On The Way Down

by Fox, Ella

  Jewel parked her dusty red Hyundai Accent in the area that was marked for the crew. Turning off the engine, she glanced over at me. “You can stop playing the poor pitiful Shaelyn card now,” she snipped. “You think life is so hard but you have no idea because you’re seventeen and have the world’s easiest life. If you want to know what difficult is, just imagine what it was like being seventeen with a toddler. I assure you that it puts your little problems to shame. Get ahold of that teenage attitude for the rest of the day and walk a straight line. Don’t you dare embarrass me in front of my co-workers, or in front of Alan if he visits today.”

  The little dig about having me young scraped against my nerves nearly as much as the rest of what she’d said had. I glared at her as I opened the passenger door and stuck my leg out. “Say what you want about me,” I whisper-shouted, “but don’t act like I’d ever do anything in front of your precious Alan—or anyone else for that matter—that would embarrass you. As far as anyone knows, you’re a wonderful mother.”

  As angry as I was, I forced myself not to slam the door for dramatic effect. The reason I didn’t had nothing to do with not wanting to embarrass Jewel. It was purely that I wasn’t looking to humiliate myself. I liked to fly under the radar. Being loud and flouncing around like a teenage diva wasn’t in my wheelhouse. That was why, instead of going off on her like I wanted to, I slung my navy blue backpack up over my shoulder and followed along at her side in silence as she made her way to the production trailer area.

  As we walked I thought about how exhausted I was of being her punching bag. I detested her and how much guilt she liked to heap on me about how big a burden I was to her. She’d made her choices and blaming things on me was bullshit. That was her way, though, because she was never, ever in the wrong. I believed it was a serious psychological problem. She could be standing in front of you holding a severed head and a bloody knife and claim— with a straight face— that someone framed her. Further, she’d get angry with you for questioning her at all. In Jewel’s mind if she said something, it was true. Period.

  Like most things, motherhood didn’t come naturally to her. She wore it like a cloak made of chain that she was forced to carry through life. I think she’d liked me more when I was younger, cuter, and more easily led. Coincidentally, that was probably when I’d liked her the most as well. Honestly, I couldn’t recall ever feeling warm and fuzzy with her. Our relationship was what it was, and no amount of analyzing, adjusting, or going along with what she wanted would ever change anything. I’d learned that the hard way.

  Like me, Jewel had been raised by a single mother. My grandmother, Goldie, was sixteen when she got pregnant with Jewel. The pregnancy was a result of hooking up with an older (married) man who lived on her street back in Boulder City. Immediately upon telling her extremely religious parents she was pregnant, they threw her out. Her older lover had a similar reaction. He gave her eight hundred dollars—which, back then, seemed like a lot of money—and told her that not only did he want nothing to do with a child, he’d kill her if his wife ever found out he’d knocked her up.

  Goldie was just a kid with no real skills, knocked up by a loser who left her holding the bag, and absolutely no family support, yet somehow she found a way to persevere. After getting kicked out of her house she’d had no choice but to go to a home for unwed mothers. The entire time she was there she kept the money from Jewel’s father—sixteen wrinkled fifty-dollar bills—a secret. She’d sewn it into the lining of a skirt that no longer fit and hung it at the back of the closet in the room she shared with three other pregnant girls.

  The people in charge of the home believed that Goldie would be putting her baby up for adoption, but they were very wrong. Once she’d given birth she “changed her mind” and refused to sign any papers. Seven days after delivery she walked out of the home for unwed mothers with her money, her baby, and a promise to herself that she and her daughter would survive without anyone else’s help. From there, she got on a bus for the short trip to Vegas.

  Unfortunately for my grandmother, Jewel turned out to be a handful and a half—a wiseass little brat with a chip on her shoulder the size of Alaska and a bad attitude to match. I’d once heard my neighbor say that no one was surprised when she herself got knocked up at fifteen by her weed dealer. Said dealer’s response to my impending arrival was to move to Phoenix where he died of a coke overdose a few years later. Having never met him it wasn’t like I had anything to miss other than some juvenile fantasies of what having a father could have been like.

