Brave Page 8

  My mother and I during this time had very little contact, and I just felt like, how am I going to explain this insanity? And I was done with my father, done with the brutality. I just surrendered, thinking, There’s literally nowhere else for me to go.

  That’s when I met Brett Cantor, the Pied Piper of People, aka the Mayor of Dragonfly. He co-owned the club as well. Brett had blue-blue eyes and short, platinum, shaved hair. He was lovely. Funny as fuck. He was twenty-five (I was just nineteen by now) and he was the youngest music exec at Chrysalis Records.

  When we first started going out, I was too shy to speak; I was so exhausted from being anorexic my talkative side had left me. I had my sister Eve speak for me, if you can believe it. But he was perceptive and figured out what was going on with me. He was in AA. He had been sober for seven years, since he was eighteen, when he’d hit bottom and sold his dad’s Irish setter on the side of a freeway to get money for crack. He suggested I try OA, Overeaters Anonymous. Oh, and he got the Irish setter back to his dad. After that, Brett and I became much closer and I started to regain my powers of speech. He showed me such kindness, a kindness that I’d been missing. I started seeing flashes of the girl I really was and the woman I was going to become. One day, I opened up to him about William and he was determined to help me get out of there. After discussing my limited options with Brett, we made arrangements for me to live with a friend of his. But I needed money. Shit.

  Eve and I went back to the fancy Beverly Hills house and looked around for what we could sell, but everything was too heavy for us to carry down to the pawnshop. And then I saw it. The Steinway grand piano! At this time, there was a paper that you could advertise in for free called The Recycler. I called and placed an ad to run the next day. William was out on one of his benders and I hoped he didn’t come back. I listed the Steinway for $1,500. I didn’t know that these kind of pianos were going for $20k; I thought $1,500 was a ton of money, bless my heart.

  The next day the house was swarmed with piano buyers. I realized that I could’ve gotten a lot more money for it, but oh well. It was taken away that day. I pulled a reclining chair over to put in place of the absent piano and went to sleep. When I woke up, William was sitting in the chair. Eve and I were terrified, sitting on the couch staring at him with frozen smiles. He simply sat, drugged out, and didn’t seem to notice the missing Steinway. He started talking about how he wanted us to start over in our relationship. I was so nervous, I just played along with him. I told him that it would be best if someone could pick him up and give me time to think about it. Now, it made no logical sense to have him picked up since he had his new Ford Explorer, but luckily his addled mind went along with the plan. A druggie friend of his picked him up.

  I said to Eve, “This is it, this is our chance.” We threw everything we owned, mostly just clothes, into the back of the Explorer and took off like bats out of hell. I drove like a possessed person and we made a twenty-four-hour drive in just eighteen hours. Once I got to Seattle, I dropped Eve off and went to the Ford dealership. I forged William’s signature on the car’s “pink slip” and traded it in for a spaceship-like sports car and never looked back. That was the end of William for me. I felt some guilt, but my missing toenails reminded me that I shouldn’t feel too bad.

  I was nervous to see my dad, who was frosty to me, but he still gave me an awkward hug upon seeing me. I said a teary good-bye to Eve, got some of my stuff from my dad’s house, threw it in my new space pod of a car, and took off. It was time to move on to my new life and that included Brett.

  I drove back down to Los Angeles, drinking Diet Pepsi in place of food to keep me going. Not obsessively exercising was really hard; I felt extremely guilty and extremely fat.

  I called Brett numerous times on the drive back down, but I couldn’t reach him. I kept leaving messages. When I got to Hollywood’s Highland Avenue exit, right by the Hollywood Bowl, I called him again from a pay phone. I was starting to panic about having no place to stay. I hung up and called again. A man answered the phone and it wasn’t Brett. The voice identified himself as L APD and said, “Brett has been murdered.”

  My blood ran cold and I remember nothing after that. I found out later Brett was stabbed twenty-three times and almost decapitated. My world, my hope, went black. I fell to the ground and went catatonic. I don’t remember much until the funeral. Everything went so dark and I couldn’t stop crying. He had been stolen. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much fear he must’ve experienced in his final moments on earth. How much rage and terror his kind soul had absorbed. I shudder even now thinking about it. He’ll always have a piece of my heart. The case is still unsolved, but I have been trying for years to remedy that.

  Embarrassingly, I also had the fleeting and fucked-up thought that the magnitude of his death would cure my disordered mind and get me back to being the brave girl I was. I was so bored with thinking about my body.

  At the funeral they played “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd and I can honestly say I wish Brett were still here. He deserved to have a full life; he deserved to keep shining. I sat down and cried and cried.

  I saw his brother Cliff at the funeral and thought he was the darkness to Brett’s lightness, both physically and in personality. It’s bizarre, but within two weeks of the funeral, I went to coffee with Cliff. They say statistically there’s a high likelihood that the surviving partner will go out with the best friend or relative of a deceased partner. I wound up going out with Cliff, which was a mind fuck for sure. When someone dies, it stops your relationship exactly where it was, so I felt like I went from zero to thirty with Brett, and then went from thirty to one hundred with his brother. It was weird, but men were my ports in a storm, you know?

