by Naya Rivera
April 8, 2004
Things to do (or buy)
get ears pierced (sterling silver)
pay taxes—$88.00
pay Mychal back
get clear belly ring while doing no. 1 on list
get new jeans
look for + get guy who fits list*
get new eye sleeper mask
take back shorts to V. Secret
get new bra from PINK collection
think about something other than material things
get new modeling agency
get a job (modeling/acting)—first job in ’04
do something nice 4 Mom 4 Mom’s Day
get real diamond belly ring
BIG ONE! get Chanel pink C earrings
figure out God stuff
get new car (nice one)
take SATs (get good score)
get into good college
finally get a record deal
get PR person to promote me as hot, sexy, rich party hopper
get Tarina Tarantino chandelier kitty earrings
take back miniskirt
get $71.00 back from Dad
finish reading “mind” book
get some more money
file unemployment claim
continue to be spontaneous and everything will work out
get some type of shimmer bronze powder for face 4 sexy summer look*see criteria here
I once asked my mom why she fell in love with my dad, and her answer was simple: “He was fun.” Shortly after they met, she moved out to California to live with him, and I’m sure they were your picture-perfect California couple. She was an aspiring model, and he a surfer boy with long hair and a yellow Jeep. Dad taught Mom how to drive in that yellow Jeep, and wasn’t even (that) mad when she later smashed it into a wall.
When Mom found out she was pregnant with me, it definitely wasn’t something they had planned on, but they went with it anyway. For most of my childhood, my parents were winging it. We have video of my first birthday party, which was just me, my mom, and my dad (wearing eighties nerd glasses) eating cake and opening presents in our tiny Glendale apartment. Later my dad drove a silver Nissan Z, which at the time looked like it was straight out of Back to the Future. It was just a two-seater, so when the three of us were in the car, I’d sit cross-legged in the back, sans seat belt or even seat, hold on to the crossbar for “safety,” and duck every time we passed a cop, or even anyone who looked like they might call the cops.
When I was four, my brother came along, and four years after that, my little sister. My parents were no longer two young people madly in love, celebrating their baby’s birthday—they had a full-fledged family. Shit had gotten real, and was about to get even realer when my dad lost his job.
We’ve always jokingly called my dad a jack-of-all-trades. He’s a natural-born schmoozer who can fix anything, learn anything, do anything. He worked for Disney, he worked for Universal Music Publishing, he worked in IT, he even drove a truck for a sushi company for a while (my brother and I were not mad at that job, as the California rolls he would bring home were delicious). Some of those jobs paid more than others, and when Dad had money, he spent it. I don’t fault him for this—it was my philosophy too. If you’re not having any fun now and saving everything for tomorrow, well, hello: you could die tomorrow!
But Dad took it to the extreme: we had boats and two Jet Skis, he had a motorcycle (which I refused to ride because the vibrations from the exhaust made my legs itch), and we vacationed on Lake Mead every year. With three young children, my mom didn’t work, so when Dad’s money would start to dry up, or a job didn’t work out, we’d be back to sharing bedrooms in cramped, shitty apartments and clipping coupons to make ends meet.
When he got offered a job doing IT for a tech company, we thought we’d made it—he was making a really nice salary, and they were flying him back and forth in business class to the company headquarters in Arizona. My parents bought a Lexus to celebrate, and we moved into a big house in Canyon Country. The house was a middle-class dream: two stories, on a lot of land, and located in a brand-new suburban subdivision where all the houses looked the same. It was like something out of a movie. When we went to look at it, I thought it was a mansion.
My brother, sister, and I followed Dad from room to room, asking, “Please, can we have this house? We love this house!” with Mom secretly encouraging us in a whisper, “Tell your dad you want the house.”
“WE WANT THE HOUSE!” we screamed in unison from the gigantic backyard. Before we left, Dad put in an offer, and we bought the house.
I had my own room, and I got to have a thirteenth birthday party with a dance floor under a tent in the backyard. The living room had big sliding-glass doors that opened out into the backyard, and my dad opened those and hooked a karaoke machine up to the TV so people could go in and sing whenever they wanted. My mom made chili dogs and ice-cream sundaes, and set up a corner full of beanbag chairs as the ultimate hang zone. I even got to slow dance with my crush. It was movie magical, and the best birthday ever.
Still, though, it was pretty obvious that something wasn’t right under the surface. My parents always seemed to be fighting about money, the screaming matches usually brought on by something new my dad had just bought or by the fact that he’d taken out a double mortgage on the house. They spent very little time with each other, and whenever they were both in the house, the tension was as thick as Jell-O.
Then, when I was fourteen, Dad lost the job in Arizona. At first it seemed like no big deal. Dad could do anything, right? Certainly he’d have a new job in no time. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case. It was 2001, and I think the technical term for the economy at that time was “in the shitter.” September 11 happened, and the first Internet bubble burst, so jobs, especially ones that could support a wife and three kids, were hard to find. We watched as our dad, who seemed like he could talk his way out of a paper bag and who knew enough to be president, couldn’t find a job for another three years.
