Girl Act (2 page)

“Is it loaded?” I asked.

When you screw an actor and you’re an actress, you can go on for hours with trashy, over-the-top dialogue, because unknown/semi-working actors never ever get enough lines.

“Why don’t you find out,” he said, as he took me by my arm and yanked me off the trail and in the direction of the mountainside that didn’t face the Hollywood Hills houses.

“I’ll have to search you, Miss,” he said.

“Sure, Officer, you have to follow police procedure.”

He faced me against a tree, pressing the side of my face into the thick bark as he spread my legs apart, the way they do on all cop TV shows and in the movies.

“You better not be packing,” he said.

“Just a kumquat, Officer,” I replied, innocently.

He slid his hand up my right thigh, then my left and gradually into my crotch, where he dug like he was planning to bury something deep. My face still touching the tree, I played the tough girl part, not the victim. “Go ahead cuff me.” And he did cuff my hands behind my back. Then he unzipped my jeans and yanked them down to my knees, gripping my butt with too much force, but still I kept my moans silent. And then he unzipped himself with one hand, slid a condom on and put his erect fleshy gun inside me.

The actor/grip/cop discharged enough seeds to fertilize a troupe of wanna-be actors or politicians on my ass and down my thighs. When we finished, he pulled back up my jeans and un-cuffed me. Then he spun me around—my face checkered from the imprint of the bark, my lips puckered and my eyes beaming.

“Stay out of trouble, or next time I’ll arrest you,” he said.

“Uh, uh,” I stammered, feeling sticky, smelly and oh-so-human. He left the condom on the ground. I know it wasn’t environmentally correct to litter, but it was erotically exciting to see it.

Off I went back down the trail and onto Commonwealth Avenue again, over to Prospect Avenue and onto Rodney Drive, leaving him to exit the park on his own, as every good cop should do. A month later he booked a movie in New York, and dropped by to give me his cop uniform, as a memento—I had to keep it.

The very last time I ever heard his voice was from LAX; he left a message on my machine just before his plane took off.

“Vivien saw a broken down school bus in Torrance and thought of screwing you seat-by-seat, finishing you off against the steering wheel.” I had to smile, and I saved the message. When I got lonely, I’d play it over and over. The crappy thing is that when you use the phone company’s voice mail system, it only lasts a little over two weeks and I went on to be single way longer than that.

The shower was off and the Tennis Actor was standing in front of me, just staring at me.

“I’m hurrying up, don’t worry,” I said, as I slipped on a cotton dress and then reached into my closet where I still kept the cop uniform on the top shelf and grabbed my yoga clothes. I followed the Tennis Actor out the door with my trusty rescue dog, Shadow. No one really noticed us at Starbucks; the morning crowd had dispersed.

The Tennis Actor drove to the public tennis courts in Griffith Park, taking Shadow with him—which was one of those sweet things I dug about him—while I walked up to Yoga Vibe over on Hillhurst. The morning group was in and we did our sunrise salutations, our downward dogs, and while I lay in meditation I realized that I, the ‘official callback actress,’ was finished with Los Angeles, AKA Hollywood, with all its hype, propaganda and buildup of ‘maybe gonna make it BS’ and all the actors, producers, directors and studio heads.

Afterwards, I talked to Carol, the yoga goddess, whose broad boned body was extra fit, and I said, “I’m done with LA, I need to move away.” She grinned at me, not saying a word. I stood there, thinking, and then I said just as if it was common news to everyone but me, “I’m not amounting to anything here. Not even sure I have a purpose anymore.”

She took a deep breath in and out and then said, “Sometimes, we have to go home to begin again.”

Carol proceeded to tell me how she had been a Wells Fargo Bank teller for five years, and then spent a year as a co-manager at a finance company with her then husband, but one day, she stumbled in the middle of a supermarket aisle, and while lying on the linoleum floor had a panic attack, where she couldn’t stop shaking, trembling and sobbing. By chance or luck, the man, who sat down next to her on the supermarket floor trying to help her, was a yoga teacher, and he taught her how to breathe, how to steady her heart rate and calm her racing mind, right there while other shoppers looked on. Within three months she was divorced, living with her sister and studying various types of yoga.

“Look for the signs, they will appear,” she said.

