“Yes, no. No I’m not an actor but yes I go on auditions sometimes,” I said, rocking nervously in my sensible high heels. “I really have no idea what I’m doing,” which I’m sure was super reassuring for him, considering he was going to be auditioning opposite me. Auditioning with someone who has no idea how to act is sort of like trying to play tennis with someone who has no idea how to play. You hit the ball to them, and they just stare at you blankly.
Wes was not the first former client I ran into while on an audition. I had several similarly awkward interactions. With the models, it was always, “You look so much thinner!”
“Well it’s a lot easier to stay trim now that you’re not sending me muffin baskets daily,” I always wanted to say.
Like my first husband, Wes also interpreted “upscale casual” to just mean “casual.” I was the only dope in the room dressed like someone whose day would be made upon hearing that there’s cake in the conference room. Wes was clad in your standard East LA actor uniform: a partially un-tucked flannel shirt, the sleeves unevenly rolled, the collar not popped but not totally flat either—a calculated disarray, a level of disheveled-ness that can only be achieved with the finest attention to detail.
Our child was five and three-quarters and was missing her two front teeth. She told me she got twenty dollars per tooth. My mouth dropped open like a codfish. This may have seemed like an indication of astonishment, but really, it was jealousy.
Wes and I went through the same motions—the proposal, the pregnancy news, the glamour shots at Sears—in five or six minutes. My life’s most momentous occasions were cranked out twice and packaged up tight, all for the sake of selling insurance. I always imagined I would someday get married, get pregnant, and have a child, or maybe even a few. I just never imagined all of this would happen with two different men, and within ten minutes, in a windowless room with coffee-stained carpet.
Walking out of the casting facility, I un-tucked my blouse and pulled my hair into a knot with the elastic I had accidentally left on my wrist during the audition. I took down my convertible’s top—manually, of course—and kicked off my kitten heels, cracking my toes against the floorboard. The car’s antenna was broken, so all that would come through on the radio was Mexican ranchero music. I reached into the backseat and grabbed the Case Logic that had followed me across the country years before. As I headed west on the 10, back toward the beach, and back toward my home, my BMW rattled along in the far-right-hand lane, the CD skipping with every bump in the road.
A Million Little Pieces (of Paper)
I have this impulse to put things on paper—bits of dialogue I overhear, observations, anecdotes, funny old-fashioned sayings my Southern relatives slur after too many Scotch and sodas8, lists of books I should have read by now, lists of films I should have seen by now, lists of words I should use but never do. All these things are scribbled on tiny pieces of paper. Hundreds of them. They’re written on pulled-out pieces of notebook paper with the perforated edges still attached, on Post-it notes, corkboard coasters, coffee shop pastry bags, the corners of flight itineraries, the backs of bookmarks, the blank pages torn from the ends of books. I write these notes while I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, while I’m waiting for my hair to get highlighted, while I’m driving my car.
In Santa Monica one day, while getting honked at for holding up traffic, I scribbled on a carwash receipt: “Why does the intersection of Lincoln and the 10 always smell like cinnamon buns?” (I have yet to discover the source.) Another time, I wrote: “Melon is a superfluous fruit.” What on earth would I have done if I couldn’t have recorded that earth-shattering insight while cruising south on Sepulveda?
These pieces of paper follow me everywhere. They’re crumpled in the console of my car, wadded in the pockets of my jackets, hibernating in the bottoms of bags next to receipts for things I should not have bought and meant to return. The largest heap of these notes is collecting in the corner of my apartment where my desk meets the wall, in a formation reminiscent of a wigwam. I check occasionally to make sure a small animal hasn’t tried to make a nest inside them. I try to contain them, with a paperweight, with a stapler, by paper-clipping ones with similar themes together, by taping some of my favorites to the wall, but the pile keeps growing. Some days I’ll think, okay, I’m spending today typing them into the computer, and then I’m throwing them all away. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Because sometimes the thing it’s written on tells as much of a story as the observation itself.
