Venus and the Grim Reaper

Astrology and Tarot change the course of my life; while Death is the understudy waiting to seize the lead role as soon as the star obligingly breaks her neck.

I am flailing. Sinking. It is astounding to me now that apart from my time at the American Academy and a semester at NYU, I will never go to college. That just doesn't happen to Jewish people of a certain class. It is an impenetrably idiotic decision, based in my sense that college is frivolous and fun, and so I should embrace the misery of my climb to success.

Or some shit like that.

I just stay in New York, waiting tables, falling into a fantasy life of how I will be Discovered, so I don't need to waste my time going to school. I've lost too much time already, the years being forced to live with my father, and I want to live my real life NOW. The fact that there is nothing at all real about my relationship to life doesn't occur to me. Yet I always seek solace and solutions, often in unorthodox places.

My friend Pam, my partner in the crime of fantasy, is the one who will pay the bill when it comes due. She hears about an astrologer and Tarot reader who's supposed to be fabulous. We both decide to go. I know he will tell me how rich and famous I am destined to become. We make our appointments separately. I go to see him first. He is on the Upper West Side, in a filthy, pack-ratty apartment covered with cat hair.

My reading lasts six hours.

This man knows every goddamned thing about my life and he scares the hell out of me. Abusive dad? Gotcha. World travel? Ditto. But it goes so much farther. I am convinced he can see into my soul. I also get the feeling he wants to date me, but that seems a little beside the point, even though it could be construed as undercutting his principal bombshell, which comes when he asks me what I think is the most important thing in my life, the one thing I can't live without.

I say success.

He shakes his head, getting very, very serious and telling me that it is imperative I understand this: loving and being loved is at the very center of my entire existence, and that without it my life will come to tragedy and early death.

Well. He goes on to say that I currently have a small window of vulnerability in the wall of emotional defenses I elaborately constructed as a young child - that if I don't break through these defenses, if I don't find a way to be closer to people; to my mother, to myself, to someone who will love me unreservedly - if I don't accept what he is saying fully, take it in, truly accept it - if I don't do this - I might never have another chance. Ever.

I am terrified. Particularly since if my life ends in tragedy and early death, that probably implies I won't become rich and famous.

But I know what he says is true. I know he is telling me who I really am. Not who I want to be. Who I pretend to be.

Our schedules keep Pam and me apart for a few days, during which time she has her reading. When we get together and I excitedly tell Pam all about me reading, she is terribly jealous. We both paid the same fee. I got six hours and a life changing experience. She got one hour with a lot of questions about depression.

She doesn't know that her understudy is getting impatient.

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P.B.J. Needs Prozac

Two drama queens find best-friendship amid the dementia of the Pimp Acting Teacher's classes.

My new best friend Pam is under the same spell as I am. We think Carol, the Pimp Acting Teacher, is supernaturally gifted and will make us world famous. It seems a very reasonable expectation to us both; a comment on our mutual insanity.

Pam is an older woman. I am twenty and she is thirty. Pamela Brenda Jacobson (P.B.J.) which stands for her initials as well as her favorite sandwich. Pam and I actually served time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts together without really knowing one another well. But we don't really become close until we are studying with our magic woman. We meet up after our restaurant shifts in separate restaurants most nights at a place on 88th Street and Second Avenue called Cronie's. At two o'clock in the morning we have buffalo wings. I drink scotch. She drinks vodka. During the day we hang out in Greek coffee shops dreaming about the future, reassuring one another how unfair and temporary it is that we aren't being recognized by the world for our essential fabulousness.

Somewhere along the way we start talking about real stuff. We take turns trying to top each other for which of us has the most abuse-filled childhood memory. It's pretty much a draw. Maybe that's the source of our mutual adoration. We're both freaks. Her parents have been in the process of divorcing for something like fifteen years, with her mother accusing the father of creating a secret cabal of judges to cheat her out of what should be rightfully hers.

Pam remembers her father touching her. She is very articulate about how confusing it is, since she remembers loving the attention, loving the physical sensations, loving feeling so special. Then feeling so ashamed.

People don't pop antidepressants yet, not like now, where you aren't eligible to join the Writers Guild without a note from your psycho-pharmacologist.

We don't know how depressed we are. A couple of deaths will change all that.

