Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  My brother was still in high school and playing football, so he and I trekked with my dad to the deep Valley—Van Nuys. It wasn’t the nicest place to begin with, and our neighborhood was more hood than neighbors. There were no street lights on our block, or any of the blocks around us, for that matter, and it was a bit of a shock to a born-and-bred suburban girl like me.

  Dad rented a three-bedroom house for our fractured family and gave me the biggest bedroom. The space was huge, almost like a small loft, and there was plenty of space for all my recently acquired (and unfortunately unreturnable) furniture.

  But I had to contend with the five-hundred-dollar-per-month rent my dad began charging me. So I set about looking for a job, without looking very hard. That led me to the Abercrombie & Fitch store in the Valencia Town Center (RIP, because it’s long since closed). I had worked at Abercrombie before, as one of my first jobs, when I was sixteen. My friend Madison had worked there too, and it definitely had not felt like “work.” It was more like an after-school program: we’d show up for our shifts wearing T-shirts with the name of the store plastered across the front, and sometimes even the back, and cut-off jean shorts so tiny that it was actually a good thing I didn’t have an ass. We’d fold T-shirts for a couple of hours, help a customer or two if we absolutely had to, and gossip while spending the few measly dollars that we made on some Panda Express at the food court.

  Having a job was so fun!

  But now that I was nineteen and had a rent check hanging over my head, I wanted to make more than minimum wage. I figured the best way to do that was to be a manager: I didn’t want to fold the T-shirts; I wanted to be the person who told the other people to fold the T-shirts.

  For some God-only-knows reason, being a manager at Abercrombie required a bachelor’s degree, which I definitely did not have. So I just lied—my résumé was a glorious work of creative writing. I explained that because I was an actress, I’d graduated early from high school by taking advanced-placement classes, the kind where you also earned college credit. Because I’d taken so many of those, I had an associate’s degree by the time I was sixteen! And just three years later, I’d already obtained a bachelor’s degree in—get this—fashion merchandising and communications. I was just that motivated! That someone with a college degree and that much ambition would decide to move back in with their dad and get a job at the mall makes total sense, right?

  Anyway, they bought it and hired me, which I guess is probably a testament to my acting skills more than anything. Lies and falsified credentials aside, I was a really good manager—I told all those underling teenagers how to fold those jeans and spritz that cologne like the boss that I was.

  One of my coworkers was this guy named Greg, who was actually almost thirty but still acted like he was eighteen. Every season we had to spend an extra late night in the store, changing out all the old merchandise to make room for the new. We’d work until after midnight, and on one such night, I unfortunately hooked up with Greg. In the store (insert grimacing emoji here).

  At this time in my life, I’d only had sex once and my amorous adventures were pretty limited. I wasn’t used to getting attention from guys at all. It was super boring being in a store counting sweatshirts at 11:00 p.m., and when Greg started coming on to me, I was more “oh well” than “oh wow,” but figured why the hell not? At that point, any sexual experience, even a bad one, still counted as experience in my book. Greg and I were one and done, though, and as far as I knew, news of our hookup never really got out.

  Then, one day one of my fellow managers called in sick, and someone from a different store came to ours to cover and fill in.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, when I spotted a girl I didn’t know straightening the sweatshirts.

  “Oh, that’s Greg’s wife,” my coworker responded. “She works at another Abercrombie store.”

  I choked on my soda and squeaked, causing my coworker to give me a weird look.

  I quickly composed myself for my shift. I had no idea that Greg had a wife—he seemed like such a kid and in no way mature enough for marriage (which he wasn’t, obviously). What the hell was I going to do? Now, I had no qualms about lying on my résumé, but I was not a home-wrecker, and my panic about doing the right thing only intensified when I learned that he not only had a wife but also a kid!

  To this day, I still get random little checks from Abercrombie, because they’re always being sued for some sort of inappropriateness. Even if it wasn’t written down on paper anywhere, the stores definitely fostered this idea that their employees were fun, attractive, and sexy, and that working there wasn’t work—it was a party! Your shift is practically an orgy! I’m exaggerating a little here, obviously, but I’m trying to give Greg the benefit of the doubt: maybe he didn’t wear a wedding ring or regularly mention his wife because he didn’t think it was part of the brand. Whatever—what a piece of shit.

  I made it through the shift, and later that night decided I was going to call Greg’s wife and tell her what had happened. When no one was looking, I did some sleuthing and found her phone number in the employee directory. I didn’t want to be a bitch about it, or cause drama, but I knew that things like this get out eventually, and so if she was going to hear it from someone, I wanted her to at least hear it from me. Madison was always my accessory to crime, so we sat in her car, parked in front of my house, as I made the call from her cell phone.

  At first Greg’s wife didn’t believe me, and then our conversation devolved into her calling me a bunch of names and cursing me the hell out. “You are ungrateful!” I finally said, before I hung up.

  The next day, though, I sent flowers, sans card, to her at the store. “Why would you do that?” Madison asked. “She just called you a whore!”

  “I know,” I said. “But I just feel bad! I would never want something like that to happen to me!” Ugh, I still feel horrible just thinking about this whole situation.