Take, for example, this anecdote, written on a piece of paper that says “Mrs. Betty Snellings” at the top and is decorated with a bluebird perched on top of a picket fence at the bottom, red roses climbing up its sides. This is the paper my grandmother uses to write down her grocery lists. And because this particular story is written on this particular paper, I know exactly where I was when I wrote it: at my grandmother’s house. There is a grease stain in the bottom left-hand corner of the paper, so I remember when I wrote it, too: the afternoon of my grandfather’s funeral. The grandfather who would say, every single time I talked to him on the phone, “Da’lin, why do you live alllllllllll the way out in California? Pleeeeease move back to the east, da’lin. Why don’t you move to Savannah, or Charleston, or Charlotte?” And every time, I’d let him get all the way through his appeal, even though I already knew it by heart. For years, my grandfather pleaded with me to come back east, like it was his dying wish. When he died, I was still on the wrong coast.
After his funeral, we sat with my grandmother in her den in Georgia, eating a tin of homemade cookies, fried chicken, biscuits, green beans, and pimento cheese, drinking sweet tea during the day and cocktails at night. The following week was going to be her sixty-second wedding anniversary. All day and all night, we told stories and cried, but more than anything, we laughed. I wrote one of those stories on the grocery list paper:
My grandparents were driving back to Augusta after visiting some cousins in Columbus, Georgia. The whole family was in the car: my dad, who was six at the time, his older brother, and his younger sister.
“We were driving on one of those real country roads,” my grandmother said. “You know Pop never liked to take the main roads.” When they drove past a large factory, my grandmother said, “Look, that’s where they can O’Sage Peaches.”
“No, Betty,” my grandfather snapped back, “That’s where they can O’Sage Pimentos.” The two of them argued passionately about this for the next four miles. “I just knew I had seen the word peaches,” my grandmother said. “So I wasn’t going to let it go.”
Finally my grandfather got so mad he slammed on the breaks and said, “Damn it, Betty, I’m going to turn this car around and show you.” And he did just that, wheeling the car in a U-turn. They rode in silence as they approached the building, each waiting to prove that they had been right. When they got to the factory, one side of the O’Sage building said, “Peaches,” and the other side said, “Pimentos.”
“Oh we laughed and laughed!” my grandmother said. “If only every argument could have been settled so amicably.”
Seeing that story and her name at the top of the page reminds me of not just that day, but of many days, of all the days. It reminds me of the way my grandparents’ house smelled like Joy dish soap. It reminds me where the chocolate was hidden: in the china cabinet, and if not there, then behind the Saltine cracker tin in the kitchen cupboard. It reminds me of their remote control, which they called a “clicker” and tied to the coffee table with a string so they’d never lose it. It reminds me of the collection of condiments my grandfather kept by his reclining chair—Texas Pete, Tabasco, salt, pepper, always within an arm’s reach. It reminds me of the Twenty-One-Gun-Salute at his funeral, and of his flag-draped coffin. It reminds me of my brother’s eulogy, perfect, without a word written down. And that reminds me of the story about the day my grandparents met:
My grandmother’s first husband died in World War II. It’s a very odd fee
ling, knowing that I would not be here if it weren’t for that war. She was a very young widow with a very young son, my uncle Alex. My grandfather (my dad’s dad) was a captain in the army and landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day Plus One. While moving inland through France, his left knee was blown out by shrapnel from an artillery shell. Most of the men around him were killed. He was evacuated to a military hospital in Augusta, Georgia, where my grandmother was volunteering as a “Grey Lady” for the American Red Cross. One of her duties as a Grey Lady was going from room to room with a basketful of items the wounded soldiers might want or need: postage stamps, pens, candy, playing cards. My grandmother was a beautiful young woman with porcelain skin and thick brown hair styled like Rita Hayworth’s. When she walked into my grandfather’s hospital room for the first time, he looked up from his bed, propping himself up on his elbows. She asked if he’d like anything from her basket, and my grandfather replied with a line that is as well-known in my family as our own last name: “Da’lin, what I want from you is not in that basket.”
