Girl Act (7 page)

The last stop was the waxing. I got my legs waxed, armpits, and then my pubic area, which was not overgrown so it only took a quick second for her to pour the wax over all of it, wait for it to dry, and then yank it off. Ouch, but a good ouch!

There I was, spanking new and ready to ‘party’ into a new role, a new life. Maybe I was becoming his girlfriend and this was how he was going to be treating me. There had never been any talk about the ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ thing. We were just hanging out, sleeping together, and no one said “I love you,” ever.

I arrived at his Silver Lake apartment. Shadow was staying with my neighbor who had recently broken up with her girlfriend and needed a dog to hang out with—which worked out perfectly. The Tennis Actor/now TV regular money maker was waiting for me with a large Barney’s shopping bag. A fancy box was inside, and I didn’t even have time to sit down; he wanted it opened right away. The dress was red, not my color, had slits, was tight and required my breasts to be pushed upright. Never mind the designer, it was a ‘name’ the partygoers would recognize.

He had me strip and put it on. I think he just wanted to see my breasts smashed like the ‘red carpet’ actresses’ are at every award event or movie premiere. He wore a John Varvatos smoking hot charcoal grey suit, looking handsome, and lean. He rented a sleek silver Porsche Panamera, since he was waiting to buy a new car once the checks started arriving. I would say that it was wild, standing in the red dress and slipping on the matching heels, and that I felt a mix of not being myself, but suddenly ‘playing’ a role—of the sexy girlfriend or lover, depending on which label he was going to use introducing me.

“I’m celebrating booking the TV gig tonight,” he said over and over again, as if convincing himself or instructing himself. Go figure. I just smiled and nodded in agreement.

The party was one of those ‘Hollywood’ parties where the staff has to sign a non-disclosure contract. As in, they never saw drugs of any kind on the property, or in the nose or mouth of any of the ‘big name’ guests. If I thought drugs were sexy, then I’d probably have enjoyed the party.

Okay, so pot’s boring. When I was in high school, I tried it a dozen times, and it made me sleepy and really dim-witted. Cocaine? Oh, I tried it in college, twice, and it just made me want to take off my clothes and screw the end of an umbrella, (which I actually did). Heroin? Never. That stuff’s too brainless for words; I’d never try it.

Heroin (Thank God) was absent at the party. Nine thousand dollars worth of marihuana was at the party; an Oscar-winning actor had brought it to share. How cool is that? Beats me! And the cocaine was not spread out on the marble kitchen counter top—but placed in a silver bowl on the marble kitchen countertop, with baby spoons and rolled-up twenties for snorting it. So Hollywood! I only knew the price of the pot, because someone had whispered it to the Tennis Actor and he, in turn, whispered it to me. Coincidentally, I knew no one else to whisper the pot price to. As for the price of the cocaine, probably half a paycheck for the lead TV actor, otherwise known as the host. The staff was made up of three guys in black and white and a funky female chef in all white, who hung around smoking joints in the kitchen.

The music was provided by a female DJ, and pretty-party-people were everywhere, dressed in expensive clothes. I was introduced to blah, blah and the Tennis Actor went off to mingle (actually, he wanted to get high). I didn’t stop him. Only in Hollywood can you party like a rock-star, free of the fear of getting caught if you’re on private, very private, property. With security at the gates—gotta love that.

I wandered off, searching for a room with books, or art of some kind that I could focus on. He had beat me to it; the movie actor in his late forties, sitting in the den with a book open and bottle of red wine in his powerful hand. The room was over stuffed with teak bookshelves. The walls were antique white, covered with impressionist paintings, a plush couch, etc, etc, you can imagine it all, on top of a large Persian rug.

“Come in and shut the door,” he said in his movie star voice. I did.

“Lock it,” he added. I turned and stared at him.

“I don’t like the noise, 97 percent is bullshit,” he said. So I attached the latch, in this circa 1970s house.

“You got enough cleavage hanging out to nurse a litter of stray dogs,” he said. I glanced down at my pushed up breasts spilling out of the expensive red dress.

“I’m wearing the newest milk-titty-dress,” I said, mocking it and myself.

“Can’t blame the dickhead for buying it. You know, it’s how we’re wired,” he said, giving me the impression that he had bought the same type dress for more than one woman.

