This Will Only Hurt a Little(49)
After I was wrapped for the day, I told Tracey I wanted to go to Deluxe and get some shots. I drank so much. I can’t remember the number of drinks, but it was a lot. Too many. Chad Michael Murray was also there, with some other people from the show. It was almost closing time when I started hanging on the side of the bar and sort of swinging back and forth. Suddenly, my left knee gave out and I fell to the ground, knocking down a bunch of barstools. Tracey screamed and ran over to me, laughing. “Biz! Get up!!! What are you doing??”
I knew immediately. I couldn’t get up. My knee was dislocated (once again). I was too drunk for it to hurt, so I grabbed her shirt and pulled her down toward me.
“Tracey,” I said. “ Imma need you to call an ambulance. My knee is FUUUUUCCCKKKKEEEDDD. I have to gotoahospital.”
“Biz. What the fuck? Get up!”
“Tracey. My knee is dislocated; I have to have an ambulance.”
The bartender called an ambulance and Tracey and Chad Michael Murray sat with me while I laughed about what a fucking dumb idiot I was. I tried calling Michelle, but she didn’t answer. Tracey wasn’t sure if she should call someone from the show. She didn’t want me to get in trouble. I was laughing hysterically. How fucking dumb was I? Here I was, on this show and I should be so grateful. And I was miserable. I missed my boyfriend. I missed my friends. I missed my home. I wanted to go to sleep without panicking. I wanted someone to tell me I was doing a good job. I wanted someone to tell me I was pretty enough to be on the WB even though I WAS ON THE FUCKING WB. That my body was good enough and didn’t need to change or be hidden. That my moles were beautiful. That my acting was different than what they were used to but it was fucking refreshing.
BUT GUESS WHAT? No one is going to tell you all the things you want to hear all the time. You have to know them yourself. And if you don’t, you end up on the floor of an upscale bar and restaurant in a small town in the South with ambulance sirens screaming toward you to take you to the local hospital, where you’ll sit for hours until they determine you’re sober enough for them to give you some medicine and pop your knee back in place. And Chad Michael Murray, who you judged as a douchebag, will stay the whole time and hold your fucking hand. And you’ll scream and cry when they do it, because it hurts, but also it’s not just about the knee, and someday you’ll realize that. And when you do, you’ll also be glad the internet didn’t exist the way it does now, that people didn’t have tiny cameras on their phones at the time and that Perez Hilton was years away from gossiping about messy actresses, because it gave you a chance to be messy and gross and get the fuck over it and get your shit together and be an adult and deal with your shit without the world knowing about it.
And when the writers turn your character into an alcoholic for your second season, it will hurt your feelings, but you’ll get over it. And when they don’t write you into the finale, it will hurt your feelings, but you’ll get over that too. Because you understand they probably would have just cut to Katie anyway.
A MOVIE SCRIPT ENDING
(Death Cab for Cutie)
I knew my mom didn’t really like Craig. She and my sister had confronted me when we were all in Chicago visiting my grandparents and staying in a hotel room together. They thought he was using me. They didn’t care for him and they missed Colin.
It had come out because my sister was dating a guy she met online (this was the early days of online dating), and my mom and I were convinced he was a serial killer. I looked into hiring a PI to make sure he hadn’t killed anyone. My mom talked me into saying something about how creepy the guy was to my sister on the trip, at which point Leigh Ann exploded and told me that everyone hated Craig, including my mom!
So . . . my mother somehow got us to confront one another about what she thought of our boyfriends. Meanwhile, she’s in the corner asking us not to fight. When I left Chicago, I was still angry with Leigh Ann, even though my mom tried to get us to make peace before we went to bed. It was actually kind of an amazing and manipulative plan on her part. She was always good at stuff like that. And honestly, she wasn’t totally wrong about Craig.
At the time, he was working at Starbucks and taking classes at a UC school, trying to get a degree or waste time until something better came along, I guess. He still wanted to be an actor. It was what he’d gone to school for in Chicago, but nothing was really happening for him in L.A. I’d paid for some classes for him at the Groundlings, an improv comedy school, and also his new headshots. I paid for most everything, as you can probably imagine. Like when his car got booted and I covered the eight hundred dollars in back parking tickets. I maybe even paid his rent once. But there was the free Starbucks for me! And plus, I didn’t give a fuck about money. Still don’t, much to my business manager’s horror. If I have it, I’m happy to spend it on people I love. And I loved Craig completely. I was certain we were going to get married. But whenever I’d talk about the future—like the two of us moving in together or getting married—he would get really cagey and say in a weird cartoon voice that he liked to use, “Who knows what the future will bring?”
And then he would sort of shrug his skinny shoulders and change the subject. I thought he probably felt like he wanted things to be on a more even playing field, career-wise, before we moved forward. Not to mention, he and his brother had a fairly intense and impenetrable bond. Jeff and I had recovered from our one-night make-out when I was in high school, and it almost seemed like it had never even happened—like we had been two different people all together.