“Really, will they?” I asked.

“Hold your thoughts up to the sky to have the answers shown,” she explained. I left her and the Yoga Vibe feeling hopeful, but still a bit bewildered.

I met the Tennis Actor back at my studio apartment; he was off to an audition for Crest Whitestrips. I had watched him place the strips across his upper and lower teeth—maybe he was trying ‘Method’ commercial acting.

“They work, don’t they?” he asked as he held up the Polaroid ‘before’ shot he had taken. I said, “I’m buying!”

He washed his mouth and smacked on some aftershave that smelled expensive. I counted to ten in my head and then I said, “I’m tired of LA.”

He just nodded in agreement as he put on his brand new khakis and his new pale blue button-down shirt. He never wore the same outfit to an audition unless it was a callback. He had new clothes at my place and at his, and at his best friend Aaron’s house—a hard-nose screenwriter who claimed to have used my ‘weirdness’ for two of his screenplay characters. I gave Shadow a dog chew and took off my clothes, at last ready for a hot shower. He ignored that I was twisting my nipples for sensation, understanding my continual need for pleasure.

I had heard all about body piercing and had once met a British guy (who looked as if he could double for the actor Tom Hardy) at the bar over on Cahuenga Boulevard that used to be called the Burgundy Room—he had just gotten a cock ring.

And when I asked, “Does it look cool?” He unzipped his pants and pulled out a firm cock with a silver ring through the tip of it.

And I had to admit it looked really attractive and not at all strange. Everything sooner or later appears normal. At least, in Los Angeles.

“Bled for two frigging days, now it’s all right; thanks for asking to see it. Luv,” he said proudly. It’s cute how the Brit’s use the word ‘luv’ instead of ‘babe’ or ‘honey’.

And I said, “Looks totally cool,” and then we continued drinking our beers til the bar closed, and no, he didn’t ask me over to his place. So how it feels to touch or how a condom fits over it, I still don’t know.

“Wish me luck!” the Tennis Actor hollered.

“Luck!” I yelled, and then stood by my window watching him walk away. He wasn’t in love with me, nor I with him, just a good, good guy. And yes, he would make it just fine without me.

I had gotten tired of the East Coast years and years before. At that time, I was living half a block from Chinatown in Manhattan, and had decided that I needed to go out to Hollywood, California, and be in the movies. It was either New York or Los Angeles and I had already done NYC, and my best friend Paloma had said, “You need to chill out from NYC for a couple of years. Maybe Hollywood is the right place for you.”

It was my Aunt Helen who had suggested that I go out to Los Angeles as an adventure.

She said, “If you live by palm trees, you’ll feel something new. Los Angeles has palm trees, rows of them.”

Paloma added, “Go for it!”

And fortunately, Aunt Helen had given me the four thousand dollars to fly across the country with, money that allowed me to rent a single studio apartment (as in the one on Rodney Drive) and even to buy an eight-hundred-dollar Toyota hatchback, circa 1975, and, boy, did it look dated. Coincidentally, classic/vintage is in in LA.

I waited tables at Universal’s cafeteria on the studio lot (yucky if you’re an actress, because you feel invisible and horribly obscure). I would have done temp jobs but I’m a one handed typist—(I’ll explain why later on). Anyway, a year later I quit, because I met an art model named McKenna from Memphis, who suggested that I become an art model like her. Number one reason; the flexibility of hours would allow me to go out on more auditions. Number two; I had curvy hips, shapely thighs, and even a soft belly (not a camera-thin/anorexic actress body, but the really fleshy, rounded butt kind).

“You have an hourglass figure, the painters will go nuts over you. You have to become an art model,” McKenna informed me.

She was tall and thin; she had the ‘Egon Schiele’ artist-type body and had made a fantastic career of it.

So I said yes, which normally is what I say, because my best friend Paloma had once told me a story of how John Lennon had gone to see some art at an apartment in Manhattan and he had seen a carved sculpture on the wall that said “yes,” and, as he went out on the rooftop—there stood Yoko Ono. She had made that work of art.

Okay, so who knows if the story was or is true, but when in doubt, act ‘as if’. Even if it wasn’t, it had worked for me. Starting out saying “yes” just made life easier than saying “no”. No is a two-letter word that every actor, director, producer, or screenwriter hates to hear.

