Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (14 page)

D
riving away from Connecticut in my convertible Saab, I sobbed and sobbed. My body was doing this. My mind didn’t want to. Moving out of my other home in Laurel Canyon was so difficult, I got a tattoo as a permanent physical symbol of my unbearable, emotional pain. Why am I leaving two homes and a stellar career
?

Because I’m in love.

Lorne said I could stay at
SNL
as long as I wanted, but my cast-mates, Dana, Jon, Jan, Nora, and Dennis, were leaving. We were burnt out. We had to write our own material and you can only have original ideas for so long. My contract was for five years, and I’d stayed six.

As a last hurrah, I wrote a piece for
Update
where I showed my diamond engagement ring and sang
I Love a Cop
, with the words written on my legs to display in a handstand. I had done a handstand as a Christmas tree and another with the American flag on my butt. The handstand theme was exhausted.

I was also going through a divorce and didn’t want my little Scarlet to be left with babysitters as her home split up.

I also had a “holding deal” with Gail Berman, Sandollar (Sandy Gallen and Dolly Parton) and Fox. I was being paid $60,000 to wait while they wrote me my own sit com: my original goal in going to Hollywood. George Clooney was cast as my boyfriend, the taxi driver. My character was a single mom from the Midwest who gets a job in Las Vegas as a showgirl. As the year passed, we read the “pilot” to the three big networks. They “passed” on it. George Clooney told me that this was his twelfth pilot. He then got the series
ER
, and the rest is history. I hear he’s doing well.

The first time Paul flew to NY to see me at
SNL
happened to be the night he shot and killed the first man of his career. Maybe he was anxious to see me, or something. Anyway, he had to stay up all night filling out paperwork and getting counseling. I guess that’s what happens when you kill somebody. Actually, a woman was being shot at by her husband because she wouldn’t “wife swap” anymore. She called 911 and the SWAT team arrived. The drunk husband aimed his gun at Paul, who responded by shooting him straight through the heart with one bullet from forty feet away.

Paul hadn’t slept all night, and when he came to the stage, I was getting out of an alien spaceship with eyeballs on my nipples because we were doing a sketch about a planet where women’s eyes have mutated to their breasts because men stared at women’s chests for so long. Remember that one? Kirstie Alley was our leader. “When it’s cold, we can see better.” I ran up to Paul and said, “This must be so surreal for you… to kill a man, and not sleep, and the spaceship and all.”

“Yes, it is,” Paul said in his deep, monotone, cop voice, devoid of all emotion. The voice he always has. The expressionless face he always has. Actors call it “deadpan.”

I took Paul upstairs and introduced him to the cast. I said, “Hey everyone, this is my boyfriend, the cop!” Paul stood there rigidly with all his ripped muscles and his deadpan face. Mike Meyers goes, “Hey, got any war stories? Hee hee!”

“I killed a man last night.”

Silence.

It was then that I realized how opposite our worlds were. Mine was fantasy. His was reality. But, we both get shot at; me by cameras, him by guns. We both could die; him for real, me onstage (and they’re equally painful). And we both get rewarded for a big bust! That’s something to work with. And we both like donuts.

Paul proposed to me one spring day at the Don Shula Hotel in Miami Lakes. Our courtship involved constant air travel between LA, Connecticut, and Miami: a triangle of love. Under glaring, florescent lights in the kitchen of the hotel suite, while Scarlet was doing cartwheels in the living room, he reached in his pocket and took out a small object. His eyes were so desperately serious, I realized this was the big moment—and stopped him mid-proposal.

“Vicki, there’s no right way or right time to do this…”

“Stop! Later!” I tilted my head toward the spinning Scarlet. I was really thinking how unbeautiful I must look under this bad lighting. And I’d like to change my ‘costume’ and add a little lipstick. Life is a movie.

He stopped, and quietly slipped the small object back in his front jeans pocket.

