“Pass.”
“All right,” she said, closing my door and leaving my room. I inhaled that book. I couldn’t put it down. It was both a hard and easy read. Precious was a character sadder than I’d ever encountered in either life or fiction. She was also filled with more hope than I personally could ever muster up. I was excited to see this book adapted to film. At this point, I’d like to remind you that I’m being completely honest in this chapter and every chapter in this book. I have an insanely good long-term memory so I remember all of this.
So if I told my mom to make the leap, to play Mary, why’d I say no to the idea of auditioning for the role of Precious? Because it didn’t make any fucking sense! I wasn’t an actress. I was in school for psychology. That’s what I was going to be. A professional in the field of psychology. Sure, I was so depressed that making it there was unlikely, but I digress. Mom was the star. She was the artist. I had suffered through her dreams of stardom enough for two lifetimes. She was talented, but still she and Ahmed and I had slept in a bunk bed for five years. I’d seen Mom’s talent and drive but more of her sacrifice and rejection. Dreams are dreams. Reality is something different. Reality is the electricity and cable being cut off for late payments and sleeping in the living room so that your children can each have a room of their own. No, thank you. I wasn’t strong or talented enough to dream like Mom did.
Strangely enough, I discovered that I liked acting soon after this. Not that I thought of it as acting at the time. I was staying with Crystal at her mom’s house in the Bronx. I think her mom could see that I was on the verge of a breakdown, and she said that I could live with them for the summer. I needed the change of scenery. Crystal was a theater major at Lehman College, and she was in her first play there that summer of 2003. Peter Pan. She played an Indian and a pirate. I was bored and sad a lot, so Crystal suggested I come to rehearsals. Seemed like a good way to let the day pass. I became an Indian and a pirate also. It wasn’t much, but it was the most fun I’d ever had. Crystal’s friends became mine. I was still very sick and depressed, but at least I was around other people. AND there was a bar near the school that didn’t card so I discovered booze. That shit is delicious, and it would often help me forget that I was sad! Hooray! (I don’t recommend it, but I don’t don’t recommend it.)
The director of Peter Pan was super fun but intense. His name was Guy Ventoliere and he scared the living shit out of me. I didn’t know how to act like everyone else in the play. They were in school for theater and I was just killing time. The difference was evident. When the set for the play was built, I immediately broke an entire staircase by hastily jumping off it (seriously). Once during rehearsal, Guy called me out for watching the scene instead of being in it. These are two different things, but I hadn’t realized it until Guy told me to get my shit together and be more mindful of my surroundings. When I sang “Pirate Song” with the other actors, Guy called me out again.
“Gabby. Your singing. It’s too good.” (I know I’ve already said that my family trait is confidence and big talk, but swear to God, I’m not making this part up!)
“You want me to stop?” I asked, too scared of him to take the compliment.
“No. Make it your own.”
“You want me to be louder?” I always thought the answer was to be louder.
“I don’t know. Just make it your own.”
“I can sing the harmony if you want.”
“Yeah! That’s great. Do that.”
I loved being in that play. I remained very afraid of Guy and very sick, but doing that play for an audience of children was the most important thing I’d ever done. It was a way to fill my life with more than just constant sadness. Dark yo.
After Peter Pan, there were auditions for The Wiz. All of my new friends were auditioning so I decided to audition, too. It was fall, but by now, I was officially not going to college and enrolled in therapy. Theater became my lifeline. I was cast as Glinda the Good Witch. Dope. I was having actual fun at night while attending my therapy classes during the day. No one except Crystal knew about this. I am still grateful to her for keeping my sickness under wraps with her friends and also for dealing with my rampant mood swings. I was very hard on her. She was the closest person to me, so I often tried my best to make her feel like shit for the crime of being a normal, blossoming woman. I was often just mad that she wasn’t as sad as I was. She was very kind to share her friends, her plays, and her college experience with me. She remains one of the better people I’ve encountered in my life.