  For most of my life my mom and I had lived in my grandmother’s house. Goldie Monroe (formerly Edith Murphy, but that name didn’t sell lap dances) was absolutely, positively, never to be called anything remotely grandmotherly. As her choice of name suggested, she was a stripper and had been since four months after Jewel was born—right after she realized that if she wanted to keep her daughter fed, she needed to literally work her ass off.

  She was not ashamed of that choice or the career that followed. Although she was no longer on the pole, she still worked at the club. Boob jobs, liposuction, face lifts and tummy tucks could only do so much, so just after her forty-third birthday she’d transitioned to the office. She now managed the talent at Full Flush Gentleman’s Club. They called her a lifer and I knew some people judged that harshly, but I didn’t and I never would. Honestly, there was a sense of community at Full Flush that I found comforting. I liked that my grandmother had one place all her own where people treated her kindly and supported her. They’d believed in her, and that was priceless.

  Goldie liked her life and she wasn’t cruel or abusive. In many ways she had been more of a parental figure to me than Jewel. As a very young child I’d been a bit embarrassed by Goldie’s tendency to leave her “costumes” (otherwise known as G-strings) hanging over the shower rod. Fortunately, by the time I was eight, I no longer cared—possibly because several of our neighbors were strippers, showgirls or cocktail waitresses, which meant scanty attire became the norm to me. It was what it was, and I had absolutely no right to look down on my grandmother because of the honest work she did.

  Goldie had done her best with Jewel. After I was born, she’d watched me so that Jewel could finish high school. When that was finished, she paid for her to go to college—which she flunked out of in the first year. Next, she paid for Jewel to get training to be a secretary. Once that didn’t work out, she’d paid for beauty school, and she then helped her get a gig at one of the shows on the strip. A lot could be said about Goldie but at the end of the day, she had a good heart and she did her best for her daughter—which was a lot more than anything Jewel would ever do for me.

  For the first fifteen years of my life, Jewel and I lived with Goldie in the small house she bought a few miles off the strip when my mom was three. That was home to me, one I thought I’d be in until I got through school, but then Jewel decided she wanted something different, so she started applying for jobs in LA. A few months later we were living in a run-down rental in Burbank and she was a makeup assistant on a soap opera.

  Six months ago, she left the daytime drama for a job on some cheesy network drama. The new job had paid a whole four thousand dollars a year more, which was great for Jewel’s social life—at least until the show got canceled after the seventh episode. She’d been on the verge of moving us back to Vegas to live with Goldie—something I’d been praying for— when Alan, the man she’d been trying to snag, got her this job on a movie he’s producing.

  To say I wasn’t happy to relocate to flipping Moab, Utah, would be a gross understatement. I was a city kid, used to noise and people. Moab was nice to look at but hell to live in as far as I was concerned. In the two days since our arrival I’d seen nothing to indicate that it was any kind of a hub. Of course, that was why it had been chosen as the film’s location. Lack of people meant cheaper permits and lower production costs.

  I didn’t care about the why of it, though. I’d argued vociferously to be allowe
d to go back to and live in Vegas while Jewel worked in Moab but my pleas fell on deaf ears. Even when Goldie tried to intervene on my behalf, Jewel held firm and said no. It was a shitty situation, really. Legally, Jewel was the boss—which meant Goldie would always be more than a grandparent, but less than a mom. She was my normal in a sea of Jewel-created chaos, and I hated that I couldn’t just go back to what I knew. At least in Vegas I’d have been happy. Instead, I had no choice but to go with Jewel to Moab, which was why I was on the set of a movie that had nothing to do with me.

  From the dirt lot we followed the signs to a series of trailers located to our left. There were signs for hair, makeup, and wardrobe trailers that were located just a bit from the talent trailers. When we got to the hair and makeup trailers, I knew right away which one to go to since one was much larger than the other. The bigger of the two trailers was for the main cast—the smaller trailer was for support cast. Inside the makeup trailer, my mom introduced me to her co-workers. Gail, her makeup assistant, Mary, the lead hair stylist, and Rebecca, the hair assistant.