I thought,
I hope that isn’t a big diamond just lying in there all haphazardly. What if he bends over or something and it falls out?

After we kissed giggly five-year-old Scarlet goodnight around 10 p.m., Paul cleared his throat and approached me while I sat on the couch. I pointed to the ground. He got down on one knee.

“Vicki, I’m sorry for all that you had to go through. You don’t deserve that. We should have been together a long time ago. There is no perfect way to say this, but, would you marry me?” His eyes were so sincere, as they always were. I have never known someone as rock-like: solid, dependable, honest, kind, unselfish, gentle, strong, unwavering, not fluid, not flighty, not fake. Looking in his brown eyes is my favorite pastime. They balance me. Amuse me. Scare me. Steady me. Listen to me. Respect me. And lust for me. The next day in the parking lot as we embraced, I said, “Paul, I could never live here.” There were no show business opportunities. When I visited Paul here, I would tense up as I counted the auditions I was missing back home in LA. Maybe something juicy. Maybe the next
Sound of Music.
Every moment out of that place was a slow death to my ambition and my need for constant stimulation, and to my heart and soul. LA feels like home to me.

He said, “I know.”

I swam in his dreamy eyes, but started thinking practically:
Where would Scarlet start attending school in the fall? Where would we live? Obviously, not in this wasteland—this swamp, devoid of all culture and art.
People come to Miami to lie on a beach, in a hospital, or in a coffin
.

“When are we going to move to LA?” I asked. I still had my house there in Laurel Canyon just waiting for my new Prince Charming to move in.

“I don’t know.”

“When?” I gently demanded.

“Three years,” he said.

That was twenty years ago. I don’t know if he’s keeping me here so I will get fat, or if he can’t leave his mother, or if he is afraid there won’t be any helicopter job openings in LA, or he’ll get a pay cut, or he’ll have to learn new street addresses to chase bad people. Maybe it’s because of his reputation here. In his cop world, he’s a legend: seventy-two recommendations, medals, awards, etc. All I know is that, for some strange reason, maybe hot sex, I suddenly swerved my ambitious one-track mind from stardom to Paul-dom.

Finding Paul again all started at my
Weekend in New England
marriage therapist’s house. The therapist asked me whom I’d like to be married to if I didn’t have A.F.K.A.S.. “Hmm,” I said. “Well, I like Michael Bolton’s mansion a lot, and it is here in the neighborhood, but my Christianity would probably be repulsive to him.” I thought of my high school sweetheart, Paul, and I looked at the mortar and pestle. I think I heard angels singing and violins playing. I think.

Paul and I had been engaged in college for two years. We were Baptist virgins, deeply in love, waiting for our honeymoon night. Paul wasn’t crazy about my show business ideas. It didn’t fit into his future plans, especially if it would require me to kiss other men. I went to LA and our lives took different paths, but we never really broke up. We had unfinished business. Our last contact was that
Dear John
letter Paul had sent me in LA. It was dripping with love for me, even though he was marrying someone else. I must have slipped the letter in my red childhood Bible because it was there ten years later and is now framed on the wall in our bathroom next to the “john.”

I was swimming through my last year of
SNL
, living in LA and CT. Divorce papers were everywhere. The future was a confusing blur of numbers and losses. I would have to lose my savings, lose my houses, my IRA’s (whatever those were), and, on top of it all, try to keep my precious little daughter sheltered from the tragedy. But how could I make her feel safe when her little world was splitting in two?

