Girl Act Page 9

  When my mother left my unemotional father for the Panamanian coffee grower, my father said, “We’ll have to fend for ourselves,” and then he tossed out my mother’s coffee mug. It was a plain ceramic and lightweight; she didn’t like holding anything heavy in her hands. He never yelled, he never threw the things she left behind on the floor, and if he cried at all, he must have done it in the shower, because I never heard a thing. Nothing!

  There’s a line in the film The Deer Hunter when the character Julien says, “When a man says no to champagne he says no to life.” I can’t remember ever seeing my father drink champagne after my mother left him. I forgot about being excited to be in Cleveland, when I checked into the Comfort Inn. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I was suddenly so worried about seeing my over-educated, workaholic ‘forever single’ father, again. SINGLE? Please don’t let me end up like him.

  12

  DREAMS

  Wow, I was having sex with Ashton Kutcher in my dream. I mean, I actually woke up in my Comfort Inn bed—feeling flushed, exhausted, and well, to be truthful, wet between my legs. Wow, he was good. He was tender, focused, and he had speed. I’m not a star f***er in real life, but in my dream life, I have been a fantastic whore.

  Okay, so who have I been to bed with in my dreams? My list is as follows; dead actors first, James Dean, because I believed him in East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause (and also he seemed moody and a bit intimidated by females and that just turned me on). Next, River Phoenix (from the film Running on Empty), but to be totally honest—we were only skinny dipping in my dream. It was still enjoyable, because we were both naked, jumping in and out of a secluded lake, with crystal clear water. Yup, I could see his naked body. I woke up grinning.

  Foreign actors: Hugh Grant (UK), because he’s handsome and wildly fun in all the movies he’s acted in that I’ve seen, like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, and okay, the Hollywood Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard “alleged” scandal, that garnered him a mug shot—just made him more desirable. I like the idea of him being lonely and seeking out comfort on the street—I think I’ve felt that same loneliness and horny desperation myself. And then French actor Tcheky Karyo (from the La Femme Nakita film), because I replayed the scene over and over where he bangs his hand against the door and kicks it, and he wants so much to go back in and kiss Nakita. And he’s rough, older—and I found him really hot to watch.

  FYI, this wasn’t a sexual dream, but I did dream that Alec Baldwin’s brother Stephen Baldwin was trying to give me a religious cleansing (maybe to cure me of my male lust and penis envy). The dream was very short—Stephen Baldwin said, “You’re cleansed. The spirits are free,” and poured water over my head and the dream ended.

  I’ve had a threesome in my first and only musician sex dream—I was in bed with Jack Johnson and Ben Harper. Okay, so it wasn’t the typical threesome. I mean, Jack Johnson played his guitar and sang while Ben Harper and I were having sex, and then, when I had sex with Jack Johnson, Ben Harper played guitar and sang. It was really ‘mellow’ sex, and I woke up really, really mellow!

  Speaking of sex dreams—one time I dreamt that I was having sex with my former friend Heather’s ex-boyfriend Ryan. Life is stranger than a movie sometimes and you can quote me on that. For the record I had never, ever, ever thought of Ryan as a possibility because he was her mid-western guy and he wasn’t my type at all. So, when their relationship ended and he was just the ex-boyfriend (as in whatever)—I basically forgot about him. But then one morning, I woke up in my Los Feliz bed, having dreamt of him stripping off his carpenter pants and leaping into my bed. Yeah, I did just say leaping. The wacky thing is that the sex seemed real—so I called him. Yup, I just called him and said, “Ryan, this Vivien, I know I haven’t talked to you in a few years, but we were having sex in my dream and it was fantastic.” I was going through a phase of saying whatever I thought without censoring it—that phase didn’t last long.

  “Uh, yeah? I like the sound of that dream,” he said.

  I was stunned. I mean, I knew he hadn’t thought about me and that he would never have called me up. I was off his radar. He was living in Oakland, California and Heather had moved onto another guy. “Come visit me!” he suggested, and two days later I had booked a South by Southwest flight out of Burbank, all because I had had a fantastic sex dream. Okay, so the question is—can a sex dream actually turn into a reality worth having? It did this time.

