I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star Page 7

  The daytime was better. I enjoyed being alone in parks, deciding how much time to spend in museums, where I wanted to go, where and when I wanted to shop, and how late to sleep in. It was all up to me. And I did love that. I figured out how to get around (kind of). But when the sun went down, it sucked. It was dark, I was alone, I was scared, and it seemed to cancel out whatever strides I’d made in my independence during the day. When I was back at my hotel with only my thoughts and the same six Euro MTV videos on a loop to keep me company, I always found myself wondering, why did I do this again?

  I was nervous to do pretty much anything at night, even walk around. The city looked different to me when it was dark. I was scared to use a map because I thought I would be a target for possible rapists, thieves, or even a group of rambunctious teenagers. I guess I wasn’t the savvy traveler I thought I was because I was always making a wrong turn and winding up on a quiet, empty street. I knew there had to be people out eating, drinking, and having fun, obviously this was happening somewhere, I just couldn’t find where, and I felt left out. I used the Internet cafés, sometimes I pretended I was in a Bourne movie and that I was undercover, I would type really loud and fast, eyes clocking all the exits. That was fun for about thirty minutes. I finally e-mailed my friend Martin, the one who had been to Barcelona and had the best time by himself (liar), and was like, “WHAT THE FUCK? What do I do here? You said everyone would want to talk to me. No one does. You said everyone spoke English. No one does. You said I would meet people, I haven’t met anyone. I’m sad and lonely and I think I hate you. Why am I so lame?”

  The night before had been my breaking point. I’d hid in my room the majority of the evenings so far, only really venturing out to go to a nearby Thai restaurant (pad Thai is still a real comfort food for me). While I was out wandering around (read: getting lost) that day, I passed a cool-looking restaurant. It was tucked into a charming courtyard, and the food people were eating for lunch looked amazing. So that night, I was going to be brave—ready or not. I was going to embrace the woman who, for some reason, thought she’d like to be the kind who traveled by herself. I hailed a taxi at my hotel and told the driver the address. And to my delight, he was excited that I was American! Finally! It turns out he had been working on his English and wanted to have a conversation with me. Of course, the first thing he asked me was if I was meeting my husband at dinner. No.

  “Fiancé?”

  “No.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah! Girlfriend!”

  “No, I am going to dinner alone. I’m not meeting anyone.”

  “ ‘Alone’? What is this word? I don’t know this word.”

  Are you fucking kidding me? “Alone. It means with no one. Just me.”

  “Ah! You have no one?”

  Jesus Christ. “Yeah, just me. I have no one to eat dinner with.”

  “Alone?”

  “YES.”

  “Just you. No one. Alone?”

  “YES. Just me.”

  He handed me a Spanish-English dictionary. “Will you find ‘alone’?”

  I took it, found “alone” in English. I handed it back to him. He read the meaning in Spanish and started saying the word over and over, “Alone. You are alone. You have no one. Alone. Just you. Alone. Alone. You are alone.”

  Seriously, I am not making this up. Next, he handed me a small computer and requested that I type the word “alone.” He was keeping a list of new words so he could remember them. It was one of those translator devices they sell in the back of the SkyMall catalog, so, shaking my head in disbelief, I typed, “ALONE.”

  He took back the device and read it out loud. “Alone.” Finally, just before the pit in my throat worked its way to my tear ducts, I began laughing. And I couldn’t stop. He was saying the word over and over and trying to put it in sentences, all of these new sentences about me, naturally, and how alone I was and how I was going to dinner alone. That no one was meeting me, ever. That I would be alone forever. That I would never share a meal with anyone ever again. OK, that was my subtext, but basically this fucking guy said, about fifty times, that I was alone. NO SHIT DUDE! At this point, I was laughing so hard tears were rolling down my face. We finally pulled up to the restaurant, and he turned around, faced me, and said, “I will eat dinner with you tonight so you don’t have to eat alone.” I had finally made a friend in Spain.

