“You broke up with me, Christina. Why are you doing this? Why do you do this to me? You come over here to be with me, and now you’re just leaving without a word.”
Josh’s lips were quivering. He tried hard not to cry in front of me, because one time I’d told him it made him less of a man. I never saw my father cry. A part of me actually believed that men didn’t have feelings. And vulnerability meant that Josh would have to know the truth about me; it would mean admitting the ugliness I felt growing inside of me, and I wouldn’t dare do that. I was devoid of any courage, seeping in half-truths. It was easier to trample on somebody else’s heart than risk my own.
“Are you seeing someone else?” I asked accusatorily. Wanting a reason to resent him, to push me over the edge, to grab one more moment between us and obliterate it because I needed love proved to me infinitely; because the love we had wouldn’t ever be enough. Even when it was. It was over, sabotaged successfully. Josh hung his head. “I have nothing left to say to you, Christina. You got what you wanted. You always do. You should leave now.”
I grabbed my purse, its bottom bulging from the hidden rolls of toilet paper. I stepped into my black boots and wrapped myself up in my hoodie. I looked at Josh one last time. I wouldn’t let him see me cry, refusing to swallow my pride. I walked out of that apartment building for the last time. I walked along the dewy grass in the cold morning air at the bottom of the canyon. Up above me, glass houses stirred with families and lovers and gifts from Santa. But I kept my eyes steady on the cracks in the sidewalk, knowing I had pushed him away. Josh was gone. As was everyone else.
During the summer, fall, and into the new year of 2008, I never spoke to anyone about the $300,000 my father said would be wired into my bank account. After Father’s Day he sent me a letter explaining that his early release date wasn’t going to happen like he had hoped, but that I shouldn’t worry because I had money coming my way. “Next week, you should receive wire transfers from two of my clients of $150,000. And at the end of August, you should receive an additional $150,000 for a total of $300,000. Keep this information confidential until I tell you otherwise. And do not speak about it to me on the telephone except in very general terms . . . Instead of a 911 Turbo Porsche, maybe I’ll get an Aston Martin. XOXO, Dad.”
I never told anyone. The money never came. And maybe I couldn’t tell anyone for fear that the truth would eventually come from someone else’s reasoning other than my own—because I didn’t want to see it or believe it. I was tethered to the debt in my name, and I was tethered to the hope that once my father got out of prison, the money would come. But the difference between the two was that I chose to tether myself to my father’s hopes and promises because had it not been true, who would I have left? What would I have left? I would have nothing left to hold on to.
A few weeks before I moved out of Mara and Brian’s place, I came home from work one night and heard my sister on the phone in her bedroom, the crack of light underneath the door peering out into the hallway. It was four in the morning, and she was never up that late. I listened but couldn’t make out what she was saying. A few minutes later, she knocked on my door. I knew it was bad because we hadn’t said a word to each other since the night of the Nantucket basket incident.
“Chloe’s been arrested for a DUI. The police pulled her over after she was swerving on the 101 Freeway with a broken taillight.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah, no one got hurt. But she’s wasted; the police won’t let me talk to her. She’s refusing to talk to Mom and Richard, and wants us to go get her.”
Mara and I flew into sister autopilot. No matter how much we fought, we would be there for one another, wearing the other’s pain on top of our own.
Mara threw me her keys. “You drive,” she said. “I’m tired.” I was so concerned about Chloe that I didn’t pause to think it might not be such a good idea for me to drive after having had several shots at work.
We drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, windows down, our hair blowing in the wind as I chugged a cup of coffee. It was like nothing had happened between us.
When we were about twenty minutes from the police station, Chloe called Mara’s cell phone.
“Isn’t she in jail? How does she have her cell phone?”
“Pick it up,” I said.
Chloe was laughing through the speakerphone. “They let me go!” she cried as if she were the freest bird in the world.
“What?” Mara asked, confused. “What do you mean, they let you go?” The police officer apparently thought Chloe was “too cute” to spend the night in jail, and though she had been charged with a DUI and would have to appear in court, they allowed her best friend to come and pick her up from the police station to take her home.