One day while she and I and a few others were waiting for rehearsal to begin, a woman walked over to me. She had walked past us about twice before approaching. None of us knew her.
“Sorry, I just have to tell you something,” she said. “You’re going to be famous one day.”
“What?” I asked. Shit, you’d think I’d be used to it by now, right?
“I’m psychic. I know that sounds crazy, but I am. I don’t charge for it or anything, but I can see in your eyes that you have a big future in front of you.”
“Oh, no! I’m not a theater major like everyone else. I don’t even go here.”
“What?” Now she was confused. She apparently hadn’t realized that most of the people in that hallway were theater students. “No, this is about you. I saw you when I walked by before and I just had to say something. You’re really special. One day the entire world will be listening to you.”
“What?” (Come on, Gabby! Say something other than “what?”!)
“I see you talking to Oprah. (Oprah? Again?!) You’re going to be famous. I see you talking to her.”
“What am I famous for?”
“I don’t know. I swear I see it in your eyes. Your confidence. It’s one of a kind. You’re going to write a book. You’re going to help people with your confidence.”
I had probably just secretly thrown up and fantasized about cutting the fat off my body with a steak knife after a five-hour day of therapy. Bitch, please. What confidence? Where the fuck was it?
“Oh, wow. Okay. Thank you.” She left and that was that.
Eventually, I finished my daily therapy classes and started working at the phone sexery. I was becoming an adult: more bills and responsibilities and less time to play make-believe in the Bronx. I was grateful for the friends I’d made there, but soon I wasn’t doing any acting or singing at all. Which was fine. It was never the plan to begin with.
After several years working at the phone-hoe station, I was twenty-four years old and plan A, the one where I was going to go to school for psychology, was back in effect. I was finally old enough to get financial aid to pay for my schooling, and I had enrolled at Mercy College. There was a campus on Thirty-fourth Street in Herald Square. The phone-hoe station was on Thirtieth Street, just up the block. By now I had been promoted to monitor, which meant that it was my job to listen in on phone calls to make sure that the talkers were following the rules and that the callers were well taken care of (wink wink). I scheduled my classes around work shifts; I needed about fifteen minutes of travel time in between. THIS was adulthood! I figured that I would cross the bridge of whether being a therapist was actually still my dream when I finally got my degree.
I still thought about performing. That year on my birthday, before I started back at school, Crystal took me to see Hairspray on Broadway. It was the best surprise ever! Hairspray was one of my favorite movies, but I’d yet to see the stage version. The curtain rose on Tracy Turnblad in her bed. The music began and Tracy opened her eyes and started to sing: “Oh, oh, oh, woke up today feeling the way I always do.”
By the end of that one line, I was crying. The song had hardly begun and I was already in tears. Seems I really identified with Tracy, in a body that people are less inclined to accept and respect but still determined to be happy and share her talent. It hit me all at once that I was talented. That I, like Mom, had a gift to offer the world, but that, unlike Mom, I was wasting it. I was smart; I had a voice,
a point of view. I could be an artist! I could make art with my life, but instead I was listening to guys jack off over the phone by night and chasing a career I no longer really wanted by day. I hadn’t realized that I cared about being an artist until that very moment. I cried until intermission. My instincts had been telling me to pursue something else—art—but my fear had been louder.
Luckily, the universe (or whatever) was stronger than my doubts.
My first week of classes was pretty easy. It was my third college, after all. I had class just about every day. I had to take a language class for my major, and Mercy offered an American Sign Language class. I’d been wanting to learn ASL since I was a child. Mom knew the alphabet and a few words here and there from teaching differently abled kids, and I’d always admired that. I also had a family psychology course that I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into. That first week of school, I got a call from my friend Henry Ovalles. Henry was a Lehman graduate, one of the school’s more talented actors who was now the assistant director of Lehman’s theater department. He was calling me because he’d learned about a film audition he thought might be right for me. I hadn’t been a part of any production in about two years at that point. Henry said he knew that but figured he’d give it a shot: the casting agents were looking for a heavyset black girl between eighteen and twenty-five years old. I asked what the role was.