  I was not looking forward to continuing my working relationship with Greg. But lo and behold, I didn’t have to worry about it, because shortly thereafter I was fired for ringing up my own purchase, which in the retail world is akin to outright theft. I hadn’t stolen anything, but my new joblessness was a little bit of karma coming my way, and I was more than willing to take it.

  For the next three months, I was a bum. I slept late, hung out with my mom, and tried to wrap my head around the fact that I was seriously in debt and had no money. I took one community college class, then dropped it. I was completely lacking direction, and also behind on rent. Soon I owed my dad fifteen hundred dollars, and he showed no sign of letting me forget about it. I decided I would get a waitressing job. The hourly wage wasn’t cutting it, and I needed something where I could make tips and have cash on hand every day.

  IT’S JUST A RESTAURANT, OR IS IT?

  Enter Hooters. In my twenty-year-old brain, I knew I was cute, so I thought: cute + Hooters = better tips. I applied, got the job, and told my parents.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” my mom said. “You’re not showing anything. It’s just a restaurant.” Mom had never actually been to a Hooters.

  Dad, on the other hand, had and so was less enthusiastic about my newfound employment.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, “you work near the restaurant. Will you come to Hooters for lunch?”

  “No,” he said. “I will never, ever, come in and watch you work at Hooters.”

  As it turned out, Hooters may have been a job for bimbos, but it was not a job for slackers. They were incredibly strict about your appearance (I know, I know, big surprise, right?). The T-shirts were tight, white, and said “Hooters” on the front. The slogan on the back summed up the whole experience: “Delightfully tacky yet unrefined.” As a waitress, you were not allowed to have stains on your shirt or runs in your hosiery. To add insult to injury, if you snagged your pantyhose in the middle of a shift, you had to hurry b
ack to the break room and use your own money to buy a new pair from a vending machine. The signature Hooters shade was “suntan.” Let me tell you, it looked great on anyone who wasn’t white. (Read: it looked awful.)

  Every hour on the hour, they would play a horrible country song on the loudspeakers, and all the waitresses had to stop what they were doing, jump up on the tables, and do a choreographed line dance. Mind you—people were eating at these tables! And that, Mom, is when it wasn’t just a restaurant.

  My only solace was when Madison would come to visit me, usually because I’d made her. She is pretty much guaranteed entrance into heaven just based upon the number of fried pickles she has eaten in the name of keeping her increasingly depressed best friend company.

  One of the other waitresses at Hooters soon hooked me up with a fake ID. It was her cousin’s old driver’s license, and even though the photo was of a slightly overweight Mexican girl, it either looked enough like me to work, or the clubs where I used it really did not give a shit about underage drinking.

  One of my other coworkers was an ex–pageant girl from Texas, and she and her mother had moved out to LA, convinced that this beauty queen was going to be a star. It was from these southern women that I decided to take my beauty tips, and her mom taught me how to do my own hair extensions. We’d buy the weaves from beauty-supply stores, and then instead of sewing them in like normal people do, she taught me how to glue them to my scalp with an incredibly toxic rubber cement that smelled like paint. On top of that, I tried to turn my black hair, both real and fake, blond by dying it myself. It lightened into an awful, acrid shade of orange—you know, that really special hair color that just screams “I buy all my beauty products at Big Lots.” I paired this gorgeous styling with a push-up bra, and the overall look may be best described as “budget porn star.”

  After our shifts at Hooters, we’d hit the clubs in Hollywood—places that had Roman numerals for names or were called just one word, like Noise or Room. The kind of places that preferred their female clientele look like baby hookers. It was through this new crew of girlfriends and our totally classy scene that I met Barry, an older man who was completely infatuated with me. Barry was in his midthirties and would come into Hooters with his friend Steve. Hookers—I mean Hooters—encouraged the waitresses to sit down and chat with the customers. During one such tableside chat, someone invited Barry and Steve to go out with us that night, an invite that they were more than eager to accept.

  I found Barry pretty gross, but with encouragement from my friends, who all seemed to have sugar daddies of their own, I let him give me three hundred dollars a month under the auspices of “helping me out.” I was still too naive to understand that these financial installments—in cash—meant that eventually Barry was going to expect me to not just look like a prostitute but act like one too.

  When it became clear to him that I was never going to sleep with him—probably because I said, “I am never going to sleep with you”—his e-mails and calls became more and more frequent and frantic. I tried lying and telling him I’d found Jesus and turned my life around, but that just seemed to turn him on more. Finally, when I was flat-out scared and felt like I had a stalker, I got up the courage to tell my dad that this time I’d really, really fucked up.

  I’ve rarely seen my dad so mad—at me and at Barry—and he promptly called Barry and threatened to simultaneously kill him and have him thrown in jail. Watching my father do this, and knowing that I’d put him in a position that made him both angry and uncomfortable, was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.

  My whole life was humiliating at this point. There were tons of movie studios nearby, and studio guys would come in all the time and try to flirt with me. No matter that it was the middle of a Wednesday afternoon and they clearly had no better place to be, they’d still try to chat me up in a condescending way. Slurping the wing sauce from their fingers and smiling up at me, they’d say, “Are you an actress?”

