Miss Fortune (13 page)

All these years I've had an ongoing “it's a hard-knock life in the orphanage” shtick about how my mother didn't get me. How Sharon didn't understand who I really was. “I can't laugh without her screaming ‘Seizure!' at me and shoving a stick in my mouth.” I'd tell my friends that the picnic table in our backyard was “the adopted table,” where my family had requested I take all my meals.

Now that I'm a mother, it makes perfect sense how my mother
worried that a note in my adoption file had fallen out that had warned, “At age twelve her arms will fall off due to a rare West Virginia genetic mutation,” and she'd never know for sure if there was something seriously wrong with me. Leo's my biological son, I knew my medical history, and I still worried after he was born that he was blind in one eye and had half a kidney.

Right after Diane arrives at Danza's she announces that her cat, Tiny Tim, is sick.

“We're putting him to sleep before I go to England. It would cost a lot of money to keep him alive, and I don't want to be worried about him on my trip, so I'm just gonna get rid of him and get a new one when I get back. Kind of like I did with you.”

A dry smile is on my face and I give her a “good one” slow nod. Diane once told me that the reason she was able to hand me over after I was born was because they drugged her up. “It's what they did back then so girls could go through with it. I've had haircuts that were more stressful.”

What if all those adoption extremists are right and I'll never be able to attach to another human being? If my dad put his arm around me in front of other people—or in private, for that matter—I thought he was just trying to hold me still so someone could punch me in the stomach. Not that he'd ever done anything like that, but sometimes physical contact with people made me fear the worst. When the Snuggle fabric softener commercial came on, the giggly baby voice of Snuggle Bear was too vulnerable and needy and it would make me punch the couch pillows. That may not have been specific to an abandonment issue. The sound of that bear's voice made most non–mentally ill people want to blame everything that was wrong in their lives on him.

I'd hoped all of my misgivings about Diane had more to do with hormones than with Diane herself, but if anything she's gone
from “casual I don't give a shit” land to “aggressive I don't give a shit” land.

I don't hate her; I just see her more clearly now that I've been a mother for two years.

Danza and Diane are upstairs plugging in curling irons, getting ready to go to a Paul Simon concert. It's one
P.M
. Danza feels horrible that the only person who isn't going is “the adopted one.” The whole clan is going and they don't have a ticket for me. When I made my plans to visit, Danza had asked me if she should buy me one, and I'd said I'd rather save my money for wine and online gambling. I'd imagined that I'd use the free night to visit with one of my brothers or cousins in the area whom I don't always get time with, but it turned out that
everyone
in the family was going. I'm wandering around Danza's big house enjoying her homemaking skills, making mental notes on how to best organize batteries and ribbons, trying to fight back a little of the “which one of these is not like the other” feelings. I stop in the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and hear the familiar sound of Diane's husband, Randy, snapping photos of me.

Randy is a photographer for an Indiana paper and has the photojournalist's gift of not being at all affected by people not wanting their picture taken. He instructs me to “get that coffee mug like you were just doing. That was pretty funny. You have a funny way of doing it,” and stands an inch away from me snapping my picture.

During my visits, Randy will always take the opportunity to ask me a series of questions about Hollywood. Things he assumes I must know about, like, “Is Lindsay Lohan starting to regret doing some of that stupid stuff she's done?” Or, “Why does Pamela Anderson like looking like that?” It can be endearing, how he thinks there are twenty people in Hollywood and I know all of
them, but then, in the next breath, he'll ask me, “Lauren, can you understand anything those black people are saying on
The Wire
? CAN YOU, Lauren?”

“Hey, Lauren, how do you deal with paparazzi always chasing you and taking your picture without you knowing it? That's gotta be tough.”

“I hate to break it to you, Randy; nobody wants my picture but you.”

This kills him and he collapses into laughter and then pops right up and starts to take more photos.

Right as I'm thinking how wonderful it would be to be upstairs with Diane and Danza getting ready for the concert, Randy offers me his ticket.

“Come on, Lauren. How many times will you get to sit by your foster mom at a Paul Simon concert? I mean, come on.”

The whole family has tried to explain to Randy that Diane is not my foster mom or half mom or stepmother; she is my birth mom. Randy married Diane only ten years ago and has a hard time keeping it all straight. In the end, I just tell him that Diane is my Guatemalan plumber.

“Listen, I don't care about Paul Simon and honestly I don't want to go,” he says. “I'd rather stay here and read and watch some basketball.”

“Are you sure, Randy?” I ask his camera lens. He puts it down so I can see his face.

