I'm the One That I Want

by Margaret Cho

  I was scared by how mad I could make her. I was also scared at how really fun it was, yet I felt instantly sorry. I was sure that I had really crossed the line somewhere.

  A few minutes later, she called me again. I didn’t pick up the phone, so she left a message demanding a written, signed apology. She spelled out her name very slowly, “in case you cannot understand the Korean.” She called again and said that if she did not receive a written, signed apology within twenty-four hours that I would be “very sorry.”

  I spoke to the Korean journalists later. They told me she had called, demanding to know exactly who had told me what she had been saying. As far as I know, they did not stand by me. They were too afraid of her and did not want to get on her bad side.

  I began to feel very alone. Part of why I had done such a thing was, in a strange way, to win their approval. I wanted them to see that I fought for what I believed in. Unfortunately, without their backing me up, it had all just seemed like a thoughtless prank.

  I sent her flowers the next day, with a written, unsigned note of apology. It was not accepted.

  Over the next few months, the woman used her seniority at the newspaper to compile a huge piece about the negative impact I had on the Korean community. She did not write for the entertainment section, she worked on the city news section, but she was determined to ruin me.

  She interviewed many people, and I don’t even know what was said because I never read it. I don’t know what damage she did. Who was to say at that point? It really didn’t mean anything. I already felt hated, so this just restated that painful fact. It saddened me that this was what it came to, that somebody like her would put so much work into seeing me punished, and that ultimately it was my fault for fucking with her in the first place.

  It is awful that the two of us, accomplished Korean women, in worlds we had to fight so hard to get into, would use our strength so readily to cannibalize each other. I am sorry, too, that in a way, she might think I am doing it right now. I did, after many years, send her the written, signed apology.

  I told her that I was a different person back then, and that I did not know who she was or who I was. I should have had the deep respect for her that I do now, a respect I gained not because of what she did to me, but because I see how much she is just like me.

  I stand by her now, and I finally can say I understand the Korean.

  Rejection from the Asian-American community was hard to take, mostly because the show had been universally panned by critics, panned by every major publication. It seemed like we had no fans at all, so to be deserted by the audience that we were trying to represent was almost too much to deal with.

  I did not react gracefully to any of the criticism.

  A friend of mine wrote a piece for a big alternative newspaper that was about how insulted he was as an Asian-American to have his life lampooned by All-American Girl. He felt that the show did a great disservice to multiculturalism, and that we were doing much more harm than good by our efforts. It cut me to the bone because he happened to be somebody I cared about, and my desire for revenge got the better of me.

  I called him, and in as innocent a voice as I could muster, I asked him to fax me a copy of the article. He nervously asked if I had seen or heard anything about it, and I replied sweetly, “No, I haven’t, but I just want to make a scrapbook of all my press, and it has to include your piece, especially since you are such a good friend .”

  To his credit, he did fax the article, then immediately followed it with a letter of apology. I did not speak to him again for a number of years. Not long ago, I called him and told him I was sorry I had put him through that. I explained that I had felt betrayed, and wasn’t able to express anything but anger at that point. He told me that the newspaper had pressured him into being far more critical than he really was, for the same reasons the Korean woman felt such malice toward me.

  It’s interesting that at the time, I found it very easy to call up and rail against all the Asian-American critics, whereas I would never think about doing the same thing to the “mainstream” critics. I thought it was a family affair.

  I read in yet another article about the Asian-American backlash to All-American Girl that a Korean media action leader said I was “dangerous” and that he would be monitoring the show and would be protesting at the first opportunity.

  I reacted like a Korean Courtney Love. I called him and screamed totally unintelligibly about how stupid he was. This was very exciting because he got flustered right away. I went on and on about how much I had done for the “community” (nothing really at that point) and how I was being repaid with his idiocy. I hung up on him, but he kept calling me and leaving messages after that about events I could help him out with because I allegedly “cared” so much about the community. His messages were always tinged with sarcasm and a carefully concealed hatred that we reserve only for our own kind.

