Why I'm Like This (6 page)

 

On the night I turned thirty, about ten of my friends met me at Carmine's for dinner. I sat at the center of the long table under the misguided impression that it would make me the center of attention, only to discover that I was unable to be part of the conversations that had sprung up on either end. The man whom I was vaguely dating stood me up, and I was forced to add another layer of false jollity on top of what was already a mille-feuille of pretense. I drank too much red wine in the hope that it might inspire one honest emotion. It did: relief. I could have been waiting on my table rather than eating at it.

L
AST
night I slept for forty-five minutes. I fell asleep at 3:34
A.M
. and distinctly remember looking at the clock as I awoke at 4:19
A.M
. An investigation this morning conducted by myself and my cousin, Erica, who is staying with me in my apartment, revealed the cause of my insomnia to be an unintentional overdose of the nonprescription medication Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol.

It all began when I was invited to an ice-hockey game by a man who on our first date had, without provocation, explained that discussions of menstruation, or the P-word, as he called it, did not particularly
interest
him. Why this tiny nugget of information did not register a warning in some appropriate quadrant of my brain, I cannot say. All I know is
that I was sufficiently impressed with the fit of his Levi's to put a handful of Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol into my pocket before I met him at Madison Square Garden. When I got there I went to a water fountain and took two, as a preventive measure.

Happily, my little friend, as someone's mother, thank God not mine, once called it, failed to appear. As luck would have it, however, I was afflicted instead with a migraine headache, another source of mind-altering agony sure to enhance the enjoyment of any date, particularly one taking place in a sports arena. A man always remembers you when he has to take you home at the top of the third period, no pun intended, of a game where his favorite team, the one whose insignia is emblazoned on the front of the dorky hat he insisted you wear, is tied with the dread rival team. When the blurry vision that usually accompanies my migraine coincided exactly with the twenty-minute laser light show at the end of the second period, I did what any self-respecting person would do in my position. I took eight more Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol and kept my mouth shut.

I arrived home at approximately 11:00
P.M
. I tiptoed about, ate a Reese's Piece, and proceeded to bed. I turned on 1010 WINS news radio because two minutes of it and I am usually out like a light.

So there I am, waiting to drop off, when suddenly I realize I've heard the traffic and weather twelve times, the news eight times, and the sports twice, and although I am lying
stock-still, it is with all the serenity of a stunned deer on I-95. I begin to sing silently to myself in the hope that a gentle, regular rhythm will lull me, but find that I am only able to produce rousing renditions of “Those Were the Days,” “Hava Nagila,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the singing of which convinces me that they are, in fact, all the same song.

Just when you'd think I should give up all hope of ever falling asleep, lo and behold at 3:34
A.M
. I do. And in what seems like no time, because it was no time, I open my eyes and it is 4:19.

At approximately 4:53
A.M
. I cry, this lasting only a few seconds due to the fact that Midol relieves bloating and I imagine myself bordering on the dangerously dehydrated. Five-fifteen finds me lying crosswise on the bed gasping dramatically for air and flailing my arms and legs, an unpleasant reminder of how my single status makes just that sort of self-indulgent behavior possible. Five-forty-seven and I am searching wistfully out the window for signs of life. There is, in fact, a lone light shining from across the alley, and I momentarily hallucinate I am in college pulling an all-nighter, which makes me even more agitated because I can't get the paper done in time and every day it is late I lose a grade.

At 6:02 I yawn. My first yawn of the night slash morning. You can imagine my disappointment when I recognize that this is not a promise-of-slumbers-to-come yawn but rather
an I'm-bored-out-of-my-skull yawn. The kind of yawn that says: Fuck the warning on the package, I could definitely operate a forklift.

At 6:34
A.M
. I turn on the light and reread
Our Bodies, Ourselves
.

At 7:00 Erica's alarm goes off. I open the door of my bedroom just in time to see her slap the sleep button and roll over.

At 7:08 her alarm goes off again and again she goes for the sleep button, but because I have moved it out of her reach she knocks over the lamp. At this point she gets up. I brief her on my previous night's activities and I eat a couple of bowls of Captain Crunch in order to compound my exhaustion with a sugar headache. We determine an investigation is in order and no sooner do we set our minds upon the task than we conclude the fiendish culprit is none other than Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol. Ten caplets, to be precise. Close examination of the package reveals that in addition to the nonaspirin painkiller acetaminophen, each Midol caplet contains sixty milligrams of caffeine. With little or no pharmacological training we further deduce that the six hundred milligrams of caffeine I had ingested within a two hour period was perhaps enough to rouse a dead horse.

