This Will Only Hurt a Little(41)

It’s not often that a show finds its audience after it goes off the air, but it’s been wild to see the impact that Freaks and Geeks has had on people over the last ten years. So I’ve decided that when Birdie turns thirteen, I’m going to watch the entire series with her.

I can’t imagine anything better than both of us watching it all for the first time, together.





I DON’T WANT TO WAIT


(Paula Cole)


After Freaks and Geeks was officially canceled in May, I started auditioning for anything I could. I did a small guest spot on Malcolm in the Middle, but other than that, work was far and few between. I hadn’t made that much money for Freaks and Geeks, and in spite of the fact that the show had been critically acclaimed, it didn’t seem to be translating into anything career-wise. James was off to play James Dean and seemingly become a movie star. Linda was doing a new show for AMC. Jason was shooting a movie I had auditioned for like four times and not gotten. I felt like a loser. And I was running out of money.

Emily BB graduated from Wesleyan and got a job working at an ad agency in L.A., and we moved together to an apartment near Brentwood—a sort of neither-here-nor-there part of town generically called West L.A. She was feeling conflicted about moving to L.A. because her college boyfriend, Chuck, had wanted her to go to Boston and live with him. She almost backed out the month before we were supposed to move in, and we got into a huge fight on the phone about it. I had put down money for this apartment and had told my current roommates I was moving out. I knew she loved Chuck but come on! She had a job offer! I had an apartment for us!

She agreed with my logic and moved across the country. She and Chuck knew long distance was probably impossible, so they broke up, although they still talked almost every day. And we ended up having a lot of fun, making dinner every night when she got home from work on our George Foreman grill and doing weird arts-and-crafts projects. We didn’t want to pay for cable but we had a DVD player so we would walk to the video store and rent Sex and the City DVDs. We probably watched the first several seasons of that show at least three times.

Eventually, we became friends with the girls who lived next door, law students at USC, who did pay for cable, and when Sex and the City started back up, they would have us over on Sunday nights to eat dinner and watch the show with them. One of the girls was named Stephanie, but Emily and I decided that she seemed more like a Penelope, so we started calling her that.

In June, Colin flew me to Toronto, where he was shooting a movie with Kirsten Dunst. I remember hanging with Kirsten while Colin was doing a scene, when Harvey Weinstein came in to her trailer and sat down to talk to her.

“You know,” he said, “you have a really unique talent and ability, NKAY, and you’re clearly a beautiful girl, but it’s not always just about that, NKAY. You should really look at how we’ve shaped Gwyneth’s career, NKAY. I mean, first Shakespeare and now we’re having her do this movie where she’s a flight attendant, NKAY, and it’s amazing to see her in this new way, NKAY. That’s what’s possible for you, and you just need to remember that we’re here for you, NKAY. Like I always say, you know, do one for them and one for you, NKAY??”

If you’ve spent any time with Harvey Weinstein—and I unfortunately have—he would always say “nkay” in the middle of his sentences, almost like a tic or how some people say “like” a lot. I remember that it didn’t feel creepy to me, him coming into her trailer, just SCARY AS FUCK. Like this is the MAN WHO RUNS HOLLYWOOD. I was sitting there while he was talking, not sure what I should be doing, if I should leave or stay, so I just stayed there, eating Doritos on the leather sofa. I was secretly hoping he would notice me, and say, “You know, YOU should be a star like Gwyneth too, NKAY?”

? ? ?

Obviously, I didn’t know what I was spared in that moment, that he didn’t see me, or see an opportunity to, you know, cum on my leg, NKAY. I wouldn’t know for years. Even after I’d gotten to know him fairly well and had worked with him, I wasn’t aware of the depth of his depravity. But in that moment, I will tell you for certain I would have gone to his hotel room to talk about my career without thinking it meant something gross. I was twenty. I wanted a job. I wanted to work. I would have met anyone anywhere. Thank God I didn’t.

In August, I was about to apply for a job at the department store Fred Segal when I got an audition for an MTV movie called Anatomy of a Hate Crime, which was the story of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming. I was cast to play Chastity Pasley, who was the girlfriend of one of the murderers and an accessory after the fact. Ian Somerhalder played my character’s boyfriend, one of the killers.

MTV was making a lot of these made-for-TV movies back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, but only a few of them were dramatic. Most were comedies, and there were a few musicals (Beyoncé even did a version of the opera Carmen). I took the job very seriously, feeling the weight of the true story of Matthew Shepard’s death. We all did, really. We filmed in Calgary, Canada, which was freezing, but when I wasn’t working, I liked wandering around alone and shopping (I was pretty good at burning through my per diem). Colin came to visit me, and so did my manager, Lorraine. It was fairly low-budget, so the shoot wasn’t too long and we were finished before winter really hit.

Back in L.A., Colin and I were still dating, and still hung out with all of our college friends, so it was weirdly like we hadn’t stopped going to school. Colin and I had both moved farther from campus, but we would still go to all the parties on the weekends, and were essentially living the lives of students who just happened to have real jobs. Meanwhile, I signed up for some classes at Santa Monica College, credits that could transfer to LMU if I ever wanted to finish my degree—I took Women’s Studies, and another pottery class. (Luckily, this one was less than twelve thousand dollars.)