I Don't Have a Happy Place (12 page)

In bed that night, I conjured up all the sports movies I'd seen in my life for inspiration: speeches from coaches, slow-clap moments.
You want fame?
Debbie Allen shouted at me in my head.
Well, fame costs, and right here is where you start paying. In sweat.
I didn't have this in me. I didn't want to pay. I didn't want to sweat.

The next morning, I sat at my sliver of a desk, facing the wall. I put my headset on, then took it off, deciding I needed to use the receiver instead of talking into a small mouthpiece. I wanted to hold something heavy and real, maybe even twist the cord like I used to do with the beige wall phone in my childhood kitchen. The world got a lot better when I found out that SuperAgent Two would be out of the office and I'd be able to handle my business with no one eating PowerBars behind me. Or listening.

2:30. It was time. I dialed the number.

“Irv Shatz.” He answered his own phone. This threw me. His voice was craggy, like he'd swallowed a bag of sand. Even from the way he said his name I knew he was old-school, probably called women
dames
or
broads
. For sure he said
gams
.

“I'm Kim, from the SuperAgency,” I said. “I'm calling about Ron Ralston?”

“Who?”

All I'd done was introduce myself and already he hated me. But I was already in the dentist's chair and the drilling had started and I just couldn't get out.

“What can I do for you?” said Irv Shatz.

Did he not know why I was calling? Was he not aware we were about to start negotiations for Ron Ralston, an actor with a pleasant face who looked like he was very nice to his mother?

“Um,” I said.

“I made the offer when I spoke to the other girl. Last week,” he said.

“Well, I'm the girl making the deal?” I said, trying to find my inner Swifty Lazar. I leaned back on my swivel chair but slid out and had to shimmy back so as not to slam into the window.

“I'll say it again: eight hundred a week, eight weeks. I told the girl I wasn't gonna budge. This is my best and final. He's got better things to do? I'll get someone else.”

I was losing Irv Shatz and I was losing the job. It was so precarious holding someone's career in my hand; I was now a surgeon massaging a heart. One wrong move and he remains unemployed. I needed to put on my
we're gonna make a lot of ­people a lot of money
voice. If I did this, I'd have seniority over SuperAssistant. I'd be able to give her dirty looks and maybe even brush past her smart slacks on my way to an agents' meeting. Opportunity. It only knocks once.

I thought of my high school boyfriend, who'd had his life mapped out in his mind from the age of six. He'd planned what college he'd attend and the entire career path he'd follow. He was the only person I'd ever met who actually set out what he wanted to do and succeeded at every checkpoint along the way. I recalled a phone call we'd had when I'd started on this road to SuperAgenting.

“You know you're going to hate that, right?” he said. “That's not the career for you.” I remember hanging up and calling him a tool in my head. What did he know? I could eat PowerBars and lunch with Marty if I wanted. Good luck living out your planned life, overachiever, you know what they say about life and plans. (I don't care for footnotes, so let me note right here that high school boyfriend is now a multimillion-dollar-making film
director.
Pfffft
. Whatever.)

“Eight hundred a week,” Irv Shatz said, again. “Best and goddamn final.”

This was it. Curtain up. Light the lights. Just follow your cue, like Sponge and Spiker said. He says eight hundred and you breeze in with two grand and the Perrier. They're just words. Go. I took a breath and fixed my posture. And then, in the meekest voice I had in my repertoire, a voice so quiet I wasn't even sure
I
heard me, I kicked off my real live show-business career and said,
“Okay.”

“Good,” said Irv Shatz. “I'll have the girl send over the paperwork.”

I put the receiver on the cradle, then swiveled my chair to look out the window. I didn't make anyone a lot of money or have any fun doing it. I actually screwed up someone's chance to make more money and drink fizzy water out of small green bottles whenever they were thirsty in the privacy of their nonshared dressing room, maybe even to go to Broadway. Unsure of how to admit to the mess-up, I lied to Sponge and Spiker and told them Irv Shatz just wouldn't budge. I don't think they believed me, because Sponge ended up calling him back, probably saying I was mentally challenged, and she was able to go back in and negotiate properly, with skill and confidence, with guts.

