Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life (11 page)

I did date one budding actor when I was fifteen years old, but he wasn’t from school. I first saw him when I went to watch the rehearsals of a small stage production of
The Sound of Music
with my sister Liz, near our apartment in Greenwich Village. My mom and her best friend/our agent Ayn wanted me to check out two brothers she knew. The younger was Lizzie’s age and in the play, and the older always took him to rehearsals. When we all left the theater that day, with the boys a few steps ahead of me and my sister, I dragged Lizzie as fast as I could, so that when they held the door for us, we’d be able to make some eye contact. Big Brother let the door slam in my face.

I bumped into him there the next week, however, and we casually started dating. I don’t remember how it happened, but I never told him about the theater incident. He had a stupid way of flirting where he’d try to surprise me with a quick shove into a pile of trash or a street lamp, and then say, “Watch out for that garbage!” I somehow found it charming, even if it was gross. Being with him was also one of the first times I’d hooked up with an aggressive, hands-y kind of guy, so I dressed in layers to make it more difficult for him to get what he was after. I’d wear a trendy leotard top with a snap crotch, tight jeans, a big belt, combat boots that took forever to unlace, and finish the look with a flannel shirt tied around my waist. This was during Nirvana’s reign, and I liked mixing their grunge influence with punk styles, though all the extra clothes were really meant to slow the boy down. I think of our tricky make-out sessions when I flip past Fox on the TV, since the boy in the story was Danny Masterson, who played Steven Hyde on
That ’70s Show.
His younger sibling was Chris Masterson, who played Francis on
Malcolm in the Middle.

Not every meaningful man in my life at that time was a booty call or love connection. In 1992, I got to know Joey Lawrence while I was working at Nick in Orlando. This was decades before he could hold me at arm’s length with his shiny lips. We saw each other at auditions throughout our childhood careers, and he’d been starring as Joey “Whoa” Russo on
Blossom
for the past two years and was in Florida to visit his girlfriend Kellie Martin, who was about to wrap her part as Becca on
Life Goes On
and was working with John Goodman on
Matinee
, which was shooting at Universal Studios. Joey asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, and Kellie and I became fast friends. I had no idea then that these two people would make such a huge impact on my life in very different ways—one as my costar on my favorite project to date,
Melissa & Joey,
and one as a lifelong friend. Joey then came back to Orlando, not long after that trip, to bury a time capsule with me for a televised Nickelodeon event. (The capsule, which won’t be opened until the year 2042, includes VHS tapes of both
Clarissa
and
Blossom,
as well as a disposable camera with pictures of me and some random
Clarissa
friends on the Universal lot.) At this affair, Joey brought his new girlfriend, Jennifer Love Hewitt, with him, and we had yet another chummy dinner together.

I have to admit—one of the best things about Joey was his taste in women. I was so deprived of girlfriends my age on
Clarissa
that when I met Kellie and Jennifer, I grabbed on to them and didn’t let go until I was pried away
.
I did the same with JoAnna Garcia and Sheeri Rappaport when they were on
Clarissa
. In fact, I gave all the female guest stars, upon arriving at our Sunday table read, an invite to a sleepover at my condo on Monday and Friday nights, plus lunch every day with me at the commissary, a ride on Back to the Future during break, and a trip to the Slime kitchen to taste the goo they had backstage on the studio tour. Was I desperate for camaraderie or what?

*   *   *

For all the fun of teen flirting, lust, and friendship, these feelings had nothing on that of my first love. I fell hard in the summer of 1992, when I was sixteen years old and back in Sayville visiting my dad. A bunch of my on-again/off-again Long Island go-out friends were hanging out in town by the local pizza place, where most kids met up at some point during a night out. I was there with a boy named Tim, who was a super cute, popular guy who wouldn’t have given me the time of day when we were in public school and before I was on a TV show. I’d been casually dating him for a few weeks, but that night while Tim was off skateboarding somewhere, a group of guys pulled up in a white Chevy Celebrity. They were from Patchogue, the town just east of Sayville.

