You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (18 page)

“Would you mind popping next door and saying hello to my kids? They would get such a kick out of you.”

By that point, strange requests had ceased feeling strange. I was
handed random babies to hold and would sign arms or shoes when people didn’t have a piece of paper handy, so this didn’t seem to be completely out of line. But I must have paused.

“I am Pam’s best friend and I already asked her if it would be alright with your mom, and they said it is fine if you want to come over. I’ll make sure you are back in a jiffy.”

I took a quick look back at the mountain lion enclosure. They were lazing in the sun, the tips of their tails flicking slowly. They looked like they would wait for me. I agreed and started walking towards a nearby house.

“Oh no,” she said, “I have a lot of property and it is too far, we will have to drive.”

They say (and when I say “they” I mean Oprah) that everyone has an inner voice. Something inside you knows the deeper truth of a situation and will always guide you in the right direction. I had an inner voice, but it was shy, awkward, uncertain, and eager for acceptance; not that different from my outer voice. My inner voice said something like,
Wow, this seems sketchy and weird, but she won’t like you if you don’t go, so go.

I felt the deep and constant pressure to be nice to fans, so that I didn’t come across like a spoiled brat who thought she was better than everyone else. I wanted to be an accommodating good girl. It was also becoming clear that anything I did or said now had the chance to end up printed in a magazine article, fodder for “celebrity gossip.” I didn’t want to be labeled a bitchy little monster who wouldn’t go talk to a fan’s kids. They bought movie tickets and so I was obligated to perform, even when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I got in the car and allowed myself to be taken to the “second location,” as any security expert would have called it. Fear rose up in me as we started to drive but I was also positive that my reaction was one of an overly dramatic baby, so I remained quietly scared. I decided to not put on my seatbelt, so I could jump out of the car if the situation required it. My hand stayed on the door handle to prepare for the leap, but we were
in the middle of the country and there were no stoplights or signs. We never once slowed down.

I tried to remember where we were going, so I could find my way back to the farm with the security of the wallabies and my mom. I don’t know how long it took us to get to her house but it felt like an hour. The whole time she chatted away, about the age of her kids and her husband’s job but I only heard pieces of it, as my mind was mostly concerned with plotting my escape. When we arrived, I was shivering. She thought I was cold and gave me her sweater. Would a kidnapper give you a sweater? I was being ridiculous. This was embarrassing. Everything was fine. We went into the house and her three kids were sitting on the couch watching TV. They were all in their teens and had perfected the miserable teenager slouch. The coffee table was covered in cans of Dr. Pepper and the wrappers of whatever they had recently thrown in the microwave.

“Look kids, look who it is! Lydia, Mrs. Doubtfire’s daughter!” She pointed at me and I wondered if I should clarify that actually, my name was Lisa and my real parents were not inclined to cross-dress.

Her kids reacted as if she were a stray cat who had presented a half dead mouse at their feet. They sort of snarled and went back to the program. They did not get a kick out of me.
This is fantastic
, I thought,
they don’t care in the slightest so she will take me back to the farm and the mountain lions and this will be done.

“I should get back to the party.” I tried to be assertive but my voice cracked and I looked at my feet as I said it.

“Hold on, I have to call my husband at work.”

She hurried to the kitchen and got on the phone. I sat on the front hall stairs and shivered, pulling my knees to my chest under the sweater she gave me, even though I worried that I might be stretching it out. In the TV room the kids were still mesmerized by the show, seemingly undaunted by the fact that their mother had kidnapped someone. She was fighting with her husband on the phone, trying to get him to come home early to see this prize of a child actor she had procured. He, from
what I gathered, cared at the same level as his children and was trying to get her off the phone. She yelled back at him and that is when my tears started to flow.

The front door was right there, what would happen if I just bolted? But I didn’t really remember the route back to the farm, my panic blocked out any sense of direction. All the farms looked the same, what if I stumbled into another farmhouse of obsessed film fans? Plus, I hadn’t worn my glasses that day, as I thought they made me look bug-eyed, so my mediocre eyesight was not really up to a run though the rural countryside to safety. I ached with regret and fear.

