PRO TIP: GIVE YOURSELF THE FULL TINA TURNER EXPERIENCE
What’s Love Got to Do With It is, of course, based on Tina Turner’s memoir, I, Tina. After my Greek-Mexican beauty school dropout, I went into full Tina immersion. I watched the movie, I read the book, and I had that film’s soundtrack on repeat. If she’d put out a Tina Crunch cereal, I would have had it every morning.
I prescribe the Tina combo when you just want the pain to be over. You are about done with the nutty, even though it was supposed to be over months ago, and your instinct for independence needs a shot in the arm. Watch Angela Bassett play Tina finding that fire within her to go from her lowest to being Tina freaking Turner. She tells a divorce judge that she doesn’t need anything else but freedom and her name. “I’ll give up all that other stuff, but only if I get to keep my name,” she says defiantly. “I’ve worked too hard for it, Your Honor.”
Cut to me watching it for the fifteenth time, screaming, “Goddammit, give me my name! I just want my name.” When I had my divorce, I went back and watched Tina. I still had my name.
I’m making a lot of jokes to cheer you up, but take this seriously: If you are feeling humiliated and broken by the weight of pain over someone trifling, be Tina. Let yourself be forged in this fire. I, for one, started my adolescence wanting to be Molly Ringwald, but I spent my twenties wanting to be Tina Turner.
As for that craziness I felt, one day I woke up and I just didn’t feel it anymore. It left. It took time, but it left. It was as if the crazy was a gas bubble. You’re just really uncomfortable and the very core of your body, your stomach and chest, hurts. And then you fart or drop a deuce and the pain leaves you. I promise you, it gets better. You will fart your way to healing, I swear.
PRO TIP: CUSHION THE BLOW WITH SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY
It’s always beneficial in a breakup to have somebody else lined up. I really like to move right in and have a Plan B, C, D, and E in place before Plan A has expired.
As you go about this, your best game is honesty. Tell Plan B exactly where your head is at. “Do you want to be here? Yea or nay?” I don’t even say, “This is a rebound.” Don’t even put that much weight on it. It’s just fun. Tell them it’s like hooking up with someone on vacation. Staycation sex.
It’s on them if they think they can change the situation between you to create a lasting arrangement. Let them try, but at least you were very clear about your motivation from the start.
As you refocus your energy on someone else’s privates, you save yourself the drudgery of going over in your mind what went wrong. Bitch, you know what went wrong. Unless this is your first guy, you’re not that clueless. By your early to mid-twenties, you’ve been through this a few times, so you gotta know there’s a common denominator in these equations—and it’s you. I, like many women, know what the hell is wrong with me. Whether we choose to do something about it remains to be seen.
I know a lot of people talk about closure, “giving yourself time to mourn.” Ehhh. Let’s not play these games. I think the whole “pussy moratorium” thing is just some puritanical garbage to keep women chaste. I see it all the time in Hollywood. After the end of a relationship, an actress or famous woman has to publicly announce that her legs will be closed until further notice. Like some exorcist has to come in to flush out the demons from her vagina. Potential suitors, please wait until the little old lady from Poltergeist comes out and says, “THIS HOUSE IS CLEAN!”
You will hear, “You really need to work on yourself before you jump right into something else.” Oh, please, who’s got that kind of time? I got shit to do. I’m trying to work, I’m trying to get home to watch Scandal, and I’m trying to get it in. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and here I am using this time to work on myself.
By the way, you can work on yourself and still have sex with someone at the same time. Or at least around the same time. Your pussy and brain don’t have to take turns. Besides, there’s a bunch of hours in the day. You can actually get to therapy and go on a date on the same day.
Bonus Pro-tip: Booze Pairings to Heal Heartache
I will keep this short in case you are already reading this book at a bar. There are only two options for drinking your pain away after a breakup: red wine or tequila. Never mix, never worry.
