Rocking the Pink Page 2

  “Frank,” I told him during his fifth call of that particular day, “you’ve gotta stop calling me so much. Every time you call, it costs you money. Just think cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching every time you dial my number. I’m your lawyer, not your best friend.”

  Even under these horrendous circumstances, Frank still managed to laugh. He loved it when I straight-talked him. “But you’re my best friend, Laura,” he responded, his voice earnest. “I don’t mind having to pay to talk to you.”

  Oh, geez. I’d become this guy’s security blanket amid the biggest shitstorm of his life. I understood his desperation, but I didn’t like being a paid hand-holder. “Frank, that’s gross,” I said matter-of-factly. “I can’t be your woobie. You’re a grown-ass man.”

  “But, Laura, you’re all I have left.”

  My stomach seized. Indeed, my stomach had been in a permanent state of seizure for quite some time. I didn’t want to see this guy go down. I actually liked him, quirky as he was. I thought my teeth were going to fall out of my head from the stress. In fact, I’d started having stress dreams involving teeth—crumbling teeth, shattered teeth, falling-out teeth. And, even worse, my lifelong problem with night terrors—nightmares on steroids, during which the sleeper screams or even runs around with his or her eyes open—was at a fever pitch. Many nights, I shrieked in terror as I witnessed imaginary home invaders, rats crawling all over the floor, or phantom figures jumping out of paintings in my sleep. I was losing my mind . . . and nearly causing Brad nightly cardiac arrest, too.

  And now, on this particular day, when my own life had been hijacked to hell, there was no question that my days of fighting anyone’s battles but my own were over.

  I didn’t mince words. “I have cancer,” I told my law partner, Pete. “I’m not coming back to work.”

  Pete was compassionate, as was usual for him. “Laura, take as much time as you need. Your job is here for you when you’re ready.”

  “Thanks, Pete. But no,” I responded without hesitation. “I’m never coming back.” I’d be damned if I was going to give up my cancer hall pass, my one-way ticket to freedom.

  The next week was a whirlwind of MRIs, blood tests, and doctor’s appointments in preparation for surgery. At each appointment, Brad was by my side, holding my hand or telling the technician to use a butterfly needle to draw blood because my veins are small. Brad never left my side. Literally. Every few minutes, he reached out to touch me—my face, my hair, my arm. At night, in bed together, we clutched each other in desperation and we cried. In fact, Brad cried more in that one week than he’d cried in the twenty-three years I’d known him.

  “This wasn’t in the script,” he whispered over and over, tears streaming down his face. “This isn’t how our story goes.”

  It killed me to watch Brad suffer like this—though, in truth, his passionate tears made me feel loved and appreciated like never before. And, yes, with each passing day, fear was tightening its stranglehold on me, too, as reality began sinking in and those Scary Words began embedding their insidious fish hooks deep in my flesh. But mostly, though I didn’t dare say it out loud to anyone, I felt one overwhelming emotion above all others: relief. I’d finally found my golden ticket to freedom. And, by God, I wasn’t going to waste it.

  Chapter 3

  A month after I’d first met Brad on that fateful night under the stars, my fifteenth birthday was fast approaching, in October 1985, and I was becoming increasingly anxious about having lied to him about my age during the past glorious weeks of our googly-eyed infatuation.

  Maybe it won’t come up, I thought. Maybe he’s forgotten what I said.

  But about a week before my fifteenth birthday, Brad asked, “Aren’t you excited to get your driver’s license?”

  The jig was up—unless I could somehow fake getting my driver’s license. I mulled that over for a moment. That would involve an elaborate web of lies, not to mention some illegal driving on my part. No, I couldn’t pull that off.

  There was no way out. I had to come clean.

  “I’m actually turning fifteen, not sixteen,” I confessed, wincing. “I lied.”

  I waited for Brad to tell me that my real age, or perhaps my initial deception, was a deal breaker. But, instead, he laughed and called himself a cradle robber. “What difference does it make?” he finally said. “Laura, you’re such a knucklehead.”