“Oh yeah, it's the chance of a lifetime—see Paul Simon with your stepmom, come on.”

I run upstairs to announce the good news.

“Randy just gave me his ticket! I'm going!”

“He did what?”

“He gave me his ticket . . .”

Danza looks like she's going to cry and yells to Diane, who is lying down in the next room.

“Why is he doing that, Mom? He's the one who said it was his dream to go, and I got it all arranged and— Mom, Randy gave Lauren his ticket!”

“He did
what
?”

It turns out that the Paul Simon ticket was Randy's birthday present. The family chipped in and bought the ticket and were going to take him to dinner beforehand. The entire evening was to be his birthday celebration.

“He offered it to me . . . I swear.” This is the sentence I have to repeat all night long every time a new family member or close family friend joins up with us. It's like I stole a birthday present from a sweet, confused man. I'm an entitled selfish monster . . . who's been a lifelong fan of Paul Simon and is going to his concert!

•   •   •

Diane and I sit down in our seats. We are in the last row of the concert hall. The very last row. We turn around and there's a wall behind us.

Paul is pretty great. He looks exactly the same as he did when he was banging Garfunkel, I mean playing with Garfunkel, but with white hair, like he'd gone to makeup and told them, “Make me look like an old-man version of Paul Simon.”

He plays the first few notes of “Kodachrome” and Diane is up on her feet, dancing. The entire theater is seated politely. Nobody is moving, much less dancing. “All right, this is cool! We can do whatever we want!” Diane says and waves her hand in the air and shouts out a
woooo.

She's the only one in the entire place besides Paul's band who is standing. Even the ushers are sitting on the steps. I try to make her
sit down and she turns around and asks the wall if we're blocking its view and keeps going. “We're in the back row so who gives a shit!”

Diane starts dancing with her arms above her head, swinging her hips like the child of the sixties she is. She gets worn out before the song is over and sits back down, grabs my head, brings my ear to her mouth, and yells over the music, “
Man, how much am I wishing I'd worn a bra right now.
”

Paul, I call him, now that we've spent a couple of hours together, is playing what he claims is going to be the last song of the night, “Mother and Child Reunion.”

“On this strange and mournful day . . . Is only a motion away.”

Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. It's nice for a moment, but then my hand gets sweaty, so I wriggle free. She grabs me back. We repeat this until finally I'm full-on struggling to get my hand away.

Nobody ever holds my hand. David will grab my hand for a moment and then immediately get exhausted and let go.

Diane pins my hand down and won't let me pull away, like an orderly in a hospital trying to calm a mental patient. By the time the song is over, all the struggle stops and now I'm just holding hands with her.

Holding hands is good shit. I will hold hands with my son longer than he wants me to. I will hold on because it feels so good to have someone hold you longer than you want. You let go but they still have you. It's why you hold someone's hand when they are dying. No words, just a presence. I start crying and this time I know it's not hormonal. Thank god for Randy's birthday present.

The topic in Danza's minivan after the concert is which song was everyone's favorite.

“Lauren and I vote for ‘Mother and Child Reunion,'” Diane yells from the back of the van, where we're sitting.

“Little known fact: People think that that song is about a dog he
loved but it's actually about his favorite dish at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn that closed down.” Thank you, Justin. Justin's my half brother, Diane's oldest son. When I first met him he had a mullet and a rattail. Of course, I had blue eye shadow up to my eyebrows and a bad perm, so who I am to talk? Nowadays he's a disgruntled lawyer.

Danza's father-in-law, who is also a lawyer, jumps right in. “Actually, Justin, it was the restaurant itself that added the dish to their menu in honor of Paul, their favorite customer. The song itself is about the death of a dog.”

Don, Diane's second husband, is in the van too. He insists that the song is about the Korean War.

By the time we've dropped everyone off at his or her car or home, the song might as well have been about a meatball finding tomato sauce.

The next morning Diane knocks on my bedroom door and asks me if I want to go with her to
her
coffee shop.

“I thought your coffee shop was the one by me,” I say.

“That's my coffee shop in Santa Monica. This is my one in Bloomington. You coming or not?”

We pull into the parking lot and I'm about to jump out when she stops me.

“There is something I was thinking that maybe would be good for you to hear. Since you and your mother found me, I've never wanted you to think that the moment that you were born was in any way horrible or that your adoption was an awful ordeal. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel burdened or worried about me. But you know what? Maybe you need to know how painful it was. I'm realizing as you get older that maybe it would have helped you to know that giving you up for adoption was the most painful thing I've gone through in my life. Maybe the one thing I
kept from you was the exact thing you needed to know—that you were not an easy baby to give up. Anyway, I just thought it would be nice for you to know that and I wish I'd told you earlier.”

