Unbearable Lightness

by Portia de Rossi

  Hour after hour of wide shots from the street, aerial shots from a crane, and coverage from the rooftop exhausted me, making it hard for me to keep running. But I had a bigger problem. My joints ached. My joints had occasionally hurt when I was back in LA, after exercise and at night when I lay in bed. But on that rooftop my wrists, knees, and elbows hurt so much it was hard to move them without feeling intense pain, and so I limited their movement to the action that took place within the space of time between “action” and “cut.” Any other time I would stand still, not even able to smoke because the motion of lifting the cigarette to my mouth was excruciating for my elbow. Even if I held the cigarette very close to my lips and turned my head to exhale the smoke, the pain in my elbow seemed to localize to the slightest movement. It seemed to scan my body anticipating where the next movement could be and settle there, ready and waiting to strike. The longer the wait between takes, the worse it got. As we started the action sequence in close-up coverage and gradually widened to include the whole building, making my body look like a black ant scurrying on a rooftop, my movements had to be bigger, more exaggerated. And as the camera was on a crane, by the end of the day, I was alone up there on the rooftop, wildly flailing about, without a PA or an umbrella, since there was nowhere for either assistant or umbrella to hide when the camera rolled. Every moment was agony.

  I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t make it down a single step of the staircase after wrap had been called. My knees wouldn’t bend. They were stiff. The joke that I kept using to the concerned crew, who rushed onto the rooftop when it was clear for them to do so, was that it was so bloody cold I was frozen stiff. It wasn’t a funny joke, but I was in too much pain to care. I was taken to the elevator by two men who held me up, the weapons specialist on my left arm and the medic on my right, all the while I was telling them that their help wasn’t necessary, that I just needed to get into a warm bath. I don’t know why I refused to let the medic examine me. Maybe it was because his viselike grip on my elbow was more painful than walking on my own would’ve been. I just knew I didn’t want him to touch me, I didn’t want him to ask me questions, I just wanted to be alone. I knew that if I told him about my elbows and my wrists that he’d send me to a doctor, and I just wanted to finish the movie without any drama. I was already on the verge of making a scene and I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted to act out the scenes already scripted.

  When I closed the door to my hotel room after the PA had walked me down the long corridor holding my arm (this time by the biceps), I cried. I cried out in pain and then I just quietly cried as a means to console myself. My gentle sobs seemed to say, “It hurts” and a silent tear falling replied, “I know, old thing. I know.” I turned the hot water faucet on to fill the tub and crawled into the bedroom to pour a glass of wine. Now that wine was my dinner, I bought my own bottles and hid them under the bed for fear that the mini-bar Nazis would take the corked bottle away even though I asked them to clear the mini-bar and didn’t allow them access to my room. I didn’t allow the housekeeping team into my room either. I was too afraid they would take away my chopsticks and my dishes by accident, or steal them. When I was on location shooting the movie Sirens, a toy mouse that I’d had since before my dad died was lost. I didn’t tell anyone that it was lost when the sheets were changed because I was too ashamed to admit to the concierge that I slept with stuffed toys. The housekeepers at this hotel weren’t allowed into my room unless I was there watching them. I couldn’t bear to lose my white and green dish with the flowers and the hairline crack. I’d already lost my mouse.

  By the time I crawled back to the bathtub on three limbs, one hand holding the wineglass, the tub was full. I made another trip to get cigarettes and an ashtray and attempted to slowly remove my clothes. The joints in my fingers joined the cast of painful joints acting out in my body, needing attention and recognition for the important role they had thanklessly performed prior to this moment, and just unbuttoning my jeans was difficult. By the time I slid into the bathtub, the pain ravaged my body. It was like the hot water boiled the acidic fluid that lubricated my joints and the fluid seeped into my bloodstream, attacking the muscles and organs in its path. Everything hurt. I wept and wept. I was aware, however, that being in the bathtub in excruciating pain was the first time I hadn’t felt hungry all day. At least the whining, complaining pain in my gut that was like a five-year-old tugging at my shirtsleeve repeating, “I’m hungry,” had given over to the real pain in my body. At least I shut that little girl up.