  And that was that. The boy loved me.

  When prom time arrived for Brad, who was a year ahead of me in school, I shrieked at the sound of his car in the driveway. With one last mirror check—yes, my silver dress was red-carpet ready and my hair and makeup were sheer perfection—I ran to the front door to greet him with a kiss.

  “You look beautiful, Buddy,” Brad said, as he slipped a corsage on my wrist.

  He was right. I did.

  At the raging party we attended before our dinner reservation, I took great care to dab the corners of my mouth with a cloth napkin after I’d gulped down a large cup of sweet-tasting, yellow-colored punch.

  “Slow down, Buddy,” Brad warned. “That punch has, like, four different liquors in it.”

  I smiled at him. I was fine.

  An hour later, as Brad and I sat with three other couples at an elegant restaurant, I struggled to keep my head upright.

  Does my head weigh thirty pounds? I wondered. It kept dipping down, as if I were a drowsy truck driver, and then I’d quickly whip it back up. I couldn’t follow the conversations around me; all my energy was focused on keeping my head perpendicular to the table.

  Suddenly, there was a burst of laughter from the group. I swung my head up and looked around, trying to see what was so funny. But I didn’t notice anything.

  “What?” I asked innocently.

  Brad reached over to me and picked something out of my (perfectly coiffed) hair.

  “You’ve got lettuce in your hair.”

  Apparently, that last head dip had collided most indelicately with my Caesar salad.

  When college came a-calling for Brad, I still had my senior year to go, and I was worried.

  “What if you meet someone else in college?” I asked anxiously as we sat, hand in hand, on a low beach wall, watching the setting sun merge with the shimmering ocean.

  But Brad had decided to stay in town for college, and he was confident we’d survive. “Don’t worry, Buddy,” he assured me. “We’ll be fine.”

  Out of nowhere, I felt an electric current zing right through my body. I’d never felt anything like it before. It was almost . . . supernatural.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped. I looked at Brad. “Do you feel that?”

  His face registered shock, too. “Yes. I feel it.”

  We continued holding hands, this strange energy coursing between us. I looked around. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for anyone else on the crowded beach. I looked at our hands. They looked completely normal.

  “This is really weird,” Brad whispered.

  I started to cry, feeling overwhelmed with this indescribable electricity. Brad didn’t ask me why I was crying. He could feel it, too.

  After a few minutes, when the electric current had faded, Brad and I got up from our perch on the beach wall and made our way down the boardwalk, the whole time exchanging looks of disbelief.

  There was no question from that day forward: We were meant to be together.

  And yet when college came a-calling for me a year later, I could not escape the pull of my lifelong destiny to become the next Judy Garland. My destiny was bigger than me—bigger than Brad and me.

  And I knew I needed to go to Hollywood, by way of the theater school at UCLA, to make it happen. And so Brad, the boy I loved so much, drove me to college to settle me into my dorm room.

  It was my first giant step toward Judy-dom.

  My heart had belonged to Judy Garland, the Most Beautiful Girl in the World, since I could remember. Judy, Judy, Judy. My Favorite Movie in the Whole World was The Wizard of Oz. I languished in
eager anticipation of the movie’s airing on television, as it did once a year around Easter time.

  When the day I’d been waiting for finally arrived, Mom and Dad surprised me with the news that they were taking my older sister, Sharon, and me out to see a movie called Rocky. Sharon was thrilled, but I was beside myself with grief.

  “The Wizard of Oz is on tonight!” I wailed, pulling at my hair.

  Sharon rolled her eyes. “You can see it next year.”

  But I was adamant. I could not, would not, miss my beloved Dorothy and Toto. It was out of the question. It would kill me!

  Mom and Dad had not intended to shatter their little girl’s hopes and dreams; they’d just been in the mood for a movie. They lined up a baby sitter—Belinda, a heavy set teenager from down the street, whose jaw had been wired shut as part of her weight-loss plan—and off they went with a gloating Sharon to see Rocky.

