by Margaret Cho
Not having a clear vision of what I wanted from this business, aside from these fantasies of the glamorous life (“Hills that is, swimming pools, movie stars . . .”), I just started saying I wanted what everyone else wanted. Looking back, I realize this was my biggest mistake.
We must know who we are, so we can know what we want, so we don’t end up wanting the wrong thing and get it and realize we don’t want it, because by then it is too late. We are powerful enough that we can manifest anything into our lives. To use this power with great care and love is the secret to living a happy life. I wish I had known this then.
I moved to Hollywood around the time when stand-up comics were being sought out for sitcoms. The successes of Seinfeld and Roseanne paved the way for many would-be stars like me. For a few years I had been working on the road and accumulating television credits here and there. My Evening at the Improv and MTV credentials got me a tiny bit of notice. I even got to be on Star Search.
It wasn’t regular Star Search, it was Star Search International , this ghetto version of the show where they would put all the performers that were foreigners, or at the very least, not white. The prize money was significantly reduced, and you got to compete in only one round. The comic from India got a booking and had to be replaced by some guy from Canada, which I thought was really pushing the “foreign” angle. I was representing Korea! This was ridiculous because I was born here and I am probably more American than most people. The talent coordinator for the show knew this, and actually asked me if I could make my act more “authentic.”
“Could you be more, oh I don’t know, Chinese?”
“I’m Korean.”
“Whatever.”
What was I supposed to say?
“My husband is so fat, that when he sit around the habuku —he really sit around the habuku!”
They even put the Korean flag up next to my name on the bottom of the screen while I was performing. It was kind of like being in the Olympics without the medals or the endorsements. Not winning was nothing compared to the disappointment of not getting to compete on the real show.
All my comic friends got to be on “real” Star Search . All my comic friends seemed to be able to do whatever they wanted. Having to factor in the color of my skin whenever I tried to do anything really frustrated me. It is not that I was ashamed of my background, but that was all anybody could see at first. That was the real difference between performing stand-up in the clubs and trying to make it in L.A.
On the circuit, all the comics were judged by how funny you were. That was it. Of course, the few times I got heckled, it was race related—“Open your eyes!” and “Me so horny!” and of course the old standby, “Godzilla!,” but there is nothing a good “Do I go to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth?” can’t fix. Now, in L.A., there were no clever comebacks, because there were no opportunities for them.
It wasn’t always about race. Once, The Montel Williams Show had up-and-coming comedians on, and I was booked with lots of other comics. The makeup guy took one look at me and rolled his eyes. He hit my nose a couple of times with a sponge and told me to get out of his chair.
Then this tall, gorgeous, exotic-looking brunette who used to be a model and was now trying stand-up comedy sat in my place. He spent almost an hour and a half with her, separating her long eyelashes with a pin, delicately shading her lovely features so the camera could capture her beauty to full advantage. Then he ended up following her for the rest of the afternoon with a brush and powder, so that he could matte her down the second he saw a bead of perspiration form on her captivating visage.
This hurt me very much until that girl performed later and she was not funny at all. She was still beautiful, but she bombed so badly she became ugly by proxy. I did really well and was glad that I didn’t have to wash off all that shit anyway.
That makeup artist worked on my TV show years later. I recognized him instantly and the entire time we worked together I did not look at him or even speak to him once. Everybody thought it was the typical behavior of a bitchy Hollywood star, and I just let them all think that. I did not believe I had to explain myself. As immature and bitter as that is, at least I didn’t have him fired. He just served as a constant reminder to me that I wasn’t pretty enough. I would do things like that to abuse myself in those days. It was my fault for not being enough, I thought, but it was his fault for being an asshole. Plus—he was straight! What the fuck is that? Never trust a straight guy who does makeup unless he does the aliens on Star Trek.
When I got my sitcom development deal, it was more than just money that I got from it. It gave me a sense of power and self-esteem that I desperately needed at the time. Working in Hollywood, and not being traditionally beautiful or tall or skinny or blonde or even a guy, I felt invisible a lot of the time. It was depressing to be in casting offices with the best-looking people in the world, fighting it out for a walk-on role in The Red Shoe Diaries (even though I did wind up getting that part). I felt sexless, useless, ugly and fat, and had no idea how I was going to get past my physical self and show the producers that I actually had a lot of talent.
Once, I went to audition for some shitty science fiction movie. I went into the office with as much confidence as I could muster. I had spent many hours in careful preparation, learning my lines, really thinking about this part. I figured since I didn’t have the looks (whatever that meant), at least I could work at it and maybe that would pay off somehow.
It was one of those hot Southern California days where the smog is thick and magnifies the sun’s rays. Driving across town in the miserable heat with no air conditioning in my aged Volkswagen Golf seemed to melt my confidence along with my makeup. The casting agent’s office was shady and cool. There was this male model reading with me. As I read, I was consumed by the part. I was Commander Rina, and we were low on fuel and I was determined to get us off the planet before the dust storm damaged my ship. I finished and looked up at the casting agent. She sighed and looked at me with disgust.