Why had I done it, I asked myself. What had I been thinking, besides the obvious things like how's my breath and did I shave my legs this morning just in case? In my mind's eye I retrace the fatal moments which had brought me irrevocably to this moment, this day. This day I thought I might never
see. This day which was separated by forty-five minutes from the day before it.

I did it for a guy.

Phew, what a glaring, harsh moment of self-awareness this is. I wonder if there is any way I can tell this story and have it seem like I did it in the name of those dolphins that get caught in tuna nets. Or World Peace. Stop the fighting now, or I overmedicate!

At least I got the last laugh: the Rangers lost.

I'
M
not sure why it is that by this time in my life I am not either a VJ on MTV or living in the Mexican rain forest with my artist husband and young son and doing some kind of socioenvironmental study or something. Where is my drive? For God's sake, why don't I go get my Ph.D.? When did I fail to take the bull by the horns and become a successful human being? I really mean it when I say that I'm not going to get through the rest of this day if someone doesn't call who is more of a complete failure than me to tell me how lucky I am that I'm me and not them.

Really, I just heard that someone I was friends with in high school is living with her husband and baby in the Mexican rain forest. What the hell are they doing down there? Who
even knew Mexico had a rain forest? The last I heard they were just obscure, meandering artists. She was a dancer and I don't remember if he was a drummer or painter, but either way, when did they become sociologists? It's like me all of a sudden saying I'm a brain surgeon. It gives me the same sinking feeling I got when I was in college and there was a boy I liked and my roommate would accost him at a party and, in the name of friendship, extol my virtues in a manner that would make her breasts appear larger. How she managed this I'll never know.

My mother insists there is no such thing as success or failure; all there really is, is just living your life. I completely disagree. And even if it's true, no one in their right mind ever feels that way, so what's the point? No one I know is really happy, at least I hope they're not, so why pretend things are otherwise? Go ahead, try to walk around happy. Try to accept things as they are, enjoy your day, be thankful for your blessings. Go ahead, you'll just be riddled with guilt because you don't deserve it or you gave up on your real dream or because people are homeless.

And even if it turns out that this old high school friend of mine and her husband and her child just sort of wound up in Mexico, aimless, broke, by default, maybe it's a bad scene, whatever; still, I know they will return to civilization in due course and she will choreograph
The Scourge of the Rain Forest
and will win a Bessie and a Pulitzer and his paintings of her and their son, Leaf, or Rain, or Monkey Boy, naked,
dancing in the Mexican wilds will become collectors' items. Their exile will have fed their art, and they will ultimately write, and it will also be written about them, that had it not been for those dark years, well, you know the rest.

It drives me crazy that you can't count on anyone to stay down so you can feel up.

And just to put a capper on the whole thing, tonight I have to go to a party. I've got to get in the shower and dry my hair and put on makeup and pick an outfit. And then for three or four excruciating hours I have to skirt the edge of my bitter homebody character and try not to get so smashed that I say something truly revealing. Because nobody wants to hear it.

 

I am currently a freelance recruiter for a well-known retail company. I do this between auditions and acting jobs because it pays really well, much better than waitressing, and I don't have to work at night or on weekends. Also, it uses a portion of my brain that I did not heretofore know existed and which I plan to shut down for good as soon as is fiscally possible. I know nothing about retail—I don't even like shopping—and yet it is my job to ingratiate myself with secretaries and assistants at rival companies until I have learned the names and titles and telephone extensions of all of their executives—information which is often considered proprietary. I have several nom de phones, and sometimes I say I am from the Association of Retailers/Retailers of America/American Association of Retailers and am sending reports/invitations/
holiday cards. Or if someone sounds coldy, I say, “You need those Kleenex with the lotion.” And “Go home, for God's sake.” We laugh, and I get the names I need. I then call the executives and we discuss opportunities with my company. I work anywhere from ten to thirty hours a week, depending on my workload and on my acting commitments and on my mood. There's only so much of it a person can take.
This
person can take. I know there are people, reasonable people, people with whom I work, who devote their lives to this. Crikey.

The recruiting job sees me through many financially unrewarding theatrical enterprises. And although I am getting what seems like a reasonable amount of work, I succeed in staying just beneath the radar of almost every agent and casting director in the city.

