THE DIARY WAS RENEE’S IDEA. SHE RAN ACROSS THIS NOTEBOOK at Walgreens last week and decided on the spot that it was time for me to start writing things down. Just so you’ll know, it’s a Mr. Woods notebook, the spiral kind, with a green cardboard cover and the little bastard himself gazing wistfully from his hole in the tree trunk. Renee took this as a major omen. That evening over dinner she made such a solemn ceremony out of giving it to me that I felt like Moses on Mount Sinai. Since then, so help me, she hasn’t stopped peeping at me sideways, watching my every move, waiting breathlessly for the muse to strike.
I probably shouldn’t start until my period is over, just to keep the pissing and moaning to a minimum, but Renee says that’s exactly the time I should be writing. Some journal expert she saw on Oprah says all the important stuff happens while you’re feeling like a piece of shit; you just don’t realize it until later. I’ve got my doubts—serious ones—but I’m willing to risk it if you are.
At the moment, Renee is pretending to be engrossed in America’s Most Wanted. Though she’s all the way across the room, curled up on the sofa like some huge Himalayan kitten, I can almost feel her breath on my neck as I set pen to paper. The pressure is enormous, but I’ll try to muddle through, since it seems to mean so much to her.
Who knows? Maybe she’s right. Maybe there is a movie in my life. Maybe some brilliant young writer/director will discover these pages someday and see the perfect little film he or she has always wanted to make. And when that happens, who else but me could possibly play me? (After I’ve lost a few pounds, that is, and had my teeth capped.) Cadence Roth would join the ranks of Sophia Loren, Ann Jillian, Shirley MacLaine, and a handful of other actresses who’ve had the honor of portraying themselves on-screen. And due to the “special nature” of the material, the Academy would fall all over itself at Oscar time. I’d be a natural for talk shows too, and it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a sitcom spun off from the movie.
Of course, the real reason Renee is pushing this is because she knows she’ll be part of the story. Yesterday, when we were sorting the laundry, she told me in all earnestness that Melanie Griffith would be her number one choice to play her in the movie. That’s not as farfetched as you might think, actually. Renee’s a little broader in the beam than Melanie, and her features are less delicate, but the general effect of soft, pink, babyfied sweetness is pretty much the same. (If you’re reading this, Renee, that’ll teach you to snoop.) At any rate, we’d have our pick of voluptuous blonde co-stars if we came up with the right script and director. That’s a big if, I know, but it never hurts to have a dream or two in the pipeline.
We could sure use the cash. My last job was in November, four whole months ago, a half-hour infomercial in which I played—say it ain’t so, Cady—a jar of anticellulite cream. I have yet to see this epic aired. My guess is that the FDA finally caught up with the sleazebag from Oxnard who was fronting the operation and nailed him with a cease and desist. It’s just as well. Poor Renee, the last of the true believers, glopped the stuff on her thighs for three weeks and got nothing for her troubles but a nasty rash.
Renee, I should mention, brings home a modest paycheck from her job at The Fabric Barn, and that’s keeping us both in cornflakes at the moment. There’s no rent or even a mortgage, thank God, since I bought this house outright ten years ago with the pittance I made from Mr. Woods. Still, we’re feeling the pinch in this recession. While the wolf may not be at the door, he’s at least casing the neighborhood. Long gone are the days when Renee and I would treat ourselves to pedicures and pore cleansings at Hair Apparent, then tool into Hollywood for a night on the town.
Frankly, I’m beginning to feel a little trapped. Since I don’t drive, I’m fairly housebound while Renee’s at work, unless somebody else swings by on the way to God-knows-where. That’s the problem with the Valley: it isn’t near anything. I moved here when I was barely twenty, largely at the insistence of my mom, who got it into her thick Jewish skull that Studio City would be much safer than, say, West Hollywood—my personal choice. We lived here for seven years, Mom and me, right up to the day she died of a heart attack in the parking lot at Pack ’n Save.
