Pageboy, page 7
I think about that moment a lot—the anger that man felt entitled to display and my response to it. In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.
I forgot I had hung up on Madisyn when I frantically swung open the door to Pink Dot. I could see her on the other side of the street, already on the way over. The man was nowhere in sight, so I expressed my gratitude for the help and walked to the sidewalk to meet her, my neck twisting from side to side. I made sure to keep looking as we walked the short distance back to the hotel room.
She put her arm around me as I recounted what had happened, the touch different from before.
10
THAT LITTLE INDIE
I didn’t get my first tattoo until I was thirty, but the meaning stretched back to one of my earlier experiences as an actor. The tattoo reads C KEENS, and it’s located on my upper right arm, just below the shoulder. C KEENS is my nickname for one of my dearest friends, Catherine Keener. I met her during a pivotal time, post–Hard Candy, pre-Juno, I was busy but not very known. Groundless in Los Angeles, sprawled and unfamiliar. I was researching for my next role, up all night digesting the horrors, hoping my acting partner and I would get along, that we would trust each other. I was finding it hard to separate myself from my roles, and this role was particularly distressing.
My initial meeting with Catherine was at her home in Santa Monica, just a few minutes’ walk from the beach. At nineteen, I had just signed on to star in An American Crime with her. Tommy O’Haver, the writer and director, picked me up from a hotel in Hollywood on Highland Boulevard. We drove the forty minutes west to her home so Catherine and I could spend time there together. Talk the film, the characters, but mostly connect with each other. These weren’t easy roles.
The house was an old dark-brown Craftsman. It had an unusually large backyard, the kind you do not expect in Santa Monica. A small tree house, a swing dangling below. Tall hedges stretched above the surrounding fence. It felt like its own little world.
The fact that I had been cast opposite such an icon was utterly surreal for me. I’d be making a film with one of my favorite actors of all time. Stepping through her back gate, I was unbearably shy. I barely spoke.
I had attempted to look cool. Vintage T, black jacket, torn-up Converse. She walked toward us with a giant smile and that familiar voice. Wearing ripped jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, she oozed warmth and sincerity. She was direct, with characteristic sensual swagger.
We climbed over her deck balcony and continued our way up to the roof. Our sense of humor aligned, and her unmistakable laugh came pouring out. Staring out toward the Pacific, we spoke of what was ahead. No condescension, that dismissive cadence slung at you when you’re young. Instead an unspoken ease. I’d never met anyone like her before.
I went from shy to present. I could already feel her care, her desire to protect, but with zero preciousness. We became pals quickly, but our closeness could only do so much to mitigate the effect filming had on my nineteen-year-old self.
An American Crime was based on a true story about a sixteen-year-old girl, Sylvia Likens, who in 1965 suffered the most amount of abuse on a single victim in Indiana state history. The film is brutal, but it holds back, the real story was even worse. I had been cast as Sylvia.
Sylvia’s parents were carnival workers, and when they traveled, they left two of their daughters with Gertrude Baniszewski. Keener played Gertrude, a single mother of seven, struggling with poverty, barely earning a living by doing laundry for her Indianapolis neighbors. Gertrude almost never ate, her face gaunt, angular, and sharp, a body as thin as a rake. She self-medicated with downers, swigs from tiny bottles, mood swings fluctuated from one extreme to the other. Sylvia’s parents leave Sylvia and their younger daughter, Jennie, with Gertrude and her swaths of kids for twenty dollars a week.
When the first of the money is late, Gertrude takes it out on Sylvia and Jennie. Leading them down to the basement, she demands they bend over and aggressively flogs them. The abuse escalates, Gertrude encouraging her children to join in as well. In one of the most horrifying scenes to film, Gertrude forces Sylvia to stick a Coke bottle up her vagina in front of the other children.
We did not actually do this in front of the younger actors. They only came to set for their coverage. Off camera we pretended Gertrude only twisted Sylvia’s arm.
