Brave Read online

  I enrolled as a sophomore at the world-famous Hollywood High, where I was in the magnet program for artists. I was happy to be in the magnet program because there weren’t that many people in it and the kids were all creative. Dancers, singers, actors . . . it was every kind. But after all my more adult adventures, being back in school with young teens was odd. I felt ancient comparatively even though I was only in tenth grade. In the theater program, they were gearing up for staging a Greek tragedy. I auditioned for and performed my one and only serious play: Antigone. Despite being a rookie, I felt like I’d trained for it my whole life. I remember just channeling, vibrating, leaving my body, but this time for something good, a pure energy coming through my body instead of leaving due to trauma. This acting thing was intense and kind of fun.

  Afterward two men in the audience came up to me and said I’d made them cry during my death scene. It made me feel powerful. Theatrical acting is very different from film acting, I suppose a purer form of acting in some ways. Hollywood being such a movie town, I never felt that power again during performing. But at the time and for many years after, the idea of doing the same thing day after day, night after night just seemed too much for me, so I never really did theater.

  I was truly happy living with my mom. That had been my dream growing up, that it would be the two of us, and that she would finally see that I was worth more than the men who’d come into her life. It was so infuriating that these stupid, worthless men ruled her and thus lorded over me, just because they had something between their legs. I could see that so many of them were shysters, abusers, molesters—why couldn’t she?

  My mother didn’t realize the con jobs that were pulled off by men making her feel like she was the lucky one. Like many women, she was taught that winning a man was her ultimate goal. When we are trained from a young, young age, when we are steeped in that, we don’t learn to see our own worth. We don’t realize that it is us all along who are worth the gold; we are told that we have to settle for silver.

  Only later as I got into my own fucked-up relationships would I begin to have more compassion for my mother. I understood then how easy it is to be manipulated and how they can and do prey on you when you’re at your weakest. We’d both been taught that men were more valuable than we were. Men were my mom’s Achilles’ heel; I guess they became mine, too.

  One night I went to a famous Hollywood diner, Canter’s, and met a guy named William in the parking lot. He was maybe twenty or twenty-one—it was always older guys going for me—and we started hanging out. I think I was most likely just entertaining myself. I don’t know what I was doing exactly; I was just hanging out with this guy who liked me and who was kind of cute, and who had a sweetness to him, despite being what I deemed “very Beverly Hills.” I lied and said I was seventeen. I think I told him the truth after a week. It didn’t seem to throw him. A twenty-year-old with a fifteen-year-old is creepy, but I guess I wasn’t what you’d call a normal teenager. Even so, in the back of my mind it weirded me out, but I pushed it down.

  Around six months into living with my mom, she met a guy named Stewart. He was Dutch, and his teeth had this brown tinge to them from smoking unfiltered cigarettes. He wasn’t one of the worst ones. He was just a pathological liar, but she didn’t know that yet. One day shortly after meeting Stewart, my mother sat me down with William in the living room and said, “William, do you care for my daughter?” He said, “Yes, very much.” I remember being somewhat confused as to why she was asking this. Then she said, “I’m moving away with Stewart. Will you take care of my daughter?” I was stunned. I had only known William for three weeks.

  And that’s how I wound up living in a beautiful 1920s duplex modeled after a French château in a leafy section of Los Angeles.

  William was a spoiled brat, a Beverly Hills mama’s boy. He had gone to Beverly Hills High, which was very famous, very 90210. He was a Hollywood rich kid who refused to get a job, but it didn’t matter because his parents gave him everything. Every week, he visited Daddy’s accountants, and they’d cut him a check just for existing. Infantilized by his mom, financed by his dad, he was the quintessential spoiled rich kid. I was really resentful and jealous of him that he never had known struggle like I had. But looking back, it’s its own trap, just a softer trap.

  More and more, I fell into a depression. But I couldn’t leave and live with my mom, and my dad was NOT an option. I was stuck, so I had to pretend I liked him. Sometimes I did like him fine, but more as an odd roommate. Really we were both kids playing adults.