Among them was a boy named Mike, who was very tall, skinny, and had an extremely outgoing personality. Like my first kiss, he had long, floppy, dark, skater hair. I clearly have a type—if they didn’t look like Danny Zuko, they looked like Pauly Shore. He also had a quirky sense of humor and self-confidence like I’d only seen in the older men I crushed on around the set. Even though he was only a year older than me, Mike knew how to flirt like a man—he was big on flattery and eye contact—and I liked that he could drive and had his own car. He asked me, my sister Trisha, and two of my girlfriends if we wanted to go for a ride, without a real destination, which meant ditching Tim, but oh, well. I thought this was dope because it reminded me of when people cruised in the 1950s. (See: every other scene in
Grease.
)

We ended up at my dad’s house, and the whole gang came inside to hang. Dad was now a bachelor and didn’t have a lot of rules. He is also the ultimate smartass, so he didn’t hold back on joking around with my crush. As soon as Mike and his buddies walked into the house, Dad began his interrogation.

“How tall are you?” he asked, in a deep, fatherly tone.

“About six two,” said Mike.

“I didn’t know they piled shit that high,” Dad said with a snorty chuckle, to let us know that he thought he was hilarious.

Good thing Mike’s humor was on par with Dad’s, or he might have run for the hills. I also wouldn’t have known how to read him. That night, Mike told me his name was Jimmy and gave me a fake number, but I saw right through his prank because it was so Dad-like. I showed him my number in the phone book and told him that I could get us on MTV’s
Hanging with MTV
to see his favorite singer, Morrissey, perform if he wanted to come visit me in the city. (MTV and Nickelodeon are owned by the same parent company, so I took advantage of my connections.) He called the next day.

I broke up with Tim, and for the rest of the year, Mike and I acted like a clichéd, first-love, “nothing else matters” teen couple. We were naive to heartbreak and adored each other with abandon. It only took a few weeks for me to fall head over heels in love with Mike, and we spent as much time together as we could. He was a high school senior, so he visited me in Florida when he was on break, and I spent more time in Sayville than Manhattan when I was home. At Dad’s house, the fridge was always stocked with Bud, there were no curfews, and I knew where he hid the spare key, so I could easily come and go as I pleased. Though the scenario might have led to discipline issues with other kids, I was already living as a responsible adult for most of the year in Florida. I could handle the autonomy without getting pregnant or arrested.

I was in love for the first time in my life, so I decided it was time to lose my virginity to Mike. Six months had passed, which was the amount of time I’d promised myself I’d wait before having sex with someone I dated. Not so unlike how I orchestrated my first kiss (or most pivotal moments in my life, really), I carefully planned this night to be perfect. Mike’s birthday happened to fall on the same day as the Young Artist Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, so a lot of special moments would be happening at once. My mom and her new boyfriend, Leslie, got us our own suite at the hotel; they probably thought that we were already “doing it.” For the ceremony, my
Clarissa
stylists helped me pick out a Betsey Johnson strapless lace baby doll dress and thigh-high boots. For extra oomph, I wore a Victoria’s Secret corset underneath. It not only looked sexy when I won the award (the first of three for me as
Clarissa
), but it turned Mike on, too. I packed a Victoria’s Secret teddy for what would come later.

It was a happy birthday for Mike, and our night unfolded just as I’d hoped. That’s all I will say, though. I rarely knock go-go boots and tell, unless I’m five gin-and-tonics deep.

After consummating our relationship, Mike and I were even
more
enamored with each other and found every possible moment to be together. When I went back to work, we spent countless hours on the phone, talking about boring and useless topics, like young people with few real problems and responsibilities do. We also paged each other a lot. Before we had cell phones, rappers and clingy teen couples hung little black boxes off their belts that beeped with phone numbers, urging people to call them. We sent each other messages on these things, using a series of numbers that, when read upside down, looked like words. For instance, 07734 became “hello.” Or we typed “69” as a dirty way of saying, “Hey, I’m thinking of you, if you know what I mean.” It was a crude form of sexting, but effective nonetheless.