  Once that was out of the way, I parked myself in the supply area that was at the back of the trailer. Separated from the rest of the space by three steps, I could be seen but also easily ignored. I took a seat in one of the two directors’ chairs that were separated by a tiny plastic table before I unzipped my backpack, took out my Discman, and hit play on Pearl Jam’s Ten album.

  Bored, I traced my finger along the yellow stitching on my Doc Martens, which were two years old and starting to show their age. I wanted a new pair but doubted I would find a decent shoe store in Moab. I’d been about to bring the issue up just before we left LA but Jewel was in a mood for the last four days we were there because Alan was too busy to see her. Since I’d never met him I didn’t know enough about him to know what his deal was. Still, I had no doubt there was drama somewhere. Jewel attracted liars, losers, and half-wits like fly paper on a hot day.

  Pushing those thoughts from my head, I pulled out one of the books I’d checked out of Grand County Library, the best thing I’d found in Moab to that point. The book was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and I knew I could get a chapter or two in before I headed to “school”—something I was most definitely not looking forward to.

  The entirety of the student body consisted of me, a set of twins who would be sharing the role of the main character’s younger sister, and one other kid whose parent worked on set. The twins were six and the other kid was nine so it wasn’t like I was going to have anyone to hang out with. I wasn’t looking forward to how much school was going to suck. Not even the fact that I only had to put in three hours a day took the sting out of it.

  I was just starting chapter two of Interview with the Vampire when the door to the makeup trailer opened. Looking up, I surreptitiously watched as the star of the movie I was stuck in the desert for stepped through the door. I’m one hundred percent I had a terrible case of resting bitch face as Garrett Riordan, child star turned “serious” actor, came in and introduced himself to the staff in the trailer. Since I was clearly removed from them I think he understood pretty quickly that I wasn’t one of the staff members. If my distance didn’t clue him in, the fact that I raised my book and buried my nose in it while I ignored him entirely probably did it.

  Unlike most girls my age, Garrett Riordan wasn’t on my radar. Prior to being forced to relocate my life to Moab, I hadn’t had many thoughts about him, but seeing as how he was top billing on the very thing that had me trapped there, I wasn’t inclined to think kindly.

  He’d grown up famous due to the eight seasons he’d starred on the show “Mom’s Little Man”—conveniently starring his real mother, Aubrey Vonn. He’d been six when the show started and fourteen when it ended, so it’s not like we’re talking about Oscar-caliber performance. After the show wrapped he’d gone on to do three really good movies that I’d actually enjoyed—enough that I’d purchased my favorite of the bunch, True Dark, when the VHS tape showed up in the dollar bin at Big Lots.

  Apparently, I was one of the only people who liked any of his deeper movies, because they did nothing for his career. For all intents and purposes, he’d been written off completely by the time he was seventeen.

  Fortunately for him Hollywood loved a comeback story just a bit more than it loved scooping people up and spitting them out. Garrett came back with a bang when he was twenty-three, the year Fire Swimmer came out. With that movie he made the jump from used-to-be-someone to big-freaking-deal action movie superstar.

  Fire Swimmer was as bad as the title suggests, yet people hooved it up like it was high concept art. In my opinion, some random surfer who decided to act like a lifeguard to save lives as the beaches in LA burned was ridiculous. They say there’s no accounting for taste but let’s be real—most people don’t have any. If they did, butterfly clips wouldn’t be popular hair accessories. Fire Swimmer was also proof of that since it broke box office records as it sent Garrett into the stratosphere.

