Inside Out(14)

I felt like I was going to throw up as I got out of the car. Ginny was faster, plowing inside with her boxes, and in the seconds we were alone, Val turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” I stared at him blankly. And he said it again: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

I’ll never know if Ginny accepted five hundred dollars from Val explicitly as payment for permission to fuck me. Perhaps it was murkier than that—perhaps he gave her some money under the pretense of helping out a friend, as a loan on the deposit for the new apartment. For all I know she’d already paid him back by having sex with him herself. But what is certain is that she gave this man the key to the apartment she shared with her fifteen-year-old daughter. I’ve mothered three fifteen-year-old girls: the idea of giving a grown man with dubious intentions unsupervised access to them is as inconceivable to me as it is repugnant. That’s not what a mother does.

And what I knew that day—what I know to this day—is that though Val may have given Ginny money with no clear discussion of what he would get in return, it’s also entirely possible Ginny knew exactly what he wanted, and it’s possible she agreed he could have it.

“How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.


SOON AFTER WE moved to La Cienega I met a musician in my acting class, a pedal steel guitar player named Tom Dunston who’d been touring with Billy Joel. He was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, with a gentle presence. He immediately made me feel at ease. We started hanging out, and one night when we were alone I started to take off my clothes. Tom stopped me. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We can just be together.”

I told him about my mother’s suicide attempts, and her using me as bait. I didn’t talk about what had happened with Val. I never talked with anyone about what had happened with Val. By the time I met Tom, I had already walled it off behind the thickest plaster my psyche could construct. But I told him about everything else, and he listened.

So, when Tom invited me to move in with him, I said yes. He was waiting for me in his car when I walked out of my mother’s apartment the day after my sixteenth birthday. I never went back.





Chapter 6


Years ago, I sat in on one of my daughter’s sex-ed classes. The girls were told to be careful. They were warned about getting pregnant, and getting herpes, and all the other dangers of unprotected sex. But nobody said anything about pleasure. Nobody told them about the gift of intimacy and sensuousness that sex can offer. There was nothing to help them understand how their bodies even worked, let alone how to love them.

Which seems like such a mistake. I feel that if I’d had some of that—some information, some education, some sense of what would constitute healthy and desirable sex—I would have been better equipped to protect myself from sex that was exploitative. I would have recognized unhealthy or abusive encounters, because I would have had some idea of a version of sex that was mutual and pleasurable. I might not have been so quick to assume that anytime something happened that made me feel terrible, it was my fault and meant there was something wrong with me. I might not have felt that if a man demanded sex from me, it was my obligation to give it to him because I’d put myself in a position that made him think he was entitled to use my body.

Granted, I didn’t exactly have the kind of parental support that would lead me to value myself on that level. But I wish I’d been taught—by someone, somewhere—about my body, what was possible in a sexual relationship, how to consider my own desires instead of seeing sex as degrading or something I owed someone. Or as a way to get male validation of my worth.


THOUGH TOM DUNSTON was twenty-eight and I was only sixteen when I moved in with him, we had a surprisingly healthy dynamic. He never treated me with anything but care and respect. His mom, an executive assistant to one of Aaron Spelling’s top producers—Vegas was his big show at the time—got me a job as her receptionist at Twentieth Century Fox, even though she disapproved of my living with her son, what with our age difference. (It wasn’t just out of the goodness of her heart. I always thought she did it to make sure I could pay my half of the living expenses.) But Tom and I had a stable, comfortable routine: he dropped me off at the continuation school at Fairfax High every morning, then I went to my job, and he picked me up in the evenings on the way to our acting class. He also got me into the L.A. music scene, which was exploding at that time: we hit the Troubadour, Starwood, the Whisky a Go Go, Madame Wong’s, seeing at least two bands a week—The Go-Go’s, The Knack, The Motels, Billy Idol, The Police. It was very much about the music and the excitement of the scene: I didn’t drink, partly because I was underage and partly because I saw it as a way of separating myself from my mother.

For maybe six months, I had barely any contact with Ginny. I was angry at her for being a train wreck; she was angry at me for “abandoning” her. My dad was almost entirely absent from my life, too: he had moved back to Roswell with Morgan to live with my uncle Buddy. But Tom and I were like our own little family.

Still, against all odds, I felt drawn to my parents. When my mother begged me to go with her to visit my aunt in Albuquerque, I was unable to resist.

“Don’t go,” Tom said. “You can’t trust her. It isn’t going to be any different than it was before.” He tried his best to tell me—to protect me. But it had been months since I’d seen my mother.