Kia was scared to see me afterward, weak in a hospital bed. But she got herself together and came back to the hospital later that day, and the first thing I said to her as I put my hands on my hips while lying in the bed was “Bitch! Do I look skinny? It’s me! Gabby! You recognize me?” Two days later she picked me up and we went back to our rental house. I had three days’ worth of texts and work e-mails and requirements from people who had no idea that I had just had surgery. I was tired. My stomach was trembling and sending waves of pain through my entire body. I had oxycodone for the pain, but it made me sleepy and spaced-out. The first few nights, I would wake up at 4:20 a.m. on the dot. I’d have to get up and take the oxy just to get back to sleep. Kia made me sleep with my door open, and every time she heard me shuffling, she’d scream, “You OKAY?! You takin’ drugs?!” She watched me like a hawk and made me drink all my dumb liquids even though I wasn’t hungry. To actually lift something to my mouth to drink or eat felt like a huge hassle. Maybe it was my brain talking, but I was not interested in eating. A part of me would have loved five minutes alone with a tray of lasagna. I wanted it. I didn’t need it. The biggest obstacle between what I wanted and what I needed was my new stomach. I was very sad about all of my food needing to be wet for the first three weeks after surgery. (But I can’t tell you how exciting it was afterward to have my first softly scrambled egg. Really fucking exciting!) All I did was think about food and fantasize about my new body. Kia vowed to do the liquid diet with me, but she started to get spacey and headachy, so I told her to start eating actual food. She swore she wouldn’t and I swore I’d be fine. She started eating kale and cauliflower, and I immediately called her a traitor. I was totally kidding. It actually made me feel better to yell at her about eating when I couldn’t. I just liked yelling and talking about food. Shit. That’s weird. Is that who I am now? Is this how I self-soothe?
A couple of weeks after surgery I had to go to an Empire screening and a panel for Emmy voters. I was super excited to get my hair and makeup done and get out of the house! As I walked down the red carpet, I could already feel the difference in my weight. I usually sweat on red carpets because of nervousness and wearing heels. I stayed completely dry, and my feet didn’t even hurt. I was still spaced-out because of my liquid diet, but I had much more red carpet endurance than I usually would. In the holding area, there were food and drinks. Delicious-looking sandwiches, fruit platters, crudités, and all the wine and vodka I wanted . . . but I didn’t want it. Everyone said I looked great and that I was glowing. Whatever. Kia had been saying that when I was still in the hospital, but I didn’t think anyone else would. Right before we went onstage, I slipped into the bathroom to check my makeup. I saw myself in the mirror. Or not me in the mirror. I hadn’t seen it before but now I could. I had lost quite a bit of weight. My face was thinner. My eyes seemed bigger. Yes, I had makeup on, but I was also, in fact, glowing. I saw what I looked like and I was scared. Really scared. It was less than two weeks after surgery. What would I look like in the next two weeks? In the next month? In the next year? Who would I look like then?
When I say that I’m beautiful, I don’t say it so someone will clap and think I’m brave. I’m not doing it so that someone will comment on how confident I am. I don’t say it with ego and I don’t say it defensively. I don’t say it meaning that people who look like me are better than people who look like you. I say it because I believe it. I’ve earned every centimeter of my beauty. It has taken me years to realize that what I was born with, what was shaped, the mold it took, is all beautiful. I did not get this surgery to be beautiful. I did it so that I can walk around comfortably in heels. I want to do a cartwheel. I want not to be in pain every time I walk up a flight of stairs. I want to stop worrying about losing my toes.
I know I’m beautiful in my current face and my current body. What I don’t know about is the next body. The next face. I admit, I hope to God I don’t get skinny. If I could lose enough to just be a little chubby, I’ll be over the moon! I don’t know what that will look like, my new face, my new body. Will I still be beautiful then? Shiiiiit. Probably. My beauty doesn’t come from a mirror. Never has and never will.
18
Next
Do you expect me to be satisfied with a hashtag?