If anyone would have asked me if I needed to hear what she just told me I would have said no, but that's because my need to hear it was so completely buried. Before I met Diane, I'd thought that out of necessity for my birth mother to move on, I'd been born unloved. Adopted by a family that had to love me but didn't know what exactly they were getting. I didn't feel incredibly valued, but everyone I knew felt that way, so why make a big Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade out of it? But if I were really honest, I had to admit that there were times I felt like a random clump of a human that had to be assigned to someone in order to be cared about. When awful things happened to me, I never thought anyone would care all that much.

It mattered to me more than I could have imagined to know that I wasn't an easy baby to dump.

She rummages around in her purse and pulls out an old wadded-up Starbucks napkin and offers it to me to wipe my tears off my face and blow my nose.

Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. “And hey, kid, I need to tell you something else.”

By the way she's staring out the window at the coffee shop, I take a guess that what she wants to tell me is something about how if they only have one piece of lemon pound cake, she's not sharing. But I'm wrong.

“I don't give a shit about the pound cake; it's all about the coffee cake at this place. If there's only one piece of that left, hands off. It's mine.”

I
'm fourteen weeks pregnant at an artists' retreat in Florida.

Most of my time is spent wandering around taking in all the natural beauty that the state has to offer. I've seen a turtle, an armadillo, and a bunch of drunk guys with no shirts buying honey buns at the 7-Eleven, when I should be writing. I remind myself that only moneymaking projects are allowed at this retreat, so I can squirrel away like a good waspy rodent for the long winter months when I won't be able to perform because I'll be too fat, and I won't be able to write because I'll be too distracted about being too fat.

I'm here for only three weeks and I need to conceive, start, and finish an Oscar-winning screenplay, maybe something like
Juno
but with Aboriginal transsexual people; a web series that can be shot in a minivan, pay nothing to the actors, and be developed into a lucrative TV pilot starring all men; and a new theater piece about how having a baby is going to end my career. The theater piece may have to wait, because there's no money in theater.

Too bad, because the only thing I'm remotely inspired to do is the theater piece. The source material is endless here. None of the
fifteen artists who were already here when I arrived have kids. None. They are accomplished professional artists. Most of them are professors at fancy liberal colleges who are on salary. There was one woman with kids, a Brazilian sculptor, but she broke her ankle after the second day and had to go home. Joseph, a sixty-two-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning composer from New Haven, whose only child is his opera—“a spoiled little obnoxious girl who I will drown before the end of this week unless she kills me first”—broke the news to me at breakfast. I'd been saving a seat for her at my table so that she could tell me all about how having a baby affects your career.

A few breakfasts later Joseph told me that the pain of missing her baby was so intense “it snapped her bones.”

I said that I'd heard that she'd gotten drunk and fallen down some stairs.

“Same thing,” he said. “Pass the flaxseed spread.”

The best part of the day is when all the artists gather after dinner in the “Fellowship Hall” to sit on dirty couches, drink red wine, and shit talk whichever artist was dumb enough to stay in and work that night. That was the key to being respected here—showing up. There have been several transitions of artists coming and going. New ones arrived on Monday night. One of the new arrivals, an intense and dramatic playwright from Seattle named Tonia, very pale, with flapper-style jet-black hair, who is what I imagine Virginia Woolf must have been like, notices that I'm drinking only a half glass of red wine. I tell her I'm pregnant and she gasps. I thought maybe she'd recognized my giant glass as the centerpiece filled with floating candles from the night before, and maybe she did, but it wasn't about that.

“I had dreams once,” she tells me in a voice that sounds like an old-timey radio performance. “They all died. There are file cabinets
full of my plays, but that's all over now. You cannot be an artist and a mother—I don't care what they say; they lie. You know why they lie? They lie because they want to lure you over to the other side. They say, ‘Have a baby. I did! And, why, I've never been happier.' Lies. Believe me; the serpent draws blood along with milk!”

Applause would have been an appropriate response to her performance, but I was too dizzy to slap my hands together. If I can't tour and perform and experience the world outside of myself to write about—if I'm always here with Leo—I'll go crazy.

My career is being in the world. Walking around being traumatized every five minutes and making a two-hour show about it. It's an embarrassing way to make a living, but if I didn't do that, I'm fairly sure I'd develop an addiction to engine cleaner or vaping saffron or something. It wouldn't be the addiction that would kill me. It would be the fact that I couldn't write a story about it because the baby would be a part of the story and writers can't write about their kids because it's not their story to tell. You can't tell sex stories or curse or make fun of their fathers or talk about anal (that's a type of foot cream, baby). Fuck.