“Did you see me when I arrived?” I asked, and he grinned. I had caught his eyes on me as I first entered the party with the Tennis Actor. It wasn’t a flirting look, just a look of eyes-on-eyes in a crowded room filled with pretty people trying to be noticed.

The party blared behind us, the door locked, I was thinking about it being locked, when he said. “Sit down.” I sat across from him, and he passed me the bottle of wine and told me how he used to do drugs; how drugs had been as important to him as banging women, until he almost died of an overdose. I nodded. I had heard the rumors about him. LA is filled with rumors; if you stay long enough and you get lucky, you acquire one of your own.

He went on about the Hollywood machine, the movie business, about greed and about ‘sellout’ actors—actors who took jobs just to pay the mortgage or to keep their lifestyles, even when they hated the part. I liked his voice; I had always liked it on the screen. He moved his hand, motioning me to come closer.

“I want to read you a poem,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied. Then he inched over on the couch so I could squeeze next to him, and I wanted to; it was a strange and larger-than-life moment for me and so I sat on the edge of the couch. He grinned as I stared at his manly, well-defined, movie star features. He stammered, unable to read the poem aloud. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was his nerves, or maybe he just didn’t think he could do justice to Pablo Neruda’s poem,
I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
. He shoved the book forcibly into my cleavage and I took it from him, as his hand fell into my lap.

“Read it,” he ordered in the way he might order a roast beef sandwich at a deli. I read it slowly, uncertain of the words, and as I did, tears welled in my eyes. I felt so inexperienced, reading of the deep love that Pablo Neruda must have known.

The movie actor touched the skin on my exposed breasts. His hands were rough, like a construction workers, but I didn’t mind.

“Makes you want to find that?” he asked, not waiting for an answer, “It’s a risk; screwing is a whole lot easier, give me the book back,” he said, and I did.

He tore the poem out of it, discarding the weathered book of selected poems onto the rug. He took the page with Neruda’s poem on it, folded it, and stuffed it between my breasts. Then he sat up and kissed me on my lips. I almost blurted, “I’m not on a 24b-up,” but I didn’t. I kept my silly, inexperienced worries to myself and kissed him back as if I was in a movie.

The incessant banging on the latched door ended our kiss. He got up, unlatched it, and sauntered out. He had that ‘walk’, that commands attention.

I found the Tennis Actor by the pool under an elaborate ‘safari tent’ that had been created for the party. He was high as a dustball blowing in a tornado. He grinned at me, as he lifted his leg.

“Vivien, pull off my sock and scratch my foot,” he said, and I did.

I had to wait a month for the answer to my destiny. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but I accepted it. There’s always another shade, when at first it all seems bleak and desolate.

“Your Aunt Helen’s dying and she wants you to visit her; she’s been asking to see you. To say her goodbye,” said my workaholic, academic father. His tone was dry, that of a man used to lots of family deaths, his sister being the last of his siblings.

“Sure, I’ll pack up and come East. I needed a reason to leave La-La land,” I said.

“I don’t think you have to give up your LA life and all that,” he said in his usual style of pushing me away.

“I haven’t got an LA life worth holding onto, if you want to hear my truth,” I said.

He was silent. “Then I guess I’ll see you soon,” he replied.

“Yes, you will,” I said, and hung up.

It didn’t take me five minutes to start packing, while Coldplay’s
Fix
You
song blasted on my portable CD player. It was easy to get moving boxes from Craigslist free section. What hadn’t I found, brought or sold off of that mega-classified dot com site? I took digital photos of my very soft bed, my Ikea desk and Ikea futon couch, my porch picnic table and the four chairs. The Tennis Actor showed up when I was halfway done, not a difficult accomplishment in a studio apartment.

“Where are you going? Are you leaving me?” he asked.

“My Aunt Helen’s dying; I’ve got to go to Boston. She needs to see me,” I said without looking up.

“I need you, I want you here,” he said, as if we were part of a soap opera.

“You just signed a contract for a dream acting job, not everyone gets to do that. Meanwhile I’m doing nothing here. If I leave now, maybe I can become an indie filmmaker back in New York, I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m rotting away,” I said, without any great emotion.

“I want you with me, doesn’t that count?” he asked, as if he wanted to force himself to cry.