—Peaches, The Tale of Four
THIS IS BARRASSING, BUT WHEN I was a teenager, I used to write fan fiction about the pop group NSYNC. It’s what I did instead of homework or class work. It’s the reason, other than skipping gym, I had to work so hard to graduate. I would spend most days incessantly writing down my creeptastic fantasies about Justin, JC, Chris, Joey, and Lance in composition notebooks. I’d write about Crystal and me being adopted by NSYNC after sneaking onto their tour bus, getting caught, and going on the rest of their world tour with them. (What? Like that can’t happen?) A lot of times I wrote about being friends or even enemies (for drama!) with them in a reality (Ha! Reality? What’s that?!) where they weren’t famous at all and we were all in high school together. My friends, classmates, and teachers wanted to know what I was always writing. Because my bedroom kept filling up with more and more notebooks, my family suspected I was up to something other than just a what-I-did-today diary. The most interesting thing I did back then was cut class to sit by myself in the bathroom until math was over or head home to watch The Kids in the Hall reruns. My life has never been interesting enough to record at length. Until now (wink).
No one but Crystal knew that I was, in fact, writing a TV show starring a boy band (one I knew most intimately from daily Internet searching in my eighth-period computer class). Obviously. GOD, I’M SO EMBARRASSED! WHY CAN’T I STOP MYSELF FROM ADMITTING THIS! Anyway, every day I’d write a new episode of the show. After about six months of writing, I’d end the show, take a day off, and then start writing an entirely new show with the same cast, a different story line, and a different personality for each cast member. I’d go from being a senior in a performing-arts high school who insists on being a virgin until marriage to being a widowed, single mom down on her luck in Las Vegas who becomes a prostitute in the next season. If this sounds familiar to you, yes, I was doing then what Ryan Murphy does with American Horror Story today, which makes the fact that I eventually joined the cast of American Horror Story so weird. Life is so weird, you guys!
Anyway, this went on for about seven years. I wrote thirteen seasons. That’s what I did when I couldn’t afford therapy. I wrote. If I had a bad day, I wrote myself a better day. If a cute guy just wanted to be my friend, I’d write about two men fighting over me even though neither of them were good enough for me. Writing helped me to process what was going on inside me and around me. I created characters who dealt with depression, eating disorders, rejection. When I started my phone sex job in real life, I wrote a season about prostitutes and strippers. The members of NSYNC were my scaffolding, but I didn’t know them. I knew me. The stories were about me. I mean, please, go ahead and make fun of me. I still have the notebooks and they are truly my secret shame. To this day, the only person who has ever read what I wrote is Crystal.
When it turned out years later that several people including agents and editors thought I could write a book, I froze! I was some fat nobody who now starred in a film but was still often treated like a fat nobody. How could I write a book about that? How would my mom and dad look on the page to people who didn’t know and love them? How would Ahmed look? My friends, my bosses, my coworkers? If I told the truth about foster care, Dad’s second wife, my parents ignoring my depression, phone sex, Hollywood—wasn’t someone bound to get hurt? Or would it just be me? Never mind getting hurt, would I curl up and die of embarrassment from all I’d admitted about myself? I was sure everyone was completely wrong about me and whatever book they thought I’d write.
Today, obviously, I wrote this book. You just read it. The way it happened was . . . I just wrote the truth, and it made me feel better. So I wrote more. I felt even better. After two years of telling the truth on
the page, as I know it, I’ve written an entire book that has helped reshape my view on life, my work, my body, my family, and, most important, myself. I used to think celebrities wrote books for the money or to squeeze a few more seconds out of their fifteen minutes of fame. Now I know that many people in general, not just celebrities, write about their own lives to find purpose for pain. I get it, man. Writing this book has sent me straight into the arms (couch) of my therapist, but it has also allowed me to see people who have hurt me as just that. People. The hurt is no longer part of the equation. People. Just like me. I’m a person who has been hurt, but I’m also a person who has hurt. When I first started writing more than two years ago, I had cut my father out of my life entirely. Now I’ve found a way to forgive him enough to listen to him bore me to death about real estate in Senegal. (Seriously. He is hella into that shit and talked to me about it for twenty whole minutes while I said, “Mmhmm . . . Oh? . . . Wow . . . Cool,” in two-minute intervals two days ago.) Any money I make or seconds I add to my fifteen minutes of fame by writing this book mean nothing compared to the peace of mind I get from being happy and settled in my heart about my family. I love them dearly even if the stories in this book prevent you from being able to do the same. What’s great is that my mom keeps saying she’s fine with anything I write as long as it’s the truth. She also said she probably wouldn’t be reading my book, though. That’s fine, too. (OH! And by the way, neither of my parents or Ahmed knows that I was a phone sex operator, so you guys be cool! I can’t afford to get grounded right now.)