If the argument about the peaches and pimentos was typed into a Word Document (or the notepad app on my phone), not on my grandmother’s grocery list paper with the pen she uses for crossword puzzles, and if it did not have a grease stain from the fried chicken we ate that afternoon, would it have reminded me of all of this? Would it be the same?
On the other side of that same piece of paper, I wrote down an expression my Aunt Kirkley used while listening to the story of the peaches and pimentos: “It’s like being in a fork fight, and all you have is a spoon.” Kirkley lives in Savannah. A flight attendant by day and a trout fisherwoman by other days, she is never short on witticisms and old-fashioned sayings. I guess I had pressed her for an explanation of this locution because I also wrote, “Oh come on, Lilibet, you can’t stage an attack with a spoon. Maybe you can defend yourself. Maybe.” Reading that, I can hear my aunt’s raspy southern accent, and I can see her standing there saying it, leaning on one skinny leg, one hand gesticulating wildly, the other hand firmly gripping a Styrofoam cup full of vodka.
8 Two of my favorites: “Don’t worry about the horse going blind; just load the wagon,” and, “I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
Numb
I’m sure this is hard to believe, but sometimes I forget I’m in the box. So sucked into a book, or the endless, mindless wonders of the Internet, I forget there’s anyone else around. This never lasts long, though. Some body part will need re-arranging—my right elbow will go numb, or the tips of my left hand will start tingling—and I’ll be jolted back to reality (or, more specifically, false reality) and made aware that I am not alone, and that there is a family of four from Tallahassee twisting their necks toward me, totally confused.
Beach
The box has a beach theme tonight, replete with all the appropriate accouterments: a blue beach chair with a pair of surf trunks slung over the back, three white beach towels (though they are probably hotel towels), and neon Wayfarer sunglasses. The artist has even been kind enough to include beach heat, caused by the blinding overhead lights that blast on every minute or so, the wattage of which is befitting to, say, tweezing your eyebrows, not sitting on display in your Skivvies. The concierge tells me the idea behind the schizophrenic lighting: “Now they see you, now they don’t!”
All I know is they make reading and writing nauseating and are about to cause me to have a seizure. If I am going to be this hot, wearing this little clothing, I’d like to at least be getting a tan.
Because I certainly can’t get one at the actual beach. That is another one of LA’s secrets. Summer months by the beach are often socked in by something called a “marine layer.” There’s May Gray, June Gloom, and whatever other synonyms for “overcast” rhyme with “July” and “August.” By the beach, summer historically shows up in September, right around the time I’m ready for it to be over. Cruelly, the marine layer only happens by the ocean; inland LA is clear and hot all summer long. Whenever my friends who live east would talk about driving to Venice Beach, I’d suggest I drive inland instead, and we’d sit on their rooftops.
Here’s another dirty secret: the beaches in LA are not very nice. Sure, north of LA and south of LA—in Malibu or Manhattan Beach, say—they are gorgeous, but not so much in Santa Monica or Venice. One afternoon, while I was at the beach in Venice, my sunbathing was interrupted with a tap on my shoulder.
“Excuse me?” a high-pitched man’s voice said. “Do you know what time it is?”
I shaded the sun with my hand and looked up. A man in a Speedo hovered above me.
“2:58.”
“Oh thank you,” he said, and then he just stood there. I glanced up again and realized this man was also wearing a bikini top and makeup that must have been applied in the dark.
“My name is Tammy,” he said. “Sometimes I cross-dress but I think I look pretty good. How do you think I look?”
“You look great.” I said, flatly.
“Oh, really? That’s so nice.”
I focused my eyes back on my book, hoping he’d go away. Instead, he plopped down beside me, stretched out, and fell asleep.