  He was the heartthrob du jour and had been for quite a while, something I’d seen on the daily back in LA since a ton of girls at school put up photos of him in their lockers that they clipped from magazines. Also, people liked to throw out the tagline Garrett used in the movie. It was awful and so cringe worthy I couldn’t believe it had made it into the final cut. Just before the climax of the movie where Garrett’s character—the douchily named Chad Forrester—was about to swim through the big fire to save a group of people trying to escape Santa Monica on their speedboat. They got stranded because someone else had siphoned their gas. Lucky them, Fire Swimmer happened to be in the area. Cue. Heavy. Eye. Roll. Against everyone’s advice Chad raced for the water—but before he dove in he turned and looked back over his shoulder and winked at the bikini-clad girl begging him to stay on shore. “Stay cool, babe. I know how to handle the heat.”

  Cue vomit. The water was on fire, some of the beach houses were on fire and the girl was wearing a teeny-tiny bikini as she waved off a fire-swimming hunk. Did I mention he was oiled up? The cheese factor on that was like eleven billion percent. It was so bad that I burst out laughing in the theater. I was quickly shushed by pretty much the entire theater. They were all in with Fire Swimmer, even though the script wasn’t fit to be used as tinder for a fire.

  Now people were all aflutter about him doing Guns Out, the movie we were there for, but I’d heard Jewel on the phone with the hairstylist talking about the storyline and the makeup and hair they wanted to do for certain scenes and to me it sounded weak. I had visions of Garrett strutting around like a cowboy version of Fabio—and to me that was gross.

  None of that mattered since I wasn’t about to give him the time of day. There was a firm, albeit unwritten, code of conduct in Los Angeles that anyone who wasn’t a tourist would never, ever humiliate themselves by losing their crap in front of any celebrity. Jesus himself could’ve shown up at a Thai restaurant in the Valley and not one person would act as if anything unusual was happening. Both because of that and the fact that I was resentful of him being the star of the film that had me trapped in Moab, I ignored Garrett. The headphones over my ears and the book in my hands gave me cover to do it without seeming rude. Over the top of the book I saw when he glanced over at me a few times, but I pretended not to notice. On general principle alone I was going to continue ignoring Garrett Riordan through the entirety of the film.

  Chapter Three

  May 1998

  School turned out to be a teeny-tiny bit better than I thought it would be, which was really the only good thing I could say about my first two days in Moab. That was mostly due to the fact that there was another student there who was only younger than me by five months. Nolan Hawk was co-starring in the movie as Garrett’s younger brother and perpetual sidekick, a role that had been recast eight days prior, which was why I hadn’t known he’d be there. He tended to only be around for half an hour or so at a time since the entertainment industry standards for education were tha
t students had to receive three hours of class time per day, but that time didn’t need to be consecutive.

  It was nice having someone who wasn’t so much younger than me around since the self-learning modules that passed as school were as boring as they were easy. Nolan struck me as someone used to getting a lot of female attention, but I wasn’t into jocks. The good thing was that he seemed harmless and funny, two things I appreciated in equal measure. He also liked a lot of the same music and movies I did so we had things to talk about whenever he was around. That was the good part of my new school experience.

  On the downside, the dial-up connection for AOL at our rental was awful. I’d gotten booted off Instant Messenger eight times the night before, which sucked. I only had one friend I felt I couldn’t live without—Tia, who I’d known since preschool in Vegas, and not being able to communicate with her the way I wanted to was an issue. Bored, I could handle. Being cut off entirely? Not ideal for my already less than sunny disposition.

  To top it all off, Jewel was being a bitch about me borrowing the car twice a week in the late afternoon so I could take a dance class in town. It was a nine-mile round trip and I had money to pay for my own gas (I’d worked as a bagger at the supermarket closest to our house in Burbank since two days after I turned fourteen) but she wouldn’t budge because it was her car and she might need it. I was livid about what a jerk she was being.

  Because of her, I lived in Nowhereville, had to get up at three thirty in the morning five days a week, and couldn’t go home until she did—which for the previous days had been nearly six o’clock at night. The only thing saving me from insanity at that point was that I’d been able to nap in the makeup trailer for a few hours after school on both days.