After Perfect (24 page)

J
essica, a costume designer, owned a Brussels griffon named Chewbacca, whom we nicknamed Chewie for short. Chewie was the house mascot. Jessica hated me because she lived in the room below mine, and night after night, I would stumble home drunk in my high-heeled boots, clip-clopping around my bedroom, waking her up. Noah, who ran the house and was in charge of collecting rent, was a Republican from Arizona. He was also Mexican and gay and had chic blond hair parted to the side. He worked as an assistant to a celebrity publicist and was always coming home with gift bags of free junk from red-carpet events.

Then there was Atticus, who'd grown up with Emily Stone in Arizona. I'd met him one day at her apartment at Park La Brea. Atticus had moved back to Los Angeles after starring in a successful Broadway show. Technically, he didn't live with us—he lived in a studio apartment down the street—but he was always hanging out in Dave's room, playing guitar and singing the latest song he'd written. We called each other “darling,” and he occasionally brushed my hair and picked out my outfits.

Rob was a simple guy from Wisconsin who drove a red truck and owned a gun. He didn't like salad or condiments—not even ketchup on his french fries. Simple. Noah and Atticus were the first gay friends he'd ever had, so it took some adjusting. The day I moved in, Rob helped me carry all of my furniture into my new bedroom. It was the fifth time my cocoon of memories had been rearranged into a different room; I couldn't afford anything else, and, besides, I wasn't willing to let them go. I spent hours painting the walls of my new room powder blue and setting up everything the way it had looked back home in Virginia so that it felt calm and innocent—even if it was no longer the truth.

Before I moved in, Noah had said that, for the most part, our neighbors were friendly. There was even a hot dad that lived across the street, whom the boys later forbade me from talking to after they saw me flirting with him in the street a little too enthusiastically. The neighborhood was an up-and-coming vision of Los Angeles gentrification. So despite a few run-ins with prostitutes and pimps, we were safe.

Or so I thought.

“N
ine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“Gun shots. Gun shots went off in my backyard. There's a baby screaming.” I hadn't realized how scared I was until I opened my mouth.

“Ma'am, where are you? What is the home address?”

“I'm in my room, in my house.” I had been blow-drying my hair topless, getting ready for work, when the gunshots went off.

Pow! Pow! Pow!

“Did you hear that? Now someone's running. I hear running.”

“Ma'am, I need the address. What is the address and cross street?”

“Um, it's . . . oh God, I can't remember. I have to check my phone.” I had just moved in. I started crying as I scrolled to find Dave's name.

“4957 Melrose Hill Street. The cross street is Oxford, near Western.”

“Did you get a visual of the shooter? What race? Any article of clothing?

“No. I didn't see anything! I'm lying on the floor!”

“Would you like to leave your name or remain anonymous?”

“Christina Grace, I mean, Prousalis. I mean—it's Christina Prousalis.” Flustered, I didn't know which name to give.

“Stay on the ground. LAPD is on the way. Do not move until the LAPD are at your door, okay?”

The dispatcher hung up. I didn't move. I was lying naked on the floor, waiting for the police, and praying to God the doors were locked. The boys kept leaving the front door unlocked, as if we lived in the middle of nowhere, and I kept yelling at them each night I'd come home from the bar to find it ajar at three o'clock in the morning.

A helicopter circled the house, its spotlight moving back and forth across the backyard. Otherwise known as a “ghetto bird” in Los Angeles. It circled for about forty-five minutes as I listened to sirens and police shouting in the street. I texted Jimmy: “Tell Fiona I'm running late. Gunshots in backyard. Can't leave house until LAPD gets here.” He texted back: “Normal.”

I spent the next forty-five minutes with my head on the ground, having never been more terrified. When the doorbell rang, I called the police department to make sure it was okay to answer. The dispatcher assured me it was safe. I got up and wrapped myself in my old terrycloth bathrobe and went to open the front door. Two police officers stood in front of me.

