You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (30 page)

We filmed in a strip club during the day, while the dancers who worked there were sleeping or taking care of their kids or attending law
school. This was not a “funny” strip club like a place you go and giggle with your girlfriends on a dare. It was gross. Sad. Lonely.

During rehearsals, the director of photography was setting up the shot when his contact lens fell out. We all crouched to help him find it. Since strip clubs are not known for their ample lighting even in the daytime, we were crawling around with our faces just inches from the floor that was sticky from I don’t want to know what. When we finally located the contact, he instinctively popped it in his mouth to wet it before placing it back in his eye. When he realized that he just picked up something from the floor of a strip club and put it in his mouth, he had the look of a man realizing he had just contracted hepatitis C.

I trudged to work, did my job, and went home. Even the on-set part was feeling lifeless. There was nothing peaceful or energizing to be found there. I became a clock-watcher, trying to calculate how long the next set up would take, what time we would wrap for the day. I became someone who sighed a lot. I’m sure many people feel empty in their work but when so many other people would have loved to be in my situation, it felt selfish to not just quit.

The shoot was so unsatisfactory that when they offered to write me into some additional scenes that they would be filming the next week, I lied and said I had a conflict. My pay rate for a day’s work would have been enough to cover the mortgage for a couple of months and yet, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Everyone on set was nice enough, and it’s not as if my bank account was overflowing, but going back there sounded about as appealing as sticking my hand in a blender.

I tried to explain this to friends, hoping that they would admit to secretly feeling the exhausting emptiness. I asked if they felt like they were just sleepwalking from one thing to the next. I’d spent so long disguising myself as other people that I didn’t even know if I’d recognize my actual self anymore. Everything felt like a costume. Did they feel like that, too? They looked at me and wrinkled up their foreheads and told me I was just having a bad day and made me eat a brownie sundae.

No one seemed to understand. Hope was what separated us the most profoundly. They had faith that a life in film would make them happy; they could see such a satisfying life just up ahead. They were committed to seeing this thing through and living their dreams. I couldn’t remember what my dream ever was. I had seen that no amount of acting work would make me happy. So, I stopped trying to explain how I felt. I did what I did in interviews when honesty wasn’t going to fly—I said what sounded right. My hair started falling out in clumps.

I booked a guest star appearance on a TV show called
Jack and Jill
. My character was in medical school and one of my scenes involved walking through the living room spouting medical terms while balancing a textbook on my head. I would love to place some blame for the disaster that followed on my terrible balance, since that seems consistent with my lack of bike riding skills and the whole falling-out-of-a-chair-and-breaking-my-back thing. However, it likely had more to do with the fact that I was not committed to the job in the slightest.

I didn’t prepare as well as I could have and it showed. I went up. You know what that is; it’s when fully functioning humans get brain freeze so badly that they are unable to remember their own name. It’s amusing to watch, but for the person who is going up, it feels like a slow motion car crash. Things were going horribly awry and there was no way to stop it. Sure, my lines were medical terms that were complicated and walking with a textbook on your head is no picnic, but I should have been able to get a handle on it. Since I was four years old, I had been known as “One Take Jake” for my ability to come on set and nail it on the first try. But clearly, Jake wasn’t there anymore.

Slowly and painfully we got through the scene and I could feel the crew alternatively cringing for me and wondering why I was not better prepared. I left the set, exhausted and humiliated and confused. Never once in my eighteen-year career had I gone up. This just wasn’t something that happened to me. Why was it happening now?

When the show wrapped, I sat in my car on the Warner Brothers
backlot and cried. This wasn’t working. Even when I was working this wasn’t working. It was like the past eighteen years had been for nothing. My life was not where I wanted it to be, but I had no idea what I wanted. I just knew I wanted out. When I turned the keys to start my car it made this terrible chugging sound and then it just clicked. Unfortunately, more crying and punching the steering wheel did nothing to fix the car. After wandering down a street that was supposed to look like a wild western town, I finally found a security guard in a golf cart to help me. I went sniffling back to my car and waited for my jumpstart.

