Scrappy Little Nobody Read online

  I did get work, eventually. I acted in a few independent films that made me happier than I thought humanly possible, but they didn’t change my financial situation or keep me all that busy. So I had to develop some hobbies.

  My biggest time waster (and unrepentant money suck) was baking. Baking provided something I didn’t know I needed: the ability to make something tangible. Actors don’t make anything. You work all day but there’s nothing physical to show for it. It’s an oversimplification, sure, but it felt so rewarding to put a little effort into something and have three-dimensional evidence I could hold in my hands. It also provided more of a thing I’ve always liked: validation!

  Baking is a really fun way to get people to like you. Being a good listener, a lively conversationalist, a loyal friend—it takes so much energy. Spend a couple hours alone in your kitchen and get the same effect? Sign me up! Sadly, I have less time for it now, but for a couple years, it was my whole identity.

  When I was in the throes of my baking phase, my oven broke, and, luckily, different friends were happy to host me for a few hours and let me fill their apartments with the smell of cinnamon while I refused to let them help, because YOU DON’T KNOW THE SYSTEM. I saw baking as a risk-free way to try things that I knew were beyond my skill level. I was never the girl to strap on a snowboard and head straight for a black diamond, but if I saw “advanced” in the corner of a Martha Stewart Living recipe, I’d think, Bring it on, you crazy bitch.

  This meant that I would sometimes spend hours in someone else’s home, experimenting and cursing and emerging from the kitchen looking like I’d fought off a rabid cat. But my hazelnut torte would be shining and beautiful, and I’d go pawn it off on someone who hadn’t seen behind the curtain and would praise me as a culinary genius.

  One friend in particular liked having me come by. Scott wrote music during the day but didn’t like being alone. He wanted someone around to chat with for a few minutes every hour or so but then needed to sit in front of his computer with headphones on to get work done. It became a semiregular arrangement. After about a year of this, he told me he’d gotten off meth. A month before.

  What? What was he talking about? Meth addicts were gaunt and toothless; their hair was stringy and their nails were dirty and they certainly didn’t burn me indie rock CDs. How could a friend of mine have been in this kind of trouble without me noticing? I felt foolish and so, so guilty. He was out of the woods (and sober ever since, thank god) but really, what kind of friend was I?

  “So, you would just do it as soon as I left your apartment? I mean, were you ever like, She needs to get out of here because I need to . . . do meth?”

  “No.” He looked a little embarrassed, maybe more for me than himself. “I would do it before you got here.”

  “I’ve seen you on meth?!”

  “I would say, for the last year, you’ve only seen me on meth.”

  I’m the biggest idiot on the planet.

  “Yeah, I didn’t like being alone, but then I just wanted to sit on my own and work once you got there. You really never noticed?”

  “I thought that was just your personality!” I was reeling.

  “Why do you think I never wanted to eat the food you were making?”

  “You said you didn’t have a sweet tooth! I believed you! Because, you know, I believe people when they say things!”

  He was laughing now. I’d gotten shrill and frazzled. I was laughing with my friend about how he was hiding a meth problem from me. This is when I learned that I cannot tell when people are on drugs. At all.

  • • •

  After a while I met some fellow aspiring actors, which was nice because they were the only people in LA who didn’t crack the old “So you mean you’re a waiter” joke when the “What do you do?” question came up. Every now and then we’d get stoned and talk about our silliest, most specific goals.

  “I want the ‘and’ credit,” someone would start. “You know, at the end of a bunch of credits sometimes there’ll be a ‘with’ or an ‘and.’ Obviously I want to be a lead and get first billing or whatever, but someday I want to be the ‘and’ guy.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I want the ‘is a revelation.’ Like in the Brokeback Mountain trailer when they show Michelle Williams and the voiceover guy reads a review like ‘Williams is a revelation.’ I want to be a revelation.”

  “That’s a good one. Maybe I want that. No! I want the secret post-credits cameo!”