I’d met Renee when I was shopping for mock leopardskin at The Fabric Barn. (I make all my own clothes, so I’ve haunted most of the outlets between here and West L.A.) I took to her right away, since she was the only clerk in the store who didn’t lose it completely when I walked in. She was so helpful and nice, and while she was cutting the fabric she told me a “dirty joke” that would only be dirty if you were twelve years old, maybe, and living in Salt Lake City. When I explained about the leopardskin, how Mom and me were planning to crash the premiere of Out of Africa, she got so excited you would’ve thought she was waiting on Meryl Streep herself.
“Gah,” she said, “that sounds so glamorous.”
I reminded her that we weren’t actually invited, that the jungle getup ploy was pretty much of a long shot.
“Still,” she said, “you’re gonna be there. You might even meet Robert Redford!”
I resisted the urge to tell her that I had already met Mr. Redford (and found him boring), back when Mom was working as an extra on the set of The Electric Horseman. To be perfectly honest, I wanted Renee to like me not for who I knew but for who I was. “Actually,” I told her, “it’s more of a business-promo thing. I’m an actress myself.”
“You are? Have I seen you in anything?”
My face betrayed nothing as I moved in for the score. “Did you see Mr. Woods?”
Renee’s big, soft mouth went slack with wonder. “You’re kidding! That’s my most favorite movie of all. I saw it four times when I was thirteen years old!”
I shrugged. “That was me.”
“Where? Which one?”
“C’mon.” I chuckled and bugged my eyes. “How many roles did they have for somebody my size?”
The poor baby reddened like crazy. “You mean…? Well, sure, but I thought that was…wasn’t that a mechanical thingamajig?”
“Not all the time. Sometimes it was a rubber suit.” I shrugged. “I wore the suit.”
“You swear to God?”
“Remember the scene where Mr. Woods leads the kids down to his hiding place by the creek?”
“Yeah.”
“That was me in there.”
Renee laid her scissors down and looked at me hard. “Really?”
I nodded. “Shvitzing like a pig.”
She giggled.
“Also,” I added, “the part at the end where they hug him goodbye.”
Her eyes, which are huge and Hershey brown, grew glassy with remembrance. She leaned against the wall for a moment, heaving a contented sigh as she folded her hands across her pillowy breasts. She reminded me somehow of a figure on a medieval tomb. “I just love that part.”
“I’m so glad,” I said, and really meant it, though I probably came off like Joan Crawford being gracious to her garbageman. Frankly, I’ve heard this sort of thing for a long time, so my responses have begun to sound canned to me.
Renee didn’t notice, though; she was staring into the distance, lost in her own elfin reverie. “And the next day, when Jeremy finds that acorn in his lunch box. Gah, that was so sad. I just sat out in the mall and cried all afternoon.” After a melancholy pause, her gaze swung back to me. “I even bought the doll. One of the life-size ones. I still have it. This is so amazing.”
“Did the eyes fall out?”
“Excuse me?”
“The doll,” I explained. “People tell me the eyes fall out.”
She shook her head, looking stricken and slightly affronted, like a mother who’d just been asked if her child showed signs of malnutrition. “No,” she said. “The eyes are fine.”
“Good.”
“Do you totally swear you’re him?”
I held up my palm. “Totally swear.”
“This is so amazing.”
When I finally left the store, Renee was my escort, keeping pace a little awkwardly, but obviously thrilled to be seen in my company. I could feel the eyes of the other clerks on us as we threaded our way through the upright rolls of silk and satin. I knew Renee would tell them about me afterwards, and that made me gloat on her behalf. These gawking idiots would find that her friendliness had actually counted for something; that she’d had the last laugh, after all; that she wasn’t the blonde airhead they had probably figured her for.
I became a regular at The Fabric Barn. Since none of my outfits requires more than a yard of material, Renee would save odd remnants she thought I’d like: bits of rich, dark velvet or peacock satin or pink pajama flannel imprinted with flamingos. She kept these finds in a box under the counter, and we’d skulk off to the storeroom with them as soon as I arrived, chortling like buccaneers with a fresh chest of doubloons. While I swathed myself in fabric, clowning shamelessly for my new old fan, Renee would perch on a packing crate and tell me long, convoluted stories about Ham.