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An Excess of Enchantment

A female pimp becomes my spiritual and artistic guide. Oh, like that's never happened to you...

After the Academy breaks up with me, I start studying with another teacher, a woman who is introduced to me by an obese agent who declines to sign me, but who meets with me a number of times anyway. I am never able to impress her sufficiently to become a client, I think, because I'm unable to successfully hide my disgust at the agent's habit of eating constantly, spitting out tuna salad or whatever in great globs, while she lectures me about how and why I'll never work as an actor.

I will call the teacher Carol here. I fall deeply in thrall to her in a way I am never able to do with anyone else before or since. She is so much more subtle than the teachers at the Academy. Carol lures us in with her honeyed, enveloping warmth and positivism. I later find out she is sort of pimping the girls in class to wealthy older men. It isn't being a hooker and she doesn't get a cut of the profits or anything, but she knows a lot of men who like to date struggling actresses, older guys who are willing to help them out along the way. They have "scenes." A girl in class tells me about walking into a room at an Upper East Side townhouse dinner party one night and finding Carol on her knees giving some old coot a blow job, gesturing to her student to come on over and join in.

Before knowing all this, and safe anyway, being of another gender, I just think Carol has magic powers. She has a way of nodding and making pronouncements that cut to my heart, defining me with their psychic aptness. Unfortunately I don't now remember anything specific she offers in the way of spiritual-cum-theatrical knowledge, but believe me, at the time, she is the Wiccan of Wonder, who will make my dreams come true as long as I do exactly what she says.

I am deeply and desperately taken in by her wisdom and her continued application of the word "visceral" to describe my work, though I have no idea what she means. I don't ask. Nor do I look up "visceral" in the dictionary. Why take the chance of spoiling the dream?

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Never Surrender, Never Submit

My heroin-addict acting teacher resorts to psychological torture. Is she taking lessons from my father?

I am having a horrible time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. I just can't give in enough, or freely hurl myself into the clutches of the lunatics who teach us. The ones who make me crazy have a creepy intensity, and make demands for submission that feel just like living with the Naked Dad.

So I am constitutionally incapable of surrender, no matter how much I want to succeed, or how hard I try. It just feels like they all hate me, though they are probably all very nice out-of-work actors just trying to get by. Except for the heroin addict. She's nuts. She wants to probe me, like a Vulcan. Her take on me is that I'm too obsessed with how I appear to others and need to free myself. (Well, just because she takes heroin doesn't mean she is without observational skills.)

She does this strange exercise while breathing deeply, turning slowly on one foot, the other held high in the air, her breasts thrown forward, her toes spread apart in a way that makes her feet look webbed - while she inexplicably chants speeches from "Hamlet." Everyone is enthralled. I try to pretend I am too, but I think she's crackers. And her zeal, how it borders on religiosity, is my father, Adam, to a tee.

(When the Jim Jones thing happens Adam turns to my brother Aaron with a smirk, saying he could do that too if he wants, make people drink Kool-Aid and die. Everyone has to have a hobby. I am visiting Aaron and his wife and kids once, and we bring them a packet of Kool-Aid. Oh, how we laugh.)

Another girl in my acting class, also seventeen like me, is having the same trouble as I; neither of us seem able or willing enough to submit. One harrowing day the heroin-driven teacher decides this girl isn't responding to her acting partner fully. She is right about that. But the teacher's solution is to begin following the girl closely from behind, yelling epithets at her, trying to get her to respond. No dice. Then the teacher calls up several guys from the class, including me - though I refuse - and tells them to chase the girl and try to forcibly hold her down against her will and take her clothes off.

"Do you like that?!" The teacher is screaming. "What are you going to do about it, huh?! Wimp! Crybaby!" The point of the whole thing is to get the girl to fight back organically, but to me it's like watching Life with Father, and not in a good way. I'm sitting there getting furious. How dare the heroin addict. How does she know whether the girl is a survivor of rape in childhood or something? How can she set off a bomb in someone's psyche like this? And why is this heroin addict turning into my dad when I am in New York to escape him?

When the dust settles - the girl never fights back but the teacher stops it before it becomes Academy-sanctioned gang rape - the teacher asks the girl why she won't fight back, and her garbled, emotional response boils down to something about not going against what a teacher tells you to do. In the spirit of "If I tell you to jump off a bridge," the teacher tells her to jump out the window. The girl crawls out toward the window ledge. A couple of us drag her back. And... Scene.