“The movie is called Push. It’s based on a book by someone named Sapphire. The audition is for the lead role, Precious. The audition is here at Lehman on Monday,” he said deliberately. As if he wasn’t blowing my fucking mind!
Mom was out of town doing something that night, but I called her and told her about the Push audition resurfacing after almost five years. I asked if the book was still in the house. She told me where to find it and encouraged me to go to the audition. I reread the first page and put it back on the shelf. What was I doing? What did I think was going to happen? I wasn’t an actor and I had just put my life back on track. I’d survived an almost three-year eating disorder, panic attacks, depression, and failing out of school. I’d found my footing while taking phone sex calls for ten cents a minute just so I could save money to go back to school for the third time. I had my first family psychology class on Monday, and I didn’t want to miss it to audition to play an incest survivor. (The irony is not lost on me.) I’d never done an actual audition. College theater was a thing, but was it really? This audition was for a real movie with a director I actually knew and respected! During the five years the book was making its way to production, Lee Daniels, a powerhouse director and producer, had taken over from Susan Batson. At the time, his film Shadowboxer was constantly running on Showtime. I’d seen it over and over. The movie has a scene in it featuring Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr., having sex while Helen wears a birthday hat. I like shit like that. Anyway, this audition would be the real deal, and I didn’t think I was capable of that.
By Monday morning, I still wasn’t sure where I was going when I left the house. I put my hair up in a ponytail and dressed like a teenager just in case I ended up at the audition. I also grabbed my books for class. I could either go uptown to the Bronx to audition for this movie role that I was never going to get, or I could go downtown to my class and then straight to work afterward. I walked outside—there was a movie crew filming on the downtown side of the street. (I later heard that it was Denzel Washington’s American Gangster. I’m not sure that’s true but, of course, I’m going to go with it.) I tried to walk through the film set to get to the downtown train station. A production assistant stopped me. He was very friendly. He had a big smile. He smiled that big smile at me and explained that there was filming going on and asked me politely to cross the street. To the uptown side of the street. So I did. Then I figured, since I’m here . . .
When I got to Lehman, I found out that the audition was in the same theater space that Peter Pan had been in. If you’re starting to think, This is unbelievable, believe it. It all really happened like this. There was a sign-up table with a small pile of one-page excerpts of the script. I had yet to learn that these audition sheets are called sides. I grabbed one and sat down to read. Henry walked over with a girl in tow. A heavyset black girl just like me. I looked at Henry like, “Really, homie? I thought you only called me! You called ALL your fat black girlfriends? I see!” but I didn’t say it. He said he was glad I could make the audition, and he wished me and this new girl I’d never met before luck. Then he left. The new girl (I don’t remember getting her name, but I sometimes call her Sabourey Gidibe in my private thoughts) asked what role I was auditioning for. As if she didn’t know. I told her the same one she was. She might’ve mentioned something about being nervous. I wasn’t nervous in the least. I was disappointed in myself for missing my first family psych class and wasting my time. I waited about five minutes, and then I was called into the theater to audition. I was asked to sit in a chair opposite a camera and casting directors Jessica Kelly and Billy Hopkins, who himself had launched the careers of countless actors and cast Good Will Hunting, American Psycho, Se7en, and my personal favorite, Uncle Buck. I sat across from the two of them and I wasn’t nervous. This was magic. I’m always nervous. I’m nervous right now! (To be fair, I’m alone at my cousin’s house in LA, it’s after eleven at night, and I think I hear a coyote howling in the distance! I’m about to call 911!) But I wasn’t nervous in front of them. The scene I auditioned was Precious meeting with a therapist and telling her how depressing her life with her mother was. (Again, the irony is not lost on me.) When I was done, Billy and Jessica were quiet before finally saying, “Wow! That was great!” I, of course, didn’t believe them, and Billy said something like “Trust me, that was really good!” I got up to leave, and they handed me some longer sides to memorize and told me they would give me a call soon for a second audition. On the way out, I wished good luck to Sabourey Gidibe and told her it was cool and there was nothing to be nervous about. Then I got on the subway and headed down to the phone sexery. I was going to be early for my shift as a monitor, but the phones were busy as usual so I jumped on the talker floor and picked up a few calls to make some extra money. By the time I left the talker floor less than an hour later, I had a voice mail from Billy Hopkins inviting me to the callback audition the next day. Still, I wasn’t feeling much. It was almost as if it was a regular Monday.
