Girl Act (9 page)

My overeducated, over-read father (refuses to watch any current movies) he had forced me to watch the black-and-white film
The Misfits
, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe—the last picture they made before both dying tragically. It was filmed in the desert, too. I guess I just love the idea of being immortalized on film. I guess if I don’t go onto make “indie films,” (as has been suggested twice), I can always sell my soul and become a reality TV star who creates a sewn-on-words-clothing line, or an organic juice beverage or jars of veggie pet food. Nowadays, actors and actresses have to decide if they should audition for mainstream or break into the reality world; either way, they still have to hope they make it.

But, here I was, in Las Vegas, with two options: to turn back or go forward. Shadow barked, waking me out of my absurd worry, and I pulled over to a tiny green patch while my GPS continued to say, “recalculating,” over and over again. Too bad it didn’t come with a pause button. Of course, I’m jealous it’s not my voice as the GPS guide. Why do all the good parts always go to someone else? Why ask why?

Okay, so thinking like a loser doesn’t bring results—that much I learned during three months of therapy at the Y in the heart of Hollywood. I got fortunate and ended up with a young female ‘counselor-in-training’ for $25.00 an hour (one hour sessions only). She kicked my ass in the right direction, mentally speaking. I was only a year into my new LA life and, well, I was hanging out in various trendy Hollywood bars out of total loneliness and a lack of friends. The bars in LA are the best for finding quick company

and I don’t mean for screwing, although that’s always an option—but people did just sit and talk while they got drunk and I nursed one beer.

The ‘in-training-counselor’ got me to enroll in an actors group, to join a yoga class and to go to a café in Venice that held an open mic for poetry and monologue readings. She accomplished this by saying, “I dare you to find two things to do in the next two weeks besides barhopping,” and, well, I guess I’m competitive, because I said, “I’ll bet you that I can find three things and never go back to Hollywood bar hopping again,” and of course I won. Go figure! I don’t think a real ‘shrink’ would have ever said what she did. They just want to poke around in ‘loneliness’ issues and ask dumb questions about how has my mother’s ‘abandonment’ affected me, and other such crap. That’s just my opinion. Anyway, once I was out of the bar scene, I thanked her and quit going to the Y.

“Nothing lasts!” I shouted to Shadow who had parked himself on the grass. I told him to get in and turned the car towards the freeway, glancing at the ‘Los Angeles’ sign. “Thank you, Hollywood, for Shadow,” I called out. Shadow had been just a thirteen-week-old puppy when I saw a man hitting him one afternoon in the Silver Lake Dog Park on Silver Lake Boulevard. I used to do my one-hour exercise walks around the outside of the reservoir and often watched the dogs running and playing, but this time I marched into the park and right up to that man, “I work for the Animal Protection League! Sir, you have two minutes to stop hitting that puppy, or I’ll take it away.”

Then I strode off and over to the handful of dog owners watching their dogs play and asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Don’t know. That guy keeps hitting it,” someone said.

“He shouldn’t be allowed,” someone else said.

“He’s got five minutes to get himself under control, before I yank that dog a way,” I warned the group. When a teenager entered the dog park with his Greyhound, the man motioned to him, said something and pointed to me.

“That man down there said you can have the puppy, he doesn’t want it,” the kid raced up and told me. So I marched right down to the man.

“The Animal Protection League thanks you for giving up this puppy,” I said, as any actor would. And the man nodded in relief and quickly left the park. Act ‘as if’, that’s my motto. That’s why Shadow is my dog.

On my third visit to the Laurel Canyon Dog Park, with Shadow, I met a black haired, dark-eyed girl sitting on a bench next to a chubby English Bulldog who said, “I’m on my 3rd boyfriend thanks to this dog park.” Wow, I was excited. I figured maybe I could have a dog and a cool BF.

“You’ve really met nice guys here?” I asked.

“Yeah, if you have a dog and the guy has one, it’s a connection right away,” she informed me, like a total valley girl. Still, I believed her. Why not?

