by Naya Rivera
That asshole was trying to steal my car!
Or so I thought. When I called him screaming about it, he had no idea what I was talking about. Who knows what A’s and my future held, because after that, he totally thought I was nuts—and he had a point. I later found the keys between the cushions of the couch, and my car was still parked right where I’d left it.
I thought this was the end of my ABC adventure, and lost contact with all of them for a few weeks, until one day my cell phone started to ring when my mom was over at my apartment making lunch with me. I didn’t recognize the number, so I just hit “answer” and put it on speaker phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” said a male voice. “Can I speak to the coach of the all-star team?”
“What?”
“Can I speak to the coach of the all-star team? I heard you’re holding tryouts for new members.”
It began to dawn on me who was on the other end of the line and what was happening, and I hung up as quickly as I could. My mom was sitting there, just looking at me like, what the fuck just happened?
I had no choice but to tell her. This was right after she’d divorced my dad and was dating for the first time in almost twenty years, and we were really close. When I finished my story with “I’m really sorry I’m such a slut,” she started cracking up.
Before I could stop her, she grabbed the phone from me and hit the callback button. “Hello?” she said, in her most sassy voice, as soon as the same guy who had just called me picked up. “No, this is the coach of the all-star team! And we are not accepting new members!” Then she hung up. By this point, she was laughing so hard that she had tears in her eyes, and I had crumpled over on the couch, unable to breathe.
My mom has had my back from day one, and nothing’s going to change that, certainly not a little sleeping around.
Now I look back on my whore years and think everyone should have them. I don’t think you can be successfully married until you’ve had at least three good years of playing the field. I’m not kidding! It teaches you what’s out there (even if it’s not all that great) so you’ll know good sex when you find it later. You’ll learn how to get yourself off, get other people off, and how to get other people to get you off. You’ll learn to not shed tears for the d-bags; sleep with a few people who you might really care about, even if you don’t want them to be your boyfriend (or girlfriend); and learn that being a woman and having sex isn’t about just “giving it up” but getting yours too.
And, fuck, it’s fun. You get some great stories in the process. Years from now, when I’m still married and Ryan and I have all these kids and grandkids running around, I can sit back and think, “Yeah, I lived. I really lived.”
RELATIONSHIP TERRITORY—IT’S COMPLICATED
After Tahj and my sexless teenage union was officially donezo—and you’re definitely over-over when someone breaks up with you because your family’s poor—I went on dates and had hookups, but there was nothing really memorable or remarkable about any of the guys I hung out with. Or wait, let me rephrase that: memorable in a good way.
I dated this one guy for a while, an actor who’d shown some career promise after a small role in a movie, and he was a couple of years younger than me. He was legal but still didn’t have a car or even a driver’s license. His mom drove him everywhere. We’d hang out, hook up, and then when it was time for him to go, I’d drive him to some halfway point, like a McDonald’s parking lot, where his mom would be waiting. He’d give me a kiss, get out of my car, walk across the parking lot, and get in her car; then she’d wave and they’d drive off. It was like two divorced parents with joint custody, and it only took me a couple of times meeting his mom at the drop-off point before I was like, yeah, this is probably not going to work.
My string of randoms came to an end when I met Mark Salling at the Glee pilot. He played guitar and I thought he was so cute. This was Mark Salling circa 2009, when he was still a major looker, and I tried so hard to get him to like me. At the time, I still wasn’t sure how long my role on Glee would last, so I was still working as a nanny on the side in order to make some extra money. My phone rang one day while I was working. I was standing there, surrounded by all these kids, when I answered this unknown number (probably assuming that it was yet another credit agency). But it was Mark, wanting to know if I wanted to go out. On a date. With him.
Of course I did.
It was October, right before Halloween, and we made plans to go to Fright Fest at Magic Mountain, even though I normally hate that kind of stuff and don’t like to be scared at all. Like I said, I was trying so hard to get him to like me. I still had my bad hair extensions at this point, but I spent extra time straightening them and putting on makeup, and I wore a white American Apparel V-neck tee and a plaid flannel shirt tied around my waist—a casual autumnal Fright Fest outfit, I thought. Mark came to pick me up, and he was driving a complete piece-of-shit car with trash just rolling around in the backseat. Okay, I could forgive him that—we were all still struggling at that point. I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, so I think I must have blocked it out.
It’s harder to block the fact that he then proceeded to smoke weed in front of me, even when I declined his offer to get high, but, like I said, he was smoking hot at that point, so I just focused on his biceps and tried to ignore the cloud of marijuana smoke billowing around my head. As soon as he was done, he asked if I was hungry. I said yes, thinking, “Oh my God, we’re going to dinner! This is so cute!”
Then he pulled into the In-N-Out drive-through, the one nearest my house, still in Valencia. As we ordered, I kept telling myself that this date was going well. “I’m a down chick,” I thought. “I can eat a cheeseburger.” Which I did, sitting in the car in the parking lot. When we’d finished our meal, it took a few tries before we got the car to start, but at least the smell of weed had been replaced by the smell of fries.
