THE WORST COLLATERAL damage from all these moves was my education. When I went back to Fairfax to sign up for tenth-grade courses after our short stint in Brentwood, there were none available, at least not to me. I needed to make up credits, the school explained, and those courses were all filled. Why no one had told me about my lack of credits before I have no idea. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe I didn’t.
The choices Fairfax presented to me were either to take noncredit courses like driver’s ed or to switch to a special “continuation” school that was attached to Fairfax and attended by kids who were misfits or had drug issues or learning disabilities. I didn’t fit into any of those categories, but that was the school I opted to attend, and I surprised myself by actively liking it and doing quite well there.
One thing was clear: I had to figure out a way to support myself so I could start leading my own life and escape from the crazy unpredictability of my mother’s. And that’s exactly what the continuation school offered: I entered a program called “four and four,” which entailed four hours of classes and four hours of paid work, for which you earned credit. My very first job, which I got through a girlfriend at school, was with a collection agency. My slightly husky voice made me sound older than my age, and every afternoon I called and threatened people to pay up, or else. I kept waiting for my mom and dad to appear on the call lists.
It felt good to have my own pocket money and not have to rely on my mother, and it enabled me to enroll in an acting class—which turned out to be my salvation.
Despite her financial straits, from time to time my mom and her friends would hit L.A. hot spots like Le Dome, where Jackie Collins always went for lunch with her friends. We were there one night when a man who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties came over to our table and introduced himself as Val Dumas. He said if we liked Le Dome, we should come by his restaurant, Mirabelle, sometime. He had a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance; I remember thinking he resembled Bijan, that quintessentially eighties icon who was always splashed across billboards in a tuxedo flogging his perfume. Val was a tall, elegant man with an air of superiority or money—or both—dressed in a soft button-down shirt and neatly pressed slacks, and Italian loafers. He chatted us up for a while, and then when my mom couldn’t find her car keys, he offered us a ride home in his brown Mercedes but insisted I sit next to him in the passenger seat.
I had lunch with him at Mirabelle not long afterward. There were lots of plants, it had a relaxed, California-casual vibe, and the whole thing felt fun and harmless: it was broad daylight, and we were in public. I didn’t question why a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a fifteen-year-old girl.
He started showing up at school, waiting for me outside in his car after classes let out. It was easier not having to take the bus, and often we’d stop at Mirabelle and have something to eat at his regular table. I told myself he was like a friend of the family, but there was something about him that made me slightly uneasy—an unsettling sense I had that he wouldn’t always be so helpful and pleasant, a vague anxiety that there was something not quite right. I began to make excuses to avoid him.
Then one day when I got home from school he was there—inside the apartment, waiting for me. I felt the blood drain from my body. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Where’s my mom?”
I have blotted out the exact sequence of events—the details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my own home with a man three times my age and twice my size, to him raping me.
For decades, I didn’t even think of it as rape. I thought of it as something I caused, something I felt obligated to do because this man expected it from me—I had let him expect it from me. I had eaten at his restaurant, and he had chauffeured me home from school. In my fifteen-year-old mind, I deserved what happened.
I couldn’t see that—as someone with no guidance or grounding, no sense of worth, someone who’d spent her whole life contorting herself to meet other people’s expectations—I was an easy mark for a predator.
And I had nobody to protect me.
In recent years, I have watched in awe as woman after woman has come forward to tell her story of sexual assault—amazed both by the courage of these women and by the attacks on their character that have inevitably followed. And yet people ask why it takes women years or decades to tell others what happened to them. All I can say is that anyone asking that question has never been raped. When you are sexually assaulted in a culture that tells you over and over again that admitting your victimization makes you a suspect—makes you a liar and a slut who deserves to have your life put under a microscope for all to see—guess what? You keep it a secret. And as with any trauma, denial is a natural human response. Things we can’t handle, things that are just too frightening and destabilizing, the psyche suppresses until the day comes when we can deal with them.
Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.
LESS THAN A week later, my mother told me we were moving again. I was happy to be getting out of the space where this ugly thing had happened to me—maybe if I was no longer surrounded by the walls of the apartment, I would stop feeling so disgusting, stop flashing back to staring at those walls while he was on top of me. But to my horror, Val showed up to help us move. I sat in the back seat of the Mercedes of the man who raped me, my mother sat with him up front, and he drove us to the cluster of Mediterranean-style duplexes off La Cienega where we were moving. Now there was nowhere safe to go: he’d be able to find me.
I felt like I was going to throw up as I got out of the car. Ginny was faster, plowing inside with her boxes, and in the seconds we were alone, Val turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” I stared at him blankly. And he said it again: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”
I’ll never know if Ginny accepted five hundred dollars from Val explicitly as payment for permission to fuck me. Perhaps it was murkier than that—perhaps he gave her some money under the pretense of helping out a friend, as a loan on the deposit for the new apartment. For all I know she’d already paid him back by having sex with him herself. But what is certain is that she gave this man the key to the apartment she shared with her fifteen-year-old daughter. I’ve mothered three fifteen-year-old girls: the idea of giving a grown man with dubious intentions unsupervised access to them is as inconceivable to me as it is repugnant. That’s not what a mother does.
And what I knew that day—what I know to this day—is that though Val may have given Ginny money with no clear discussion of what he would get in return, it’s also entirely possible Ginny knew exactly what he wanted, and it’s possible she agreed he could have it.
“How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.
SOON AFTER WE moved to La Cienega I met a musician in my acting class, a pedal steel guitar player named Tom Dunston who’d been touring with Billy Joel. He was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, with a gentle presence. He immediately made me feel at ease. We started hanging out, and one night when we were alone I started to take off my clothes. Tom stopped me. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We can just be together.”
I told him about my mother’s suicide attempts, and her using me as bait. I didn’t talk about what had happened with Val. I never talked with anyone about what had happened with Val. By the