The teacher turns to us all and asks if any of us are upset with what has taken place. She singles me out immediately, belligerently saying she knows I will have something to say. Finally we have something to agree about. I tell her she is irresponsible and that what we have witnessed, what my classmate has been subjected to, is a psychological and sexual assault.

I am proud that I stand up to her, even as she sneers at me, daring anyone else in the class to agree with my narrow-minded, literal, anti-artistic position. No one does, though the girl later thanks me for being the only one to think about how she feels.

This is it, my big moment of courage during my first year in New York. I take the issue to the administration who steadfastly defends the teacher and says it is the way they do things at the Academy. That's the end of that romance for me. I can't tell anyone back in Texas. It is my first real failure. It never occurs to me to talk it out with someone, with my mother, to ask her advice. I don't have the vocabulary to admit I don't know something.

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In a New York Minute

My acting teacher is a heroin addict. During a class exercise she pushes her breasts into my back, reaches around to rub my thighs, and asks me what I feel in my groin. Nothing, bitch, nothing at all.

I start classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York when I am seventeen, with more enthusiasm, more energy, and more desperation to prove myself than I now imagine a single human head can contain. I am also a little smug at school since at seventeen I'm the youngest, and there are people I take class with who are already really, really old -- as old as thirty -- and yet I actually have more practical experience than some of them.

I'm very showbizzy already, taking all of a New York minute to embrace the tinsel and glitter of my new life. I yammer on all the time about what is professional, like I would know, and talking about how much I want to be on a soap opera, which isn't an ambition the Academy considers to be particularly worthy.

The move to New York is one of the happiest events in my life so far. I relish the time alone, knowing that each choice I make, every step I take will define the next period of my life. I see myself as a character in a novel. (Any guesses which one? You've got to climb to the top of Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls...) These are the early, struggling years. I am the only person in my acting class with my own apartment in a new building with a doorman and a terrace. Mysterious family money helps me along. I say mysterious because I never know how much there is, how the mechanics of it work, or when I will run out - an event that happens far sooner than I anticipate or than anyone in my family has the presence of mind to tell me. I am turning out like my father and uncle, a chemist, happily making shit out of money.

I don't worry. I am a fabulous waiter. Plus I think often of how fun it might be to become a prostitute.

Mostly, though, my struggles at the Academy consume me. The grim details are for the next blog, but as my horror at the whole Jim Jones-ness of the place grows, I begin to feel more and more strongly that all the teachers and students hate me. I know I hate them. All except my Theater History teacher. Him, I sleep with. And I do make friends with one other student. She kills herself a few years later. But I digress....

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See No Evil

Using a blind girl for protection, I unleash the Beast.

New York looms. When I want to say good-bye to my nine year-old sister Betsy, Adam makes his big play, decreeing that I can only see her if I agree to have this serious talk with him about my life. He has been going on and on about having it for the last year or so, and now, forever using his kids as bargaining chips, is determined to give me what for. For what I don't know. (My grandmother, Beelzebubbe, tells me he sometimes threatens her that she can't see the kids if she doesn't give him money.)

I say okay to the talk but plan a double cross. I have this friend, Shelly Brisbin, also a writer now, who is legally blind. She can see a bit actually, but when wearing dark glasses she looks like she can't see anything at all - which gives her a little bit of a stealthy quality when it comes to observing the people around her. Mismatched debate partners at McCallum, my first school, she and stay friends even when I leave. I decide to take her along with me when I drive up to my father's house. Not just a friend as a buffer, but a BLIND friend! How nasty can things get if I have a blind girl with me when I wiggle out of having the Naked Dad's dreaded talk?

Pretty nasty.

I arrive, my car stocked with food, and pick up Betsy for a picnic at the river. This is in the Texas Hill Country. All roads lead back to that fucking countryside. The father, Adam, doesn't expect me to arrive with a friend, and he is exceedingly nonplused when I take off with Betsy, after staying in his house for no longer than two minutes. We are happily picnicking when I hear the ominous sound of tires on gravel behind me.