“Fine,” Mara said. “We’re coming to your house, then.” Chloe had been living in Isla Vista, known for its excessive partying, with a bunch of students who went to Santa Barbara City College, while she worked a hostessing job in town.
We pulled up to the house. Beer cans were flung about in the street, and red party cups were wedged in the bushes. Chloe stumbled out of the front door, clapping and waving to us as if we were there to continue the party with her, completely unaware of the fact that she had just been arrested.
“Sisters!” she cried, and did a little twirl on the front walkway. I got out of the car and ran to her. I hugged her as tightly as I could. She reeked of vodka. “You are in so much fucking trouble!” I scolded. “You could have killed someone or killed yourself.” Here was I, having just driven up the 101 Freeway after multiple shots at work, telling Chloe the hard truth as if I were talking to myself.
“Where’s my ID?” Mara asked. She had given Chloe her old ID as a gift, since they looked alike. “You’ve lost your privileges,” she said, also trying to act the parent. “Hand it over.”
“Oh, please, I lost your ID a looooong time ago,” Chloe slurred. Her eyes were glassy, and I knew she wouldn’t remember any of this the next morning. And it wouldn’t matter even if she did, because I wasn’t any better. I wasn’t Mom, and I wasn’t Dad—the way we remembered them and wanted them to be. And neither was Mara. The three of us just stood there, a triangle of hypocrisy under the streetlamps as the sun began to rise without any answers. Driving up had been pointless. We couldn’t help one another even if we had convinced ourselves we could.
-19-
2008: The Year of Fantasy Thinking
“You don’t have to sign a lease,” Dave told me. He had called me a few weeks before the new year to let me know he’d just moved into a McMansion with a few friends, and they were looking for a fifth roommate. The McMansion was on Melrose Hill Street, in a neighborhood east of Western Avenue between Sunset Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. A neighborhood notorious for its drug busts, burglaries, shootings, and prostitution—a poverty-ridden pocket between the wealthy neighborhoods of Los Feliz and Hancock Park. Brisas Beauty Salon sat on the corner, with white bars and tinted windows. Across the street, the auto body shop fixed vehicles with platinum- and chrome-rimmed wheels while it bumped rap music throughout the day. Next door was Winchell’s Donut House, where the prostitutes, the drug dealers, and the occasional police officer hung out. When I drove home from work at night, I had to keep my windows rolled up and my eyes on the red light, so that I wouldn’t be propositioned for sex. I learned to ignore it; I never got involved; I just kept driving by with my blinders on and prayed that no one would pull out a gun. The McMansion was two blocks behind Winchell’s, past the dilapidated bungalows with chain-link fences, the street filled with abandoned cars and shopping carts full of garbage. Rent was cheap. There was only one problem: “You don’t have to sign a lease, but you have to put down a two-thousand-dollar deposit,” Dave said. I never had more than five hundred dollars in my bank account at a time, except for the few days leading up to when I had to pay rent.
I’d have to come up with the money somehow, as Mara and Brian had already found a new apartmen
t in Beverly Hills. I phoned my mother and begged her to lend me the money. “I’ll pay you back,” I promised. She would have to ask Richard for the money, and she was not willing to do that. “I’m not asking Richard for the money,” she said firmly. “He’s already done enough for me.”
I remember sitting in my car as Mara and Brian packed up the apartment, not knowing what I was going to do. My last resort: I would call my godparents in Washington, DC. I felt so ashamed to ask them for help. They had no idea what was happening all the way out west, because we had kept in touch only minimally. They were dealing with their own set of crises and losses. My godmother’s best friend had passed away from cancer. She had a schizophrenic son who was acting out, his father estranged, and so they were consumed daily by trying to raise him. But I was desperate. I never told them about the credit cards, and the debt. Everything had remained a secret. Finally, I called them, and tried not to cry when I asked if I could borrow $2,000. I was ready to be rejected, ready to be sleeping in the backseat of my car and on friends’ couches, when my godfather said, “Yes, no problem,” and I started to cry. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” A few days later, I had a place to live.