  I threw up the wine before I got into bed. I’d always been a bad bulimic but throwing up wine was the only thing that I found easy. Food was really difficult for me to throw up. I tended to give up after a certain point, never knowing if I got it all out. I felt bad about the whole process; the binge made me feel pathetic and out of control and the purging was the punishment. With every heave I hated myself more. I felt the blood vessels in my eyes burst and I knew that for days they would show everyone who cared to look at me that I was a pathetic loser, that I couldn’t control myself. But throwing up wine was different. For one, wine wasn’t a particularly nourishing thing to drink, and throwing it up is often better for your body than keeping it in. Also, throwing up alcohol is something that almost everyone has done at some point in their life; it wasn’t reserved for sick bulimic girls who didn’t have enough self-control over something as pathetic as food. Unlike food, at least alcohol is addictive. I threw up the wine because it was easy and because I was aware that asking my liver to break down alcohol when my body was obviously sick enough to cause me so much pain was destructive. I threw up the wine because I’d put my body through enough.

  Throughout the night, as I lay in bed rereading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I drank wine and threw it up. I worried that there would be traces of sugar from the wine that would cause me to ingest incidental, unaccounted-for calories, but I just said, “To hell with it!” I’d gotten so loose with the wine anyway. I felt completely out of control and crazy—but in a good way. My loosening up of calories was a healthy, good thing that would enable me to go out for a beer with the director, who I really liked. I could be social again. I just worked out a little harder in the hotel gym and stopped brushing my teeth with toothpaste. It wasn’t that I was crazy thinking that I could get fat from accidentally swallowing toothpaste; I was just ensuring that I cut out those incidental calories wherever I could. I ate less chewing gum and I didn’t use toothpaste. It was a compromise that worked for me. I really liked wine.

  Five days later, we went on location overnight to an out-of-the-way part of town for the next day of filming. I felt a little better, was well rested, and even ate a little more as I realized food worked like Advil, and the more food I had, the less my joints ached. I went back up to 300 calories but kept my wine ritual. I had to finish eating food by 2:00 p.m. so I wouldn’t accidentally throw up tuna when I threw up my wine. The place where we went was so remote we had no choice but to stay at a spiritual retreat that didn’t serve wine or allow smoking. As I was given a tour of the log cabin they called a facility, I felt nervous and anxious like I was in rehab. I wondered briefly if the production company had sent me to rehab under the pretense of it being the only place close to the location. (Could they know about the wine?) The woman in a turban showed me the spa, which consisted of saunas and a coffin.

  “Please let us know if you’d like to use the hyperthermic chamber.”

  “It looks like a coffin. How does it work?”

  “You lie down in the chamber for forty-five minutes and it removes the toxins in your body.”

  The thought of being in a capsule for forty-five minutes was bad enough, but the fact that it removed all the toxins in your body gave me pause. My body was made up of toxins. I imagined the inside of my body covered in a spider web of toxins that held it all together. Toxins were the thread that bound my stomach to my intestines and the skin to the muscles. The webs in my body were the unabsorbable chemical
s, the residue particles strung together from the artificial sweeteners, chemicals from the butter spray, and chemicals from the Jell-O, the alcohol, and the nicotine.

  “If I removed all the toxins in my body, there’d be nothing left!” I knew the turban thought that was a joke, even though she didn’t think it funny enough to laugh.

  I stared at the chamber that would in fact have become my coffin. I imagined a turbaned woman opening the lid and screaming as she looked at my remains. My body would be dehydrated and my blood extracted as the toxin-fighting machine, on a mission to remove every last toxin, couldn’t target the invasive toxins without removing all the fluid and the blood. My organs would be eaten up by the machine as it tore apart every last bit of tissue leaving behind a deflated sack of skin—and maybe my eyeballs.