  I’ve heard of several girls with this brand of wanderlust. Is it the early to mid-twenties that inspires it? Finally having a little money of our own? A fear of becoming too settled and never having the chance again? Of not trusting our type A personalities to allow such frivolous pursuits once we got further down our career paths? Or was it just, simply, to see if we could actually do it? For me, I think it was that. I did it. It’s not my thing, but now I know. I can still be an adventurous woman, I just want to adventure with someone else, or at least meet someone for dinner afterward. I decided not to accept my taxi driver’s offer that night to be my dinner companion. I was sufficiently cheered up and, for the first time all week, looking forward to sitting at the restaurant bar with my phrase book and novel, alone.

  How Shopping Changed My Life

  THERE ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTED to my being an actor. There is my early dancing “career” (not nearly as exciting as it sounds in my bio), joining a theater program in high school, and going to an acting conservatory for college, but the real answer about how I got my big break is this: I was walking down the street in Chicago in a vintage blue raincoat, and for the second time during my five years living there, I was “discovered.”

  It was raining and I was just weeks away from graduating from college. I was walking to my restaurant job, and a woman ran across the street and yelled at me to freeze. She asked me if I was a model. I’m not kidding. I told her no through my laughter but that I was just about to graduate from acting school, and did that count? She said my raincoat was fabulous, and I looked fabulous, and she could help me become even more fabulous. Uh, yes please!

  It turned out that she was an agent and represented models and actresses, and I just happened to be walking down the same street as her office. I was going to need an agent, so this was really perfect. I got her a stack of my brand-new head shots, and she started sending me on auditions.

  My acting program prevented students from auditioning professionally until after graduation; that was a rule. Though apparently everyone but me was already breaking that rule. It wasn’t like I was such a rule follower, just lazy, and this rule functioned as a perfect excuse. So, once I got my new agent, I got sent on some weird regional commercial auditions, which sucked, and I never booked any of them. I auditioned for some industrial films, which were awesome, but for the wrong reasons. In case you don’t know, industrial films are short movies made by companies to demonstrate something to their employees, like training videos. It’s stiff competition for those roles. Some of those guys were making almost five figures acting in them, and a new face in the waiting room was threatening, even if I was a twenty-one-year-old girl and didn’t own a suit and was never going to get cast as a corporate CEO or regional sales manager. The actors who considered these jobs their bread and butter wore these devices called earwigs. One man I met at an audition told me if I wanted to get serious about industrials, I would need to invest in an earwig. Earwigs look like baby hearing aids that are actually teeny tiny recorders; they’re flesh colored and stick in your ear. They are very expensive and could be customized to match your specific skin tone, hair color, whatever you want. You record your lines, and the earwig plays it back for you right in your ear! That way you never have to memorize “the MOR reports are to be categorized by HP22-578 label E4.” Who could memorize that? Who would want to?

  I digress, but seriously, if it’s true that we only use 10 percent of our brain space, do I really want to use some of it up on that kind of stuff? The answer is yes because there was no way in hell I was spe
nding my bartending dollars on an earwig. My bartending dollars were being spent on ridiculously tight pleather pants that could be hosed off at the end of a shift and would help me earn more dollars; that was money well spent. Anyway, after my first few industrial film auditions, I knew I wouldn’t be booking any of those, nor did I really want to. Maybe if there had been a good one, like a sexual harassment orientation video or security breach protocol movie in the style of a Jason Bourne film, those would have been the ones to fight for, but no such luck. But who cares, I had the main thing I needed most after graduation, an agent!