Jessica, a costume designer, owned a Brussels griffon named Chewbacca, whom we nicknamed Chewie for short. Chewie was the house mascot. Jessica hated me because she lived in the room below mine, and night after night, I would stumble home drunk in my high-heeled boots, clip-clopping around my bedroom, waking her up. Noah, who ran the house and was in charge of collecting rent, was a Republican from Arizona. He was also Mexican and gay and had chic blond hair parted to the side. He worked as an assistant to a celebrity publicist and was always coming home with gift bags of free junk from red-carpet events.
Then there was Atticus, who’d grown up with Emily Stone in Arizona. I’d met him one day at her apartment at Park La Brea. Atticus had moved back to Los Angeles after starring in a successful Broadway show. Technically, he didn’t live with us—he lived in a studio apartment down the street—but he was always hanging out in Dave’s room, playing guitar and singing the latest song he’d written. We called each other “darling,” and he occasionally brushed my hair and picked out my outfits.
Rob was a simple guy from Wisconsin who drove a red truck and owned a gun. He didn’t like salad or condiments—not even ketchup on his french fries. Simple. Noah and Atticus were the first gay friends he’d ever had, so it took some adjusting. The day I moved in, Rob helped me carry all of my furniture into my new bedroom. It was the fifth time my cocoon of memories had been rearranged into a different room; I couldn’t afford anything else, and, besides, I wasn’t willing to let them go. I spent hours painting the walls of my new room powder blue and setting up everything the way it had looked back home in Virginia so that it felt calm and innocent—even if it was no longer the truth.
Before I moved in, Noah had said that, for the most part, our neighbors were friendly. There was even a hot dad that lived across the street, whom the boys later forbade me from talking to after they saw me flirting with him in the street a little too enthusiastically. The neighborhood was an up-and-coming vision of Los Angeles gentrification. So despite a few run-ins with prostitutes and pimps, we were safe.
Or so I thought.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Gun shots. Gun shots went off in my backyard. There’s a baby screaming.” I hadn’t realized how scared I was until I opened my mouth.
“Ma’am, where are you? What is the home address?”
“I’m in my room, in my house.” I had been blow-drying my hair topless, getting ready for work, when the gunshots went off.
Pow! Pow! Pow!
“Did you hear that? Now someone’s running. I hear running.”
“Ma’am, I need the address. What is the address and cross street?”
“Um, it’s . . . oh God, I can’t remember. I have to check my phone.” I had just moved in. I started crying as I scrolled to find Dave’s name.
“4957 Melrose Hill Street. The cross street is Oxford, near Western.”
“Did you get a visual of the shooter? What race? Any article of clothing?
“No. I didn’t see anything! I’m lying on the floor!”
“Would you like to leave your name or remain anonymous?”
“Christina Grace, I mean, Prousalis. I mean—it’s Christina Prousalis.” Flustered, I didn’t know which name to give.
“Stay on the ground. LAPD is on the way. Do not move until the LAPD are at your door, okay?”
The dispatcher hung up. I didn’t move. I was lying naked on the floor, waiting for the police, and praying to God the doors were locked. The boys kept leaving the front door unlocked, as if we lived in the middle of nowhere, and I kept yelling at them each night I’d come home from the bar to find it ajar at three o’clock in the morning.
A helicopter circled the house, its spotlight moving back and forth across the backyard. Otherwise known as a “ghetto bird” in Los Angeles. It circled for about forty-five minutes as I listened to sirens and police shouting in the street. I texted Jimmy: “Tell Fiona I’m running late. Gunshots in backyard. Can’t leave house until LAPD gets here.” He texted back: “Normal.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes with my head on the ground, having never been more terrified. When the doorbell rang, I called the police department to make sure it was okay to answer. The dispatcher assured me it was safe. I got up and wrapped myself in my old terrycloth bathrobe and went to open the front door. Two police officers stood in front of me.
“Are you Christina Prousalis?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, officer. I have to go to work. Is it safe to leave?”
“Yes, you can leave now.”
When I asked them what had happened, they either refused to tell me or claimed they weren’t allowed to.
“Okay, thank you, officer.” I closed the door and ran to collect my things for work as fast as possible.
