Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  Now mind you, $42K is not a fortune, but at that time it was more money than I could even comprehend. My only previous income came from a part-time job at Abercrombie & Fitch, where I made, at most, a hundred dollars every two weeks. The possibilities seemed endless, and Dad tried to steer me in the right direction. He taught me how to balance my checkbook and told me how I could start building up that all-important good credit score by getting a low-limit credit card, using it for a few small purchases, and paying it off every month.

  I figured I was set—I really only had a few things I wanted to buy. Forty-two thousand dollars couldn’t go that fast. Right?

  The first thing I bought was the aforementioned boob job. Eight thousand dollars well spent. Then I wanted a car. I’d talked a lot of shit to the other kids at school—the kind who were gifted Bimmers at their sweet sixteens—about how I was going to get ALL THIS MONEY. “I’m about to come into some wealth,” I’d say, and dream about how I was going to crush them with a brand-new (to me) Land Rover Discovery.

  I have no idea why I picked a total mom mobile as my dream car, but I could not be swayed, even when the dealership told me my lack of credit history meant I’d have to plunk down a $12K down payment. I didn’t care, though. It was worth it to feel the (possibly imagined) looks of envy as I cruised into that school parking lot on the first day. The car should have had a vanity plate that read “COOGAN1.”

  So with those two “bulk items” checked off my list, I still had quite a bit of spending money left over. I took Dad’s advice and got a few credit cards and started to treat myself to a few little visits to kitson.com. And by “a few,” I mean daily. Velour Juicy suit? Add to cart. Von Dutch trucker hat like I’d seen Paris Hilton wearing in Us Weekly? Go ahead and throw that in there too.

  But I was still super on top of my spending, and each month I would do exactly as Dad had taught me and pay everything off. I was also a freak about balancing my checkbook, writing checks for everything and tracking the amounts in the little ledger that came with it. “Minus $15.07 Ralphs,” I’d write down, as Madison would roll her eyes and call me an old lady under her breath. But I loved my checkbook (I wish we still used them!), and besides, managing money was fun for me and made me feel like a grown-up.

  Those grown-up feelings intensified when Madison and I traded in the T-shirt folding shifts at Abercrombie for a job where we could make some real money: telemarketing.

  At the time, Madison had this friend Christy (she later turned out to be a total meth head) who was always very speedily and enthusiastically talking about how she was making a ton of money telemarketing and didn’t even have to work that hard. That was all we needed to hear to think that this was indeed a great idea.

  Soon Madison and I were sitting in a windowless room, manning the phones every day after school. The place we were working was a golf course and RV park that was supposed to be built a few hours away from where we lived. It was touted as an exclusive, all-inclusive retreat where people would come to vacation, play a few holes, and kick back with their families. Our job was to cold-call people and convince them to come to an “information session,” where the sales staff would use the hard sell to pressure them to sign up for a time-share membership.

  You got fifty dollars for every person you recruited to attend a meeting, and a hundred dollars if the dumbass—er, I mean, poor chap—actually bought a time-share. As clean-cut teenage girls, Madison and I were definitely the outcasts among our ragtag group of coworkers, but we took it just as seriously as everyone else. There was Norma, who chain-smoked and would encourage herself before making calls by growling “I need my money!” There was a black kid who would pretend to be Michael Jordan and sell people on the place’s promised exclusivity.

  Madison played dumb and acted like a super dippy cheerleader who thought that everything anyone ever said was about the most impressive thing she’d ever heard. “No way!” you could often hear her exclaiming into her headset to some old dude who probably thought she sounded hot. I was super slick and spoke to everyone like we were just two business-minded professionals talking shop. From one hard-working person to another, I knew they would want to take advantage of such a great offer and put some of their hard-earned money to use.

  “Dan? Dan, hi, this is Naya from Lake Serenity Golf and Ranch Club. How are you?”

  “This isn’t a good time. I’m actually having dinner with my family.”

