I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star (11 page)

There was also no parking lot/garage for my building, and there was no street parking to be found ever, at all, never, at any time. There was chatter about some extra spaces that you could rent in the lot of the building a few doors down, and I did ask to be on the wait list for a spot should one become available—but
it never happened. I had to park blocks and blocks away. Parking blocks away to the west wasn’t as unsafe as blocks away to the east. West was medium, east was bad. I kept weird hours because I was always coming home late from work, or if I wasn’t working, I was coming home late from hanging out with Sean. Most nights I ended up walking several blocks home alone pretending I was Linda Hamilton from
The Terminator
so I seemed tough and un-rapeable.

The building itself was cute. It was old and charming, probably from the 1920s. Every building in L.A. seems like it was built in either the 1920s, the 1950s, or the 1980s, never before, in between, or after those decades. My building had a lot more character than the other buildings on my street (which resembled a run-down set of
Miami Vice
, the series, not the movie), and there was always a healthy amount of sofas on the curb if you felt like lounging with the tracksuited Armenian men who populated “Beachwood Canyon area,” a.k.a. Little Armenia. These men hung out on the curb all day long and into the night. I assumed they were actors too, since they never went anywhere or did anything. I guess they could have been writers. It always confounds me how few people in L.A. seem to have a job to go to. Doesn’t
anyone
work in this town? I find myself yelling this out loud in my car when there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic at 11:00 a.m. on a weekday. Perhaps everyone here is a delivery person of some sort—I still really can’t figure it out.

With all my stuff still in a storage space in Chicago, I pieced together some furniture to make my new apartment a home. I scored a mattress off a production assistant from an independent movie I was shooting when he moved in with his girlfriend and didn’t need it anymore. I got an armchair off the same movie. The producers asked me to work overtime for free, which is fine, but their mistake was asking me inside the vintage furniture store
we had been shooting in. I told them that if they bought me the green chair I had been eyeing all day, I’d do it. It was forty dollars. I worked hours and hours of overtime on that film, no one ever saw the movie, but I still have that chair. I bought a white TV/VCR combo, covered the box it came in with a scarf, and sat the TV on top. Finally, I found some nesting tables and a lamp at a local vintage shop, and I was set. I was happy there. Eventually, I had my stuff shipped out from Chicago, but when it came, I didn’t unpack the boxes for the longest time. I liked living with no stuff, probably due to my mom’s obsessive-compulsive spring/summer/fall/winter clean outs, but whatever the reason it kept my new life very simple. I also thought it would be easier for the potential robbers if they could just carry out boxes instead of having to tear the place apart to find my valuables. Less mess for me.

I tried to make some friends in my building—that didn’t go well. First, there was the gay couple that “watched” my apartment when I would travel. We had a miscommunication. To me, “watch” meant make sure no one steals my shit. To them, “watch” meant steal my shit. I should have figured it out when they told me that they fixed the drawer pulls on my dresser; I would have just thought I’d lent out all my CDs, books, and jewelry. The guy who had the apartment next door clearly had a cockroach problem because he would constantly bomb, which only forced the bugs to run into my apartment. There should be a label on the cockroach-killer bottle that reads, “If you live in an apartment building, be sure to warn your neighbors you’re bombing, as the cockroaches will probably just run next door. They’re not as stupid as you are filthy.” I actually went on a few dates with the guy across the hall. He was cute, but I remembered my mom always telling me not to shit where I ate, and that seemed like what I was doing if I dated a guy in my building. Also, he had lost the hearing in one of his ears, which he said threw off his balance, and
therefore could only stand if there was something he could hang on to or he would lose his balance and fall right over. Perhaps you think me shallow, but at that time in my life I just wasn’t ready for that kind of caregiving in a relationship. He did take me out for Indian food on our first date. I’d never had Indian food before, and I have loved it ever since. My plan was to stay in the building until something great opened up in the actual canyon. I checked the bulletin board several times, but I tend toward laziness. Luckily I met an actress who had a great little place up there and said I could take over the lease when she moved in with her boyfriend. I felt my apartment hunting was done and I could wait it out while eating Slim Jims and drinking Diet Coke with the Armenians on the street sofas. What I didn’t anticipate was how long it was going to take her to actually move in with her boyfriend. It took a
really
long time. Like, over a year. But eventually she did, and I finally got to move to actual Beachwood Canyon.

The upgraded apartment was in a house that had been divided into three separate units. It was a little more expensive but totally worth it. It had a huge bedroom, a little living room, a tiny kitchen, weirdly, two full bathrooms, and quarter laundry in the building next door I was allowed to use. I called it my tree house and I loved it. But what I loved most didn’t have anything to do with the apartment; it was that I finally had a parking space to call my own. In the driveway. Right in front of my door. That only I was allowed to park in. This was major. I was right around the corner from a charming café and an overpriced market and right under the Hollywood sign. If the wind was right, I could probably have hit it with a well-constructed paper airplane.