  The friend of Brett’s I was supposed to stay with disappeared after I stayed there for a couple of weeks, and once again, I had nowhere else to go. So I wound up staying with Cliff. Cliff inherited his brother’s record company job, his nightclub, his girlfriend, and his car. That must’ve been so psychologically challenging. I know it was for me. I’d look at him and imagine he was my lost love. We both needed each other as a connection to Brett.

  I started Overeaters Anonymous more seriously because Cliff was also sober and in AA like Brett was. It helped me immensely. I was called the toast girl, because the first year in recovery I ate toast three times a day. That was what I committed to doing, and I cried every time I did it, because I felt my body expanding and my brain going crazy with the fatness. I kept a diary at the time that I filled with horrible, crazy, mean scribbles like “fucking fat ass” written a thousand times. I guess I was vomiting on the page versus actual vomiting, which I was never good at.

  It was after Brett died and after I joined OA that I started doing the real work of my life: dissecting things, studying them from all angles. OA’s twelve steps are basically the same as AA’s. Granted, I never made it past ten. Those final two steps are explicitly about regular prayer and spiritual awakening and I didn’t want anything to do with God. It was too loaded with trauma for me to get there at the time.

  Three weeks after Brett was killed, I was standing by the front of a gym, waiting for my friend Josh, weeping over Brett again. At this point the sobs had turned into a sort of constant leak, so I was just standing there leaking, when this woman came up to me and asked me if I was an actress.

  If she had been a man, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, because if you’re a beautiful girl in L A, countless men come up and say, “Are you an actress?” just to see if they can sleep with you. But because it was a woman I gave it a little bit of credence. I told her no.

  “Well, do you want to be an actress?” No.

  I had just turned twenty. My idea of actors was based on the stereotypes, that actors were selfish, self-obsessed, fame hungry. I had the self-obsession part down because of my disorder, but not the other parts. I never had that hole in my soul that could only be filled with outside things, including fame. I knew from William tha
t “things” couldn’t make me happy. I knew deep down that happiness was an inside job. It turned out the woman was the producer friend of a director named Gregg Araki, a famed indie director I hadn’t heard of. Gregg had looked far and wide for the lead in his upcoming film The Doom Generation and hadn’t found her yet. I was undecided, but I gave the woman my number. They called for about a week trying to get ahold of me. It was my friend Joshua from Class of 1999 who convinced me to go meet with the movie people.

  At last I met with them. I had to go deep into the Valley, outside of L A. I remember not wanting to drive all that way. But after asking how much money I’d get paid ($10k), I realized it was enough for first, last, and deposit to rent a room in a house. I’d have enough left over to go to Paris and visit the empress Josephine’s summer home, the Château de Malmaison. I would not have to go back to cold, rainy Seattle and my dad. My deciding factor on being an actress came down to that: Dad, Paris, and rain avoidance.

  So I met the director; I thought he had a fun, infectious personality. The audition commenced. One of the male stars was there. Araki told me they needed to test us for chemistry. The actor was lying flat on a couch. I was made to lie on top of him. He was lying on his back and he had an erection. I could feel it. Which wasn’t his fault, but I think it is a really messed-up way to do a chemistry test. Imagine it happening at your job interview.

  I did the same thing that I always did. I snapped out of my body and floated up to the ceiling.

  I guess we had chemistry. I got the part of Amy Blue.

  IT BEGINS

  It doesn’t happen that way, being discovered. An incredibly rare thing happened to me. That Gregg Araki and the investors took a chance on a complete unknown is like one in a million, maybe more. Interviewers have asked me what I’d have done if it weren’t for acting, and my answer is usually, “I’d have been a pathologist or archaeologist,” but it’s probably not true. The reality is I don’t know what I would have done, because frankly, it was always a foregone conclusion that I was bound for movies in some way. My life was always going to be big even when I tried to make it small.

  Doom Generation was like acting boot camp for me. I knew very little about technical aspects of filmmaking. They would tell me: “Stand on your mark.” I didn’t know what a mark meant—I just wandered across the room. “The X on the floor. That’s where you stand.” They said: “Watch your camera framing.” That means how much room you have, like in the invisible box around your head from the camera’s viewpoint. You can’t step too far to the left, or too far to the right, or you’ll be out of the shot. “Let’s rehearse blocking.” Blocking is where you go from point A to Z in any given scene. You have to remember all that and then forget all of it to make it natural. It was a difficult shoot because we had a very short amount of filming time, and we had about three takes’ worth of film for each scene. I tried my best to get everything right all the time.

  My character, Amy Blue, was a snarling red lipsticked sixteen-year-old. I didn’t know about creating a character, so I just based her on me at fourteen. A permanently pissed-off punk. I related immensely. Through Amy Blue I could channel my anger.

  The first day of filming there was a huge earthquake in L A, the biggest in decades. I remember it was like surfing in bed, and I kept laughing, thinking it was super fun. Later I found out people died, so it was not so fun in reality. We filmed mostly at night in abandoned places on the edge of the city, for a postapocalyptic vibe. I thought the aesthetic was really cool. Gregg Araki told us that we’d be tired and cold, so I knew what to prepare for, and he was right.

