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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 3 years

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My story from the 5/24/21 Moth grand slam:

I was 27, living in a loft with no walls with my ex who had cheated on me with over 100 women and given me herpes. We were still living together because he was my business partner. Life was messy. After going six months without anyone asking me out, which felt like a lifetime at that age, I told my friend Jim I just wanted to date someone who read The New Yorker. He delivered the Novelist to me, who had given him a subscription for his birthday, so it was clearly meant to be. The Novelist had written a doorstop of a cult classic book that Jim made me read before we met, which is even better than deep Googling someone, should you ever have the chance. He was charming and successful and super smart. When we first met, I was reading an old paperback while I waited for him and after introducing himself he asked if he could see my book, then he flipped through the pages and smelled it. I was hooked. After years in fashion and not having anyone to talk books with I had found someone who wanted to talk about them all the time. I mean, when he went on a mini book tour, he bought us both copies of All the King’s Men so that we could read it and discuss it every night on the phone. I had never been so head over heels completely engrossed and caught up in love with anyone before.

We spent every night together at his tiny apartment because, again, still living with the ex. After many visits spent waiting in my car for him to show up because I didn’t have a key, I asked if I could have one, given the whole every night of it all. He said no. He’d never given anyone a key and the thought of it freaked him out. That kind of shocked me. I guess I assumed once he realized how much time I was spending sitting in my car, that of course he’d give me a key and that would just be that. I guess I should also mention that he was 40 and maybe too old to have never given someone he was dating a key before. But, he showered me with love letters, a first, and told me he’d never been so in love with anyone. His friends said he’d never introduced any of his girlfriends to them before and that this was a big deal. We had dinner every Sunday night at his composer friend’s house then watched The Sopranos in his giant ballroom. Things were pretty magical there for a minute. It felt like I had been plucked from my messy life and dropped into the one I had always dreamed of.

Under this spell I didn’t see, or maybe I just excused, the bad stuff. The controlling stuff, telling me that I couldn’t hang out with certain people, that I dressed too provocatively, that he knew better than me how to do just about everything from grocery shopping to purchasing car insurance and I certainly wasn’t welcome to write around him. It was the first time in my life that friends and family told me they didn’t like someone I dated, which was weird, because clearly I had made some truly awful choices before him. When my parents came out from Florida for one of my fashion shows I was so excited for them to meet. They hadn’t met my business partner before either and after the show they told me how much they loved him-–the man who had cheated on me with over 100 women and given me herpes, but sure-–and kind of danced around how much they disliked the Novelist. Maybe it was the way he spoke in know-it-all monologues and mentioned he went to Yale any chance he could get. Maybe it was how much like my dad he was. But no matter what anyone said, I still couldn’t see it.

One night we went to The Chateau Marmont for drinks after a boozy expensive dinner with a professor who taught his first novel. He was pretty high from the piles of praise at dinner, the man considered himself a great talent and especially appreciated it when other people noted that as well. He told me he wanted to marry me, knew that we would make beautiful babies and couldn’t wait to start a life together. It was everything I wanted to hear and made all the bad stuff seem worth it.

The next day it was 97 degrees out and I headed to the farmer’s market to buy his groceries for the week while he wrote--as I was expected to do every week. When I came back, sweaty and slightly annoyed by all the hauling in the heat, he asked where his change was. The man wanted change. I snapped listing all the things that had become my job on top of running my own business like helping him finish his book, helping him entertain people who came through town that might give him an edge with the upcoming National Book Award, making him clothes for his book tour, copy editing his galleys, cooking all his meals, buying his groceries, doing his laundry. It was a lot. And then he broke up with me. And I was devastated. Like the kind of devastated where the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is start crying devastated. And that lasted for a few years, not the crying all the time, but the feeling like I had lost everything.

A couple years ago I ran into the Novelist at Jim’s 60th birthday party. He’s now married to a woman who he describes as type C. I had to look that one up, but basically it means someone who will do all the things I was doing and put their partner’s life first without ever complaining. Clearly it was the complaining that was my undoing. I now have a partner of 6 years who is also a writer, who also went to Yale and who also has been known to tell people that on occasion. But he’s a TV writer, not a novelist, which makes him more of a collaborator than a monomaniac. It took me years to recover from that breakup and to finally realize that I hadn’t lost out on my dream life, I’d probably escaped a life of abuse. The TV writer doesn’t really read novels or want to talk about them, but he does love doing the laundry and I am fine with that trade off.

#themoth #storytelling #neverdateanovelist #mothgrandslam

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 3 years

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I told my story of having an abortion at The Moth’s Housing Works slam and won, guess all it takes is telling one of the hardest stories of your life. It felt good to share and so many people came up afterwards to thank me or to share their own stories. Let’s all keep sharing, even the weird/hard stuff.

#Planned Parenthood #the moth #storytelling #roe v. wade

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 4 years

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I was 16 and had just gotten my driver’s license when my parents very reluctantly let me take their sweet Ford Escort station wagon out on the town by myself for the first time. Don’t know exactly how to explain it except to say that that day I had a really unhealthy need for The Go Go’s “We Got The Beat”. I was kind of in the middle of a cheesy 80s pop music obsession and also in the middle of a fairly serious shoplifting habit. So, I grabbed my Austrian foreign exchange student neighbors, who had been stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down in the great city of Fort Myers, Florida with me and we headed to Kmart on a mission. My dad, who was a German professor, thought the Austrians were good influences on me, teaching me to speak better German, but it was more like they taught me how to procure exotic drugs when The Grateful Dead came through the state and how to put on makeup so you looked old enough, or just plain trashy enough, to get into bars.

