I'm the One That I Want (26 page)

We came back to L.A. because Marcel still had many days left on the community service chain gang. He was afraid he might have to go to jail because he had taken so long to complete his sentence. As usual, I would kick him awake, bargain and plead, until he got up, took huge bong hits off the water pipe made from a wine bottle, and went on his way.

Luckily, he completed his sentence without a hitch, and made plans to return to New York. I counted the days like a prisoner, and soon, it was time. He was depressed and angry, running red lights all the way to the airport. When I dropped him off at the curb, he cried like a baby. He was going to miss me, he said. Things weren’t going to be the same, he said. I should hope not, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I drove away with my heart doing somersaults in my chest. I was crying too, not out of sadness but out of sheer joy and the delight of freedom. I came home to a clean and empty house, with no trace of him except some shirts he had left behind. I held my skinny, shaky, sickly dog and felt whole and new.

I wasn’t going to New York. I told Marcel so over the phone shortly after he left. It took all the courage I had in me to do it. It was the first act of me finally looking to save myself. I didn’t even know I was going to do it. I had been making out a “to do” list. There were things on it like “Return videos, dry cleaning, drop off Ralph at the vet . . .” and at the bottom, without even realizing I had done so, I wrote, “Find the strength to leave Marcel. . . .”

I couldn’t believe I had written it. It terrified me. I crumpled it up immediately, before he could have a chance to see it, afraid of his finding out that I was cheating on him, with myself. But after, I knew that I could never go back, and that even though he called every night and would talk for hours about love and plans, that his days were numbered.

After he left, I felt much calmer and happier. It was easy not to drink. I didn’t need to block anything out. Since I had been getting high every day for all of my adult life, being sober was an altered state unto itself. I never felt better in my life, and now with Marcel gone, I was ready to fly.

Still, his late-night calls came daily to clip my wings. It had to end somewhere. I had finally let go of the wedding fantasy. I started to see that the reason I had always been so miserable was that I constantly put everyone else’s happiness before mine.

I went to New York to visit Marcel, mostly to end the relationship, but I got so caught up in plans. We had tickets to
Rent
, an invitation from Bobby Flay for dinner at Mesa Grill. Christmas was coming and I’d already bought presents . . . everything was so inconvenient, who had time for honesty? He was still driving me crazy. Sometimes, I was so exhausted being around him, that I would fall asleep spontaneously, like a narcoleptic, and wake up hours later, stuck in the nightmare.

He had made a strong effort to get clean after our last time together, and now, because he was sober and had no other fixes, he wanted to have sex with me all the time. There was no way I could do that. He repulsed me physically, and I would practically shrink from his touch. The few times he wore me down with his bargaining and demanding, I jerked him off, and could hardly hide my grimace.

I came back to L.A. still in the relationship, and not sure where to turn. I couldn’t keep doing this to myself. I couldn’t keep doing this to him. I couldn’t keep doing this to love.

I went to a yoga class on Larchmont and stood on my head, thinking inversion would shake loose an answer. It did. I discovered that there was a goddess deep inside me, standing around my heart like a wallflower, waiting for me to ask her to dance. I saw that whatever I had in front of me, I could use her strength, instead of mine, to lift it. She agreed to be my power plant, which was such a relief, as I had been running on empty for so long. When the class was over, I was afraid the spell had been broken. I wasn’t sure if it had been some massive
Lillias and You
hallucination. I wanted it to be true so badly. I knew that I could not leave Marcel without her strength. I knew that I could not leave the hell I had made for myself, unless she was there to give me a ride.

I cried and cried and tried to stop crying briefly as I went into the supermarket. I got as far as the deli, and I got number 99 and they were only on 57 and I fell apart.

An old woman in a plaid coat and snowy white hair came up to me and offered to trade numbers. “I got 70, if it’ll make you feel any better. . . .”

“No—it’s ooookkkkkaaayyy. I’mmmm fiinneee . . . realllyyy,” I choked out between sobs.

“That’s okay, honey. Take it. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Totally embarrassed, I turned away.

She just kept standing there, holding out her white ticket.

“We have a while. Do you want to tell me what’s the matter?”

I didn’t want to. But I felt the need to justify my crazy appearance, crying uncontrollably in yoga clothes, at the glass deli case at Mayfair Market, and so I did, as fast and as plain as I could.

“I have to break up with my boyfriend, but I just feel so
guilty
.”

She just stood there, holding her ticket.

After a long pause (“58! . . . . 59! . . . . 60! . . . . ”) she said, “Oh, honey. I felt so guilty, I married him!”

“61! . . . . 62! . . . . 63! . . . . 64! . . . . 65! . . . . 66! . . . . 67! . . . . 68! . . . . 69! . . . . ”

I took her ticket. How could I refuse a goddess?

When I drove up to my house, I could hear Marcel on my machine, leaving a loud, long message. I ran in the house and picked up the phone. I told him that I was leaving him, that I didn’t love him, that we could not get married. I told him not to call me anymore. He hung up on me. I held the phone for a minute longer, not believing what I had just done. Not believing, not believing, then finally, believing. The red light was blinking on the machine, and I looked down at it and punched Erase.

Marcel was not that easily persuaded. He called and called many times after that, but I never spoke to him again. The calls finally stopped coming. I hear through the grapevine that he is doing well, and I wish him nothing but the best. I am not trying to hurt him in writing this. I only want to tell what happened, how I felt. His family was very kind to me when I visited them, and there were times when I really did think Marcel was my only friend in the world.

When you finally turn on the light in the cellar, among all the cardboard stereo boxes and old shoes you want to throw away, you see there are still treasures you want to keep forever. I have taken all the barbs and thorns out of his love and kept just the blossoms, dry with age and remembrance, and pressed them in the book of my heart.

