You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (31 page)

Money was also something that had to be considered. I was abandoning the only thing that I was qualified to do, which happened to be fairly lucrative, when it went well. My financial plan had never been savvy; it was simply to save as much as I could while assuming that I’d get another job before it all ran out. Since money had never been the rationale behind the job, it seemed ridiculous for it to be the reason to stay. I had a small amount saved, but this was far from a set-for-life situation. With the naïve optimism and blind faith that only a twenty-two-year-old can have, I just figured that it would all be okay and it would work out somehow. I wasn’t proud. I could be broke and eat Ramen noodles—except for the fact that I didn’t know how to cook them.

I told my friends, family, and agent that I was leaving L.A. My parents covered their surprise well and said I should do whatever I wanted. Most people figured that it was a bluff and predicted that I’d be back sitting in a Paramount studios casting office within ninety days. I was tempted to agree with them. It was comforting to know that whatever happened, it would all still be there. L.A. would remain its Botox-injected, unchanging self, and I could come back and pick up where I left off; dating wanna-be actors and reading over-written scripts.

I was also throwing myself headfirst into a relationship that for all intents and purposes was about six months old. Sure, we had been friends for four years before that, but this new version of us as a couple was barely old enough to eat solid foods. We were still working out the kinks of melding together two lives and two very different personalities. I had always jumped from one boy to another, enjoying just the early parts of the relationship, when it looks the way it does in the movies. Now, I’d be committing to the monotonous parts that rarely show up on film. It’s hard to sign up for the grocery shopping that is not in the form
of a fun montage with peppy music and playful food fights. A real relationship involves gastrointestinal issues and passive aggressive attempts to get the other person to take down the Christmas tree. If you see those unsavory parts in a movie, it just means that there is either an affair or a divorce coming. Probably both. But if there was anyone who I wanted to go to the grocery store with, it was Jeremy. More than anything else in my life, he felt like home.

I rented out my house and packed all my furniture into the garage. I collected my actor’s union t-shirts and jackets from various films and shoved them in a giant plastic tub. I didn’t know much about where I was moving to, but I figured wearing an
Independence Day
crew jacket in central Virginia was not a good way to blend in. I packed one suitcase of clothes and another of books and figured that was all I needed for my new life. Maybe intentionally losing everything was the best way to find something meaningful.

My friends were so convinced this was temporary that they mostly said, “Bye, we’ll see you soon.” Someone joked that I’d be barefoot and pregnant in some hillbilly kitchen in no time. I handed over my house keys to the renter and sobbed as I fed the dogs drugged spoonfuls of peanut butter and loaded them into the cargo hold of a plane. On the cross-country flight, I put the blanket over my head and convinced myself that this was not career suicide. It was a break from films. Not a break-up. Eventually, maybe I would realize that I really was an actor who couldn’t live without films and I would make my triumphant return. The return of the ethnic girl.

At the Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, the dogs and I stumbled into our new lives. We were all equally traumatized by our cross-country flight, but as we saw Jeremy waiting for us, our hearts settled. The dogs slowly wagged their sedated tails as they sniffed his face, and I managed a tired yet deep smile that seemed to come up from my toenails.

“Welcome home,” he said.

I felt it. From that first moment, everything behind me was truly
the past; the slate had been wiped clean. My life wasn’t about L.A. and being an actor anymore. I was not sure what it was about, but I knew it wasn’t about that. Doubts still lingered in the back of my mind, but it was all covered with this blanket of peace. If you had just ruined your life, wouldn’t you feel like you just ruined your life? Wouldn’t you look behind you and see it all ablaze like some apocalyptic nightmare?

It didn’t feel like that.

It felt like we were finally home.

When I moved to Virginia, being out in public became much easier. There were, I believe, three main reasons for this.

1. People are polite. They considered it rude to interrupt dinner simply to inform me that I was on cable last night.

2. People don’t really care. They had interests other than movies. I might have been hanging out with a guy who just got back from building schools in Haiti, a chef who was nominated for a James Beard award or Thomas Jefferson’s five-times-great-grandson.

3. People who are legitimately famous live here. If someone really was stealing glances in my general direction, chances were good that Sissy Spaceck, John Grisham, or Dave Matthews was behind me.

I settled into our nerdy, hippie college town and it suited me. There was an annual festival celebrating books and another celebrating vegetarianism/stray dog rescue. There were seasons, glorious seasons, a full
four of them. It was not just fire season, pilot season, earthquake season, and awards season, either. These were real seasons that demanded a change of wardrobe.

The place was also a writer’s paradise. There were almost more used bookstores than there were drunken freshman. Writers from Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner had chosen this place, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to find themselves and lose themselves and write it all down.

Our Charlottesville social circle consisted of people with far more degrees than I, which admittedly, was not much of an accomplishment. The last thing I had graduated from was a two-day class on producing short films from The Learning Annex. It did come with a diploma though, which I framed, since it was my first since 8th grade. Jeremy’s cohorts were all MBAs-in-training, the classic polo-shirt wearing, educational elite that I feared would rain their judgments down on my high school dropout self.

