by Kyle Rutkin
That sales job was like every shitty one I had before that—an excuse to avoid the blank page. Continue in the shadows. Pay bills. Afford drugs during my setbacks. That sort of thing. I was in love with the idea of writing but petrified of the work.
Instead, I cold-called, worked nine hours a day. Made 7 percent on print advertising. Just enough to pay rent, eat, and relapse once a month.
I liked Sara the moment I saw her. I’ll never forget that first day. She was dancing in the middle of her cubicle, her arms flailing, her neck bobbing. She blushed when she saw me, but that didn’t stop her. Never would. From that point on, I was smitten—with a married woman. Sara was beautiful and kind, unlike her husband. He was an asshole. No redeeming qualities. She married too young. As she grew up and shone brighter, he got meaner. And fatter. And violent.
As is the case with most forbidden relationships, I found ways to stay connected. I stole glances as often as I could, in between sales calls. At lunch. During meetings, our eyes lingered on each other from across the conference room table. Flirty smiles every morning and at the end of every day. Sara was a different kind of rush. Better than drugs. Nothing else mattered. Not my past. Not my failures. I got that side of her that her husband had shut out. The inside jokes. The warmth. The humor. I always thought she would leave him, or at least I hoped. She would love me someday, I dreamed. We could both go to Oregon. We’d be together. We’d be happy.
Sara wouldn’t break her vows. Her husband would come into work once in a while like it was a chore. Nonchalantly standing over her desk. Everyone loved her playfulness, but not him. My obsession felt dark. It was my duty to blight their marriage. I needed to save her. Eventually, I told her how I felt.
We were driving back from lunch. I said, “You know I’m crazy about you, right?”
She didn’t speak until the car was parked in front of the office.
She said, “No matter how I feel, no matter how unhappy things seem, I will not leave him.”
She was adamant, and I got angry. I called him an asshole, and she said, “That’s my fucking husband.”
She stormed out of my car.
I kept pushing.
We kissed once. She told me it had to stop.
I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t. My life revolved around Sara. I couldn’t think of anything else. I went to work because of her. I’d come home to a blank computer screen. Fall asleep to a blank computer screen. Woke up for work. Repeat process. I was still using, but not as much. I didn’t bottom out. I became a functional addict. I devoted my life to loving a married woman. Nothing else. I didn’t give back. Or serve anyone. I maintained all my old addictions and I found new ones. I thought it was romantic. It was cowardly. My idea of love—one-sided, selfish, and full of shit. Just another distraction. From writing, from evolving, from dealing with all the shit in my basement.
The grand finale came at a Christmas party. Everyone was drunk, including Sara’s husband. I was itching for a confrontation, sneaking glances at them all night. She avoided my eyes. I was relentless. I cornered her when she left the bathroom. But her husband had been watching me too. Exactly what I wanted.
He grabbed my shirt and pushed me against the wall.
He said, “Did you tell my wife you were in love with her?”
I was happy she told him. Even happier to admit it.
Protect Sara. Kill him. Make him bleed.
We stumbled out into the street, drunk. We exchanged punches while Sara cried next to us. I found his jaw. He dropped. My hand fell faster, harder. My knuckles were covered in his blood. In my head, I thought, this was for Sara. I was helping her. She would thank me.
Bullshit. It was vengeance. For my mother. For my brother. For every fucked-up person in the world who did terrible things to good people. People shouted, and Sara stepped in front of her bloody husband, while I stood there with my fists still raised. My heart stopped. My vision returned. Everyone held their breath. My hand fell limp.
Her husband got up off the asphalt with his nose broken and his pride destroyed. Sara ran to him. He raised his fist. There was fear in her eyes. Precedent. He was more than just mean and apathetic in their marriage. He was violent.