Ironically, the location, what I longed for most of all, turned out to be the only problem with my new apartment—and it was a life-and-death one. Literally. When I was waiting to find my tree house, it never occurred to me that the Hollywood sign was
a major tourist destination, that the only street I could take to get home thousands of people would drive their cars halfway up, pull over, and run into the middle of to photograph the sign. Huge tour buses of elderly people, foreign tourists, children, all jumping out of these buses, cars, vans, and walking purposefully, not looking both ways, into the middle of the main artery for this neighborhood, to take a shitty photograph of the Hollywood sign. Or, better yet, to have someone else photograph them under the sign pretending they’re holding it up! But what I really came to resent were the looks of apology that people would feign as they darted out in front of my car. One day, after I almost killed an elderly Asian tourist, I vowed to go to every bookstore I ever passed for the rest of my life and rip out the chapter in all the tour books that tells you to stand in the middle of that street for a great shot of the Hollywood sign. Tour book writers: STOP FUCKING WRITING THAT! YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR READERS KILLED! I did a spit take one day when I found out that there was talk of lighting the Hollywood sign. The community was really against it for historical reasons. I was against it because when it was dark out, and the most dangerous time for potentially hitting a tourist, there were no tourists since the sign was not visible at night. Thank
God
. I had just about as much as I could handle during the day. People, if you find yourself going to L.A. anytime soon, please just buy a postcard photo of the sign. I am not saying to not drive up there and see it, sure, do that. Get a coffee at the café, or even better, go horseback riding at Sunset Ranch and take a million photos of it from the trail on your horsey ride, but please, I beg you, do not exit your vehicle and stand directly in the middle of a road and take a picture. If you ignore this warning, I promise you will hear obscenities being screamed at you from the swerving cars.

However, none of these screaming people will be me. No, I
have since moved on. I now have a less interactive view of the sign. I can still see it from my front yard, but I no longer fear committing homicide every time I drive home. When I was finally looking to buy a place, I saw so many different houses in so many different neighborhoods. I wanted to get away from the “sign.” I wanted to get away from the helicopters, cockroaches, and thieves. But in the end, like the crime family to Michael Corleone, it pulled me back in. My house was the only one I could find that I could afford. Call me superstitious, but maybe since I had made it this far staring at those famous white letters every day, I shouldn’t leave it behind just yet. I wonder if that iconic sign was somehow watching out for me as much as I was forced to watch out for its fans, and I realized I just wasn’t ready to leave “Hollywood” for good.

I think it was once I bought my house that I really felt at home in Los Angeles. Moving to L.A. is really hard. I had an easy time getting work, but fitting in and making friends was another story. I wanted a home, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in Hollywood. I didn’t want to get hurt and have an awkward breakup with it. I wanted it to be a clean split if it happened. And to me, a clean split meant not settling in. But time passed, and not settling in started to mean I wasn’t committing completely to my work and my life here, and I was ready to commit. Besides, at a certain point I had no other skills and nowhere else to go. When I told people I couldn’t get another job besides acting, that I wasn’t qualified for anything else, they’d often say, “Oh, please, if you can use Excel, you can get a job.” This proves my point because I didn’t (and don’t) know how to use Excel. I had no friends left in Chicago or Detroit, and I couldn’t use this famous Excel people spoke so highly of, so I reluctantly found myself at home in L.A.

When I look back at my first five years in Los Angeles, I don’t
think it was the places I lived and their unique disabilities that kept me from feeling at home—I think it was that fear. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid this town would eat me up, but while I was fighting it and not paying attention, I was planting roots. Time goes by fast in Southern California. I blame the weather. It’s pretty much always warm and sunny, and the seasons are so mild you blink and it’s been five years, blink again and it’s ten. It’s hard to track time here, because it doesn’t change much. Leaves stay green and they stay put, and by accident I did too.

WHEN I LANDED MY FIRST PROFESSIONAL ACTING
job and had to join SAG, the actors’ union, my given name was Judy Evans. My full legal name is and always has been Judith Therese Evans. For some reason, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) insists my middle name is Laura—but it is wrong and, it turns out, impossible to bargain with. At the time I joined the union, you could only have one name per member, and there was already a Judi Evans; she was on my awesome babysitter Shirley’s soap,
Days of Our Lives
, which made it my soap, too. Judi Evans played Adrienne Kiriakis, a real pillar of the
Days
community, and in the early days of my career (and life) I didn’t feel comfortable using our shared name. She had it first and she was really good. I had a decision to make. I could be Judith Therese Evans, Judith T. Evans, Judy Therese Evans, Judy T. Evans, or, as my mom’s side of the family called me to avoid confusion with my aunt, Baby Judy. And even though, legally, all of those options except Baby Judy could get me on an airplane using my driver’s license, all those names felt like someone else’s.

Having three names felt too fancy, and I am not fancy. Being called Judith just made me feel bad about myself because the only time I ever heard it was when I was in trouble and my dad went full name on me, or when the kids in school yelled “Judas Priest!” in the halls when I walked by. I had a long talk (approximately eight minutes) with my parents about changing my name from Judy Evans, and we decided I should stay Judy but change the Evans to a different family name.

My dad’s mom’s last name was very Serbian and hard to spell and pronounce. So that was out. I still have no idea how to spell it. However, my mom’s grandmother’s last name was McGuire. Judy McGuire had a cute ring to it. The fact that I was drinking Guinness in Irish pubs all over Chicago at the time might have had a little something to do with my decision as well. On the night I settled on my new name, I fell asleep (passed out) happy with my new identity and excited about the future of Judy McGuire. The next afternoon, I arose from my drunken slumber to find a giant billboard right outside my window of Tom Cruise, laughing in his sunglasses, with two giant words next to his giant face: Jerry Maguire. In fact, the entire city of Chicago was painted with posters and billboards of it. I felt like I was in a
Punk’d
episode—everywhere I went, there was my almost-new name, sides of buses, benches, posters plastered all over construction site walls, phone poles. Maybe they did this for every movie, but with this one I felt bombarded; it seemed like overkill.