  Most of my friends were not actors. A surprising percentage were just my neighbors. I became close with a group of stunning girls who lived in a duplex down the street. Paige was a model, Amy was an exotic dancer, and Valerie was a former exotic dancer whose wealthy boyfriend paid her bills and rent. They’d met during a lap dance. It was a true LA love story.

  The girls were beautiful, hilarious, and tough as steel. On the night we met, Valerie, through her thick Queens accent, said, “You’re smart, right? You know how I know you’re smart? ’Cause I woulda copied offa you in high school.”

  I liked hanging out with them. These ladies could PARTY, and being with a group of girls that bombastic made me “the quiet one.” I was their mousy, serious friend, and I happily leaned into the role. Surrounding myself with people who were so much more attractive than me meant I could feel like the substantial one. I wouldn’t call it healthy, but I did it anyway.

  They also had a talent for getting into and out of trouble. The cops showed up at their house once because of a noise complaint, and I swear on my life, they turned up the music, ran into the street, got on the cop car, and danced with the officers until they went away. In the rain.

  We went to Vegas and Palm Springs. We went to the Spearmint Rhino in downtown LA after eating some especially potent pot brownies and watched Amy do what can only be described as an erotic Cirque du Soleil routine. When Valerie’s boyfriend came into town, he’d rent out a suite at the Chateau Marmont and we’d all get drunk and choreograph fake music videos to every song on my iPod.

  They got me out of the house, which was no easy feat. And no matter how hard I struggled, they forced me to occasionally have fun.

  I still hadn’t yet had a “boyfriend,” though, and I realized this was unacceptably weird. Nineteen-year-olds had boyfriends, dammit. They had boyfriends, they had ex-boyfriends, most of them had multiple ex-boyfriends. I bought a book called Guide to Getting It On! and prepared to get it over with.

  Outside of romance, my “real life” was coming together, slowly but surely. It didn’t look like how I’d once thought it should. I couldn’t afford Crate and Barrel plates (my ultimate idea of status. Related: Did you know that there are fancier places than Crate and Barrel to get plates??). The jobs I was getting were low-budget and almost willfully not mainstream. My friends weren’t polished, but neither was I. It was so much better.

  boys and the terror of being near them

  I read somewhere that the reason adolescent girls are attracted to androgynous young men is that they seem less threatening. Since their sexuality is not fully realized yet, they feel safer placing attraction on boys with thin frames and delicate features, because it subconsciously reminds them of another girl. They don’t have to confront the implications of being attracted to someone masculine and virile enough to, you know, “do it.” (Okay, I don’t remember exactly what the thing said; I’m just trying to sound smart before I talk about “special feelings.”)

  The piece stuck with me, whether it had any merit or not, because I was totally one of those girls. I loved the baby-faced New Kids on the Block but felt wholly creeped out when they changed their name to NKOTB and started growing facial hair. When Jonathan Taylor Thomas cut his hair short enough that it no longer fell in his eyes, it was a betrayal. Zack Morris was far preferable to A. C. Slater. Slater was the one with the rippling muscles, but outside of lifting heavy furniture, what on earth did that have to do with anything?

  The thing the article got wrong in my opinion was that I didn’
t feel threatened or intimidated by masculine guys; I felt nothing. They didn’t stir something in me that I wasn’t ready to deal with; they didn’t stir anything at all. They seemed as attractive as the side of a building. Not that I knew exactly what I wanted to do with, say, Devon Sawa in Casper, either. Even my tender-faced teen crushes inspired pretty elementary goals. I knew I found them interesting, I knew I liked their faces, and I knew if we met (like if they maybe moved to Maine to escape the pressures of stardom) I’d want them to like me. Beyond that I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen. And once I found out, I was so nauseated that my daydreams would only reach the point where I kissed the object of my affection (a.k.a. the middle brother from 3 Ninjas) before the dream cut out like a busted VHS and started again from the beginning.

