When I was in high school I wanted to be an actress. I had no talent, was only moderately cute, and my voice went up about ten octaves when I acted. Nevertheless, I was somehow given the chance to star in a production of Crimes of the Heart. One of the girls from the play died a few years ago, and I believe the last remaining VHS copy of the tape of that performance died with her, thankfully. I eventually gave up my dreams of stardom for the less glamorous world of backstage, and fell in love with the idea of becoming a Director. I liked the idea of being the only female in a male driven world, and I was happy to hand the job of starlet over to the likes of Michelle Pukey, who had an angelic face and the personality of a soggy magazine. It has been a few decades since high school, and next week I will finally be given my shot at the spotlight as I star in an episode of reality television posing as a customer of an illicit website. Aside from the fact that my mother would disown me if she ever found out about it, I can’t see how this brief foray into playacting will harm me. It seems to actually be a natural progression of things, as I spent most of my last relationship making things up, and my younger self spent a brief time dabbling in the seedy world of sexual perversions. It feels fitting that I should wrap up my life of sin with a National television show devoted to my fabricated wonton ways. And then I shall move on, from unrequited love and life’s rotten underbelly and emerge a new person, less interesting to be sure, but wholesome and pure as I enter the next chapter of my soon-to-be boring life.

Revisit the site and read the last post here.

the absinthe we never did,

the joy of your sweatshirt

and the time I drank whiskey out of your boot.

(read on…)

It has been a few years.  I have moved back and forth across the country twice, and somehow, miraculously, kept in touch with the British, surly man who had professed his love for me when I was a lowly assistant at his company, to the peril of both of our jobs.  I moved on, and so did he and somehow, we stayed friends.  But not the kind of friends you have in real life, just Hollywood friends having lunch every few years and talking about sleeping together but wisely, not.  A few years ago I had just such a lunch with him, and he was getting married.  He still expressed interest in me, and that was the last I heard from him save for one email stating that he had sold a huge screenplay with a big Star attached, the same Big Star for whom I catered a New Year’s Eve party when I was still poor and struggling.  A few months ago, I got a call from the brooding Brit, in the middle of the night, his voice foggy, he misses me, wants to see me…. The next day I emailed him innocently, sure lets have lunch, and he sent back a picture of a lovely little one year old baby.  Apparently, however, his marriage was ending, and he said I am the girl of his dreams.  I have been through this before, men loving the girl I used to be but not the girl I am now.  My history with these guys, any guys other than my Dead Ex, is pathetically small, but I agree to a lunch because I respect the Brit’s standing in our fucked up little community, and the lunch started with nice pasta and ended with him chasing me around a coffee table at his house.  Somehow I managed to escape unscathed but the damage had been done, he loves me now, real love, even though I am a new person, I am no longer fabulous or successful or fast-moving, and his obsession grows anyway. I don’t see him for months afterwards, but I bask in the glow of feeling pretty enough to be stalked, and then finally I agree to go out with him for Valentine’s Day.

Read D Girl Diary immediately.

I wasn’t able to escape God’s Creatures forever though, because when I was in college my boyfriend and I inherited two tiny Boxer puppies after his Dad died of lung cancer, and suddenly we were living in an illegal sublet in Stuyvesant Town on the lower East Side of Manhattan with two dogs, something frowned upon severely by the Stuyvesant Town Gestapo, who had already banged down our door on several occasions to try and evict us, foiled only by my insistence that I was not in fact living there, but just the maid and that the tenant would, always, be home shortly.  I was only 20 years old, and I did not want dogs.  I didn’t want dog hair on my Marc Jacobs silk sweaters, but I loved my boyfriend, so we moved to an apartment that allowed animals, a little dump in Hell’s Kitchen with a patio, and soon those little puppies turned into eighty pound dogs that took up more room in our little full size bed than me, and I spent years in bed with my boyfriend and two dogs, curled up in a little corner with my feet hanging off so those dogs, who were brothers and best friends,  could be comfortable.