  To be totally truthful, there was no ‘great romance’ at all. Ryan picked me up at the airport and we both laughed. We didn’t kiss, didn’t even grope each other. Then I spent an hour rearranging his bed, because his lower back had been aching and he hadn’t flipped his mattress over. After that, he cooked us a healthy meal (as in no meat). Yeah, I guess I like guys who can cook. I’m kind of a healthy menu girl (as in I can choose nutritious items off a menu). After we ate, we took off our clothes super-slowly and got into bed and we did ‘it’. He was excellent, and so was I. The other thing I should confess about Ryan is that he’s well-endowed, and he was rather shy about it. How sweet is that? Come on, how adorable is that? Of course I was thrilled. Let’s just say I gave him lots of praise.

  I don’t know whether Heather cared about the size of his cock, because we never talked about intimate stuff like that and she never said anything about him as a lover. The surprise was worth it. I’m not the same in bed as any of my friends—no one is the same in bed as their friends. Okay, so in my opinion; most guys who are well-endowed have matching egos. And it can get boring when they wave it in your face and tell you how terrifically fortunate you are. That happened once, not twice, and luckily not with Ryan.

  Anyway, it was a weekend-stand, vs. a one-night stand. I called him once trying to get us to do ‘it’ again, not because I was horny (okay, probably I was) but more because I just didn’t want it to be a weekend stand. But it never happened again. Go figure.

  Months later Heather dropped me as friend, not because “I did it” with her ex-boyfriend (they had been broken up for three years), but because I didn’t tell her. The idea of me calling her up and telling her that it ‘only’ happened because of a sex dream I had, not because I had ever, ever wanted Ryan—seemed impossible. Friendships end when one person chooses to dump it lock-stock-and-barrel. It ends like a death, non-retrievable, that much I learned from that.

  Paloma, on the other hand, is the opposite. She’s so proud of being a Puerto Rican and bred in NYC that if I had slept with one of her ex-boyfriends, she wouldn’t care, nor would she ever take it personally. I know that for sure, because she caught one of her ex-boyfriends eyeing my acting headshot that was nailed to her wall. He asked her to set him up with me, because he was going to be visiting LA and she called me up, saying, “Vivien, if you do him, you better be good, because otherwise, I’ll have to make up for it.” I pretended I was going to be away filming on location. The real reason I don’t like remakes are because the first movie should stand as it is, unless it was terrible. As in life, I act the same. The Ryan sexual weekend ‘mini movie’ was enough!

  “Goodbye, Cleveland,” I shouted out of the car window as Shadow and I headed for Pennsylvania. Some of the movies filmed in that state are Rocky, Boys on the Side, Blue Valentine, I Am Number Four (I saw it, because the lead actor looked cute) and The Sixth Sense. There’s a line in The Sixth Sense, where the character Cole Sear says, “Some magic’s real.” I guess I like to believe that about my own life.

  The road sign read ENTERING HARRISBURG. Hello Pennsylvania!

  I had booked us in a room at the Comfort Inn in Harrisburg for three reasons: it was close to Hershey Park, the Hershey chocolate stores, and the Harrisburg State Hospital. After checking into our wonderful room, I took Shadow around the dog-friendly grounds, and then headed off for chocolate. Okay, so probably the Swiss make the best chocolate in the world, but for old fashion, yummy American milk chocolate—hands down it’s Hershey.

  The movies that have had ‘ch
ocolate themes’ that I’ve seen so far are, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, (Como Aqua Para Chocolate) Like Water for Chocolate, Forest Gump, Matilda and Blood & Chocolate. Going to an amusement park is usually more of a ‘couple’ thing to do, but I didn’t care. Milton S. Hershey created the Hershey Park, and the chocolate factory. I mean, he just had to have been a very enjoyable, ‘yummy,’ man.

  I bought myself tickets for the amusement rides. I went on my first roller coaster at Coney Island when I was six and now I can never get enough. So I went on the Fahrenheit three times; the Comet once and didn’t throw up. It’s really satisfying to scream at the top of my lungs in mid-air. I think doctors and shrinks should make amusement parks mandatory, once a month, for all people trying to juggle their humanness. And I did it while eating an almond-covered Hershey bar. Chocolate can replace sex, sometimes. Wow, how much fun I had and the sight from above is a bird’s eye view.