She got off the phone and came over to me. My eyes were swollen and tears streaked my face. While I might have perfected the film cry with the one, slowly rolling tear on an otherwise unmarred face, I have never been a pretty crier in real life. It usually involves jagged gasping and shocking pink blotches. She seemed not to notice.

“My husband will be home soon, why don’t you watch TV with my kids until he gets here? He will get such a kick out of you.”

I started to heave, gasping for air and chocking out my words. “I want to go back, they are going to wonder where I am, please, I want to go back.”

“Oh, but he will be thrilled to meet you. It won’t be too terribly long. Why don’t you go get to know the kids?” She shooed me towards the living room.

I heaved more and she sighed at me and shuffled back to the kitchen to call her husband back. Over my chattering teeth, I could hear her telling him that he really needed to come home sooner. They fought for a while, she screamed about other times he hasn’t cared about her or supported the things she was interested in.

I was clearly going to die there. At my funeral they were going to talk about how it was my own damn fault for getting in that car. They always say don’t get in the car. I deserved to get kidnapped.

I was reaching hysterics as she got off the phone the second time.
My legs were starting to get numb from holding my knees to my chest so tightly. She stood over me and looked disappointed. Her hunting and gathering project had been unsuccessful; no one was interested in her offering.

“Fine. Fine, let’s just go,” she yelled at me while she grabbed her keys and angrily marched to the car.

Did she mean it? I stood on my weak and wobbly legs and followed her like a stupid little lamb. We got back in her car and I wondered if we were really going back to Pam’s or if I was about to be scalped and dumped in a landfill. She said nothing on the whole trip back, she just stared out into the fields that blurred past. Again, I kept my hand on the car door handle. My heart leapt as things started to look familiar. Maybe she really was taking me back. I cried the tears that come when you think things just might actually be okay.

As we pulled in to Pam’s driveway I began to think that I over-dramatized this situation. Maybe she was just a really clueless movie fanatic who failed to notice that I was completely terrified. Maybe she just wanted attention from her husband and children and thought I might be able to get her that. Maybe she was just lonely and bored and I was something interesting that happened in the midst of her gloomy day, something she could tell the person behind her in line at the bank. When she pulled to a stop, I took off the sweater and got out of the car quickly, unfathomably saying “thanks” as I slammed the door shut. I saw my mother and Pam by the wallabies and ran over to them trying to hide the fact that I had been crying.

“Hey, I thought you were going to be here with the animals?” my mother said. She seemed a little annoyed that I was not where I said I would be. I was nothing but relieved.

Pam watched the car and the driver as she pulled away.

“Who was that?”

Pam didn’t know the woman or the car, the woman had not talked to Pam or my mother as she had claimed. I was not able to give a description
of anything that was helpful. I had such stress-induced tunnel vision that I couldn’t even describe the house, the woman, or even the kids very well. I couldn’t remember where the husband worked.

I don’t think she ever meant me any harm. She had fallen into the theory endorsed by the trash media: actors are not real humans. I had just been a little trinket for her to collect. She was so blinded by Hollywood that she didn’t notice that I was just a scared kid who never learned how to say no.

This is what gets lost in the shuffle of gossip-fueled headlines and grainy undercover vacation photos—it’s a big deal when the media doesn’t treat actors as people. It might seem like a harmless distraction but the impact is significant. When we “otherize” people, when we look past their humanity and make them inherently different from us—it’s a problem. We lose our sense of empathy and understanding. It allows us to be blinded by devotion, or unflinchingly merciless. When we turn people into infallibly divine kings or unrelatable, lowdown slime, we are doing some serious damage to our humanity. If we can just remember that people are all fundamentally the same, it doesn’t make any sense to grab a kid from a party like she’s a gift bag.

