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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.”
When I visit New York City it’s like seeing a boyfriend you sleep with occasionally and each time you see each other you pick up right where you left off. This trip it was crowded and smelly, as usual, and exciting and vivacious, and there was some crazy car bomb parked a few blocks from my apartment: people and cities rarely ever really change. I went to New York to see my doctor, because I have not found a good neurologist in LA yet, but the doctor’s appointment was almost an afterthought to seeing friends and cousins and going to a Yankee Game. Nobody in that city seemed to care that I am trying to clean up my act and live a better life: I wasn’t treated any better, given any special sidewalk space or a reprieve from a long line. That’s what I love about New York: it’s a narcissistic city and completely self-absorbed, just like all the men I date. I’m uncomfortable with affection, have serious intimacy issues, and I feel completely at home being abused by this city. As I walked down the streets feeling slightly ill the other day, the buildings spun around me and I swayed and wobbled, and almost fell about ten times: nobody even noticed. It reminded me of growing up as the middle child of a huge family, when I was sick my Mom would say, “You’ll live.” And maybe give me a can of ginger ale. For a nurse with eight small children, she did not have the gentlest of bedside manners.
Back in Los Angeles, I have moved to the beach. Now that I’m living in a spacious ocean chalet I’m wondering why I didn’t make this move a while ago, but I suppose I felt comfortable suffering in my crime-ridden Korea Town studio. I don’t even know what to do with all this new space, it looks like I am squatting, but I finally feel like I belong out here: if I start making any kind of money as a writer there is an imminent danger I might actually be a carefree, happy Beachcombing California Girl. My Old Boss who is now my New Boss was nice about me taking off to New York for a few days, but now that I am back he has tasked me with coming up with new ideas for television shows because the show we are working on has been tanking in the ratings. I was hired to assist the writers on the show but my Boss has been using me more and more to assist him: his real assistant is a cocky, good-looking kid who thinks he is too cool to do menial tasks for my Boss. Even with my luxurious new Oceanside apartment and my recent coast-to-coast jaunt, I am not too cool for grunt work, and Hollywood will always make me feel like I am cheating on New York – my flippant, cool boyfriend — with some guy who surfs and sleeps until noon.
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.
I have only been at my new job a few days and I already have the feeling it’s not going to last very long. I get nervous when I meet new people: I want them to like me almost pathologically, so I haven’t stopped talking for three straight days. I don’t know why I think people want to listen to me talk for that long, but silence makes me anxious, so I talk and talk, and because there is not much to talk about, most of the things coming out of my mouth are untrue. I spent last night looking this up on the internet, and apparently it’s a real psychological malady called Compulsive Lying Disorder and I stayed up until three in the morning reading message boards about the condition. I am suddenly empowered by the fact that my dishonesty has a clinical name, and there are other people who walk around telling lies all day. Although some of the people in the online forums are clearly wasting the opportunity to have a medical community recognize their amorality as a sickness, like the guy who says he has been telling people he is a vegetarian for years but secretly eating meat. I can’t believe I have never looked into this before, I have been in four mental hospitals and lost about thirty really good friends, and until now I have chalked this up to my eccentric nature. I remember the Sarah with the Big Boobs telling me people in Los Angeles talk about me worse than they talk about their dogs: I guess this is what she was talking about.
I’ve never really been called out about my lying before, I guess I’m good at it, but I think some people have been suspicious over the years, because unless my friends and family think I like driving around in an antique car, they are probably aware I have not exactly achieved the level of success I tout in my stories. As I’ve gotten a little older, I have grown weary of making things up, at this point I mostly just cover up for all the lies I told in the past, but since this is a new job and I want to impress everyone, I have gotten a few classics out of the hall closet and brushed them off, such as the imminent nature of my book publishing, which in actuality is a deal I lost a long time ago having never handed in the manuscript. I remember hearing from the Billionaire’s Daughter a while ago that Fifi doubted I actually have Multiple Sclerosis. Sigh. I wish I had made that one up, and if I had I would have picked a disease that had a name I could pronounce.