  Good riddance.

  I sat, glued to the small TV in the family room, mouthing every line and singing along to every song. When Glinda asked Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” I answered, in perfect mimicry of Dorothy’s tone and inflection, “I’m not a witch at all!” My “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” was a dead ringer for Dorothy’s, too. In a film biography about Judy’s life, I thought, I was a shoo-in to portray her as a child.

  When my family returned home from seeing Rocky, Sharon could not stop yammering about the movie. She told me Rocky had spent a lot of time punching hanging meat. “And when he finally finished,” she said, “he knew he was ready to fight Apollo Creed.” She just couldn’t stop flaunting her expertise on all things Rocky. She continued, looking smug, “Apollo was the champ, you know.” Of course she knew I didn’t know.

  My interest was piqued. “Did Rocky win the fight?”

  Another eye roll. “No. He lost.” Sharon was exasperated. “That was the whole point.”

  “He lost?!” Well, that’s just stupid.

  But Sharon told me it was so much better that he had lost. And, she said, I was a real dummy to miss having seen Rocky just so I could see a movie that would be on TV again next year. I didn’t regret my decision, though, not even for a moment. Sharon could keep her stupid Rocky. I had my Dorothy.

  That night, I was jolted awake from a horrible nightmare about the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West. She had locked me in her tower with the large hourglass, and the sands of time were rushing unabated toward the bottom. She cackled wickedly (of course) and called me “my pretty!”

  I went into my parents’ bedroom, frightened and crying, and woke them up.

  “I had a nightmare, Mommy!”

  Mom’s thick hair was rumpled.

  She retrieved something out of her dresser drawer, and then she led me back into my bed.

  “Take this, lamby,” she instructed. It was a tiny red satin pillow, maybe a sachet from her underwear drawer. She placed it in my hand. “This is a magic pillow. You can’t have a nightmare if this is under your pillow.” She smoothed my hair away from my face and kissed me on the forehead. “Now go back to sleep.”

  I rolled onto my side, feeling relieved and protected by my magic pillow, my new woobie. Nightmare-free sleep descended upon me. The sands of the hourglass were, thankfully, gone.

  And now, thirteen years later, Brad and I sat in traffic, slowly making our way to the promised land of UCLA, the gateway to Judy-dom. I was taking control of my destiny, taking a giant leap toward the person I was meant to be!

  So why, oh why, did it feel like my heart was being ripped out of my chest?

  Chapter 4

  “You’re so smart, Buddy,” Brad said, as we stood outside my dorm building at UCLA. “You’re gonna do great.” But his face was pained.

  After one last hug, Brad climbed into his car to leave, blinking back tears. As he shut his car door, our eyes met and his mouth distorted. With an attempt at a smile and a little wave, he drove away, just as tears started streaming down his chiseled cheeks.

  I sobbed under the shade of a nearby eucalyptus tree for an hour, and then finally made my way into my dorm room to meet my new roommates. My dorm “room” was actually a suite: two bedrooms, one tiny bathroom, and a small sitting area. In my bedroom, my two roommates were Kelly, a lily-white freshman majoring in engineering, and Naimah, an African American senior from Queens, New York. In the other bedroom, all three girls were of Asian descent: Marie had a wild mane of black hair and drove a Yamaha motorcycle, Erica was a girl-next-door type (literally, in this instance), and the last girl, my fifth roommate in the suite (whose name I cannot remember), was attached at the hip to her nebbish boyfriend, whom I did not particularly like. If the boyfriend had any charisma or social skills whatsoever, he did not reveal them to me.

  After initial introductions and small talk, several of Naimah’s friends came over with some beer, enough for all of us. After an hour or two, someone suggested we go swimming. This was a fab-u-lous idea, we all agreed, but, alas, the nearby university pool was closed for the night. But since it was hot and muggy, and by this time we were drunk, we didn’t let a small thing like a locked fence change our plans.