Ham was the guy she lived with, a strapping, redheaded TV repairman whose likeness was captured on the baseball-sized photo button she wore on her purse. His real name was Arden Hamilton, which sounded classy, she thought, but none of his friends ever called him that. As near as I could make out, he spent most of his time on dirt bikes, but Renee was absolutely goofy over him. She fixed him box lunches every morning of the week, and—even more amazingly, I thought—didn’t care who knew it.
When Mom died I was a wreck. Not only had I lost my best friend and manager, but my dreaded Aunt Edie, Mom’s terminally uptight sister, swooped in from the desert “to take care of all the arrangements.” One of the things she’d hoped to arrange was my expeditious removal to Baker, California—the scene of my bleakest childhood memories. I would need someone to look after me, she said, and she had a perfectly nice Airstream trailer just going to waste behind her house. Why on earth didn’t I sell this run-down little cracker box and return to my hometown, where people still remembered and cared for me?
The hell of it was, I didn’t have a good answer for that. I did need someone to look after me, though God knows I never would have put it that way. Without someone to drive and manage the loftier household duties, I’d be marooned in no time amid a pile of empty Lean Cuisine boxes. What’s more, none of my friends at the time had the slightest need for a housemate. My best buddy, Jeff, the most likely candidate, was no longer single in the strictest sense of the word, having fallen in love several years earlier with a nurseryman from Silver Lake. The others were either officially married or confirmed loners or already making payments on a mortgage.
This was very much on my mind when Aunt Edie dropped me off at The Fabric Barn two days after Mom’s death. I was hardly in the mood for shopping, of course, but I needed something dark and dignified for the funeral, since a black-sequined cocktail dress was the only thing in my wardrobe that even came close. When I told Renee what I required and why, she led me with blank-faced dignity to the storeroom, where she burst into tears, fell to her knees, and flung her arms around me. I didn’t want to rebuff her, certainly, but I had to maintain some degree of control. I knew that once I started blubbering I wouldn’t be able to stop.
“It’s OK,” I said evenly, patting her shoulder.
Renee let go of me but stayed on her knees on the cold concrete floor, swiping at her mascara-smeared cheeks with the backs of her hands. I remember thinking, even in the midst of my bridled grief, that she looked like something out of Fellini, some gorgeous bad girl at a shrine, pouring out her sins to the Holy Mother.
To be honest, I was thrown by her histrionic response. I’d shopped at The Fabric Barn less than half a dozen times, and my relationship with Renee had remained on a friendly but professional level. Now, for the first time, I wondered how she really regarded me—as a valued customer whose mother had just died or as some sort of tragic curiosity, an orphaned freak? Her fandom was one thing, I felt; her pity, quite another.
“What’ll you do?” she asked.
“Handle it.”
This came out sounding cross, so I offered her a smile to soften it, which didn’t seem to work because she looked more desolate than ever and sank back with a sigh onto her big dairymaid haunches. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know it’s really none of my business.”
I told her as nicely as possible that I appreciated her concern.
She wiped her eyes again. “I didn’t mean to get weepy on you.”
“It’s OK.”
“Did you expect it?”
She meant Mom’s death, I realized eventually, so I explained that my family has a history of heart problems.
“But I mean…you didn’t think…?”
“No. Not then.”
Renee shook her head for a moment, then said: “Is it OK if I sit down?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
She gave me a lopsided, bleary-eyed smile. “I wasn’t sure what people do.”
“People do all sorts of things.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet.”
“So,” I said, trying to get us back on track, “you think there’s something in a nice crepe de chine?”
“Oh…right.” She was looking distracted, as if her thoughts had already wandered elsewhere.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“C’mon…spill it.”
“It seems so stupid now.”
“Renee, talk to me.”
She gave me the most pathetic little shrug. “It’s over, that’s all.”
“What is?”
“Me and Ham. He says I have to go.”
When she drenched me with her tears all over again, sobbing so hard that she became incoherent, it dawned on me why she’d been so quick to participate in my mourning—and which one of us was really the orphan.