Ron Ralston went to Florida with a better bankroll and no shortage of beverages. I, in a move still beyond my comprehension, got franchised and would now be considered a junior agent, while still playing the role of SuperAssistant. Why anyone agreed to this, I'll never know. I was terrible at my job and a nuisance in the office. This promotion would allow/force me to start finding my own clients to represent, sending me out to church basements and dank theaters all over town in the hopes of lassoing some talent. I felt guilty for not telling the truth about my negotiation but
realized maybe they found this trait appealing and agenty. If, my first time out, I was able to lie (albeit to the wrong person), maybe I wasn't such a loser after all. Maybe that's why they patched me through to the next level.

A week after the negotiation, I sat in front of SuperAgent Two and gave my notice. He nibbled on a PowerBar, storing little pieces in his cheeks so he could say goodbye.

•   •   •

After eight years in this racket, I finally decided to break up with show business. One of the number-one rules in show business is Don't work with kids or animals, and so, just to spite the entire industry, I decided to become a dog walker. Maybe what I needed was an alternative lifestyle. I had visions of myself communing with nature, considering perhaps that what I had to offer couldn't be contained indoors. Not everyone was cut out for office life, right? It was time to take my talents elsewhere.

I kicked off my new career by walking my friend's mutt, Dixie. I didn't have to sit down and hear about the phone answering and filing I'd have to do. There were no contracts to keep up or deals to make when walking an animal, just a leash and a plastic bag. And, who knew? Maybe I'd find the Murray and Ted Baxter of dog walking out in the park. My business multiplied rapidly, and in a matter of weeks I had a few clients, all from the same building. A Havanese named Baxter. A white fluffy thing called Norm. And when word got out about me, a short businessman put me on retainer. His foxlike dog, Duke, needed to be walked once in the morning and again later in the afternoon. He didn't even care what time I showed up.

Every morning, I'd strap on my overalls and headphones blasting AM talk radio and head out to pick up one of my clients, then take him to the park. Together we'd go for long walks. He'd sniff
around and I'd imagine all the books I could be writing if I didn't have to spend so much goddamn time walking these dumb dogs, who, if we're being honest, were beginning to get on my nerves.

Instead of going to the park, I started watching TV in the dogs' apartments. Eventually I'd drag them outside to pee, where'd I'd sit on a bench and give the animals dirty looks. Seemed as though dog walking, like show business, was just not all it was cracked up to be. At least it didn't take me eight years to figure it out. Norm's mother was the first to fire me. She didn't think I was serious enough because I didn't leave notes on her kitchen counter with recaps of what Norm did on our walks and how many times he did his business. My friend kept me on, as did the short business fellow. I took their faith in me as a sign to just keep moving. I stayed with the dogs for seven months even though we hated each other.

I never did get discovered. Not on the city bus, not in the cookie aisle at D'Agostino's, not in the business of show. I did, however, make a discovery: I was bad at jobs. I realized that Tom Brokaw was wrong—not everyone could make a buck. I don't even want to talk about making a difference.

This Is Our Story?

• • • • • •

T
he first time I saw Buzz, he was walking down Beacon Street. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with an unbuttoned baby-blue oxford over it and carried a navy backpack, a sheet of looseleaf crunched in the zipper. A swirl of his black hair escaped its ponytail, and the faded jeans he chose that morning seemed to be falling off, defying his canvas belt. Stopping at a huddle of boys, Buzz listened, then laughed by throwing his head back while keeping his mouth wide open, like Guy Smiley.

“There!” said my friend Mitzi, pointing her Camel Light across the street. “There he is!”

“That guy?” I said.

“Yes!”