  The most painful part of the backlash was a letter written to the editorial section of my newspaper at home. It had been submitted by a twelve-year-old Korean girl who wrote, “When I see Margaret Cho on television, I feel deep shame.”

  Why?! Why?! I realize now this was because they had never seen a Korean-American role model like me before.

  I didn’t play violin.

  I didn’t fuck Woody Allen.

  I was just me, or actually, I wasn’t even me, because All-American Girl was so far away from being me it was ridiculous. The first episode’s story line had me doing stand-up comedy, and publicly embarrassing my family. At the end of the episode, I learn my lesson, and vow never to publicly embarrass my family again.

  Quentin Tarantino, who I was dating at the time, called me up screaming, “They took away your voice! Don’t let them do that! You fucking live to publicly embarrass your family!!!”

  The backlash was not against me, but it felt like it. The show was not me, but I thought it was. I was not me, not by a long shot. The sudden fame, the criticism, the backlash, the diet, the schedule—it started to make me go insane.

  13

  CRUSH CRASH

  I fell for one of the writers of the show. It was rather unexpected, but I was in a state of serious distress. The show had been on for two months, starting very strong, but with ratings that dropped week after week. The headaches and nausea from the diet pills were slowly killing me. The bad reviews and backlash from the Asian community left me heartbroken and enraged at the same time. Having no friends anymore outside of work made me question what was real and what wasn’t. Finally, with the situation in North Korea continuing downhill and with no word yet on the future of the show, I needed something or someone to take my mind off it all. I found Jon.

  I decided that I was gonna have a crush on him. Crushes allow us to step outside ourselves and view ourselves as we believe the crush might.

  Very often, a crush is not about the other person, but about us and how we think we are in the world. By looking at this reflection of ourselves through another person, we find a way to achieve self-love without actual self-esteem, a way to admire oneself without admitting that is what you are really doing.

  Crushes are about fantasy colliding with reality, the fantasy of who we think we are matched against the reality of who we are. Other people have little to do with it.

  When I set off on a crush I spend a lot of time on my appearance: buying clothes, working out, immersing myself in the crush’s perceived culture. I imagine I can be closer to the crush if I surround myself with the things he likes. I feel that it will rub off on me, making me more attractive in the glow of the familiar. It also serves as a way to get to know him without actually having to speak to him and risk rejection, or having him say something that might not coincide with the imagined life I have given him. I take a spare collection of facts and trivia, mix it with things he has said, fortify it with my own personal research about him, throw in a bit of profiling for good measure and there we have it—crush! Here’s one I made earlier . . .

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nbsp; I needed that escape more than anything. Maybe Jon did, too, although I have trouble distinguishing what really happened with what happened in my imagination. This was not only the craziest I ever got over a guy, it was the most insanity I have displayed ever. That is saying a lot.

  Jon was not handsome or sexy or particularly attractive in any way. He was having a hard time in his personal life. His mother and his uncle were both dead of cancer in the space of a week. Jon traveled on weekends back and forth from the East Coast, and he looked sad and tired on Mondays when he returned to the set.

  He wanted to talk to me about things. He was leaving his job. He needed the time. His family wouldn’t stop crying, he said. Maybe we could get together and talk. Maybe.

  He came over to my newly rented Hollywood Hills house and sat on my red couch and didn’t have much to say about anything. He felt sorry that things were going so wrong for me, too. He had the most understanding expression on his face. I don’t know what he was trying to do. I hoped he had come to save me.

  I was alternating between depression and denial. All-American Girl was on the verge of being canceled. I hated the show, and so did the rest of the world, it seemed. I had to stand behind it, because to abandon it would mean I’d have to leave myself behind in the wreckage.

