There Goes My Social Life (18 page)

I paused for a moment. “Who the hell are you?”

It was an interesting question. Gina, in her career, had toured with NSYNC, Toni Braxton, Reba McEntire, Britney Spears, and Janet Jackson and had assisted Shanice Wilson, the first African American to play Eponine in
Les Misérables
on Broadway. She had handled finances for Pat Boone, Matthew Hines, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jennifer Aniston, Elise Neal, Juliette Lewis, and more. I met her right after she'd decided to quit the business, except for a short stint to help out with the estate of Michael Jackson after his death. For a few days, she was neck deep in organizing his materials for the court hearing. Every single time I called, she noticed how my handlers panicked. They didn't know how to say no to me.

She had seen my movies, so she was familiar with the roles I'd played . . . but she didn't connect my name to the person on the phone. Gina wasn't bothered at all to tell me that I wasn't going to get money. “You don't have it, so I can't give it,” she'd say, matter-of-factly. I respected the woman. Later that day, I called my manager and he simply passed the phone to Gina.

“Do you realize your tags on the BMW are expired and your driver's license is too?” she asked.

“No they're not,” I said, before realizing she was exactly right.

“Just meet me at the DMV,” she said with the same confidence as when she was telling me I couldn't have my money. She had a certain manner that made me want to do what she said. And I rarely have that feeling with anyone. When I got to the DMV, I came face to face with Gina. She was a little Mexican woman with green eyes who seemed to know everything about my bills and personal files. True to her word, she took care of my license and vehicle. On our way out, I mentioned that my phone was acting up.

“Let's go to the phone store and check on your plan.”

That was how I met the woman who would take care of me . . . possibly the only woman to ever consistently take care of me in my life. She began helping my business manager part time and then would stop by my house and work until 5:00 in the afternoon or so. There, she'd take care of everything. If she noticed dimmed light bulbs, the next thing I knew she'd be teetering on a ladder replacing them. She made sure that all of the little household annoyances were taken care of before I even noticed that they needed attention. She tried to make sure she was gone before Francesco came home, because he found her suspicious.

“Why is she working for free?” he asked me one night as we got into the bed. I didn't know. I just knew that I valued her so much that I hoped she'd stick around. “It just feels like she's after something.”

One day, Francesco came home and saw Gina on her way out of the house carrying clothes to take to the cleaners.

“The next thing I know I'll come home and you'll be in bed with my wife,” he said.

“No thank you, but if you don't take her car to get the oil changed soon, I will,” she said as she walked out the door.

Turns out, Gina did have an ulterior motive. Things started getting really shady with Francesco, and I began to fear that he just wasn't right. Eventually, he got abusive too. But I was done letting guys use me as their punching bag. I went to the police, filed a report, and got a restraining order. I had no job—and even less money than I thought. Turns out, Francesco hadn't paid the rent on our house for three months.

The day the restraining order was granted—requiring he stay one hundred yards away from the kids, our home, and me—I filed for divorce. I had hit rock bottom, with no real options for getting back up.

Turns out, Gina knew all along. When she had started to look into my finances, she realized that Francesco was bad news. She knew he was in over his head, that he had been “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and that I was headed for financial ruin. I guess she didn't want me to go through it alone. And so she worked quietly, waiting for the moment when the truth would come out. It always does, eventually.

Gina, God love her, still stuck around even though I had less than no money to pay her. By the time Francesco left, we'd gotten to be friends—almost like family. I was determined to make enough money to start paying her. But how?

“Why don't you do a reality show about your life?” my brother suggested. It sounded like a reasonable idea. Honestly, I had never met anyone with a life quite as dramatic as mine. We put together a sizzle reel—a video presentation of what my show would look like—and VH1 loved it. But it would take a while to determine if they actually wanted to buy it.

About a month after Francesco left, Gina walked into the house holding a piece of paper.

“This was on your front door,” she said. It was a handwritten “3 Days or Quit” notice. This is what California has decided landlords must do to give notice to occupants who haven't paid their rent in too long. It had the name and address of my landlord and said that I'd have to move out if I didn't pay in three days.

“I bet all my neighbors saw that!” I wailed. “What are we going to do?”

“Well, we've got three days,” Gina said. “It's not over yet.”

One day after this notice, I got an audition. VH1 was producing their first scripted show, and I auditioned for it at their request.

“Listen, we love you for the lead,” the head of VH1 said. “Please reconsider the reality television route. Wouldn't you rather do this scripted show instead of the reality one?” The new show, produced by Queen Latifah, was called
Single Ladies
. I didn't have a great feeling about it, but I needed the money. “Let me put it to you this way. Do you want to be Kim Kardashian or Carrie Bradshaw?” he asked, implying that scripted roles carry more prestige. I looked up at the ceiling as I tried to weigh my options. Turns out, I didn't really have any options. “Plus there's this. If you don't do the scripted show, we're not gonna do your reality show.”

In other words, he was holding my reality TV show hostage. Without a real alternative, I agreed to be the lead in
Single Ladies
. After I shot the pilot, I met a guy named Max, a very wealthy man from Texas who lived in Copenhagen. He was in the process of getting a divorce from his wife. They'd been separated for a while, so the legal divorce was just a formality. After we met, he called me and said that he had literally turned his plane around to come back to see me.

“Please come to New York,” he asked. “It's a great place to be over the Fourth of July, and I have to be there for business.”

After our wonderful weekend in New York, he asked me to meet him in France. Paris is the City of Lights, but it's also a city for lovers. Max and I made love there for the first time. It was so romantic, and I couldn't believe how deeply I felt for him after such a short time. I spent the entire time in Paris at the hotel, waiting for him to show up to see me. In fact, I never left the hotel while he was at his business meetings.

