by Sarah Lassez
I was about to journey to the kitchen, when I saw it above me: the water stain from hell. Just this morning it had been a little yellow dot, and yet somehow, in the course of my day, it had been fed a million other little dots and was now the size of a small child. I lay back down, hypnotized by the blistering mustard yellow stain. Hmmm, I thought, it looks familiar. I tilted my head, studying the mark. Oh my God. An Oscar. It looks exactly like an Oscar! It’s a sign I’m going to win an Academy Award!
But then, as quickly as the hope shot through me, it was gone. I’d have to tell my landlord about this. The ceiling could collapse and kill me in my sleep.
I started to cry.
Here I’d just found out that the man I thought I’d loved was a sex fiend drug addict who’d cheated on me with a Baywatch babe (okay, she had just a brief stint on the show, but she was in a bikini, and I think that counts), but it was the water stain on my ceiling that made me lose it. I loved my little apartment: a 1940s-style studio apartment with a view of the Hollywood sign and a charming black-and-white checkered kitchen floor that made me want to wear white gloves and full skirts, and set pies in windowsills to cool. But my landlord was the not-so-wonderful aspect of my apartment. A rotund and prickly man, he acted as if I’d been sent from hell to personally orchestrate his downfall. This, I knew, was because I was a woman, as the men in the building could do no wrong. I swear the guy downstairs could douse his kitchen in gasoline, drop a match, and walk away—yet my landlord would simply study the charred remains, shrug, and proceed to talk about football or basketball or one of the many sports I do not pretend to understand. If I, however, so much as let a strand of my hair touch the bathtub, he’d fly into a tantrum about drains and clogs and exploding pipes and women and their hair.
To cope with this annoying chauvinism I’d usually enlist whatever boyfriend I had at the time to deal with said fat landlord. But now I was alone. The water stain had waited to emerge (no one lived above me, and I swear it hadn’t rained in months) until I was freshly wounded and newly single, hence illustrating yet another reason why it sucks to be alone.
Just call, my logical side said. Call and report the ceiling! Get it over with! Be responsible! I was about to reach for the phone, but the image of my landlord standing in my apartment with a scowl stopped me. “Obviously you were on the roof with a jack-hammer,” he’d say, shaking his fat head. No, I had no choice. My only option was to forget about my landlord, brave death by falling ceiling, call my friend Gina, and get drunk.
Gina and I met when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two and her father was dating a friend of mine. No stranger to dysfunctional relationships, she’d always maintained there were a few lines she wouldn’t cross, one being dating an actor. According to her theory, actors are essentially trained liars, and dating one is the same as having a dangerously high fever: You can’t think straight, no one makes sense, you start seeing things, you lose your appetite, and you think you might die. Tom, the sex fiend, drug addicted, Baywatch-babe-chasing cheat, also had the honor of being an actor—though my take on dating him had obviously been different. The way I saw it, Tom was employed as a waiter, not an actor, so clearly he wasn’t a good liar, or at least not a successful one. Besides, I myself am an actress, so wouldn’t I be prepared to handle a fellow thespian?
The answer is no. I was not, and most likely never will be. In a city where there are egotistical issue-riddled actors and musicians everywhere you turn, and the egomaniacal issue-riddled people (producers, agents, directors, whatever) who made the aforementioned famous, odds are you won’t escape unscathed. However, even worse than that group is the one that resides many ranks below: the struggling souls who want to be famous actors and musicians, and so on. As far as issues and egos are concerned, this group is essentially the same as their successful counterparts, the way a shadow resembles a form…only they’re broke. Tom, bless his twisted evil little heart, was a member of the latter category.
The key, Gina insisted, was to meet a “normal person,” that rare individual who’s not in the entertainment industry at all. This, alas, is a near impossibility, practically a pipe dream. But for a chosen few it happens. Gina herself, for instance, dated an accountant for one month, and yet told the story for years, as if she’d been fishing in a stream and found gold. “A tad on the boring side,” she’d say, though I got the distinct impression he was more than a tad boring, as on their dates she’d call me from restaurant bathrooms just to chat. “Still, they’re out there,” she’d remind me. “The normal people are out there!” “Really?” I liked to ask her incredulously. “And after a date do you remember anything, or has time gone missing? Tell me about their ship!”