  It was a dark time for both of us, and the last nail in my coffin was Jon and my obsession with him. I see now that it wasn’t him at all—I just needed to be rescued and he was the frog I kept kissing. I was drowning in quicksand and he was the dry twisted branch that I held onto, even as it broke off and splintered in my hand.

  He was subtly persuasive in his way. There was something about him that obsessed women. It had to do with the way he withheld. He was like a geisha, or a Victorian ingenue, offering a tantalizing glimpse of his inner being. This frustrated me and many like me to total madness. I think he was proud of it.

  He told me that he had once volunteered on a suicide hotline. A disturbed woman became fixated on him and he tried to break away. He had the hotline transfer all her calls. She got angry and threatened to do something bad. He did not believe her.

  When she finally got him on the phone, she told him she had pulled out her eyes. The Bible said that if her eye offended God, to pluck it out, so she was calling him to tell him she had done it. She was stunned and creepily calm and not yet feeling the pain. Then suddenly, she felt it. She screamed at him fearful, primal screams, and the whole time he was trying to get her to tell him where she lived so that he could send her an ambulance. He had to talk her through it all, stand in the darkness with her. He said it was the scariest thing he had ever done.

  Later, they would meet. She, of course, was now blind, and had become a nun. I thought about them meeting and how maybe she would be curious about how he looked. I thought she would ask to put her hands on his face, and he would let her, reluctantly, as he did everything.

  When he told me that story, it made me feel strangely inadequate, as if my obsession with him would always pale in comparison. I wanted to kiss him when he was in my house, but he wouldn’t let me. He was already cheating on his fiancée with another woman who worked on my show and he didn’t want to three-time her.

  What was so seductive about him was that I thought he cared about me when nobody else did. That bound me to him. I wanted him to kiss me so bad and he did and then he didn’t. He pushed me onto the floor and left. That place in my house is haunted by the electricity that went through me. Later, when I missed him I would lie in that space and remember his hands on me.

  Right after he left, he called from the car and said he didn’t want things to be strained between us. He was sorry, but he wasn’t sure for what.

  He’d call every couple of months, to vaguely make plans that would never happen, or to put me off, or to be friendly, or to leave a message to call him, which he’d conveniently never be around to receive, pushing me further and further into my obsession. Days went by with me dressing and waiting by the phone and it never, ever rang. Not once.

  I would keep putting on makeup and the sun would move across the sky. Finally, it would be too late for anyone to be calling or making plans, even though I thought he still might, and I would just get high and wait longer, phone by my bed. I’d fall asleep on top of the covers, completely dressed and made-up. It would be morning and the birds would be singing and I would wake with a sharp intake of breath and a realization that I had wasted an entire day waiting. The lights from the night before would still be on, throughout the house, and ashamed and desperate that I had lost another twenty-four hours of my life, waiting for a man that did not care if I existed, I would get up and do it again.

  After thirteen episodes had been shot, All-American Girl was on hiatus, so I had nothing to do but spend my life in preparation to meet him. I went to a silversmith and ordered a beautiful flask engraved with, “Astronauts, Movie Stars, Politicians. I know you would if you could . . .”—a sort of attempted private joke that was so private that I am sure only I got it. It was a cryptic reference to the fact that I had been loved by all these illustrious men and that he would love me if he could just be as accomplished as they were or something ridiculous like that. I realized somewhere along the way that it was insane, and I never gave it to him. Actually, I never saw him and therefore was unable to give it to him. Now, I display it prominently in my home as a reminder to never let myself go so insane again.

  I was so fucking crazy and I did so many drugs just to keep this fantasy of him alive. He did take me to dinner once at Off Vine. I tried too hard to seduce him during dinner, and unconvincingly licked red wine off my fingers. He said that I would have to do a lot more than lick wine off my fingers.

  He took me home in his stupid Acura Vigor with the ugly sheepskin seat covers and drove me up Vine. Later in my obsession, depression, I would drive myself up Vine and feel special. What kind of life is that?