Most of them didn’t. A couple of them did. Generally, I got a lot of questions about why on earth I would leave acting. I was clearly an outsider and there were times I wondered if I was not better off in the environment I had just left. In L.A. no one scoffed at a high school dropout. It was a badge of honor; a metaphorical middle finger salute to the establishment. It indicated that you were such a brilliant artist that nothing so inconvenient as a formal education could hold you back. Here, people heard I hadn’t graduated from high school and they looked like they wanted to contribute to some sort of fund.

I bought a cookbook and made veggie stir-fry in the wok I had brought in my suitcase. I managed our bills, clipped coupons and delivered our rent check to the landlord on time. I learned how to use the coin-operated laundry facilities that were down the hall from our apartment, and usually got the stuff out of the washer before a college kid threw our clothes on the linty laundry room floor. I did normal. And I found a staggering beauty in all of it. This was the real life that I had once
scoffed at while sitting in coffee shops with my actor roommates? What had I been so afraid of?

I obsessed over those multiple-choice career quizzes. They unfailingly told me that I was an artist—usually an actor. This was not reassuring. It made me wonder about the chicken and the egg-ness of it all. Was I simply born to be an actor? Or had my experience crafted my personality so strongly that every multiple-choice test was forced to come to the same conclusion?

The MBA program had a “Partner’s Association” organized to boost the morale of the lonely mate of the exhausted graduate student. These women (male partners didn’t seem to join) were very kind, but seemed to be from another planet than me. Many of them had kids and threw dinner parties that included a soup course and they decorated their homes using the rule of threes. They made New York-style cheesecake using the recipe on the back of the Philadelphia cream cheese container. They didn’t exactly know what to do with a broken-down former actor recovering from an eighteen-year career. I tried to politely extricate myself from the tennis parties, book clubs and the cookie swaps. Besides, I was a girlfriend of nine months, decidedly not a wife. Along with the complete abandonment of my entire life, career and identity, that level of commitment made my throat tighten.

As I tried to branch out from the graduate school world and make my own friends, I faced a surprising problem; I was not quite famous enough. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem for someone who leaves L.A. and doesn’t want to be an actor, but it makes things awkward.

I was not rightfully famous. It’s not like when I walked in a room, everyone knew who I was. They were more likely to squint at me and wonder if we went to high school together. I considered this to be a massive blessing; however, it’s tricky when you are beginning to be friends
with someone. There was this period of psychological stress, wondering if they knew I used to be an actor, either by recognizing me or hearing it though someone else. If they already knew and I told them I was an actor, then I looked like a self-obsessed asshole. Because really, what kind of regular person meets a new friend and announces what their job
used
to be? Can you imagine? “Hey, I just wanted to mention, just to get it out there, that when I was eighteen, I worked at The Olive Garden. I hope that doesn’t make things weird now.”

So, when I tried to make new friends by taking pottery classes filled with newly divorced ladies, or agreeing to be a judge in the neighborhood Halloween pumpkin carving contest, I just wouldn’t say anything about it. Then I seemed sketchy and suspicious because when my potential new friends asked about my childhood or where I went to school, I looked as if I would rather bolt from the room than discuss my past. A friend once told me that I behaved like someone who had killed her entire family and moved out of state.

Whenever I finally confessed to being a former actor just to explain my scattered history, it always involved stumbling over my words, staring at my own feet while red blotches crept slowly across my neck. Then, the nice women sitting across from me in Introduction to Quilting Techniques would ask why I left L.A, with an inevitable look of astonishment. I would stammer out my diatribe of, “I started when I was really young and I feel like there are other things in the world that I am interested in…” They would look as if they were hoping for a better story. “My eating disorder counselor recommended that I take some time off…” or “I had an affair with a famous actor and his wife had me blackballed from the industry…” Even my story of leaving L.A. felt like a colossal disappointment.

All this nervousness was well-founded; people were often thrown off balance by my past. They tended to respond as if I had just removed my jacket to reveal that I was actually a winged Pegasus. The next part would proceed in one of two ways:

Outcome #1—My potential new friend knew my films and felt embarrassed about that,

or,

Outcome #2—My potential new friend didn’t know my films and felt embarrassed about that.

They apologized either way because they were nice southerners, then there would be this long silence. I knew what they were doing. They were trying to remember what the poster of that movie looked like, and then do one of those age progressions like you see on fliers of missing people and make it match up to the face sitting across from them. I’d just wait, watching that familiar movie-induced distance creep in, creating an opaque fog between us. Sometimes those friendships didn’t go anywhere because apparently being friends with a former actor can be strange. I am not nearly that special, but some people seem to think, thanks to tabloid fantasy projections, that actors are fundamentally different from everyone else and can’t possibly be quality friendship material. A few brave souls waded through the fog and reached out a hand, but more than once, I found myself grasping at nothing, all alone in the haze.

All around me, adult people were getting their lives sorted out in a calm and orderly fashion. They seemed to be following a path that had been nicely manicured and they didn’t publicly weep at the mere thought of their future. It looked so nice. I decided to try to fit into this mold of the “educated adult.” I vaguely thought about college, but with such a disastrous educational background, who would accept me?

The fact that I hadn’t completed high school was something that haunted and shamed me. A GED could rid me of that particular insecurity and prove that I could have graduated high school had circumstances allowed. My lack of experience with standardized anything
meant that I tended to freeze up during tests and even the thought of a Scantron form made me hyperventilate. But I needed to prove my worth beyond just being a film actor. At least I hoped there was worth there.