At Fright Fest, Mark was very high and very excited. He loved all the ghouls and monsters, and had even brought a camera—not to take pictures of me, or the two of us, but to get pics of himself with all the different people in costume. It was pretty weird, and I wish I had those photos, because if I did, they would definitely be in this book. All in all, though, the date was not a total disaster, and we ended it with nothing more than a friendly hug.
A few weeks later, we kissed for the first time on the night that Obama was elected. I was watching the election results at home in Valencia with my dad, and when it looked like Obama really was going to win, I was totally overcome with patriotism and excitement and called Mark. “What are you doing right now?”
He was celebrating at a bar in Santa Monica and was as enthusiastic as I was. “Come and meet me!” he yelled into the phone. “I’m coming!” I yelled back.
Once we met up, we got drunk and made out, periodically taking breaks to yell, “Can you believe this?” or “Yes, we can!” and wipe tears of joy from our eyes. Then I spent the night at his house. After that, we somehow became boyfriend and girlfriend, and he told me he loved me just four weeks into us hanging out. This time he wasn’t high on weed or political progress, but ecstasy.
We were about to go out, when he pulled out this pill and asked if I wanted to do it with him. At first I said no, because I’d never done ecstasy before, but he finally convinced me to split it with him. As soon as I was done, he turned to me and said, “Hey, so I’m just going to say this now because I’m probably going to say it later, but I love you.” Then the car pulled up, and off we went, before I even had time to really decide what to say back. “Do I say that I love him?” I wondered. “No, because I don’t.” I was also intensely examining every emotion and physical feeling for some sign that the drug might be working. But it wasn’t, and I still didn’t know what to say, so finally I just said, “Thank you?” We went to the Happy Ending on Sunset, and Mark spent the entire night high as a kite, smil
ing his ass off, and I never felt a thing. Except maybe a vague sense of paranoia and impending doom, but that might just be in hindsight.
Mark and I went on to date for three years. During that time, we were either very much on or very much off, but he was my first real boyfriend. Woof. When things were good, they were great. He was from Texas, and I went home with him twice. Texas might as well have been a whole new world, through the eyes of a California girl, but I loved it. We went to visit his grandma and stayed, just the two of us, at his family’s creek-side cabin. He’d play the guitar and we’d lay in the sun and write songs and go fishing. We were that fucking retarded couple, where I’d be like, “Oh, baby, you caught me a bass!”
Glee was a new experience for both of us, so it was great to have a buddy to get through all the shit with, and being on set together was really fun—when we weren’t hating each other.
Because Mark was one of the leads in the show, people started to recognize him long before they knew who I was. His star was on the rise—at least to hear him tell it—and so he explained to me the deal: his publicist thought it would be better for his image if he pretended to not have a girlfriend. “If anyone asks,” he said, “I’m single.” Fine, whatever. I agreed to that, though I had a feeling his pretending to be single had less to do with his publicist and more to do with his dick. A saner woman would have walked away from that relationship right then and there, but two things stopped me from doing so: one, I was not a sane woman at that time in my life, and two, to break up with Mark would mean I wouldn’t have a reason to fight with him anymore. And I loved fighting with him. I was addicted to the drama.
He’s a moody fucking person, and whenever he’d get in a mood, I’d start feeling some type of way. I’d do something to push his buttons, which would make him withdraw even more and piss me off even more. I was constantly asking him if there were other girls—which, let’s be honest, there totally were—but he would deny it, and then I’d demand to see his phone, and when he’d refuse, I’d try to get sneaky and grab it the second he let his guard down. All in the name of good, clean, unhealthy fun!
The POS car he drove when we first started dating was pretty indicative of what Mark was like—there were a lot of areas of his life where he just did not give a fuck. Where he lived was another one of them. He had this apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. It was right next to a liquor store, the next-door neighbor’s door was riddled with bullet holes, and if I ever had to park more than just a few feet away from his place, I’d lock my car and then run as quickly as I could. One time we even came home and found that a homeless person had taken a giant shit right on his welcome mat. But Mark didn’t care one bit, and didn’t even move out of that place until season three.
But still, I was in love, or so I thought, and I’d be sleeping over at that shithole apartment, happy as a lark, thinking, “I could live here if we were married. I could definitely fix it up.” Oh, to be young and completely deranged.
Once, he was away on a trip, and word came back to me through other members of the cast that he had fucked some other girl. I’d always suspected such things had happened, but this was the first time someone had flat-out said to me, “Yo, he banged that chick,” so I instantly was pissed.
I called up Madison, my forever partner in crime, and we drove down to Mark’s apartment while he was still out of town. We made a pit stop at the liquor store next door and bought dog food, Coca-Cola, eggs, and bird seed, and then dumped all that shit all over his car. I took video of it. He was still scheduled to be gone for a few more days, but by the time we were pulling away the feral cats had already started to come mewing out of the alley and were jumping up onto the car to eat the food.