“Are you Christina Prousalis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, officer. I have to go to work. Is it safe to leave?”

“Yes, you can leave now.”

When I asked them what had happened, they either refused to tell me or claimed they weren't allowed to.

“Okay, thank you, officer.” I closed the door and ran to collect my things for work as fast as possible.

A few days later, a neighbor said that the gunshots didn't come from any drug dealer, pimp, or crazy rapist on the loose, which was what I'd assumed. They were
LAPD
gunshots. A SWAT team had raided one of the houses behind us for some drug offense, which explained the baby crying. The helicopter was just backup.

B
arack Obama was officially running for president. Artist Shepard Fairey's iconic red, white, and blue image of the Illinois senator covered street corners, storefronts, and billboards. Everyone was suddenly under the belief that change was possible. The word
hope
had reinvigorated us.

For a while, it was a thrilling time at the McMansion, home to a bunch of misfits dying to leave our mark on this world. It was always buzzing with young artists and starlets like Jessica Szohr, Dianna Agron, Amanda Bynes, Nikki Reed, and Lindsay Lohan. Jessica was filming the new hit show
Gossip Girl
. Dianna would soon be auditioning for a television musical that was circulating around Hollywood called
Glee.
Emily (now officially Emma) was dating musician Teddy Geiger, whom we also knew from
In Search of the Partridge Family
, and they would come over when Emma wasn't filming one of her latest movies. It was a house burning with reckless creativity, a place where we could be chameleons in a world that would never make sense yet we were determined to grab it by the reins. It became what I thought was a safe haven away from my crumbling family, while I remained beholden subconsciously to my father and his promises.
Hope!
Locked in a prison where, if I had any sense of reality, I might try to set myself free. But the search for anything outside of myself to numb me, to save me from the pain, would only get worse. Living in a mansion that looked good on the outside but was largely empty on the inside, nestled in the ghetto, was the truth.

I
can't remember which happened first: being rejected for financial aid after I discovered I was still on a leave of absence and had one last chance to go back to LMU
or
blowing through $13,000 in eight weeks for a signed Roy Lichtenstein print I'd sold at auction at Bonhams and Butterfields. I can't remember because I smoked pot multiple times a day for almost the entire two years I lived on Melrose Hill. After a talent manager told me I needed a nose job so I could “look more like Megan Fox,” I decided to stop acting for a while.

I thought about going back to school to become a writer. There was a budding part of me that felt I had something to say, even if I didn't know what it was yet. And my father kept bringing up the idea of going back to school in his letters. USC, UCLA, Yale University School of Drama. The university needed to be well known. For my father, it needed a label, like designer clothing (Versace is to Brown as Prada is to Cornell)—a degree to prove my status in this world. Much to my parents' disappointment, I had been wait-listed or rejected from USC. (I can't remember which; probably rejected.) My SAT scores were terrible. I never studied for them. On Facebook, I watched as all of my high school friends graduated college, and started submitting their applications to business schools, law schools, and medical schools.

I decided to call LMU one day and ask if I could reapply. I wanted to go back and study screenwriting. To my surprise, an administrator told me, “You're still a student here. Your leave of absence isn't up until after this semester. If you can come up with fifteen thousand dollars by the due date, you can register for classes.”
Fifteen thousand dollars?
I didn't even own a credit card. I hadn't told any of my roommates about my current financial situation, not yet. It took me a few months to open up to them about my father being in prison. But the boys were intrigued by the story once I told them. They teased me and said, “Darling, get ready. When Daddy comes home, he's whipping out the gold shovels!” They were convinced he had money hidden in Swiss bank accounts, because it's where Mara was sent to boarding school. It only fueled my desire to believe it more.