I knew calling her and admitting that Tom had indeed lived up to his trained-liar status would elicit a big fat “I told you so,” but I took the risk. That damn water stain above me still looked like an Oscar, but now it looked like a laughing Oscar, a mocking, spiteful, cruel Oscar. “Who do you think you are? You’ll never make it as an actress! Give up! Move back to Kansas!” Granted, I’ve never even been to Kansas, yet still the idea upset me. I reached for the phone.
Calm, I thought as her answering machine beeped. Calm and rational.
“It’s me. Just calling to say hi.” I paused and took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, anything that was once calm and rational escaped. “I must have been Jack the Ripper in a past life. That’s the only reason my love life would suck so bad! He was cheating on me with that slut hostess at his restaurant, that Baywatch chick! And he was a drug addict and a sex fiend! Pick up the phone! I’ve had a bad day! Pick up the phone!”
Gina finally answered and listened to my afternoon’s saga with the perfect amount of cursing and comforting. At the end I paused, trying to get my heart rate to settle into a safer zone, and Gina took advantage of the silence to announce she’d be over in ten with wine. I thought of calling her back to utter the words “piña colada,” but instead I simply stared at the door until she arrived.
We sat on the bed with full glasses of merlot. Stains already covered the comforter; what did I care? In a studio apartment you have very limited space, so I was very limited with furniture, and hence my bed served as just about everything: couch, chairs, coffee table, dining room table, et cetera. This tended to make dates difficult, as at the end of the evening my inviting a guy inside was the same as saying, “Please, welcome to my bed.”
“I deserved it,” I told Gina. “I should’ve known.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. We all get delusional. Actors look good. That’s their job. They’re like pretty shiny toys—they’re hard to resist.”
“You make us sound so bad. Remember, I’m an actor too.”
“I know. And you couldn’t pay me to date you, either.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Oh,” she said as she lit a cigarette, “and I told you so.”
Ah, there it was. I smiled. “Did you? I don’t remember. Maybe that was the same day I told you not to take that job you know is going nowhere.”
“Huh. Could’ve been.”
I sniffled. “I hate Baywatch.”
“Baywatch sucks. And Candy—”
“Cindy.”
“Sorry, Cindy, whatever; she looks like a Candy. Fake boobs. And bad fake boobs. They’re like shelves, they—”
“I hate fake boobs.”
“I know you do. We all do.”
“Tom doesn’t.”
Gina took a deep drag of her cigarette, her words smoky. “Tom sucks.”
It was another night of reveling in our misery. I’d stopped crying and was now looking out my dark window at pretty much nothing. One solitary tear skittered down my cheek and rested on my lower lip. It dangled there, but I made no move to brush it away, as somewhere in my grief I was still a twisted actress aware that the combination of my pained silence and puffy eyes and that one single tear must have been heart-breakingly beautiful. So impressed was I with the vision I’d created of
myself that I actually forgot about Tom long enough to wish Gina had a camera.
“It’s seriously for the best,” she continued. “Think ‘normal person.’ Wouldn’t it be nice to be with someone responsible? Someone with a savings account? With a 401(k)? That accountant I dated—granted he was a tad boringish, but shit—he had a 401(k). A 401(k). I don’t even know what those are really, something to do with retirement, but I know normal people have them. God, what would it be like to retire? I wanna retire.”
Recently Gina had been promoted to manager at a clothing store she’d worked at during college, a job that had been fine during her student years but was now a reminder that she’d amassed tons of student loan debt to graduate and fold sweaters. Ever since then, she’d been obsessed with the idea of fleeing the country, running off to some place where people didn’t use the phrase “career path”—a place where her high school newsletters, with their maddening updates on all her successful past friends, would never find her. Her dream, as she called it, was to move to Europe, live on an Alp, and make cheese. She really loved cheese—and I don’t mean that she just loved eating it; she actually loved looking at it. How weird is that?