What have I done? I had ignored all the signs. She suffered like my mother. I put my own needs ahead of hers. Like this was some game. Her husband was just like my father. She was trapped. I should have seen it. I should have known. I couldn’t sleep that night. The guilt. The shame. My heartbeat pounded, ringing in my ears. I failed her.
I came to work the next day with my apology ready to go. I was sorry for being selfish. For not seeing the truth. Not sorry for hurting him. He deserved more. But Sara never showed up that day. Or the next. She was gone. Her phone number changed.
I couldn’t spend another moment staring at her empty cubicle. Staring at my failure. Instead, I stopped going into the office. I decided to numb myself into extinction. I nearly did it. Pissed pants. Vomit on the floor. Screaming for death to take me. It would have happened, too. But my sponsor found me in my darkest hour. He picked me up off the apartment floor. He got me coffee. He convinced me to leave town, do something worthwhile. To stop living a selfish life. I had two thousand dollars saved, and I searched for the cheapest place I could find, farthest away from a city. I spent the first week in the Oregon wilderness doing the same shit I’ve always done. Drugs and booze. Punishing myself. Avoiding the blank page. But in the stillness of the forest…something changed.
I woke up one morning and made my small twin bed in my 300-square-foot cabin. There were no longer any distractions. I was out of drugs. I prayed to my brother. I grabbed a pen. My hands shook from withdrawals. I didn’t care. The story poured out of me. I wrote Pay Me, Alice in six months on a spiral bound notepad. Without a single pill, line, or drink. That’s the story of my novel. How I got clean.
Donaldson smiled. He stamped out the cigarette in the already-filled ashtray. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him.
“So what happened to Alice, I mean Sara? You never got closure?”
“That’s correct.”
“Never saw her again.”
I shook my head.
He smiled.
He pulled out a Ziploc bag of photos and slid them in front of me.
Pictures of Sara and another man.
“Then why did we find these in Kelly’s assistant’s room?”
Jez: I don’t know how those got there.
Lizzy: Kelly’s assistant was sick in the head. She was obsessed with Kelly. If Kelly liked something, I guarantee Jez’s fixation ran deeper. It would make sense that she became obsessed with the author and all the characters in his story. Ask her what happened on Kelly’s birthday.
Jez: Her birthday? Oh my gosh! It was the best party ever. Kelly was in such a good mood, minus the little setback with Lizzy. You’d think she’d call to wish her a happy birthday. Instead, she called to scold Kelly. I was so tired of Lizzy’s crap. Seriously. Just let us have fun.
Lizzy: I called to warn my best friend.
The Real Kelly Trozzo
TheInsideJuice.com Interview 2019
INSIDEJUICE: There have been lot of rumors floating around about your drug addiction leading to your exit from Zoe Loves.
TROZZO: It’s true, drugs did play a role in my leaving the show. I consider my addiction to be genetic, passed down to me by my mother. I have early memories of her dragging me to rundown apartment buildings to score. That’s how she silenced the voices in her head. If the pain was bad enough, she’d pull out her needles and shoot up right in front of me. Sadly, she was high the last time I saw her. She was screaming my name, running across the set with a dirty T-shirt hanging off her back. But it was her eyes that really killed me. She wasn’t my mother any longer. There was no light left inside her. Security removed her before I could say goodbye.
That night, Barry came into my room and told me to make a choice—either shed the remains of my past life and start new or walk away
from stardom. I’m sure you know what I chose. I thought about my mom a lot when I started down the same path. Like mother, like daughter. The only difference? I wasn’t weak like her. I had a purpose.
INSIDEJUICE: Are you saying you overcame your addiction? When’s the last time you used?
TROZZO: I haven’t taken a pill in over a year.
INSIDEJUICE: How did you quit?