  The second time my raincoat worked its magic was at my first movie audition. It was for Kissing a Fool, starring David Schwimmer, Jason Leigh, and Mili Avital. It was shooting over the summer in Chicago, and they wanted to cast a local actor in the role of Mili’s visiting cousin. It was raining on the day of my audition, so, of course, I wore my blue raincoat and decided to use it as a prop during my scene for the casting director. In the audition scene I was getting ready to go out and Mili’s character was asking where I was going, so I put the coat on while answering her question. My raincoat clearly made an impression because when the director came to town for callbacks, he asked for me. I auditioned for him, and when I was finished, he didn’t say anything about my performance but asked where the raincoat I used in my tape was. It was sunny and hot on the day of my callback, so I said, “Look out the window, it’s not raining, so I didn’t wear it.”

  I don’t know if it was my sassy comeback or the memory of that raincoat from my tape, but I got the part! Of course, not without promising him and the two producers that I would wear the raincoat in the movie. I shot Kissing a Fool the summer after I graduated from acting school. I got another movie after that, a guest spot on a TV show that shot in Chicago, and then a play. I was a working actor starting the day I graduated. It’s not the best story to tell actors who are just starting out. I feel guilty that I had such a smooth beginning in Chicago. And how do I tell people who ask me what they should do to get an agent? Should I lend them my raincoat? I even ended up getting another agent soon after my raincoat discovery. My first agent decided after she signed me to leave the business and pursue her dream of becoming Jodie Foster’s character Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs and joined the FBI. My new and improved agent only had a few clients, and he treated us like we were his children. He was direct and honest. He never let us wallow if we didn’t get a part, but would somehow manage to build us up for next time. His name was Chuck Saucier, and he was the one who really started to carve out a career for me, not just get me auditions.

  The magical blue raincoat still hangs in my closet. No matter how many closet purges I do, I could never get rid of it. I haven’t worn it in years, but every now and then I get it out and try it on. I recently bought myself a new jacket. It’s a black leather motorcycle jacket. I’ve always wanted one and finally decided it was time. I doubt people will ever stop me on the street because of it, but when I wear it, it makes me feel the same way my old blue coat did—really cool. I sometimes wonder if it was the jacket that attracted the attention or the way I felt when I was wearing it. And could my “big break” really be because of a raincoat? The years of ballet, high school plays and musicals, four years and thousands and thousands of dollars for acting school, was it even necessary? Or did it boil down to one day of thrift shopping in Chicago? Guess it doesn’t really matter because here I am, but if it was the shopping, I have a good argument for how to spend my next day off.

  Home Is Where the Cops Shine Their Helicopter Lights

  EVEN THOUGH I KNEW I HAD TO COME TO LOS ANGELES to pursue my chosen career, I was afraid to move here. I had probably watched too many hair-band music videos as a kid, but I didn’t want to be that girl getting off a bus on the corner of Hollywood and Vine with a suitcase and a dream, only to find herself, years later, in a music video wearing a lace teddy and writhing on a hot rod for drug money while still telling her parents she was “acting.” L.A. scared me, and I quickly decided I wasn’t going to stick around to see what happened if I didn’t get acting work. I was going to give myself a little time, I am somewhat patient, but I didn’t want to live here forever, still don’t. It is a huge city, spread out and connected by roads that are covered in cars that all slam on their brakes the minute I get behind them. Trying to drive here is like standing in line for a one-stall bathroom at a nightclub, but with sixteen feet of car wrapped around you. The weather in L.A. is almost perfect every day, yet no one ever seems to be outside. No one walks anywhere. People drive everywhere, and mostly with the windows up. Maybe because of the smoggy air, or maybe they’re ashamed of what they are listening to during their commute. Before I moved here from the Midwest, I thought everyone here would have a convertible, but they don’t. And I get it. When I see one now, I assume it’s a tourist. I rented one once when I came for a visit, but my advice is, save your money. You will get a weird sunburn, and everyone will be staring at you assuming you are a tourist. It’s rare to drive above thirty-five miles per hour here, so that dream of the wind blowing your hair around while you speed up the Pacific Coast Highway watching the sunset over the ocean will probably be just that, a dream. Spend the extra money on drinks at a beachfront bar instead. Trust me.