  One of the two male stars, very good looking as you’d expect, was permitted his bad behavior. It was the first time I’d heard about method acting, where the actor stays in character all the time, even when the camera isn’t rolling. I have never met a female method actor. To me, “I’m a method actor” is usually synonymous with “I’m going to be a fucking dick to everybody on set.” It’s something so many young male Marlon Brando wannabe actors do. And I’ve never been on a set where that bad behavior wasn’t indulged. I wasn’t impressed, and I wasn’t turned on by him, either, which I think may have confused him. He was incredibly mean to me. My boyfriend had just died. Everybody knew about Brett. I was shocked, but it was like nobody cared.

  I quickly learned nobody was going to protect me.

  There was a defining moment when the favoritism, the misogyny, the toxic environment on movie sets became real for me. But I didn’t know how to articulate it then. I didn’t understand why these guys were allowed to get away with everything and permitted all. We were shooting a scene with the actor and me in the front seat of a car. The director and cameraman were in the backseat, filming my close-up while the male actor gave me my lines from off camera. All of a sudden I felt something wet under my skirt, and an insistent pushing pressure on my vagina. The actor had taken a bottle of water under my skirt to spray and push onto my privates. I froze. Then I snapped. I went to lunge for him, but the camera was in the way. Gregg Araki just said, “Oh, children.”

  Later I told that story in an interview, and Gregg Araki wrote a long response that I skimmed and mostly don’t remember except for the last part where he said, “Rose remembers it wrong.” To me that is the height of misogyny and victim blaming. Gaslighting. Don’t gaslight me, motherfucker. My vagina remembers. My body remembers. It is a scientific fact that memory changes every time we bring it up, but the body has memory that is even more accurate than the mind. Women know when they have been violated emotionally, physically, or verbally. And no man has the right to tell us otherwise. Our bodies shake, they burn, they do all kinds of things when they remember. Our muscles remember. We know by the way we feel when we have been violated. Even when we are drunk we know the difference between welcome and unwelcome—the body ALWAYS feels it during and after.

  The male actor has since apologized and it is an apology I completely accept. There is no bad blood between him and me. I think he’s great. I still respect Araki’s work and am still grateful that they took a chance on me, but everyone on sets should be respected, not just the males.

  The producer was a young woman at the time, although still the better part of a decade older than I was then. I ran into her years later and I brought it up with her, how disappointed I was that she didn’t protect a young girl.

  That happened over and over in films I did. It was like they didn’t really even see me. I was just the girl and it was okay to be treated poorly. But it’s not okay. So I did the only thing I could do. I pretended like I was one of the people in my books, the characters that I’d turn into when I read as a child. I created my own character in my own version of the movie that I had in my head. Later on I realized that the movie in my head was often a lot more interesting than the actual movie I was in. I eventually came to look at it like I was doing performance art in other people’s worlds, like what Cindy Sherman did in photographs, transforming herself into other people and other lives. It was an attempt to preserve my sanity and the part I most enjoyed.

  In The Doom Generation I had to shoot a three-way sex scene, which actually wound up being almost comical, because we were all wearing sweatpants and slippers and just making sexy noises. On film it looked super sexy, but in real life it felt as if there were eerie sex-cult parallels that I couldn’t clearly articulate, even to myself. At the time I thought the language in the film was like 95 percent made-up slang. Some years later I did the DVD commentary, and I finally was adult enough to understand what I had been saying in the movie. Holy shit. No wonder my dad chased Gregg Araki out of the Seattle Film Festival and tried to beat him up.

  In January 1995, I went to my first Sundance Film Festival with The Doom Generation. The excitement was palpable in the thin mountain air of Park City. Some people were so upset by the film that they walked out of our screenings. It was a very polarizing movie—nothing like a little nihilism to freak people out. I loved it. Despite my experiences on the
set, I thought Araki and all of us involved in that film created something really cool and different. I would go on to be nominated for the Best Debut Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards (like the Oscars for independent films).

  There were lawyers everywhere at Sundance. I didn’t understand why they were all giving me their cards. It reminded me of my runaway days, with troll men creeping around trying to prey on you. I had no idea why I’d need a lawyer. I had come into the whole industry backward and because of that didn’t know the “rules.” Normally you come to Hollywood, enroll in an acting class, do workshops hoping an agent may choose you, start by trying to get on a commercial, work your way up to a one-line role on TV, maybe play a dead body or something, then try for a featured guest star, then a little role in an indie film, then hopefully a bigger one, and then the Holy Grail, starring in either a TV show or film. As you slowly climb the ladder—normally it takes years and lots of luck—you learn who the sharks are. But not me. I was a baby in the industry, and working at a level beyond my understanding. So I had never heard the rumors of what creeps to avoid, who to trust, if anyone. I was so innocent to the games played, it just didn’t occur to me that people would lie to me, that they would have nefarious motives. I didn’t know I needed to be scared of those who smiled and extended a hand to me.

  There was one lawyer at Sundance, a little guy in cowboy boots, who approached me and explained why I needed a lawyer. He signed me and he got me an agent, and it went from there.