“Don’t you ever go into another audition and give a reading like that again. I suggest you go take some acting classes at once. I am only telling you this for your own good. Don’t you ever ever ever. Now thank you. Please leave.”
The male model just sat there and smirked at me the whole time. When I shut the door behind me, I could hear them laughing.
Actors face that kind of rejection every day. The experience was upsetting, but it did not keep me from trying. I knew there was something better out there for me, and that if I kept going that I would be rewarded for my efforts. Why was I so tough? It was because I wasn’t just looking for a job, I was looking for some self-worth. I constantly looked outside myself for something that would fix me, and it was a desperate search.
This need to avenge myself upon all the casting directors, producers, actors, makeup artists, agents, and assholes who said I couldn’t do it, who denied me my need for validation, was a big motivation. My values were all screwed up. Looking for self-esteem outside myself and thinking I could find it in Hollywood was insane, but I didn’t know any better at the time. I thought if I could get the job, get noticed, maybe even become a star, then I would stop hating myself, and adore me just like the rest of the world. Self-love doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that.
I had thought for so long that it was somehow noble to hate myself. As if fate would take kindly to me, and say, “You adorable little scamp! Somebody will love you, because you just can’t seem to!” Then, it was a matter of wanting people to love me, despite the fact that I could not love myself.
I knew this girl who seemingly hated herself, and yet she was beautiful and men fell at her feet while she did her best to seem insecure. Now, I think it was all an act. It was not possible for her to hate herself as much as she said she did and still have that kind of pulling power. She’d say, “I am so unattractive . . .” and bat her violet eyes in such a way that young men would swoop down around her to c
onvince her otherwise.
I think that I said things like that about myself hoping for the same response. I wanted people to shake their heads sadly and think, “She has no idea how beautiful she is . . .” and sigh at the irony of life.
Unfortunately, when I said, “I am so fat” and didn’t immediately get a response like “No you’re not!” I felt like the other person had just agreed I was fat. Their nonparticipation in my make-believe dialogue made me resentful, without them having done anything.
It would be worse if they decided to joke along with me. I remember working on a film with an aging actress, and every time I put myself down and called myself fat, her face would fill with orgiastic delight. She was so excited to go down that path with me and criticize my body, as long as I was instigating it, of course. I guess she wanted me to see that she could be as mean to me as I was, and do it all in the name of good fun.
Ultimately, other people are amateurs compared to me in the horrible things I can say about myself. I cannot even bear to list the things that fill my mind during these episodes of self-loathing. I think we all have our own messages, the tapes that play over and over in our minds, that weaken us, that desecrate the holiness of our lives, that come disguised as a way to motivate ourselves, when really they are all about self-sabotage.
I don’t want to be weary anymore. I don’t want to be my own worst enemy anymore. When I tell myself I am fat, that I have to work out, I’ve taken from myself the energy to go out and do it. I feel hurt, bled of life force, and then I must work with that deficit. I give up before I am through because I feel defeated before I even begin.
Self-hatred doesn’t accomplish anything. It destroys everything it touches, comments upon, attacks, judges. No great deity is going to come to you, in those great moments of self-loathing, and rub the dirt from your rosy hobo cheeks and say, “Chin up! It’s not so bad!” I think that was what I was always hoping for, that God would try to prove me wrong; if I hurt myself enough, God would try to stop it. As ridiculous as that sounds, I find that even now after admitting it, it is very hard to let go of that notion.
But I will if you will. Let’s not hate ourselves. We are all we have. We cannot change anything until we accept that. I cannot do this alone. I don’t love myself enough to do it alone, but I can do it if we have a pact, if I am keeping up my end of the bargain.
I have been a longtime perpetrator of hate crimes against myself, and I am turning myself in. I have had enough.
10
ROAD
By 1992, I was living in torment in L.A., only to leave for a worse life on tour.
I was eating dinner out of vending machines, spending lost hours driving on black ice all over the Northeast, performing for college kids by day, staving off the loneliness of the long-distance traveler with Sweetheart soap and red Washington apples.
In West Virginia, there were anonymous phone calls warning me that I would be spending the night in a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. In Macon, Georgia, someone tried to break into my motel room while I was sleeping. My screams set off peals of hillbilly laughter and then sudden silence. I moved all the furniture up against the door and called the unoccupied front desk all night long.
In eastern Pennsylvania, I got wrong directions that led me six hours away from my destination, and I had to backtrack hundreds of miles in the snow and ice at breakneck speed to get to the show on time. That same winter, I spent three days in the Baltimore airport under ten feet of snow to get to an all-boys’ school—a military academy in New Mexico, where cadets ran onstage and did pushups in the middle of my act. I went to hell and back in the name of comedy.
There were small signs that I was starting to go insane. I rarely changed clothes or showered, sometimes for as long as two weeks. Sleeping in what I wore all day, pulling my greasy hair up with a Goody barrette, thinking it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, because nobody cared.