“
That
guy?”

She grabbed my arm. “Yes. That's him. Isn't he cute?”

“Cute?” I said, looking for my smokes. I was wearing a black off-the-shoulder snug-fitting shirt, a man's suit vest, jean shorts over multicolored floral tights, black John Cougar Mellencamp–inspired western shoe-boots, and a top hat. “That guy looks ­ridiculous.”

“He went to camp with my sister,” Mitzi said, as if that changed the fact that he resembled Tiny Tim without the warble and ukulele. “I think we know a lot of the same people.”

“He's still ridiculous.”

“You're wrong.”

We smoked, sitting on the fourth stair of the building's front stoop that served as Emerson College's student lounge. Most of our classes took place in the converted living rooms of old brownstone buildings that dotted the Back Bay of Boston, but the steps of 130 Beacon Street were social and cigarette-­smoking headquarters. Buzz traipsed along, eventually disappearing around the corner as Mitzi news-briefed me that he, like us, had transferred to our school sophomore year. He was a Jew from a fancy Wasp town in Connecticut and went to summer camp in Ontario, Canada, which is where he met Mitzi's sister. He majored in advertising, had a girlfriend who went to another college in the area, and when he drove his off-white 1973 Super Beetle he wore a signature wool hat with earflaps, no matter the season, which he called his Driving Hat.

“Come on,” Mitzi said when he was no longer in sight. “You don't think he's even a teeny bit cute?”

“No.”

•   •   •

I replay the original Buzz sighting of 1990 in my head often, wondering how I got here.
Here
is a rental car we've secured at the Cancun airport, a red compact we will sit in for two hours along a highway that is crumbling, not unlike my life, and even in my state of despair I am able to see the irony—or is it a metaphor—and I add
messed-up road
to the running mental list I began before we left, entitled “Signs.”

That morning, to the untrained eye, I might have looked like
I was minding my own business in the vestibule, waiting for the town car to arrive and speed us to the airport. Buzz didn't notice me inspecting his Plane Pants, which were really just cargo pants from the Gap. Buzz didn't like wearing jeans on a plane, as he found them too constricting and without enough pockets. After spending four months locating the perfect pair of travel bottoms, he then gave them a moniker, which was not unusual for Buzz, as evidenced by his Club Shirt in college and the recently scored Dog-Run Jacket from Filene's Basement. The Plane Pants were equipped with deep pockets, and I spent a good amount of time lacing my Pumas, pretending I wasn't searching for a lump that could pass as a small velvet box. When that proved fruitless, I asked if I could get some gum from his backpack, which he obliged, making it clear there was nothing concealed in his bag either. I tried to stay optimistic by switching the nature of my investigation, focusing less on hard evidence, more on behavior.

But I should have known better than to flirt with optimism. Buzz was not a morning person, or a big conversationalist, so it was usual for him to be quiet and dazed as we waited. To clarify, Buzz is a talker—so chock-full of information they should farm him out for weddings to keep topics flowing—but he is not a conversationalist.

Me, I can easily go ten rounds on
Do you think the laundry ladies hate me?
Or
Do you like the bus?
Or
Do you think our deli guy hates me?
But on these subjects, he has nothing to add. On the morning of our Mexican vacation, Buzz was acting just like Buzz. Not squirrelly, not like he was concealing anything. Signs were quickly turning into omens. I sat on the dirty lobby floor, eyes on the Spackle-colored sky, comforted that I was not the only rain cloud on Columbus Avenue that morning.

•   •   •

I wasn't always like this. As a kid, nuptials were not my thing. I didn't have sunny yellow wallpaper or the disposition to match. I didn't wear headbands or the Esprit sweaters my mother pushed me toward in the store, and I certainly never ripped out pictures of wedding dresses, cataloging them in a binder for my eventual big day. It's not that I was against the event. I wanted to marry Duran Duran as much as the next person, but I could never imagine myself in a poufy white dress.