  Barf. Even when such salacious questions didn’t make me throw up in my mouth, I was usually too embarrassed to say yes.

  I didn’t much feel like an actress anyway. I hadn’t booked a part in more than two years, and my auditions had dried up. I wasn’t even in college, and the only good thing about my career was that I occasionally got free mozzarella sticks. It’s totally normal to be in your late teens and early twenties and still figuring it out and making horrible decisions. But to me, figuring it out just felt like fucking up. I’d been really young when I had a taste of what I wanted to do—everything else was bitter in comparison.

  Deep down, I knew I had more in me. If I wasn’t living up to my potential, I had no one to blame but myself. I couldn’t even blame my dad for making me pay rent.

  NAUGHTY IN NEW YORK

  By the time I was staring down the barrel of my twenties, life had kicked me in the ass enough to make me think it was time for a plan B (and no, not the contraceptive). My first step toward getting back on track was obvious: get the hell out of Hooters. I quit and threw my stupid suntan pantyhose and that horrible T-shirt in the trash. I unglued all the hair that hadn’t actually grown out of my head, and I moved the Wonderbras to the back of the underwear drawer.

  I applied for and got a job as a manager at the Michael Kors in the Topanga mall (I lied on my résumé—again—but they were just tiny little white lies). And I enrolled again in community college, this time vowing not to drop any of my classes.

  I cut ties with my trashy friends and spent my nights studying. I actually got good grades in all my classes and started to realize that maybe I hadn’t given myself enough credit before. I’d fallen back on my looks over and over because I didn’t think I had anything else to offer, but now I was starting to see that I was actually smart. Getting a graded paper on which the professor wrote “well written!” felt a million times better than getting a 25 percent tip because some d-bag got to ogle my butt when I dropped off his burger.

  In my classes, I discovered that I most enjoyed writing. I started to think about screenwriting as a potential career path, figuring that if I couldn’t be in front of the camera, I could at least be behind it. I did some research and came across a three-month program at the New York Film Academy. I gave my dad the hard sell, and he agreed that it sounded like a good idea (he was probably also still thinking that it would be a good idea to get me three thousand miles away from Barry). The program cost ten thousand dollars, and though he didn’t have a ton of money, he agreed to split it with me. My mom told me that right before I turned eighteen, she had squirreled away part of my Coogan account to protect it from my spending sprees, and I used that to pay for the other half.

  I enrolled in the program and bought myself a ticket to New York—one with three stops along the way, because I didn’t want to waste money on a nonstop flight. We had some family friends who lived in New Jersey, and I stayed with them and commuted into the city for class each day. The commute took two and a half hours: I took two buses, a long subway ride, and then walked the final twenty blocks, which, being from California, was probably the most I’d ever walked in my entire life.

  Still, I could not have been happier. Even when I was sitting in a smelly seat on a bus going over the George Washington Bridge, I felt amazing. I was finally doing something with my life and making my own decisions as opposed to just going with the flow. I hardly knew anyone, which was also a relief. In LA, it seemed like I couldn’t go to Starbucks without running into some guy I went to middle school with or some girl I used to see at auditions.

  After a month of that hellacious commute, my friends hooked me up with an apartment in Manhattan, at Fifty-Eighth and Eighth, which was unoccupied but owned by people they knew, and where I could live rent-free for the next two months. It wasn’t really furnished, but I didn’t care. When I got my tax refund, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought new sheets for the bed, feeling like a queen. The apartment had no TV, a
nd I could only get Internet in the laundry room. I didn’t have much money, but there was a little Mexican restaurant around the corner, and I would go there, sit by myself, and make one margarita last for hours while I people watched.

  The first month of the program was all about developing our ideas. We’d come up with several and throw them out to the rest of the group for feedback. I had one idea for a super dark drama that was inspired by listening to Adele’s “Hometown Glory” nonstop, but I also had an idea for a teenage comedy that everyone seemed to really like, so I set about putting that one down on paper.

  My screenplay was called “Naughty,” and it was about two high school girls who are best friends and outcasts. One is slightly overweight, and her skinny friend has stringy hair and wears glasses. Through some twist of the high school rumor mill, everyone thinks they’re lesbians, and they decide to go along with it as part of an elaborate plot to get the guys they really like to hang out. One of the girls has a hot older sister who is their mentor and gives them blow job lessons on a banana. The climax (no pun intended) occurs when their parents find out about their doings and stage an intervention, complete with a poster of a pregnant teenage Jamie Lynn Spears with the words “Don’t let this be you.”

  The screenplay was sexy and funny, and I loved watching people laugh out loud as they read it. It didn’t feel as amazing as delivering a punch line while the cameras were rolling, but it still felt pretty damn good, and I knew that I was talented. The credits that I earned at the film academy transferred to my community college, so when I got back to LA, I only needed one more year before I could transfer to a four-year school. I’d had such a great experience in New York that I couldn’t wait to go back. I started looking into transferring to film school at NYU or the creative-writing program at Columbia. I got a job as a nanny and started to pay down my credit cards and save whatever money I could. I was done with being an actress.