My mother survived that incident. But her faux suicide attempts became a regular occurrence, a routine. Back would come the emergency medical teams with their sirens and gurneys, and off we’d go to get her stomach pumped again. She didn’t want to die: she was crying out for help, and she wanted attention. Often, her overdoses followed some sort of devastating interaction with my dad. The man I thought of as my dad, anyway.
I was in a constant state of anxious vigilance. I never knew what I’d find when I walked through that apartment door: my mother’s self-destructiveness was boundless, narcissistic, and unstoppable. And yet I was developing armor: I took comfort in my ability to deal with her crises and the knowledge that I could handle whatever came my way. I never felt I was going to fall apart, never turned to anybody and said, “I can’t take this.” I could get through anything she threw at me: if she tried to kill herself; if I had to peel her off of a bar stool; if she told me Danny wasn’t my real dad. I would survive, no matter what. But I would survive by being on guard. And then, when crisis struck, by exiting my body: functional but frozen.
Everyone knew about my mother in our apartment complex, of course, and I adopted an invulnerable, self-sufficient persona in response. My character was on her own, unfettered by curfews or rules. Every time I tossed off “My mother doesn’t care if I . . .” or “I can do whatever I want . . .,” I rode the wave of that dubious freedom, but I also felt the emptiness of it. I did not feel particularly sympathetic toward Ginny. Even as a fourteen-year-old I realized that her self-absorption and “suicide attempts” came at my expense.
Her accelerating self-destructiveness lent an urgency to my attempts to define myself in opposition to her. I’m a different person, I kept telling myself. I’m not like that. But the insecurity that had been nipping at my heels was intensifying.
I was the girl whose mother was always trying to kill herself. I was the girl who’d been abandoned by two fathers. My wandering eye suddenly seemed like an obvious physical manifestation of the truth about me: I was just off, and everyone could tell. I had surgery just before I turned fifteen that finally fixed my eye, but in my own mind, I remained marked as broken.
All of this coincided with puberty. My transformation from a skinny, lazy-eyed kid to a young woman who men desired was confusing. The unfurling of my sexuality was linked for me on the deepest level with shame. It would be decades before I could even begin to disentangle the two.
I STARTED SPENDING time with a couple of guys who lived down the hall and were very friendly to me. They were older, in their mid- to late twenties, but I thought I could impress them and join their crowd by acting cooler and more mature than I actually was. I was alone a lot in my mother’s apartment, and sometimes they’d stop by to visit, or I’d wander down the hall and hang out with them at their place.
One evening, I was in their apartment drinking beer, and we were all flirting. It was fun at first: I was still quite innocent, just beginning to discover the effect I had on guys. But I wasn’t in any way prepared for the consequences. One of them made a move, and the other one disappeared. That was evidently what he had wanted from me all along, and somehow, I felt I had no choice, that it was my job to give it to him—like I was obligated to fulfill his expectation just because he harbored it. I blamed myself for acting provocative and older than my years.
Afterward, I was left with the hollow, empty feeling of being used. A new kind of lonely.
GINNY WAS NOT really interested in how I was doing at my vast new school, Fairfax High, and she didn’t care about my report card or even seem to register that such a thing existed. When we spent time together, it was as if we were a pair of girlfriends out on the town. She never offered me any guidance; there was no talk about college, for example, or discussion of my future. Instead, the conversation revolved around how unfairly life had treated her, what she had missed out on, and how she wanted to find the kind of relationship she deserved.
She succeeded for a while when she took up with a great guy named Ron Felicia, who owned a recording studio. They actually had a seemingly healthy relationship, and he really grounded her for the short time they were together. For a few months, we even moved in with him. I didn’t have to change schools, though I wouldn’t have minded—I wasn’t really involved in anything at Fairfax High. By that point, I was numb to the whole high school scene and was just trying to get through it. I’d managed to make few friends out of the thousand kids who were my classmates. (I’m sorry not to have crossed paths with Flea or Anthony Kiedis, who were at Fairfax at that time but whom I didn’t befriend until decades later—though I seriously doubt I was cool enough to run with their crowd.)
Through Ron, I met a guy who was kind of a pretty-girl-type agent. It was difficult to get work because I was inexperienced and underage: Helen Hunt, Jodie Foster—people like that had all been acting since they were very young. I was on the outside looking in at the entertainment industry, and as I had always done, I learned by the fake-it-till-you-make-it method. I’d love to say that the underlying drive came from a fascination with plays that I encountered in school, or from the thrill of performing classic roles in drama class. I wish that was how I came to acting, but, in truth, Hollywood was like one more school I had to figure out, one more system to game. I chipped away at it, trying to grasp how it worked. It would be years before I made a living as an actress, but that first agent did get me a small role on a TV show called Kaz playing a thirteen-year-old prostitute. My big first line that got me my SAG card was, “Fifty dollars, mister.”
As much as my mother wanted a relationship with a kind man, and Ron Felicia was that, she couldn’t sustain it. Instead, she felt compelled to ruin it and managed to—dramatically—when Ron came home one day to find her in bed with my dad. Ron was understandably furious, punched Danny, and threw my mother out. She and I hastily moved to a little studio in Brentwood right off Sunset—I drive by it all the time, and I always feel a little pit in my stomach.
There were always men. Ginny and I got a lot of attention from them when we went out together at night. I remember sitting at the bar at Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a trendy Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood. She was drinking too much and eyeing the guys at the bar flirtatiously. Whenever I recognized her boozy, blowsy come-hither look setting in I cringed. One of the men took the bait and came over to us. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. (It was Ginny’s favorite question.) “No.” She grinned. “This is my daughter.” The man protested that she couldn’t possibly be old enough to be my mother. And really, she wasn’t: she was a thirty-four-year-old woman with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She chuckled as he leered at me.
I was beginning to resent my role as her bar companion; it seemed like she was just using me as bait for these men—and as her designated driver, albeit one without a license.
When I look back, it’s incredible that we never got caught, but then again, in those days Ginny could have taught a master class at defying expectations (and odds). For somebody who was getting by on a thread, all the apartments we moved into, though small, were clean, often newly built, and generally in safe neighborhoods. We were never “slumming it.” Maybe she was continuing the game she and my father used to play, staying one jump ahead of the landlords by using aliases, but whatever the reason, in the first two years after my parents split, we moved seven times. One move was a matter of safety, after a guy she’d been dating got angry at her: I came home from school one day to find all the electrical wires cut and the smell of urine in our apartment. He’d come by and marked every corner of the place, like a dog.
The stress of being on the run from apartment to apartment was contributing, I’m sure, to my mother’s instability as well as my own anxiety. One night when I came home late, she was waiting by the door. “Where have you been? You know you’re supposed to be home by eleven,” she shrieked. Home by eleven? Never once had she mentioned a curfew or asked where