This Will Only Hurt a Little(54)

“YOU’RE SUCH A FUCKING DRAMA QUEEN, BUSY.”

I hung up the phone and called Emily.

“Please tell me, Emily. Please. Tell me. Am I crazy? I think I’m crazy. They say I’m crazy. Did I make this up? Did I do this? What the fuck??”

I was sobbing hysterically, barely even able to get out the story of what had happened. I was digging through a disgusting salad and sobbing into it and calling my best friend to reassure me that I wasn’t a crazy selfish bitch, as these boys, who I had loved since I was a teen, were now telling me that I was.

Emily tried to calm me down. “Listen to me. You’re not crazy. I don’t know why they’re doing this to you, but it’s not fair. You have to calm down. Get on the plane. Come home.”

Suddenly, I screamed. People looked at me. There was a dead bee in my salad. A GIANT DEAD FUCKING BUMBLEBEE.

“I CAN’T,” I sobbed into the phone.

“Pup,” she said, using her nickname for me, “go see if there are any seats in first class and pay for it. Calm down. Get on the plane. Come home.”

I threw the bee salad in the trash and called Lorrie Bartlett back. I told her not to do anything. I didn’t care. They could have it. There were no seats in first or business, so I sat in my middle seat in coach, crying the entire flight, trying to figure out what I had done that was so egregious to Craig and Jeff that they wanted to make me feel like I was insane and selfish. I just wanted to love them. I just wanted Craig to love me back. I didn’t know what I had done wrong.

When I landed, I called their home and got the machine, so I tried Jeff’s cell phone, which he handed over to Craig. They were all at St. Nick’s celebrating the impending sale of our movie. I mean, of their movie. Again, Craig reiterated that I was the selfish one who didn’t have much if anything to do with this script. They had done all the work. Anything I thought I had contributed was so small it was hardly worth mentioning. How could I stand in the way of their success? Did I really need the attention that badly? I hung up and screamed as I drove down La Brea toward my house.

My agent and manager called the next day. They wanted to know what I wanted to do.

“Nothing. They can have it. It’s theirs.”

I had a hard time recovering. It wasn’t the script. It was that I’d been so easily thrown out, like trash. I was in the way of their success, I guess? Collateral damage. And in order for them to do this insanely shitty thing to me, they vilified me and told me I was crazy. The story became that I was the one who had tried to STEAL ideas from them, that I was ALWAYS just looking out for myself. THEY had come up with this AMAZING STORY, and I was the less-than-talented girlfriend trying to glom on to their talent and carve out a piece for myself. A piece that I didn’t deserve. I had a hard time figuring out what was real.

A few weeks later, the deal for the script was about wrapped up when my manager got a call from their shitty fucking douchebag manager saying, “The boys want to do the right thing and put her name back on the script.”

Mark asked me what I wanted to do. I said whatever. I’ll take whatever credit and whatever money. I don’t care. And I didn’t. I was too heartbroken. Plus, I didn’t think “the boys” wanted to do the right thing. I think they felt the exact same way, but that somehow business affairs or some lawyer needed to cover their ass since I had registered the idea with the WGA to begin with. There was obviously some sort of trail that I was involved in, and no one wanted to get sued. I called Craig to thank them. I still wanted to get back together, something that seemed as insane as I currently felt. I know it’s hard to understand. Looking back, it’s so wild that I continued to hang on to my relationship with Craig when he clearly thought so little of me. But I didn’t see that. I was still in love with him and convinced that we would find a way to work it out.

For a while after that, Emily would come home from work and find me on the floor of our kitchen, halfway through making dinner when I would just give up and lie down and sob. I started getting a weird stress-induced aphasia where I would replace words with other words so what I was saying would be nonsensical. For instance, “You wanna take the stairs or the elephant?”

I lost my voice for over a month and had to go to a speech therapist that my ENT Dr. Sugerman sent me to. My auditions for movies were terrible. I had zero confidence. Why would anyone want to put me in anything? I had an audition for Walk the Line, the part that Ginny Goodwin ended up playing, which was truly one of the worst, most embarrassing auditions I’ve ever had in my life. If I ever get to speak to James Mangold, I will have to apologize for the atrocity of my performance. By the way, no joke, Ginny went in right after me, and not that she wasn’t born to play that part, but I am certain that my disaster right before made their choice even easier.

I dyed my hair dark red, thinking that if I looked different, maybe I would start to feel different. I went out as much as I could and drank as much as I could. I ran into one of Craig’s best friends from college at a party and made out with him in the bathroom, then fell into the street when I was leaving and cut my hand so badly, I still have a scar on my finger. I went on a yoga retreat in Hawaii where I didn’t shower for a week and got a heat rash on over ninety percent of my body. I started taking a memoir-writing class where I met a sweet med student who I tried to pretend I was deeply in love with for a month, fucking him up for a while after, I’m sure. Especially when I dumped him out of nowhere.