When we got to Kmart, we hit the makeup aisle first, scoring some truly unfortunate brown Revlon Color Stay lipstick, that haunts me from old pics to this day, but it was a CD that ultimately did me in. We’d stolen so much over the last year and never gotten caught, had seen so many fake mirrors and cameras that I didn’t think the one over the music section of the store was actually real. I grabbed a CD featuring the song I needed so badly and put it in my backpack. Turned out the camera was super real--I realized this the second a very large security guard grabbed me by the arm as I was walking out and said that I shouldn’t try to run, which was exactly what the Austrian foreign exchange students did. He dragged me to a windowless back room where he told me I would have to wait while the manager called the police and my parents. That was when I started crying and begging him not to call my dad, telling him that he beat me and for stuff way less severe than this, so imagine what he would do when he found out I had stolen something. (My dad totally didn’t beat me, but teenage girls are manipulative, dramatic nightmares and I was one of the worst). He bought it and said because I was a minor he still had to call my parents but, since all I had stolen, or been caught stealing, was the CD, he wouldn’t call the police.

I waited in the back room for about a half hour before my dad walked in red faced and screaming, definitely looking like the kind of guy who beat his kids. He made me give him my driver’s license and then tried to rip it in half, which, was fairly impossible and just made him angrier and redder as he tried to twist the laminated plastic in two. While this was happening, the security guard and I locked eyes across the room and he mouthed “I’m sorry”. Eventually my dad gave up and calmed down and the manager made me sign some papers that said I was never allowed to shop in this particular Kmart, nor was I ever allowed to work in any Kmart ever for the rest of my life—something the adults in the room seemed to think was a very serious consequence, but my snotty teenage self was like: Um, fine? When we got home, my dad grabbed a pair of scissors and dramatically cut my license to pieces while my mom cried. They told me that I would have to paint the entire house by myself as punishment and when I was done I could get a license again. I wish I could say a lesson was learned, but I spent the next couple of months listening to cheesy 80s music as I painted the house, which turned out to be a task I really enjoyed. And I kept stealing, though less frequently and brazenly for a while longer until one day I just stopped, not really because of some moral reckoning, I just didn’t do it anymore.

Years later after I moved to LA, I randomly found myself at the grand opening of a dungeon in an Orange County office park, because who could say no to an invite like that? And I was checking out all the themed rooms they had, eventually wandering into a nursery, where I saw a man in a diaper chatting up The Go Go’s Jane Wiedlin. At first I wasn’t sure if it was her, because that seemed like a random place to happen upon a Go Go, but then I heard her tiny adorable voice and there was no question. I waited for diaper guy to go and then very excitedly told her the story of how her song led to my unhealthy craving, juvenile delinquency and banishment from KMart. She laughed and then we went and watched the chunky mistress of the dungeon swing from hooks in her back as she did some bad interpretive dance to a Tori Amos song in the air above all her creepy slaves.

I don’t know if there’s a moral to this story, I mean, the 16 year old me who was stuck in that windowless room in the back of KMart would have been thrilled to know that she’d end up in another windowless room across the country all those years later with a leather clad Go Go. Maybe it’s that sometimes stealing is good…I mean, at the very least it can be an excellent conversation starter.

#thegogos #themoth #storytelling

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 4 years

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I met The Not Gay on Thanksgiving not long after The Painter and I had broken up. We’d been dating for five years when The Painter finally became financially self sufficient and didn’t need me to subsidize his life anymore. He broke up with me the week my mom was diagnosed with leukemia, my business partner announced he would be taking our company from me (so, no more money for him), and my ex boyfriend shot himself in the chest in the Hollywood Hills. The Painter moved out a few days later and in with a producer of one of the Real Housewives shows, whom he had met on instagram and sold an extremely expensive painting to, which was helping bankroll this whole operation. I have not seen him since the Real Housewives lady realized what a deadbeat he was and kicked him out and he showed up at my place late one night with the next sucker, a mutual friend to grab a package he’d accidentally had delivered there. The mutual friend also gave him the boot, but he has since married, having found someone who would put up with and finance his life. Anywho, life kind of fell apart there for a minute and Thanksgiving rolled around and while I normally hosted dinner, after all that I just couldn’t do it, so when a friend invited me to his place, I jumped at the chance to bring some normalcy into my life—and to ask out a guy I knew would be there, who I had been crushing on from afar as my relationship with The Painter slowly dissolved over the previous year.

Having been out of the game for five years, I was feeling a little gun shy, so I warmed up by speaking to The Not Gay first. We talked about theater, missing acting, how I still got my performance fix from storytelling, and I asked if he wanted to go to the next Moth with me. The second he walked out of the house, one of my friends loudly asked: “So that guy is totally gay, right?” This had also been my assumption, but, as it turns out — though dressed in head to toe white linen in November — he was not. Our host explained he’d known him since they were kids, that he had an 11 year old son and a crazy ex baby mama and was decidedly Not Gay. I had just accidentally asked out the wrong man. (Which didn’t stop me from asking out the right one that night, my crush, who could not have been less interested in going out with me, historically the case whenever I’ve approached a man.) This meant that I would not be hanging out with my new gay best friend, I would be going on a date with him.

