It didn’t make sense. He was sleeping on my couch in a gang-ridden neighborhood and yet giving me a purse worth $20,000. I looked it up online before bed, and I had that unsettling feeling again, the feeling that I was splitting in two. Something’s wrong. I had been making ends meet on my own to bridge the gap until my father got back. Had I experienced anything of value during that time that maybe I couldn’t see yet? I was good at not communicating or asking many questions, because the answer was always the same: “Not to worry. I’ll take care of it.” Money, possessions, and things had always appeared magically growing up; I was never privy to the process—the journey or the struggle of how one gets from A to B. It was: Poof! Here’s a puppy at the foot of your bed! But that other side of me loved the thought of being taken care of again; it was what I longed for, what I fantasized about while cleaning up puke at the bar and waiting on needy celebrities, wanting to be a part of this, not that. Whatever “this” was. And the splitting feeling wasn’t just about me; it was about my father too. So, were the boys right? Did he have money hidden in Europe? Or was he lying? Or was he innocent? Or was he guilty?
“Dad, how did you get this?” I asked.
“Behar’s connections in Paris,” he said. Wait, Behar? The Albanian businessman? I felt my blood pressure drop at the reminder of the email and the stabbing I’d read about all those years ago, like maybe I might pass out. But instead, I was possessed by some automatic lying reflex implanted somewhere within my subconscious and replied, “It’s beautiful!”
I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t think about the “But what if?” Mara, Chloe, and I acted ecstatic. It brought back an association with all of the old feelings I had waking up on Christmas morning to extravagant presents underneath the tree. I was ashamed to admit it too: a part of me felt safe—my father’s having money again was going to help me get back on track. I could act again. I could be everything he wanted me to be. I could be a star! I buried all of my fears in the back of my mind and jumped for joy, thanking him and forgetting all that I had learned—if I had learned anything at all.
This purse would fill my wounds twofold with how much attention I received from it. “Oh my God, is this a Birkin bag? I’ve always wanted one. Victoria Beckham has, like, a hundred!” Later that week, I spent a lot of time staring at myself in the mirror with it. Holding it, deciding whether it looked cooler if the clasp was loose and undone, or giving it a more bohemian look, or a more A-line look, all buckled and crisp looking. I often rubbed the bag and inhaled its smell of fine leather. And I never put anything dirty in it, like pennies or receipts. I made sure the bottom was always clean and visible. Each time I got into the car with it, I had the urge to strap a seat belt over it, like it was my baby, so it wouldn’t go flying forward and get scratched if I slammed on my breaks. It was so expensive; it was worth more than anything I owned, including my BMW. But, really, I felt ashamed because I knew I could barely pay my rent. Still, at the same time, in those moments with my father, I felt we were inching closer to going back to the way things used to be—how they remained in my memory.
The day before my father left to go back to Virginia, we went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. As we stood in line at the Grove theater, Mara, Chloe, and I clad in our most fashionable articles of clothing and clutching our new designer bags (making sure each label faced outward), a kind gentleman in a white polo walked up to us and said to my father, “What a beautiful family you have, sir.”
“Why, thank you,” he replied.
It had been a long time since I had heard anyone say those words: what a beautiful family. No one had to know anything about us, or that my father was just released from prison. It was just more fuel for the belief that everything would be okay now. And even though my mother wasn’t around for Christmas, I actually had hope that maybe she’d be around for the next. These were the kinds of gifts my father had showered my mother with: Chanel, Hermès, the $1,000 under the table—they were explosive time bombs hiding under the guise of love, a love I believed to be real, just waiting to explode. Mara, Chloe, and I, we were becoming triplet substitutes for my father’s need to hook us, fish to bait, because our mother had disappeared, and maybe my father was afraid he would lose us too.