Choose red wine if you’d like a warm hug and maybe a nap. A Malbec is that slightly bitter pal who rallies to say, “There, there, we’ll get through this.” A Cabernet is a model of efficiency, drinkable with a high alcohol content. With all of its varied flavors, Pinot is the one who’ll encourage you to keep a sense of mystery.
But if you want to skip all that and just get to the point where you fuck one of his friends? You go tequila all the way. I prescribe straight, no chaser.
Either way, first round is on me.
twelve
ON MEAN WOMEN AND GOOD DOGS
One morning in early 2012, I got a call from Essence magazine. They wanted to give me the Fierce and Fearless award at their pre-Oscar luncheon in February. I had to give a speech, which I figured would last about thirty seconds. “Thank you,” I’d say. “Yay, women.”
Then they said I would have five minutes.
Whoa, I thought.
“If you give us your speech we can have it printed,” they offered. That made it real. My instinct to protect myself shot up, and I immediately went to standard Hollywood cliché bullshit.
I started writing my speech on my laptop, saving the draft as a file titled “Fierce and Fearless.” For days I would just look at the words on my computer screen. How was I supposed to be either of those things? I kept asking myself. I was so afraid that if I told the truth I would face judgment and rejection.
“We live in a town that rewards pretending,” I typed. “And I had been pretending to be fierce and fearless for a very long time. I was a victim masquerading as a survivor.”
I went to delete those lines, but kept going. “I used to revel in gossip and rumors. And I lived for the negativity inflicted upon my sister actresses or anyone I felt whose shine diminished my own. I took joy in people’s pain and I tap-danced on their misery.”
It was the most honest I’d ever been in my life. When the day came, I put on the armor of a green vintage Versace above-the-knee dress, and I took a deep breath as I approached the podium.
As I spoke, I felt the room become still. The murmur of chatter and ding of forks against plates stopped as I read my truth. People began to put arms around each other’s shoulders, drawing them closer and crying. I stammered just slightly at one point, and I felt a wave of love come at me. These incredible, fierce women were all listening, pulling for me. Oprah Winfrey was there, her mouth wide open. Her seatmate Iyanla Vanzant reached over to close her mouth for her. “I had never heard anyone be that honest in public or private,” Oprah said, “about the competition and fierce drive to be seen and succeed in Hollywood.”
To be seen.
Leave it to Oprah to get to the heart of the matter. I was desperate just to be seen. I was afraid of anybody else getting attention. Because there’s only so much to go around. With Oprah’s benediction, people started acting like I was the Messiah and I would lead Hollywood’s actresses to the promised land of mutual love. I wasn’t ready. “I’m still in my own shit,” I said.
And I really was. I had only recently found the courage to get up on that dais and be honest. I had been hiding, sometimes literally. I am someone who physically hides when I am feeling, let’s say, stressed in a situation. Behind a garbage can, behind a tree. If I am somewhere and get an attack of the feels, I look for the nearest place to stash myself. I am the Where’s Waldo? of emotional availability.
There was a particular moment in my life when I found myself hiding under my bed. I was in my early thirties and my life was a disappointment. My divorce was final, and I decided my career was over because a show I had a lot of hopes for was canceled. I slipped off my bed, looked underneath, and thought, Well, that looks cozy. So I scoote
d myself in, intending to stay there, oh, I don’t know, forever.
My dog Bubba Sparxxx came into the bedroom to investigate my disappearance.
Bubba was a huge dog, about 130 pounds of Mastiff–American bulldog mix, but he was determined to do a marine crawl under that bed to get to me. His path to me was precise, like a longtime soldier carrying out a mission. We did have history. We had found each other in the middle of the night while I was shooting Cradle 2 the Grave at Los Alamitos Army Base, near Long Beach, California. It was a night shoot, and at 2 A.M., my costar DMX decided he wanted to buy some dogs. He needed a litter of dogs brought to the set right then. People just stood there, dumbfounded. I said, “I think I can help you.”