  “Delicious! Is there a better time I can call you tomorrow?” I wrote down all my calls in my calendar and always followed up exactly when I said I would. “Great! Two p.m. it is!”

  And the following day, right on schedule . . . “Hi, Dan, it’s Naya from Lake Serenity Golf and Ranch Club. We spoke yesterday when you were having dinner with your lovely family . . .”

  Madison and I were so good that we both got promoted. Now we weren’t just on the phones but actually doing in-person sales pitches at the infamous information sessions. When one of the owners discovered I was good at public speaking, I got promoted even further—now I delivered the sales presentation. That meant I got a commission for every audience member who’d seen me work my PowerPoint magic and decided to sign up.

  I’d stand up onstage in my best business casual attire—little button-up shirts, white jeans, and my kitten heels. With a pointer in hand, I’d click through the slides in my presentation, pointing out where the pool was going to be, the solar panels for green energy, and the view from the eighteenth hole.

  “Hey, golfers,” I’d say, “I have a question for you—how much is one round of golf where you play?” Then I’d break down the financials of our “birdie package.” When I’d exhausted that tactic, I’d go in for the emotional kill, pulling up some stock photos of kids, and saying, “Just think of all the Kodak moments you and your family will have when you’re here.” “Kodak moment” was my signature phrase, and I wore it out.

  Over the phone, you could really believe that the person you were talking to was a sharp businessman who recognized a good deal when he saw it. In person—oof—it was harder to deceive yourself: these potential customers were usually people with three teeth in their mouth and a credit card, desperately looking to buy into a dream. We were there to sell it to them, and take all their money in the process.

  But still, I was eighteen and making fifteen hundred dollars a weekend.

  Also, I was totally a believer—I assumed that everything I talked about would happen, that every rendering I showed onstage would someday be built to those exact specifications, possibly even more grand. That pile of dirt there? In my mind, I could already see the bubbling fountain that would someday be in that spot. And there were golf carts! Surely that meant a full course was not too far off.

  Wrong. The whole place went bankrupt before a shovel even hit the ground, and Madison and I had to find new jobs. Abercrombie, here I come. Again.

  WAIT—SO RENT IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO PAY EVERY MONTH?

  I paid off the Land Rover, got the good stamp on my credit (just like Dad had said), and swapped it for a little Mercedes Kompressor. Up until this point, I’d been doing everything right. I still paid off my credit cards every month, and with what was left from my Coogan account and the golf course job, I was the very picture of fiscal responsibility.

  When I first turned eighteen, I thought the money would be my ticket to doing whatever I wanted—including ditching my parents and moving out on my own. Instead, I kept living with my dad until I was twenty, and my brother, who was still in high school, was living there as well. Mychal is not a small person.

  Also, my dad had decided that since I was technically an adult, and had a job, I should start paying rent.

  I didn’t exactly agree with him on this point and thought that if I was going to pay rent to live in a bedroom at my dad’s house, then I might as well get my own place. I didn’t go far.

  Valencia is crawling with b
ig apartment complexes, so I literally just looked down the street from where I was living with my dad and said, “There! I’ll move there!”

  I still love apartments, especially those in big complexes where they all look the same—I find it comforting. I couldn’t wait to move in, even though I had no idea how much living on my own would cost. Even though I was now a manager at Abercrombie, I was still making only about three thousand dollars a month—before taxes. I signed the lease and used some of my lump-sum savings to pay the first, last, and security deposit on a one bedroom with a tiny balcony. It was super cute. In fact, thirteen-hundred-dollars-a-month-in-rent cute.

  Then I had to furnish it. Aside from my dresser and bed from my dad’s house, I didn’t own so much as a spoon. I had to buy everything—towels, dishes, trash cans, a toilet brush . . . I also bought a lot of things that couldn’t exactly be called necessities—like a Hello Kitty toaster that burned a cat face into each slice of bread, and a giant flat-screen TV to mount on the wall in the living room.