The Coke bottle scene culminates in her being dragged toward the basement steps. Screaming and crying, she is hurled down the stairs. Smashing her head on the cement floor, Sylvia is left with serious blunt force trauma.
There were scenes in my previous films that had been difficult to shoot—violent, sexual, and physical. But this was different. Moments in this film were unspeakably brutal. As a teenager, I did not have the skills to turn it on and off as abruptly and easily as I can now. To leave the work at work. The scenes would linger, feelings stuck. It took longer to dislodge from the body.
During Sylvia’s last moment alive, she was branded. Gertrude straddled her while one of the kids held Sylvia’s hands above her head. Someone passed out in the theater during this scene when the film premiered at Sundance in 2007. I don’t blame them. Sylvia died not long after that. Torment written in her flesh.
Sylvia’s body faded away until it broke. Knowing that the story was true made it all worse, the details even more gut churning. I couldn’t escape Sylvia, and the days came home with me.
If I was alone in my apartment, I would pace. Walk then sit. Up again, pace. Look out the window, pivot to the bathroom. Windowsill again, sit and smoke. Cigarette done. Grab the backpack and get out. My incessant, underlying need to flee, my new normal. Stopping is too risky, that’s when the feelings jump out. Playing a character that was partially starved to death allowed me to lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself.
“It’s for a film,” I’d say in response to a mention of my small bites, the annoying, concerned tone, almost a challenge.
I’ll prove to you all that I need nothing. The little voice would brag with the creak of a side smile.
In agony, Sylvia would scratch the concrete floor until the tips of her fingers wore off, she chewed her lip compulsively, biting through the pain. When they found her body it looked as though she had two mouths.
I’m hungry.
Two more hours, then you can eat.
What am I going to eat?
Steamed vegetables and brown rice … half of it.
How much more time?
One hour and forty-five minutes.
I’d shower at night, washing off the burns, the bruises, a reminder that I had nothing to complain about. How dare I acknowledge my silly pain as anywhere near hers.
I listened to “Downtown” by Petula Clark incessantly. It was one of the most popular songs in 1965, the year Sylvia was murdered.
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand
Walking, I would listen. On the bus down Sunset, I would listen. In the house, sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette, I would listen. It was compulsive, a way I tend to be with songs, some for stranger reasons than others.
I would walk down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, catching the bus west to Hollywood. I’d get off around Vine and wander into Amoeba Music, a warehouse-size new-and-used record, CD, and DVD store in Los Angeles. The tack tack tack of potential buyers flipping through the hard plastic cases filled the ears as much as the latest, hippest songs they played, a metronome setting the speed. It helped the time pass.
Characters affected me in various ways, how could they not? It’s an exploration of another human’s experience. A never-ending exercise in empathy, opening the heart, hoping it all sinks in, waiting for that release of emotion. My eyes would close, and it would strike me, an inconceivable depth of despair. I wondered how she even made it as long as she did. How she didn’t just give up. I guess that is what torture is, dragging you to the end and pulling you back, again and again.
I was staying in Silver Lake in the top floor of a two-story house that had been converted into its own apartment. A one-bedroom with large windows that offered a beautiful view of the city. It was tucked into the hill on Lucile, not far from Sunset Boulevard, but isolated, a substantial, steep climb. I was alone; I had next to no friends in Los Angeles at the time.
I remember Keener scooping me up in her black sedan and taking me to a July Fourth BBQ in the backyard of a house formerly owned by Buster Keaton. I think she wanted to help me, sensing a struggle I could not speak to. We sat down across from her friend Karen O, who I idolized. Show Your Bones, a quintessential record for me at the time. But food was stressful, drinking was stressful, my eyeballs darted around, calculations in my brain that refused me the moment.
I was lightly seeing a guy at the time. We would go to dinner and I would just stare at the menu, dazed. I wanted none of it. We sat in a restaurant in a train car that served only pasta. Without ordering, we left, and he drove me home.
