Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (15 page)

“But, how did you know my parents number?”

“I remembered it.”

For four hours we caught up on ten years.

“Did you see me on TV?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“Well…”

“What was the first thing you saw me on?”

“Uh… I think it was a Supercuts commercial.”

“Really? That was like the second thing I was ever in, like ten years ago. Wait. I didn’t even have any lines. How did you know it was me?”

“You were walking into the Supercuts store in a big group. I knew it was you.”

“Wow. What did you think?”

“I thought, ‘She did what she set out to do.’”

“Weren’t you surprised?”

“No. You always did what you set out to do.”

“Wow. Did you see me on
SNL
?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“When I was first on Johnny Carson did you see me?”

“Yes. I went to work the next day and the SWAT team guys were talking about you.”

“What were they saying?”

“Something about a pretty blonde who was doing a handstand or something. I told them I was once engaged to you and they didn’t believe me.”

“That is so funny! Do you like being a policeman?”

“It’s fulfilling.”

“Aren’t you scared being on the SWAT team?”

“Well, we’re highly prepared. But sometimes it gets a little rough.”

“Didn’t you get shot? My mom said you got shot.”

“Yes. A while back.”

“Where? Did it hurt a lot?”

“It was my finger. We were doing a raid on a cocaine cartel and my partner actually fired a round and the splash flew back and just missed my face and hit my hand. The tip of my finger went into the ceiling. They found it and sewed it back on.”

“Wow. I can’t believe it. Were you in the hospital a long time?”

“Yes.”

“My mom said your marriage isn’t very good. What happened?”

“Well, actually, Viv and I aren’t really living together now.”

“What happened? Why didn’t you have kids?”

“Well, she didn’t want any. We seem to have separate lives. She goes out after work with her friends and I go out with mine.”

“To bars?”

“Well, sometimes.”

“I started drinking.”

“I have an occasional
Johnny Walker
.”

I laughed loudly. I figured my worldliness might be the deal breaker. “I like chardonnay. I started smoking too, just when I’m nervous and Scarlet isn’t around.”

“I have an occasional cigarette. I’m smoking a cigar right now.”

“What happened to us? I feel really guilty about it.”

“Me too.”

We sent cards and letters to each other throughout the next year as our divorces became final. We had both saved our love letters from long ago. The colorful paper stacks covered in familiar handwriting were growing again. Paul sent me a 5x7 of him in his police uniform with his serious little face and his humble little shy smile on it. He really is a public servant. It fits him. He has a servant’s attitude. His complete lack of ego and pride was so refreshing after all the self-absorbed actor types I had met over the last few years.

As April approached, Mom invited me down to Miami to attend her church’s Easter play.

“Mom, I’ve seen the story of Jesus for thirty years now and… wait a minute, I could see Paul again. Okay.”

Baby Scarlet and I flew to Miami and checked into the Sheraton Bal Harbor. I didn’t like staying at my Mom’s house. My old room had turned into a museum for her doll collection. From the floor to the ceiling on all four walls were thousands of tiny faces and eyeballs that stared at you in bed. The room smelled like mildew because the thousands of plastic bodies held trapped humidity in them. On all my high school and college notebooks (you know, those dreamy, teenage doodles of hearts, arrows, initials, and sketches of your dream house with the smokestack?), which I still had, Scarlet Wessel was scrawled as the name of our first child. My other dream names sounded like romance novels: Beaumont, Chadwick, Heathcliff, Bonnie Jocelyn, and Joy Adorea!

I was very thin. I couldn’t eat because I was nervous A.F.K.A.S. would kidnap my baby. The divorce proceedings were getting ugly. I had a feeling that all my hard-earned
SNL
money would soon be disappearing right before my eyes. Paul and I were going to re-unite. I was thirty. Better late than never.

Two years earlier, when I was doing the movie
Casual Sex?
I heard the music of Tom Waits for my first time. A young female production assistant was assigned to drive me to the set every morning and back home at night. Tom Wait’s strange, gravelly voice was pouring out of the VW bug dashboard.

She said, “Do you like Tom Waits?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “Tom Waits.”

“Oh, is that a singer? Is this him?”

Right then the song “Martha” started playing.

Operator, number please.

It’s been so many years.

She remembers my old voice

while I fight the tears.

Hello, hello there, is this Martha?

This is old Tom Frost

And I am calling long distance.

Don’t worry ’bout the cost.

Cause it’s been forty years or more now.

Martha, please recall.

Meet me out for coffee

where we’ll talk about it all.