  Back at the Comfort Inn, I fed Shadow and ate a tofu walnut salad I had bought at a health food store along the way. I rested, and then put on my black jeans with the sewn-on patch ‘LOVE IS’, my black long sleeve shirt, and my Nike sneakers. I was headed to the Harrisburg State Hospital, the location central to the movie Girl Interrupted. Okay, so not to get morbid, depressed or suicidal—I’ve only seen the movie five times, and the actress part of me thinks I was supposed to be in it. Go figure! I decided to take Shadow with me; he could sit in the car while I walked around the grounds.

  The hospital had opened in 1851 because of the efforts of a female humanitarian named Dorothea Dix, but had since closed. Crazy is crazy, and, well, this was on my movie-location-across America-trip list, and I was about to cross it off. It was a quick drive and I parked near the entrance. Bizarre, it looks just like it did in the movie. I stood there, watching the movie scenes fly past me. I have an auto replay in my mind for films, but not for TV.

  In the film Girl Interrupted, the character Lisa says, “If I could have any job in the world I’d be a professional Cinderella.” I stood there, not caring if one person heard me as I said, “I wish that, too!” Actually no one was around: it was deserted. I think one of the buildings was being used as a government office, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. In a way, I felt as if the mentally ill, the mentally challenged, and the others who had inhabited this complex had left their ‘ghosts’ behind. I stood motionless and silent; I think just maybe I could have heard their pleas. But who knows. I think too much!

  So I took a Facebook shot of myself in front of the engraved sign HARRISBURG STATE HOSPITAL. The best way to show my trip across America was by uploading photos to Facebook wherever I stopped, I’ll admit that Shadow was in the majority of them, but he’s a very photogenic dog. Before going to bed, I put on my all white Hollywood bikini and went swimming in the totally outstanding Comfort Inn pool—feeling a little like a half-sane Cinderella.

  13

  SEX

  Shadow and I drove fast towards New York State, listening to Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits; it was time to get into the city and be off my movie-location-road-trip. Forget about the movies filmed in NYC; there are too many to list, and besides, home doesn’t count. Hello New York! I’m back!

  Paloma’s place on the Upper East Side was my first stop. My dear, big apple—my beautiful, overcrowded, noisy city. With Paloma’s friendship, I have never had to worry about being ‘perfect’ or failing her, because, as she once told me, “Friendship is about connecting. When it’s thick, it’s thick, when it’s thin, it’s thin, but it don’t ever have to be broken.” I felt like crying when she said that, but I stopped myself. Sometimes I just stop myself from feeling things that are too multi-layered, mysterious and profound.

  Paloma is 5’3”, curvy beyond curvy—and she has the ‘best’ Latin skin. I mean, it’s the best. If she ever had a pimple, I never saw it. She’s got thick, firm thighs, 32 B boobs, a shapely butt, and she likes clothes that stick to her figure; she hides nothing. Her hair is long and black, and the one time she cut it short, she sobbed for two whole weeks because she didn’t recognize herself. Paloma is pretty, with a capital P. Her father and mother have told her that, and, of course, guys and strangers on the street have, too. She’s just that pretty.

  Paloma was the first one to set out to learn about sex and I tried to follow her. By thirteen, we were into bras; she needed one and I was just hoping. She was into makeup before me. I’ll admit it—I covered myself up in black turtlenecks and baggy jeans. Anyway, we liked boys and we had crushes 24/7. It was around this time that fate stepped into our lives (we’d just turned fourteen), and we were introduced to a ‘sex lady’, an educated older woman, who oozed sex appeal. It happened like this: we were in Macy’s, looking at beautiful, fancy lace bras and underwear in bright colors. Okay, so I wore black on the outside, but I loved color. Bras that aren’t white or black, but are dark purple, butter yellow, or lime green are what I like to buy. Only I wasn’t buying them at the time, because I was flat-chested with nipples only. Paloma found a pair of sheer underwear on a Macy’s hanger. It was so unusual, so different to us, that we couldn’t help but giggle.

  “Why do women buy these, when they can just be naked?” Paloma asked. Remember she was fourteen.

  “It’s the chase, the tantalizing lure of the smell of your vagina that intrigues males,” said the Sex Lady, who looked older than our mothers, but not as old as a Grandmother.