On the morning I took him back to the airport, we were walking out the front door, the Birkin dangling from my arm. “I love it, Dad!” I said, petting it again. He asked me if I had been dating anyone since Josh and I had broken up. “No one worth mentioning,” I said. I threw him my keys and hopped into the passenger seat. My father revved the engine, placed his hand on the stick shift, put on his aviators, and said, “You’re never going to find a man as cool as your dad, Bambina.”
I kissed him good-bye and merged onto the exit ramp of LAX when it suddenly occurred to me: we never went over my credit.
-21-
Denial
“I need another one.” I looked at Atticus, begging him, my eyes like fire, mascara smeared, and beads of sweat forming along my forehead, underneath my arms, my back, in between my legs. Atticus’s head flung down, and then up, and then shook from side to side as his fingers fluttered and melted into the keyboard in front of him. He was writing a song, a beautiful love song called “The Sweetest Love Song Ever Written,” and I wanted more of his Adderall.
I had just impulsively bought a plane ticket to New York City in a moment of overwhelming drug-fueled joy to be with Atticus while he auditioned for a new Broadway musical. My father had just wired a few hundred dollars into my bank account. It was the first time he had done this since he returned from prison, and I was happy to let him. Instead of getting a second job, I went ahead and let my father begin to take care of me again. On some self-inflicting, vengeful level, I felt he owed this to me. I knew my credit score wasn’t going anywhere—he wasn’t “fixing it” even when I reminded him—and I wanted to continue cutting corners and blaming him for my lack of financial responsibility while my drug intake escalated. I should have known better by then, but I continued walking through my life with my head turned the other way, and so I did it anyway. I also believed that on some level, the money, along with the Birkin bag and the way our lives were reweaving into each other, was bringing my father and me closer together.
Finally, I told Atticus about the credit cards in my name, and the debt. And then I told him about the email my father had recently sent asking my sisters and me to apply for dual citizenship in Greece. “Girls, as the great-grandchildren of Greek immigrants with a Greek surname, you are eligible under Greek law to become a Greek citizen and have a Greek passport . . . I have retained Jennie Giannakopoulou, Esq., a lawyer in Athens, Greece, to manage our entire application for Greek citizenship . . . I have attached a PDF (open with Adobe) of the legal services agreement that we all need to sign . . . XOXO Dad.”
Atticus listened without saying a word except that he loved me. “Tini, I love you,” he said. I thought it was a strange time to say this, and in hindsight, he knew that deep down I didn’t believe I was loveable. I had expected Atticus to express some kind of an opinion about my father; maybe a part of me was hoping he would, but he didn’t. And then my drug-induced narcissistic self thought that maybe he was falling in love with me, or I was falling in love with him. It was the drugs; I couldn’t tell. Until he saw that it scared me, and then he grabbed my shoulders, sober and abrupt. “I’m gay, Christina. I love you, but I’m gay, and I’ll never hurt you. I’m gay.” And I remember shaking my head and thinking, Right, yeah. I know. My ability to decipher reality from fantasy, right from wrong, fact from fiction was becoming increasingly distorted and disturbed.
“That’s the last one I’m giving you,” Atticus said, handing me one of his prescribed pills. “You’re too little.” Adderall had replaced pot smoking for me because I didn’t want to sleep anymore, because my nightmares were getting worse. My father kept dying in front of me. I would find him lying on the ground, bleeding to death over and over again, and all I could do was stand the
re and watch it happen, paralyzed, unable to move my legs or cry for help. Then I’d wake up—this time with the lights on, because I’d known it would come and had been prepared—crying, clutching my chest. I’d take off my nightgown and stumble to the bathroom sink to run cold water over my arms and face to remind myself that I was alive. My subconscious was thundering with truth, and in those waking moments, the closer I got to it, the more intensely I wanted to annihilate it with drugs.
We hopped off the L train at Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when I started talking again about Dad’s wanting me to get dual citizenship. I’d taken almost twenty milligrams of Adderall by noon that day. Since Atticus had stopped giving me his pills, I picked them up from a girlfriend I’d met at the nightclub.
