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  GIRL ACT

  Novel written by Kristina Shook

  This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locals are intended to provide a sense of authenticity, and used fictitiously. All characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Kristina Shook Publishing

  Copyright 2013

  Acknowledgements

  This novel is dedicated to my dearly departed Sarah Lawrence College professor Dale Harris—whose attention and detail to educating me was AMAZING—he taught me the art of ‘pausing’ and he boldly told me what I needed to do in order to hone my craft—I am forever in his debt and his spirit is always with me when I sit down to write.

  And to my lovely, dear friends, you know who you are—a zillion thanks!

  CONTENTS

  1. ACTORS

  2. YES

  3. EGGS

  4. AUNDITIONS

  5. PAWS

  6. ROLE

  7. ANSWER

  8. GOING

  9. FREEWAY

  10. MOTELS

  11. COMPASS

  12. DREAMS

  13. SEX

  14. RITUALS

  15. ARRIVAL

  16. TRICK

  17. OPPORTUNITY

  18. REST

  19. GAMBLE

  20. TASKS

  21. ROOMMATE

  22. CRY

  23. JEALOUSY

  24. LETTERS

  25. WORDS

  26. RESCUE

  27. ACTION

  28. CEREMONY

  29. INHERITANCE

  30. CIRCLE

  “Rated G is nobody gets the girl. PG is the good guy gets the girl. R is the bad guy gets the girl. XXX is everybody gets the girl.”

  AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  GIRL ACT

  1

  ACTORS

  I was naked on a sandy beach, just at the crest of it—with the frothy, white foamy tide coming in slowly, past my feet, up my ankles, across my thighs, and in between my spread out legs. All the while I was orgasming noisily, in rhythm with the sound of the waves crashing.

  Buzz, buzz, buzz went the alarm clock loudly—before the actor shut it off. He was the dirty blond I had met at the Verizon commercial callback, that typical commercial-style actor, the kind that looks smart, but can also drive a Chevy Blazer or grab a beer with a group of blue-collar guys in a Miller commercial. He looked at me with his classic blue eyes—going cross-wise, trying to act funny; he could never stop putting it on. I knew the drill: the morning after sex shower, and then the tennis shorts, t-shirt, sneakers, and tennis racket in his hand.

  “How’d you sleep, babe?” he asked.

  “Another wet dream!” I said, loud and proud.

  “About me?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I answered.

  He laughed and got out of my bed, turning so I could watch his very cute, firm ass walk towards the bathroom.

  It was a tiny Los Feliz studio apartment—that housed a full size mattress, an upright Ikea desk covered with acting paraphernalia, a black Ikea futon couch with two pillows; one that had the word LOVE embroidered across it, a 5x8 richly woven Navajo rug that hung on the far wall, a small bathroom, a petite kitchen and a roof deck that housed a picnic table, four plastic Ikea chairs and thirty-two potted plants. It was surrounded by a white lacquered fence covered with purple bougainvillea. The low rent kept me from worrying if I booked an acting job or not.

  I got up, not wanting to shower; hoping the people at Starbucks would smell last night’s dirty sex all over me and be jealous. I had become a typical LA transplant, wanting to be noticed at any cost and in any which way.

  He was my fifth actor, and the sex had been fair, not like the Charles Bronson look-alike I had gone with after booking a Domino Pizza commercial. Incidentally, the earlier part of my ‘wet dream’ had been about the ‘Bronson’ actor—chasing me across the sandy dunes, pulling me onto an inflated raft and sexing me up with his enjoyably rough tongue, but when you’re an actress, you use white lies to please everybody. I had heard the shower go on and just stood there, thinking about that Bronson look-alike, a TV actor who hadn’t booked a job in a long, long while. He had once been on General Hospital for a year as a stud-muffin character, the kind that married women use as an unkempt lover, and he had played a bit-part as a cop on a hit TV show. But at the time I met him, he was having to grab odd jobs as a grip. When we met, I had had my own small dressing room and the overhead light didn’t work. Being a lead actress, I got to complain, and he, being the grip/electrician, was sent into fix it.