  Naimah’s friend was a whiz at opening locked fences, it turned out, and in no time the group was cannonballing and chicken-fighting in the (closed) campus pool. But our boisterousness apparently alerted the cops, and soon Officer Bob was shining his flashlight into our stunned faces. When he yelled, “Freeze!” (wasn’t that overkill?), time stood still for a nanosecond . . . until we hopped out of the pool and scattered like cockroaches after a kitchen light has been turned on.

  I saw Naimah run into the dark, grassy field just west of the pool, and I followed her like a drunk driver tracking taillights. Clad in only our dripping-wet bikinis, Naimah and I played an enthusiastic game of follow-the-leader: She scaled a tall chain-link fence, and I followed. She jumped down to the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, and so did I. She ran for about a mile, straight to our dorm building, up the stairs, down the hall, and into our room. And I shadowed her.

  Finally, Naimah and I were standing inside our dorm room, leaning against the door, breathless, panting, and sweating through our soaking-wet bikinis. Only then did Naimah’s eyes lock onto me—it was as if she were seeing me for the first time.

  “Laura!” Naimah exclaimed in total surprise. “I had no idea that was you back there. I didn’t know you had it in you.” She was laughing. “Girl, you’re all right.”

  I was beaming.

  I didn’t mention to Naimah that my lawlessness had been a singular fluke, or that, despite appearances, I really didn’t have “it” in me at all. Wasn’t college the perfect opportunity to reinvent myself?

  I was now officially a badass.

  Kelly and Erica, we later found out, had not run like fugitives from the law, like the rest of the group. Like proper law-abiding citizens, they had stood still when Officer Bob commanded them to “freeze!” But even though he had questioned them at the scene for almost half an hour, the girls had not ratted us out, much to our relief. Thankfully, Officer Bob had shown them mercy and let them go with a stern warning to relay a message to the rest of us to turn ourselves in. We all laughed and laughed about that one.

  “Let me just go get my pants so I can run down to the police station,” Naimah joked.

  “Wait for me,” I added. “I want to put on some makeup for the mug shot.”

  I sounded cavalier, but in actuality, I was scared to death that Officer Bob had tracked Kelly and Erica back to the dorms and would, at any given moment, burst into the room with a SWAT team. Welcome to UCLA!

  The next day, I walked down the main artery on campus, enthralled by the thousands and thousands of diverse students swarming past me—black, white, Asian, and Latino!—and I felt like a country mouse in the big city. After having attended a small school with a graduating class of sixty-one—only one of whom was black—I found it electrifying to be a part of something so big. So global.

  I
was also proud to be at a big school with a storied sports program. Coach Wooden! Bill Walton! Jackie Robinson! Arthur Ashe! They were my people now.

  One day, as I strolled through campus, I saw our Bruins quarterback, Troy Aikman (who went on to win three Super Bowls for the Dallas Cowboys), leisurely eating a cup of frozen yogurt, which looked like a thimble in his big hands. I walked past him without saying a word, but I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “This is UCLA, folks!”

  I took general education classes all over campus, like Detective Fiction (a class well attended by the football team, I noticed) and Women’s Studies (which prompted me to curse Brad’s invidious attempts to “muzzle” me). But mostly I took classes for my theater major in a separate, “artsy” part of campus known as North Campus, where students lay on the grass in the sculpture garden, reading scripts, or lounged on benches, commiserating about upcoming auditions. I felt bohemian just being around them. And again, I was proud to be part of something with an illustrious history. Francis Ford Coppola! Carol Burnett! Lloyd Bridges! Jim Morrison! My peeps!

  After my first week of school, Dad called to check up on me.

  “Tell me the name of a fellow theater student who’ll be famous one day,” he challenged.

  I didn’t hesitate: “That’s easy, Dad: Jack Black.”

  “Well, that’s an easy one to remember,” Dad responded, sounding excited.

  Back in the dorms, whenever I was around Naimah, I tried, to the best of my ability, to “act like I’d been there before,” just as Brad had always coached me.