Michael was as good to me as Nikki had been. After helping me find an apartment, he took me shopping. I foolishly squandered five thousand of the six thousand dollars I had saved from my modeling gigs on a white loveseat that was big enough to sleep in. I didn’t have enough money left over for a real bed, so I bought a mattress. A distressed coffee table from Modernism Artisan Furniture on Ventura completed my decorating.
Before I knew it, Michael and I were breaking in the mattress together. And, suddenly, I was dating the male Nikki. He was a sweet, nurturing, incredibly bright guy and a marketing genius who was in the process of starting a handbag line (which I now see at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus). Suddenly, I was feeling good about this whole L.A. caper. For once in my life, I thought things might be easy for a while.
The only problem with living alone was being alone. When Michael came over, he’d just have sex and leave. He never spent the night. I wanted someone to stay with me because throughout my life, from my brother to Jack, I had always slept with someone in bed beside me. It made me feel safe.
To substitute for human companionship, I bought a little television. Every night, I slept on the loveseat in my small windowless living room with the TV on. Soon, it was my only friend. Michael came over less and less. As usual, my dependency on him was driving him away. But I had learned my lesson from Jack; and when I complained to Michael about the distance he seemed to be putting between us and he didn’t do anything about it, I cut him out of my life. That was my new attitude: either you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus. I wasn’t going to put up with half-assed commitment.
Now I had no one. I had no car, no money, and no survival skills. It was a fate I met kicking and screaming every day. My father had always warned me that the most dangerous place for a woman to be alone was a parking lot. And my new apartment had a desolate gated underground parking garage that looked like the set of a slasher film. The only way to get to the apartments was through the garage. A little doorway there led to a narrow, dimly lit staircase. I was perpetually scared that someone was going to jump me.
When I called photographers for work, they told me they couldn’t shoot me for another three months because my pictures were, once again, saturating the magazines. With the little work I got, I could afford rent and some food. I refused to go back to stripping, though the temptation for the easy money was strong. I would sooner have walked dogs.
Every night, I would order food from a little Italian restaurant around the corner and then leave it half-eaten on the floor as I cried myself to sleep, just like when I was a little girl. One evening, I opened the door to let the deliveryman in. It was always the same guy: a hairy, thick-armed doofus with stringy black hair and a wardrobe consisting only of grease-stained button-down white shirts. But today, he looked different. His jaw was set, his eyes blazed, his voice trembled. When he passed me the food with shaking hands, he just stared at me.
I left the door open and walked to the loveseat to get my wallet. He followed me in and closed the door behind him. “I saw you naked in a magazine,” he said. “Yeah, you looked real good. You and I are going to —”
I screamed at the top of my lungs. I just kept screaming and screaming. I was sure I was about to be raped. But instead the guy abruptly turned around and ran out of my apartment. I collapsed onto the loveseat, shaking. My whole body felt cold, and I curled up and stared at the wall. I must have lain there for hours, comatose. I slowly came to the realization that I was going to be one of those homeless burnouts on Hollywood Boulevard unless I did something for myself. I had no one to rely on —no Jack, Dad, Nikki, or Michael— to help me or push me or chauffeur me. I needed to take control of my life and do something if I ever wanted to get out of this rut. And that’s when I decided to shop myself.