The night of our “date”, I waited nervously for him outside, not sure what he was expecting, or what I was supposed to do, but, being southern and polite, I hadn’t canceled, despite the mixup. I don’t even know how you explain that mixup, sorry, I didn’t realize you were straight? We talked about our days, sat down, things were going okay, then he got called up to the stage, told a beautiful story about his mom that made me, and much of the audience cry, and I was hooked. He asked me out for our next date, afternoon tea at the Peninsula, something we’d both always wanted to do. Again with the white linen suit, this time a bow tie was added to the mix, this time I had all the pertinent information. And things just went from there. My friends and I referred to him as “The Not Gay” until he stuck around so long that they demanded we call him by his real name, Adam. (I actually always use both of his names, as he shares a first name with my brother, which can feel a touch incest-y at times.)

He is a mix of all the good things from previous relationships that went bad, like I had taken the positive stuff from all the dirtbags who’d come before and put them into one guy. He’s self sufficient, unlike The Painter, he’s witty and well educated, like The Novelist — which is a whole other crazy story — he is a “reasonable adult” to balance out my lack of such stuff, he’s kind and warm to me and his kid and pretty much everyone and I may love him so much that it scares me a bit. My therapist having heard all the stories of the yahoos that came before him, asked me one day how I had suddenly made the right, healthy choice, after so many bad ones and I said: I kinda didn’t.

We’ve been accidentally together for over five years now and every Thanksgiving I send a text thanking our friend who unwittingly threw us together at his dinner all those years ago. That’s also the day we celebrate our anniversary every year, doesn’t matter the date, Thanksgiving is when it all began. Two years ago we bought a house, last year, we survived living in a siren filled studio apartment between two emergency rooms in New York City for six months, this January, he went home to Florida with me for the first time and met my clinically crazy dad, no small thing to ask of a partner, trust me. We have been through some shit, but I can’t think of anyone I would want to have gone through it more with than the Not Gay.

#themoth #storytelling

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 4 years

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Years ago my grandmother gave me a beautiful handmade malachite and silver ring she had had since the 60s. She’d just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and wanted me to have it while she would still be conscious of how much I loved wearing it. And I did. Earlier this year, I lost that ring at work. I was bartending at the NoMad hotel and had rushed there straight from a job interview so I was kinda dolled up and frazzled, or else I would never have been wearing it on the floor. I loved her so much and thought of her every time I wore it, it was pretty fucking devastating to lose. Why was I rushing to a job I already had from an interview for another job? I think that may become more clear as this story continues.

I guess I had stashed it in the pocket of one of the ill fitting leather aprons designed for men that all of the bartenders, male or female have to wear, when I realized it was still on, because—fun fact—any ring bigger than a wedding band is considered a health code violation in this state, and I must have just forgotten to take it out at the end of my shift. I noticed it was gone the next day and sent out a panicked email to everyone who worked behind the bar telling them the story of the ring and my grandmother and I attached a picture asking for their help to find it. One person responded. The day after that, given that no one seemed to care, I sent a similar post to the entire company’s message board, again explaining how special it was to me and asking for help. This time I got a speedy response from the assistant general manager of the hotel telling me that she had taken down my post because the picture was offensive, but if I wanted to put up another pic of the ring, I was welcome to do so. Oh, and she hoped it turned up real soon. I should probably explain that I don’t often take photos of my hands, so I had posted the only close up shot I had, which was a picture of me with a giant smile on my face flipping off the camera. But, I feel like if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant at any point in your life, you’d know that that’s perhaps the least offensive thing that could possibly happen in one. I mean, they kept a life sized headless, limbless frozen female torso in the bar freezer that had holes in the nipples for doing shots out of. Basically, you poured alcohol into the neck and then it would shoot down through tubes and out the nipples like a pornographic ice luge and no one seemed in any way concerned about having that thing laying around so I figured, given my back story, they might let a silly picture slide. Nope.

After getting her email, I was all kinds of angry and started telling anyone at work who would listen the story of the ring and my post being taken down and I basically got two kinds of responses, one being: Oh, yeah, someone totally stole that, it’s gone. the other: Well, everyone who works here is poor, what do you expect? I guess I expect that people I spend more waking hours with than anyone else in my life, might care just a little bit that I lost something so important to me? I know I would care if it happened to them. I also think that poor people shouldn’t steal from other poor people? Like, if you’re going to steal from someone, steal from someone who can afford to be stolen from: corporations and billionaires come to mind. I fully support stealing anything you can from Jeff Bezos or any of his companies.

A few days after all this went down, one of my dearest, oldest friends who knew the ring and how important my grandmother had been to me told the story of the great missing ring caper of 2019 to a friend of hers. And this woman, who I’ve never met, who lives all the way across the country, told her she wanted me to have a vintage malachite and gold ring that had been given to her by a deadbeat ex. She didn’t want the bad memory attached to it anymore and hoped it would make me feel a little better about my loss. A week or so after that phone call, a box came in the mail, I opened it and just started sobbing. I had held it together through all the disappointments, but getting this generous, thoughtful gift from a complete stranger after so many people who actually knew me acted so indifferently or just plain openly didn’t care, gutted me.