“I’ve already dealt with my issues,” he said before pulling away.
“I think I’m gay,” I said once while we were fucking. Closed off, disassociated, not even performative.
“No you’re not,” he responded, continuing with the pumps.
I was barely eating, barely sleeping, delirious on set. I smoked compulsively. Hoping to blow out all the thoughts. Or as Kurt Vonnegut puts it, “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
The shoot became increasingly difficult. I’d crash at Keener’s sometimes, especially after the more horrifying days. I felt taken care of there. We’d drink tequila and sit around her firepit. We would blare music and dance dance dance, a wide expanse of unknown adventures ahead. We met making a film wherein she murders me. In the real world she was the only thing saving me.
By the end of the shoot, I had lost a significant amount of weight. And it continued to plummet when I returned to Halifax, where I was still living on and off. I dropped to eighty-four pounds. My arms were so skinny I could take the outer sleeve of a to-go coffee cup, stick my hand through and slide it up my arm, beyond my elbow and to my shoulder. Wasting away. Later that year, I dressed up as a coffee cup sleeve for Halloween—WARNING HOT BEVERAGE INSIDE—spelled out with a thick black marker.
No matter the words or looks of concern or how many rich pastries people tried to get me to eat, I could not see it. I refused to. Hurting my body to that extreme must have been a cry for help, but when the help would come, it made me angry and resentful. Where have you been? An unfair question really. I had never communicated what I’d been grappling with to anyone.
When I first returned home my mother’s face was filled with panic. The worry in her eyes shattered me, a look of anguish I had not seen before, and the culprit was me. I had crossed a threshold, my weight so low the emaciation had become visible. The sunken cheeks scared me.
My need to fix her, to protect her, forced my eating issue in an alternate direction. Now I did want to eat, I was desperate to. I didn’t want her to feel that way.
Finally motivated to eat, I couldn’t. I’d prepare to take a bite of a sandwich, something simple, nothing fancy. My throat would clench, the back of my neck would grow moist, my chest swelling with deep dread. Spinning into a full panic attack, I could not swallow the food. Having been obsessed with maintaining control, I’d now lost it. Squeezed far too tight. My body, understandably, was done with me.
That will not go in. That will not go in. That will not go in.
My days revolved around the moments I was supposed to get food down. There was no hiding it now, my face cadaverous, body skin and bones. I could not escape the stress, the concern omnipresent. And I could not shake Sylvia. I thought of her all the time. No role had stuck with me like that. Flashes of the basement. The hunger. Forced to eat her own vomit. Screams ignored.
“How about you try putting cheese sauce on your broccoli?” a well-meaning therapist suggested.
I sat in her office near the Dalhousie University campus, a white room, credentials framed, she had long, wavy, light hair and wore glasses. She had a smile that was stuck on her face.
“Nuts are a great snack to have around.”
The conversation revolved around when and what I should eat for breakfast, when and what I should eat for a snack, outlines of what should be on my supper plate. I wasn’t supposed to exercise, no push-ups or anything of the sort. Nothing beyond food. And it was all beyond food.
I avoided the few friends I had in Halifax. I was ashamed. The “actress” goes off and returns like all the others. I was such a goddamn cliché. Social anxiety was already a prevalent aspect of my life and as my mental health suffered, my isolation intensified, just a text to a friend seemed out of reach. The idea of making a plan unfeasible.
Loneliness had always been a staple for me, an inherent disconnect from my surroundings, a foundational dissociation. Lured away from my existence, I thought those around me wanted me to disappear—that I was preferred as an illusion.
I was unable to work for a while. The therapist suggested the break, as did my parents. Acting was the last thing I wanted to do anyhow. Too fragile and erratic, loud noises made me jump. A soft touch on the shoulder could make me cower. The thought of being away, of being alone—for the first time, it all felt impossible. I’d ached to be on my own in the past, and now I’d cling to whatever I could grasp. Any inkling of care I could sense.