  I put all this on my credit cards—fully intending to pay them off—but then discovered that my rent and car payment alone pretty much cashed out my take-home pay each month. Then there were utilities on top of that! I kept paying the electric bill, so at least I could still watch the big-screen TV that I couldn’t technically afford, but I wasn’t making a dent in the credit card bill, and it was rising by the month. When the bills came in the mail, I didn’t throw them away (that would have made me feel too guilty) but stuffed them unopened in a drawer, telling myself that I was going to get to them, someday.

  After a few months of living on my own, I was really popular—with the credit agencies. All kinds of credit agencies, all over the country. They’d call, I’d answer, and then save that number in my contacts as “do not answer” so I wouldn’t ever mistakenly talk to them again. If anyone had looked in my phone, they would have seen my sheaf of “do not answers” and thought I was up to something seriously sketchy, even though I wasn’t. At least not yet.

  I lived in that apartment for half a year, and when it was finally just about fully furnished, I had to face the fact that I just couldn’t live there anymore. I’d signed a yearlong lease, so I had to pay an early-termination fee, not to mention losing my deposit and paying damages for drilling holes in the living room wall to hang that big-ass TV. When the management company presented me with the final tally of how much it was going to cost me to move out of their building, I practically laughed in their face. It was money I didn’t have, so chalk that up to yet another black mark on my credit report.

  For my grand move out, I begged Madison to help me, and scraped together enough money to rent a U-Haul. Not an actual truck, mind you, but a flatbed trailer that lets you cruise down the street with all your shit on display in the open air. We hooked it up to the back of her SUV, loaded up all the stuff, and drove right back to the same apartment I’d moved out of just six months before. My dad was coming out the door as we turned the corner down his street. Madison started honking the horn and waving out the window as soon as she saw him.

  “Hey, Dad!” I yelled as we pulled into the driveway. “You got room for all this stuff? Don’t worry, we’ll make it work!”

  One reason why I was never too worried about the bills piling up was that I was always hoping an acting job was right around the corner. All it would take was one role, and one check, to pay everything off. This was true in theory, but in reality I was working so much at Abercrombie that I didn’t have time for auditions. That impediment soon took care of itself (I got fired), and then I had plenty of time for auditions, but my already small monthly income shrunk down to a big fat zero.

  My financial lifelines were unemployment checks and the occasional residual. The Fresh Prince and Family Matters were both in reruns at the time, so occasionally I’d get a check when one of my episodes would air. It’d be like six dollars, but I’d head straight to the bank to cash it, because, hell, six dollars meant lunch! Some days I wouldn’t even leave the house unless one of those checks came. The mailbox and I were best friends. I even requested my own key. “Dad, I’ve got stuff in there too!” I protested when he seemed ready to resist. “And the bank closes before you get home from work!”

  Soon I got more mail—a letter from the bank stating that my car was going to be repossessed. I’d completely stopped making payments on it, so this wasn’t exactly a surprise. I asked my dad for advice. “Okay, here’s what you’re going to do . . . ,” he said, and instructed me to clean out all my personal belongings and make sure I always left it where it could easily be found. Clearly this was not his first repossession rodeo, which makes me think that he hadn’t really “turned in” the Lexus a few years before.

  Now every time I went outside to check the mailbox, I’d also check the curb to see if my car was still parked there, basically like a crackhead making sure no one had stolen my stuff.

  Sure enough, one day it was just gone. I texted Madison, like, “Shit, can I get a ride?”

  No car, no job was not my financial rock bottom, nor was it the unpaid parking tickets and resulting unpaid court fees that were also piling up. It hit a few weeks later, and completely by accident. I had deposited a twelve-dollar check at the ATM and, without thinking, asked to withdrawal twenty dollars. Lo and behold, it gave it to me and a lightbulb went off: I give machine envelope. Machine gives me money . . .

  Soon I was depositing empty envelopes and taking out cash whenever I desperately needed money.