All the artists in the meeting hall are nodding in agreement with Tonia, or nodding off from red wine, except for the married writing team from San Diego, Carla and Paul. Thankfully Carla and Paul had brought in a new batch of folks who didn't have metaphorical “stretch marks on their souls,” but real ones on their bodies.

“That's a bunch of cuckoo-bird yak-yak,” Carla, the wife, a ballbuster, no-makeup, no-nonsense lady originally from Mississippi, tells me. According to her, kids focus your time and generally make everything better. “Children are happy if you are happy,” Paul, who's either Russian or just extremely exhausted, adds. “And if you are getting paid to do what you love to do, they'll be happy.” I watch
him get up to get some scotch tape to hold in the lenses of glasses that keep falling out whenever he isn't sitting completely still.

Their advice to me is to continue to tour, but take David with me. I love that idea because it's essentially who we are—carny show folk. David had directed one of my theater shows in the past; now he could direct all of them. Run the lights with the baby strapped on his chest while I performed. We could combine our finances, throw the baby in the back of the wagon, and hit the road. They love their life. “It's not conventional, but our kids are growing up with parents who get to do what they love, and more importantly we all get to be together.” They had dropped their kids off with a relative and were enjoying what they referred to as a rare romantic work getaway.

Finally, I found my role models.

Role models who fought like George and Martha from
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
every single day of their retreat.

“
I don't know what page we are on! Do I look like MapQuest?!
” The sound of their stressed-out marriage became a part of the retreat's swampy soundscape. Every night after Fellowship Hall, the artists would retire to their studios and drift off to sleep to the sounds of gators grunting, insects chirping, and Carla screaming at Paul, “Why are you so fucking crabby? What's your problem? Go home if you're in such a bad mood!” Yeah, Paul! If you can't sit there and be screamed at with a little better attitude, go home.

Back at home, I'm driving to Nate 'n Al deli in Beverly Hills when Allen, my agent, calls me with an audition. Thank god. I accomplished absolutely nothing during the retreat. That's not true. I memorized an e.e. cummings poem and learned how to play the chorus from David Bowie's “Space Oddity” on a ukulele. Not exactly powerful skills for the workforce.

As many women's magazines go on about working mothers and
having it all, I have noticed that on airplanes when I pass through business class on the way back to the Septic Tank Section, it is still dominated by white men in suits. And rappers with their moms.

Only celebrities are allowed to be pregnant and still work. They can afford nannies, and entire film shoots are scheduled around their pregnancies. Pregnant ladies in Hollywood are like spiders. The Hollywood studios scream when they see a spider and want to get rid of it, but then a good producer reminds them that spiders are vital to the system. They serve a purpose. The ones who serve a purpose are A-list famous ones. Talented ones. The bit players don't serve a purpose. They don't bring money into the studios or sell tickets. A pregnant Anne Heche is a spider. An alien spider but still a spider. A pregnant me is more like a flea. They will crush me between their fingernail and their forefinger and my career will be over.

Without my career I'm nothing. I'm just a stack of bones covered with skin on a big rock hurtling toward my death.

“Okay, what are the details?” I make “mmm-hmmm” noises as Allen talks, so he thinks I'm writing it all down instead of speeding down the 10 toward creamed herring and street parking I can't afford.

It's for an HBO show called
Hung
, a comedy about a down-and-out high school baseball coach who, thanks to his special talent of having a large penis, becomes a gigolo. They would like to see me for the character of Horny Patty.

Horny Patty sounds like a sexy bombshell type. I, however, am, as I've mentioned, pregnant. My face is covered in brown splotches, and I can't stop burping and shitting my pants.

“The casting people said just go in with no makeup and nerdy. Think lonely odd girl in the office who masturbates at her desk and goes to SeaWorld by herself.”

He assures me that they want a “real” person and to play it “real.” They always say that. They said that when I auditioned for
Desperate Housewives
for “a shut-in who marries prison inmates.” The waiting room was a sea of tall, leggy models wearing tight mini-sundresses and high-heeled sandals. They all had so much makeup on they looked embalmed. I was wearing a full-length denim skirt and an oversize Mickey Mouse sleep shirt. Before I'd left the house David had begged me to put on more makeup and detangle the back of my hair.

“David, she's a shut-in! Why would she brush her hair?”

“It's a network show. Those are the parts that you have to add a ‘that you want to fuck' at the end of every description,” David said.

