Authors: Kristina Shook
I don’t remember oversleeping, but I did. There was nothing to wake up for, except to walk Shadow; I hadn’t booked the movie role, and Ray wasn’t calling, nor was the commercial agency. I had only a few art modeling gigs and they were at night, and the Tennis Actor had booked the doctor TV show and was already on the studio set. I heard my cell phone ring and picked it up with no amount of jolly in my voice.
“Yeah, what is it?” I asked, like a sulky bitch.
“I think Sam walked your dog, I’m his brother,” he said.
I sat up, “What? Wait, what’s wrong?!!!” and there was silence on the other end.
“Is Sam in the hospital? Is Sam ok? You’re calling me because my dog Shadow and I are his friends. What’s happened?” I asked, my heart already racing and my hand out stretched as if I could catch his words.
“Sam fell off a parked tractor at a construction site in Echo Park. It appears that he jumped off.” His voice was tender. I was now wide awake and sick to my stomach.
“Damn it!” I said.
Sam and I met in my Los Feliz neighborhood on Hillhurst Avenue; he was walking a pack of dogs of various sizes and breeds. I had seen him around; he was built like a marathon runner (which he was) with a friendly face, and he spoke dog, which translates to ‘he loved dogs’. I asked if he could add Shadow to his dog walking route. And he said yes, and it was that easy. I gave him my apartment keys and never asked for a reference, because he was Sam—he was all good.
I cried, and told his brother how Sam felt like my brother, and a part of my family, and that I hadn’t ever noticed his sadness—I’d only seen him looking, being, or ‘acting’ happy. And I didn’t know Sam could get depressed.
We hung up and I got dressed without showering and walked Shadow up Hillhurst past the spot where I had first met Sam and up into Griffith Park. Life’s strange. One day it’s fun and pleasant, the next it’s maddening, and the very next it’s dreadfully sad, and the next—well, a person just has to wait and see what it will bring. There was going to be a memorial, before his brother took Sam’s body back to his parents.
I waited until after the Tennis Actor and I had celebrated his success at booking the doctor TV show. Rumor had it that possibly a ‘permanent’ TV role offer was due in the coming months. I waited until after we had made out and after I had sat on his lap, looking at his cute actor face. He wasn’t Mr. Darcy, but he was mighty attractive and mighty enjoyable to be with. Then I told him about Sam’s death. He was upset right away, troubled that he, too, might have overlooked something in Sam’s demeanor.
“Should we ask everyone we know if they’re faking happiness?” he asked. I was wondering the same thing. Who do you ask first? And when do you ask? We lay in the pitch dark, talking about how long we both imagined we’d live, and about how old age might turn out for each of us. Would we have false teeth? Would we live in nursing homes? Would we die tragically? It was getting really depressing and bleak in my bedroom, as we built our own dark murky sleepless night.
Around four in the morning I said, “I’m going to die screwing, no matter how old I am,” figuring why not picture the best way to die.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“It’s just a hope,” I said.
“Does that exist at the end of life?” he asked.
I sat up. There were only two ways to get us out of our gloomy funk, one was to go to sleep, and the other was putting his Tonka truck in the tunnel between my legs. I opted for number two. So I got up, took off my clothes, pulled a black wig (a mix between wicked-witch/gothic-whore) out of my closet, and put on a mustard colored pair of spiked twenty dollar high heels and returned to the bed room.
“Scene one: woman vampire enters bedroom, sees naked man,” I stopped and he quickly stripped, “Man is fast asleep, snoring loudly,” I said in the voice of a wanna-be director. He snored loudly, but kept one blue eye open.
“She, the vampire climbs on the bed, straddling him, so he cannot move,” and I did just that. “She sucks his neck…” I was interrupted by, “No hickies, I’m on TV,” —killing the mood.
“Maybe she was a vampire who kicked ass. Yeah, that sounds better,” I said as I dove in for a kiss on his lips and pulled him to the side; now he was on top of me. Wow, with one great, swift movement, I slapped his ass. He felt it. It was war now, the best kind of erotic war there can be, even when…it’s not true love.