“Hollywood has your back covered; they want you. Not me! We’ve had great sex, but I’m not your soulmate, you and I both know that,” I said, speaking the truth out loud for once, without blame. After all, love’s a two-way thing.

I had never spoken so straightforwardly; it was as if the words had been packed in the back corners of my mind waiting to pounce, waiting to be let out. Freedom!

“You’re my girlfriend,” he said, as if that had been a fact all along. But I knew I wasn’t that important to him. Sure, I was the only one he was sleeping with and spending every day with, but he had never even suggested that he wanted more with me.

“You wanted friendship with benefits, you said that after we slept together for the first time,” I said.

I was trying to remind him about what had happened five months ago. “Things have changed,” he answered, as if that was all he could think of. Shadow watched us, making sure we weren’t arguing. What a dog! Shadow’s very sensitive to loud voices and the tone of anger. Then again, so am I.

“It’s okay,” I said to Shadow, only the Tennis Actor thought I was talking to him. So he pouted, and then kicked the wall, but not hard. He threw a plastic cup, and then sat down and punched the air and I watched. Good acting is good acting, and a private scene is always a compliment. When he was done, he pulled me onto my bed—which was currently listed for sale online, but I didn’t stop him. He was intense, ripping my bra and my ‘peace’ labeled underwear off, as if the thought of not seeing me again made him extra horny and extra attentive. He was the kind of guy who took to my nipples like a teething newborn.

Sometimes I just give in. I’m easy. I’m a simple slut, and this was one of those times. Hell, I had spent years on-and-off being single, years on-and-off hoping some guy would really want me. A good penis had been, at one time in my life, like looking for Godot and my quest hadn’t been easy.

There’d been the guy at Vassar College that I met while visiting my friend Leah Bloom in Poughkeepsie. He had curly blonde hair, an open face with kiss-able intellectual lips, and a really academic mind that I wanted to lie next to, that I had wanted to listen to day and night. He had asked Leah for my phone number and she told me he was going to call, I waited and waited; I think I waited two months. Incidentally I never bothered going back up to Poughkeepsie. Pathetic is pathetic, and I once was. Of course, my friend Leah told me it was probably for the best; God’s prevention.

And I had had crushes on three no-wins who shall go by commercial titles, as in ‘Mister Clean,’ the ‘Jolly Green Giant’, and the dancing ‘Dr. Pepper’. Mister C. had been the super cute, Chace Crawford type in high school who I had slam danced with, locked eyes with, and who had caused my hips to move in his direction without my mind knowing what they were doing. I swear my hips moved without me thinking about it. Yeah, I was into punk and he had great introspective eyes. He had been too shy to respond to my failed love letters, handwritten (ha, ha) and left wedged in his locker. FYI, never write a guy a lusty letter, because guys chase girls. So I didn’t get to screw him, and out of that ‘rejection’ I screwed a guy I didn’t really know in a closet at a party. Go figure! Yeah, it’s possible to screw fast, hard and without love. I learned later, after graduation, that Mister C. had regretted not going out with me. Double Ugh.

Jolly G. G. was a guy who had been at sea, and hadn’t been laid in a long, long time (over a year). I met him at a New Year’s party at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan and he begged to come home with me, so I let him. He was tall, (a Paul Walker type), and filled with stories of having sailed half the globe. And he was from Martha’s Vineyard. Okay, so it’s true; don’t go to bed with a guy you don’t know. The sex was great; it always is with a man who hasn’t been laid in a really long time. Let’s just say every inch of my flesh was kissed, stroked, and appreciated. He said the usual, “I’ll call you, I want to see you again!” and yeah, I waited by the phone. I started daydreaming about weekends going to Martha’s Vineyard from Manhattan just to be with him. Three months later ‘I got it’, as in ONE NIGHT STANDS ARE STUPID!

And last but not least, Dr. Pep, who was my fault; I blew it. Dr. Pep and I met during a college summer program and we danced to Prince’s hit song,
Delirious
. He was (a Viggo Mortensen type), rugged in a casual way, and ‘true blue,’ as in he told the truth, he hadn’t been corrupted yet. But I was in one of those ‘I don’t deserve a good guy’ phases and pushed him away. My bad! My mistake! Some girls get lucky: it’s one guy and they’re set for life, or it’s a few and then they’re set for life, but for me, it’s a total loaded crap shoot.