“You know,” she continued, “that water stain on your ceiling is pretty bad. You should tell your fat landlord about that.”
With the mention of my fat landlord the tears were no longer silently beautiful but full-force heaving ugly. I wasn’t crying because I didn’t have Tom; I was crying because I had no one. Again. Once more I’d be reduced to eating frozen dinners. (The only thing more depressing than cooking for just yourself is sitting down, alone, to eat the meal—so why fight it? Frozen meals are the answer. They say, “I’m single but still deserve a meal!”) Once more I’d be doomed to sleep and wake in a bed that was just too tragically big. Saturday nights would again involve Gina and parties that always slightly horrified us, or evenings in sweatpants watching Grease for the hundredth time and eating blocks and blocks of Brie. (Some girls binge on ice cream. I binge on Brie. It’s the one cheese I really like, and I blame it on being French. Gina loves this about me and claims it’s a sign that her Move to Europe and Make Cheese plan is the answer.)
I was bawling and she was uttering reassuring sayings, a universal soundtrack of consolation with a few Gina originals in the mix: “It’s okay. It’ll be okay. This happened for a reason. Tom sucks. One day you’ll laugh at this. Someone better is out there. Fuck that Baywatch bitch.” Meanwhile, my cat, China, a snotty and obese Himalayan who seemed determined to live up to the size of her name and who had no interest in me unless I had a can opener in my hand, heaved herself onto the bed. The mattress springs moaned. I reached for her—it would have been so comforting to have her curled up and purring in my lap—but she shot me a dirty look and arranged her girth on, and over, a pillow.
All of a sudden I realized there was a third bottle of wine on the floor. My tears stopped. Now, Gina tends to be, for lack of a better word, psychic. It’s not something she has much control over, and usually the things she predicts are fairly useless. (Did it help anyone that she dreamt a total stranger would tell her he stapled his finger?) But one thing we’ve learned is that when she gets drunk, she can be quite the oracle. There have actually been a few times when her predictions were scarily right on, and because of this I take what she says very seriously. Unfortunately, her opinion is that I take it too seriously, and she usually flat-out refuses to make predictions, since she’s perfectly aware that revealing a vision of me at a party wearing a stunning pair of pink Manolo Blahnik shoes as I talk to a gorgeous guy who looks very interested will only send me scurrying off to Neiman Marcus, where I will blow my rent money on those shoes.
I eyed the wine bottles. “You’re pretty drunk, huh?”
“Yeah, I didn’t have dinner. I was too—” She stopped. Her eyes narrowed. “No.”
“Please! Just tell me you see a man in my future. I need to know.”
“I see a man in your future.”
“No, come on, Gina. Look at me.” I held my arms up, displaying myself as if I were the principal exhibit at a high school assembly meant to warn students of all things dangerous. “This,” a woman with a tight bun and a gray pencil skirt would say as she pointed to me, “is what dating an actor can do to you.” I concentrated a bit and forced tears to well in my eyes. “I need this. I need hope.”
Gina laughed, as I figured she would. “You’re pathetic. It’s a good thing I love you.” She downed the rest of her wine. “All right, fine. Here I go.” She closed her eyes and was silent for a while. Then, all of a sudden, she was glaring at me.
“What? What? What do you see?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me!”
She sighed. “He’s an actor.”
I recoiled. “What? Why would I do that again?”
“I don’t know, Sarah, why did you do it again? It’s not like Tom was your first.”
“Tell me what you see exactly. What does he look like?”
She closed her eyes again. “Dark hair, dark eyes. Not too tall—I mean, he’s an actor.”
Right there she’d described half the men in Los Angeles.
“Maybe you work with him?” she said, rubbing her temples. “It’s horrible. You both look happy. Really happy. He’s doing the whole gaze-into-your-
eyes bit and holding your hand.” Then she shrugged. “That’s it. That’s all I get.”