“Really? So if the character is a ninety-year-old Native American in a coma and it's network, then it's a ninety-year-old Native American ‘that you'd like to fuck'?”

Turns out, David should have been a manager.

My real manager assures me that this is different; it's HBO.

“Just making sure it's actually a part that I could get.”

“Listen, Weeds, you were invited to the party. When you're invited to the party, you go.”

I'm about to ask him if he stole that line from the Dalai Lama when he gives me a quick, “Sounds good, Weeds,” and hangs up.

Of course I'll audition. I have to. Everybody keeps telling me how babies are magic, so maybe I'll get a good parking spot.

On the way to the audition I call Allen to ask if there's anything else I should know before I go in today. Anything that may throw me off, like “Bill Clinton will be in the room” or “The casting woman has no eyebrows.”

“Her name is Horny Patty,” Allen says. “How many more details do you need?”

The waiting room is crammed full of women. It's clear that we are all here for the same part. It's also clear that some of them have taken the “that you'd want to fuck” note to apply for network
or
cable. There's an actress with amazing posture who came dressed as “nerdy porn girl.” She's got thick black glasses on with tape wrapped around the nose and double Ds that the Lord gave her after she paid him a mighty sum.

The energy in the room is pretty heavy. All the actresses look so miserable. They're all deeply focused on inhabiting the character of Horny Patty. It's a room full of Daniel Day-Lewises. Or maybe they're just miserable. To break up the tension, or undermine the competition, I cross my fingers, shut my eyes, and shout, “GOD, I HOPE I GET THIS!” as I walk in. Nobody laughs. Usually I save my jokes for after the audition when I close the door, yell, “I GOT IT!” and then burst into fake sobs and run out of the room.

In the corner of the room I spot an actress I see at every audition, Emma.

She and I are always up for the same “crazy lesbian ballbuster” parts. To prove that I see her as a human and not just someone there to steal my health insurance, I tell her I like her outfit. She pulls out the sales tag still attached to the collar and says, “Nordstrom's. I put panty liners in my pits so I don't ruin it.” She shoves the tags back in. She tells me how she's been thinking about designing a T-shirt that reads
I HATE MYSELF
on the front for when she first walks in to audition and then
I'M SORRY
on the back for when she leaves.

Emma is sure that she won't get the part. “I know how this bullshit works. Someone like Juliette Lewis or Octavia Spencer probably already has the part. They're just killing time until she signs her contract.”

Usually I'm the manic wreck in the corner at an audition,
pretending to go over my lines, but what I'm really doing is chanting “dead body in a casket . . . dead body in a casket,” trying to convince myself how unimportant booking a commercial for Gas-X is in the grand scheme of things. If it's a film role, “dead body in a casket” isn't graphic enough and I have to add images of eyelids sewn shut and a botched embalming.

Today feels different. Emma goes on and on about her diet and hair regime with her sweat-soaked panty liner peeking out of the top of her blouse, and I'm able to do what the Buddhists have been yelling at me to do for years: observe the world around me without feeling any attachment to it.

Did somebody slip a Xanax into my Red Bull?

It's so calming to know that in my always-uncertain life, one thing is for certain—a baby is coming.

I mean, come on. What's it all about at the end of it all? I've had a good career. I was on
The Daily Show.
I was fired from
The Daily Show
, but that doesn't mean I don't still have the luggage they gave me for Christmas. Eddie Murphy said I reminded him of Ruth Gordon. His body double told me later he meant Ruth Buzzi, but I think I'll go with the real Eddie on that one.

If I don't get this job—in fact, if I never work in this town again—the baby is still coming. We could move to Corydon, Indiana, and live with my birth mother, Diane. She's always letting me know that when I decide I'm done with the Hollywood thing, a simple small-town life is waiting for me. I'll go back to waiting tables.

I loved waiting tables for the same reason I love giving blow jobs: You get to put on a little show. Corydon is a small southern Indiana town. Small towns are so completely foreign to me, and I love foreign things. I thrive on being completely out of my element and chronically constipated from unfamiliar foods. The Corydon Ponderosa has an all-you-can-eat steak night. The waitresses chew
gum and say things like, “Y'all ready for another steak?” There's a pharmacy with an old-timey lunch counter and soda fountain in the town square called Butt Drugs. Diane knows the Butt family and could get me a job working the lunch counter. Retired farmers sit at the counter sipping on two-dollar cups of coffee and talking about the good old days. The waitresses wear T-shirts that say
I HEART BUTT DRUGS
. Why wouldn't I want to work there?