A few days later, a neighbor said that the gunshots didn’t come from any drug dealer, pimp, or crazy rapist on the loose, which was what I’d assumed. They were LAPD gunshots. A SWAT team had raided one of the houses behind us for some drug offense, which explained the baby crying. The helicopter was just backup.
Barack Obama was officially running for president. Artist Shepard Fairey’s iconic red, white, and blue image of the Illinois senator covered street corners, storefronts, and billboards. Everyone was suddenly under the belief that change was possible. The word hope had reinvigorated us.
For a while, it was a thrilling time at the McMansion, home to a bunch of misfits dying to leave our mark on this world. It was always buzzing with young artists and starlets like Jessica Szohr, Dianna Agron, Amanda Bynes, Nikki Reed, and Lindsay Lohan. Jessica was filming the new hit show Gossip Girl. Dianna would soon be auditioning for a television musical that was circulating around Hollywood called Glee. Emily (now officially Emma) was dating musician Teddy Geiger, whom we also knew from In Search of the Partridge Family, and they would come over when Emma wasn’t filming one of her latest movies. It was a house burning with reckless creativity, a place where we could be chameleons in a world that would never make sense yet we were determined to grab it by the reins. It became what I thought was a safe haven away from my crumbling family, while I remained beholden subconsciously to my father and his promises. Hope! Locked in a prison where, if I had any sense of reality, I might try to set myself free. But the search for anything outside of myself to numb me, to save me from the pain, would only get worse. Living in a mansion that looked good on the outside but was largely empty on the inside, nestled in the ghetto, was the truth.
I can’t remember which happened first: being rejected for financial aid after I discovered I was still on a leave of absence and had one last chance to go back to LMU or blowing through $13,000 in eight weeks for a signed Roy Lichtenstein print I’d sold at auction at Bonhams and Butterf
ields. I can’t remember because I smoked pot multiple times a day for almost the entire two years I lived on Melrose Hill. After a talent manager told me I needed a nose job so I could “look more like Megan Fox,” I decided to stop acting for a while.
I thought about going back to school to become a writer. There was a budding part of me that felt I had something to say, even if I didn’t know what it was yet. And my father kept bringing up the idea of going back to school in his letters. USC, UCLA, Yale University School of Drama. The university needed to be well known. For my father, it needed a label, like designer clothing (Versace is to Brown as Prada is to Cornell)—a degree to prove my status in this world. Much to my parents’ disappointment, I had been wait-listed or rejected from USC. (I can’t remember which; probably rejected.) My SAT scores were terrible. I never studied for them. On Facebook, I watched as all of my high school friends graduated college, and started submitting their applications to business schools, law schools, and medical schools.
I decided to call LMU one day and ask if I could reapply. I wanted to go back and study screenwriting. To my surprise, an administrator told me, “You’re still a student here. Your leave of absence isn’t up until after this semester. If you can come up with fifteen thousand dollars by the due date, you can register for classes.” Fifteen thousand dollars? I didn’t even own a credit card. I hadn’t told any of my roommates about my current financial situation, not yet. It took me a few months to open up to them about my father being in prison. But the boys were intrigued by the story once I told them. They teased me and said, “Darling, get ready. When Daddy comes home, he’s whipping out the gold shovels!” They were convinced he had money hidden in Swiss bank accounts, because it’s where Mara was sent to boarding school. It only fueled my desire to believe it more.
I downloaded the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form and spent an entire afternoon filling it out, excited about the possibility of finishing school. But when I got to the part asking for my parents’ financial information, I didn’t know what to put down. I couldn’t contact my father to ask him certain questions about income, and I don’t remember a box to check for having a parent in prison. I was still considered dependent even though I had been managing to make ends meet on my own. I called LMU, and a woman there told me that because I was born in 1985, I was still considered dependent. If there were extenuating circumstances as to why I should be considered independent, I’d have to write a letter of explanation. This was impossible for me to do because I never took Ralph Adler’s advice and sued my father. My financial history looked like an out-of-control eighteen-year-old had gone on a rampant shopping spree with a half dozen credit cards. It was hopeless. But I submitted the application anyway.
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