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Authors: Charlie Newton
Tags: thriller
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a
serious
actress. Add regulation 34C’s from the best guy I could afford in West L.A., the strawberry blond hair from a salon on Sunset. And the teeth—a $16,000 smile I agreed could be billed one weekend a month in Palm Springs. Aspiring actors and actresses call those weekends paying the dentist, or the plastic surgeon … or the rent if things get bad enough.
Oh, and they can. Be a runaway in the City of Angels for a year or two. Rely on the kindness of strangers.
Swallow
. Gun on my lap—my new solution? No. No. Not a … or a victim, an actress,
the lead
in
Streetcar
.
Actress. Actress. Actress. When I stepped off that bus into Venice Beach I was fourteen, scared and alone, but would’ve laughed out loudhad anyone told me how far I’d go to become an actress. But promise something every night, crave it down to your heart and soul, more than food, sex, and safety, and a teenager starts to see things differently. Flirting with the devil seems doable … or as things begin to unravel,
survivable
. But by then you’re often alone in a dark room with something the old you couldn’t quite have imagined, and he has his hand out.
So you pay him—and you never, ever talk about it—and just for that one time, never again. And like the thousands of ingenues who preceded me, each time I confronted the
next
time, I closed my eyes tighter. And buried deeper those parts of me I wanted to keep real and mine. And paid him again. I said yes.
Yes
to the City of Angels—her casting calls and lineups, and readings when you could get one, each office or waiting room electric with preparation and hope … and then invisibility. I said
Yes
to the big theaters with bright marquee promises and darkened empty seats, heartbreaking voices saying “Thank you for coming”—because that’s all an aspiring actress does every day until she
aspires
so hard and so often she can’t remember which parts of her are the real ones, not with any certainty, not like back home in wherever you came from, population 6,042.
So you stay in L.A. or Los Feliz or West Hollywood, hanging on as part of the glittery nightlife that passes for real life, enjoying the dead desert wind and smog-filtered afternoons that pass for golden California; you stay through your new family’s overdoses, doomed Vegas weddings, bankruptcies, and spikes of hope; all of you living for the next call, the next brush with career
something
. And when there’s just a few of you left, after
years
of holding on to each other’s dreams and promises and the next audition, 80 percent of those valiant, tenacious, bet-everything souls hit the wall … career finito. Your dreams and family are over. Then you die or you run.
I ran. Got so scared one night on the Santa Monica pier that I didn’t bother to pack; ran ocean to ocean, to New York. But when I got there I couldn’t quit, couldn’t
transition out
as they say at the SAG office on Wilshire. A fellow actor once said that
the life
wasn’t a lot different than a heroin addiction, Hollywood just takes longer and the methadone clinics are waitress jobs.
Rain continues to sheet. The street’s a blur. I wipe at my fogged windshield and drop my window, downshift, and—POP, POP, POP echoes somewhere in the grainy streetlights. Gunshots? Mirror check. Robbie Steffen doesn’t care that I’m an actress; he’ll be coming for me. Can’t go home; Robbie will figure me for home.
My radio crackles. Billy Idol and band pound into “L.A. Woman” circa 1992, tonight’s gunshots, Billy and me doing Hollywood déjà vu:
“Another lost angel … City of Light … City of Night.”
POP, POP, POP.
Back then the Hollywood dream was my fix-everything plan. Erase it all—my da, the Four Corners, the sunny California runaway years that followed … backseats of rental cars, teen modeling offices, the afternoon dinner-vigils at supermarket Dumpsters. All gone. Coleen would see the marquee lights, she and I would build a
serious
actress. Add regulation 34C’s from the best guy I could afford in West L.A., the strawberry blond hair from a salon on Sunset. And the teeth—a $16,000 smile I agreed could be billed one weekend a month in Palm Springs. Aspiring actors and actresses call those weekends paying the dentist, or the plastic surgeon … or the rent if things get bad enough.
Oh, and they can. Be a runaway in the City of Angels for a year or two. Rely on the kindness of strangers.
Swallow
. Gun on my lap—my new solution? No. No. Not a … or a victim, an actress,
the lead
in
Streetcar
.
Actress. Actress. Actress. When I stepped off that bus into Venice Beach I was fourteen, scared and alone, but would’ve laughed out loudhad anyone told me how far I’d go to become an actress. But promise something every night, crave it down to your heart and soul, more than food, sex, and safety, and a teenager starts to see things differently. Flirting with the devil seems doable … or as things begin to unravel,
survivable
. But by then you’re often alone in a dark room with something the old you couldn’t quite have imagined, and he has his hand out.
So you pay him—and you never, ever talk about it—and just for that one time, never again. And like the thousands of ingenues who preceded me, each time I confronted the
next
time, I closed my eyes tighter. And buried deeper those parts of me I wanted to keep real and mine. And paid him again. I said yes.
Yes
to the City of Angels—her casting calls and lineups, and readings when you could get one, each office or waiting room electric with preparation and hope … and then invisibility. I said
Yes
to the big theaters with bright marquee promises and darkened empty seats, heartbreaking voices saying “Thank you for coming”—because that’s all an aspiring actress does every day until she
aspires
so hard and so often she can’t remember which parts of her are the real ones, not with any certainty, not like back home in wherever you came from, population 6,042.
So you stay in L.A. or Los Feliz or West Hollywood, hanging on as part of the glittery nightlife that passes for real life, enjoying the dead desert wind and smog-filtered afternoons that pass for golden California; you stay through your new family’s overdoses, doomed Vegas weddings, bankruptcies, and spikes of hope; all of you living for the next call, the next brush with career
something
. And when there’s just a few of you left, after
years
of holding on to each other’s dreams and promises and the next audition, 80 percent of those valiant, tenacious, bet-everything souls hit the wall … career finito. Your dreams and family are over. Then you die or you run.
I ran. Got so scared one night on the Santa Monica pier that I didn’t bother to pack; ran ocean to ocean, to New York. But when I got there I couldn’t quit, couldn’t
transition out
as they say at the SAG office on Wilshire. A fellow actor once said that
the life
wasn’t a lot different than a heroin addiction, Hollywood just takes longer and the methadone clinics are waitress jobs.
Rain continues to sheet. The street’s a blur. I wipe at my fogged windshield and drop my window, downshift, and—POP, POP, POP echoes somewhere in the grainy streetlights. Gunshots? Mirror check. Robbie Steffen doesn’t care that I’m an actress; he’ll be coming for me. Can’t go home; Robbie will figure me for home.
My radio crackles. Billy Idol and band pound into “L.A. Woman” circa 1992, tonight’s gunshots, Billy and me doing Hollywood déjà vu:
“Another lost angel … City of Light … City of Night.”
POP, POP, POP.
Back then the Hollywood dream was my fix-everything plan. Erase it all—my da, the Four Corners, the sunny California runaway years that followed … backseats of rental cars, teen modeling offices, the afternoon dinner-vigils at supermarket Dumpsters. All gone. Coleen would see the marquee lights, she and I would build a
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