I get excited about my birthday because I grew up in a big family and that is the only day of the year I ever got any attention. My Mom used to give us a choice for our birthdays: dinner alone with her, dinner with the whole family, or a sleepover party. We usually chose the dinner with the family option, because if you chose to go out to dinner alone you would have seven siblings really angry with you, and the sleepover party option, well, I picked that option once, when I was in the eighth grade… All of my friends had to have their parents drive 45 minutes from the nearest real town, and 2.2 miles down a dirt road to my house. The road was very treacherous: the hills had nicknames, like “Jacob’s Ladder” because I think people stuck on them had a lot of time to kill waiting to be rescued. It’s actually quite picturesque, where I grew up, the road was called Falls Road because there was a beautiful waterfall on it, but because we had to work so hard as kids, I don’t think I ever really appreciated the quiet splendor of those woods. I don’t think a bunch of junior high school girls really appreciated it either, especially because my Mom’s idea of a special treat is pizzas we had to make from scratch, and she made us go to bed at 7 PM, with no talking allowed. Of course it’s nearly impossible to keep seven girls of that age quiet, and my Mom has the ears of a Hawk and she would yell up the stairs when she even suspected there was whispering going on. It was a good thing we were well-rested, however, because my Mom woke us up at 6 AM the next morning as it was my turn to muck out the horse stalls. Birthday or not, there was work to be done, and I have never forgotten the image of my junior high school friends cleaning up horse poop. That was the first and last sleepover party anyone ever chose for their birthday around my house.
This year I’m looking forward to a nice dinner out with my boyfriend, and I’m calling him that because he acts like my boyfriend and I heard it slip out of his mouth the other night when he was telling a friend who he was hanging out with. Last night he took me out for a pre-Birthday drink, and we started chatting with another couple at the bar. The women was ex-Hollywood, she had been a producer of some sort, and the man was Indian and wealthy, and it was my pre-Birthday so I told them the Aspiring Actor is not yet officially my boyfriend even though we have been dating exclusively for a while now. When they were saying goodbye, the man slipped me a bar coaster with this written on it: “Some men need an ultimatum. This is one of them.”
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)
LA LADY: Partial view from D GIRL window of her Hollywood Hills joint (circa Hancock Park, LA.). Finally some west coast sunshine from an ole’ New Yorker turned LA’er. Her column (as if you didn’t know) is D Girl Diary.
I have read 26 scripts since 9:00 this morning, and my eyes are beginning to cross. I’m doing coverage for money now, until I find a real job, and I’m acutely aware that some poor screenwriter’s fate is in my hands as I evaluate their life’s work with a Vanilla Ice Blended in one hand and my television remote in the other. I’m using a pseudonym for my coverage, Shippy Shipwright, so that I might still be taken seriously as a real writer, and I’m thinking of adopting this pseudonym for other areas of my life as well, so when I screw up and blab someone’s deepest, darkest secret, Shippy gets the blame for it.
In order to make my rent next month, I need to do about 150 more sets of coverage, so I call one of the interns from the company I just left. She doesn’t know I quit, so I tell her I’m working from home for a few days. The intern has purple nail polish and bright hot pink curly hair, and she does really great coverage. She’s also a screenwriter, and her script, which is set on Mars, won a contest I helped arrange, which is how I found her.
The Intern comes to my apartment to collect some scripts from me, and we start chatting. After a few glasses of wine, I’m considering asking her to have a threesome with my Insignificant Other, but I don’t know if that’s too much to ask. The Aspiring Actor I have been dating (and not dating) for three months is quite obviously not just looking for the love of an okay woman: if he is going to commit to someone full-time, he wants added benefits. I tried to break things off with him when I quit my job last week, but I couldn’t take all that change, so instead of gradually not returning his calls, I made up a new sexy girlfriend I met at Barry’s Boot Camp: Shippy Shipwright, who has seen his picture and can’t wait to meet him.
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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.
This morning I brought a box to work. It was just a plain old empty box, and when I got to the office I filled it with my stuff, said goodbye to the Iranian girl who is the only one in my company still talking to me, and walked out the door. I don’t know if anyone even noticed. My lawyer was the one who advised me to do this, she said the stress of working in such a hostile environment was making me sicker, and I suppose it was, but I hate to give my New Boss the satisfaction of winning our little war. As I walk down the path from our office building to my car, I realize I thought this would feel more liberating, as I’m quitting as opposed to getting fired, but instead I’m scared to death. I haven’t gotten paid yet for writing the television pilot, and who knows if they will ever pay me now that I have quit my job on them. I got a small check for the rights to the internet column, but that will barely cover my bills for the next two months. When my company decided to turn my internet column into a television show I thought that was my Big Break. Turns out it was just a small break. Another small break was the deal the Notorious Book Publisher offered me for the rights to the novelized version of my column: that was an even tinier break. I will be able to buy some new underwear and a magazine with that money. I always thought a book deal and a burgeoning television show would mean I would finally not have to worry about money for a while, but apparently I will never be rich.
