Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986)

by Tomlinson, Sarah

  “You have to see this movie,” he said. “It’s amazing. I picked it up because I remembered the actress. And it’s just incredible. I mean she can’t really act, but she’s just so natural on the screen. It’s like you can really see who she was. Actually if you could look up her bio on IMDb and send it to me, I’d appreciate it.” At various times, he asked me for IMDb bios on everyone from Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, to Jennifer Aniston.

  I sniffed, partly amused, partly jealous. He had a profound respect for actors as artists, and he truly believed it was possible to see a resonance in Drew Barrymore’s romantic comedies that could be traced back to the natural talent of her grandfather, John Barrymore, whose catalog he’d seen in its entirety.

  And so my father meant it as a compliment to me when he said, “I think you’re going to meet an actor at a party and know a love like you’ve never known before.”

  In the meantime, when I turned to the used-book dealers it was possible to access through Amazon to feed his voracious appetite for books and movies, he became very interested in the site. During every call, he asked me to find a copy of some obscure film or self-help book, cackling with glee when they could be bought for one penny, plus shipping and handling, and often having them sent to me so I could enjoy them first. If our dad-daughter outings in Boston had been our re-­creation of the childhood relationship we’d never had, now I had reached my teenage years with him, chafing at his attempted influence. I often waited until he started nagging me for the book or movie after several months and sent it to him without ever having read or watched it.

  Of course, when I did watch the movies he sent me, they were always brilliant and moving, or at least cool. But sometimes they were hard for me to take. My father became obsessed with Dario Argento’s daughter Asia and sent me a double film set that included her directorial debut, Scarlet Diva. I was freaked out from the first moment I saw the DVD cover, which featured a photo of Asia topless, coyly covering her breasts, because I saw a striking resemblance between her and my sister. The movie itself was a very dark look at a young Italian actress who’d been screwed up by her parents and spins out of control in a wash of drugs and sex. It included an explicit scene with a musician in which the dialogue was an almost word-for-word duplicate of what I’d experienced with my most recent rock star, whom I’d spent the night with in LA following his Grammy win.

  As I watched the scene unfold, I felt queasy. I’d spent years seeking books and music and movies that made me feel less isolated, so there was no way for me not to be moved by her story. I could have been touched by the fact that my father had sent it to me, maybe even as a way to connect with my experience, which he was well aware the film mirrored. “You were never a groupie,” he once said to me when trying to help me put my time in the rock world in perspective. But there was something off about the scenario. I knew he was fascinated and moved by Asia and her movies because it was too painful for him to get close to the parts of my sister and me that had been damaged by his absence. There was something comforting for him in caring for this lost girl. Again, I knew I should have felt moved by this. But instead, it made me furious. He had the luxury of choosing to look at my pain or of understanding it through films. Of course, I didn’t say any of this. I tamped it down and carried on as I always had.

  My father was also sending me a lot of reading material in those years related to his spiritual beliefs, including a longtime favorite, Awareness Techniques by William Swygard, and a new discovery: Dr. Bruce Goldberg’s Custom Design Your Own Destiny. I was quite moved by Dr. Goldberg, a former dentist, who happened to be based in Woodland Hills. I even got in touch with him in order to get a tape on managing dental phobia so my father could begin to deal with his increasingly pressing need to have his teeth replaced.

  It wasn’t difficult to be drawn to teachings that led to greater personal happiness and success, especially when I felt so lacking in both areas. This was in the wake of the cultural phenomenon The Secret, after all, and everyone was talking about manifestation, especially in California. I was attracted to my father’s beliefs that suggested I could create positive outcomes in my writing career, which seemed stalled, and was a constant source of stress and longing for me. I kept tutoring, and catering, used my credit cards and dog-sitting gigs to fill in the gaps, and felt grateful for Rebecca’s ongoing kindness.

  I had gone to Los Angeles to find an outlet for my writing and seeking, and I would stay and fight it out for as long as it took. And yet, it was hard not to be impacted by seeing my friends from Boston start to marry and settle down while I was no closer to achieving my goals. I spent hours on the phone with my dad. He believed in me. There was no doubt in his mind I would achieve everything I set out to accomplish and more.

  “I fully support you getting everything you want,” he said again and again.

  Early in 2008, I had a lucky break, on two levels. A friend of a friend who wrote celebrity memoirs became a meditation teacher and decided to only cover health and wellness topics. She was up for a book with the bisexual reality TV star Tila Tequila. She offered the gig to my friend, and my friend offered it to me.

  I was only vaguely aware of Tila at the time, but a writing job meant money, and even more important, it meant the chance to write for hire, which was one step closer to my goal of being a working writer. I sent some journalism clips and a bio, including mention of a ghostwriting job I’d done for a life coach, to the agent handling the project. Tila was intrigued by my experience writing about self-help, as she wanted the book to be genuinely useful to people. We had a phone meeting. I found her to be bright and excited to be writing a book, which charmed me, as I’d been trying to publish a book for fifteen years, and I considered it a great privilege. I got the job. I was ecstatic. My rate as a first-time collaborator, even after the agent got his cut, was more than half of what I managed to scrape together in an average year at that point.