Having been raised by a nineteen-inch color Zenith, I thought this is what weddings were. Dresses of any kind were not welcome in our closets because my mother was a feminist. Minus the burgundy velvet floor-length skirt with bustle she wore to my brother's bar mitzvah, I never saw my mother in a dress. She wore suit pants, with panty hose underneath, because Marlo Thomas said mommies were people and people wore pants. As I came of age in the ‘80s, things got more confusing. From the neck down my mother looked like she worked for IBM, but above the shoulder pads she glazed her face with pinks and blues and molded her hair into a domed helmet that would make Joan Collins look like she'd given up.

It's possible my mother was trying to convey messages of strength and equality, but to me they were filtered through a colossal game of visual Telephone. We didn't have intimate talks, because my mother was private. So I learned to focus on what was physically in front of me, which was usually a bag of mixed messages. As a result, in the sixth grade I never took off my steel-toed boots, because we were feminists. But I was also encouraged at thirteen to buy blue eyeliner and small jars of Indian Earth because it made us look less tired. My father must have wanted to be a feminist, too, because he also started wearing bronzer.

When I moved out of my childhood home, I was confused. Finally living on my own, I would get to the bottom of what it meant to be a grown woman. I achieved this by doing the opposite of everything I'd seen my mother do to date. Skirt buying became an addiction. I renounced hairspray. And I took not being vain to such champion levels, Buzz often said I looked homeless. As a strong woman, I would have solid reasons for my actions and belief systems that I'd share with others. No accessories for me. I was going to have substance. I was also going to have lists. Because what better way to show you meant business than bullet points? When friends started talking emerald-cut rings and three-tiered lemon-chiffon cake with raspberry cream, I hung the following list above my toilet.

WHY I DON'T WANT TO GET MARRIED:

1. Jordan almonds are stupid.

2. You can't wear a veil if you wear glasses.

3. Dancing is dumb.

4. Chicken, beef, or fish?

5. Don't have enough friends to invite so would appear like loser at own nuptials.

6. Can't call in sick to own wedding like you do for other parties.

7. I don't like parties.

I lived my life with limp hair and strong convictions for many years. Now, in my late twenties, I suddenly found myself in one of those movies where someone gets hit in the head and sees things differently and learns lessons and switches bodies with
Fred Savage. Now, seven years into this relationship, I ached to get married.

•   •   •

Tulum is a sleepy pueblo, on the eastern side of the Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is home to a well-known archeological Mayan ruin but not known enough to warrant a call from my mother reminding me of a
Dateline
she saw recently and to please watch out for kidnapping and decapitation. Today Tulum has a “hotel zone” and nightlife and an ATM and a gym and there is talk of an international airport, but back in 2000 tourism was limited to a few Mayan-style thatched huts for lodging and a mellow quality that made Buzz repeat (frequently) that it was a place for “travelers, not tourists.”

This was a return trip for us. Two years earlier, we'd driven this same fissured road to spend six days on a divine beach we had just about to ourselves, minus the odd stray dog, the stunning woman with mermaid hair covering her boobs while practicing naked yoga in the distance, and the small group of fellow travelers we dined with occasionally even though one of them, a gay blind man named Blair, was so detestable that Buzz and I spent the better part of the week debating the karma, rules, and social implications of having a problem with the sightless. Mostly we just wanted to know if we were allowed to hate the blind guy.

One had to be vigilant driving this route from Cancun so that a Mexican crater didn't swallow up your rental. There were no dividing lines to hint at where you should be driving and seemingly no road rules at all. This kind of driving was Buzz's Super Bowl. Back home in New York, if I slammed on the pretend passenger brake or gripped the handle above the window where people sometimes hung their dry cleaning, Buzz would just shrug and say, “What?” On the Mexican highway, however, I
had sunk deep into the bowels of a slump and couldn't even be bothered to police Buzz's driving. Instead, I pressed my forehead to the window and seethed. I thought,
Drive like an asshole, see if I care. Get into a head-on collision and get us both killed. I'll just look at your stupid run-overed face and say, “What?”