I won’t try to build the suspense here, because you already know what happened. Renee moved in a week later, three years ago next June, complete with seventeen pairs of pumps, her Christian exercise tapes, and the aforementioned Mr. Woods doll. (As I write this, the rubbery little wretch leers down at me from his niche in the stereo cabinet.) It was Renee, by the way, who insisted we room together, though I told her from the start I had serious reservations. We hardly knew each other, after all, and I felt that the stars in her eyes might have blinded her to the practical realities of living with someone like me. For better or worse, I am not your standard-issue roommate. I just didn’t think she could handle it.
I was wrong. Renee slipped into my life as deftly and unceremoniously as Mom had slipped out. To Aunt Edie, she became my reason for staying here: the “old friend” with a car who would love to room with me and was not opposed to paying rent. She even drove me to Baker for the funeral, where, predictably, she wept buckets during the eulogy, much to the bafflement of the other mourners. By the time we got back to Los Angeles we were a functioning unit. Renee had become an old hand at waiting for me to climb down from the car, or asking the waitress at Denny’s for a phone book for me to sit on, or fending off the small children and large dogs I invariably attract in public places. She was natural and un-nursy about this too, as if she performed these courtesies for all her friends.
Better still, she never stopped being my fan. If anything, her fascination with my career seemed to escalate as we settled into comfy sisterhood. One day I showed her my listing in The Guinness Book of World Records. She was so impressed that she made a Xerox of the page and kept a copy in her purse, so that the girls at The Fabric Barn—or the post office or the checkout counter at Ralph’s, for all I know—could see for themselves that she, Renee Marie Blalock, was now sharing a house with the World’s Shortest Mobile Adult Human.
I feel a little fraudulent about this, since the Guinness listing I showed her was about four years out of date. In 1985 the World’s Shortest title was copped by a twenty-nine-inch Yugoslavian, who appeared, so help me God, out of thin air. Mom and I went so far as to call the Guinness offices in New York to ask if this foreign pretender had legs, and we were given the most incredible runaround. One of these days, having bragged once too often, Renee will be challenged by some troublemaker with a more recent edition, and I’ll have some serious explaining to do.
It’s well past dark now, and a nice spring rain has begun to fall, sluicing off the awnings and shellacking the banana leaves just outside our sliding glass door. We have a pink spotlight on that part of the yard, so the general effect, if you squint your eyes just so, is of a rosy-hued aquarium. I half expect to see a school of huge red fish, or a giant crimson octopus, maybe, come shimmering past the door.
Renee has turned off the TV and is studying an old issue of Us as if she’s expecting a pop quiz. She hasn’t spied on me in a long time, so I figure she’s pleased with my activity, or at least has decided that benign neglect is the best policy. I’m lying stomach-down on my favorite cushion, my “tuffet,” as Renee insists on calling it, even though I explained to her years ago that a tuffet is either a small stool or a tuft of grass. The cushion is covered in a dusty-rose tapestry depicting unicorns and a maiden with a conical hat. It isn’t antique or anything, but I like it because it fits my body, and because Mom gave it to me on my birthday the year before she died.
I’ll tell you about the rest of the room, in case you need it for set decoration. Against one wall there’s an old green corduroy sofa (where Renee is sitting), which needs reupholstering in the worst kind of way. We’ve covered the most gruesome splits with strategically positioned pillows, though God only knows who we’re fooling. The bookshelf next to it is one of those cheapo wicker numbers, the bottom two units of which are reserved for my own library: a boxed Tolkien, half a dozen recent star bios, and a book of Mapplethorpe portraits that’s so huge I peruse it only when I’m in need of serious exercise.
The walls of the living room are painted Caribbean Coral, a shade that looks subtle and warm on the little paper strip at the hardware store but is distinctly reminiscent of a whore’s nail polish when actually applied. We both hate it and plan to redecorate one of these days, but the money just isn’t there at the moment. I’d like to try for something stark and Japanesy, but Renee seems to have her heart set on pink-and-green chintz, a Laura Ashley nightmare. I may have to be firm with her.
There are three lights in the room—a plain brass floor lamp, a ceramic black-panther lamp with a ball-fringed shade, and a small plastic modern thing that clips onto the stereo cabinet just below the shelf where Mr. Woods lives. I bought that damned panther on an impulse five years ago at a junk shop on Melrose, mostly because my friend Jeff, who was with me at the time, said it was an extremely valuable example of fifties kitsch. Others have been less convinced. Mom wanted to toss it the moment she saw it, and Renee has seconded the motion on several occasions. I think I’m beginning to agree with them; there’s something really depressing about it.