I think my grandmother would love this story, she was a generous lady and she also shared my unhealthy love of costume jewelry. I am never going to get her ring back, but this kind gesture did give me back a little faith in humanity. Oh, and I super duper don’t work there anymore, life’s too short for all that.

#TheMoth

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 5 years

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I took a pic in every dive bar bathroom I encountered in New Orleans during my writing residency. There were a lot.

#New Orleans swimmingpoolsandmoviestars divebars

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 6 years

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I’ve done KCRW’s 24 Hour Radio Race for the last two years, it’s a super fun way to play with audio geeks and get to know your city a little better.

#kcrw #radio race #teamvangina #vanlife #thenewnormal

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 7 years

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Parkour

I told a story at the Moth eight years ago about dating a cop whose girlfriend of five years called me one morning after he and I had been seeing each other for six months to let me know that 1. She existed and 2. He did this to her a few times a year and I shouldn't feel special because he always came back. I happily stepped aside. This is an addendum of sorts to that story.

I had been dating my current boyfriend for a few months when one day he jokingly asked me if I wanted to go to a 12 year old’s birthday party with him and his son, to which I immediately said yes, because I’m always down for weird social outings and when you’re a childless woman in her 30s things like that are exotic. Then he mentioned that it was for his son’s friend Tucker and I did the math and thought about the deadbeat cop’s kid who was 5 when we broke up and because that isn’t the most common name around asked if his last name happened to be Beall. It was. And then I was super in. As we hadn’t been dating all that long, I was still doing my best to seem normal and not at all like the terrible person I actually am-that comes later in the game-so I said something like: “Wow, I would love to see Tucker all grown up-which in all fairness was true-do you still think it would be okay for me to come, or would that be weird? I mean, we did break up, like seven years ago.” He said he would call Tucker’s mom, the cop’s ex wife, to see if it was okay. Oddly, they had been on a few dates in the past and become friends and then made their kids go on play dates together because they were the same age and all that parental nonsense, so that’s how the invite had come about. The longer I live in Los Angeles, the more creepily small this town gets. I immediately called all of my girlfriends who had lived through that Lifetime Movie of a breakup with me and each of them fully supported my somewhat evil desire to attend, which is probably why we’re such good friends. We were all on pins and needles awaiting the verdict and then I got the call: I was a go for the Parkour themed son of my ex’s 12 year old birthday party.

When we got to the party, a random warehouse next to SpaceX HQ, I learned that parents these days don’t actually attend birthday parties, they just dump their kids off and leave and come back for them a few hours later, this is not how I remember the beer fueled birthday parties of my youth. This meant that the only adults present were Tucker’s mom, her boyfriend, a couple of unreasonably enthusiastic parkour instructors in their 20′s to whom I cannot imagine any woman every being attracted, and us. I was sitting with my back to the door as we watched all the gangly boys run around the parkour course below and we were talking about how terrible that show The Affair is when the cop arrived. Because I had my back to the door he was introduced to my boyfriend first, gave him a hearty handshake and then his ex wife said: “And of course, you know Giuliana”. I turned around, huge smile on my face and reached out my hand, his face kind of froze and he recoiled his arm and ended up awkwardly just shaking my finger tips. The last time I had heard from him was when he sent me some boilerplate 9th step Sex Addicts Anonymous apology letter to which I had not replied a year or two after our split, but I can safely say from the look on his face in that moment that he did not truly wish me well as the letter had stated. The last time I’d actually seen him was before his girlfriend called me-I had gone to his house and gotten all my things immediately after that conversation while he was at work and just left my key and a note saying I would be spending the day at Planned Parenthood getting tested for STD’s because he was such a piece of shit. It had been a minute. He quickly made a beeline for the other side of the room and got on his phone and into a heated conversation that we all pretended not to notice, presumably with his wife, who had not yet arrived and also presumably with whom he had had many of these conversations over the years if his girlfriend was to be believed about the number of women with whom he cheated. He had to run into ladies like me all the time. Side note: I guess he didn’t actually always come back to the girlfriend, because she was decidedly not the wife.

At that point I had gotten what I had come for, to create an awkward moment of reckoning for someone who had done me wrong, but there were still awkward hours of parkour-ing and cake to go. When his wife showed up she did not shake my hand, just gave me an icy hello and went to the other side of the room, where she would remain with him and their adorable toddler daughter for the rest of the afternoon, occasionally shooting me hateful glances, which in all fairness I probably deserved. Even better than finally getting my moment all these years later, because it did seem like he got off easy, not having to see me or speak to me once I found out his secret, was the karmic beauty of the universe giving a man who had treated so many women so very badly a beautiful baby girl.