Up ahead, I noticed the green highway sign with white lettering that read,
EXCUSE TO DISTURB YOU IMPROVEMENT THIS ROAD FOR YOUR COMFORT
. Last visit, Buzz and I enjoyed this sign a great deal, quoting it often, followed by general laughing and pats on the back for our hilarious senses of humor. This time, Buzz hit my arm to signal its presence but I ignored him, leaving him to laugh alone. He didn't even notice. (
Signs
.) We turned right, heading toward the very end of the Boca Pailla road.

“I'm starving,” Buzz said, turning off the car. “You?”

I didn't say anything.

“Guacamole?” he said. “Maybe fajitas.”

He got out with our bags, disappearing into the hotel, not noticing I was still locked inside.

•   •   •

Mitzi ended up in Voice and Articulation class with Buzz, Thursdays at 8:30 a.m. They became fast friends sitting in the back, learning of sibilant
s
's and dentalized
d
's. Since fast-friend making was not my strong suit, I just glommed on to Mitzi's choices. I learned right away that Buzz was charming, if not a nincompoop, but pretty focused academically for someone who drank so hard he spent more than a few nights asleep on a stoop on Exeter Street. No matter the damage he'd done to himself the night before, he'd show up to every class with books in hand and a ring of Pepto-Bismol around his lips.

We were creatures from different parts of the zoo. He, a quasi-Deadhead sporto part-time vegetarian/alcoholic with a
rotating stable of girls passing through his bedroom. Me, an occasional agoraphobic listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff CDs and the original soundtrack to
Les Mis
é
rables
while still making crank calls. He made dean's list three years running and I missed the first month of Novel into Film because I couldn't locate the classroom it was held in.

In 1990, Emerson College was about 35 percent male, and half that population was gay. These were the statistics I attributed to Buzz being so lady lucky. To this day, he contends that I, like the rest of the female population, was in love with him, which is completely false, as I was perfectly busy being obsessed with a flamboyant Richard Grieco lookalike we dubbed Booker.

Pretty soon after our newfound friendship, Mitzi lost romantic interest in Buzz and moved on to a senior with a Hollywood pedigree. Buzz ended up with a model-singer Mariel Hemingway doppelganger as his main course, with a lazy Susan of dark-haired coeds and one art major who did her photo thesis on Buzz as Jesus in a toga. I didn't like Buzz as more than a friend, but you couldn't help but appreciate the guy who, for Valentine's Day, mailed me a flappy, almost wet, slice of deli turkey in a small white envelope and, for my birthday, gifted me a three-pack of those plastic rain bonnets my nana used to wear.

•   •   •

I moved to New York in the fall of 1992—three bucks, two bags, and all that—in order to become a talent agent and marry Adam Sandler. My previous Boston boss knew a working actor in the city whom she'd convinced to let me sublet an apartment from. The rules were simple:

1. Keep it clean.

2. Pay rent on time.

3. Never receive mail, never check the mailbox. Do not play music, talk to anyone, be seen coming in or out of the building, get deliveries, or keep the lights on too long. And please, take the trash out under cover of night.

And, as with the rules in
Gremlins
, I followed none of the above.

The studio apartment was dinky at best, the only piece of useable furniture being a double bed. It served as sleeping place, dining area, hangout spot, guest seating, and a surface for my clothes since there was no closet and I was forbidden to use the dresser. Hostile about that rule, I rifled through his top drawer the first day I moved in, only to find a men's navy-blue G-string with a golden zipper on the crotch. I made a mental note to go against my snooping instincts for the duration of my sublet. The walls were layered with chipped white paint, and the pipes clanked so loud and often it sounded as though a trapped chain gang was trying to get out.