One night, fourteen years later, I was out with my cousin, and I came home a little drunk and very tired, and as I kicked off my heels I saw that one of the dogs had died on the floor of our apartment.  I called my boyfriend and he left his bartending job and came home and wrapped the dog in a blanket and took him to an animal hospital where they could properly dispose of him.  The other dog stood patiently at our apartment door waiting for his brother to come home for three months.  Once in a while he would let out a small whimper, but mostly he was just quietly waiting as he had no knowledge of death, so for him, it was just a matter of time before his brother came bounding through the doorway.  We got a cabin in Vermont that summer because I had a book deal and wanted to finish my novel, and the surviving dog got to go with me.  We thought he would love the open fields and refreshing little lake, but he had lost the use of his back legs by then, and he waited at the cabin door for his brother just like he had waited for him back in New York.  A few months later, he died.  I feel like that dog sometimes, as the bright sun shines through my balcony window and I can smell the ocean air on a quiet Sunday at the beach.  I don’t want to go run through the fields or jump off the dock into the cool lake water. I just want my best friend to come home.

D GIRL‘s last column.

As much as I want to just squander away the rest of my days in the soothing embrace of victimhood, or the haze of wine and prescription medication, I cannot because, alas, there is a guy. A really cute guy with blondish curly hair and blue sweatpants with two red stripes running down the sides who walks his two biggish dogs on the beach every morning and every early evening, and not knowing him at all, save for a friendly wave every day, seems to be reason enough to blow dry my hair and change out of my Dead Ex’s double XL wool sweater every so often into a small tee shirt that shows off the new tiny waist I have acquired from the Grief Diet. This guy, who I have seen every day since I moved to the beach last May, and who, for all I know, could be married, gay or boring, is my reason for living right now. I refuse to talk to this guy because I find happiness in not knowing anything about him, just as I find some solace in the fact that I have no idea where my Dead Ex is right now. Hopefully my Dead Ex is languishing between some tall stacks of rare books somewhere, and the Beach Guy is single and has a penchant for skinny girls with sunken eyes who haven’t slept for months. I am happy to leave these questions unanswered.

D GIRL‘s last column (8.17.10) is here.

So I will admit it now, get this out of the way before the protestations grow.  I had never actually lost someone.  I mean Lost Someone, for good.  I had an Aunt die when I was in high school, and all my grandparents are no longer alive, but we are a very spread out family.  I feel silly now as I look back over my life and realize how desperately I held onto so many people, afraid of losing them – afraid they might not go to parties with me anymore, or return my phone calls – for I had no idea what loss really meant: I spent my life upset because of things like a best friend of a few years deciding not to be my friend anymore, crying over hurt feelings or crying over a lost job or an unrequited crush.  Not a tear in my life was shed for any good reason, I have decided, because I had really never lost someone: until now.

Life after my Dead Ex-Boyfriend has been a series of awakenings.  Immediately after it happened, I tried to lose myself in the News of it All.  As long as there were people to tell and arrangements to be made, I didn’t have too much time to sit around and think about what had occurred.  I sent a bunch of emails I now regret, to the East Coast and West Coast Sarah’s, specifically, and did not hear back from either ex-friend.  At the time I was just hurting, and wanting to connect with someone who knew how much my ex had meant to me, but now that I never heard back from either of them, or Fifi the celebrity chef, not even a “sorry for your loss” email from the Angry Indian who had been my friend for years, and not a word from my little sister, who knew my ex well: through all this, I can see that something good has happened to me.  I have finally learned to hate people.  Its freedom, this hatred, I should have discovered this a long time ago.  The freeing feeling of never caring about a person again is something I have never experienced – quite the opposite, I so clearly cared too much, about all these people who never cared about me, and my ex who is now dead.  So this has been a month of firsts for me.  My first Dead Ex-Boyfriend, and the first time in my life I have ever hated anyone.

(Please read last week’s D Girl Diary.)

D Girl Diary is back today.  It’s a very poignant piece of writing and should be read directly.

Please have a look.