Well, I didn’t exactly meet a boyfriend. Instead, I met a one-night stand. Correction, a two-night stand. Instead of becoming his girlfriend, I became his spinning top. Wowie! He had a purebred Shepherd that he had trained, and was, of course, a successful commercial actor. He had a very tight body, and an East Coast stride about him. Oh, and he looked as if he was Robert De Niro’s son or a younger twin. Shadow played with his overly polite Shepherd, so that helped. We talked about acting. What else? He wore a leather brand-name fanny pack, containing a roll of poop bags, treats, a dog whistle—and condoms. Very cleaver! I was ready to tell the whole female population at the Laurel Canyon Dog Park what I’d noticed, “Hey girls, this guy has condoms! He cares!”

My college friends and I had met a bunch of guys who used to say things like, “I can’t feel anything or enough with the condom on,” or “That thing stops my squirting potential.” Well, maybe they didn’t say exactly that, but they did complain how a condom took away the ‘real’ experience for them. Answer: “Herpes and AIDS can take more than that away.”

So the dog park actor invited me to have a home-cooked meal at his apartment. “A home-cooked vegetarian meal? Sure, I’m up for that,” I said. He gave me his address and explained how to find his house along Mulholland—which is one curvy drive. And yeah, there’s a cool movie that borrowed the title from it. Go figure.

The day I went to his place, I left Shadow at home, knowing that four was a crowd. It’s like that sometimes with pets. He had the typical ‘Hollywood’ bungalow house, a brick fireplace, an open back yard, tiled floors and lots of windows. It was easy to find, and I parked next to his FJ Cruiser. When he swung the front door open, he was fresh out of the shower, his hair wet and clean, and he was still buttoning his denim shirt. “Irish Spring, smells yummy,” is what I almost sang out, when he gave a hug. Incidentally he hugged me in that way when a guy presses his whole torso into yours and if you don’t press yours into his, well, you could be called frigid.

He had two Whole Foods shopping bags on the Spanish-tile countertop. He had the pasta going and had sautéed tofu like a guy who wants to get laid by a vegetarian. He played Billy Holiday singing
The Very Thought of You
, while he tossed the organic salad with homemade dressing. He had ‘husband’ potential skills that wouldn’t really be activated for another ten-to-fifteen years, but the ‘set up’ was clear. A girl might think this guy would just settle down with her, at least as a steady boyfriend, but I knew different. Another plus was he talked about his mother with affection and fondness, a sign that a guy doesn’t have any weird, boxed-up rage against women. But I instinctively knew I was only going to be treated to an erotic experience, so I wasn’t thinking about this going anywhere but R-rated.

After dessert, which was chocolate tofu cheesecake (sounds strange, but totally yummy); he made his purebred Shepherd do ‘cowboy’ tricks with him. He put an orange water gun in a brown vintage leather cowboy holster fastened around his slim waist. “Now, mister, this ain’t your lucky day,” he said, pretending to shoot—while his Shepherd fell to the floor, rolled over and played dead. They did this seven more times; if I had had some salted peanuts and a box of Cracker Jack, I might have thought I was at a slightly boring circus.

“Let me show you my bedroom,” he said, as he took off the holster. It’s always funny when a guy says that. It’s not like he’s a real estate agent. Bedroom equals what it equals—sex. “Buffalo Bill—” Yup, that was the dog’s real name. “Go to sleep,” he said in a Texan accent and the dog did just that, on top of a fluffy dog bed. Then he took my hand and we walked into his bedroom. His queen sized bed was pushed into a corner and he had a small dresser with an Ansel Adams poster hanging over it. He put new wave type music on—the kind you often hear in a dentist office. Weird, that was warning number one for me, but I didn’t pick up on it fast enough.

“Wait a second, I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said proudly, as he disappeared from his bedroom.

So I sat on the bed that was covered by a Western comforter, with cowboy pillows. He came in wearing tight white corduroy short-shorts and nothing else. Weird, warning number two. This time I noticed. He flicked his stereo switch to blast Pink, singing, Try. He began to dance across his bedroom, his butt packed into his tight short-shorts. He did what I can only call the ‘
Spider-Man
’ dance, pressing his hands against the wall and then turning quickly and pressing his pelvis against it. Across the wall he went like
Spider
-
Man
. And I watched, and I watched. No peanuts needed for this.

Later, he jumped onto the queen size mattress, proving that it had box springs under it, and then he helped me take off my Gucci dress, which I wore because I was trying to look like a different type of girl. Go figure. We kissed a few times before he had my bra off and my underwear flung onto the stereo. Then he flipped my legs into the air, with my backside, chest and head against his cowboy pillows. A spinning top was what I was. Weird! He took off his shorts and he was in between my legs like the Sundance Kid. As if he was fishing for gold in a deep stream—he went in and out, and in and out.