I waited for someone to get me the hell out of there.

If I was looking for drama in my relationship, I was sure to find it. Before we upgraded our friendship, Jeremy had committed to a MBA program in Virginia. We had agreed to do the long distance relationship thing: he’d come back to visit and I would go down there for long weekends. It was only eighteen months, anyway.

But with his busy class schedule and my habit of going out every night, we didn’t get to talk much. We emailed and I missed him, but the rest of my life just took over. I was not a good long-distance partner; my need for constant attention and reassurance was too strong. My career was making me unhappy and I was stagnant and lost. I still got dressed up and went to parties and tried to be young and fun and all the things people told me I was. My panic attacks persisted; the slightest trigger would completely possess my body and leave me gasping for air and on the edge of fainting.

I went to auditions but barely prepared for them. Although my dialogue would be memorized, I had no interest in finding the character or the emotion within the words. The self-sabotage was exquisite. But wasn’t this just a bump in the road of my career? You didn’t get divorced just because you had one little fight. I came to California in 1990 to be an
actor. Wasn’t I one? Wasn’t this why I sold out to KFC when I was four years old? So that I could live in Hollywood and audition for bigger, better things to which I could sell out?

Besides, the idea of being a
former
child actor was more terrifying than anything. It scared me to think that I was going to end up like Baby Jane, or be laid out on a fainting couch somewhere, begging Mr. Demille for my close up. It never goes well for former child actors, does it? Don’t we all OD on dirty sidewalks or try to reinvent ourselves in our thirties when we are no longer cute but can play the parents of cute new crop of child actors on a Fox Family sitcom? A former child actor was a tragic figure. A cautionary tale. That couldn’t be me.

I bought a wok. That would make it better. This simpler life I longed for was possible in L.A., I just had to figure out how. I didn’t know if I needed to buy a pot or a pan to learn to cook with, so I bought a wok because it kind of looked like a combination of both. This wok represented the new me, the self-sufficient grown up who could have a real, normal life. I made a grilled cheese sandwich in my wok. I could learn to be normal.

Little did I know that everyone was about to have their idea of normal altered forever. I remember not knowing what to call it. I referred to it as The Tuesday the World Blew Up. I tried to call Jeremy in Virginia but he was two hours from Washington D.C. so I couldn’t get through. I’d just clutch the phone, the hollow recorded voice telling me over and over to please hang up and try my call again. I shivered on the couch with my dogs as we watched people jumping out of the Twin Towers.

I flew to Virginia on September 20
^th
. I was desperate to see Jeremy and would have walked across the country if I had to. At the Los Angeles airport, soldiers stood on guard with guns. I prayed for John Malkovich to step out of the Duty Free Shop and take that Uzi apart and guarantee
my safety. But he wasn’t there. There was no such assurance for anyone. Behind a pillar, a flight attendant was trying to console her coworker who was sobbing about not wanting to get on the plane. It was suddenly very obvious that their jobs were not about offering passengers the whole can of Diet Coke.

Once on the plane, I took a Dramamine, eager for the drowsiness to take effect. The flight attendant woke me and flipped down my tray table to give me lunch. As I opened the napkin packet I noticed that they had provided me with a silverware fork and a plastic knife. I took another Dramamine, not wanting to think about what could be done with a butter knife.

The few days I was able to spend in Virginia were delightful. It was reassuring to be back in Jeremy’s arms and the bucolic college town offered a break from obsessing about my career. We walked around the university that Thomas Jefferson built and I lost myself amongst musty stacks of library books and ornate Corinthian columns. There was so much peace to be found in Jeremy’s one-bedroom basement apartment. We intertwined our fingers and I got reacquainted with this man, who reminded me that he loved me, regardless of any labels or job descriptions. It was just on the cusp of fall in Charlottesville and you could see the season changing by the hour. I had lived in L.A. for so long that I had forgotten about seasons. But here you could see that nature was continually reinventing itself.