  I had dropped out of Hollywood High at this point. William kept me like a bird in a cage. He was desperate to control something, and there I was, this young thing that got a lot of attention. I didn’t have a car, and you can’t do much of anything in L A without one. No car, no work. So I had no money. I would steal a dollar here and there when William left tips at restaurants so I wouldn’t have to ask him for tampon money.

  He was also incredibly, stupidly jealous. I don’t know how I could have possibly cheated on him because I was dependent on him for rides, for food, for shelter . . . but regardless, he would fly off the handle if I so much as looked at a waiter, so I learned how to act, trying to keep him calm. And THAT is how you fall into an abusive relationship: when you start acting in a way so as not to upset the other person or set them off. You’ve given away control of your own life, bit by bit, bit by bit. It’s incremental, until one day, you have hidden so much of yourself you get lost.

  If a man flies off the handle over even the mention of a crush or an ex or whatever, it is a red alert. Get away. Fast. The possessiveness only gets worse. Cut your losses and bail.

  I didn’t. One day I got out of bed and William looked at me and said, “Stop.” I stopped. “Stand still.” I stood still. “Now turn around.” I turned in a circle wondering what was going on. “What are those upside-down triangles on top of your legs?” What? I went to look in a full-length mirror and then I saw what he meant. Or thought I did. What happened in that moment is something that happens to so many girls. I stopped seeing myself through my own eyes. I was now seeing myself through William’s sick eyes. Suddenly his version of my triangular-thighed reality was my truth. Snap your fingers. It happens that quickly.

  Once again, a man was telling me I was imperfect. Now, had I been a grown woman at this point I would’ve simply pointed out that those triangles were where my legs met my hips, but even though I was living as an adult, I was technically still a child. When life is big and scary, the only control a girl sometimes has in this world is her food and body. Many people mistakenly think eating disorders are about vanity. Trust me, there’s no vanity involved when you’re growing fuzzy hair on your whole body because it’s trying to insulate you from your starvation, there’s nothing vain about having vomit and stink coat your fingers after puking, there’s no vanity when you’re so full from a binge that you can’t breathe. Anorexia and bulimia start out about weight loss usually, but it is about far more than the body. It is the mind. Fear of imperfection in this fucked-up society becomes an obsession-run riot. So I did what I was programmed to do in our perfection-seeking cult. With every movie I’d seen, with every magazine I saw, I knew the tricks and the rules already. I’d been primed. That’s the fuck of it all. The programming begins from the day we are born. It lies in wait for you, and then when you’re down—that’s when it strikes hard.

  My legs went from being a part of my functioning body to being the most hated part of my body. Suddenly all I could see were legs made of upside-down triangles. They needed to be controlled! They needed to be destroyed! How had I not seen these grotesqueries?!

  I went after those thigh triangles with a vengeance. William bought me a Step aerobics bench to exercise on. I got a Cher workout tape, played it over and over and over, four to six hours a day, sound off on the tape, Nirvana playing on repeat as I went up and down, around and around. I was obsessed.

  William would buy me Marie Claire, Glamour,
Vogue for “thinspiration.” When I was trying to figure out how to best stay thin, these magazines were a great help. I cut out so many pictures, anyone with super-skinny legs. I would sit on the toilet because of the laxatives I was taking and cut out pictures of girls who were thinner than me. And I’d cry. And I’d be mad. Now and then, whispered words would try to puncture through my haze. This is not who you are. This is not what you care about. This is not your life. But it was my life. And I was now trapped physically and mentally.

  About once every three days I allowed myself to eat something, usually a big pot of pasta.

  I never was able to get below ninety-two pounds. For some reason that was my cutoff point. Because I had read about girls who were eighty-four pounds, I felt like a failure.