The Beast drives up in his station wagon. He wants a word. (Just the one? I doubt it.) In the kind of stage whisper that anyone within five miles can hear he rips into my character, my "fucking" friend, how gutless I am, and how if I don't have "the talk" I'll never see my sister again. Surprising even myself, I start to laugh. I don't know why. I'm still kind of shocked about it to this day. It's just that we've all given him so much power over us, for such a long time, and suddenly his whole control trip just seems sort of funny to me. I calmly tell him I will NEVER talk to him about anything in my life, that his opinions don't matter to me, that I lied about letting him talk to me so I could see Betsy. Then I walk away. I can practically hear his face turning purple behind me, he is that enraged. "Don't you walk away from me, or it's the last time you'll walk away from anything!" God. Not just a ridiculous threat, but a hoary cliche. Can't he do better than that?

I turn back around. "What are you going to do?" I ask, "Shoot me?" And that's it really. What CAN he do? Even though I'm half-convinced he will pull his gun from the glove compartment in the car and do it, I know listening to him tell me about his perceptions of my life would kill me anyway, since it would make my head explode to submit to him. I'd rather chance it here and now, by the river, with my blind pal as witness.

I'm not sure if Shelly ever really forgives me for this day. Warning someone beforehand, as I do, can't really prepare a person for my father. For his bitterness, his violence, and his righteous certainty - the closest thing to religion I know in my childhood.

Betsy and I carry on a surreptitious relationship for the rest of her childhood. For a minute and a half once, when I am nineteen, I attempt a reconciliation of sorts with Adam so I can have more regular access to her. I am visiting Mom and my step-father David in Texas, and I drive out to Adam's. I want peace. He wants influence in my life. And obedience. I decline. That part of my life is over for good. On the way back from my father's I stop at Sonic for a large chili-burger, large fries, lime slush, and chocolate shake. Then I throw it all up.

My Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Which is worse: Bulimia or the bullshit I feed myself about my fabulous life to come?

My best friend at L.B.J. is probably my other bulimia pal, Donna, the one who won't let us vomit in her bathroom. In the end I believe she likes me for who she thinks I am, remaining drawn for all the time I know her to ambitious people who seem surer of themselves than she. A few months into the school year, I let my hair down and tell her how much I obsess over what people think of me, and how insecure I sometimes feel. We stay friends for years after that but our relationship never really recovers from my telling the truth. What I tell her makes her sick - she tells me so - no small thing when bulimia is a casual part of your life.

During that last year of high school I travel for several weeks to audition for schools in New York and Pittsburgh with my brother Aaron as my chaperone. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York tells me right away, right in the room, that I am accepted. That is in April. I return to Austin to finish the year, and then take Tennis and Government in the summer to finish out the credits I need to graduate early.

I spend that last summer dying in the heat, driving to summer school with my friend Julie Kenner, then Beck, who is now a successful novelist. We hang out at her house eating Kraft Macaroni n' Cheese, the sort of processed food that I am never allowed to eat, so it holds an exotic allure for me. (It occurs to me that I may be the only person on Earth to have ever used the words "exotic" and "Kraft" in the same sentence.)

Julie is very indulgent. A couple of years younger than I, she doesn't interrupt my constant babble about how my life in New York is going to be so fabulous. Years later we live next door to one another in Los Angeles where we sort of grow up together, even though we are already grown-ups.

At night during that last summer in Austin, Julie works crew and I act in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the blazing outdoor heat of August. I play Bottom like a demented Marlon Brando. Every moment, every breath for me is about the future. I live so far outside my body it might as well be astral projection.

My mother is resigned to my going to New York but very ambivalent and sad. She can't understand why I don't stay in Texas where I can probably go anywhere on full scholarship. We have been together properly for only six years and I had to fight so hard to make that happen. Maybe I need to leave so that she can remain my fantasy. In planning for New York and during my first years there, as separation looms, my fetish for her returns with a happy vengeance. We shop at Montgomery Ward for my new kitchen. She buys me clothes. We do coke (just the once). Yet I am impatient for my shiny new life to begin. I am so restless I can hardly sleep, and I walk for hours at night near our house, singing to myself, smoking, and dreaming of New York. No one will be able to hurt me there, because I will become an entirely different, new-and-improved famous person. I have that power. The universe will change just for me. Magic. Always the magic. Like dog shit I can't scrape off my shoe.