For the most part I followed the eating schedule from the therapist. The stress at mealtimes did not go away and knowing how dangerous the situation had become only added to my anxiety. I wanted the external concern to stop. Tired of “the talks” and the scrutiny. And there was a part I desperately wanted at the time, the role of a pregnant teenager no less. I focused on Juno, and avoided the core of the issue.
Snacks had been a void in my life, something before bed, unthinkable, but I’d force it down. My weight began to rise. I drank smoothies with blueberries and avocado and protein powder that made me gassy. I was managing the snacks, slowly training my body to chew and swallow and digest food again. To stay calm, to not have to get drunk first. Not ideal, but at least some pounds were returning.
I had to travel to Los Angeles for my final Juno audition, which was more of a screen test. I am the first to admit when I am not right for something, but this was one of those rare occasions where by page five, I couldn’t fathom not doing it, I just knew. I read Diablo Cody’s screenplay on the floor of my bedroom in Halifax. Her wit opened up a new vernacular—it was organic and honest. I’d been craving something like this, a character like this, as an actor and an audience member. This I could do.
Still too thin, but much better, I flew to LA with my mother. I had gone from being independent very young, moving out at sixteen, to a kid with their mother traveling alongside them. The thought of functioning alone felt too risky, and I could not take any chances. A suggestion from the well-meaning therapist that I don’t think was the best decision. As I grew more confident in my queerness, her denial grew, too.
Before she was a teacher my mom worked for Air Canada, not as a flight attendant but as a passenger agent. My mother has been forever terrified of flying. For the takeoff, she closes her eyes and braces tight. Turbulence and you witness her heart jump, a sort of shiver runs through the body. I let her know that it’s okay, it’ll pass. It wrenches my heart watching my mother afraid, a window to her pain. She’s had a lot of that in her life.
We reached altitude. My anxiety was fluttering. On a plane you have no choice but to sit, body pressed into the seat, nowhere to flee. I obsessively went over the pages for the audition. Running the dialogue in my head, I wrote it out over and over, a process that helps me remember. My mother finally calmed and focused on a movie.
We flew from Halifax to Toronto, where we met Michael Cera and his father on our Los Angeles flight. For this audition, I was to read thirty pages of the script, mostly with Michael, the lengthiest audition I have ever done. But having just binged Arrested Development, I was stoked, his humor original and grounded, emotions on his sleeve. We sat in the middle of the plane, Michael and his father were on the other side of the aisle. We exchanged pleasantries, he was quiet but exuded kindliness.
After takeoff, Michael promptly lowered the meal tray, crossed his arms over it, and rested his head to sleep. He stayed that way until we started our descent. I looked on in admiration and disbelief. How could he be so relaxed? I pressed back my seat, reclining it more, I could see my mom’s anxious knees bounce.
Even though it was implied the role was mine before the screen test, my heart still burst with excitement when I got the call. One of those rare occasions—a character who filled me with joy. I’d been cast, a dream role.
Initially we were supposed to make the film a couple months after the screen test, but it ended up being pushed, which was good, more time to recover, no excuses. Drastically better with food, albeit still self-restricting, work helped me. Being on this set was healing, flashes of torture not following me home, and I was making a point to fuel my body. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better. I had something meaningful to focus on after feeling unequivocally no meaning at all. Depression had sucked me dry.
It was a job where I felt comfortable, able to start from a grounded place, versus outside my body, trying to crawl back in. Hair, wardrobe, and makeup at work was typically a nightmare for me. Ironically, playing a pregnant teenager was one of the first times I felt a modicum of autonomy on set. I was wearing a fake belly but not being hyperfeminized. For me, Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.
While filming in Vancouver I stayed at the Sutton Place, or the “Slutton Place” as some in the industry refer to it. A cavernous hotel, with dated decor, it’s located in downtown Vancouver and has long-stay units where actors frequently reside.