Luckily I still have friends in Hollywood, and only five minutes after I put out the word I’m looking for a job, I have a job interview. They say love is all timing, and jobs are no different. I don’t have time to change, but luckily I dressed up for my dramatic exit this morning, and I drive over the Hill to the Universal Lot hoping by some miracle I land this job. The job is to be Creative Executive for a man who produced The Sixth Sense, among other movies. I wonder if I should mention to him that when that movie came out I thought of making a short film called The Seventh Sense, about a guy who has heightened gaydar. The opening shot in the movie would have been a man on an exercise bike looking out over a city. Through all the windows in the neighboring buildings, he sees Gay men in various states of undress, and he says, predictably, “I see Gay People.” When I sit down with the Producer, though I immediately can see he does not have a sense of humor, so I keep my little spoof idea to myself.
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D-Girl Diary tomorrow! (d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)
I have been thinking of names for my unborn child since I was five years old. My tastes have evolved since then, so it’s no longer Olive or Pickle: I have become more of a fan of names that won’t get my child beat up after school, because if that sort of thing is hereditary, the kid already has the deck stacked against him. For years I daydreamed about having a brooding, big-nosed, green eyed kid with my ex-boyfriend, the guy I dated for sixteen years, but I lost many hard-fought battles over the subject, and ended up in Planned Parenthood more than once. They should have a frequent customer card there, some sort of points/reward system for girls with no backbone. The last time I was in Planned Parenthood I went with the East Coast Sarah, and she was pregnant too: we had co-abortions, which were kind of like a couples massage but without the soothing feeling, soft music and pleasing aroma. I hadn’t planned on having that abortion, in fact I had told my family and my Boss that I was having a kid, with my boyfriend of 8 years, and that we were very happy about it. But in truth my boyfriend wasn’t ready for a child and in the end I couldn’t saddle him with any more problems than I already had. Dating me was hard enough. They screwed it up though, the nice folks at Planned Parenthood, and I had flown home to Ohio for a Black Tie Dinner in honor of my Dad, and was sitting at a fancy table with most of my brothers and sisters, all dressed up, when I realized something was wrong. The whole thing was a nightmare, and today as I sit at my desk staring at the pregnancy test I just bought at the pharmacy, I am hoping I never have to go through anything like that again.
There should be a group you can join on Facebook that counsels you about how to break the news to a guy you have only been dating a few months, someone who has adamantly declared he doesn’t want to be in a relationship, that you might be pregnant. The group could give you helpful hints, like how to open the conversation, and how to protect the breakable items in your apartment from being thrown against a wall. Mostly I would like to know how to keep him around afterwards, because I am about to lose my job and I hate change, so I don’t think I could take losing my non-boyfriend too.
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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)
When I was in Junior High School in Massachusetts, I had a fight scheduled with another girl almost every day after school. Girls would constantly ask me to fight them, I guess it was because I was really small but I had a big mouth. I only won one of these fights, and that was because I hit a girl in the mouth who had braces and she started bleeding and stopped fighting me. All of the Tough Girls at that school hated me, mostly because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut during class; they slashed the tires on my Mom’s car when she came to see me play the drums in a band concert and I couldn’t walk to the local library after school without fearing for my life. I used to hide on the path between the school and the library until all the Tough Girls left for the day, and I remember distinctly one day a tall girl who was about 16 and still in the eighth grade chasing me down the street while wheeling a baby carriage, cursing at me with a lit cigarette in her hand. It was a rough town, a small factory town, and not the actual town my family lived in, as I lived in a town too small to have a Junior High School. We moved away after my eighth grade year and I came back once to visit my best friend and go to the Annual Town Fair. Even though years had passed, I got followed around that day by some Tough Girl still angry at me for wise cracking at her during Science Class.
I am an adult now, and no longer get into fist fights with girls, but much of the conflict in my life still stems from my Big Mouth, and Hollywood is a lot like Junior High School. Every day lately, at some point, I start to get the same queasy feeling I got when I was younger and the end of the school day approached: the feeling that sometime later that day, I was going to get the crap beat out of me. Only one spunky Iranian girl at work has the guts to talk to me, everyone else has been instructed not to speak to me because my Big Boss is afraid I will sue the company for firing me for having Multiple Sclerosis. I had no intention of suing when this first happened, I was happy to learn I still had a job, but the New Producing Partner is now on a mission to make my life so miserable I will quit, and once again I am being called out to the playground to fight someone twice my size.
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D-Girl Diary tomorrow!
