The Easter Bunny Gets Real

Who knew? My mother is as addicted to Magical Thinking as I am. She reassures me that I will find love. That I will find myself. Even if I have to retrace my steps 3,000 miles to do it.

Enough is enough. I have to settle down with someone. Three years in Los Angeles go by quickly. My acting career is non-existent, though I do have a fabulous run as the Easter Bunny in a kiddie show. I don't take chances on anything that matters to me. But I'm still in show business since my day-job at a television and film promotional fulfillment company has turned into something resembling a grown-up career. I become a twenty-two year-old account executive, overseeing the distribution of press kits, posters, t-shirts, and various other ad specialty paraphernalia to television stations and video stores. It is better than shoveling elephant shit. If you don't get the reference, go ask someone else in The Showbiz to explain it to you.

I work myself into the ground at my new company, loving the feeling of totally losing myself, of reaching utter exhaustion, of living a kind of martyrdom. When you put in sixty, seventy hours a week, working harder than everyone else, no one can question you about anything you do. I don't want to be questioned. I just want to be right. In control. I am very bossy and some of the people I work with hate me. Maybe "hate" is too strong. They just can't fathom why it all matters so damned much to me, why it is life or death if a press kit goes out on time.

I sleep with my boss a few times, which appeals to my sense of drama since he is in a long-term relationship. I develop deep, if evanescent, crushes; on a slightly dimwitted blonde who works there (who poses nude for an art book and shows me the pictures), on a client at Paramount to whom I send flowers at the company's expense, on a gorgeous television production designer. Nothing comes of any of it.

I work all the time. When I have a free weekend I sit at the beach all day reading and eating hamburgers. A job offer in press and promotion from one of our clients shakes me up. Is this supposed to be my future? Have I spent my whole life dreaming I will live the Jacqueline Susann ideal only to end up writing promotional copy for syndicated television? Okay, so maybe I have needed some stability after my friend Pam's suicide. Maybe the job thing is a good choice. Temporarily. My mother almost kills me when I quit. She has been out to stay for a couple of and has met everyone at work. She sees how much they value me and knows how much I need that. The way she connects those dots touches me. She is a practical lady who cares about things like job security, but when she talks about my job as mattering to me emotionally, as being something important that fulfills a deep need, it dawns on me that she actually understands me better than I imagine. I take a step forward with her and let my hair down and tell her how she is right, but that I have dreams I am afraid of losing, that without those dreams I'm not sure if I actually exist. How I feel like a failure.

She gives me her blessing even though I get the sense that she thinks I am doing the wrong thing. We cry a lot together. Not over the job thing, not really, though that is the pretext. I think we both know that we have broken through to real connection at last. All it took was me admitting how scared I am. Practically all the time. I tell her another truth. Part of why I have quit my job is that I have come to have an overpowering belief that I will find love, not in Los Angeles, but back in New York.

My pragmatic mother grows even more supportive. I learn that she believes in psychic impressions too. She believes in magic. Like me.

The Extra "E"

The New Age dawns for me in California. I embrace it for all it's worth and celebrate by killing my inner child. Really.

My grandmother, Beelzebubbe, used to clean out the refrigerator of any house she entered. Family, friends; even if she was just a dinner guest you could often find her in the kitchen emptying out the fridge, sometimes before anyone was in there doing the dishes. She would be there everything that that wasn’t unopened and vacuum-sealed from the store. Sometimes she’d throw that stuff away too, talking to no one in particular while she went along, grunting, rasping, saying "Good! Get rid of it! Good!"

She was always proud of leaving her hosts with almost no food, her work there done. That is probably how I am most like her. I have an impatience with any kind of mess and want things to be clean and orderly, gotten rid of at all costs. If a scab needs to be pulled do it now. Whatever the cost.

There is a curious, unintended upside. As controlling my physical environment grows more and more vital to my sense of well-being, imposing absolute order on my physical surroundings gives my mind the freedom to wander about recklessly. As the early '90s dawn, I come to neither expect nor want explanations for the mysteries of creativity, of the metaphysical world, or the human spirit. Who knew? I begin to explore lots of weird, supernatural, New Age, pop-psychology ideas, reveling in their messiness. Maybe I just like being contrary. People who know me expect rigidity. Perversely, I like surprising them with my California-appropriate spiritual openness. I even go to an energy movement specialist who hypnotizes me, drains the darkness from my chest, and helps me kill my inner child.

That death gives birth to the title of this opus.

It is a mercy killing. The psycho/meta energy movement man regresses me down to seeing this pathetic little boy (ostensibly me) and asks me what the boy wants. I say, "To die." I don't know where it comes from, but I know in an instant that it is quite true. His lonely suffering has been so acute, so damaging, that the only real answer is euthanasia. He dies happily.

I then can't resist running around and telling everyone I know, and many people I have only just met, that I have, indeed, just killed my inner child.

As I do with most things, I make light of it, enjoying the strange, counterintuitive triumph of doing something that feels revolutionary. And surprisingly, it does feel rather light and buoyant. Perhaps letting my inner child die is giving me an honest to God breakthrough. Or maybe it's the Herbal Life I'm taking. Or the wheatgrass juice. Or my new friend, the psychic dog sitter.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the killing of my inner self, but gradually I stop paying people for massages with happy endings. I'm not ready for real love, but I want to be. I vow to at least try to meet someone, and drop the pleasure for-hire since I intuit that I am unlikely to acquire a real boyfriend by buying one.

My skills at courtship are still rudimentary though. All I know how to do is pick up people in bars and clubs. The last time I did that, back in New York, it was a hunky bartender who rather inadvertently (I think) peed in my bed. We were both very drunk and he fell asleep as soon as he climbed into my bed, leaving me horny and pissed off. When I awoke his mouth was below my waist and he was holding me rigidly in place on my side of the bed, not letting me spread out over to the side where he had slept. When he was gone I figured out why. There was a huge puddle of pee on his side. Massage therapists and hookers don't wet the bed. Not unless you pay them to.

There was this sex channel for a long time in New York on free cable, where Robin Byrd had a talk show that opened with the song, "Baby Bang My Box," and where Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine would interview guests as he sat naked, his flaccid penis hidden by bulges of fat (a life changing, Medusa-like sight, that could replace capital punishment if it weren't so cruel and unusual). This station also offered commercials for prostitutes and phone sex. "We have warm, Oriental girls waiting to serve you." Like that. One particular phone sex commercial has stayed with me all these years. It was for 976-PEEE. A woman peed on a cop while saying, "The extra 'E' is for extra pee." Comments? Questions? Email me.