Mike and I were together for fourteen months before he went to Fordham University in the Bronx. As a college man-child living in coed dorms, he partied a lot, ate too much White Castle, and hung out with his brilliant but bizarre roommate Kit (Mike and Kit—insert
Knight Rider
joke here). Shortly after he moved in, I visited his room and was sitting on his bed, taking in the sights and smells of a guy’s dorm (basically filth, beer, and sex), when a girl busted in wearing nothing but a towel and asking for Advil.

Right away I knew something was up with this chick if an entire dorm of PMS-ing female students didn’t have a single pill to spare, and she came to
my
boyfriend’s room, half-naked, like a whorish damsel in distress. As soon as Mike awkwardly introduced her to me, she said “never mind” and left the room. Survival instincts kicked in, and I sensed a threatening female on my playground. (I’ve had a sixth sense for bitches since I was young.) However, I also get jealous easily, so it can be hard for me to tell who’s really menacing and who’s not. Was my first love really cheating on me?

On the night of my eighteenth birthday, and the end of Mike’s freshman year, I began piecing together the clues that suggested Mike might not be the faithful prince I thought he was. He constantly broke plans, offered fewer invites to stay over on campus or hang out at college parties, and then finally on my eighteenth birthday, when I suggested we go back to his dorm, he wouldn’t let me and didn’t want to stay over at my place. On my birthday! Mike also refused to admit he was acting weird, so a few weeks later, when his friends went to the Jersey shore for the weekend without him (he said he was going home to his folks’), I invited myself to join them. I was a woman on a mission. I drove for four hours, in my busted-up Jeep with no top or doors, down the Jersey Turnpike on my way to the beach. It wasn’t the safest decision I’ve ever made. But I was trying to make Mike jealous by hanging out with his boys, and maybe do some recon on the side. When Mike didn’t seem to care, I blatantly asked Mike’s two buddies if he was cheating, and sure enough, they’d seen him canoodling with the tart upstairs.

I was so livid, I couldn’t breathe. And since this was my first real relationship, I also didn’t understand what I was feeling. I didn’t know a heart could literally ache, while simultaneously making me want to throw up. I was also angry as hell. As the sun came up, I sped back to my dad’s house in record time and told Mike that I was coming to his house for a talk. Though I was only five minutes away, he left before I got there and his mom answered the door. She and I were as close as any girl and her boyfriend’s mother could be—a warm, loving Italian who’d whip us up homemade penne alla vodka at 11
P.M.
after a concert or party. God, I loved her pasta. Anyway, I told her I thought Mike was cheating on me, and she promised to make him call me at my dad’s that night, since she could see how hurt I was. When Mike rang, I went back to his house and confronted him about what I’d heard. Of course, like most red-blooded American teens who like having their tarts and eating them, too, he lied and said he wasn’t dating the trashy coed.

“Calm down,” he said. “I just kissed her.”

As I drove my doorless death trap home that night, listening to The Smashing Pumpkins sing “Disarm” for the gazillionth time and with the summer air whipping my hair in front of my face, I knew I had to end the relationship. For a long time after, I cried in the shower, tore up our cutesy photos, and returned gifts to him by way of my father, whom he’d started working for. Dad refused to fire Mike, and I couldn’t get closure since my siblings stayed close to him and kept calling me with sightings and updates.

As a birthday present from my parents, Dad bought me a bike and Mom got me a plane ticket to Paris, so right after
Clarissa
wrapped, I took off on a bike tour to lick my wounds and burn calories. It was a long, lonely, and physically demanding ride through the French countryside with a bunch of spoiled, immature teens from rich towns in Long Island for four weeks. Not the salve I needed. It was like
Under the Tuscan Sun
meets
Amélie,
but starring an angry, confused, and broken-down young woman. A cigarette, red lipstick, and possibly a mime could have turned this into a moody black-and-white film.
Quel dommage.

Chapter 8

MOMS DO THE DARNDEST THINGS

Mother/daughter relationships are notoriously complicated. There’s Joan and Melissa Rivers, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, and how about those Judds? My own mother, Paula, is no Mommie Dearest, but she’s certainly thrown me for enough loops to keep my girlfriends entertained by her stories. Even so, our relationship has gone through a lot, both good and bad, that’s helped turn me into the person I am today. For that, she gets her own chapter.