The Joy of Uber Driving

by Yamini Redewill

  They adopted me as their communal female playmate and included me in many of their soirees and evenings at fancy nightclubs and restaurants in Hollywood. I knew a little Italian and much more French and was able to join in their discussions over coffee at our favorite street café on Sunset Boulevard. Also, Serge had a fabulous apartment above the Millionaire’s Club on La Cienega, the hottest new nightclub at that time, which he had designed. He often cooked dinner for us, displaying his expertise as a chef of French and Armenian food. Once, he invited Mickey Rooney to dinner, and we all enjoyed the many Hollywood stories Mickey told.

  Another time, Serge brought out his collection of belly dance costumes and Moroccan kaftans, which we wore as we danced seductively around his apartment to the sensuous drumbeat of Middle Eastern LPs (long playing vinyl records).

  PING! A call came in to go to the Buck Institute in Novato. There stood three well-dressed men of East Indian origin, all laughing as I pulled up to the front entrance. The tallest one, named Sanjit, sat in the front seat with me, and I asked him to tell me about the Buck Institute, since I didn’t know what it was for. I had always wondered about the stark white, ultra-modern building situated among dark green oak trees high on a hill facing the 101. It looked very stately and important. He said it was an anti-aging institute and that all three of them were each around 120 years old. They all laughed when I looked at them in disbelief.

  I found out they were highly regarded doctors who specialized in preventative medicine. They had come to Buck to learn life-saving scientific methods for reversing Alzheimer’s. They informed me that they were British Indian Bengalis who also worked for the BBC to promote well-being. We related on so many other issues that I felt an immediate connection with them. I told them I felt like they were my “soul brothers” and that I would include them in my book. This pleased them so much they insisted on taking a selfie with me when we arrived in Sausalito. This ride was the highlight of my day and week.

  Once when I was out of work for two weeks and my food and money were running out, Francois dropped by and handed me three boxes of spaghetti to tide me over. Finally, a week later, I found work in a doctor’s office and excitedly went out and bought a lamb chop and frozen peas. Just as I sat down to eat, Serge called and invited me to his place for a small dinner party. I let loose some loud expletives at his terrible timing and not so politely declined his invitation. He forgave me later, and we made up with a delicious private home-cooked meal by Serge and a few kisses from me.

  One time a big group of us drove down to Riverside in separate cars to watch the car races. After the races, we went out to dinner and got ripping drunk. We ended up forming a parade down the middle of the street. Everyone pretended to play some loud instrument while they pushed me in a grocery cart as their reigning queen. At the last restaurant, they kicked us out because Vitto decided to dance on the tables. I thought he was spectacular! Later that night I had at least three visitors in my hotel room, one after the other. What was unique about this experience as they took turns making love to me was the sweet way they each asked my permission. I guess they felt that our friendship was more important. This probably covered over any feelings of guilt or self-loathing I may have had. After all, they couldn’t help it: they were men!

  In every situation, including this, I was almost always in a haze of intoxication. Nothing I said or did had any substance or moral relevancy. I was like a rag doll being tossed from one scene to another without a backbone of true self-worth. My life was just a series of momentary flashes of ego gratification. I can only thank God that drugs were not part of the scene in those days or I might have been a goner. I was not an alcoholic, just a social drunk and an embarrassment to myself.

  WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

  Absolutely Nothing!

  PING! I pulled up to a mobile home and Doris, a woman in her fifties who looked a little bit like the forties movie icon Jean Harlow, climbed into the back seat. Her platinum blond hair in a shoulder-length bob and her retro sundress even reminded me of the fifties. The first words out of her mouth were “Fuck . . . I left my wallet in the house. . . . Wait, I’ll be right back.” When she returned, she was petulant and seemed to be preoccupied with something. Then suddenly, she yelled, “Fuck it, I’m late! Can you please hurry? I’ll miss my appointment.”

  Right after that she sighed, saying, “I’m sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m just getting over a relationship and everything is just crazy right now.” She told me the story about her latest love affair with a “lyin’, cheatin’ SOB” who dumped her for a younger woman. She said he was no prize himself, referring to his age, which was at least ten years older than she was. She confided in me that he had made her his sex slave and would appear on her doorstep for a “booty call” whenever he felt like it. She knew it was demeaning and wrong, but he excited her, and she didn’t know how to say “no” to him.

  Last night, she finally came to her senses when he didn’t show up for a dinner date, telling her later that he was embarrassed to be seen with an old hag like her. I gave her my ten cents’ worth, saying, “You could do a hell of a lot better than him. The truth is, he doesn’t deserve to be seen with a beautiful, classy woman like you.”

  I sneaked a peek at her in my rearview mirror, and I noticed her eyes were beginning to well up. She looked back at me and smiled, whispering, “Thank you.” I turned on the radio and asked what kind of music she liked. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Play whatever you want,” she replied. So I put in a little mood-changing music with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The rest of the ride was rockin’, and we arrived right on time. My passenger had become transformed, compliments of Cindy Lauper.