TROZZO. Sheer willpower. This might seem strange, but I kept buying pills long after I stopped using them. In fact, I keep a giant bucket of them in my room. There is something empowering about it—adding to this giant white mountain of prescription pills. I enjoy the temptation. This symbolic mountain that I clawed my way out of. I want to remember what I was up against. It is an everyday reminder of my inner strength. That the promise I made to my fans is far greater than a pathetic addiction. My mother would have chosen to dive into the numbness. Not me. I can’t sleep through this part of the story. Not when I am finally myself. Not when there is so much work still left to do. Not when my fans are counting on me to lead them to victory.
The Blog of Kaleb Reed
(Continued)
Two days after Kelly’s death.
“Are you finally ready to talk?” Detective Donaldson reentered the interrogation room with greasy stains dotting his grey button down. The smell of cheap fast food chicken lingered on his breath. He was getting impatient. The breaks were getting shorter. So was his fuse. His face was stiff and tense, his eyebrows raised.
I couldn’t blame him for being upset with me. He had never met fans like Kelly’s. They were trained to be persistent, unrelenting. The pressure was mounting for an arrest. The clock was ticking. Either charge me of the crime or release me back into the wild. I still didn’t have a lawyer. Guilty people need lawyers. Hopeless people don’t give a shit. I enjoyed our time together, the playful banter. The dramatic tension. It was therapeutic in a way. The detective couldn’t say the same.
He sat down, wiping a napkin to his chin. “Why don’t you help me make sense of this? I want to understand why Kelly hired you. Why her assistant would have pictures of Sara.
I didn’t respond.
“Alright. Let’s start small. What happened on Kelly’s birthday?” Detective Donaldson dropped a stack of papers in front of me. He licked grease off his fingers, then rubbed the gray stubble on his round chin. He leaned forward, pointing to my signature on the top page.
“You know what this is, right?”
“A contract.”
“For the completion of a book, love story, memoir, whatever you want to call it.” Donaldson flipped through the pages, examining them. “A lot of interesting clauses in here.” He scrolled his index finger down the page. “Oh, here’s my favorite. ‘Unless freed of contractual obligations, Mr. Reed agrees to finish the manuscript regardless of the following circumstances . . .’ Hold on, let me find the good one.” He wet his fingers, flipped to the next page. “Here it is, ‘Mr. Reed’s incarceration.’” He slid the paper over. “You see how all this looks? Almost sounds like Kelly knew you’d be here? Like she knew what you were capable of. Or maybe she knew you would betray her.”
I didn’t answer.
She knew me pretty well.
“You signed on Kelly’s birthday. You were a busy man that night, weren’t you? You attended a movie premiere with Kelly.” He slid over pictures of us on the red carpet. “And we all know how that turned out…Then Long Beach PD received a 911 call from a neighbor of one Sara O’Conner. The man they reported on her lawn fits your description. Know anything about that? Or are we still pretending you never saw her after you wrote your book?”
I didn’t respond.
Donaldson pointed to the contract. “And you also signed that.” He studied me. “What the hell happened that night, Kaleb?”
I stared at my signature on the contract. The lines were jagged, crooked. My name was barely legible.
“You did something bad didn’t you?”
He had no idea.
He turned to the two-way glass with an arrogant smirk. I hadn’t seen him this confident since our first hours together. He had something to reveal. It was time for him to crack the big case. “Tell me what happened on Kelly’s birthday.”
I had been living at Kelly’s for two weeks. Two weeks of pushing myself to the brink.
There was something satisfying about tiptoeing along the edge, staring into the abyss. Thus far, I had successfully avoided my favorite drugs. But I did everything else in large quantities. As a regular in Kelly’s Hollywood court, I drank bottles of champagne that cost more than a month’s rent at my apartment. I toasted with her entourage. I partied with singers, agents, producers, and actors.
I met a screenwriter named Kohl who was interested in adapting my book for the big screen. He was the best in the business. He was my age. He wore a leather jacket, tattoos on his fingers, slick black hair with gray streaks running through the sides. We were standing in the backyard, overlooking the Hollywood Hills. The pool area was filled to the brim with drunken kids. Skinny-dippers. People hooking up on reclined pool chairs.