No one could have told me that I’d ever write a book, and no one could have told me I’d ever direct a film. Except a psychic! Actually, this one was fancy and called himself a “spiritual advisor.” Either way, I was too scared and lazy to ask him to elaborate. I was sure he was just assuming that I, being an actor, was interested in directing someday. But back then he was dead wrong. I had zero interest in directing. My first director, Lee Daniels, knows exactly what he wants and how to get it. He doesn’t accept anything less than what he asks for. I watched him very carefully on set. I took in every bit of his process, and said, “Nope!” I didn’t want the responsibility. I didn’t think I could care about anything enough to fight for it the way I’d seen Lee and every other director I’d ever worked with fight for what they wanted to say with their work. Me, a director? The boss of a movie? I didn’t want to be the boss. What if I failed? What if I wasn’t as good as Lee Daniels? Or as good as anybody? That would be horrible. Even as a phone sex operator, while I wasn’t content to sit at a desk moaning into a phone my whole life, I never wanted to be the boss of the entire company. Somewhere in the middle without a spotlight or too much responsibility would’ve been all I needed. There’s no fear in the middle.
But that was six years ago.
I directed my first film, The Tale of Four, during the summer of 2016 and immediately submitted it to film festivals. The film is an adaptation of the Nina Simone song called “Four Women” about four strong black women from four distinct worlds: an abused woman, a woman of mixed race, a woman called Sweet Thing who uses the power of her sexuality, and a tough, bitter woman whose life “has been too rough.” My producing partner Kia (you know her!) came up with the idea a few years ago, and we built an entire world around those women.
Well, thank God I was a creepy fat kid, cuz it has made for an interesting adulthood! Out of really nowhere, Shatterbox, an offshoot of Refinery29, offered me the chance to direct any short film I chose. I could’ve said no. I had just finished a season of Empire, was writing this book, and secretly considering surgery before going back to work on Empire. I had only months to get the entire film done. Also, I’d never directed traffic. How would I direct actors and a crew of people looking to me for answers? I wanted to say no. No made the most sense. But writing this book had reminded me that my life has been filled with nos from other people. The only time something got interesting in my life was when someone said yes.
I said yes, but the film needed to be Kia’s, too. Even if I couldn’t yet believe 100 percent in my own voice when it came to directing a film, I believed in hers. Kia has known she wanted to be a filmmaker for most of her life. She went to college for it. She’d already directed her own shorts. When I was a twenty-four-year-old phone sex worker who’d tripped into a starring film role, I envied her tenacity. She did exactly what she wanted to do instead of what she felt she had to do. Like my mom. Her job was a fantasy job . . . on purpose. When I was given the chance to make my own film, I knew I needed Kia.
I asked her if I could direct the film and told her that I would fight to hire her as producer. Kia was skeptical at first. Handing over this film idea that she had held on to for years wasn’t easy for her. We both worried that Refinery29 would police us with rules and veto our ideas and change the story completely on us. That didn’t happen. At our first production meeting we found out who the actual bosses were. Turns out, it was Kia and I. We were in charge.
After hiring Kia as creator and producer of our film, I brought on super producer Lisa Cortes to be a part of our team. Lisa has produced films with Lee Daniels for years. She produced Precious and never ceased to amaze me with her ability to be a lovely, smart problem solver who expresses her wants and vision without apology. A woman who doesn’t apologize for her very existence on Earth is rare, and that’s what I wanted for myself. I would carefully listen to every word she said on set. Hiring her for my first film was a great decision. I needed a whip-smart woman in our corner to fight for Kia’s and my voice in case we couldn’t do it on our own.