I slept as much as I could, because that was my only escape. I got used to waking up with a too-much-sleep headache and having no idea where I was. I did this to make up for so much lost sleep, from going back and forth between time zones and losing and gaining hours every day.
Being on a tight schedule, I was terrified of oversleeping and missing flights, so I was never able to relax. Sometimes when I was home, I would wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that I was late for a flight. I would hurriedly gather my bags, which were always packed, and get dressed in the dark, only to realize when I was almost out the door that it was my day off.
Being alone all the time began to take its toll. Once, I treated myself to a fancy dinner at a hotel restaurant. The dining room was lit with candles, and filled with couples enjoying a romantic evening. Sitting alone, waiting for my lemon sole, I got bored and took out my makeup bag and started plucking my eyebrows at the table. The waiter gave me such a look of horror as he set down my overdone fish that I immediately put away my Tweezerman in shame. It was time to go home.
This was not what I had signed up for. What use was it to follow your dreams if you only wound up miserable? I wanted to be a comedian, not a traveling salesman, but that was essentially what I had become, lunging for the last Eggo waffle at the complimentary continental breakfast at the Comfort Inn in Peoria.
I still travel extensively for my work now, and I am writing these words in a hotel room. Today, I could not face another stinky, sticky hotel “health club,” climbing onto rattling, ancient machines at my own risk, so I just took a shower instead. I know I should be grateful for those nasty-ass exercise rooms.
I remember when I would stay at places that didn’t even have those human-salt-covered stationary bikes. For recreation, I would walk in straight lines across dry, weedy fields. Any vacant lot was my gym in those days, and I would chap rather than sweat from the wind whipping my face.
This morning, I sat in a rented limousine, on I-95, with interior colored lights changing every five seconds for my pleasure, lest I get bored on my way to the airport. It is a far cry from the rented Sun-bird I used to drive on this highway, looking for exits that did not exist. Back then I prayed that I might die before the next gig, that God would just take me, because I was so tired and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I kept going. And slowly I became glad to have lived so that I could tell the tale.
I remember driving and driving to Fordham University, a school supposedly not far from where I had begun my trip in New York City. Getting to the Bronx seemed easy enough.
Fordham wasn’t hard to find, since the outside of the campus was covered in barbed wire. I looked around the school for the hotel where I was supposed to be staying. There didn’t seem to be one around, so I kept driving.
The streets looked dangerous, but I kept telling myself it was the middle of the day, it would certainly be all right, I was in a car after all, and I could find everything on my own. Finally, after much searching, I pulled into a motel on a side street. The place looked okay from the outside, so I parked and handed the manager seventy dollars, a fortune back then, and got the key. I walked up the rickety stairs and into my room. The door opened much too easily for my comfort, the lock nearly falling out of the rotting wood. My heart sank as I viewed the graffiti spray-painted all over the room.
I tried to reason with myself, live with it for just a second. Then, I fast-forwarded in my head to scenes of the rest of the night, like a hideous coming attraction. I saw myself going to bed, listening to gunshots and praying that I would not get shot during the night, watching the sun come up through that broken window if I was allowed to live, of course. Then, suddenly thinking, “Hey, I am getting what I asked for. I am supposed to die this way!”
I lugged my bags back down to the office and the manager handed me my money back right away. He hadn’t even put it in the register. He knew I’d be coming back. I drove on and on, not seeing anything on the sides of the road. I had to go to the bathroom, I had to rest for just a minute, I needed a place to stop, collect my though
ts, hopefully before the show.
There had been a vague mention by the booking agent that I would be staying at a Holiday Inn, just off the highway. I searched and searched, up and down for hours, and the friendly green sign never appeared. Finally, I spotted a motel that looked fairly decent and clean on the side of the road. Thanking my lucky stars, I pulled off the freeway and into the parking lot.
The office was behind bulletproof glass once again, yet I still tried to hang onto my hopes. Most of all, I was starving, and I wanted a clean bed and room service before having to perform for the kids at the college. It seemed I had found it at last.
The man in the office was enormous and his rolls of fat pressed up against the glass. His flesh so resembled an octopus’ in an aquarium, that only out of desire for a decent room could I resist the overwhelming urge to tap on the glass.
The octopus demanded payment in cash, the standard seventy dollars, before he would even look at me. He handed over the key and I walked up the stairs, hopeful and happy, not thinking that I could have possibly made a second mistake. Why did I think I couldn’t fail to find shelter twice? Why was I so confident when I opened that door?
The room was dark, as only one light was working. It stank of that weird ammonia they use to clean porno booths and strip clubs. The cherry ammonia scent is so powerful, it flavors all the drinks from the bar. I wonder if for some people it is an aphrodisiac. For me, it brought on another brief vision of being haunted by the ghosts of dead hookers and murderous johns, that porn smell permeating my luggage and my clothes for the rest of the trip, for the rest of my life.
Brave from the last motel experience, I stomped back down to the office, demanding my money back. The octopus screamed that I couldn’t have a refund, then finally lifted one of his eight arms and threw thirty-five dollars back in my face.