19

ON THE MEND

Just after I left Marcel, my old agent Karen called me. I was so glad to hear from her—we hadn’t spoken for years. She had read my script and loved it. I told her everything that had happened with Roman. She couldn’t believe it, but then, of course, she could.

She said that whenever I decided that I wanted to take over the world, she would be there. I believe that when you take those first steps in loving yourself, the universe conspires with your soul to keep that love affair going. I had taken baby steps in sobering up and leaving Marcel, and now I was ready for a quantum leap.

There was still Greer to contend with. Actually, it wasn’t even him. He had left the company, but before leaving, had me sign a three-year contract, binding me not to him, but to his old firm. I was being handled by his assistant Ched, who once told me “The Asian thing puts people off.” What is the “Asian thing”?! Some gimmick that I pull out of my ass every couple of years to jazz up my career? Like I am Steven Seagal.

Getting out of that contract wasn’t easy, partly because I was afraid. How did I know what was going to happen? How did I know who to trust? I’d been through so much heartache with my career, it was hard to imagine it getting any worse. For the millionth time in my life, I had nowhere else to turn.

Karen still had utter confidence and faith in my talent. She booked me at countless clubs and colleges, and I fell in love with my work in a way I never had before. I realized that when I was onstage with the mike, I was home, and that when I am at peak performance, when the crowd is right, the night is relatively young, and God is there, nobody does it better.

I wrote constantly and toured with a vengeance. Karen came with me for all my gigs, taking notes, helping me rebuild myself. Siobhan came and opened for me, which made those road trips more fun than they’d ever been before.

I recorded a new comedy CD, with proceeds benefiting the Montrose AIDS Clinic in Houston. It felt good to do something for myself and help others at the same time. I started to feel useful. I started to feel good.

We traveled together like nuns, from city to city, and the planes and trains and town cars that had once been so lonely now felt like raucous road trips, the stuff of independent films.

Siobhan and I wrote and produced a sketch comedy show called
The People Tree
at Highways in Santa Monica while keeping up a hectic tour schedule. I was rejuvenated by work and by being clean for the first time in my adult life. My stand-up started to change with me. I wanted to do more than just tell jokes for half an hour a night. There was more I wanted to give.

I started to talk about my experience with the TV show, something I had avoided in all the years following it. I didn’t want to bring it up, I didn’t want to be seen whining about failure, I didn’t want audiences to think I was that same person. I was ashamed of what had happened, so I tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Being silent for so long had rotted my insides, but when I began to speak, all the misery and despair dissolved. I began to see that my experience was horrendous, and also incredibly funny. There was so much to say, I almost didn’t know where to start.

This was the birth of my show
I’m the One That I Want
. It came out of my club act that I was doing at the time, where I wanted to share what had happened to me during my long absence from the public eye. The show covered my television experience with enough emotional distance to make it funny, not depressing. It also explored weight issues in greater detail than I’d ever gone into before. My attitudes toward my body were changing.

During the first few weeks of sobriety, I lost a lot of weight, mostly as the alcoholic bloat receded. I was still taking the diet pills, which I had stood by for over five years, even after they made my hair fall out.

When my body got used to not drinking, and I ran out of pills, my diet “doctor” mysteriously vanished, leaving L.A. without a trace. I couldn’t face another shady “fly-by-night-devil-may-care” medical situation, so I started to gain weight, which was terrifying. This time, however, instead of embarking on another insane diet, I thought,
Fuck it. If I am fat, then I am fat. Fuck it. I am going to eat whatever I
want and see what happens.
I realized that I didn’t have to be thin to be acceptable to any network, or to get a job, or to please Marcel, who was as demanding of my figure as I was. All I had to do was be happy.

So I ate everything I could get my hands on for the first few weeks, appetizers and dessert with every meal—even breakfast. Then I just forgot about food. My weight went up, and then slowly started to go back down. This time, the thinness I acquired was not attached to the usual baggage.

Before, I would lose weight and then suddenly experience a flood of male attention, not necessarily because I looked better, but because I
thought
I did. So then, I would find myself having sex with people I didn’t want to be with, thinking I had to be grateful for the offer, never refusing anyone since I could not afford to let this body go to waste. I had worked so hard and starved myself, I felt like I had to store up all the sex in some sort of “fuck bank” in case I got fat again. The underlying message to my psyche is horrifyingly clear: “You have to be thin to get love, but the love you get is not enjoyable, so you suffer this self-hatred, just to make room for a different kind of self-hatred.”

Subconsciously, I was terrified of being thin, so I would sabotage every plan by overeating, and then punish myself with exercise, and then get too hungry to control myself around food, and on and on and on.

So one day, I just dropped it. Fuck it. Game over.

I look better today than I ever have.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking weight issues are not important. It isn’t a frivolous thing. Fat is still a feminist issue. Weight is not just about our bodies. It’s how we feel about ourselves. It affects every decision we make. The status quo would like you to think of it as a petty, unimportant thing, to make fun of it like it is a ridiculous, female obsession, a weakness. It is one of their greatest weapons. Don’t become a casualty. This war is almost over, and we are going to win.

When we let go of that, our arms are free to do everything.

It’s not easy at first. You have to completely dismantle all your thinking, the way you see your body, the way we all so casually grab parts of ourselves and say, “I hate this” and “I need to get rid of this.” We need to stop taking exercise classes named “Butt Burners” and “Saddlebags 101.” We have to stop buying magazines that scream on the cover, “Get the body you want now!” We have to stop living our lives with the dressing on the side.