I have been struggling lately to write, because I am not sure anymore what being a writer means for me specifically, and what it means to the people around me. Am I a chronicler of events, I wonder, is it merely the case that I write down what happens around me, or is it inevitable my perspective on things pervade my every sentence?  If this is the case, should I simply stop writing, because that seems to be the only way not to hurt anyone?  I remember Nelly the Billionaire’s Daughter once told me that I have a “snake tongue”.  And she was right, for all her histrionics and fits of rage (and there I go again, instigating my point of view as I try to retell events) she had a moment of clarity: I do have a gift for being able to reduce a person not only to tears, but also causing them to reevaluate their entire character, just because I know how to spin a phrase. People like Nelly, unarmed as I am with the weapons of language and heightened perception, fall prey to my barbs and I’m left wondering why I have lost so many friends; why someone as kind as I am has a list of enemies that would rival only that of Hitler or Bin Laden, and it’s all because I can write, so I have been thinking perhaps its time to put down my pen and quiet the snake tongue for once and for all.

What sparked this recent bout of self-loathing was the fact that my older sister, the one of the white-blonde hair and watery blue eyes, lost her mind last week, and I am not sure, but her downward spiral might have been sparked by a mention of her in my column a few weeks ago.  I didn’t mean to hurt her, I rarely ever mean to hurt anyone, but that is beside the point, because I brought her up, and her troubled past with her children, and she sent me a message after she read it, fuming that I had characterized her actions as some sort of abandonment of her children years ago, and I was mildly surprised because I was there, at the time, and there is no other way to recount what happened.  I was merely speaking the words out loud, telling the story as it had occurred, even conscious of handling it gently, and it’s as if just reading the words sent her into a tailspin – multiple emails followed, as I quickly backtracked and apologized, and things settled, even seemed loving and sisterly and I glowed into that evening thinking my writing had brought me closer to a sibling I had not communicated with in years.

A week later, my sister lost her mind.  Quite literally, and seemingly sparked by some incident with her husband, who was the best man in my other sister’s Wedding From Hell (at which my Mother had threatened my Dad’s life and there were fist fights and champagne thrown in faces, police called and ambulances summoned), but I am left to wonder if my snake tongue has struck again, and if my role as The One in Our Family Who Writes it All Down has landed my sister in a mental hospital.  It’s a bone-chilling thought, and as I question my part in her breakdown and my self-anointment as Narrator and begin to see myself as someone who is now not just recounting, but possibly causing events to spin out of control around me, the strangest thing is happening to me: I find myself unable to not write about the events of my sister’s past week.  Sense needs to be made of it all, and I realize I am the writer’s equivalent of the Inmate Running the Asylum but there is no way to leave this out of My Story: the tale must be told.  And then, perhaps, I will finally write the two words that need to be written the most right now, because there has to be calm in all this lunacy, there has to be a way to quiet the demons that swirl in and out of my life and the people around me, and the only way to end it might be to simply write, for once and for all:  The End.

D-GIRL was a development girl in Hollywood and New York City for many years. While finding projects for actors, directors and producers to make into movies, she amassed a number of salacious tales of questionable morality that became an internet column entitled “D-Girl Diary.” She left show business to become a full-time writer in 2001.

(d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)

My Uncle is getting married, which is nerve-wracking because my Mother will likely attend, and any family gathering with my Mother involved is likely to attract police, ambulances, curious townspeople, and will require years of therapy to erase from all of our brains.  My Uncle is her youngest sibling, and they also had a sister who was next eldest, but she passed away in a car accident a while ago, when she was only 26 years old.  I was fifteen when she died, living in Ohio with my Dad, and I had been to her wedding a few summers before: a glorious affair and a testament to her loveliness that she married her long-term boyfriend’s best friend and her ex-boyfriend was not only okay with that, he was in their wedding party.  She had long bone-straight black hair, an Italian beauty, and was gentle natured and kind to the flock of nieces and nephews my Mom would parade through her apartment in Boston every year for the Boston Marathon.  I remember she always had M and M’s for us, and we never had candy in our house so that was a treat in itself.  She ran the Marathon every year, and we would stand by the roadside at the bottom of Heartbreak Hill and give the runners oranges and wait for her to come by.  Shortly after her wedding, my Aunt was in the back seat of a car when it was hit by a drunk driver and she went right through the roof.