#TheMoth #Storytelling

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 7 years

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When I was growing up my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in Miami every summer, then after my grandfather died when I was 9 it would just be me and my grandmother. She was a proper southern lady who said “Hawaya" instead of Hawaii and “KO-rean" instead of Korean, she wore gloves when she pumped gas, took me to “the club” for lunches while my grandfather golfed and to Bloomingdale’s to buy back-to-school clothes she deemed appropriate for a young girl, which looked nothing like the hand me downs I wore going to school on the hippie commune back home, or later the thrift store finds I wore in high school. She was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and told my mother and I that she hoped we would join, as we were eligible—we both passed on that one. She tried so desperately to get me to say “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am”, but that, like the Daughters of the Confederacy membership was a losing battle, given that I grew up calling all my teachers on the commune by their first names. I think it was her mission every summer to drill good manners into me to try and undo my year away from her with the hippies. Don’t get me wrong, some of those manners are great and as I got older I appreciated having been taught how to dine properly and when I started working in the service industry, the whole “please” and “thank you” basic became far more meaningful—I do think there’s a special place in hell for people who don’t say “please” and “thank you” to their servers. From those summer lessons in manners I did not however take away the necessity for ladies to cover their legs with pantyhose, no matter how hot or humid it is outside, or that children should be seen, not heard. Years later when Mad Men started, I would recognize her in Betty Draper: beautiful, cold, very concerned with appearances, questionable cook. We never hugged really, or snuggled like I did with my parents, I could tell she loved me, but I couldn’t tell you anything meaningful or personal about her, other than she loved her ladies of the PEO fiercely, she was kind of southern mystery to all of us. When she wasn’t hosting perfectly set luncheons for her ladies, which usually featured chicken baked in Smucker’s orange marmalade and a frozen dessert involving mayonnaise and canned fruit, she was talking to them on the phone for what seemed like hours on end. She loved Wimbledon and Lady Di and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. She wore a wig that very much resembled Nancy’s helmet hair, not because she didn’t have hair, it was just a little thin and grey and I guess because it wasn’t perfect anymore she decided to cover it up. She had a housework wig for when she was dusting her knick knacks with her ostrich feather duster, or if she was by the pool, she had a turban, and then she had her going out wig. All of the wigs lived on styrofoam heads in her closet and I can still recall the smell of them, a mixture of stale sweat and White Shoulders cologne. She loved the color red, again probably because of Nancy. She hated my dad, hated that we lived in the woods and that I was being raised to question authority and run wild in those woods. We didn’t appear to have a lot in common.

When I was in high school, she started to lose her sight and went from being very independent to needing more help from my family. Then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it was decided that she would move to our town so we could take care of her. The afternoon she went from being Betty Draper to a fairly remarkable woman for me, when I finally understood who she was and saw past all the southern manner facades was right before she moved out of her house. My dad had driven to Miami and brought her over to look at houses to buy in our neighborhood and it was time to take her home. I was 16 and begged to do the drive solo, though I had never done it before—at least to my parents knowledge, there had been some late night trips in their Ford Escort while they slept to which they were completely oblivious, but that’s another story altogether. It’s about a two hour drive across the state from Fort Myers to Miami and for some reason, they let 16 year old me do it. This was a year into her Alzheimer’s diagnosis and it was kind of a magical time, the effects made her forget short term things, which was worrisome, but they also made her forget to be polite and perfect and impenetrable. She ultimately forgot that she hated my dad, which was convenient, as he became her main caretaker, she did not forget that she hated my brother’s wife, which was a newer memory but one she admirably held on to until the bitter end.

When we first drove off, I was tailgating the car in front of us and she called me out on it, I figured she was going blind and probably couldn’t really tell and said something in a flippant teenage way to that effect and then she tilted her head back and loudly and sassily read off their license plate: IUD something something something. Then, like a memory had been jogged, she said so matter of factly: “I used to have an IUD” and launched into a story about when she was first married and not ready to have kids yet. As we whizzed across Alligator Alley through the Everglades, probably going 90 because I knew she couldn’t see the speedometer and “probably” because the speedometer only went to 80, she told me about her honeymoon in New Orleans and what a special place that town had always been to her and my grandfather, how much she missed him. I put on a Billie Holiday CD that I loved and she sang along, reached over and held my hand. My grandmother, Theodora Morris was suddenly a person, a person who, thanks to Alzheimer's had this need to connect, to touch and be known and it felt like such a privilege to finally be let in.

#FloridaIsTotallyTheSouth #TheMoth

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 7 years

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That Time I Had an Abortion

I never thought I would be using Planned Parenthood to get an abortion, or getting an abortion at all, for that matter. I had been in their teen theater group in high school, had gotten on the pill when I was 16, used condoms and obsessively taken pregnancy tests every month, so worried was I about ever becoming a teen mom. In college I kept going to them because they were who I knew and when I moved to LA and didn’t have insurance, they signed me up for MediCal and made sure I got the pill for free-always left with a bag of free condoms, always felt respected and cared for. But shit happens and at 31 I realized one day that my boobs hurt like crazy and that that super light period I had the month before might not have actually been a period after all. My boyfriend at the time was an aspiring painter/jeans salesperson and couldn’t take care of himself or his bills. He told me (and my worried parents) on several occasions that he wanted to marry me and I had deflected, suggesting he could be the Tim Robbins to my Susan Sarandon-this was when they were still together and was probably somewhat prescient. I didn’t want to have a baby with someone I didn’t want to marry, someone who couldn’t take care of himself, someone who was allowing his life to be subsidized by an inheritance I received and the meager earnings I made from my clothing company. I didn’t want a welfare baby either. I wanted, if I ever chose to have a kid, to do it right. At the time and maybe even more so now, it felt like a huge, important responsibility that would change my life forever and I wasn’t prepared to do that with him, didn’t have the means to do it by myself.