On the flight home, the heaviness returned as the plane descended through the golden smog over L.A. The city was reeling from the terrorist attacks. L.A. feels a certain kinship with New York that I am not confident is reciprocated. Los Angeles is like the ditzy cheerleader younger sister who is constantly searching for approval from the all-black-wearing, don’t-give-a-fuck-older sister who is actually really embarrassed to have any association at all.

The film studios were on high terrorism alert because al-Qaeda must care about the entertainment industry. I went to auditions and opened
my purse, offering it up for bomb dogs to sniff. Men crawled under my car with little mirrors, searching for explosives. One panicked thought consistently raged through my head:
I don’t want to die doing this job.
Friends of mine would gladly have their lives end on the Twentieth Century Fox backlot, in front of those fake New York street brownstones, but I always kind of wanted to be a goat farmer. If I was going to die I wanted it to be in the fresh air surrounded by animals and fields of wheat. I didn’t want there to be a blurb in the Associated Press about how I perished going to a screen test for
Boston Legal
.

Many people made life changes in the wake of this staggering tragedy. When the end of the world felt imminent, it offered justification to do something people would think I was crazy for. I wanted to build a new life. I hadn’t the faintest idea what that life should look like, or even who I actually was. All I knew was that I felt like an empty shell, with just a few grains of dry sand rattling around inside. I wanted to talk about what was on sale at the grocery store and have a hobby that didn’t involve buying a movie ticket. I wanted a relationship I was not willing to abandon in exchange for making out with my co-star. I didn’t want my worth to be based on who I had worked with when I was fourteen years old. Everything and everyone could be dropped at a moment’s notice to go to Europe for three months to film something. I wanted to be tied down. Needed. Responsible.

It occurred to me that I could leave. Leave L.A., leave movies and just do something else. It was a revelation, like the prisoner realizing that the cell door had never been locked. I could just choose to be done. Couldn’t I? Didn’t people change jobs? But it’s not like I had my engineering degree to fall back on. What was I going to do? I had always been too busy working to come up with a backup plan.

I told a friend that I was thinking of retiring from acting. Maybe I’d move away. Start over. He laughed at me.

“It’s just a phase, it’ll get better. This is what you do—you get restless and want something new. But you’re living the dream, baby. Why would
you give all that up? And for what?”

I didn’t know. But I kept dreaming about airplanes.

Jeremy was getting his MBA in Virginia and I was…well, I had no idea what I was doing other than having a complete breakdown, but it couldn’t happen in L.A. anymore. It had to be possible to escape the centrifugal pull of Los Angeles, although I had never seen it happen. A few of my friends had been talking about leaving for years. One had always wanted to be a teacher and would talk wistfully about how much he wanted to stand in front of a chalkboard and get middle-schoolers excited about reading
Animal Farm
. But then he would get a call for a job. The sparkling film industry with its plentiful bankroll kept him in the gravitational field. My emotional state had the fortitude of a twig, so it seemed unlikely that I would be the one who had the strength to say no and really mean it.

Absence does not make producers’ hearts grow fonder and I worried that this was a huge mistake. But spinning my wheels wasn’t fun anymore. This ungrounded, unfocused life was exhausting. At twenty-two, I was, quite simply, too old for this shit. It was time to fling myself into the dark, hoping that this reckless act, finally, would make me feel alive.

There was a problem. I had lived in a bubble for much of my life thus far and there was little evidence that I was equipped for regular life. There were things you learn while growing up that had been missed while hopping from school trailer to school trailer, from country to country. I couldn’t convert measurements to metric, for example. I was a terrible speller who couldn’t ride a bike well. I didn’t know what it meant to sauté something. I didn’t know that a car could be paid for in monthly installments and that laundry should be separated into like colors. I didn’t know the difference between Catholics and Protestants or that college football had different rules than professional football. The
common sense that I possessed was restricted to the uncommon life that I had been leading. Knowing exactly how many steps it would take me to get to a mark on the floor or which syllables to emphasize while doing an Eastern European accent was not exactly practical.