Once I felt confident he was asleep and not dead, I gathered my things and folded up my chair. That was about all I could stand for one day.
I have noticed, however, that if someone asks what I did that day and I say I spent the day at the beach, they’ll often say something like, “Nice!” or “Good for you!” But if someone asked what I did that day and I said, “Oh I just laid on my floor, read Us Weekly, and ate a bag of potato chips,” no one is going to congratulate me. But it’s basically the same thing. At least in my apartment I don’t have to contend with skin cancer, sand, or cross-dressers named Tammy.
Voyeur
This term has become so overused, it seems to have lost all relation to its original meaning. In its original definition, a voyeur is “one obtaining sexual gratification from observing unsuspecting individuals who are partly undressed, naked, or engaged in sexual acts.” Perhaps as a result of its overuse, a second definition has been added: “A prying observer who is usually seeking the sordid or the scandalous.”
The word voyeur is French for “one who sees.” Thus, the sexual undertones are not surprising; with the French, it seems, everything is sexual. Over time, the definition has shifted, and those sexual connotations have, for the most part, been lost. What has also been lost is the word “unsuspecting.” In the original definition, the person being viewed is unaware that anyone is looking.
Voyeurism in the modern context, however, seems to imply the watched are acutely mindful of being watched. Be it a participant on a reality show, an online exhibitionist who posts videos of her daily doings, or the everyday Facebook user, the individuals being viewed are now hyperconscious of their audience.
Reality show stars sometimes claim they “forget” the camera is rolling. There is no way they forget. From my very limited experience with taping reality TV, I can assure you, there is no way they forget. One of the models I had represented asked me to participate in a shoot for her reality show pilot. (The show never got picked up.) For the episode, I was going to be the “friend at the coffee shop.” To be fair, she and I were actually friends in real life. Before we shot the scene, the producers held me in my car so our “Hellos!” and “So good to see yous!” would seem genuine. Those initial pleasantries were the only remotely real part of the whole process. The director would interrupt every minute or so to re-direct our conversation. He told me what questions to ask, such as, “What did your boyfriend’s parents think about you doing Playboy?” This question wasn’t exactly off the top of my head, considering I had completely forgotten that she had ever even been in Playboy, but I guess “Where did you buy that sweater?” didn’t make for interesting television.
On a smaller, more routine scale, we willingly—eagerly, even—hand over infinite amounts of personal information to the loosest of acquaintances, to n
on-acquaintances, to strangers. This is voluntary. We sign up to do this. We log on to do this. (By “we” I mean everyday users and consumers of social media. By “we” I mean me, because I am guilty of all of this.)
We trade our privacy for that connection, that validation we crave. In a lot of ways, I think our obsession with watching other people has more to do with us wanting to believe that we are also worth watching. If someone else doesn’t see what we’ve done—that piece we published, or that picture from the party last night—it disappears. Memories no longer suffice; moments must be made concrete, made real through photos posted on the Internet.
Hyper-aware of being watched, we tailor our online behaviors to present the version of ourselves that we believe (or wish) ourselves to be. There are two strands at work here: the public versus the private self, and the person versus the persona. There is the person living the life, then the same person mastering how their puppet appears. We are the art directors of our online lives.
Sadly, it sometimes seems our online selves are outpacing our real selves. I see many of my friends on Instagram more than I see them in real life. A friend told me that, at a wedding recently, one of the groomsmen grabbed the microphone on the bus to the reception and said, “I think we all know what we are here to do: drink beer and Instagram.”
I often find myself initiating conversations and getting cut off mid-anecdote. “Yeah I saw that,” someone will say. They’ve already seen the pictures on Instagram or Facebook, or they’ve read something about it on Twitter. I hate leading with, “I don’t know if you saw this, but . . .” because I don’t like making the assumption that everyone sees everything I’ve ever posted online. At the same time, I also live in constant fear of repeating myself. It’s not easy to navigate between the moments for which we are present and the moments we are recording.
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