Later, in bed.
Renee is in her room now, giggling on the phone with her latest squeeze, a guy named Royal she met at The Sizzler last week. She has yet to bring him around here, but I’ve got a great mental image of him already: rumpled black clothes, an iodine-colored tan, and long hair slicked back to a ratty little ponytail. Renee says he’s a Scientologist and makes his own beer, and she seems enormously impressed by both things. Sometimes I just don’t know about her.
A little while ago she came in here and told me that I’d just bounced a check to Dr. Baughman, my dentist, for work he did three months ago. When I told her I hadn’t heard the phone ring, she looked confused for a moment, then said: “Oh…no, it didn’t. I knew about it earlier, but I didn’t wanna spoil your concentration.”
While I was writing our opus, she meant. Now it would only spoil my sleep.
“His helper, that girl with the big eyebrows…”
“Wendy,” I said.
“Right. She called me at work today.”
I could actually feel my face turn hot. “She didn’t try here first?”
“Well, no…I mean, she might’ve, but…”
“She didn’t. I was here all day.”
“Oh.”
“In the future, Renee, would you please tell her that I’m a big girl and can handle my own finances?” Maybe this sounds a little bitchy, but I get so tired of being patronized by people who think that small means dependent. Even my own mom, may she rest in peace, pulled this shit on occasion. Once, when I was about twenty-five and we were visiting Universal, a casting director, this really hip lady who seemed to like me a lot, offered to take us to lunch at the commissary. Mom put on her best Donna Reed face and said: “That’s nice of you, thanks. I just fed her.” I didn’t say a word at the time, but I was pissed at my mother for days. How could she have made me sound so much like a hamster?
Renee looked cowed. “She didn’t really call about you. She was confirming my appointment tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“She was just…you know, killing two birds with one stone.”
This made me feel a little better, but not much. Wendy still should’ve called me personally. “How much do I owe?” I asked.
“Two hundred and seventy-four dollars.”
“Shit.”
Renee ducked her head, and I was pretty sure I knew what was coming next. “I could loan you some.”
“No,” I said firmly. “Thanks.”
“Maybe I should start paying rent. It isn’t really fair that…”
“Fuck that, Renee. You do enough as it is.” I smoothed the bedclothes, reviewing the options. I’d bounced three checks in a week, and there were no reinforcements in sight. Another loan from Renee would be a temporary solution at best. When all was said and done, I needed work and fast if I was to maintain my sacred independence.
“What about Aunt Edie?” Renee asked.
“What about her?”
“Couldn’t she loan you some?”
I gave her a menacing look, knowing she knew better. The slightest whiff of my impoverishment would have Aunt Edie on my doorstep in three minutes. And nothing would please her more. I might be desperate, but not that desperate. There are worse fates than starvation.
“Well…” Renee fidgeted with the neck of her sweater, fresh out of solutions. “Want some cocoa, then?”
“Get outa here. Go call your studmuffin.”
“But what are you gonna…?”
“It’s OK,” I assured her, shooing her out of the room. “I’ll give Leonard a call first thing.”
Leonard is my agent, the source of all hope and despair. I signed on with him after finishing Mr. Woods. The first job he landed for me was a role in a horror flick called Bugaboo, in which I played a zombie and appeared on screen for exactly four seconds toward the end. An unsuspecting housewife—Suzi Kenton, remember her?—opens the door of her refrigerator and finds yours truly crouching on the bottom shelf next to the orange juice.
This was a real advance for me, believe it or not, because you actually got to see my face (albeit gray and scabby-looking) and it filled the entire screen. According to Aunt Edie, who never tells a lie, that one brief, shining moment in the light of the Kelvinator was so recognizably mine that theatergoers in Baker actually stood and cheered. This isn’t possible, since all they’ve got there is a drive-in, but I knew what the old bat was trying to say. In the eyes of the people she cared about, I was legitimate at last—a real movie star—no longer just a dwarf in rubber. I won’t pretend it didn’t feel good.