  We both stared at her. She had un-brushed shoulder length brunette hair, tight jeans stuffed into brown knee-high leather boots, a sheer top showing her black bra. There were lines around her eyes, and her lips were glossy. She could have passed for a Broadway star. She was hauntingly beautiful and wild—we didn’t dare move.

  “You know, don’t you?” Paloma asked. God, how I wished I had been the one to ask.

  “Come on, we’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you girls some things. This is what I do. I help women understand their sexual joy,” she said.

  “Sexual joy?” Paloma asked.

  “Hmmm, yes,” she answered. She had been running a women’s sex group out of her cozy, West Village apartment for years. She taught women how to orgasm, how to free-up or maneuver their sexual power, even how to ask for pleasure. Oops—I’m jumping ahead.

  We followed her, our arms linked as we headed over to Elaine’s, on the Upper East Side at 57th street. That was the restaurant Woody Allen used in his film Manhattan (my father’s other favorite, one of the few he still owns as video, rather than DVD). FYI, the restaurant is no longer around. She bought us tall iced teas, not cocktails. And we ate something, only I can’t remember what, because she was telling us about orgasms and how we had to have our own; that if we didn’t, we’d be forever caught up in pleasing men and not ourselves—she said, that was the true difference between a sex life lived and a sex life served. Oh God!

  Most of what she said floated over my fourteen-year-old head. I had only fooled around with a boy (Eugene) when I was eight, playing hide the skin stick in the hole (a silly game), but it wasn’t bona fide sex. We had even tried dry humping like his mother and her bearded boyfriend had done, but we didn’t know how to do ‘it’. I was just into kissing and wanting to be kissed, and, well, hoping a teenage boy wouldn’t be pissed off that I was flat chested. I was even doing ‘titty enlarging exercises’ that Paloma’s fifteen-year-old neighbor Cleo taught me. I’m not alone, millions of other teenage girls have done exercises to make their boobs grow—I think.

  Paloma sat, elbows on the table, leaning towards the Sex Lady, trying to memorize all of ‘it’. I mean, she was the pupil with her teacher, while I played the part of the invisible teenage friend. So, it was natural that Paloma had an orgasm first, and fell for a guy in Washington Square Park and made him her first sex partner. Usually girls get their periods around twelve—not us. At sixteen she got her period, but I had to wait until I turned seventeen-and-a-half. By then my father had moved us to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I finished high school as an outsider
, a New Yorker craving for her city and her best friend. So finally, I screwed a teenage boy (a nobody) in a closet at party, just to do it. I didn’t orgasm; that came later with another guy—and on a bed.

  Paloma was in a ruby red dress, midnight black high heels, swinging a crimson leather bag and waiting in front of her Upper East Side building when I pulled up in the red BMW.

  “What a shock, wow, look at you, best friend!” she shouted. Paloma can make anyone feel welcomed; especially me, that’s the way she is. We hugged and she gave Shadow a dog bone. Paloma has two tiny teacup dogs, Spoon and Plate, but she had left them in her mother’s apartment so that Shadow could be the only dog.

  Paloma’s mother lives in the downstairs apartment. Her father left for five years, moved to Spanish Harlem and lived with two women, but one day he came back and no one said a thing. He still disappears, but only for three to four days a month. Paloma once said, “He’s probably got other kids,” but then she changed the subject, and I knew it was a closed topic. Before she passed away Paloma’s grandmother used to live in the apartment Paloma has now. When you get a rent controlled apartment in NYC, you keep it.

  I remembered how the Sex Lady had invited us to drop by her West Village brownstone, if we ever wanted to learn more, but we’d have to pay a small ‘fee’; those workshops were how she supported herself. She told us that sex wasn’t ‘free,’ that it came with a price. That price was pleasure or pain.

  “Like crying?” Paloma had asked.

  “No, pleasure is about erotic joy, erotic stimulation. If you cry after sex, it has to be because you felt pleasure deeply. Negative emotions brought into sex will ruin the pleasure,” the Sex Lady had told us.

  “I’m not going to be negative,” Paloma told her.

  I don’t know why, but I couldn’t say anything. I guess I was too worried that I’d end up a failure in bed.