For weeks, you flirt with the lead actor, who plays the father of your student. This escapes the notice of absolutely no one on set. He himself is currently best known for being newly divorced, two-days-ago newly, from an Academy Award — winning actress, this split currently on the cover of People magazine, and The Star and all the rest of those, covers with the fake tear down the middle and the box on the side with a paparazzi photo of the alleged other party with her head down. In this case, the gossip is that she may have she left him for someone more famous, which is technically true, if not the actual reason. Your lead actor has not yet worked this out for himself. Right now, any and all attention from attractive women is welcome, and on this set, in Toronto, you are at the top of that list. There may be other attractive women here, but you have positioned yourself in his line of sight, and the fact that you are not an actress is a major plus right now. He is smitten, and you are smitten, and this may not be a career, but it is a thing you could see yourself doing for the rest of your life, so that’s something. Romantic words are said. Neither of you is thinking about the fact that he is so not over his ex-wife, though you spend some good time thinking about the fact that you are stepping in the shoes of America’s current sex goddess. Drinking helps with that a good bit, though you haven’t technically had full-on sex yet, as you have decided that though you like trailers for most purposes, and might even like a trailer for sex purposes if you were say, camping, but on a movie set, sex in a trailer is more like a storyline from the third sequel to Valley of the Dolls.
But what you have or haven’t done in your movie star’s trailer really doesn’t matter when the second AD sees you coming out of it. Storylines will be cooked up, embellished, styled, reworked, revised, and retold by third cousins who were there, and these storylines will be gobbled up like the snacks from craft services. For reasons still unknown to you now, you are grateful that this gossip never makes it to the tabloids, like the way everyone knew Rock Hudson was gay but it didn’t get printed until the end. You’ll forever be known in the movie business as the woman who busted up that guy’s marriage, but you’ll be none the wiser.
— I’m not sure how this is helping my story at all. There’s like one sentence about writing.
— In my mind you’re just making notes for a tell-all memoir.
The Rest of Your Life
One night you’re stumbling home from the P&G bar down the block when you trip over the curb and break your wrist for the third time — the same one, but again, when you wake up the next day with a giant purple paw in place of your hand, you’re not really sure what happened. The guy you brought home last night, who isn’t a total stranger but who is a good three or four friends away from you, tells you he doesn’t know for sure either, but that you might want to think about getting some help with your drinking problem. You take great offense at this. He’s the big drunk, obviously, and you tell him so. I know, he says, that’s how I know! He says you should really go to AA. You go to AA, you say. Ah, I’ve already been, he says. You’re thinking he’s not the greatest advertisement for this program, but you give him the benefit of the doubt. So you can drink and go to AA? No, he says. I don’t go to meetings anymore. But it works, really. It’s not magic. You should just go. No, you should just go, you say to him, and point to the door.
But he’s planted that stupid mustard seed, as they say, and you’re pissed. First things first, the emergency room. The doctor asks how it happened and how much you had to drink; you don’t have an answer to either question; he wraps your wrist in a cast, hands you a little card with a triangle in a circle, writes an address on it, says he goes to a noon meeting in the neighborhood when he can. You should go there right now. It’s five past noon now. You can be late. He’s cute. Will there be other guys there who look like you? If I say yes, will you promise to go? Maybe. Okay, then yes.
So you go. You go and you sit in the back of the room and listen to the speaker talk about almost killing someone in a DUI and still not getting sober and you think, Well, I haven’t done anything like that, it’s not too late to just slip right out with no one noticing, but then the speaker talks a little about what her life was like before she even started drinking, feeling hopeless and not smart and like her problems were so specific and different from anyone else’s that there were solutions out there for everyone but her. Which seems very specifically how you’ve been feeling for what seems like ever. She goes on to say that drinking helped that some, until she started crashing cars, and that when she finally got sober, ten years ago, she found other people who showed her how to live without drinking. There is a lot of laughter in the room during her talk, none of which seems all that funny to you, but the laughter gives you a good feeling. You understand that there’s a recognition.
At break time, they pass around a pan and make announcements. The person in charge asks if anyone is celebrating a sober anniversary. Several hands go up; they all take turns saying their names and how long they’ve been sober. Each person gets cheers, whether it is celebrating a sober anniversary of three months or three years. You are beginning to feel something, sitting here, you can’t quite identify it because it’s not something you’ve really felt before. Belonging? You haven’t even talked to anyone yet. Weird. The person in charge asks if it’s anyone’s first AA meeting. Your hand goes up before your brain thinks better of it. Fuck. You’re in AA forever now, obviously. You’ll have to pay dues and pray to Jesus and fuck knows what else. The cheers in the room are louder than the ones for the other people celebrating. Well, okay, that’s nice. The person next to you looks you dead in the eye, with a kind of warmth that’s new to you. The person in charge says some words toward you after this, you’re not sure what, you’re a little overwhelmed, this morning you woke up thinking maybe a Bloody Mary would make things better, and now you’re in AA for the rest of your life? You were never a rest-of-your-life kind of person. But you kind of are. When the meeting is over, the people to your left and right say something about happy destination roads and tell you if you’re willing to do the work you can have an amazing life. This morning you woke up half drunk with a broken wrist and this afternoon you have ten new friends who take you to lunch and two or three of them are obviously weird and fucked-up but the rest of them are now your brothers and your sisters all over this land, in your life, forever, done.
— There’s no one in charge of AA, Mom.
— Someone has to be in charge.
— No, there are no leaders, only trusted servants.
— That’s not creepy or anything.