  Newsflash: banks catch on to that stuff! And fast.

  I tried to play dumb when they called, and claimed I had no idea why so many of my deposit envelopes were coming back empty, but they didn’t buy it for a minute. So soon, not only were my credit cards maxed out and my phone constantly buzzing with “do not answer” numbers but I couldn’t even deposit my measly residual checks anywhere because the bank had closed my account. Seriously, though, I’m lucky that all I got was a shaming and a few more levels of inconvenience—what I was doing counts as fraud, and I could have gone to jail. There are characters on Orange Is the New Black who were locked up for less than what I was doing.

  Finally, after a brief stint waitressing—where I seemed to spend more money going out with my coworkers than I made—I realized I had to get serious about my finances.

  The first step in that process was facing up to the fact that the big acting paycheck I’d been dreaming about forever might really never come in. I went back to working retail and used the little money I had coming in to pay my dad the rent that he still insisted on charging me. I also started to try to pay down some of my debt—“try” being the key word here, because I was barely making a dent in the interest.

  I also cut my expenses wherever I could. I completely stopped spending money on anything that wasn’t totally a necessity. I dug through my closets for old clothes that I hadn’t worn in forever, and got creative with the styling to make them seem like new outfits. When I absolutely had to buy something new, I bought it on sale, at the store where I worked, so I could maximize my employee discount. When I went to my shifts at the mall, I’d take snacks or pack a lunch, so I wasn’t dropping an hour’s worth of pay on some shitty pizza and iceberg-lettuce salad from a fast-food restaurant. When the “do not answer” numbers called, I actually answered, and would talk to them about how much I owed where, and what I could do to start paying it off. I always hoped that they’d give me a break because at least I wasn’t avoiding them anymore, but, ha! no such luck.

  I limited myself to one night out a month with friends, and came to terms with the fact that my new social life mainly involved going over to my mom’s apartment to sit on her couch and watch her watch Tyler Perry movies. It wasn’t fun, but at least it was responsible. I was no longer afraid that the bank was watching my every move, nor did I feel like a tweaker train wreck, one residual check away from living on the streets.

  When I
finally booked Glee, I didn’t celebrate with a vacation, a new bag, or a new ride. Instead, I hired an agency to help clean up my credit. The hard truth about these kinds of agencies is that they really don’t do anything you can’t do for yourself. The ones you hear advertised on the radio that promise to get negative things “removed” from your credit report are a scam. If you get your car repossessed like I did, well, sorry, girl, that’s just not going away.

  What they can do is make a whole bunch of calls for you, figure out how much you need to pay to whom and when, and basically act as the intermediary between you and all the people you need to pay off. With my new gig on Glee, I had the money to pay off my bills, but the filming schedule was so hectic that I didn’t have time to keep track of the bureaucratic side of it, so a credit agency made a lot of sense for me—and I used them for five years.

  That was how long it took, and even after I’d paid off all my debt, my credit was still sucky enough that I couldn’t get a lease, and had to put down a huge cash deposit when I wanted to get a new car.

  Even after I booked Glee, I was still cautious about spending money or getting in over my head with any kind of purchase, so I kept living with my dad. Finally, one night I was rehearsing a dance routine for “I Say a Little Prayer” until almost two in the morning, and trying to be as quiet as I could since my dad was asleep upstairs and had to get up early for work, but I kept messing up because I had the music so low that I couldn’t hear the beat.

  I knew I needed to move out, but there was no way I was making the same mistakes again. I convinced a high school friend to move in with me, and we got an eight-hundred-square-foot studio apartment on Vineland and Ventura. It was a thousand dollars a month, so we split the rent and each paid five hundred. We had two twin beds, like a dorm room, which would have been disastrous if I’d ever tried to bring home guys, but at this point dating was the furthest thing from my mind. I’d work, shower, sleep; work, shower, sleep; and whenever I got a free moment, I’d call the credit agency and see who I needed to write a check to that week.