  Moving on to one of the lowest points of my life, which I had conveniently forgotten until I wrote down her awful story: I remember being in a coffee shop on Melrose after auditioning for a play when I noticed one of the other actors giving me the once-over. He ambled over to my table and asked if he could join me. When he said he saw something in me that screamed “star material,” that got my attention. I let down my guard and said, “Sure.” From there, he held me captive for a solid seven hours, convincing me that he had the means to make a star out of me, if I would just put my trust in him completely and swear my allegiance to him. He asserted that he was the Welsh stepbrother of Richard Burton, who was then married to Elizabeth Taylor. He had beady black eyes and crooked teeth, and he didn’t have a car. God knows why I didn’t see the red flags waving furiously in front of my eyes. He was a hypnotist and a con man, whom I will call Rasputin.

  We moved into a musty old castle in Hollywood Hills owned by an older, wealthy woman acquaintance of his. We stayed on the top floor. It turned out that he was a sadomasochist who would whip me with a belt every night “to bring out the charismatic, vulnerable sexiness hiding within.” He thought he could make me into another Marilyn Monroe. After each whipping, he would either have me walk back and forth in my underwear to see if I had any charisma yet, or he would tie me to the bedposts and rape me. I don’t remember the whipping ever hurting that much. If it did, I must have felt I deserved it: my penance for being such a wicked woman. It may have been just a symbolic whipping to humiliate me, anchoring his dominance over me.

  In my demented state of mind, by this time, the rape was exciting and sexually fulfilling. I let myself go completely because of my emotional detachment from this man. He meant nothing to me except perhaps a ticket to stardom. How cynical is that? Had I really sunk that low? I let him do things to me I’d never let anyone else do, and I screamed with orgasmic pleasure each time. I felt like I had some kind of power over him with my feminine submissiveness. And, of course, I was subconsciously playing him to become the star he envisioned me to be. This part of my life has been hidden in the back pages of my brain, and I only just regained my memory of it after writing Doris’s story.

  As if this weren’t enough, I learned that Rasputin was married and had a two-year-old baby. He or
dered me to use my dad’s credit card to pay their rent and food when I drove him to their house once a week. To illustrate how devious he was and how conveniently stupid I was, he talked me into letting him play my part in a movie. I won a part in the movie called The Courtship of Eddie’s Father playing an artist at a concession where I sold handmade ties with sexy women painted on them. I actually painted all the ties previously, but he sat in the chair I was supposed to sit in while the star came and purchased one of the ties. I don’t remember what my payoff was for that. I guess it was confirmation of my total lack of self-worth.

  I soon got tired of him and his twenty-four seven BS and made my first rational decision: to move out. I found a room available above the Sunset Strip with an actress friend of mine. But he was not to be deterred. He started coming around and once again worked his “bad” black magic on me by dangling the mention of a project he was working on, which looked “promising for my career.”

  This hypnotic fast-talker fooled not only me but also a whole host of people in Hollywood. He managed to charm a UHS TV station to give him his own show (free of charge), and he enlisted some reputable, but out of work, TV directors and actors into creating a weekly drama series. I, of course, starred in the first drama, Chekhov’s The Boor. The leading man, Frank de Kova, a well-known character movie actor who played Indian chiefs, came in drunk on the day of the shoot and was fired. Rasputin, who was the director, took over his role, reading the script below the camera line of vision.

  Time after time he gave me the wrong cue and I had to improvise. In the end I received a standing ovation. Something had taken over my conscious mind, and I was transformed. I had become the embodiment of Greta Garbo as a tormented woman throughout the whole show, and nothing could take me out of character.

  I’m ashamed to say I participated in a scheme of Rasputin’s to enlist “wannabe” actors and actresses to pay money to act in our TV shows. But after The Boor, we struggled to put another show together. There were many roadblocks, and people began to question Rasputin’s authority. He became intolerable, growing more demanding and more dependent on me every day. He was a pervasive presence in my life, and he clung to me like a leech with his constant stream of lies and demands.

  Our last relevant time together was on a road trip to Big Sur, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. In the middle of a screaming match, I stopped the car on that dangerous, narrow road high above the ocean and told him to get out. Actually, I pushed him until he was out and then shut the door and sped off. In my rearview mirror I saw him stand there, watching in disbelief as I drove away. Thirty minutes later, I came to my senses, feeling guilty. I made a U-turn and found him walking along the road. I picked him up, and we didn’t speak a word the whole way home.

  That same week, the TV show was canceled and Rasputin was found out for who he wasn’t. He disappeared from all of our lives like a puff of exhaust fumes, leaving toxic residue on our bruised psyches. I don’t remember if we paid back all the money we took from the “wannabes.” I think we tried our best. I do know no one sued us or took us to court.

  Between Basil and Rasputin, my self-worth was degraded, and my youthful innocence had been totally corrupted. Not liking myself very much made it difficult to relate to people in a warm and friendly way. I kept getting into circumstances where I would continually give my power away, believing everyone was smarter and more worthy than I. Although I was developing a well of emotions to draw from for acting, in real life it did little to bring about success or happiness. I was unaware that life was teaching me some important lessons at this point. I was just a victim of circumstances and did not have the power or the will to understand or change anything.