Attitudes
, a perky woman’s talk show, called my agent and offered me a free trip to my hometown, Miami. I figured my Mom could get a visit from her only grandchild and I could get paid for it. During my interview, they asked me if there was anyone from my past I wanted to look up. I said, “Paul.” They giggled and went to a commercial. I thought maybe I’d put the vibes out there into the airwaves then see what happened. Paul and I hadn’t spoken in ten years and Paul’s dad had recently died of leukemia. He was a popular doctor in our neighborhood who I had worked for one summer. He wouldn’t let me answer his office phone because “People will think my office is being run by a child.” So I was relegated to typing his dictations. He mumbled and he scribbled. Why do doctors do that when people’s lives are in their hands? Dr. Wessel used to give motivational speeches about success to anyone who would listen. One day he told me that my voice would deter my success as an adult, but that he could arrange throat surgery for me that insurance would pay for because my flaw was “congenital”—congenital palatal insufficiency. We had a conference at our family round table and decided I would forego having my throat cut open. No one in my family thought my voice was strange. My highschool speech teacher scolded me for “talking in a baby voice for attention,” but no one else seemed to notice anything odd about it. Besides, what if the doctor made a mistake and I could never talk again?

So here I was in my old hometown, chatting on a TV chat show with my successful palatal insufficiency and thinking about Dr. Wessel and his handsome son Paul, my old flame. We were born in the same hospital. We met in seventh grade. Paul had a briefcase and acne and big ears
.
He had a dry wit and a silent confidence. He had thick glasses too. On our first date, he kissed me goodnight simple and clean, on my doorstep, holding my face in his hands. He wrote me poems and songs. When I was seventeen, I was sent to the hospital for tests to see whether I was a man or a woman because I hadn’t had my first period yet. Paul came to visit me. I was so embarrassed about the whole thing. Next to a refrigerator filled with bouquets for the diseased and dying, Paul looked me in the eye with his deadpan face and said, “Well, I love you, so if you’re a man, I’ll just have to be gay.”

After the silly talk show, back at my Mom’s house, I asked her if she thought it was appropriate for me to call Paul, since he was married and all.

“Well, I hear he’s not getting along with his wife.”

“How do you know that?” I asked curiously.

“Well, Sue at the hospital told me.”

“Why didn’t he have any kids?”

“His wife didn’t want any.”

“That’s weird. We used to name our seven children when I drew our big mansion dream house. Remember that? The first name was Scarlet.”

“Yes,” my Mom said, and she quickly looked up his number in her raggedy twenty-year-old Holly Hobby phone number book.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mrs. Wessel? This is Vicki Jackson. Remember me?”

“Oh. Oh. Well, hello.”

“I know this must be a surprise. I was just in town, and… I’m sorry about Dr. Wessel. He was a great man.”

“Oh, yes. Thank you. He was.”

“I sent him a letter. I don’t know if he got it. I didn’t know what to write so I just sent my picture… and you know, tried to make it light hearted. I just wanted him to know I was thinking about him” (I had sent him my 8x10 from
SNL
inscribed, “Would you hire this girl?”).

“Oh. Uh huh.”

“Uh, I just wanted to say hi to Paul. Do you have his phone number?”

“Oh, Uh. Well, he has a phone machine.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good because then I could just leave my number and he wouldn’t have to call me back, if he didn’t want to.”

“Oh. But his wife answers it.”

“Oh. Uh. Okay, Nevermind. Just tell him I said hi. Okay. Bye.”

I looked at my mom and said, “I don’t think she wants me to call him. She said something about his wife answering the answering machine.” My mom nodded. She didn’t know how these situations were supposed to work either. Is there a book on the appropriate protocol for Baptist ex-virgins who want to say hi to each other ten years after their relationship ended while both are in bad marriages to other people? I just forgot about it. He probably wasn’t the same guy anyway. I knew he was a cop now and I’d heard cops can be pretty worldly.

A month later, Scarlet and I were at my LA house. A.F.K.A.S. was at the Connecticut house. I was fleeing him. He scared me. The phone rang at 10 p.m.

“Hello?”

“Vicki, is that you?”

“Paul?” I knew his voice instantly.

“Vicki.”

“Paul, how did you get this number?”

“Your parents.”

“But, how did you know I called you?”

“I was driving to church with my Mom and she told me you called, so I called your parents to get your number.”