  I was exhausted all the time. It took every ounce of my energy to work out. But I couldn’t have an imperfection. Whenever William would start harassing me or yelling at me about who knows what, I’d fall asleep almost instantaneously, chin on chest. It became a defense mechanism. The only time I was active was to work out; the rest of my time was spent trying to check out mentally. It is an infinitely lonely disorder. No one can get to you, least of all yourself. If your life becomes about all these invented perfection “rules,” you are no longer in your mind, you only hear the evil outside voices. Those evil outside voices become inside voices. And those voices are mean. Kind of like nasty message board/comment sections but in your own head at all times. Super-fun stuff, right?

  To deal with it all, I just checked out by going into Step Reebok Land. I lived an impersonation of an adult life with a wealthy son of a Hollywood somebody. I became sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and then nineteen. I mostly didn’t speak for almost three and a half years, which is hard to believe if you know me. But I was too tired. I was a young woman trapped in a strange, empty life.

  One year I went to visit my family for Christmas in Seattle. I arrived through the front door, ran through the house and out the back door, and then went running in the snow. It was about ten o’clock at night, and I ran around the lake, which is about three miles. I had my Step Reebok with me, too, of course—couldn’t leave home without it! In fact, I had an insane theory that if it wasn’t disguised, the baggage handlers were going to steal it for their overweight wives.

  It got so bad I was hallucinating. I tried never to sit down. I was sure people could see fat dripping off me.

  Starving made me feel a fuzzed kind of high. I remember thinking that at least I was superior to heroin addicts because I was high for free. Yeah, that’s how you want to go around gathering your self-esteem, from your superiority to heroin addicts. But I also think it was my way of surviving trauma. I could deal with starving myself in the name of perfection as self-protection. I could deal with having to tell William I loved him because I’d cross my fingers and hide them behind my back. I had started to really hate him, but I pushed it down because I knew I had no alternative living arrangements.

  Thankfully, William and I didn’t have sex very often. It felt like sleeping with a half brother, if your half brother had screaming, jealous rages. It was weird. I hated it. Tears would leak down the sides of my face while he’d be pumping away on top of me, thick beads of his sweat falling into and burning my eyes. Sometimes I’d turn to the side and cry, but it didn’t stop him. I just went back to my old trick, separated from my body, looking down on myself from above. I had decided to act my way through sex. I didn’t know what an orgasm was supposed to feel like, despite the stupid magazines always talking about them, but I figured out that if I faked it well, I could make the sex stop faster.

  That was me, an imitation of life.

  For years afterward I’d get down on myself for living with William. I blamed myself as if I’d been an adult making grown-up choices, but I was just a kid. A kid that was so, so scared of being homeless again.

  In hindsight, I was surrendered to a guy I barely knew. But even though I was abandoned and held a lot of anger about that, I now realize that growing up how I did, you go where the love is, and if the only love you’re getting is coming from men who say they want you, then of course a girl’s going to go to that. It sets you up for failure. It sets you up for loss of life. It’s something that I think people don’t talk about in the cycle of abuse.

  While I was busy whittling my nonexistent fat away, William’s mom died suddenly. I’d say within three days William lost his marbles. The problem with making your children completely dependent on you is that if you leave them early, they are fucked. And he was fucked. It was very sad.

  We immediately moved into her big house in Bel Air. Our uneasy alliance went deep south at this point. William was rudderless and absolutely unqualified to know how to take care of himself without his mother. I really did feel bad for him. But as he turned to more and more extreme drugs to suppress his pain, he became erratic. One moment speedily talking and then crashing into sleep for twenty-four hours. I had to walk on eggshells. The occasional kindness he showed me, the occasional sweetness in his eyes, disappeared entirely into drug use. Smoking, snorting, pill popping, whatever. He started disappearing for a day, then a night, then three or four days at a time, leaving me with no money and no food. Since I was anorexic, that was kind of okay.

  During this period, I still had to manage the housekeepers and the gardeners, making sure they did a good job. Even though I was living in a fancy house, they had far more money than I did. Since I was busy being anorexic, I had other things on my mind, but the truth was I was stuck in a huge Beverly Hills mansion that had become a prison. The house was in a canyon, and there was nowhere to go. I was alone.