I had overheard enough fighting to know that the double mortgage was a bad idea; but when my parents came home and told us they’d “turned in” the Lexus for a Mazda, it was confirmation that we were indeed fucked.
Soon after that, we said good-bye to the dream house and moved into a shitty three-bedroom apartment that was literally on the wrong side of the tracks. At night, while I was sleeping, I could hear trains rumble by and rattle the pictures on the walls. The other people in the apartment complex were total riffraff, so we couldn’t play outside much because my mom was afraid we’d get kidnapped (or worse) by the methy neighbors.
For a while, we applied for government assistance for health insurance, but then putting enough food on the table became a stretch. I also remember going with my mom to the grocery store, where she would write checks that she wasn’t sure would go through so she could get some cash to pay for little things we needed and give us a few bucks each to take to school. Christmas was a similar, yet more intense, runaround, as she went to check-cashing places and jumped through all sorts of hoops, trying to figure out how she was going to buy presents for my little brother and sister. Now that I’m a mom myself, I appreciate how hard she struggled to provide for us even more.
My high school was full of rich kids, the kind who got new cars for their sixteenth birthdays and carried Louis Vuitton Speedy bags to biology class. These weren’t kids I was close with, but most of my friends were still middle class. They lived in nice houses and their parents bought nice things for them. Whenever they wanted to do stuff, like go to the mall or watch a friend’s band play at a local coffee shop, I had to get really creative to cover up the fact that I didn’t have money to go with them. All those acting skills came in handy.
When I was a sophomore, I got asked to g
o to the senior prom, which seemed like a total coup, until I realized there was no way I could pull it off. I didn’t even own any makeup, much less a fancy dress.
When I confided this to my best friend, Madison, she took me to the Clinique counter at the mall and used her own money to buy me eye shadow, foundation, and lipstick. My mom’s cousin stepped in to buy me a dress. I was a total prom charity case.
The dress I picked out could best be described as Latina Barbie. It was black satin with spaghetti straps and hot-pink edged ruffles down the front. My mom took me to Santee Alley, LA’s wholesale fashion district, and we bought one of those little jewelry packs that had pink teardrop earrings and a matching necklace. I even wore a flower in my hair, señorita style.
In spite of the group effort, the prom was—as almost all proms are—a total disappointment. My date didn’t buy me a corsage (his mom ended up running and buying me one at the last minute), and at the dance we barely talked. At the end of the night, he made a halfhearted attempt to sleep with me, which I rebuffed wholeheartedly. The before and after pictures were basically like this:
Before: Me smiling and posing, hair piled high on top of my head.
After: Me scowling and pissed off, with a ’do no amount of hair spray or bobby pins could hold in place.
As Dad’s stint of unemployment dragged on, I became the only one in the family who had any money. The California Child Actor’s Bill requires that 15 percent of a child actor’s earnings be automatically set aside in a trust, which is often called a Coogan account, named after Jackie Coogan, a child actor in the 1920s who earned millions of dollars only to turn eighteen and discover that his parents had spent it all. Whoops.
I didn’t have millions—more like tens of thousands—in my Coogan account, but these were dire times. There was literally no money coming in at all, so over the next few years, my mom and I made two court visits to request a withdrawal from my account. I’d miss the first few hours of class, and we’d go to court and stand in front of a judge to petition for permission.
“Your honor,” my mom would say, “this is my daughter and she has X amount of money in an account that I protect, but recently our family has fallen on hard times. We would like to withdraw two thousand dollars from the account to cover us for the next month. My husband is currently looking for work, and I have two other children to take care of.”
The judge would listen, and then ask me if I was okay with the idea. I always said yes.
Because I’d been a working actor, I was also eligible to receive unemployment, even though I was still a minor. This brought in another seven hundred dollars every two weeks, in checks made out to me that my parents cashed, so for about three years, from the time I was fifteen until I was a senior in high school, I was almost always financially helping my family in some way.
I don’t think it’s right to take money from your kids, and I don’t think my parents thought it was right either. I just think they didn’t have any other choice. I wasn’t bitter about it at all. Because I’d started working so young, I’d always been mature for my age and had a pretty adult relationship with my parents. But still, we weren’t exactly a family that talked things out or excelled at communication, and they never asked how I felt about contributing to the household financially. This was at the height of my eating disorder, and somehow they didn’t connect the dots and see my anorexia for what it really was—a control-freak reaction to being under a lot of pressure.
As I’ve mentioned, my auditions had pretty much dried up by this point in my life, which was a major blow to my self-esteem and sense of self-worth. The added financial stress on my family made me feel even more helpless about everything. Then I felt like it wasn’t just my career riding on every audition but potentially the roof over my family’s head. And walking in to sing and dance and light up a room while carrying that emotional baggage? Well, hell, it’s no wonder I didn’t book anything.