“I fucking loved the book,” Kohl said. “It was dark and gritty. I haven’t written something that good in years. You could tell those chapters were crafted through pain.”
“They were.”
“You still talk to the girl?” He lit a joint, exhaled.
I caught Kelly’s eye as she navigated around the mob of partygoers. She was wearing frayed jean shorts and a white tank top with her stomach showing. My eyes followed her everywhere.
“Huh?”
“The girl in the book. I assume she’s real. I wrote my best shit about my ex-wife.” He took another hit. “So, you and that Alice girl…you guys still talk?”
I took a sip of my drink. “Not anymore. But we lived together. For six months…we were happy.”
He glanced down at my drink. “And then you fucked it up, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
He understood. Maybe too well.
“Well,” Kohl said, lifting up his glass, “At least you have a second chance.” He stared at Kelly across the pool. “I can’t wait to see what you’re going to write for her. She’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. But she has that thing, you know? Beyond beauty and talent.”
“You guys ever—"
Kohl took a drag. “No,” he exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. “She always turns me down. But I’m sure she’ll make one hell of a muse. Maybe her story will be better than your book.”
Kelly smiled at me from across the party.
I didn’t smile back.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Kohl eyed me curiously.
“Kelly is a fantasy. I’m using her. And she’s using me too.”
On cue, Kelly weaved in and out of the crowd, sauntering towards us. She put her arm around Kohl, taking a hit of the joint from his hand. A twinge of jealousy stung me. “So are you going to write the screenplay?” she asked him.
Kohl grinned, then glanced back to me. “I’d be honored to take a crack at it. But only if Kaleb trusts me with his characters.” He laughed, throwing the joint down. “Now if you excuse me, love birds, I’m going to find some blow.”
Kelly took a sip of her drink, bouncing her feet up and down playfully. She reached for my hand. I withdrew. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m just—”
“You know it’s my birthday tomorrow,” she interrupted. “What did you get me?”
“I’m still thinking.”
“How about you come with me to my friend Lizzy’s premiere. And maybe a signature on the contract.” She pressed her body into mine.
Chills ran down my arm.
I met her gaze.
Her eyes consumed, devoured, pulled me back in.
I chugged the rest of my drink. I grabbed her hand. I followed her back to my fantasy.
I remember flashes of the rest of the party.
&nb
sp; Watching Jez and Kelly dance from room to room.
Jealousy. Longing.
Chugging a fifth of Vodka with Kohl.
Spinning. Fading.
Kelly’s hand in mine, pulling me up the stairs, smiling back at me.
Lust. Hunger.
I remember seeing Sara. She was reaching out to me in bed, smiling beneath the covers. The dream played in slow motion. Her dirty blonde hair swept over her eyes. Wake up, Kaleb. She put her hand to my face. Where are you? she whispered. Come back to me. Then her smile glitched, eyes distorted. Shadows rolled across her body. Her face transformed. Kelly’s sharp blue eyes came into focus. She mouthed, Save me, Kaleb.
I jolted awake in Kelly’s oversized bed with my heart pounding. The sun poured in through the window. Head pounding. The sheets drenched in sweat. I took a deep breath, reaching to the other side of the pillow. Kelly was gone. In her place, the unsigned book contract and a ticket for the premiere. I knew what I had to do.
That night, I put on a crisp navy suit and polished brown leather shoes. I stood in front of the mirror, adjusting my tie, taking deep breaths.
Kelly was standing in the foyer, waiting. She was done up to perfection in a skin-tight sparkly dress, one shoulder exposed. Her shimmering blonde hair was parted to one side, flowing down her shoulders. Her eyes were smoky and beautiful, and for a second, my resolve weakened. What if I could have a second chance with Kelly? If I could break through the illusion. Perhaps in a different life. If our demons didn’t have agendas. If neither of us had secrets.