I downloaded the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form and spent an entire afternoon filling it out, excited about the possibility of finishing school. But when I got to the part asking for my parents' financial information, I didn't know what to put down. I couldn't contact my father to ask him certain questions about income, and I don't remember a box to check for having a parent in prison. I was still considered dependent even though I had been managing to make ends meet on my own. I called LMU, and a woman there told me that because I was born in 1985, I was still considered dependent. If there were extenuating circumstances as to why I should be considered independent, I'd have to write a letter of explanation. This was impossible for me to do because I never took Ralph Adler's advice and sued my father. My financial history looked like an out-of-control eighteen-year-old had gone on a rampant shopping spree with a half dozen credit cards. It was hopeless. But I submitted the application anyway.

M
y mother and I weren't speaking much since she moved in with Richard, but one afternoon she called to tell me she found a pair of signed Roy Lichtenstein prints. She said she forgot she still had them, rolled up in plastic tubes that had been shuffled around in the move. (Because of course one just forgets she has signed Roy Lichtenstein prints.) “They were a gift from one of your father's clients. I never liked his work. You can have them.”

I picked up the prints with dollar signs in my eyes and took them back to the house. I remember pulling the prints out of plastic tubes, sitting on my floor, and staring at them for a good five minutes. It was Roy Lichtenstein's
Whaam!
, consisting of two separate prints that went together. One iconic image was of a fighter pilot and his words trapped in a cartoon bubble above him: “I pressed the fire control . . . and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky . . .” And the other was the image of a crashing jet that had been hit by a rocket, with big block letters sprawled across the red-and-white explosive fire that read “Whaam!” The jets didn't look like enemies. They matched, each drawn in the same colors: red, white, blue, and yellow.

As I studied the airplane and pilot spiraling downward to his inevitable and fatal crash, I felt sick to my stomach. The colors of the prints were the same colors in the photograph of my father standing in between his red Porsche and his red, white, and yellow Porsche Mooney airplane, smiling in his aviator sunglasses. The pair I still wore everywhere for hours at a time. I wouldn't take them off until they'd left two indentations on the bridge of my nose. Men in Ferraris and Lamborghinis would honk and stare at me with my top down in traffic, and I'd smile, rev my engine, and then shift into first, second, third, fourth, fifth gears—blazing through the Wilshire corridor, hoping I was driving them wild like my father said I would. But my car was always breaking down because I never had the money to fix it. Someone told me that in exchange for discounted parts and service, I should just bring my car mechanic weed brownies, and he would hook it up. It worked! I did it three times, and nobody knew.

As much as I missed my father and was doing as he'd asked, I didn't want to keep the Lichtenstein prints—and not just because of how much they were worth but because I didn't want to look at what they symbolized. So strange, how the images remained tucked away in our basement in Virginia all those years, like some deep, dark secret waiting to be found. I wanted them out of my house, my room, my life as quickly as possible. I put the prints back in between the two pieces of cardboard and called Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonhams and Butterfields letting them know I had Lichtenstein's
Whaam!
signed by the artist himself at the bottom in pencil. Bonhams and Butterfields was the first to respond. A woman told me over the phone that it had an open house for evaluations and appraisals once a month and that there would be one the following week.

I
sat in an open conference room with about fifty other people. Some had large pieces of art by their side like me. Others held jewelry, manuscripts, cultural artifacts, and sculptures. I wondered what everyone's story was and why they wanted to sell their possessions. Did they bring about a bad memory? Or did they simply need the money?

An older woman in a conservative dress and glasses called my name. She led me over to her table across the room. She thought I was there to waste her time, as I was by far the youngest person in the room. But when I pulled out the prints, her demeanor shifted. She took off her glasses and looked at me. “Were these a gift?” she asked, wondering, no doubt, what on earth a young girl like me was doing with signed Lichtenstein prints.

“Yes, from my father,” I said with confidence. “I want to sell them as soon as possible.”

“Okay, give me a few minutes, please. I need to verify their authenticity.”

She disappeared with the prints for about ten to fifteen minutes. I sat looking around the room. I felt like I was waiting for medical test results to come back, and took little comfort at the sight of the other people around me, sitting nervously at the tables with other art dealers and appraisers, unsure if what they possessed was worthy of the amount of money they needed.