When I turned sixteen, I was allowed to take some money out of the account to buy something for myself—a mothereffing car! Blood, sweat, and tears went into the rounds of negotiation with my parents, and when they finally agreed, you would have thought I’d won the lottery. I set about looking for my dream car, and I found it: a Jeep Wrangler, for sale in Huntington Beach for forty-two hundred dollars. On the day I went to sign the papers, the whole family came along to cheer me on.
The car was a full-on, grown-up version of the Barbie Jeep, no doubt a latent wish hanging around from the days when I got to drive the battery-powered Jeep on Family Matters. It was white with two pink stripes down the side, a removable top, leopard-print seat covers, a steering wheel the size of my face, fuzzy leopard-print dice hanging from the rearview mirror, and a pink Barbie sticker on the back.
It was also twenty years old and a bona fide lemon.
The Jeep had no air-conditioning, which I figured was no big deal because I could always just take the top off and cruise around with the wind in my hair. But it was an extraordinarily hot day in June when I went to buy it, and I could already feel the sweat start to pool under my armpits before I’d even pulled out of the lot. I did not care one bit, though—I was on top of the world, riding high on a wave of newly found independence. My family waved to me as I drove off, and as I saw them getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, I was like, “I am free! I am finally free!”
Then my new car started to break down on the freeway. It slowed and sputtered, and all of a sudden there was no acceleration. I put the blinkers on and coasted to the shoulder on the right; then I called my dad to come and get me. Fortunately, I’d only managed to get a few miles, so the family was not too far behind me. Mere minutes after I’d celebrated my independence by leaving them in the dust, there they were, all four in the Mazda, hazard lights blinking and horn honking, pulling up behind me on the shoulder while my little brother and sister waved from the backseat and my mom hung out the window of the passenger side, yelling, “Naya! What happened to your new car?”
There was a feeling of wind in my hair all right—from all the other cars zooming past as Dad and I sweated through our shirts trying to figure out what was wrong. Turns out, the car was out of gas because the gauge was broken. Dad waited with me, while my mom drove to the nearest gas station and returned with just enough gas to get me home. Once we got home, we called the dealership. They were super apologetic and told us they’d be happy to fix the gas gauge. All it would take was another two thousand dollars. That was two thousand dollars we definitely did not have. And there was no way we were going back to court to attempt another withdrawal.
The tears started to well up in my eyes, the smell of exhaust still in my hair from an hour of standing on the side of the freeway. This day was not turning out quite like I’d imagined.
Dad, sensing I was on the verge of a meltdown, jumped up, ran into the kitchen, and returned with a piece of paper and a pencil.
“Okay, Naya,” he said, “here’s what you’re going to do. Every time you go to the gas station, you get a receipt. You figure out how many gallons you put in, and you note your miles from your odometer. Then you divide . . .” I swallowed my tears and nodded. I hated math, but I also really, really wanted to have my own car.
From that day on, I was more on top of my mileage than my schoolwork. I added and subtracted every damn day but still broke down seven times in that car, once when it was 110 degrees in the middle of the summer. I stowed a gas can behind the backseat and made a mental map of the nearest filling stations and the quickest, most discreet routes to get there.
I drove that POS Jeep for two years, and then—wouldn’t you know?—jack-of-all-trades George Rivera sold it at an auto fair for thirty-five hundred dollars.
We’d never fixed a thing.
COLD-CALLING MY WAY STRAIGHT TO HELL
I’d imagined that life with a car would mean nonstop cruising to the mall to fill up the backseat with s
hopping bags, or cute boys piling in so we could all drive down to the beach for bonfires and sunset make-out sessions.
“You guys go on without me,” I imagined some dreamy blond surfer saying to his friends. “I’m going to chill with Naya and get a ride [double entendre totally intended!] in that Jeep.”
Alas, that was not the case, and my new wheels were mainly used for chauffeuring my siblings around town and picking them up after school, especially once my mom, who’d always stayed home, started to look for work.
Finally, she called me into her room one night when I was seventeen. “I’m divorcing your dad,” she said as she sat on the bed. “It’s just something I have to do.” Rather than crying upon hearing this news, I was happy—for my mom and for my dad, but especially for my brother and sister, who still had to contend with several more years of living at home. This felt like the first step in all of us getting on with our lives. My sister was still in elementary school, so she stayed with my mom, but my brother and I went to live with my dad.
My dad had a few pieces of advice he liked to dole out. One he called boyfriends and girlfriends “dream killers,” cautioning us about throwing away our dreams for another person. He was also big on doing what you love for a career (all his children followed this advice), and he took credit scores very, very seriously. “Don’t mess up your credit!” was practically his mantra. With every financial decision he made, Dad always meant well and tried to do the right thing for his family. For some reason, stuff just never worked out for him. But he practices what he preaches—even though he’s been bankrupt twice, he still has really good credit.
As my eighteenth birthday was approaching, Dad took me to the bank and set me up with a checking account and debit card in anticipation of my getting total access to my Coogan account. As soon as the clock hit midnight on January 12, 2003, my bank account went from zero to forty-two thousand dollars.