We went in right after Christmas to take the test-I guess I could have just gotten it at a Rite Aid or something, but going there felt more safe, like if I went there, they would know what to do and if I took it with him it might be like the time he gave me an iPod mini for Christmas (which comes in a container very much the size and shape of a ring box) and my stomach dropped because I knew if it was an engagement ring I would feel compelled to say yes even though everything inside me said no. I didn’t want to say yes to having a baby because I felt bad about hurting his feelings.

When they told me it was positive, I started crying, so I guess it was pretty clear where I stood on that. I was told that this was the day they did medical abortions (the pill, more on this later) but they couldn’t fit me in. The next available day was a week away, unless I wanted to go to a different clinic, then they could get me in sooner. I had been going to this location for over a decade and didn’t want to go somewhere else. If I was going to go through this I wanted it to be with the women I had seen over the years and with whom I felt comfortable-the clinician who always wore head to toe purple, the clinician with the eastern bloc hooker accent, the very tiny, very quiet, very gentle medical assistant who always wrapped up a visit. These had become the people I trusted. That said, I don’t recommend spending a week knowing you’re pregnant and can’t do anything about it-I was suffering from morning sickness, severe fatigue, was beyond depressed-it was an awful time. My body felt hijacked and I felt alone. My boyfriend was mad that I made the decision without him. I thought, given our situation the choice was pretty obvious, but then he told me that he would quit painting and become a full time manager at his work so he could marry me and put me on his health insurance. I didn’t want to be married to someone who managed a store in the mall because they gave up their life’s dream to acquire health care-that didn’t seem like it would lead to anything other than a sad, bitter, resentful end, which it kind of did on its own anyway, sans child. Eventually I think he realized how crazy that was and I’m pretty positive that he’s glad we are not linked in any way all these years later. I know I am. That’s the thing about getting older-you watch your friends have kids, break up, get stuck having to deal with a bad life decision for the rest of their lives-yeah they get a great kid out of it, but they also get all kinds of problems that come with making a baby with the wrong people. Sometimes I think that maybe if I had been younger and hadn’t seen all that happen I would have just jumped in.

At the time I was completely broke, Steven Tyler had had his girlfriend order a ton of custom clothes from my company for a South American tour that Aerosmith was on, then refused to pay for them-to the tune of 30K, which put us in a terrible financial position-worst Christmas ever, thanks ST! (It was a sad day spent pretty sure I was pregnant, watching Die Hard, Bucket family style, on the tiny antique brass day bed we were using for a couch, eating frozen fish that had come with an Omaha Steaks package my business partner’s mom had sent him and that had been avoided until it was really the only food option left).

Because abortion isn’t federally funded, which I think is shameful, that left it up to me to come up with the steeply discounted $600 that they charged for a medical abortion. I guess it goes without saying that my boyfriend had no money to offer towards the cause. I called my mom and told her I was pregnant (don’t know what I would have done had I not had a parent who could help me) which was an extremely difficult thing to do, in no small part because when I told her, her initial reaction was complete happiness, then I had to explain why it wasn’t a good idea to make a baby with this person. She started crying and said she knew I would be a good mom someday when it was right. I guess if you don’t know my mom, her crying might not seem like a big deal, especially about such an emotional issue, but, she’s not really an emoter.

When I went in the following week I had to have someone drive me, and as my boyfriend didn’t have a license, had never had a license (so many signs it was not meant to be to procreate with this person) my friend Cazzie volunteered to do the chauffeuring. She waited with him in the lobby while I went back and the eastern bloc clinician did a vaginal ultrasound to see how far along I was to make sure it wasn’t too far along for the pill. She said if I had come in the next day it would have been too late and I would have had to have a surgical abortion, something that really frightened me. Then she asked if I wanted to see the ultrasound image, I said sure, though, again, that may have just been because I felt like that was what I was supposed to say, not because I really cared to. Then she printed it out and asked if I wanted to keep it-again with the sure, again didn’t really want it, no idea where it is now. I was taken into a room with a very young, impossibly cheery medical assistant who explained what was going to happen-she said I would be bleeding a lot and having bad cramps, that if it got too heavy, if I went through more than two or three super max pads in an hour I should go to the ER. Made it seem like a fairly simple, casual procedure. It wasn’t. I guess some people react more severely to the medicine and I was one of those lucky people. I was given a pill at the clinic, then told to go home and take another few pills, some pain killers and some pills that would cause a miscarriage. It was an hour plus drive home in gridlock with Cazzie at the wheel, my boyfriend in the backseat, all of us awkwardly stuck in this small space knowing what was happening but not terribly well equipped to discuss it. I later found out Cazzie, who had been trying for a few years to get pregnant, had just found out that she was two months along and didn’t want to tell me because she felt bad, can only imagine how much more stressful that made the day for her. I think at some point we stopped for maxi pads on the way and then she dropped us off and I got ready to take the pills. Again feeling super lonely, like my boyfriend just didn’t get it and like all I wanted was for her to stay. My neighbor and friend, a nurse came over and checked on me when things really began in earnest because that’s when it went from being an abstract idea and got scary. I did bleed far more than I was supposed to but she said I should stay home because if I went to an emergency room, I’d just be bleeding out in the waiting room, so low on the priority list would I be. It was a traumatizing night spent violently vomiting and spewing the contents of my uterus out in the shower until the hot water ran out and then in between water heater refills, on the toilet. I remember that my boyfriend was there, but I don’t remember him doing much but watching and being grossed out.

