This Will Only Hurt a Little(70)
But for all of my crazy spinning thoughts and constant tears, Birdie was a sweet and unflappable baby. I mean, I barely would put her down, so she had no reason to cry but she was a baby who was so generally happy that strangers would comment that she was like a little Buddha or call her an indigo child. My biggest regret with Birdie is that I wasn’t able to enjoy her babyhood as much as I should have. I was so in my own head I couldn’t enjoy it at all.
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My constant panic about Birdie wasn’t helped by our financial situation. My agents knew I needed a job, badly. My business managers didn’t know what to do about the house. The market was swallowing people whole. My house wasn’t worth what I owed on it, and no one in their right mind would pay it now. In a few short months, my investment had become a trash heap. We couldn’t rent it out, we couldn’t sell it. I fundamentally didn’t want to default on it, but I had no money. If I let it go to foreclosure, the banks would come after Marc and the house we were currently living in with our newborn daughter. We couldn’t lose that house. In order to try doing a short sale, I had to stop paying my mortgage for at least two months, which I did. I spent all my free time taking calls from different bank representatives, and trying to figure out who the fuck could buy this house from me. (The mortgage was two loans—I really don’t even understand why, but it was.) I personally found an actress to buy the house for what I owed on the first, and somehow we convinced the second to roll into an unsecured loan that I would pay off until it was gone. It wasn’t even a stupid short sale. Everyone ended up getting paid. But on Christmas Eve, my phone rang. It was the bank. They told me that it was too late and they were putting the house into foreclosure. I had done all this work, trying to figure out how not to have this happen. We had a signed contract approved by everyone and now they were foreclosing on the house? ON CHRISTMAS EVE?? I screamed at the woman on the phone and gave her all the paperwork and all the people who I had spoken to and all the approvals that had been given. I went into some sort of fugue state. And I just kept screaming, “ON CHRISTMAS EVE??!!!”
They ended up calling back the next morning. There had been a mistake. The sale was approved, after all. They wished me a Merry Christmas. I told them to go fuck themselves. Not really. But in my head I did. In reality I just mumbled a half-hearted “Merry Christmas to you.” Then I hung up the phone and sobbed.
I had been called into an audition for a show that was picked up straight to series by creator Rob Thomas called Party Down. I knew one of the stars already cast Adam Scott from the NBC table read years ago and I had become friendly with him and his wife socially. I thought the part was perfect for me. They agreed. I had lost a considerable amount of the baby weight but still had more to go, but I actually liked the idea for the character, you know? It’s superrealistic for girls who move from the Midwest where they did sketch comedy to Los Angeles and within a year they’ve lost like twenty-five pounds and gotten a nose job. I thought it would be a really interesting added layer to the character. Rob and Adam agreed, and I was their first choice for the part. I was so excited. I loved the show and thought it would be so good to get back to work. I could probably even hire a nanny! I would have to! Lorrie was so excited about it, as was my new manager Steven (I had cut ties with Mark; his bro personality didn’t work for me). But no one was more excited than I was. I was going to work again!! On something really great!
I was rocking Birdie in her glider when Lorrie Bartlett called. “Hey, Biz, how ya doing?”
“Good, just sitting here with the little Bird.”
“Hey. So, there’s no good way of saying this so I’m just gonna say it. Biz, it’s not gonna go our way. The network.”
My heart sank as she paused, because my agent was about to tell me something really fucked up, and I knew what she was about to say, “They . . . really don’t feel that physically they can give you the part. It’s the network. Not Rob Thomas or Adam. Honey, they just feel like the weight is an issue.”
I didn’t even try to stop myself. I just started crying, tears rolling onto my baby girl’s perfect little head. “Oh . . . I understand. Yeah. It was dumb of me to gain so much weight anyway.”
“I’m so sorry, honey. Rob Thomas has an email he’d like to send you. Is it okay if I pass along your address?”
“Sure. Bye, Lor.”
I hung up and rocked Birdie and sobbed. What a fucking dumb, bad actress I was. So broke. So miserable. So scared. So fat. The heads of a third-rate cable network thought I was too fat to play a waiter in a show about struggling comedic actors trying to make it in Hollywood. This is the same network that HIRED an executive AFTER another network had fired him for PUBLICLY ASSAULTING his girlfriend! Hollywood is the fucking most disgusting, most vile place on earth. But I couldn’t do anything else. I had to act. I had no other skills. I hadn’t even graduated from college. I had tried to write a movie, and we know how that turned out. I had tried to write a book, and the literary agent I gave it to thought no one would care about my “pregnancy-scare and date-rape stories.”
“From you, I think people would want to know more about, like, Katie Holmes,” she had said. Her dismissal of my past legitimately almost discouraged me from ever writing again.
And now here I was: the only thing I had to do was keep this perfect child alive, and could I even be tasked with that? My husband sucked. I was exhausted. I couldn’t stop my brain from thinking that all of the worst things ever were seconds away from happening all the time. And I was too fucking fat to work as an actress. The email came. It was kind.