  28

  I WOKE UP with my eyes closed as the dream I awoke from was so disturbing I tried to finish it for several minutes even after I was aware of being fully conscious. In the dream I had found myself standing naked in front of Tom Cruise, who was lying on a bed wearing a raincoat. I was naked and yet the reason for my being naked wasn’t completely obvious; the mood wasn’t sexual, it was friendly with nothing sinister implied. This bizarre scene took place in a big loft with concrete floors and a high ceiling, which I assumed to be one of his houses. It was the middle of the night, two or three o’clock maybe. The room was brightly lit like a department store or a supermarket, and the bed was in the middle of this enormous room. As I stood naked in front of him, I talked about being gay. I bared my soul in the same manner that I bared my body. I showed him all of me, inside and out. As I did so, instead of becoming lighter by unburdening myself from the secret that weighed me down, instead of losing weight, I became heavier. I felt burdened, heavy and dark, panicked that something dreadful was about to happen despite the kindness and acceptance he was showing me. After I talked for what seemed like hours, I began to make out shadowy figures in the walls that I thought were painted black. As the sun started to rise I could see that the walls behind his bed and to the side were not painted black. The “walls” were floor-to-ceiling windows. To my horror, I could see the silhouettes of what seemed like hundreds of people looking in, and I could see that I was in a street-level glass building in Times Square. I was on Good Morning America, and Tom Cruise was conducting an interview.

  As I lay awake trying to trick my brain into thinking that I was asleep so I could make it end differently and take away the nervous, sick feeling that carried over from the dream into my reality, I realized that the sick feeling wasn’t only from dreaming about being tricked into exposing myself. The sick feeling was also from drinking and throwing up the bottle of wine I’d snuck into the no-alcohol retreat. (I’d stolen a corkscrew from the mini-bar in the hotel in Toronto and added it to my traveling case of tools and utensils.) I’d had a rough night. The pain in my joints increased to the point that I couldn’t find a position to sit or lie in to make myself comfortable, even briefly. I alternated between sitting, lying down, and walking in an attempt to relieve the pain, but the only thing that seemed to work at all was wine. So I kept drinking it. I had to keep drinking it, as its numbing effect seemed to wear off when I threw it up. But since forcing myself to throw it up gave me a splitting headache, I began to feel nauseous, and so the throwing-up part of the ritual became involuntary by the time I’d drunk my way down to the middle of the label. In between drinking and throwing up, I ran my wrists under the hot water in the bathroom sink, as the room didn’t have a bathtub and hot water seemed to help a little. I felt sorry for myself. I cried a lot. I thought about calling my mother, but I didn’t know what to say. I was in the middle of shooting my first big Hollywood movie. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I knew that if I complained to her at all, she would respond in the same way she did when I cried to her about not being able to eat ordinary food with my family. If I were selfish enough to tell her how sad I was and how much pain I was in, I knew she would respond angrily because being angry was easier than being worried, and so she’d say, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You wanted to be an actress.”

  And I would say, “Yes, Mama. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a model, and I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be special, and I wanted people to think I was pretty. What I didn’t know was how hard it was going to be to be thin, to be considered pretty, and to be worthy of attention. I’ve had to work a little bit harder than I first thought, Mama. My journey was a little longer than most girls’. I was born with big legs and small eyes and a round face that’s only pretty from one angle.” Then I would tell her what I’ve always wanted to say to her but because we tend not to talk about heavy and emotional things, I’ve never been able to. “I don’t blame you, Mama. I blame Dad.”

  I blame you, Dad. I blame you for telling me that I was pretty. I blame you for dying before you had time to change your mind. Because of you I make up stories, have fantasy lives, fill in the missing words. You’re the blank. You’re the “Dear Mum and . . .” letter I had to make up because all the other children at camp had a dad and not a blank where a dad was missing. Being forced to write that letter was the first time I really knew you were missing. And it was a year after you died.