And those were days of roses,

poetry and prose

And Martha, all I had was you,

and all you had was me…

The sun was setting on the Laurel Canyon Mountains as we barreled down the 101 Freeway. Sunset is called the “golden hour” in movie making because the natural light gives your skin an attractive golden glow. It’s the best time to shoot close-ups. I had just learned that on the set. I glanced at my face in the car’s side mirror. I was exhausted and so happy. I was shooting my first lead role in a movie. I had lots of lines. I had fourteen-hour days. I was getting so good at this acting thing, I could almost cry on cue. I had a mansion on Lookout Mountain; a happy, curly headed two-year-old baby girl; and a glass of wine waiting for me by my fireplace. I had a hit TV show (my second season of
SNL
), lined up in September—the guarantee of another year of big, fat checks. I had a home on the east coast and good churches on both coasts. I was missing one thing: romantic love.

And I feel so much older now.

You’re much older too.

How’s the husband and how’s your kids

You know that I got married too.

Lucky that you found someone

to make you feel secure.

We were all so young and foolish.

Now we are mature

And those were days of roses,

poetry and prose

And Martha, all I had was you,

and all you had was me…

Tears streamed down my face. The song was talking to me. My driver glanced over, “He’s good, isn’t he?” I was embarrassed because I couldn’t make my tears stop. No song can be that good. She’ll think I’m nuts.

“Wow. That is a powerful song,” I said. “It reminds me of my high school sweetheart. I should call him.” I should call him before I’m sixty. I should call him before I’m thirty. My beauty is fading.

What good is anything if you have no one to share it with? Why be in movie after movie pretending to be in love? This was the sixth movie I was in where I had to pretend I loved someone: Joe Pesci in
Half Nelson
, Robert Downey Jr. in
The Pick-Up Artist
, Dan Ackroyd in
The Couch Trip
, Matthew Broderick in
Family Business
, Jerry Levine in
Casual Sex?
, Weird Al in
UHF
, and “Dwayne” in
Baby Boom
. Story after story. Song after song. Really being in love would be better than pretending.

So here it is, years later. I will be seeing Paul again. What should I wear? I don’t want to look seductive. I don’t want to look like a slob. What would be just real? Okay. Shorts and a T-shirt. A little makeup. At 1 a.m., there is a quiet knock on my hotel room door. Paul was just getting off of his SWAT team shift. Another very quiet knock. Paul knew Scarlet was sleeping. I opened the door. He caught his breath.

“Vicki, just let me look at you.”

I started giggling uncontrollably.

Paul just stared at me, and his whole body sighed like he’d just come home from a long journey. He had huge muscles, almost cartoonishly large. He was, as always, immaculately groomed. His acne and glasses were gone. He had contacts. He’d grown into his ears. My best friend was here.

Paul walked in the door and hugged me. He put his gear down, shut the door gently, and then hugged me again. I kept giggling. My whole body was shaking. Paul crept over to the bed, sat next to sleeping Scarlet, and stared at her for a long time. She was five. We went out to the patio. I poured him a
Johnny Walker
from the mini-bar and a chardonnay for myself. We talked on the patio, next to the ocean, under a full moon. At sunrise, Paul gave me his perfect kiss, quietly shut the door, and left. I penned a quick song before slipping into bed next to Scarlet.

Moon over Miami

There’s a moon over Miami,

That shines in the endless sky,

And though I leave, and come, and go again,

It stays until I die.

I never believed in love,

It’s fleeting and shallow.

It comes in a sudden rush,

And leaves you so sallow.

But when I saw you again,

I got drunk on the taste of moonshine.

Drunk in the throes of love,

Never to thirst again.

You were always there,

Waiting for my return.

Now I’m back to stay,

Under the moon over Miami.

We held hands through the Easter play the next evening, and back in the hotel, when Scarlet was asleep, we snuck into the closet and started kissing. We had run out of words.

A few months later, Paul visited me in LA. We had never consummated the love that began so long ago in 1970. Now it was 1991, and the lid just had to blow off the popcorn. We were trying so hard not to do it. We had both only had sex with our spouses, no one else; and not that much with our spouses for that matter. He says I raped him. We ended up on the wooden floor in Laurel Canyon, crying. Both of us. There were fireworks. I was transported to another planet. I could have died happy, knowing the experience of true love reciprocated physically, mentally, and spiritually in a huge explosion of rose petals and violins.
Whew!
He stayed in a hotel that night on Ventura. We were Baptists. We knew it was wrong to have pre-marital sex. We were hypocrites for doing it. But what were the rules now? We were divorcees swimming in the murky waters of in-between land. Divorce isn’t Biblically acceptable unless your spouse cheats on you. We both suspected our spouses of cheating. So, here we were. We better get married quick before we sin again.