  It was just like being dead, and this waiting and wanting was with me for two years. I never got over it. I heard through the grapevine that he had broken off with his fiancée. I saw her ad in the Recycler : “Wedding Dress For Sale $800, Never Worn, Call Reese S _________.”

  That set me off trying on bridal gowns like Muriel’s Wedding . I found out that I don’t look good in them anyway. What I loved about it was that everybody at the bridal boutique was so nice. It was the happiest place on earth: the women trying on gowns, and the women with them on the verge of tears anytime anybody came out of the dressing room. It was this joy that was so seductive. When I left those shops, I couldn’t help thinking that I really was getting married to Jon, and it would be only a matter of time until he would realize it.

  “The Wedding Fantasy” has been one of my most lasting and persistent daydreams. They go back as far as T. Sean, my blue-eyed Texan beau, from when I was just twenty. I saw marrying him in quickie Vegas fashion. Smoking a cigarette in a pink shantung silk suit, ’60s style, tapping my foot impatiently, holding a tiny bouquet of baby roses in a trembling gloved hand.

  Curiously, I also saw our make-believe marriage fall apart, and me drunkenly stalking him into his next relationship. I fantasized about being found by his young son from his next marriage, passed out on their porch early in the morning wearing a fur coat and pearls and nothing else, and clutching a broken champagne glass—That’s Dad’s first wife before Mommy. She’s having some trouble letting go. Can I call the ambulance? Please? Please? Please?

  I saw getting married to Jude, a country-western crooner I had a brief affair with, just as clearly. That particular ceremony was held in a stone church in wine country, C&W all the way down to white cowboy boots. The justice o’ the peace would be Col. Sanders, and he, of course, would also cater the event. Jude would sing to me, and all the girls would cry at the romance of it all and the fact that he was taken for good.

  My fantasy wedding to Marcel, my last most horrible boyfriend, seemed far more real. We’d go to the South of France, to Provence, where he had attended a weddi
ng years before. The theme would be turn-of-the-century peasant, and we would serve stone soup. There would be fiddles and tiny flowers weaved into my unruly mass of Manon of the Spring hair. All the men with their black vests and pocket watches like old-time bankers would lift the heavy oak table and set it outside in the field, where we would dance and drink the night away.

  I never pictured my parents at these functions because they represented the awful truth, the bad shit, not that they were awful, bad, or shitty—they were just real, and I could not live without lying. They were the black watermelon seeds of my existence. I wanted to just have what I thought were the good parts of my life, seedless and sweet.

  I got deeply into this fantasy, thinking I could go to 1900, that expensive boutique on Main that is open by appointment only, just to price antique cotton, to see what a dress would be like should this fantasy come true. I didn’t want to lose my head about my wedding dress as many a young bride is known to do. There were so many new magazines to buy—Bride’s and Modern Bride and such, just like Vogue but with a sense of purpose and direction. The gowns in there were ugly and puffy. I realized as always I’d have to go the vintage route, or perhaps design it myself.

  I thought about the bridesmaid dresses. Lemon yellow granny dresses, sort of ’70s Gibson girls with big bubbly bun hairdos, which of course they’d never wear again, but who cares? Who wears anything again? I saw myself in Victoriana, white gauze and delicate white lace and daisies in my bouquet, and the bridesmaids, my friends Siobhan, Ebby, and Marcel’s sister Louise, in yellow to match the yolk of the daisy.

  And suddenly, it wasn’t a fantasy anymore, it was outright planning. Later, when the relationship went sour and I could barely stand the sight of Marcel, I still didn’t want to break up because I had spent so much time on my fantasy. In fact, I was being held hostage by my fantasy. I was willing to let myself be miserable in this relationship, to stay with someone I hated, someone who tortured me every time he looked at me, talked to me, or touched me. I was going to endure a lifetime of hell for the pleasure of ONE IMAGINED DAY!!!!!!