  William needed more and more money for drugs—I think he’d started freebasing cocaine or meth—and he started coming home and demanding money from me, forgetting that I had no money of my own.

  I would call William’s dad, a big-shot senior executive, and beg him for money to get out, to go anywhere. I asked for $500 because I thought that was a lot of money. But the dad’s answer was always a big fat NO. Through one of William’s mom’s friends, I managed to get a little work doing a small commercial for Allstate, the insurance company, but it wasn’t enough to get an apartment or anything, really. Plus, when I cashed the check at a check-cashing place, William took the money out of my hiding place and spent it on drugs. Meanwhile the dad bought William a brand-new Ford Explorer. Because that’s appropriate. Reward your son who’s a major drug addict with a new car. Hollywood parenting.

  One night I woke up with hands around my neck. I screamed and in the low light I saw that it was William squeezing my throat. His eyes were black. No one was home. I made a deep choking sound, and it snapped him out of his fog. He backed up a few steps and looked at his hands. I kept thinking that this was all some ridiculous movie I’d gotten stuck in. He pushed me onto the floor and dragged me by the back of my collar. I was screaming every curse word I knew at him. I was scared for my life. He pulled me outside, across the patio, and I tripped while he continued to drag me across stone pavers, tearing two of my toenails off. I screamed and startled him into letting me go. The pain was intensely sharp, but I didn’t feel it much because I was furious. I got up and limped/ran inside to the laundry room. I came out and crack! I smacked William across the head with the broomstick. The doorbell rang. William went to answer it. I heard his father’s subdued British tones. Surely he’d give me enough money to leave this time. William, only holding the door open a crack and with me crying in the background, was telling his dad I was upset about a friend. I started yelling. While William was trying to hide the evidence of my blood trail, I called out to his father. “Please, I just need to leave. Please, just help me get out of here!” Instead, the father and William shut the heavy front door on me and left me there bleeding as they drove away.

  My feet were on fire and feeling like I had individual heartbeats in my throbbing toes.

  I sat on the couch trying to decide what to do.

  I couldn’t figure
out how I was going to get the money to escape, but it was time to go. Then I got a call from my sixteen-year-old sister, Eve, telling me she was running away from my dad and needed to stay with me in California. I knew it was bad with my father, but I also knew it was bad with William. I figured my situation was the lesser of two evils for my sister. When she told me she was arriving at noon the next day, I panicked. How was I going to get her from the airport to the house, with no money to my name?

  I decided the best thing to do was to pawn one of the televisions. I, at ninety-two pounds, carried a giant TV down the hill and into a taxi that I had take me to Beverly Hills Pawn. I sold it for $80, enough to get Eve out of the L AX parking lot with $6 left over. My poor sweet sister was going to be met by me, a cranky anorexic with no extra energy to waste on niceties and talking sweetly. It makes me cry thinking of how mean I was to Eve, especially because she was so grateful for me taking her in. And what was I taking her into? A beautiful house with no food and a crazed, unpredictable “boyfriend.” Still, she thought it better than where she’d been, which breaks my heart.

  William disappeared almost entirely at this point. The gardeners and the maids, paid for by his father, still gardened and cleaned. I thought it was absurd that Eve (and less importantly I) had no food but the house showed to perfection. One night soon after Eve arrived, William reappeared at 5:00 a.m. and woke us up by banging away on his mother’s Steinway grand piano. Then he came and started a knockdown fight with me. Eve saw it all. I was mortified. William passed out finally.

  After that, every couple of days William came back and slept for at least twenty-four hours, so I knew I had a chunk of time free of him, and I would “borrow” his car while he slept, taking my sister dancing at a nightclub in Hollywood called Dragonfly. At the time, it was a total incubator for talent. I saw Fiona Apple play there before her first album came out, and Mazzy Star. The crowd was so beautiful. We were all so beautiful then. I became friendly with a lot of people who worked there. The kindness of strangers was a relief.