I get a commercial agent, though, and book a commercial for an East Coast supermarket chain. The commercial shoots in Wilmington, Delaware—a delightful city—and I finish the first day of shooting trying to get the feeling back into my fingers after spending ten hours reaching into the glass-front cases of what is commonly referred to as Your Grocer's Freezer. I spend the second day of shooting jumping on and off a rolling metal cake rack as it careens through the bakery section, a low-rent version of the old Rice-A-Roni ad. I do this dressed in a skirt and pumps—I am a working woman—and as I roll along I gape at a selection of pastries and sweets and compliment the store's lighting. Thankfully, the com
mercial doesn't air in New York, although my Philadelphia relatives are
very
impressed.

I do a commercial for ESPN in which I stalk an old, odd-looking sportscaster. It is a very funny ad and I hope it will do for me what that Dentyne commercial did for the actor Rob Morrow. It doesn't. The only people who see it are the type of sports fans who watch ESPN in lieu of a career.

I get a part in a really good off-Broadway play. I play the lead character's talking dog. This is not the same play in which Sarah Jessica Parker is transformed into the sexiest talking dog on earth and almost steals a woman's husband from her. In this play the old, mangy talking dog dies.

I play at least one lesbian a year in one or another downtown theater. Most of these plays are written by the same playwright and are attended by her large lesbian following and by my family, who surprises me by roundly accepting my work-related lesbianism. Their only request is that I provide them with a project-by-project breakdown of sexual content so they know which friends to invite. Some don't want to see any kissing.

One of these productions leads to an audition for the lead in an independent feature. I have already been in one independent film that actually made it to the Sundance Film Festival, but my part in it was so small that my character did not have a name. On my résumé, though, I call her Janice.

The character I am auditioning for, Sarah, is the out-of-work wife of a millworker and she is having an affair with
Susan, the college-bound granddaughter of Sarah's black neighbor. The focus of the story isn't the sex, the director assures me; it is about Sarah wanting to
be
Susan. Sort of a Catskills version of
Persona
. After the audition I go home and read the script. There are a series of funny, pathetic scenes of Sarah lying her way through job interviews in a crumbling, town-that-time-forgot town. I am interested, that is, until the scene where Sarah has sex with Susan and has to simulate orgasm-face on-screen. Is it a tasteful but explicit scene? Or is it soft girl-on-girl porn?

The director calls and tells me I'm the front-runner for the part of Sarah, and she asks if I will come read with a bunch of prospective Susans. The director and her crew are now ensconced in a room in the offices of a film company on Washington Street. The building has been renovated expensively using a lot of exposed cedar beams and moldings and it smells like a freshly cleaned hamster cage. I read scenes with a succession of attractive black actresses, the last of whom makes the greatest impression. She is beautiful. She wears boys' suede sneakers, jeans low on her straight hips, a tank top, and a baseball cap on backward. I could never pull that off. And her acting is very sullen, almost as if she isn't acting. As it turns out, she isn't. She's a poet and she has never acted in her life. This bit of information will eventually be the source of one of Life's Great Ironies. If you can't guess what that might be, don't worry, I'll fill you in later.

In late August, the poet and I are officially cast. Rehearsal is a strange affair. Nonactors can be more temperamental than actors. It's not their fault; they don't know the protocol, like the one where you act with the other person in the scene.

We shoot the movie over the month of October in upstate New York, the cast and crew all living together in a big house. Someone shoots at us through a window one day because they think we are making pornography. My greatest success is that I manage to convince the director that the orgasm close-up should be of the poet's face, not mine.

We run out of money.

A year later, with more money, we return to the Catskills and finish the movie. In the hiatus the poet has taken acting classes and becomes more fun to work with. We get into a bunch of festivals, including a prestigious festival in New York. The film gets some very nice and some okay reviews. I get some very nice reviews, too. My friends call me and say, “This is it, your life is totally going to change.”

In fact, nothing happens. Well, one thing. Two months after the film screens in New York, my father-in-law passes away. He was a fairly conservative, old-school gentleman, and it is intimated more than once that seeing me locked in an erotic embrace with a black woman hastened his decline.

I finally get a theatrical agent when I perform a piece of my own at a reasonably hip theater company and am a hit. There is a sense of legitimacy an actor gets from having an agent, and all these years I have wondered what that feels
like. Now I know. It feels mostly like my agent sends me out for things I am not pretty enough for.

A year later the poet appears in a highly publicized film at Sundance. Her picture is in the
New York Times
.

 

Maybe the best I can hope for now is that everything will collapse and I will have to move, I don't know, somewhere horrible, so I can rise again from the ashes like the phoenix, and I, too, will write of those harrowing days and nights and, who knows, maybe also start a grassroots organization that in five years' time will make me both financially independent for life and a good person.