“I want to see Paris!” I said, grabbing his arm after days of room service. I wanted to go shopping for shoes, to experience the most romantic city on earth.

“Listen,” Max said. “I have something to tell you. We can't go out.” Apparently, he was worried that word would get out that we were lovers.

“Are you ashamed of me?”

“Well, I wouldn't want my wife to find out.”

“She has to face facts eventually,” I said. “You're separated.”

“Well, we're still
technically
together.”

“What do you mean
technically
?” I said.

“We're not quite separated,” he smiled. “We're nesting.”

“You're birds now?”

“I live in the downstairs and she lives upstairs,” he explained. “That way, the kids don't have to switch between both of our homes.”

“You don't want her to know about me?”

Something wasn't adding up. I left him at the hotel, feeling betrayed. Max had lied to me. I walked down the cobblestoned streets of Paris, looking at the lovers walking hand in hand right next to the River Seine. Bicycles with baskets leaned against lampposts, stylish women carrying large shopping bags stopped at cafes for a snack. The city was alive and vibrant, but I felt dead inside.

This is never going to work
, I thought.
I should stop this now
.
I shouldn
'
t go any further
. But there was one small problem. I had already made love to him—a married man! Suddenly, I was “the other woman” again—something I had never wanted to be again since I cheated with Axel. I felt that I loved him. No, it was more than just a feeling. I did love him.

And because of that feeling, I stayed with Max, and hoped that his divorce would work out soon enough.

Within weeks, I found out the pilot for
Single Ladies
had been successful. The show had been picked up, so Lola and I moved to Atlanta to start shooting. Though I have had trouble keeping my personal life in order, I'm a consummate professional at work. I'm on set, on time. I know my lines. I can give you an eight-hour day or a twelve-hour day with no problem. But many of the other actresses and actors on the set didn't have the same idea about work. The acting was horrible, the plot was raunchy, and the hours were long. No matter how late we stayed up the night before, I was always on time. If we had to be there at 7:30, Gina and I were there at 7:00. Meanwhile, everybody else got there at 8:15 or 8:30 and still needed three hours to do hair. Most of the other girls had black hair, which takes a lot longer to do than Latin hair. I'd end up waiting for hours in my trailer.

I actually had an actress come up to me and say, “You wash your hair every day like a white girl, don't you?”

Holy shit. She actually said this to me.

The topic of hair amongst black women is one of the most hotly contested, debated, divisive topics you can imagine. Black women try to stick everyone into different camps—on one side are the “big hair don't care” ladies who believe in “natural hair.” On the other are ladies who use chemical relaxers to straighten their hair and make it easier to deal with. When the topic of hair comes up, you can immediately see black women's eyes light up. The “natural hair” women whip their hair back and forth and explain that they love how God made them. The “relaxed hair” women say that their lives are easier because God gave them chemicals for a reason. Black women judge each other on their hair more than on any other topic—even the phrase “good hair” is now considered an insult. What
is
good hair, after all? Is there an element of racism in that phrase, because it implies that looser curls are somehow better than kinky hair? The politics of black women's hair cannot be solved by any amount of debate or reason. If you're not a black woman, you have no idea the contention and judgment black women hoist on each other. (Though Chris Rock did a good job trying to understand it in his movie,
Good Hair
.)

I, however, am on the outside of this debate. I find it boring and small. Because I'm half black and half Mexican, my hair texture is different from everyone else's. Black women will sometimes take one look at my hair and immediately try to classify me as “not black enough.”

On the set of
Clueless
, my hair was discussed by the stylists on the very first day.

“You've got great hair,” said one after I settled into the chair. She held some of my hair in her hand and examined it. It was still damp from my morning shower. “But it won't do,” she said as she twirled a lock of it between her fingers.

“I thought you just said it was great.”

“It
is
great,” she replied, “but it's not black enough.”

“Not black enough?” I knew instantly what she meant. “What about braids?” I suggested.

We agreed that braids would do the trick, so I went to a hairstylist who was a friend of mine. She used real hair for the braids, which took six or seven hours to put in, and I had to repeat that every month. Because I washed my hair every day, they didn't last as long as they could've.

As I walked out of hair and makeup, I felt the weight of my new hair on my head. I had to admit I loved the way I looked.

I wasn't offended when she said that my hair “wasn't black enough.” Of course, filmmakers have ideas in their heads about “what black people do” and “what black people look like,” and it's not bad for actors to change to meet the requirements of a role. However, it does get old when it seeps into real life. My entire life I've been told, I had to behave a certain way, look a certain way, and think a certain way. I was always told I acted like a white girl because of the way I spoke, looked, or washed my hair.

What does that mean
,
“like a white girl”?
I thought when that actress on
Single Ladies
made the snide remark about washing my hair every day.
Do white people have a monopoly on washing their hair? Is that what you
'
re saying?

But I didn't respond. I could tell the actress was trying to goad me, so I simply put my earbuds in and ignored her.

Gina, who always was standing nearby to monitor things, said, “Oh, well, she's Mexican.”

Thankfully, Max was a fun distraction. I saw him about every five days. Wherever he traveled, he wanted me by his side. We went to Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, everywhere. Though I didn't love him for his money, there were benefits. He bought me a six-bedroom house
and
gave me money to decorate it. We spent hours talking about love and life. Frequently, our conversation turned to politics.

Once we were having a conversation about how liberals believe that justice demands that you take money from one group of people and give it to another.

“That's socialism!” I protested.

“Of course,” he laughed. “What do you think it is?”

“Oh my God. No, no,” I said. “That can't happen. We can't have a socialist nation.”