  He strode in, wearing form-fitting blue jeans, a Gap shirt, with a handsome amount of stubble on his very attractive chin. And to top it off, his thin lips were parted. There’s always that kind of first meeting, which I crave experiencing—it’s where I go, “Oh, My God!!! I have to go to bed with this guy,” and that’s just what I had with the actor/grip. He had dark brown neatly cut hair, dark intense eyes, a fit body and muscular legs.

  Yeah, I knew he was worth a climb on. I guess the meaning of a bad-boy to me is the kind of guy who is so sexual that he just can’t be ignored. And being an actress, I wanted to experience everything. So we flirted—it was so easy. And he asked for my number and I counted, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” and then, “Here it is.” And he called me that night.

  “Hey, Vivien, you want to go out tonight?” And I said, “It’s eleven already,” and he said, “Yeah, I know, the night’s just starting to pop.”

  So I said yes. I was going to say yes, no matter what. Not being a ‘hitch-hiker’ type girl, a girl who goes out with strange guys with hard-ons, I should explain that the redheaded nine-year-old, the real star of the pizza commercial, his mother was a screenwriter who knew the actor/grip from a Monday night workshop created and run by Tommy Moretti, the co-writer of an Oscar winning film, and she told me how amazing the actor/grip’s work was whenever he hit the stage. So it was, in away, like meeting his ‘stage mother’.

  We met on the corner of Hillhurst and Hollywood Boulevard, at the King-King bar, and he was already sucking on a draft beer when I sat next to him. He was washed and smelling like he had a bar of Dove under each armpit. He licked his lips and I held onto my stool as he ordered me a Bud Light. His profile was GQ, but with a Montana twist, which incidentally was where he was from.

  We babbled about booking acting work and how impossible it usually was. He was on the outs with acting and trying to make up his next plan; I was still thinking that my big movie break was due any day. My agent Ray had huge plans for me and I believed the hype.

  The actor/grip talked about his stint on GH and the popular cop show, and about the once-steady paychecks. Booking acting jobs is all about freedom, opportunity, and living in the moment of becoming a new character. But when there are no bookings, it’s all about apprehension topped off with boredom at having to be just yourself.

  “Are you a free spirit?” he asked.

  “I think so, but what’s your definition?” I asked.

  He said, “Having sex on the first date.”

  I nodded, and then tried not to smile as I asked “Is this considered a first date?” and he nodded yes.

  Then he asked me if I had ever done one of those ‘trust’ exercises.

  “The kind where you fall backwards and let other people catch you, and you trust that they won’t drop you?” I asked (FYI, it’s taught in most beginner acting classes).

  “Yup,” he said.

  “Okay, then yes, and more than once. Why?” I asked.

  That’s when he told me how he wanted to blindfold me and drive me to his place over near Melrose Avenue, and how he wanted to have sex
the whole time with the blindfold kept on. And I slid off the soft bar stool and pulled my black Chanel bag over my shoulder and said, “This free bird is standing; grab her while she’s up.”

  Outside I got into his vintage black VW-beetle and once I was in the tattered leather passenger seat, he pulled out a conservative necktie, a leftover from some insurance commercial audition. It had been in the back seat with his other audition clothes, crumpled up, but ready. He put it over my eyes, tying it tight and when I told him I couldn’t see anything but darkness, he started the engine and off we went. It was cool, I sort of guessed he was taking Hollywood Boulevard and cutting down maybe La Brea, but I was just guessing and the passenger window was blowing air in and we didn’t talk. Like when you’re falling backwards, no one says a thing, because you have to just ‘trust’ that they will catch you—even the breath gets held and the silence lingers.

  He helped me out of the VW-beetle and onto the sidewalk. It was like a blind character role that I had just been cast in, or maybe it was just ‘Method’ acting. There were three thick steps and then he unlocked two locks, held the door open and led me in. Then he relocked the locks, took my hand, and led me up twelve carpeted steps. Wow, I was walking up a flight of stairs in the dark. At one point, I touched the wall and felt a frame covered in glass, but I let go of it.