The phone rang, pulling me away from the window and out of my deep thoughts. It was the painter, Kenneth. He needed me to pose for a few of his friends in Venice; his other model had unexpectedly canceled, leaving them stranded for a muse.

“How fast can you get here?” he asked.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Unless I fly, and then, well, that’s a minute or two,” I said.

He liked my wry, okay, really dumb, humor. Everyone knows in Los Angeles, that to get to the West Side (Santa Monica/Venice/Marina Del Ray), it takes less than an hour when there is no traffic and up to two hours when there’s traffic. The key is going when there’s no traffic and taking the 10 Freeway or Sunset Boulevard all the way there. So I dried off from a quick warm shower and put on my black DKNY dress and gave Shadow an extra dog treat. I had already done the art schools from Pasadena to Brentwood, and after just a year, I was only working for private artists.

It was then that I decided to see if I could borrow some extra paint from Kenneth to paint my own “YES”. Maybe if I hung it up, I’d get the answer to where I was to go after I left LA.

Kenneth is one of those realist painters, where everything looks as if you could snatch it off the canvas. There were two other painters, a guy, older than Kenneth, originally from somewhere in Russia, who did charcoal drawing that blurred real images with an imaginative bent and a local California artist Kenneth had known for years, who laughed a lot and told jokes when everyone took breaks.

Kenneth’s studio was the quintessential artist studio, the kind a set decorator would die to use as a movie location: enormous open space, museum white walls, a model block in the middle with several old easels set around it, a lengthy steel counter with a stainless steel industrial sink against the far wall, a very used and trusted coffee maker brewing for the billionth time, a slouchy, worn out leather couch with a Mexican blanket draped over it, a black leather club chair, a single metal bookshelf with stacks of art books, a stereo, and no TV. The tiled bathroom had a shower, a toilet, a cobalt glass sink and gray bath towels.

Large finished painted canvases were stacked against the walls close to the door. A wooden table with four heavy ornate chairs was where I’d sit with Kenneth and the Russian artist, while the California guy moved around us, never standing still. It had always gone that way.

I arrived to a warm bear hug from the 6’2”, sweet-faced Kenneth. To win him over to using me as his art model, I had had to prove myself. The key to being an art model is simple and challenging at the same time. A set of three B’s: Being able to contort the body. Being able to hold the pose fifteen to twenty minutes without moving. Being able to go right back into the same pose after a short break, without changing the level or position of any part of the body. I had first posed for one of his ex-wives, also an artist, who told him about me, and that’s how I started posing for him and attaining all three B’s for twenty-minute stretches at a time.

There’s that thing I like so much, when you meet someone new—and it just doesn’t take long to feel a kind of closeness, as if you knew him/her for years. Kenneth and I had that; we just dug each other as subject and artist. He liked my curvy hips, my breasts and my imperfections, which incidentally make an art model worth drawing. Supermodels need not apply, imperfections rule on canvas every time. I trusted him so I had allowed him to take photos of me, for future work.

So there I was, heading into Kenneth’s small bathroom to put on my Chinatown-bought silk robe while the artists took their positions behind easels. A crimson velvet chair stood on the raised model platform, otherwise known as the model block. A minute later I walked toward it, taking off my robe and letting it fall to the floor.

Being naked in an artist’s studio or art classroom is a thousand times different from pole dancing at Cheetah’s on Hollywood Boulevard or any other ‘live nude girls’ place. No one is there to get horny. Artists see beyond the T&A; in fact, they notice the color of the areola, the size of the nipples, the contour of the thighs, the outline of the veins, the nape of the neck, the slope of the shoulders, and the hair that sprouts in whatever shape, length and color above the vagina. An art model doesn’t jiggle, she stays motionless, and that’s what I did as I faced the chair, and twisted my wide hips out so my breasts showed and my neck arched. I held one hand on the chair where I was pivoted and the other above my head, my fingers curled toward the painters. I heard Kenneth’s guttural noises of approval, since, I knew what type of poses he liked and tailored them for him. “Ahhhhhhhhhh,” he said. That’s probably the fourth unspoken key to art modeling: being able to anticipate the pose an artist wants.