It was enough. Just that sliver, that snapshot, gave me hope. That night I thought of my future dark-eyed man. I played with scenes, fiddled with settings. We were on a bench in a park, surrounded by majestic oaks, the moon slinking through branches as he leaned in close. No, we were on the beach at night, inky water slipping around our bare feet, an open bottle of wine awaiting us at our blanket. I stopped. I didn’t need that. I didn’t need any of that. What I really wanted, what I really craved in that way that actually hurt, could take place right here in my boring little studio apartment. Just him opening the door for me, then walking inside the cramped room with no couch and no coffee table and my fat furry mass of a cat hissing from the bed—just him smiling, smiling because it’s my life he’s seeing, my world he’s a part of, me that he has.
God I am pathetic.
A couple months later and Tom was nothing more than a sex fiend drug-addicted dot in my rearview mirror. I’d moved on, partially healed by my acting career, which suddenly seemed on the rise. A movie I’d done was finally released, and my tormented performance (my character committed suicide) garnered an attention I’d only dreamt of. Strangely enough, that role was just the first of many suicides for me. Though my parents have always found it slightly horrifying, casting directors, producers, and directors alike all tended to see me as a natural when it came to committing suicide, being raped, or being murdered. Eventually I did break free from my snare of victim roles, though I was then hurled in the extreme opposite direction, going from playing innocents to being cast as whores—and not just your simple garden-variety whore, but a whole range of whores, my favorite being a ghostly whore from 1900. Evidently, anything that was whorish just screamed “Sarah!” And though I’m always thankful to be working, I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that.
The success truly hit home when I discovered myself in Vogue. Not featured, of course, but there I was, in the fashion section, right next to Madonna. Apparently our shared love for leopard-print handbags had catapulted me into the same league as the Material Girl—if only in terms of handbags, and I had to resist the urge to buy hundreds of copies of Vogue and mail them off to anyone who’d ever doubted me. “Just thought you might want to check out the latest in leopard-print handbags…. Oh, and yeah, that is me next to Madonna. Talk to you soon!” The only thing that stopped me was that TALKING FASHION was inconsiderately splashed across my face, though I believe the G brushed into my idol’s picture as well—yet one more thing we had in common.
When another magazine decided to do a spread called “T
welve Actors to Watch,” and they selected me—one of only six women—I could barely contain my glee. A bit nervous, I showed up on time for the photo shoot, dreaming of looking glamorous, until the coordinator stared at me—eyes wide and skittering from my face to the door—in a way that made me realize there’d been a huge mistake. They didn’t want me. Somewhere out there was a different Sarah Lassez, and obviously she was the one to watch. Her career was on the rise while I was anchored to the earth.
Finally the woman spoke. “You…you’re here alone?”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d been there for approximately sixty seconds and already she was pointing out how alone I was. “Yes. Why?”
She started laughing. “Oh, how cute!” And then she disappeared to select my outfit.
How odd, I thought. Sadly, it later made sense. As I eventually learned, the actresses before me had arrived with entourages, groups of people there for support and flattery…and, it turned out, protection. While everyone else got to look beautiful and glamorous, I was for some reason featured as a dour musician in electric blue hot pants, morosely meandering across a park with a guitar case. I don’t even play the guitar.
Still, life was going well. I was receiving praise, my manager was still taking my calls, and I actually got a birthday present from my agent. I believe the present was an unscented candle, which may not be much, but my agency was so big and powerful that their remembering they even represented me was gift enough. Seriously. When I’d call to talk to my agent, I’d say my name and cross my fingers.
Even the water stain had been fixed, repaired by a man who’d stubbornly insisted it looked more like Elmo than Oscar. Oh, well, I thought. Everyone’s got his own particular dream.
All I could really complain about was my lack of love and that my cat had started to stubbornly mistake my bathtub for her litter box. To anyone else the bathtub–litter box confusion would simply be an annoyance. But to me, a bath freak, it was beyond devastating. No longer was I able to gaze proudly at my vast array of bath products, as their view had been eclipsed by ugly bottles of Clorox, Tilex, Ajax, Comet, and a few others. (I tend to overreact.) Despite my dutifully cleaning the litter box and even hanging catnip on the wall above as a sort of temptation, nothing worked. She knew what I loved, and continued to go for the kill.