  PING! Uber sent me to a home in Tiburon where a short, very stocky man with a full head of curly black hair came out the front door and waved at me as he headed toward the car. He looked comical as he struggled to pick up speed with his short, fat legs while pulling a large piece of luggage behind him. He finally made it to the car, and I opened the trunk and helped him lift the bag up and in. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he smiled and thanked me. Breathing rather heavily, he managed to stuff himself into the back seat of my car as I pulled the front passenger seat up to give him more room. I asked if he wanted a bottle of water, which I kept on hand for long-distance riders. He accepted it gratefully. He said his name was Andy and he was a standup comedian and had a gig in San Diego that weekend. He reminded me so much of someone I had known a long time ago, another actor/comedian.

  Suddenly he contorted his face into a pout and messed up his hair, imitating a well-known celebrity called Donald Trump. “I’ll tell you a really YUGE secret. When I’m President of the United States, I’m going to cover the White House with gold leaf. Then I’ll feel comfortable living in it.” He cracked up at his own joke and said he just thought of it. “Maybe I’ll use that tomorrow night.”

  I cracked up too but then added, “It would be no joke if he actually did become president.”

  We both became morbidly silent for a good five minutes, and then he said, “Moving on, seen any good movies lately?”

  I welcomed his change of subject and said, “No, I’m too busy living my own movie.” He liked that. We chatted amicably all the way to the airport, and it felt like I had known him from another lifetime. We shook hands, and he with his short legs and stubby fingers toting a large suitcase disappeared into the terminal as another call came in.

  Shortly after Rasputin exited stage left, a big, sweet, chubby, middle-aged character actor named Stanley, who was part of the TV team, took a liking to me. He drove an MG sports car, which made him look kind of ridiculous with his big frame stuffed into such a small space. (Yes, this was the man Andy reminded me of.) He liked to make me laugh with his many character impersonations, and we enjoyed each other’s company. Soon we became lovers, and he made me his mistress. The tables had turned; instead of me supporting a married man and his wife and child, now a married man was supporting me.

  This arrangement didn’t last long, because he walked into my apartment one day unannounced while I was rehearsing a love scene in a play for which a friend and I were auditioning. We all looked at each other, shocked. My friend had no idea I had a lover who had a key, my lover didn’t know I was rehearsing a scene from a play, and I wasn’t expecting him to show up in the middle of the afternoon when I would normally be attending classes at UCLA. His unannounced visitation marked the official end of that affair since he didn’t believe me. I was a better actor than I thought as far as the love scene was concerned, but apparently a lousy actor when it came to trying to convince him I was just acting.

  So much for my dreams of love and/or stardom, but I still didn’t get it. These star-studded illusions, called “opportunities,” continued to tempt me at every turn, looking completely new and different and more promising each time. But it was always the same song trying to tell me that it had nothing to do with love or my soul’s purpose. Doggedly, I put another nickel in and played it over and over and over again.

  STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

  Adventures in Alternate Realities

  Bouncing around from one apartment dwelling to another, each one visited at least once by Basil, I came in contact with a woman named Patti at a cocktail bar on the strip. She took a liking to me, and I was flattered, as she was a striking, tall blond with a strong sense of self. We became close friends, nightclubbing together at various clubs on the strip, and one day, she introduced me to her boyfriend, Richard, who also took a liking to me. In retrospect, he was much like a tall, lanky Humphrey Bogart, and she was very much like Lauren Bacall. That resemblance never occurred to me until now.

  They offered to give me a permanent place to live in their beautiful modern redwood-and-glass house in the Hollywood Hills. During this time, I became Patti’s lap dog. I believed everything she said and admired everything she did. I followed her around like a puppy. Although her strong, outgoing personality gave one the impression she
was in charge, in reality Dick held sway over her because of her financial dependency and because she was deeply in love with him and so afraid of losing him. He loved her but had a nonchalant attitude toward her and basically toward everything (like Bogart). Often she would call him on his insensitivity, and he would just look at her and then begin laughing as he pulled her into him and kissed her passionately, shutting down any meaningful dialogue they could have had.

  I enjoyed their friendship. It afforded me a (false) feeling of security and groundedness that had been so lacking in my “flying by the seat of my pants” life. For the first time, I felt like I was not alone but had the support of two mature, intelligent people. In retrospect, I think he was a father figure to me, and she was like my big sister.

  Little did I know I was about to be indoctrinated into the world of LSD. However, I was not interested in having any, as I feared losing control of my already fragile mind. So they asked me to hang around at every weekend LSD party to make sure nobody jumped off the balcony. Richard was a habitual pothead, smoking almost every day. But he kept his wits about him, as he was a real estate broker who made good money to support his wealthy lifestyle. One day, I experimented with pot while painting a life-sized, full-figured self-portrait, which turned out so well that he paid me $200 for it, which was a lot in those days. It took me all of four hours to draw and do an impressionistic rendering in acrylics. The picture featured me slouched in a chair in my panties. My shirt was loosely unbuttoned, exposing one breast. That was a pretty good representation of where I was at in my life.