  When it came time to edit, I was thrilled to find that my editor regularly worked with the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman, a serious writer I often admired who I had once interviewed for the Boston Globe. Through the entire process, I learned an immense amount about every aspect of publishing, from the contract to the publicity. Every step was precious to me.

  No matter that when the Boston Globe covered the book’s release in their gossip section, “Names and Faces,” the reporter who called me to do the piece razzed me, asking, “So did you hook up with Tila Tequila?”

  “I would never write and tell,” I rebounded coyly.

  No matter that no one was taking the book seriously. I got it. The cover featured Tila in a bikini sitting near a pool and was filled with sexy photos of her. But it was a real book, one I could find on bookstore shelves and, yes, even in the Library of Congress.

  The other unexpected windfall of the book came when I met the woman who had passed on collaborating with Tila. She was trying to make the bulk of her living by teaching what she called “twenty-minute meditation.” This was basically an introduction to the principles of transcendental meditation, which I primarily knew of through the director David Lynch. Out of gratitude for my newfound job, I decided to sign up for the introductory workshop at her apartment in Laurel Canyon over Memorial Day weekend.

  I didn’t know what to expect as I nervously wound up into the Canyon, trying to feel soothed by chirping birds and the smell of eucalyptus. She was absolutely lovely, possessed of that perfect mix of energy and calm I saw in people in Los Angeles who were pursuing a healthier, more fulfilled life. I wanted some of whatever she had.

  When we practiced together on that first day, I was sure I wasn’t doing it right. But I kept going back, out of respect for her, and because I could sense there was something good for me there. On the final morning, as instructed, I brought offerings for the shrine and was given my personal mantra during a private ceremony. There was something gilded and precious in the moment. Raised without religion, I loved symbolism and ritual and
was moved by the ceremony and the intent with which she welcomed me into an ancient tradition. After that, I began meditating every day.

  My father, of course, was interested in my meditation practice, although it was hard not to feel like a dilettante for meditating twice a day for twenty minutes when he was clocking in three hours a day with his snorkel. But, for once, I let it be, and the more I meditated, the more it became a genuine passion for me, as it was for my father. As I began to step back from the frantic pace of life, even just for forty minutes a day, my practice became profoundly healing, when sometimes—not always, but enough—I felt a kind of downy cosmic bliss, a sense of being safe in the nest of a benevolent universe, much as I had when I’d used drinking to blur the edges of my experience when I’d been younger, only now it felt so much better, authentic, mine.

  That year, my relationship with my father was complicated by his relationship with my sister, who he’d been conscientious about staying in touch with ever since her visit in 2005. He had saved enough money, and he was going to visit her in Munich during the fall of 2008. I helped him find a plane ticket he could afford, and he sent me a check to cover the cost so I could order it for him online. Then he nervously prepared for his trip, going to the airport to be sure he would arrive in time to go through security and catch his flight, obsessing over exchange rates, how much money he needed for the trip, and how much of this should be a gift for Asmara.

  I had lived in Los Angeles for nearly two years now, and he had never considered coming to visit me, even though the flight was a third of the cost. And if he went to Germany, it would be many, many months before he would be able to afford a flight to California. I tried not to be greedy and focused on how much more time I’d had with my dad than Asmara had, and how good this visit would be for both of them.

  When my dad traveled to Germany in early October, I was in Boston, doing a project for a website development company, a much-needed influx of capital. I was going over some notes in my hotel room when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but answered.

  “Hi, this is Sarah,” I said, my tone formal in case it was a work call.

  “Hi, this is Dad.”

  “Oh, hey, how’s Germany?”

  “You have to find me a flight home,” he said.

  “Why, what happened? You’ve only been there two days.”

  He described how he’d decided to fast when he landed and was consuming nothing but green tea, sounding put out as he described how Asmara’s stepfather had encouraged him to drink a Bavarian beer and eat some of his homemade German noodles. I felt for everyone involved, knowing my dad was just trying to feel in control of a situation that stressed him out, and also guessing that he had no idea how uncomfortable it would be to have a houseguest who refused to eat. The tensions had culminated when Asmara and her mother, Eva, had taken my father sightseeing to a beautiful Bavarian park. My father had been hurt by what he’d seen as my sister’s aloofness. Choosing to ignore her obvious discomfort, he had pressed her to talk about several serious topics. As they hiked in the woods, she spun around on him.

  “I will not be your mother!” she shouted at him.

  Then she ran back to their van, and the three of them returned to the city in heated silence. Now I was jealous of my sister for a new reason: she’d had the guts to push back. I suddenly had mad respect for her and, with it, a newfound affection. She was a spitfire. I liked her. And I wanted to help her.

  “You’re not leaving,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re the adult,” I said. “You’re supposed to be the parent. It’s up to you to be forgiving, no matter what she says or does.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is important. This is your chance to spend time with her. I wish we’d started fixing things earlier, instead of waiting until I was twenty-five.”

  “I know.”

  My dad stayed until his scheduled flight, even though it wasn’t easy for him. A few days after my sister’s eruption, he was called to a family meeting in their apartment and told that they had taken a vote and decided to pay for him to move to a hotel. And then they gave him an unexpected gift, which I was ecstatic about, even if he was uncertain.