Oh, and he had a red condom on: he had pulled it from a cloth pouch between the bed and the wall. He could have taught a Learning Annex workshop on putting a condom on in less than a second. Really, I think a lot of guys would have attended it. Maybe I was remembering him because it was time to swear off going to bed with ACTORS for GOOD and the long drive was giving me the chance to get myself straightened out. Okay, friendship sure, but nothing more. Yup, I was ready to change. Las Vegas was the place to make my vow, once and for all.

I pulled across from the famous Flamingo Hotel at 3555 Las Vegas Boulevard where Bugsy Siegel had ruled. I guess he would have been happy with the film version of him played by the hot, ever good-looking Warren Beatty. In that movie,
Bugsy
made me want to be a “gangster” girlfriend for a few weeks.
Ocean’s
Eleven
was filmed there and it looked so exciting, but I wasn’t going in.

“Shadow, we can’t afford to stay there on this trip, but maybe one day,” I said.

With a Bluetooth in the ear or a dog beside me—I can really get away with talking out loud. I waved to no one and started driving toward our first Super 8 Motel, one that welcomed dogs and was affordable. It was miles away and when we finally got there, it seemed like a movie location; or maybe I just wanted it to be one.

Motels, hotels, are just fancy bedrooms with none of your identity attached to them, and that’s why I love them. If I could, I would live in a hotel for a year, never doing laundry, never cleaning up after myself, and never worrying. It’s a rented bedroom with a bed, a TV, an alarm clock, a closet and a bathroom. That’s what this one had, along with a small desk. Shadow took the bed right away; he’s a creature of comfort and, given that I was suddenly single, he could share it with me.

Motel rooms, hotel rooms, are also the places where, at twenty-seven years old, you realize that in three years you’ll be thirty. That’s what happened to me. I suddenly found myself adding up the years. I sat down on the super-soft bed and the tears rolled out; it hit me: twenty-seven, not married, not engaged—which technically comes before getting married—and no career. All three! Ugh! Okay, so now I understand potheads. I mean, if ever there was a time I wanted to get stoned, it was in that motel room. Motel rooms, hotel rooms, are also the best places for romance, and here I was, with none to be had. I guess I could have gone guy searching, but with my now red-rimmed eyes, it wasn’t worth it.

Afterward, I watched a rerun episode from my dyslexic TV writing hero, the late, great Stephen J. Cannell’s
The Rockford Files
. Incidentally he created or co-created 40, or close to 40, television series. I mean he’s one of my ultimate favorites. Unlike me, he didn’t hide the dyslexia, but maybe he always had enough money to hire a secretary. That’s the problem for those of us who have to earn a living with no extra financial cushion. Bummer! Anyway, I just so appreciate the father-son relationship between the James Rockford character and the dad that he created, maybe he had that in his life, too.

I fell asleep in my clothes, and woke up around 6:00 to walk Shadow and check out early. I was headed to Arizona. I wanted to get far away from Las Vegas—which I’d decided was better as a scene in a movie or on a postcard.

Hello Arizona! In my opinion, Arizona’s landscape is red. I couldn’t help but notice that right away. The land’s burnt red. I pulled into Flagstaff where my bookish father’s other favorite black-and-white film
Casablanca
, had been shot. Also,
Easy Ride
r and
Midnight Run
had scenes shot there. The town looked undersized. No tall buildings. Wow, the Native American influence was strikingly visible.

I headed into a diner and ordered oatmeal. I felt dejected, as if all the crying had washed away my voice. I watched the families eating together and several truckers drinking coffee. Hey, I was driving myself across America, I had to laugh; there was no time for getting sad or depressed, because I was on an adventure. Correction, Shadow and I were on an adventure and I was driving. The waitress came over and asked about the red BMW, and she told me how she was saving to go to beauty school, and how she planned to move to Texas to become a top hairdresser in Dallas. I told her to go to LA and do hair and make-up for the movies. She suddenly liked my idea better than her plan.

Once outside, I called Paloma in Manhattan to tell her to start focusing on the real guy, the guy she wanted to end up with—the ‘Mr. Darcy’ husband guy.