“He says you don’t have to be fluent in Greek,” I rambled. “He told me over the phone; he’s been in touch with a lawyer over there. I’ll be able to travel anywhere I want—all over Europe—buy property someday, if I want to. He’s going to take us all on a family vacation there to apply in person at the US Consulate in Greece because it’s easier and faster than applying here in America. It’s so exciting, and I can invite you and the boys someday! Can you imagine all of us in our bathing suits and sun hats riding bikes along the Mediterranean Sea?!”
I looked like a strung-out Margot Tenenbaum, in a vintage fur coat I found at a thrift store for $30 and with my Birkin bag as we strolled beneath naked trees down the edge of McCarren Park across from old button and glove factories, now converted into chic, unaffordable apartments. Atticus, in his green skinny jeans and black director glasses, kept walking, ignoring me. Then he stopped in front of a park bench.
“Right here,” he said. Atticus sat down and pulled out a joint.
“Atticus,” I whispered, “not in public!” Drug-induced paranoia awakened my senses to all that was around me: coffee shops, vegan restaurants, hipsters riding their bikes in bow ties and skinny jeans.
“Oh, okay,” he replied with scathing sarcasm. “You’d rather have dual citizenship in Greece like a criminal, but you won’t smoke a joint on the street in Brooklyn?”
Atticus jumped up from the bench. His usual comedic facial expressions melted into serious concern and annoyance. “Christina.” He never called me that. He put his hands on my shoulders, the move indicating I needed some sobering up, and swept his hair to the side.
“You are not signing that dual citizen contract, or whatever you’re claiming it is,” he said adamantly.
“Why?”
“You have to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Thinking that this is normal and okay.”
Atticus was rarely ever serious, so this was serious.
“Normal? You want to smoke an illegal joint on the street!”
“Your dad took credit cards out in your name. He used you!”
“Why can’t you just be happy for me?” My adrenaline was rising, my heart about to implode. “He’s back and taking care of it.”
Atticus threw his hands up in the air and shot back, “He is a criminal, Christina! Wake. Up. He was in prison!”
This wasn’t some revelation Atticus was having in the moment. I knew the words had been boiling up inside of him for a long time, ever since I’d told him. But I wasn’t ready to hear them.
“You don’t even know my dad!” I shouted back. “I was lucky to have a dad like him; he gave me everything! I had a fairy-tale childhood. It wasn’t his fault; you don’t even know the whole story!” I huffed in utter defiance. I didn’t realize it, but I was speaking about my father as though he were dead.
“He loves me,” I said.
“Well, your definition of love is fucked. Look at that ridiculous purse,” Atticus said with disgust.
I held back my tears over all the debt I’d managed to forget about, knowing it was still lingering in the databases of banks and credit agencies. “This purse was a gift!” I didn’t have any words left as I paced the sidewalk, feeling attacked for no reason until the truth spewed from Atticus’s mouth like daggers: “You are in so much denial, Christina.”
Speechless before my explosive rage rolled through me, I screamed, “Fuck you!” at the top of my lungs, flinging the Birkin bag in the air. Atticus turned around and started walking back to the L train, dismissing my outburst with a calm sense of power, his boots steady on the sidewalk.
I panicked. “Where are you going?”
Atticus shook his head down at the sidewalk and kept walking. “I can’t talk to you right now.”
“Where are you going?” I stood there, panting in the cold air next to the open park, my heart palpitating, my warm breath like smoke. I didn’t know where I was or where to go as I watched New Yorkers whisk by me with determined direction. I felt dizzy, a panic attack coming. I hadn’t eaten anything in almost two days. I flinched as more human beings raced by me while I shuffled in circles, unsure of what to do, whom to call, or whom to trust.
That summer, I met Liam, tall, dark, handsome, at a party in the Hollywood Hills. I told him I was a writer. I had started writing late at night to sort out my thoughts, searching for the things I couldn’t see. Though I wasn’t a writer in any professional sense of the word, which was how I had implied it, I said it because I wanted to appear smarter than I felt I was and because every time I said “actress,” I felt like a failure. Only later did I tell him I used to be an actress, and that’s when he asked me if I wanted to audition to star in a horror film he was producing about biker gangs and exorcism. He said I would be perfect.