So I called my then-husband Chris, who knew a guy who bred Royal Bandogs, mastiffs bred specifically with American bulldogs. So Chris called the breeder and this man showed up to the set at 3:45 A.M. with laundry baskets full of puppies. There were probably five or six dogs in total, all of them brown except one little white one. They were all so cute, and DMX picked out two, quickly naming them Pebbles and Bam Bam.
“You can take one of the dogs, too,” the breeder said to me. “You got me the sale.”
They were all adorable, but the little white one with a few brown spots seemed to call to me. I picked him up, round and white like a seal, and looked in his little amber eyes.
“Aw, you have an outie,” I said, rubbing his little stomach.
“That’s actually a hernia,” said the breeder. “He’s the runt. The hernia will either retract as he grows or he’ll need surgery.”
We needed each other.
“He’s the one,” I said. I named him Bubba Sparxxx after the white country-rapper, and he became my soul mate and best friend. He could tell when I came home frustrated. He’d stay very chill and wait for me to come around, without being pushy or needy. If I had big news, he was hyped about it before I even had a chance to articulate it to him. Whenever I had parties and he had the sense that some plus-one might be the least bit shady, he wouldn’t let them walk around the house. Bubba never growled at anyone who wasn’t foul.
He was just super intuitive. Which is how he knew to be under the bed. This huge lug of a dog crawled under the bed to look me in the eye. We regarded each other for a long time.
“Is this what we’re doing today?” he said with his eyes. “Okay. It’s cool, I just want to know. ’Cause I’m under here.”
When I didn’t respond, he began to lick my face. It was one of those moments where you just realize, Well, this is the most pathetic scene ever.
“Bubba,” I said, “I think this is what the lady was talking about.”
The lady was a trainer and life coach who had been hounding me at events. I had literally run from her at red carpets. It was like she could see through the façade. “When you’re ready, call me,” she’d say, pointing at me like a black female Tony Robbins. “You’ve got my number. You’ll know when you’re ready.”
I reached up to get my cell from the bed. I had put her in my phone as Coach.
“Gabrielle,” she answered, like she’d been waiting.
“I think this is what you were talking about when you said I’d know when I was ready.”
WE MET IN A GYM ON A RAINY NOVEMBER DAY. SHE IMMEDIATELY PUT BOXING gloves on me. I started punching the heavy bag, going strong to impress her.
“What’s on your Happy List?” Coach asked.
“My what?”
“You gotta do a Happy List,” she said. “Tell me the things that make you happy.”
I stalled, hitting harder. She asked me again, pointedly this time. Like a drill sergeant. “What makes you happy?”
I had nothing. I couldn’t think of a single thing or single recent time I’d even been happy. Right away, I felt like I was failing a test. I started to cry, and my heart raced as my anxiety kicked in. I couldn’t even do this right. My arms started to get numb from punching, so I slowed down.
“Come on,” she yelled. “Give me three things and I’ll let you stop punching the bag.”
I kept punching, finally saying through gritted teeth, “Real butter.”
Punch.
“Ground beef.”
Punch. What else? Punch.
“Imitation crab,” I said.
Punch.
I stopped, exhausted. Coach was looking at me with a mix of disgust and concern.
“Bitch,” she said, “did you say imitation crab?”
In my mind, it was the best parts of the crab but so much less expensive.
“You don’t even love the real thing?” she asked. “Can we just start there? The fact that they’re all food items, we’ll get to that later. Let’s stop here, because there’s so much more that we gotta get to before we can even think about nutrition.”
She gave me the homework of writing down ten things that made me happy. We agreed to meet twice a week.
I went home and I couldn’t get past the three. Real butter, ground beef, and imitation crab meat. I went back to her with the same three things the following week.
She shook her head at me again, and that session we didn’t work out at all. We just sat in the gym and she threw out questions, dissecting the smallest pleasures of life.
“Do you like sunsets?” she asked. “Do you like sunrises?”
Even that made me cry. I didn’t know.
“Um, uh,” I ugly-cried. “Sunsets.”
“Do you like crushed ice?” she asked. “Whole cubes?”