So funerals/memorials in general are yucky (I know that’s a 3rd grade word, but sometimes it says it all) and not something I like to have to go to, but Sam’s was the most satisfying memorial I think I’ll ever attend in my life. Okay, so I don’t know the future, but still, that’s what I believe. His army brother stationed in DC, called everyone Sam had ever walked a dog for. He had arrived in LA for one mission only, to take Sam’s body back home, but had agreed to a memorial in Griffith Park before.
The Tennis Actor had to meet his acting mentor first, only because he was now really being considered for a regular part on the doctor TV show, but promised to cut out early to meet me at the memorial.
The directions his brother gave were: bring all dogs on leashes and drive up Vermont Avenue, park anywhere possible, and walk over to the gathering. First I raced over to Hollywood Boulevard and into Hollywood Toys & Costumes, the number one shop where I love to buy wigs, and bought a black bandana to go around Shadow’s neck for the memorial.
I wore a black dress and black DKNY sneaker heels. I piled my hair up on my head, wore no makeup, except deep blue eye shadow and mascara for a dramatic affect. Yeah, well, I’m into theatrical colors for my eyes. Go figure. And of course I took along a few doggy bags, in case Shadow or some other dog did what they usually do.
The park was packed when I arrived, but I squeezed my Volvo in a space that miraculously appeared and we headed over to the gathering—thirty plus four-legged paws. Dogs were everywhere as if this was a movie. Shadow and I found our way to the top of the pack. A friend of Sam’s, who I didn’t know, began reflecting on his bigheartedness and loyalty. I recognized Sam’s brother, in an army uniform. He and Sam shared the same forehead, and nose, but otherwise looked different.
I’m a crybaby, I just can’t help it. I started sobbing, but I wasn’t the only one. The dogs barked and that fit so well with who Sam was and how we would all remember him. Barking for Sam! Bow-wow-wow!
I glanced at the girl who had been Sam’s girlfriend for a very short time, the last person to kiss him. I didn’t know what I would do if I was her or how I would handle the future. She was wearing a long multi-colored skirt and a white-t shirt with Sam’s face on it. In the picture he held two scrappy dogs. I liked it. As the ceremony began to wind down, I ambled a few feet away with Shadow, wanting distance. Soon it would be over—everyone and all the furry paws would leave the park. The spot would be empty, without a trace of what had been lost.
I remembered hearing a renowned older actor talking about Katharine Hepburn’s memory of her brother’s suicide. The story goes that she went to New York City with her fifteen year-old brother, a trip designed to cheer him up and a chance for her to visit family friends. The last thing her brother was quoted as saying to her was, “
You’re my girl, aren’t you? You’re my favorite girl in the whole world.”
And then he went upstairs to bed. The next morning, he was found hanging dead.
I don’t know why I remember his words quote un-quote; I guess I imagined being with her when it happened. She found him! As an actress, she was powerful. My favorite K-Hep films are
Morning Glory, The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib, Suddenly Last Summer
and
On Golden Pond.
She died without Botox or plastic surgery—her face was her original face. Not many actress pass away un-nipped and un-tucked.
Back to suicidal tendencies—I remembered being sixteen and filled with miserable thoughts of self-loathing, feeling like an outcast, a total misfit. If I hadn’t found acting, I don’t think I would have made it to seventeen, but a chance meeting with a play called
A Streetcar Named Desire
changed that. I read it line-by-line in an hour and then over and over again. I wanted to be the character Stella, but I felt more like the character Blanche and it haunted me. Would I end up manless and living in the past like Blanche, or would I end up with a man who was an untamed sexual brute, like Stella got with Stanley? Would I be anything? Those kinds of worries, those heavy, heavy feelings; I know them. They are not strangers. Go figure! I guess acting is for those who feel too much everyday, I don’t know. I just know that’s why I’m an actress.
I looked up and the Tennis Actor was staring down at me. He had arrived. He was wearing a black Nike jogger’s outfit, his hair gelled and slicked back. He held out his hand and I grabbed it. Shadow was barking at him, like he always did, as if he had not seen him in months and was overjoyed. The crowd was thinning, people heading back to their homes, to their jobs; it was just after nine-thirty in the morning.