  Before I committed to L.A. and got an apartment, I was homeless, but not like real homeless. I was starting-out-actor homeless. It’s the kind of homeless where you have a bunch of crap in your car but haul it into whichever apartment you are crashing in at the moment. When I booked my first few jobs in Hollywood, I was sleeping on the carpeted floor of an empty bedroom in my friend Sean Gunn’s apartment in Westwood. His roommate hadn’t arrived yet, so I had the room until he did. I slept on a pile of blankets because I was too cheap to spring for an air mattress. At an audition one day the casting directors asked about my move and my plans to become local. I told them I wasn’t going back to Chicago for a while but needed to find an apartment because I didn’t want to share a bathroom anymore with a boy if I wasn’t at least sleeping with him too, and Sean and I were not that brand of friends. They told me to drive up Beachwood Canyon in the Hollywood area and check out the bulletin board outside the Beachwood Market: there were always lists of apartments that were available, and they were usually more eccentric than the lists the rental companies had. I was secretly pleased that they thought I was the type of person who would enjoy an “eccentric” apartment. Now I know that term was probably code for cheap and weird. I had never seen anything like Beachwood Canyon before. It was so charming, and as I drove up that hill and saw the old buildings and bungalows, I knew I wanted to live there. If you’re not familiar with L.A., it is the canyon directly under the Hollywood sign. It’s literally the Hollywood Hills. When I looked at the bulletin board, I was heartbroken to find there were no apartments available in Beachwood Canyon proper, but there was an ad for one in the Beachwood Canyon area. (By the way, this is a total real estate lie. When they say “area” or “adjacent,” they are lying.) The little one-bedroom was in Hollywood, not Beachwood Canyon “area” as promised, a few blocks from the intersection of Hollywood and Western. My first clue that this was not the neighborhood of my Hollywood dreams was the constant sound of helicopters flying overhead, and at night that sound was accompanied by these bright helicopter lights that shone directly into my living room. My apartment was on the first floor, front unit. All that separated my living room from the criminals being chased outside were four ancient French doors with locks similar to those in a bathroom stall. I am shocked and thrilled that during the few years I lived there, I never got robbed. I wish someone would have told me, “Don’t live where there are cops driving around all the time.” I blame it on my midwestern naïveté, but I thought that made the place safer. Nope! If cops are around all the time, that is because there is a need for cops to be around all the time.

  There was also no parking lot/​garage for my building, and there was no street parking to be found eve
r, at all, never, at any time. There was chatter about some extra spaces that you could rent in the lot of the building a few doors down, and I did ask to be on the wait list for a spot should one become available—but it never happened. I had to park blocks and blocks away. Parking blocks away to the west wasn’t as unsafe as blocks away to the east. West was medium, east was bad. I kept weird hours because I was always coming home late from work, or if I wasn’t working, I was coming home late from hanging out with Sean. Most nights I ended up walking several blocks home alone pretending I was Linda Hamilton from The Terminator so I seemed tough and un-rapeable.

  The building itself was cute. It was old and charming, probably from the 1920s. Every building in L.A. seems like it was built in either the 1920s, the 1950s, or the 1980s, never before, in between, or after those decades. My building had a lot more character than the other buildings on my street (which resembled a run-down set of Miami Vice, the series, not the movie), and there was always a healthy amount of sofas on the curb if you felt like lounging with the tracksuited Armenian men who populated “Beachwood Canyon area,” a.k.a. Little Armenia. These men hung out on the curb all day long and into the night. I assumed they were actors too, since they never went anywhere or did anything. I guess they could have been writers. It always confounds me how few people in L.A. seem to have a job to go to. Doesn’t anyone work in this town? I find myself yelling this out loud in my car when there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic at 11:00 a.m. on a weekday. Perhaps everyone here is a delivery person of some sort—I still really can’t figure it out.