A week to the day I went back to Planned Parenthood, which meant that I knew the majority of people in the waiting room were either there for follow up or to take the pill. Looking around, knowing that, it was hard not to cry, not to feel the heaviness. I explained to the medical assistant what had happened, that the abortion had not been as easy and breezy as explained, she was alarmed. Someone was sent in to address this/make me feel better and to try to figure out another way to convey the possible outcomes in the future so as to properly prepare people for what could come. And that’s one of the many reasons why I continue to use Planned Parenthood as my health provider, they might not always do a perfect job, but when alerted to a problem, they have always stepped in to try and make it right.

I saw Cecile Richards speak a little while back and she said it was important for people to share their stories about Planned Parenthood. I feel like most of the stories you hear are the P.C. ones that are easy to tell, about a mammogram that saved the day or birth control for someone too poor to get it otherwise, so I decided to share this story that wasn’t easy to talk about then, isn’t easy to write about now, but it feels like if more people shared the hard stuff, maybe we wouldn’t feel so alone.

#istandwithpp #planned parenthood #cecile richards

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swimmingpoolsandmoviestars · 8 years

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Four Seasons

It began the night I punched someone in the face for the first (and sadly, only) time, a birthday present of sorts to me from a random weird dude who was into that kind of stuff. When I said I’d never had the pleasure, he offered his face, requesting I keep my giant skull ring on for full effect. It (the punching) wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be — no blood, no bruising, no fun sounds like in the movies.

Actually, maybe it didn’t begin that night — as I’m told we made out the month before on Valentine’s Day. But I remember little of that night, just the unfun stuff, like waking up next to a bucket of my own vomit the following morning in a semi-dressed state. So perhaps he came to the show because of the promise of more of that attractive behavior? Or because our mutual friends were walking in it? I don’t know. But I digress.

So. It began (or didn’t begin) the night Alice Cooper hosted one of our fashion shows at the Avalon in Hollywood. A really fantastic human, that Alice Cooper, not at all the shock rocker one expects — or maybe people don’t expect that anymore because of all the golfing and Jesus and Republican nonsense? Backstage, as he got his makeup done, I watched him transform from amiable family man to “Alice Cooper” when — makeup complete — he put on the red and black leather Mariachi-from-hell outfit that we made for the occasion and slowly beat his rusty baby-head codpiece with a cane, making intense eye contact in the mirror and referring to himself as “Alice” in what I couldn’t tell was the third person or a reference to the character.

It was a pretty wild night as Junker shows go, lots of craziness and kooks to juggle. During an early run-through for the local 11 o’clock news, one of our models — who unbeknownst to us wore nothing under his leather trenchcoat — opened it up and whipped his dick back and forth for the cameras at the end of the runway. (Tod would later walk in on Dick Whipper and another model — who was transitioning from male to female and would go through a full medical transition on Doctor 90210 a few years later — involved in some kind of shenanigans in the mens’ dressing room bathroom. He said the smell would haunt him forever.) Alice must have remained pretty oblivious to the hijinks, because when he saw that one of the other models in the show was our friend and porn star, Kimberly Kane, he made a point of letting us know that he wasn’t comfortable with nudity or sex acts. Born agains really have no fun. And I keep digressing.

He sat with Eric Erlandson and I watched them smiling while looking up our models’ short dresses as they passed by on the runway, their grins especially wolfish when Kimberly came out topless. Two men with well-deserved reputations for being perverts, were Eric Erlandson and Mike Mills.

He was a nice enough fellow, super smart. We’d actually met years before the sketchy Valentine’s Day make-out, gotten into a bit of an argument at an after-hours drug fest/World Cup viewing at Dominick’s — but he didn’t remember that at all. I had a boyfriend back then, so when he started hitting on me, I wasn’t terribly receptive, which seemed to lead to the argument. I guess rock stars, even alternative ones from the 80s/90s aren’t used to being rebuffed. But this time around, being single, celebrating my birthday after our fashion show and drinking heavily — well, it clouded my judgment a little. (It should be noted that of the members of REM, my middle and high school years had decidedly not been spent pining for the bass player, rather the singer. But I think we all know how that turned out.)

I was sleeping with a chef at the time, by which I mean whenever we happened to be in the same town. He called from the Sofitel, where his LA restaurant was located, to see if I wanted to come over. I told him I was just down the street and he should come by. If he’d taken me up on the offer, I guess I wouldn’t have ended up at the Four Seasons but in a different expensive hotel suite with a different much older man that night.

Mike had just gotten back in town from REM’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and was super jazzed on that. It was pretty much all that he talked about, just to remind us in case we had forgotten. I had a hard time not asking lots of questions about Patti Smith — who had inducted them and was far more exciting to me — but I could tell he was getting annoyed with my many requests for stories about how great she was. I also recall him singing Sweet Caroline at top volume with my friend Ingrid, harmonizing with her drunken Irish birthday-cake-sugared-up (diabetes-be-damned) voice like the pro that he is.