  My dad had terrible, rotten, broken teeth. But every time I gently worked the conversation around to getting them fixed, he put me off by saying he didn’t want any “welfare teeth.” I couldn’t blame him. Now, however, he’d have his own set of beautifully handcrafted teeth made for him by Asmara’s Bavarian stepfather, Norbert, who made teeth for a living. As my dad described how Norbert had made a mold for the teeth, he sounded doubtful about the whole thing.

  Take the teeth! Take the teeth! I thought.

  “Dad, that’s great! Bavarians are known for their handiwork. Those are probably some of the highest-quality teeth you could get anywhere. What a wonderful gift.”

  “Yeah, but I’d have to get my teeth pulled out in America and travel to Germany, without any teeth, to get them put in.”

  It wasn’t my mouth, but that seemed like a small price to pay to repair a chronic condition that could have serious health implications if left untended.

  “I’ll go with you, Dad,” I said.

  “What I really want is to take you and Asmara on a trip around Europe,” my dad said. “You and I could go to Paris to see the cafés where all the writers hung out. We’d take you to Bavaria to see where Asmara grew up. And then the three of us could go to Hungary to see where we’re from.”

  It was a whole lot easier to plan a dream trip than a trip to Germany, without any teeth. And so I let him change the subject, and I gave him my belief in his great European adventure.

  Meanwhile, my dad remained serious about rehabilitating me. He gave me “homework,” to write down everything I wanted from my dream relationship, and to answer questions about my sense of self from one of his self-help books. I dutifully considered the questions, answered them as honestly as I possibly could, and mailed them to him. I wasn’t just doing it for my dad, though. I needed help, and I knew it. But, as for my dad, it was often hard for me to accept assistance, even when it was offered. I wanted to grow and become strong like my sister, but fearing I’d fail to reach my constant goal—perfection—it often seemed scary to even try.

  chapter sixteen

  LEARNING TO LOVE THE FALL

  Even though I had pushed myself and opened up my life by moving to Los Angeles, I felt stuck. My friends were buying houses, planning weddings, and I still couldn’t even pay my bills without falling back on my credit cards. I was looking for help anywhere I could find it. I had become smitten with one of my dad’s great passions—isolation tanks—and had written them into the first TV pilot I finished under my Los Angeles mentor’s guidance. Now, as a way to support myself while I got my writing career up and running, I wanted to open a business where people could float in a spalike environment. A man had opened just such a space in a suburb of Boston, which I’d tried during one of my trips back home. I e-mailed with the owner about franchising his business in Los Angeles. At a networking event, I was talking about floating when a woman told me she went to a tank that was just a few blocks from where I was living. Not only that, but it was overseen by the son-in-law of the couple my dad often spoke of as the patron saints of flotation tanks. They had even owned a float business in Beverly Hills in the seventies.

  I went to float in the tank, which was the more common “coffin”-style tank. As the body-temperature water and the toxin-clearing saline soothed me, I began to feel a rising sense of possibility. In fact, by the time I climbed out of the tank and showered off the salt, I was euphoric. It was like a postworkout endorphin rush, magnified a thousandfold, and I was sure it could be the next big thing in LA.

  I found a woman with a hundred thousand dollars to invest and took her to float, convinced it was all happening, and sure I would soon be running a business that could also provide a good source of income for my dad. The investor, howe
ver, was not as convinced as I was.

  And so, still searching for a way to leap into the next stage of my life, I gave my father my full attention for the latest plan he was working on; he’d become convinced—by reading Dr. Goldberg—that he had the ability to manipulate the outcome of events in his life. He, of course, decided to apply this power to horse racing. He asked me to buy him books and videos on mastering the racetrack, and he studied them carefully. He was also rereading On the Road, and he’d become obsessed with a moment in the book when Kerouac had intuited the winner of a race but failed to trust his instincts. Maybe because writers I admired—Kerouac and Hemingway—wrote about the track, I was still able to find the romance in it, or maybe that was my way of not fully holding my dad accountable. Whatever the reason, I needed to trust in my dad, and so I did, still avoiding the possibility that there might be a reason not to at this point.

  My dad was open with me for the first time about his regular trips to the track, because now they were research, and any money lost was kind of like a business expense. His plan was to hone his intuition to the point where he could pick the trifecta at the Kentucky Derby. He thought he might have to come out to LA to Santa Anita, the big track east of the city. My faith in his plan, which had been total, wobbled slightly at this news. He wouldn’t come to LA to visit me, but he would travel for the track.

  No matter, though, I reasoned, his plan was for me as much as for him, so I forced myself to stay cheerful. He was going to win a hundred thousand dollars and give it to me so I could put a down payment on a property with a guesthouse where he could live. Intellectually, I knew it was a long shot, and I told almost no one about our plan. Before I dared to confess our dad-daughter undertaking to my friend Cathy, I stopped abruptly and said, “I’m going to tell you this, but you have to absolutely believe it’s going to be true.” In my heart of hearts, I was still that little girl at the window.