She survived, and was in a coma for a while, and woke up blind.  I still have the note she sent me in Ohio after she woke up which looks like it was written by a third grader.  She lived another year, and then died on a postponed honeymoon to Jamaica, I guess her head could not handle the traveling.  It is beyond heartbreaking that somehow she was taken from this Earth and my Mother is still here, making all of our lives a tiny bit less bearable.    I am hoping my Mom passes through this family event without incident, but it would be shocking if she could concede the spotlight.  She has softened over the years, with age and ailing health, so we might have a chance of escaping this wedding without her usual bouts of hysterical blindness or severe Munchausen’s syndrome in which she suddenly takes on, for example, the symptoms of my disease.  For my birthday this year she sent me an easel, and canvases and paint supplies, not even knowing my penchant for painting the words of T.S. Eliot crudely on canvases and distributing them to friends who all, in seemingly unrelated incidents, dump me soon afterwards.  It was an incredibly generous gift, completely unlike her, and although it was preceded by hundreds of phone calls announcing its imminent arrival, it was deeply appreciated and gives me a small bit of hope that she will attend my Uncle’s wedding graciously and surprise everyone, just like I was surprised two weeks after my birthday when the package of art supplies actually came in the mail.

It was really late, maybe 4 A.M one night when I had the urge to send Sarah an email. There is a reason these impulses only happen under the cover of night: in the light of day it might be embarrassing to chase down a girl who was at one time my best friend and has not wanted anything to do with me for years. But recent events have brought on introspection, regret, remorse, and most of all a desperate need to figure out what went so wildly wrong with my life. What’s funny is, I have been kind of – dare I say – happy lately, as happy as a single, family-less, ex-party girl can be, so I don’t quite know what I am searching for. I love my new apartment, it is spacious and comfortable and allows for beachside bike rides and barbeques, and I don’t like going out much anymore so I have more than enough friends. I have a relatively quiet job assisting a group of nerdy television writers who are quick to compliment my often sequined outfits and sun-kissed hair. I don’t have a boyfriend but I have a boyfriend-like guy who is great company and who makes out with me sometimes when I am not feeling well, and maybe I don’t have that girl I talk to a hundred times a day anymore, but I hate the phone anyway and I have a pen pal to whom I can tell anything, so there doesn’t seem to be too much more need for co-dependency in my life. But for some reason I emailed Sarah, just to tell her I am writing again, and show her the generosity of spirit I wish more people would show me, and she wrote back, cheerful as ever, as if we had continued talking eighty-five times a day this whole time, and I remembered that I always thought she should have a permanent exclamation point at the end of her name: “Sarah!” should be her legal name because she always seems happy to hear from you.

So we arranged to have drinks, and I am prepared for an ambush, but I don’t feel inculpable enough to prevent an onslaught of criticism, and I hope I don’t become so nervous I revert back to the manic and high-strung person she decided to abandon years ago. I miss Sarah terribly, just because it always made me feel great that someone as good-hearted as her would choose to have me as a friend, but I am not naive enough to think we will ever be friends again, for I am afraid too much has passed between these smiles. Still it will be nice to see her, I heard she is getting married and I am glad to see at least one of our lives turned out the way it was supposed to.

D-GIRL was a development girl in Hollywood and New York City for many years. While finding projects for actors, directors and producers to make into movies, she amassed a number of salacious tales of questionable morality that became an internet column entitled “D-Girl Diary.” She left show business to become a full-time writer in 2001.

(d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)

I found out today that a friend passed away, he killed himself, which is even sadder than the normal death of a friend, and of course I feel like I should have done more to make him feel better.  But I have a complicated past with this guy, so I am not sure what more I could have done. I know that I have been really close to trying to kill myself before, I have taken bottles filled with pills and was made to drink charcoal in the Emergency Room, had my stomach pumped and I have spent many nights just staring at my scarily full medicine cabinet trying to gather up the courage to make myself fall asleep permanently, but I have chickened out every time, and one thing I learned from all that was, taking pills is not the way to go.  You have far too much time after you have swallowed them to think about what you have done.  I am not sure how my friend did it, but I am pretty sure I know how he was feeling and it’s hard to describe how helpless and lost you feel in that moment.  I had just gotten a message from him a few days before he died telling me how inspiring I am to him.  He told me he would tell me some day why that is, but now he will never get to tell me.