Since then everything and nothing has happened. There was a brief period in the late eighties when I worked in performance. I was more or less adopted by a space in downtown Los Angeles, where I was in great demand by artists doing pieces on alienation and absurdity. They were gentle, surprisingly naive kids, who took endless pains to guard against what they referred to as “the exploitation of the differently abled.” This got to be old fast, so I pulled two of them aside one day and told them not to sweat it, that I was an actress first and foremost, that of course I would play an oil-slick mutant for them, that I would sit on a banana and spin if it was in the goddamned script and they paid me something for it.
This seemed to relax them, and we got along famously after that. My mom, who thought Liberace was avant-garde, came to one of the presentations and left in horror and confusion, though she pretended afterwards to find it “interesting.” I have no doubt Renee would feel the same way if I were still in performance, so it’s probably just as well that I’m not. Besides, the money was pretty awful (if not nonexistent), and the work was unconnected with the Industry, so I was getting nowhere fast.
Except that one night we were visited by a star: Ikey St. Jacques, the black child actor who used to play the adorable seven-year-old on What It Is! Little Ikey sat in the very back of the bleachers, all duded up in silver and burgundy, in the company of an extremely long-legged adult female. Word of his presence spread through the space like wildfire. The other cast members did their best to look blasé about it, of course, but they were clearly stunned that such a recognizable icon was in our midst. Frankly, I’d had my suspicions about the kid for years, so it didn’t surprise me a bit when he came backstage and confessed.
It wasn’t that easy for him to do, either, logistically speaking, since he was forced to wade through the refuse of the night’s performance, great gooey wads of surgical gauze smeared with stage blood and about two dozen rubber baby dolls in varying states of dismemberment. His friend was waiting for him in the car, he said, but he just had to tell me that I was wonderful, a great actress, that he’d been totally inspired by my performance, since he himself was a little person and really seventeen years old, not seven. I shrugged and said, “What else is new?” and we both laughed and became buddies on the spot, exchanging phone numbers. His real friends called him Isaac, he said, so I should do the same. Before he left, he told me some great stories about other closet midgets in Hollywood, some of which, I promise you, would curl your hair.
Imagine my excitement when Isaac called a week later to say that he’d proposed a little people episode for What It Is! and that he wanted me to guest star. (That was just the way he put it.) I was to play a clown who meets Ikey at a Dallas mall and teaches him about the true nature of compassion. How I was to accomplish this inspiring feat of liberalism Isaac didn’t say, but he assured me the role would be both touchingly hilarious and cutting-edge, a surefire candidate for the Emmy.
No sooner had I phoned half the population of Baker to spread the good news than Isaac called to say the project had been killed—by his own producers, no less. They were desperately afraid that another little person on the show might provoke a discussion of the subject in the press, thereby blowing Ikey’s cover. It was just too risky, they said, given that the kid’s voice had already changed drastically and he was “in grave danger of becoming a grotesque.” Isaac had fought for the idea tooth and nail, or so he assured me, but the powers that be were unbending. My long-awaited showcase role never even got to the script stage.
To his credit, Isaac called out of the blue about six months ago to see how I was doing, but I didn’t have much to report, career-wise. I had picked up some money doing phone solicitations for a carpet-cleaning service in Reseda, but the work had proved boring beyond belief. My boss there had said some nice things about my speaking voice, however, so it made me consider the possibility of radio work. Since Isaac seemed to think that might be a good approach, I phoned Leonard Lord, my intrepid agent, and asked him to keep an eye open. He told me his contacts in that arena were minimal, but he’d put the word out and see what he could do. I haven’t heard from him since.
That’s enough for tonight. It’s late and I’m beginning to depress myself. The rain clouds have shifted a bit, and there’s the oddest little nail paring of a moon hanging in my bedroom window. I’ll concentrate on that and the nice warm breeze that’s rippling my curtains. Things could be worse, after all, and I’ve always been able to cope. I have my friends and my talent and my commitment, and I know there’s a place for me in the firmament of Hollywood.
If not, I’ll get a new agent.