After all those years of corporate apartments and murderous mansions, it was time to find a more permanent place to lay my head in Los Angeles. Age fifteen seemed a good time to get into the real estate game. The house my mom found was close to my favorite bagel place and had a gorgeous grapefruit tree in the backyard. So, I bought a tree, which just happened to come with a house.

It was the summer of 1994. The Northridge earthquake had hit in January and the city was still reeling. Rubble remained strewn about, as people tried put their lives back together while waiting for the insurance checks to clear. We had been in Canada for Christmas and missed the seismic event but my mother, always the opportunist, saw something positive amongst all the cracked drywall and crumbling roofs.

It was a simple one level ranch-style house with two bedrooms. It had been built in the 1930s and had all the charm and architecture of the era. It also had all of the crappy plumbing and electrical wiring of the era. It was a weird little place. The shower door was decorated with a frosted glass deer, eating frosted glass flowers in a frosted glass field. There had been clumsy and certainly illegal additions, meaning that there were random brick walls or windows that peered into adjacent rooms. Surprised guests would open a door, expecting a coat closet, and
find themselves in a completely tiled room that served as a shower or a handy place to commit an easy-clean-up slaughter. Modern conveniences, such as temperature control, functional kitchen appliances, or windows that closed all the way were not part of the house’s repertoire.

I lacked the motivation to fix those sorts of things, and without stable money coming in, those kinds of luxurious extras didn’t seem financially feasible. The money in the bank was what I’d have until the next job, and if there was no next job, it needed to last until my actor’s union pension kicked in. My actor friends always complained about their lack of funds, so, I tended to be in a constant state of panic that I was broke. Even though I was still a teenager, I was convinced that each paycheck might be the last one I would ever get.

The house had seen better days. Before me, it had been mostly inhabited, it seemed, by feral cats. The floor buckled in some places, pushing up cheap parquet tiles into jagged, threatening peaks. The ceiling was collapsing in other places, raining down insulation and rat droppings onto horrified Sunday Open House visitors. The house had a long line of short-term tenants in its past, who had no concern for sustaining its health. The earthquake appeared to be the final straw, the last owners had abandoned it and the bank became its reluctant owner. The house needed saving. It was awkward and strange and I absolutely loved it. We had a kinship. Mom and I did just enough renovation to make it livable, moved in, and made it our California home.

My next door neighbor, Paula, was an elderly German woman who loved to garden. She was short and sturdy and always moved quickly with intense determination, as if something behind her had just recently blown up. Because the house had been abandoned for such a long time, she had decided that she was responsible for it. When I first moved in, Paula kept telling me how happy she was that I was going to be living in her house. With her garden. She wasn’t the type of woman that you could correct without getting something cracked against your knuckles, so I just said that I loved her house and was happy to be there. My
meekness only seemed to encourage her, as she developed a habit of walking in my front door and demanding that everyone present identify themselves.

Paula’s most helpful form of intrusion was caring for all the rose bushes that she had planted on my property. Since I couldn’t keep a cactus alive, I was happy to have her wander around my yard, early in the morning, caring for the plants. She would get excessively emotional about gardening; she’d enthusiastically praise the rosebushes for their growth or yell impassioned threats towards the aphids that were chewing on them. This habit of hers, while undoubtedly beneficial to the flora, would become problematic later on. My Jewish boyfriend found Paula to be quite unnerving; he claimed that he had a genetically ingrained fear of anyone waking him up by shouting in German.

“The hill” separates the porn stars (San Fernando Valley) from the movie stars (Beverly Hills). My house was right on that hill, just on the sketchier side. The valley was populated with establishments where you could pawn something and then conveniently get some fro yo right next door. Delis, nail salons, and unsavory video stores were all slung together in long, low strip malls with flat roofs and large parking lots. Palm trees striped the streets, occasionally obscuring the billboards advertising liquor or TV movies. The smog settled in a thick layer between the mountains, giving the valley a golden radiance that you could easily delude yourself into thinking was merely a California glow.