We didn’t yet realize our own strength.
Kia was in charge of assembling our crew. She set up interviews for me with assistant directors and camera operators. My friend and mentor Victoria Mahoney, an actress turned director who had hired me for my second film role, told me the assistant directors I’d be interviewing would most likely be men and to watch for those who seemed ready to undermine me. The first assistant director I met was a man who wanted the job, assumed he had it, and kept commenting during the interview how smart I was. But not in a good way. Every time I said anything that showed I knew what I was doing, he said, “Oh . . . so you’re smart, huh?” Ladies! You know what I’m talking about, right? Hell, no. Not on MY set! I hired a very smart and serious assistant director who had done some documentary work I liked. My director of photography had worked on projects I admired, too, and he had a very Zen-like, calm demeanor. In fact, there are photos of him on our set standing on his head. (Buddhist monks do that, right? No? They don’t? They should.) Both of these men became my pillars of support. Both of them listened patiently to all of my thoughts and concerns. Neither of them ever said no to me. Neither ever tried to be louder than I was. They both taught me so much and allowed me to make my film the way I wanted.
No one on our crew was there to get rich, which would’ve been impossible. We had champagne dreams for our beer-budget film. Some of our crew belonged to unions that wouldn’t let them work without proper compensation. So they changed their names for us and were paid much less than they were worth. Just because they believed in us. From our actors to hair and makeup to producers, camera operators, and set photographers—we had friends, family, and allies in every department of this film who all happened to be talented, award-winning professionals. Every time I started to feel overwhelmed or nervous, I’d look up in any direction and see my friends there for me—and it would immediately calm me down. That was the real joy. Being surrounded by people who all were there to support me and what we wanted to say with our film.
What did we want to say? The film takes place in an urban setting. Our Aunt Sarah, Simone’s long-suffering woman, is raising children who aren’t hers and mourning the loss of her husband and sister. We portray Saffronia, a mixed-race teenager raised by a single mother, being bullied on her way home from school and then again on the web. (Fucking Millennials! I’m kidding. You’re probably reading this book right now. Hi!
Snapchat is so lit, right?) Sweet Thing is an artist who is sleeping with a married man. And then there’s Peaches. Peaches is a video blogger who sits in front of a shrine to her dead son made up of his medals of achievement, college graduation pictures, and diploma; she is making a vlog update after more than a year of fighting for justice for her son, who was killed by a police officer.
I’m a black woman. Surprise! I don’t want to get into a conversation about race relations, being compliant around police officers, or #AllLives vs. #BlueLives vs. #BlackLivesMatter. Frankly, that conversation feels like it’s too big and important to have in a book where I talk about using my imagination to blow creeps over the phone and writing fan fiction featuring NSYNC. It’s also too big a conversation to have on Twitter (as we Millennials do). Every time I tweet something like “Why are police so quick to shoot down and kill unarmed black men when their hands are clearly in the air?” I get about a hundred tweets from eggs or profile pictures of Trump or the Confederate flag calling me a monkey or a fat nigger. Tweets telling me to go back to Africa (according to my dad, I have a lovely home in Senegal, so being told to go back there is actually a great vacation suggestion; thanks, racist!) or telling me that I should be grateful that my people were saved from Africa and brought here in the first place. I get tweets about how black people kill one another all the time so—so what if police kill them? No, Twitter may not be the right place for this conversation. But I don’t have the privilege of pretending I’m not concerned about the target that seems to be tattooed on the backs of people who look like me or that I am not absolutely terrified. Not for myself, for all of the black men in my life. For Ahmed. For my younger brothers, Malick and Abdul. All three of my brothers are gentle giants who stand over six feet tall. Abdul, who is twenty-two years old now, has special needs and speaks with a very pronounced stutter. The idea of him walking around Brooklyn by himself and being perceived as a threat by the police and not being able to talk his way out of a standoff terrifies me. I can’t say that on Twitter, so I had to find a way to say it in my film.
This Is Just My Face Page 20