“She’s an innocent college graduate who survives at the end, and you don’t have to take your clothes off.” I gave him my number. I didn’t believe he was serious. But a few days after the party, he called, insisting that he take me out to dinner and that I audition for the part.
Soon I was coming home to find care packages on my front doorstep. Books like The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader, with little notes tucked inside: “Christina, this is my version of a dozen roses. Love, Liam.” Or Six Feet Under: The Official Companion, with another note: “Christina, I’m sure you’re thinking, this guy’s romantic.”
Eight weeks later, we were filming in a little town outside of San Francisco called Petaluma. I quit my job at the nightclub to make $100 a day on an ultra-low-budget horror film. And before I left, I had been so excited about my father’s release from prison that I even changed my name back from Christina Grace to Christina Prousalis—to honor him. The opening credits of the film would read “Introducing Christina Prousalis.” As if the movie star had arrived!
Most days I was tied to a chair, bound in Saran Wrap, being tormented by rockabilly aliens with pompadours and sideburns, screaming lines like “You’re a monster!” while the stunt coordinator kept trying to look up my skirt. I should have caught on when he kept using me to demonstrate certain moves for other cast members. “Christina, come here.” He’d pick me up and throw me down on the mattress. “Good girl, Christina.”
I sent out mass emails to family and friends letting everyone know what a fabulous time I was having; how much I was learning about my “craft.”
But my week of fantasy stardom fell into a dark reality when I awoke one morning to a phone call from a high school friend of mine. One of our best friends, Stone, and his brother, Holt, had been killed in a car accident the previous night somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley. A summer thunderstorm hit, it was pouring rain, and a tractor-trailer couldn’t stop, slamming into their car and pushing them underneath the truck in front of them. An explosion. Everyone went up in flames. I read later that they had to mill and repave the road the next day.
I sobbed, rocking back and forth on my bed with the phone pressed to my ear in my bleak motel room, thinking about our childhoods together, thinking about his parents. It was an unfathomable loss for the entire Washington, DC, community. Stone and his brother, they were doing something of substance with their lives. They were going to change the world. They were heading back
to DC from Texas to attend a book party for historian Douglas Brinkley’s new biography, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. Stone had been his research assistant while at Rice University.
And here was I, sitting in a makeup chair later that morning, watching the makeup artist splatter fake blood across my face, my arms, my legs, surrounded by fake cars, fake knives, fake aliens, fake people. This violent depiction we call entertainment—yes, it was so entertaining. What was I doing here? Playing make-believe. Was this what I wanted? Was this the “dream”? Drained and swollen eyed, the thought of such a violent way to die permeated a deafening silence in me. The AD called my name to set, my body sick with violent visions and grief as she led me out into the empty field where for the final shot, we had to pretend that life as we knew it was ending.
After we wrapped, I hopped out of the white van. It was dark outside, and I walked toward the motel room of one of the supporting actors, who I knew had drugs. He handed me a prerolled joint, “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, after I told him what had happened.
“Fine,” I replied, the fake blood dry and cracking and flaking off my skin.
Suspended from the universe, I don’t remember the walk back to my room before I opened the door, sparked the joint, and inhaled as much as I could to obliterate my feelings, sliding to the floor with my back against the door. Stone had been my first crush; the first person to say hi to me when I was new in the seventh grade and didn’t have any friends yet. I sat behind him in Ms. Bowen’s history class. I forced him to listen to Mariah Carey’s hit single “Emotions” in the tutorial room when we were supposed to be doing our history homework. Instead, we danced on the tables while lip-syncing the lyrics. I taught him how to freak dance in his driveway. We could talk for hours over the phone. Why couldn’t I have told Stone the truth when he’d messaged me on Facebook and asked how I was doing?
After Perfect Page 21