Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

I was convinced that simply because I attended college and majored in acting, I would walk out of the not-a-serious-acting-conservatory Emerson College and straight into my own trailer in Hollywood or some backstage door on Forty-second Street. The details were not mine to work out! That’s what acting professors were for! This was before I realized that my acting professors were themselves actors who also thought at one point in their misguided youth that they’d be famous. I don’t think any of them ever got offered a role in The Godfather and told Coppola, “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m going to have to turn this role down. My real passion is to wake up every morning and teach a bunch of hungover college kids the concept of sense memory.”

In all my years of college, I never really sat down and got to thinking, Okay, so how do I take this class where I do monologues from Equus and turn it into a career? I was usually busy thinking about the cute Kurt Cobain look-alike who was always sitting alone in the cafeteria near the cereal. (Turns out that the reason he looked so much like Kurt Cobain was that he was also a heroin addict. I recently looked him up on Facebook and now he’s a chubby, short-haired, button-up-shirt-wearing computer programmer—married, with two kids. I mourn this outcome more than if he had OD’d.)

In the back of my mind I just assumed that there existed a special red phone in the dean’s office at Emerson. In my limited knowledge of how the world actually worked, I decided that this phone I made up in my head existed solely for placing and receiving calls to and from Hollywood. I pictured a kingmaker with a Santa Claus–esque workshop running Hollywood, who kept a master list. Instead of who’s naughty and who’s nice, his list had names of who’s talented and who’s not. I pictured my acting teacher calling this Hollywood Santa and saying something like, “Hi. This is Judith Renner. I’d like to report that Jen Kirkman just made herself cry in my Acting 101 class. Yes, she was doing a monologue about being a single mother but she used the image of her favorite dead pet as a catalyst for the tears. She was also speaking from her diaphragm and not mumbling. Oh, and she also nailed this really difficult Fosse dance move that involves crooking her pinky finger and sitting on a chair. Can we move her up on the ‘talented’ list? Great. We’ll be in touch once she nails a Scottish accent—specifically the Shetland Isles.”

A FEW WEEKS before I graduated from college, in lieu of a realistic life plan, I decided I’d get a life-altering haircut. I didn’t even plan the haircut. It just came to me as I walked by a Supercuts. I went in, plopped into an empty chair, and told some girl to give me the “Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby ” pixie cut. What I really wanted was the “Winona Ryder in Reality Bites ” pixie cut, but I was too self-conscious to ask for that one. I’d always been told that I resembled Winona and I didn’t want people to think that I was aware of that fact and trying to be like her. Of course, all I wanted was to be like her—mainly because she was dating Johnny Depp at the time and always got to play characters in movies that smoked cigarettes. Two things that thrilled me about the possibility of becoming an actor were (1) having an excuse to smoke if “my character” called for it and (2) doing love scenes with hot guys.

Within three minutes of walking into Supercuts, my hair was on the floor like a slut’s thong and what was left of it was sticking straight up off the top of my head. The woman with the scissors said, “Whoops.” Who knows whether she was even an actual employee. She could have been a sociopath off the street who carried scissors and wore a red-stained apron that she swore was just “hair dye.” I looked stupid but I felt strangely liberated. I’d just done a really spontaneous thing that I could not take back or correct for a long time—sort of like getting pregnant or having an abortion. It gave me an immediate Zen acceptance of who I was.

Nevertheless, the haircut looked like shit, so I went down the street to a real salon where I had to confess to an about-to-combust gay guy that I’d been careless enough to trust Supercuts to get the Rosemary’s Baby/Reality Bites pixie cut correct. He did a dramatic pinwheel with his arms and brought his fist to his chin like the statue The Thinker, then took a deep breath and placed his hands on my shoulders. He cried up to the ceiling, “Hon. What are we going to do?” Then he moved back and, with tears in his eyes, waved his hand in front of his face like a lady about to faint on her porch from either humidity or a sexy gentleman caller.

He took another deep breath.

“Hon, I have no choice but to nearly shave your head and leave a few pieces of bangs in the front. And you’re going to have to act like you meant to do this. It’s going to be very runway and you just have to promise me that you’ll never wear this hairstyle without product or… an attitude.”

I agreed—anything to get him to stop grabbing me so hard and behaving like he was a character from a Tennessee Williams play.

I went to a college party that night and when I climbed out the window onto the fire escape to smoke a cigarette, my favorite acting teacher was already sitting on the steps about to rip a bong hit. She exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face and said to me, “The hair. I like it. You’re not hiding anymore. You’re really you now, aren’t ya, Jen? Aren’t ya?” I had no idea what she meant, but I was still under the impression that she was going to pick up that red phone as soon as she was done getting high with a bunch of twenty-one-year-olds, to let Hollywood know that I was no longer hiding. I held out hope that something would save me from my credit card debt. I’d just added another couple of hundred bucks to my MasterCard to have that queen at the chichi salon shave my head.

I’D PASSED MY college years spending money on important things like tapestries for my bedroom walls and cigarettes for my lungs and now it was time to tighten my belt buckle—or at least to get a belt. The good thing about moving back home with my parents was that they weren’t the type to try to teach me a lesson by charging me rent. They probably had more fun just silently judging me.

My original life plan had been to graduate and then move in with my boyfriend, Jamie. The only problem with that was that Jamie had dumped me a few months before graduation. (That also could have been a catalyst for the haircut, now that I think about it.) Jamie lived with his friends Adam and John, in the closet of Adam’s bedroom. We’d lay in his single bed, watching his shirts hang above our heads, listening to Adam snore through the closet door and making plans for the day when Adam would move out and Jamie and I could take his room. When we weren’t fumbling to get each other’s pants off on a thin mattress on the floor of his closet, we were in the same college sketch comedy troupe called This Is Pathetic, which actually would have been a great label for our relationship.

Jamie and I were opposites. The only thing we had in common was our comedy troupe. Jamie was a beer-drinking, sports-loving fraternity guy. When I wanted to go see the Ramones play at a rock club in Boston on Valentine’s Day, that was the beginning of our end. He didn’t like the same music I did, yet he didn’t want me running around to concerts by myself on such a Hallmark holiday. He said it “embarrassed him” that his woman attended a show alone. I never got the chance to ask him before he died, but I don’t think Joey Ramone gave a shit that I went unaccompanied to see his band play.

Jamie always told me that I reminded him of his best friend from high school, Paula, for whom he’d always had unresolved feelings. He and I would take long, romantic walks through the Boston Common and he’d just stop and smile at me. He had a fantastic smile. He was like a shorter, greasier-faced Robert Downey Jr. I’d say, “Yes, Jamie?” waiting to hear him profess his love for me. And he’d say, “Sorry, you’re just so… Paula right now,” and then hug me tightly. I was too young to realize that if your boyfriend has feelings for his unrequited high school love and high school was only four years prior, you’re not just a pleasant reminder of his youth; you’re a Second-Place Paula.