  We turned left, then right, and I knew I was in his bedroom. He put me on the side of his bed, and then came in front of me and began undressing me while I just sat there, moving my arms so he could take off my top, and then my bra and then my favorite blue jeans with my slogan ‘WHAT IF’ sewn on the back of them.

  Then he stood in front of me, parting my legs, and had me help him take off his t-shirt and his jeans and his flannel boxer shorts. Feeling that flannel reminded me of one of those kids’ books filled with touchy-feely fabric. All I can say is that I knew it was flannel.

  He was already at attention and his penis size matched his feet, which meant he’d be an excellent fit inside of me. He slid me back on the bed and pulled the blanket from under me, and then he put his mouth near mine and we kissed for a while. Then he spread my legs really wide and he licked me like I was thirty-one flavors or more.

  Oh, wow! He was inside of me for hours. When he was in—he was fast, like a baby seal swimming upstream. Okay, so I’m corny sometimes. My hips moved back and forth and he glided us all over his king size bed, and all the while, it was sheer black before my eyes.

  At some point, I just let myself feel everything, and I wondered about what we looked like. He begged me to sleep with his tie across my eyes so I did, and then in the morning, he took it off and I saw the room. It was plain; a bed boxed in a wooden frame, a nondescript dresser, and a wall-to-wall closet with clothes that looked like any guy would have. He didn’t have any photos or plants, or anything that might have belonged to an ex-girlfriend.

  We exited through the hall and that’s when I saw the framed glass—it was a movie poster from a Sundance flick that had gone on to gross a ton of money, and there was his grinning mug on it. So I’d screwed a real working actor, or at least a has-been. A few feet from it was his framed glossy 8x10 soap opera picture, the kind that gets signed and given to fans. And then there was his cop shot from the popular TV drama show; that one turned me on the most.

  “I’d like to do it with a cop,” I said, feeling like anything was possible after the necktie.

  “That can be arranged,” he said in a very matter-of-fact tone. He dropped me off in front of my brick apartment building and watched me walk into the courtyard, I didn’t turn around, but I heard him drive off.

  It was two weeks later when I heard from the actor/grip. He left a sexy message about seeing a car wreck off the 101 Freeway, and how he’d like to bang me in the back seat. Later he called just before eleven and asked if I’d do him inside of it. I said, “Sure,” and he picked me up at midnight and we found the totaled silver Mercedes near Woodland Hills. We parked a few feet away and walked to it.

  “No one died, did they?” I asked.

  “Nah, I saw it happen, just a mega lawsuit.”

  We got in. The black leather backseat was still intact; the car reeked of fragrant air freshener. He sat down and I got on top of him. This time I got to lead us in the in-an-out game. We did fifteen minutes of serious humping and then left.

  He dropped me back at my apartment. I smelled like sex and the inside of the crushed Mercedes. The last time I saw him, he had asked me to meet him in Griffith Park, in the open field area where the park rangers have arranged several really large rocks and a few picnic tables; it’s been used as a backdrop a ton of times for commercials. I was in my favorite jeans again, the “WHAT IF” ones, a clingy black top—that clung to my red bra, creating size 34 C mountains, and my faithful neon Nike sneakers. I had hiked halfway up when a cop yelled at me.

  “You’re trespassing!!!”

  “No, I’m not?!!!” My mind was so focused on finding the actor/grip that it took me a minute or more to recognize the cop’s smirk. He was dressed to the nines. His cop pants were snug and he had cuffs dangling from his left middle finger.

  “Where’s your gun?” I asked.

  “In here.” He gestured with his right hand in the shape of a gun at his zipper.

  “Is it loaded?” I asked.

  When you screw an actor and you’re an actress, you can go on for hours with trashy, over-the-top dialogue, because unknown/semi-working actors never ever get enough lines.

