I recited this insight while we shared a smoke. “This shit ain’t exactly
Chekhov . . .”

I was always writing and bringing in new characters and sketches, but they were either rejected or revamped beyond recognition,
while the guys’ ideas and gags were rarely thrown out, and if they were, fits were had and lines or sketches immediately restored.
Also, unlike the guys’, my costumes got progressively skimpier each week, so much so that at times I was almost as naked as
the Chick in the Body Glove Clothes, except usually with a ridiculous wig or bad hair, presumably to reflect my not-hot-ness.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that instead of being in on the joke, I
was
the joke.

“Where are my costumes?” I cried to the cheery, disinterested producers. “What happened to my character?” I demanded of writers,
makeup artists, cameramen, grips, craft ser vices, and anyone else who would listen.

“Listen,” one of the writers told me, “everyone
loved
your gag about being a punk rocker, but we’ve tweaked it a
little
, so that now you’re the Rock and Roll Slut, a groupie who’s fucked the entire music industry. You’ll see, it’ll be
awesome
. . .”

I wanted to feel awesome, I really did. But standing on the cold set in a bra with steel spikes, fishnets, and an Elvira wig,
being mocked by frat boys, I felt stupid, ugly, and, worst of all, totally unfunny. The apogee of all this came when it was
my turn to go out before the taping and “warm up the crowd” with cute jokes. I finally refused to do it after this exchange: