This Will Only Hurt a Little(28)
“Oh! Americano! Americano!”
He smiled and laughed and then took my cheeks in his hands and said something softly in Italian, I guess? A prayer for me. He made the sign of the cross on me and put his palm to my forehead and then nodded at me and turned and walked away, back through the door where the Pope goes to do Pope stuff. I remember his eyes. They were soft. I remember that he really had love for me. Truly. I remember I knew it was okay.
I’ve never told this story publicly; I haven’t even told people I’m very close with. It almost feels sacrilegious for me to be typing these words now, giving this to the world. Imagining having to talk about this in an interview for a gossip magazine to sell my book, or seeing the headline, reducing what was the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me to clickbait. But I don’t exist without this story. And the story doesn’t exist without this ending. It doesn’t work for me without getting the absolution I needed. And from the only person in the world who could give it to me: the Pope in Rome. When we got back to the hotel I called my parents and woke them up. It was June 14, 1995, in Rome; June 13 in Arizona. It was my due date.
INTERSTATE LOVE SONG
(Stone Temple Pilots)
I had been begging my mother to let me get an agent ever since I was in third grade. How did a third grader in Arizona know what an agent was, you might ask? Well, my friend Ami had an agent in Los Angeles and would fly out for auditions and put herself on tape. She even screen-tested for Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family movies, the part that eventually went to Christina Ricci. Ami also sang the jingle for her dad’s window-tinting company on the radio. To the tune of “Stupid Cupid,” her little voice would ring out from 104.7 FM, “Polyglycoat you’re the one for meeeeeeeee!”
Third grade was when I landed the role of Wilbur the Pig in our grade’s production of Charlotte’s Web. Actually, I wasn’t the only Wilbur. The whole play was double cast, in order to give more kids parts. Jeremy Babendure was the other Wilbur. Jeremy also had some professional experience. The year before, he’d been cast as “Scamp with Squirt Gun” and had gotten to deliver three whole lines in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona. I felt a little bit of pressure, sharing the part with such a seasoned professional, and I became determined to shine brighter as the other Wilbur.
The week before the play, the teachers explained to the two casts that one would be performing at the morning assembly in front of the kindergarten through second-grade kids, while the other would perform for the fourth through sixth graders, and that it was up to me and Jeremy to decide who would perform for which group of kids. Well, I’m not an idiot. Obviously, the power move is to perform for the older kids. Who gives a fuck what a bunch of babies think about my portrayal of Wilbur?? I wanted the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders to know how talented I was. I remember this moment of manipulation so clearly, it still makes me laugh. I immediately turned to Jeremy and very earnestly said, “I think you should do the morning show; you really have a way with younger kids that I just don’t have. Honestly? I just think they’re going to like your Wilbur better. They’ll understand ’cause Wilbur is a boy and you’re a boy. I think they might get confused by me playing it since I’m a girl, right?? Don’t you think???”
I mean. Jeremy didn’t stand a chance. It was way more satisfying to have older kids come up to me in the weeks after the play than it would’ve been to have impressed a bunch of kindergarteners. I also made sure I took off my pig snout for curtain call so that kids who maybe didn’t know me before would be able to recognize me in the halls. I was one hundred percent hooked on the love of performing, but I think the recognition was more important. Sometimes it still is. SEE ME! LOVE ME! TELL ME I AM THE BEST! TELL ME YOU LOVE ME!
I knew that in order to procure work as an actress, one must have an agent. After Wilbur, my mom did take me into the local Ford agency, where I was rejected by the agents working there. I clearly wasn’t meant to be a child model: too short but not tiny, not conventionally or uniquely pretty enough. So I kept doing my theater programs, auditioning occasionally for an open call that my mom would find in the paper. But she wasn’t about to figure out how to take me to L.A. to get me an agent. My parents didn’t really have the expendable income to have a child actor. Especially back then, if your kid really wanted to act, one of the parents would essentially have to give up their lives and move to L.A. to live in one of those horrible apartment complexes that the out-of-town kid actors all live in and devote all of their time and income to making the impossible happen. No. My parents weren’t interested in that.
“When you graduate from high school and make it through at least two years of college, Busy, then you can really try. But your dad and I will not be paying for that!”
I was convinced the only thing that could somehow redeem any of the previous few years of my life was if I were to become famous doing the thing I’d declared I was going to do in third grade, and as soon as possible. Honestly, the only time I’d ever expressed interest in being something else when I grew up was when I’d decided at age three that I was going to be a red bucket. The final straw in my high school years—which had, more often than not, fucking sucked—was having Shawn Harris cheat on me repeatedly after he went away to college, and then give me HPV (because OF COURSE HE DID). I was due for something good.