That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (10 page)

My mom sees me as her selfish mother: I'm abandoning my kids, doing what I want to do with my life, and not thinking about how that will affect them, but I'm not sending them mixed messages by keeping them in an abusive household. I need to make her feel okay about how she was (or wasn't) during the abuse and afterward. Which makes me angry. I'm not a victim. I don't feel anything and I'm above it all.

The last few months have been a very rough time in my life, to say the least. Talking about it to you has been nothing but positive. I think maybe it's helped me come out of
the cave, at least a little. I'm real. I'm not sick. I'm going to survive. I don't want to be binned. I want to be salvageable.

What I like about doing Shakespeare is he gets how confused everyone is. Definitely not “
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner
,” which I think is total bullshit. I'll never forgive Jesse or Carl, nor should I. But before them came Karin. Before my mother came her mother. And before Ava comes me. Line I came across on a bathroom stall in grad school: “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Men and their fucking selves. Shelves.

At a casting—a long corridor with benches lining one wall—I sign in at the desk at the end, passing all the models who are here because they've been preselected for having a natural, easy smile and perfect teeth. As have I. They're all sizing me up. I pretend I don't notice, even though I'm painfully self-conscious. I feel inadequate and think they made a mistake calling me in here. I sit down and the guy to my left is the same guy I saw yesterday on the Metro shouting out in accented Spanish an apology for bothering us: he's unemployed and selling his
paintings and incense. We're living through an economic crisis and he's a father trying to make ends meet.

He looks like Cameron, my old boyfriend from college—blonde, pale, and thin, but not quite as hot. Nonetheless, he's not your average beggar. I study him intensely. He's suddenly a real person to me, which is horrifying. We could have slept together back then and now look at him. When I watch him audition, I learn he's Belgian. He's supposed to take a bite of this Hershey's chocolate bar and love it. He can't quite muster up anything other than indifference, maybe even dislike. He seems dead. I can't help thinking how much happier he was in the Metro, talking about real stuff. We'll do anything for a stupid chocolate commercial that pays seven thousand euros. All of us.

Remember that film I did this summer? The producer asked if me if I'd like to work with him on a horror movie he's developing. I've never done one. There will be tons of screaming, terrified looks, and I even get possessed at the end. Should be quite hilarious. Going to have to keep myself from being an audience member while acting. It makes me laugh just thinking about it.

D
AVID
S
HIELDS
is the author of twenty books, including
Reality Hunger
(named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications);
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
(a
New York Times
bestseller);
Black Planet
(a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and, forthcoming over the next year,
War Is Beautiful
(powerHouse Books) and
Other People
(Knopf).
I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel
, co-written by Caleb Powell and published by Knopf in January 2015, has been adapted by James Franco into a film that premiered in May 2015 at Vancouver's DOXA documentary film festival. Shields's work has been translated into twenty languages.

S
AMANTHA
M
ATTHEWS
is an American actress who lives in Barcelona with her partner and two children.