At some point Ingrid left and I was alone with Mike for a second on the couch. That’s when he went in for a kiss. And it was terrible, just awful, which made me think: perhaps that’s why I didn’t remember our previous hook up, or why I drank to such excess on Valentine’s night. A few minutes later, he said something like: let me try that again, I can do better. And it was. And I was drunk. And he was living at the Four Seasons while his house was being built high above the Hollywood Bowl. And I had never been to the Four Seasons. Or so my drunken logic went.

After much food and booze, we drove Ingrid home. She thought I was getting out of the car to stay with her, even tried to talk me out of Four Seasons-going while Mike sat there, slightly bemused, as she spoke of his reputation for being a male whore. I just said: I’ll be okay, call you tomorrow. And then we arrived at the mostly empty lobby, where I did a walk-through in my brightly colored backless mini-dress and motorcycle boots — surely the picture of their normal clientele.

When we got to the room, I was kind of underwhelmed. It didn’t seem nearly as luxe as the branding would suggest. It was like a Ramada Inn, just bigger and with better ingredients. We got in bed and kissed a bit, but I pretended to be far more drunk than I actually was because I realized — having now seen the inside of a Four Seasons hotel room — I’d gotten what I came for. And this is the part where I suggest that, however shitty it sounds, you should never go to a hotel room with a man unless you’re willing to have sex with him, because that’s exactly what’s expected of you if you do. No one thinks you’re going to kick it and chat. You’re going to fuck. It’s part of the societal transaction, like it or not.

In the morning, it was another story altogether. I couldn’t pretend to be drunk anymore. I knew that the easiest way out of the room and back home was to just have sex with him. So I let that happen rather than even begin to awkwardly try and navigate my way through a sexless scenario — path of least resistance and all that — which led to me laying on my back staring up at him as he screamed my name at top volume.

There’s a few things to note here:

1) I was doing absolutely nothing to deserve said screams. (I’m perfectly capable of eliciting them, but was really just cold-fishing it, so that was puzzling.)

2) My name is not easily screamed, doesn’t roll off the tongue. It was super-weird to hear it being yelled by a sweaty, ovoid pink man as he pumped away.

3) Unlike the Ramada Inn, I imagined that at the Four Seasons, screams from a room might elicit calls to security or something, was slightly terrified of someone coming and pounding on the door. Maybe their walls, like their towels, are thicker because luckily no one did.

And then it was over. He ran to the shower, asked if I was hungry. Well, yeah, and I felt like I had most definitely earned some room service at this point, which would be a pretty spiff way to end this adventure. When I said yes, he grandly offered me anything I wanted…from the mini-bar. Apparently, I warranted screams, but not room service. I recall the selection as less than dazzling and settled on a bottle of pasteurized orange juice — not something I would ever drink normally — but it seemed rude to not take something. Having just had sex to be polite, it totally made sense to continue going through the motions. This was not the Four Seasons visit of my dreams.

Bottle of Minute Maid in hand, back into my mini-dress and motorcycle boots, Mike Mills and I took an early afternoon stroll through a much more populated Four Seasons — my first ever non-solo walk of shame.

We got on the elevator and after a couple of floors, a man eating a fruit plate got in. He looked at me, looked at Mike, ate a grape and said to me: Hey, you look really familiar. I replied: That’s because we went to high school together, Ian.

Yeah. Of all the elevators, Ian — who I had not seen since the 90s in Florida — somehow found his way on to this one. I remembered he was a rich kid who had been kicked out of the fancy private school in town and sent to slum it in the public school with the rest of us. Partied a lot, not terribly bright. Once that awkwardness was out of the way and he knew who I was, he looked at Mike and said: Hey, you look really familiar too. God bless Mike’s response: Yeah, we didn’t go to high school together, Ian.

Then Ian got a funny look on his face, while I imagine he puzzled over who Mike actually was, and asked me why I was there. I blurted: Oh, I had a fashion show last night. Again with the puzzled face. Why are you here Ian? He replied: I’m working the Tarantino press junket. And then the elevator doors opened and he got off. I wondered how long it would take him to realize with whom I was riding on that elevator and to decide that I must be a hooker now and blast it out to the Cypress Lake high school class of 1997.

I don’t recall the ride home as being very eventful — silver Mercedes, quick kiss goodbye outside of my tiny DTLA apartment and that was that. Later that day he asked if I wanted to come see his house, and — curiosity getting the better of me — I dropped by. It had a spot in almost every room in the house for a TV. I didn’t even own a TV at that point in my life and was pretty horrified. Also noticed that the master bedroom didn’t have his and hers sections, as one sees in most giant fancy homes. He was just building himself an enormous bachelor pad, which seemed kind of sad to me. I think me noting these things out loud led to our second fight and that was pretty much the last time we hung out.

I have since visited the Four Seasons many times on my own terms, which means still dressed fairly inappropriately for the scene. Been for cocktails, to lunch, for late-night meetings with Robert Rodriguez in the bar and early-afternoon meetings with Vince Neil in his suite (which is always strewn with empty champagne bottles and room service trays, as that’s just where they live and hold court when they’re in LA). Once met Frank Miller there at a meeting with Robert in a fancy suite to go over sketches for the Sin City 2 costumes we were making. He talked to my boobs, couldn’t look at my face. But, my clothes were on and I was offered real room service that time around—is that how you know you’ve made it?

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