  I went through two phases of trying to win the affection of boys. While we were still young enough that sexual contact was off the table, I waged a full-out assault on the seemingly impenetrable interests of the male. I was short, I was loud, I wore the same thing to school for days at a time—where was I going wrong?

  During that blissful period before I had to think about sex, I liked to present myself as “boy crazy.” I did like boys, both boys that I knew and the appropriately feminine boys in Teen Beat, but I played up being “boy crazy” because it seemed like the trait of a pretty, popular girl. In third grade, I took a quiz in Seventeen magazine and brought it to school.

  “I’m totally boy crazy according to this. It’s so embarrassing. Look!”

  I’d looked at the answer key prior to marking each question but thought my classmates would be duly impressed. My teacher took a look at the magazine and cautioned me to curb this quality as I got older. What is she talking about? The whole point of this is to seem like a cool, older girl! It took me years to realize she was warning me not to become a slut.

  For as much as I thought about boys, which wasn’t as much as I pretended but was still a lot, they did not seem interested in holding up their end of the bargain. They were supposed to stride up to me in the cafeteria, push Libby Perrino and her shiny black hair to the side, and ask me to the school dance. But we didn’t have dances in elementary school, and none of the boys I knew wanted to talk to me anyway.

  Wait, that’s it! By fifth grade, I cracked a major development in strategy. I needed to get boys to talk to me. I wasn’t pretty, but I could make them like me through the magic of conversation, or at least trick them into revealing some actionable knowledge and go from there. My current crush was Matty Boothe. He had dirty-blond hair and seemed dangerous in that way that only a fifth-grade boy from Maine can. The only thing I knew about him was that he liked gory movies, so I spent a few weeks letting my older brother pick the movie rentals for a change. We’d tell our parents we got FernGully again and wait until they went to bed to sneak downstairs and watch his selection. I forced myself to sit through horror films and action films and Pulp Fiction. I knew I was unprepared to see some of them (Pulp fucking Fiction!) but I was going to turn myself into Matty Boothe’s dream girl, dammit.

  One day he stayed after class because he hadn’t done his homework (mah boy was such a rebel!), and I lingered and pretended to clean up my desk. I ever so casually struck up a conversation.

  “Oh, Matty, you know the other day”—three weeks ago—“when you were talking about the grossest movies you’d ever seen?”

  Cue Matty looking up at me, cautiously intrigued.

  “Well, I’ve got a really gross one for you. Have you ever seen Outbreak?”

  “Outbreak isn’t gross. It’s not even scary.”

  “Yeah, totally.”

  Okay, so talking to boys had not been a success. But I didn’t blame myself for not watching movies that were gross enough or scary enough for this boy’s taste. If anything, I walked away thinking, Wow, talking to boys is not that fun. Or at least, talking to a boy with whom I have nothing in common, and who has no interest in me, is not that fun. New development! I just won’t bother with boys who don’t like me or any of the things that I like! I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll definitely never make the same mistake again!

  In middle school, I discovered that liking boys who didn’t like me back was all I’d be emotionally capable of for a very long time. Middle school was also when I went through a phase of liking exclusively non-Caucasian boys. They didn’t like me back, either. Any boy of any ethnicity other than my own was automatically the object of my love. In case you forgot, we are in Maine at this point, and the handful of racially diverse young men I met in middle school immediately struck me as exceptional. I barely knew any of them; I was just attracted to them from afar. Looking back, it’s pretty plain that what I liked was how different they seemed. I was desperate to be around anything and anyone outside of what I’d experienced in my life so far. One could even argue that I wasn’t attracted to the person but was actually fetishizing their race (but definitely don’t listen to that because it’s dangerously close to an intellectually sound argument where I come off sort of racist). All I knew was that in sixth grade Shahin was beautiful and Iranian and so much cooler than me.