And that’s how I got my first media scandal. A sample headline from Us Weekly: “Exclusive: Glee’s Naya Rivera Keyed Mark Salling’s Lexus in Jealous Fit.” Someone leaked it to the press but got all the details wrong—there were no keys involved, and he definitely did not have a Lexus. I never fully admitted it to anyone, but Mark knew it was me. He was friendly with the people who ran the liquor store, and when he got back to find his car covered in fermenting sludge, they showed him surveillance-camera footage of me in the store, buying all the stuff. Whoops.
Mark might have had a shred of guilt about sleeping around behind my back, or—more likely—he was as addicted to the drama as I was, because we kept at it, even after this incident. He even helped me cover it up, and we posted a pic to his Twitter account of me pretending to choke him while wearing my Cheerios uniform. “I don’t even drive a Lexus. Silly rumors, we’re the best of friends,” he captioned the photo, and we never talked about it again.
We continued to bicker and break up every other day, and then finally Mark had had enough. He ended it for good, against my wishes. For a while, there was drama on set, because we hated each other and I didn’t even want him looking at me. Any time a new person was added to the show, it was like fresh meat being dropped into a piranha tank. Eyebrows went up and hormones started churning at the thought of new hookup potential. Lucky for me, Chord Overstreet joined the cast right after Mark and I were donezo, and the minute I saw him it was like a lightbulb went off. “You don’t know my drama with Mark,” I thought. “Hey,” I said to Chord, “let’s hang out!”
Of course, it didn’t take long at all for word of said drama to reach Chord, and he confronted me on set one day, while at the same time trying to hide from Mark. “But I’m friends with him!” Chord protested, before ducking behind a car as Mark just happened to walk by. “Don’t let him see me!” Chord hissed from his crouch.
Within a few weeks, though, I was like, “Mark who?” and Chord was like, “Naya who?” and everyone had completely forgotten about it and moved on. That was one of many good things about the Glee cast—it was impossible to stay mad for long; we knew how to keep it moving.
So what did I learn from that completely dysfunctional relationship? Nothing. Absolutely nothing—until Mark’s legal woes (google it) made a few unsavory headlines on their own a few years later. My son’s nanny actually told me about it when the story broke. I can’t say I was totally shocked, but still—W-T-F? Then I had no doubt that God really did have my back along the way. When Mark dumped me, I thought it was the worst thing ever, but can you imagine if that didn’t happen? And I was laying there in bed when the battering ram came through the door? (Again, google it!)
Similar to how I feel about the whore years, I think everyone should have that one relationship where you look back and ask yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?” You’ll learn something and you won’t regret it. Unless, of course, that relationship was with someone who had a sizable stash of child porn on his computer. Then, by all means, regret everything.
BUMP IN THE ROAD
One of the reasons why I don’t (totally) regret what happened between Mark and me is that, had this shitty relationship never happened, I might never have met my husband.
It was 2010 and, as was often the case in those days, I was in a horrible mood because of Mark. It was either a break, breakup, or fight (hard to keep track), but I had plans to sit at home and wait for him to call me so I could scream that I never wanted to talk to him again and hang up. Heather had no intention of letting this happen, though, and told me that I was coming out that night if she had to come by my house and pick me up. I conceded that she was probably right, and agreed to meet her at a burlesque show in Santa Monica, where one of our dancer friends was going to be performing.
Almost as soon as we walked into the club, I noticed Ryan sitting at the bar. It was a classic double take, like something out of a movie, my head swiveling around on my neck and my eyes practically popping out of my head. He had a chiseled jaw, long curly hair, and a black bandanna tied around his head. “Who is that?” I asked Heather, and when I wouldn’t stop talking about him, she decided to go find out for me.
Heather walked up to him, pointed me
out, and said something along the lines of “My friend thinks you’re cute and wants to talk to you.”
And what did Ryan say? He wasn’t having it. “I like things to happen organically,” he told Heather (as a polite way of saying no), and she came back to our table alone. I couldn’t believe it! I do not take no for an answer, so I spent the next forty-five minutes pounding drinks to get up the courage to go talk to him myself. Finally, I walked over and introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Naya,” I said. “How are you liking it?”
He asked, how was he liking what? The show, I told him, and he laughed and shrugged, saying it was okay. That conversation topic exhausted, I was like, “Well, I just want to say congratulations.”
“On what?”
“On your incredible bone structure.”
“It’s just the lighting,” he insisted, but my blatant pickup line must not have been that bad, because he asked me to sit down. We spent the rest of the night just talking, and I remember his body language never changed at all. He never seemed very receptive, and I had total flashbacks to chasing boyfriends in preschool. At the end of the night, though, we exchanged info.
“We should be friends,” he said, as he punched his number into my phone.
“Great,” I said, “I love friends.” That was a total lie, because friends was not exactly what I was going for.
Later, after we’d known each other for a while, he told me that he’d had no idea who I was, but that his friends had recognized me from the show. “That’s that girl from Glee,” one of them told him on the way home. “You must be something if she wants to talk to you.”