Our complicated past started when I was in college. My school was mostly girls, it had been a Catholic Girls School but had started letting boys in right before I got there.  My friend transferred into our college when I was a sophomore, and all the girls were weak-kneed over his looks: he looked almost exactly like the actor Montgomery Clift, he had a JFK Jr. shock of dark hair and hurt, searching brown eyes.  He was rumored to have a drug problem but I was only 19 and didn’t even know what drugs looked like, so I let him move into my one bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that I was illegally subletting. He lived in my living room, and would run the bath water every time he went into the bathroom which I thought was odd, and only realized years later it was to hide the sound of snorting drugs.  He had a beautiful girlfriend at the time who he met in Central Park, she didn’t need makeup, was about 18, and had long straight brown hair and huge round eyes. They looked like movie stars together, and I remember he used to put his hand in the back pocket of her jeans and I wished my boyfriend would do that with me but he was from Bayonne, New Jersey and that’s just not how a Bayonne boy walks around with his girl.

There has been so much change in my life in the past month it seems almost contrived: if I were making this up, a good writer would tell me it’s too much. First, my Non-Boyfriend has decided he would rather spend time by himself than hang out in the eye of the storm with me, so I have not heard from him or seen him in a while. I moved to the beach and decided to start telling the truth for a change, and he lives on the other side of the world from me, in West Hollywood, and prefers fantasy to reality, and in retrospect if I had wanted this Non-Relationship to prosper I would have stayed holed up in Korea Town in my studio, but I opted for the lavish and pure life of Oceanside living, so I will be single for a while more, until I meet some tousle-haired beach bum who won’t mind my histrionics if it means a hot meal and a warm place to sleep. Second, I seem to have happened upon the only Hollywood assistant job that is actually, painfully boring, I think I would be better off working in an accountant’s office, or proof-reading M and M’s. There is not enough work to go around in our office. I would fire my unpaid intern if he was not so handsome and precocious: he knows the Box Office Gross of any movie ever made. He is like a film-geek Rainman.

I have also been really sick for a little over a month now. It started with a dumb virus but just like everything associated with my disease, it has morphed and degenerated and it started affecting my speech and ability to walk. It was hard to be cute for a while there, and even though I didn’t miss a day of work, I spent a good deal of the past month researching for our writers behind my computer and trying to act like I was be-bopping to music on my Itunes so nobody could tell that my arms and legs were jerking around because I was so sick. I don’t have an official Los Angeles Multiple Sclerosis Doctor yet, partly because I needed a reason to fly back to my beloved New York City every six months, but this past month I was sick enough to start doctor shopping out here, and I finally settled on the Amazing Dr. Wong, a gorgeous, tall Asian (!) Man whose teeth actually twinkle when he smiles. Dr. Wong is one of those people you just know was potty trained before he was a year old, and probably taught himself to read by age two. His movie star good looks and list of celebrity clientele, including the unstoppably quirky Miss Teri Garr, made him an easy choice against my Insurance covered doctors who all have offices on Alvarado Street and take patients on Saturday. It takes six months to get an appointment with Dr. Wong, and I will be paying thousands to be neglected by yet another stunningly handsome, elusive man. I may be single, and sick, and working a job far beneath my Masters Education and impressive resume, but I have the same doctor as an Actress I have admired since her role as the crazy Mousetrap lady in Scorsese’s After Hours and I live at the beach: this really is where people come to live out their dreams.

D-GIRL was a development girl in Hollywood and New York City for many years. While finding projects for actors, directors and producers to make into movies, she amassed a number of salacious tales of questionable morality that became an internet column entitled “D-Girl Diary.”