  April Fool’s Day is a bad day to die for a practical joker. I thought that because you winked only at me, I was the only one that got the joke. Remember when the Easter Bunny came and how you winked at me as you ate the carrot with his bunny teeth marks? We got the jokes, you and I. We were smart and we got the joke.

  I didn’t sleep at all until morning. I’d seen the shadowy dawn become the light of day, which no doubt set the scene for my horrific dream that was hard to shake even after I opened my eyes.

  As I carefully applied concealer to achieve the perfect no-makeup look before going to makeup, I thought about my subconscious and its lack of imagination. It seemed to me that as I became thinner, I became dumber, as even my subconscious failed to conjure up a decent metaphor. One part of the dream stuck with me, however, and that was my casting of Tom Cruise in the role of sneaky interrogator. My mother had always wanted me to marry Tom Cruise. Not just any famous actor, Tom Cruise in particular. He was the living image of the perfect movie star who seemed to separate his private life from his public life—a man of mystery, a private man. Choosing Tom Cruise as an example was perhaps another way of my mother reinforcing that there was a payoff to being private. “There’s a reason they call it a private life,” I’d often say to interviewers. But there’s a fine line between being private and being ashamed.

  The day wasn’t just any day. It was DAY ELEVEN of filming. Day Eleven was a long bike ride to where the only known photograph of my character’s mother was buried in a box under a tree along with the money my character’s father had buried after he robbed the bank and before he was incarcerated. The bike ride began with a race for the treasure between a sweet, caring guy and an emotionally bankrupt girl, climaxed when she told him through her tears that she only wanted the picture of her mother, not the money, and ended with the two of them in love. It was a big day. And although I was prepared—I’d learned my lines and could comfortably fit into my wardrobe—I was not ready. I was in agony. And the day hadn’t even begun.

  “Ride as fast as you can past camera. And go as close to camera as you can, too.” The director had to literally cut to the chase to make his day, a term used in movie making that meant that all the shots for all the scenes for that day had to be completed. Today he didn’t have a smile in his eyes; he wasn’t as full of jokes as usual. Directors can get very stressed about making their days.

  “Yes, boss. No problem.”

  I called the director “boss” because I liked Chris, but I also had no problem lying to him. Because riding the bike fast was a big problem. Nothing hurt my knees more than pushing down on the pedals, especially if I had to lift myself off the seat to get speed. After two takes of riding as fast as I could, I wondered whether or not I would mak
e my day. My ankles, wrists, and elbows hurt almost as much as my knees. My lungs ached with every deep breath. I couldn’t believe how unfit I was considering how much I worked out. I’d continued my regular workout routine while in Toronto—an hour on the treadmill at 7.0, 105 sit-ups followed by 105 leg lifts—the only difference being that it wasn’t as fun. I no longer had to lose weight and so there was no motivation, no lower number on the scale to look forward to, only a higher number to dread. I had weighed myself that morning. I was 96 pounds and I was never going beneath it. I didn’t want to. But what scared me the most was how little I had to eat to avoid gaining the weight back. I ate 300 calories a day and I was just maintaining. I felt trapped, knowing that I would have to continue to be this extreme just to maintain the body I’d starved myself to achieve. It was a realization that was hard to digest.

  The next scene was the crying scene. Ironically, I need to be in a happy mood in order to cry; I need to feel pretty self-confident and strong before I can pretend to be insecure and fragile. Usually, crying in a scene makes me feel good, as I get to show off my acting skills. But there was no joy in crying about the death of my father. It was too real, too close to me. I shut down with pain, both physical and emotional. Despite my condition, I managed to cry a little for the scene, but by the end of the day I was crying a lot. I didn’t even need to cry anymore, the scene was over; my character was completely over her father’s death and on to falling in love with Christian Slater. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t over my dad leaving me and I wasn’t falling in love with anyone. I couldn’t stop crying. It was like a flash flood. Its onset and its end were unpredictable and uncontrollable. It just happened, and like a flood, it was devastating.