By the next morning, I had memorized both scenes I’d been given—the same one with the therapist from the day before along with another one where Precious is telling her class that she has contracted HIV from her father. Mad emotional yo. I asked Mom to read the scene with me. I hadn’t attempted to cry on cue while rehearsing the scene by myself. I hadn’t even said the words aloud up until then, but as I read with Mom, when it was time to cry, I just did. Mom was crying, too. Pussy. She asked if I wanted to go over it again and I said no, I wanted the emotion to feel new for the audition. I don’t know where that idea came from. All of a sudden, after being on autopilot for years, I was making real decisions.
At the callback audition, this time at some office way downtown in Tribeca, there weren’t any other actresses who looked like me. No Sabourey Gidibes waiting for their lives to change. Just me. Jessica came out to greet me. She told me how impressed they’d been with my audition the day before. I think I said okay instead of thank you. It sounded like I was being a sarcastic asshole, but I think I was just trying to process everything. In fact, I figured they were lying to me when they said I was good. I was a loser who had flunked out of school for being sad. I was a phone sex worker who lived with my mother. All of a sudden I was in the casting office of the guy who had discovered Macaulay Culkin. Seriously, what the fuck? Finally, I was ushered into the audition room where Billy was waiting. I think there was a reader and casting assistant in the room as well. I fumbled a word on my first take—I was finally feeling a tiny bit nervous—but then I must’ve remembered that this was all a complete waste of time and my nerves went away. I cried when the script t
old me to cry, and I delivered the scene as if I were completely out of my body. I don’t know who I was on that day (perhaps the real Sabourey Gidibe). When I was done, Billy and Jessica stared at me for a few seconds as I waited for it to be over.
Then Billy quickly demanded, “Get her a script. Get her a script!” The casting assistant rushed to get me a full script. Not just the sides. I stood up to leave and asked what was going to happen next.
“We’ll call you. You’re going to audition for Lee!”
“This whole thing?” I asked, referring to the script. If they didn’t know that they were working with a novice, they knew now.
“No! You’re just going to do this same audition again with the director. We’ll call you!” Billy said.
I listened to the Hairspray soundtrack on my headset on the way back home on the subway. By the time I got out of the train station, about half an hour later, I had a voice message from Lee Daniels’s office. He wanted to meet me the next day. This was almost starting to seem normal for me and the subway.
I went to class the morning of the audition and asked someone to switch shifts with me at work so I could make the four o’clock appointment. I had read the entire script and brought it along with me in case Lee planned to point to a random scene and make me deliver it. Not that I could memorize it that quickly or that Lee would be that sadistic. I was just ready for anything. I got to Lee’s office way too early. I waited in front of the building and used the extra time I had to pray. I didn’t pray that I would get the role. I prayed that whatever my life was supposed to be, whatever my path was, I would finally be on it. I was only twenty-four years old, but I was tired of fear. I was tired of running away from something I could see into something I couldn’t. I didn’t know why this book, these characters, this production had shown up in my mother’s life five years before or why they were showing up in mine now, but I knew this was my purpose. It wasn’t that my purpose was to be a movie star; it was just for my life to begin. (I also decided that if I didn’t get the role of Precious I would never see the movie and I’d curse the girl who actually got the role. Curses to you, Sabourey Gidibe!)
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