  Seventh grade was interrupted when I moved to Yonkers with my dad for the duration of High Society, so I never developed a crush on anyone at school. In New York, I did have a crush on the boy who played Young Simba in The Lion King, but since I was only in a room with him one time and our parents were there, our love did not blossom.

  My friend Nora from The Sound of Music and I often discussed that great mystery that looms before all adolescent girls: sex. We talked about sex A LOT. Not boys (I apologize if this freaks out any parents)—we did not talk about <3boys<3 and how cute Ryan’s new haircut was, or how dreamy the boys in 98° were—we talked about sex. What we’d heard about it, what it would be like, how you were supposed to do it. We were on a mission to compile everything we’d ever heard about all things sex-related. Condoms, porn, hookers, first base, second base, third base, and by the way, when the hell were we gonna get boobs?

  If any parents are still with me, the good news is that we were way more interested in figuring it out than actually doing it. We were like theoretical sex engineers. Oh! Theoretical Sex Engineer! Title of my next book!

  The other good news is that we were pathetic. We were the blind leading the blind. She told me about a pornographic comic book she’d seen and the offensive joke it contained about Hispanic women’s pubic hair. I told her that a girl from my church had seen Stephen King’s Thinner, and in one scene, the wife leaned in to her husband’s lap and moved her head up and down. . . . So blow jobs involved . . . moving, I guess?

  It’s adorable in a super-uncomfortable way, right?

  I’m grateful that we were wondering the same things and that we were both hungry to put a name to our feelings and to have someone reflect them back. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I went home and received many blank stares from friends who were not interested in or prepared for talking about sex out loud.

  That was the last time I would ever be ahead of the curve sexually. In fact I pretty much plateaued there for the next six years. This was only a noticeable problem once I got to high school and phrases like “fooling around” and “hooking up” were no longer empty braggadocio.

  When kids I knew started to go past first base, I felt nervous and excited. It was like waiting in line for a roller coaster, if you’d seen a sex-ed video about how the roller coaster was probably going to ruin your life. For me, the nervousness usually outweighed the excitement. Now that potentially seeing each other naked was part of the package, I would still try to court the male, and then RUN FOR MY LIFE at the smallest sign of interest. I was the romantic equivalent of the annoying friend who goes to the haunted house but chickens out and eats candy apples outside until it’s over (also me).

  I don’t know if my aversion came from the suspicion that I’d make a fool of myself, insecurity about my body, or just the fear that it would hurt. I could sense I wasn’t anatomically read
y when most girls were; maybe the emotional part was waiting for the physical part to catch up? It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t have The Feelings. But I was dealing with those on my own.

  I was conflicted, to say the least, and it didn’t help that I’d found a pamphlet under a seat in the auditorium that proclaimed, “No one likes a tease,” but I still sought to ensnare a boy. Sure, the odds were against me, but there had to be at least one guy I could trick into settling for a girl who wore a training bra and was terrified of sex.

  There was Andy, who had long eyelashes and was so cerebral and self-aware that even at fourteen I deemed him “pretentious.” Intellectual insults were my high school version of pushing someone on the playground. If I thought he deserved the label, it clearly didn’t bother me very much. I followed him around during his free period so often I almost failed the class I was supposed to be in during that time block. We flirted a lot and kissed a few times, and I was never sure if we didn’t get together because he didn’t want to, or because I would get that queasy “what if he wants to see me naked” feeling whenever he showed more than a passing interest.

  I met Hunter at a rave that my brother snuck me into. He was slight and kind of gorgeous. He wore a bandanna with the Puerto Rican flag, I suspect to compensate for his misleading white-kid name, and he told my friend Lindsey that I had a “nice ass.” Who talked like that? Even putting that memory on paper gives me butterflies. I had never met anyone so forward. He asked for my number (what are we, in a movie?) and called a couple times but stopped after the third phone call when the awkward pauses led him to ask, “Am I bothering you?” No, you’re not bothering me! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me ever!