I panicked again, weighing the merits of both. “Um, when there’s a bowl of ice . . .” I paused. I had something. “I like really, really cold Coronas.”
“That’s five,” she shouted. She was the Annie Sullivan to my Helen Keller, helping me make sense of my world. I couldn’t think of any more.
“You can’t even think of ten things that make you happy,” she said. “What made you think you were ready for marriage? How is someone else supposed to make you happy if you don’t even know what makes you happy?”
We started in November, and by January I had finally found my ten things. Bubba was on the list. Before that, I couldn’t say he made me happy because he was such a good dog I didn’t think I deserved him. Coach and I started examining that kind of thinking, too, and started unraveling my life decisions from there.
One night I took Coach along with me to a party. By then I was less guarded with her and feeling bold. We were in a room at the party and I started holding court, using my well-honed ability to turn a phrase to tear down an actress who wasn’t present. It was well honed because I used to feel I had to do it for survival, but now it was like I was killing for sport. As I ripped this absent woman to shreds, I felt like I was being fed as these people laughed and looked at me with faces that said, “More, more.”
When I was done, there was nothing left of my target.
“How did that change your life?” Coach asked me after my performance.
“Excuse me?”
“Did you get her guy?” she asked. “Did you get her job? Is your house bigger now?”
I looked down at the ground, completely called out.
“What positive happened in your life because you tore this woman down?” she asked. “And, by the way, you showed exactly how much power she has over you because you spent an hour talking about her to a roomful of people.”
I realized what I had been doing. When you’re in a place where you don’t know what makes you happy, it’s really easy to be an asshole. I put other people’s pain on my Happy List.
I went home that night, and sure enough, my house was not bigger for tearing that woman down. Bubba came to greet me and we sat in the living room.
“I’m trying, Bubba,” I said. “You weren’t always perfect, either.”
Bubba was in fact a terror until he was two and a half, a whirling dervish of energy. My husband and I were with him in the park when we realized we needed to have him trained. A little boy was calling to him, so Bubba ra
n down an incline at full speed. His legs got away from him and he rolled into the kid like a bowling ball. The kid’s mom thought it was funny, thank God, but then, as the boy was on the ground, Bubba sniffed him and then peed on him.
The first time we worked with a dog trainer, he bit the trainer. Which was a blessing, because that led me to trainers at a ranch that bills itself as the Disneyland of dog parks. They helped Bubba become the best dog in the history of dogs.
He changed. So could I.
AFTER MY ESSENCE SPEECH, THE MEDIA LATCHED ON TO THE MEAN-GIRL narrative of what I was saying. They missed the point, because it’s not like I was some kid slamming people into lockers or spreading rumors about a sophomore. I was talking about being a woman. It’s not like you age out of bullshit. It just sort of shape-shifts.
Because I was a mean woman, I can spot them. Game recognizes game, right? You encounter them every day if you work with other people, period. Whether you’re a teacher, a lawyer in a large firm, or a stay-at-home mom. There is an epidemic now of people “being real” when they’re being anything but. It’s the person who loves being “someone” who notices every little thing wrong with what you say, do, wear, or think, and has to point it out. Those mean women, and mean men, affect people’s opportunities and experiences, at work or with their children.
When I see negative comments about me online, if I have time I will go down the rabbit hole of social media to see how great the life of the troll really is. Because you never know, maybe they’re right. Maybe they have something to teach me or for me to aspire to. I’ve done it countless times, Instastalking, Twitter stalking. Never once have I learned something from someone who talked shit. If anything, it’s “Baby, you really don’t want to put a bull’s-eye on your back.” But so many people really love the attention they get by trolling. It’s a temporary cure for their invisibility.
The problem is, there’s always an audience for negativity. There could be someone with a bullhorn screaming, “I’ve got a beautiful script here that gives a deeper insight into the human experience.” And few in a crowd would pause. And then someone says “I’ve got Jennifer Lawrence’s nudes,” and a line will form. Negativity and the exploitation of other people’s pain drive so much of our culture and conversation.
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