Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

AS A GIRL, Becca hadn’t resembled Drew Barrymore at all. But now, at twenty-five, especially after gaining a few pounds, she had grown used to comments from bartenders and store clerks, and the half-startled looks from passersby.

That was funny because her mom had always gotten the Sissy Spacek tag, even if Becca thought that was mostly because of a bad nose job. Still, Sissy and Drew were worlds apart, physically. It was a subjective thing; sometimes people could see the Sissy, sometimes they couldn’t. But no one ever seemed to have trouble with Becca’s “Drewness.” Her boyfriend Sadge, who on a good day looked like a piss-poor Jack Black, got his kicks from playing it up — like the time he booked a table at Crustacean under Drew’s name. He made sure to get there first and had Becca come forty minutes later in huge sunglasses, head swathed in a knockoff Hermès scarf. They were high, and the maître d’ wasn’t thrilled. (He must have been on to them from the beginning because Sadge had been ushered to the “civilian” zone.) A few diners turned their heads when Becca arrived, but she didn’t have as much fun as she might have because Jordana Brewster was in the house, just on the other side of the glass partition, with a trim bald man Becca assumed to be her manager. Whenever Sadge laughed raucously or cued Becca to ham it up, the aspiring actress felt foolish, as she was certain Drew and Jordana knew each other. Jordana didn’t look over once, and the whole thing kind of threw water on it for her. Suddenly Becca felt cheap, like a character in her friend Annie’s favorite movie, Star 80.

That was the week she saw Drew on a Jay Leno repeat. Her divorce from Tom Green had just been announced, but there she sat, surrealistically giddy about the marriage. She gushed that her husband had sent a dozen roses and a note saying good luck on the show, and the audience sighed. Jay volunteered that it was actually a statistic that comedians stayed married longer. Drew said how great was that. It was so horrible and depressing that Becca actually got nauseated then angry that someone in programming would have been so careless as to rerun that particular show. She thought it might have been deliberately perpetrated, like when those malicious video store clerks splice porn into animated classics. Jay Leno struck her as a good and decent man, and she told Sadge — who’d laughed throughout the segment until Becca hit him — it was the kind of thing that if it was brought to NBC’s attention by Drew’s management (she hoped), the talk-show host would definitely apologize to her personally. Becca actually considered being the “whistle-blower,” but then her own career concerns overtook her.

• • •

“THAT WAS GREAT,” said Sharon. “I think you’ve got the potential to be quite a comedienne. ”

She gave the word a Frenchified emphasis, and Becca was lost. Did she mean stand-up? She was too intimidated to ask for clarification. Maybe she meant Becca should be doing gigs at the Laugh Factory instead of wasting time trying to get movie and TV roles.

She decided she didn’t care what the woman meant. She would simply persevere, perseverance being the one quality all successful actors had in common. She’d just gotten her SAG card and had finally found a commercial agent but didn’t yet have the all-important “theatrical.” Still, she thought of herself as a winner because only a month or so after a general meeting with Sharon Belzmerz, one of the big casting directors on the Warners lot, she had been invited back to do a taped audition for a WB pilot. Sharon’s friend, Becca’s acting coach, made the initial contact. What you always heard was true — it was all about personal connections.

“That was really fun!” said Becca. “Thank you so much for seeing me.” She glanced at the video camera on the tripod opposite her. “Can I get a copy?”

Sharon smiled at her naïveté.

“Well, the director has to see it first — then we usually recycle.”

“Oh! That’s OK,” said Becca, hiding her embarrassment.

“You’re really very good. Don’t worry, you’ll have tape or film soon. You’ll have a whole reel.”

On the Boardwalk

WHEN HER FATHER had a stroke, Lisanne took the day off.

She worked for Reggie Marck in the penthouse offices of Marck, Fitch, Saginow, Rippert, Childers, and Beiard, at Sunset near Doheny. She was thirty-seven and had been Reggie’s crackerjack executive secretary for thirteen years, beginning with his stint at Kohlhorn, Kohan, Rattner, Hawkins, and Risk. When he heard the bad news, he encouraged her to get on a plane and go home. That wasn’t so easy. Lisanne had a profound fear of flying (a condition long predating 9/11). After a round of phone calls to her aunt, she went to the Venice Boardwalk to clear her head.

The shoreline was windswept and absurdly pristine. Since the bike path’s renovation and the rebuilding of a few burned-out boardwalk apartment houses — not to mention the arrival of Shutters and Casa del Mar — the beach had lost some of its funky grandeur. There wasn’t much to be nostalgic about anymore. The shops, vendors, and performers were forced to clean up their acts, and the city hadn’t sanctioned Fourth of July fireworks on the pier in years because of the gangs.

Lisanne bit the bullet and took possession of her wistful stroll; she had some serious mulling to do. There was the dilemma of her father’s grave condition, plus imminent jet travel…. Still, it was diverting to take in the scene. Because it was a weekday, there weren’t many people out. Interspersed with the homeless was an upscale cadre of citizens busily exercising their right to play hooky at watery world’s end. They spun or sprinted past doing “cardio” or simply sat and stared at the passive ruthlessness of the sea whence one day they would return, if they were so lucky. Heads tilted, faux-contemplative, to regard the occasional chandelier of gulls.

Lisanne waited for a woman in her late forties to jog by before crossing the path. A tribe of drunks sat on the grass. One of them yelled, “You go, girl! You c’n do it! You c’n do it, girlie!” The runner pretended to ignore him, but Lisanne could tell the bum had found her prideful nerve. Later, she saw a different drunk approach a gorgeous twentysomething couple. The boy’s pants slung stylishly low, and the drunk said, “Hey, your fuckin pants are fallin down your ass!” The boy, smiling and trying to be cool, decided to say, “I know,” to defuse the harassment. His girlfriend was being cool too, but the drunk wouldn’t have it. “Then pull ‘em up ! Pull ‘em up !” It was like the commedias dell’arte that Lisanne had studied in school. The bums and winos were there to keep it real, to deflate the ego and remind that all was vanity.

Lisanne slunk away to avoid being heckled. She was forty pounds overweight — a perfect target.

She tried to imagine herself climbing onto a plane. As a girl, she didn’t mind flying so much, though she remembered only a few trips. The 747s were so big and she was so small that somehow it was OK. But now it was different: Reggie would have to hook her up with his doctor for the big gun sleeping pills, and if she timed it right, she’d wake up as they touched down at Newark. That was the best of scenarios. Aside from the obvious fantasies of wind-shear-induced nosedives, messy hijackings, human-debris-scattered cornfield fireballs, and charismatic pilots greeting her with gin-laced coffee breath as she boarded, Lisanne considered some of her lesser concerns to be laugh-out-loud comical. What if the pills put her out so deep that her snoring became shamefully stertorous or she drooled on the passenger beside her? What if her throat closed up or she had a reaction to the pills and vomited in her sleep? No — try as she may, Lisanne couldn’t see herself getting into some fucked-up cylinder and hurtling through space. She wasn’t ready to play that kind of Russian roulette. In heaven or hell, the biggest bunch of losers had to be the ones who crashed while flying to be at the side of a stroked-out parent.