We strolled with Shadow up into the park toward the observatory (the famous location used in the film
Rebel without a Cause
). The Tennis Actor told me about various types of suicide he’d read about, like the male model who took sleeping pills, the pretty European female model who jumped off a balcony (actually he said there had been two who did), and about a well-known songwriter whose music graced several cool films and had allegedly stuck a knife in his own chest. FYI, suicide is not a sexy topic. In my opinion, it’s creepy, twisted, and disheartening, but I listened; he had to tell me his morbid stories. In Hollywood, it’s hard to tell if a story is just a story, or a rumor made into a story. Anyway, death is like that, it gets you thinking about more death, and so on and so on.
Luckily, being a movie buff and an actress, I knew the one key element that was missing: a scene change. I stopped; he turned and stared at me.
“Hey, want to practice French kissing?” I asked, then added in a breathy voice, “Ooh la la,” the only French I know, as I traced the outline of his lips with my fingers.
“Bisous, Ma Poule, Ma Cocotte, Je t‘adore, Je ne peux pas vivre sans toi…Mon tresor,” he said in the worst French accent possible.
Maybe he watched porn in French? Maybe he had Googled online how to ‘woo’ a French woman? I don’t know. Not understanding French, I had to act ‘as if’, so in my dictionary it translated to, “hey, baby, let’s make out using our tongues,” and we did just that, while Shadow sat on the ground by our feet, licking his paws.
I sat in the Tennis Actor’s agent’s office in a fancy building on Wilshire Boulevard that A-list actors walk in and out of after signing ‘crucial’ deals or bitching about the lack of work or the kind of roles they want. A really expensive, modern building, with an ultra stylish lobby, where only the top-name directors and producers go in and out, signing ‘major’ deals or bitching about the lack of work or the kind of work they want.
He was signing his contract for the series regular role he had officially booked on the doctor TV show. I was there to keep his hand steady as he signed his name four or five times (more paperwork when it’s a network contract).
To be envious is to be human, in my opinion. There he was, doing what I had come to Hollywood to do—signing to a fat money-paying-contract. I was just a tagalong in the fancy A-list agent’s plush office. His older, balding, four-thousand-dollar-suited agent winked at me and offered me a bottle of Smart water and some chocolate from Switzerland.
“Your guy’s got talent; the show will last at least five years. Then, it will go into rerun heaven, cha-ching, cha-ching,” he said, like I was planning on living off the Tennis Actor. Like I needed to know that a Beverly Hills mansion with an enormous pool was coming, along with other lofty amenities.
The Tennis Actor gave one of those ‘acting for the sake of acting’ lines: “My character’s great, I hope he gets used and abused by the writing team.”
I felt the urge to fall out of my stiff grey leather chair and play dead on the carpet in front of them.
“Just you wait. The viewers at home, women and gay men, will tune in every week, just to see what you do next. You’re the wild card on that show,” his agent said and they both laughed the same laugh.
We wandered outside into the Los Angeles weather, always sunny and warm, give or take a few days of rain. I took several pictures of him in front of the fancy A-list-agent modern building, and he took one of me with my white-rimmed sunglasses, that later I realized made me look like a freak in shades. Drat.
He had been invited to a Hollywood Hills party by one of the leads on the doctor TV show and he wanted us to go. That meant a new dress and his treating me to a half-day at a spa, which included not only a facial and a full body rub, but a waxing of my pubic hair. Bare down there, is the style in LA these days. FYI, it hurts the first time and makes you look like a plucked chicken between your legs, but after you do it once, you go again because growing it back is not worth the hassle—and most LA lovers actually prefer it bare. Go figure.
It was his day/his celebration and he quote unquote wanted to spoil me, but I felt more like my ‘messy’ self was being over hauled, so I’d look good on his shoulder in front of his new, soon-to-be ‘TV friends’. I was too tired to ask him what kind of dress he was shopping for. I mean, it’s one thing to buy a dress together; it’s another thing for a guy to pre-select it. Oh, well.
Los Angeles is filled with great spas. This one was over in Koreatown, and designed like a hideaway next to a golf course. I walked in and was given a locker key. I promptly stripped, tossed on a robe, and headed for my facial. Who knew I had blackheads and whiteheads? Fortunately, they were removed one-by-one. My face looked blotchy and patchy, but very pure, as if everything—even the emotions—had been lifted. As for the full body massage, front and back, I laid there as a ‘pity me’ ball of nerves and was gradually rubbed into a ‘princess’ state of awareness, as if anything I wanted was in reach if I’d just reach for it. Way wonderful!