(d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)
I have not called in sick to work in years, maybe ever, but two weeks ago I was having a bad day, my left arm has been going numb for a while now, it crawls all the way up my cheek and lasts for a few minutes, and I finally just called in sick. The day before I called in sick I was in a meeting with my Boss and a Super Star singer/actress and my arm fell asleep and creeped up the side of my face. The Singer was nice about it, but I figured maybe I should rest, see a doctor, and admit I am sometimes sick for just one day. I am sitting at the doctor with an IV of steroids in my arm when my Boss’ new producing partner calls my cell phone. She has only been at our company for three weeks, and her voice has a phony ring of concern as she asks me if maybe in light of my recent flare-up of Multiple Sclerosis I should consider taking some time off. By time off, she goes on to say, she means a few months, and then I should get a job somewhere else. I can barely lift my head from the pillow in the hospital room as I gasp, “Are you firing me?” She sighs, as if this is the hardest thing she has ever had to do. “I just don’t think you can handle this job,” she says faux-sadly.
There is a flurry of activity that includes my Mother, who is a right-wing politician, calling my Boss and demanding to know if her daughter just got fired for having Multiple Sclerosis, and a letter being delivered to my hospital bed signed by no less than eight lawyers calling the whole event a “mistake”. Hospital beds, lawyers, concerned mothers, panicked Bosses, none of this is familiar territory for me and my prevailing thought is what could I have done to make this Producer hate me so much? I will admit I don’t like her much, but I didn’t know she knew that, and I was just getting used to having a job again, a real Hollywood job with buck slips and business cards and my own little office. Even though my Boss hired me back as soon as I called to tell him what happened, I have a feeling nothing is ever going to be the same for me at this job again.
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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 am feeling very overwhelmed lately with a sudden influx of job/writing career/relationship success, its hard to keep it all straight but I am certain the Private Investigator my insurance company has sent to keep an eye on me will sort it all out. I don’t think he has much else to do except sit out front of my apartment building behind his tinted windows watching my stream of male admirers enter and exit, and I wonder if they will cancel my insurance policy because I am suddenly so popular. I suppose they are casing the joint to find out if I actually have Multiple Sclerosis, and I want to knock on the guy’s window and tell him I would gladly give up my insurance policy not to have this disease, and to be able to walk without wobbling for two days in a row.
Meanwhile my Boss has been keeping an eye on me to make sure I am doing my job and that all my recent success has not made me lazy, and I am extra vigilant via the internet about making sure my non-boyfriend is not non-committing to any girl he has met on his travels. And finally, my nemesis Lorna McSlutchen has taken to tapping into my emails to also see if I am doing my job, we are all watching each other closely, and it’s frankly keeping me up at night. There is a nice guy who worked at this company right before I left who reads my Internet Column, and he now works for a notorious book publisher with a past even more checkered than mine, and he has brought her my work and they are offering me a small book deal. I should smack down a copy of my manuscript as soon as I finish it right on the windshield of the Private Investigator’s car, it will tell him everything he needs to know about me.
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(d girls image artist Tashina Suzuki)
I have never had a baby, but I wrote a script once. I checked myself into a room at the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles to finish it, and handed the script to my best friend and Literary Manager Sarah when I was done. In my life, I have checked into various establishments before for help: hotels and hospitals, voluntarily and otherwise, but the Standard has far superior food to them all. I don’t know how to write anything that’s not about me, so I wrote a script called Forever Yours about a girl who stalks all her boyfriends, and it never went out as a spec because Sarah’s boss told me the main character was too creepy. I think the word stalker gets overused in modern lexicology: to be honest I don’t see what’s wrong with spending every second with someone once you know you love them. My new almost-boyfriend the Computer Guy/Thespian does not, however, subscribe to this philosophy and is going on a trip to India for a month for work. He is clearly not completely aware of my excruciating abandonment issues; meaning, I make it excruciating for anyone who tries to abandon me. I want to press my face up against the glass of his airplane to say my final Goodbye to him, but FAA regulations preclude this, so I am forced to make a colorful sign and stand woefully at the window of the divider between the main terminal and the gates at LAX while he endeavors to make his way to his airplane. The sign says “Don’t Forget Me” but I think it would be difficult for anyone to forget me, especially since I deliberately spilled an entire bottle of my Chanel perfume into his suitcase this morning.
We have only been dating a month, but I have had three vodka-Red Bulls, so I text him that I love him as soon as he is boarding his plane. It’s amazing how nervous laughter actually does translate in text message form, because his response is “love ya too babe” which, of course, commits to nothing. I head home immediately to begin an onslaught of email missives the likes of such this guy has never seen before. Forever yours, don’t forget me. Love, D-Girl. He has no chance, this docile, young studious lad. He has encountered a force bigger than himself and decisions have been made about his life far into the future. He should not fight it and just enjoy the ride. I’ve heard one may lose weight in India because the food goes right through you, so for this reason and my aforementioned stalker mentality I decide to look up flights to India and possibly join my new friend in a faraway land that hopefully has forgiving lighting and no laws against the aggressive pursuit of true love.