  “Why don’t you find out,” he said, as he took me by my arm and yanked me off the trail and in the direction of the mountainside that didn’t face the Hollywood Hills houses.

  “I’ll have to search you, Miss,” he said.

  “Sure, Officer, you have to follow police procedure.”

  He faced me against a tree, pressing the side of my face into the thick bark as he spread my legs apart, the way they do on all cop TV shows and in the movies.

  “You better not be packing,” he said.

  “Just a kumquat, Officer,” I replied, innocently.

  He slid his hand up my right thigh, then my left and gradually into my crotch, where he dug like he was planning to bury something deep. My face still touching the tree, I played the tough girl part, not the victim. “Go ahead cuff me.” And he did cuff my hands behind my back. Then he unzipped my jeans and yanked them down to my knees, gripping my butt with too much force, but still I kept my moans silent. And then he unzipped himself with one hand, slid a condom on and put his erect fleshy gun inside me.

  The actor/grip/cop discharged enough seeds to fertilize a troupe of wanna-be actors or politicians on my ass and down my thighs. When we finished, he pulled back up my jeans and un-cuffed me. Then he spun me around—my face checkered from the imprint of the bark, my lips puckered and my eyes beaming.

  “Stay out of trouble, or next time I’ll arrest you,” he said.

  “Uh, uh,” I stammered, feeling sticky, smelly and oh-so-human. He left the condom on the ground. I know it wasn’t environmentally correct to litter, but it was erotically exciting to see it.

  Off I went back down the trail and onto Commonwealth Avenue again, over to Prospect Avenue and onto Rodney Drive, leaving him to exit the park on his own, as every good cop should do. A month later he booked a movie in New York, and dropped by to give me his cop uniform, as a memento—I had to keep it.

  The very last time I ever heard his voice was from LAX; he left a message on my machine just before his plane took off.

  “Vivien saw a broken down school bus in Torrance and thought of screwing you seat-by-seat, finishing you off against the steering wheel.” I had to smile, and I saved the message. When I got lonely, I’d play it over and over. The crappy thing is that when you use the phone company’s voice mail system, it only lasts a little over two weeks and I went on to be single way longer than that.

  The shower was off and the Tennis Actor was standing in front of me, just staring at me.

  “
I’m hurrying up, don’t worry,” I said, as I slipped on a cotton dress and then reached into my closet where I still kept the cop uniform on the top shelf and grabbed my yoga clothes. I followed the Tennis Actor out the door with my trusty rescue dog, Shadow. No one really noticed us at Starbucks; the morning crowd had dispersed.

  The Tennis Actor drove to the public tennis courts in Griffith Park, taking Shadow with him—which was one of those sweet things I dug about him—while I walked up to Yoga Vibe over on Hillhurst. The morning group was in and we did our sunrise salutations, our downward dogs, and while I lay in meditation I realized that I, the ‘official callback actress,’ was finished with Los Angeles, AKA Hollywood, with all its hype, propaganda and buildup of ‘maybe gonna make it BS’ and all the actors, producers, directors and studio heads.

  Afterwards, I talked to Carol, the yoga goddess, whose broad boned body was extra fit, and I said, “I’m done with LA, I need to move away.” She grinned at me, not saying a word. I stood there, thinking, and then I said just as if it was common news to everyone but me, “I’m not amounting to anything here. Not even sure I have a purpose anymore.”

  She took a deep breath in and out and then said, “Sometimes, we have to go home to begin again.”

  Carol proceeded to tell me how she had been a Wells Fargo Bank teller for five years, and then spent a year as a co-manager at a finance company with her then husband, but one day, she stumbled in the middle of a supermarket aisle, and while lying on the linoleum floor had a panic attack, where she couldn’t stop shaking, trembling and sobbing. By chance or luck, the man, who sat down next to her on the supermarket floor trying to help her, was a yoga teacher, and he taught her how to breathe, how to steady her heart rate and calm her racing mind, right there while other shoppers looked on. Within three months she was divorced, living with her sister and studying various types of yoga.