I sometimes turn to my journals from back then to try to connect with Samantha. I can hear my fourteen-year-old self in the exclamation points and emotion on the page.
May 17, 1986
Fuck she was special. Imissher!!!!!… I am scared that if I get too depressed, I might kill myself. Which is something I don’t really want to do, but when I throw a frenzy, I am capable of any kind of destruction to myself.
June 12, 1986
I hate this world!!!! The other day at school, I tried to kill myself. I just wish I would have succeeded! Every day seems to get worse. Dying sounds better and better. Ever since Samantha’s death things haven’t been too good… Fuck I miss her! I just want to be with her. My sweetheart. My love. Her picture is on my wall looking over me like a guardian angel.
I want to go back and find that fourteen-year-old girl, the one who was determined to be modest to the point of self-effacement, the one struggling with her body image, the one fasting, drinking only water, the girl who had survived so much and who now had to deal with the violent loss of her friend. I want to wrap her up so tightly and tell her everything will be okay.
I often think about how MS is exacerbated by trauma. My currentstomach problems act up if someone starts to stress me out. I start vomiting, almost like my body is trying to stop the noise, too. Then I end up in the hospital again.
I just want everything to stop.
But it won’t stop. I’ll be stuck in this bed, my brain lesions sparking like a downed wire. I’ll be poring through my journals from when I was young, trying to find the key to something. Perhaps I saw into the future in ways that are hard to believe. This from, again, June 1986.
The bright days that I so looked forward to are turning to gray. Why is life for me more of a chore than an experience? Each time I awake I dread the day that will follow. I wish that the pain I feel inside would terminate. I hate it here. But I suppose that I should “look on the bright side.” My heart says what bright side and my mind says that there is joy on the “long and winding road” ahead. I just don’t know if I should follow that road. Who knows what it’s leading to. Either happiness or sadness. I think that I should just give it a try.
I suppose I did follow that road, but did it lead to happiness or sadness?
Just as for everyone, for me it led to both. It led me here.
With everything turning to gray, I thought comedy was beneath me. My world was punk and the Canyon and Melrose and three hours of school every few weeks between jobs. Committing to a comedy showlikeMarried… with Children,which was billed as an antidote to the smarmy charms ofThe Cosby Show?
No thanks—comedy was for suckers. I had a shaved head and a gnarly attitude.
I was sure that I was destined for a career filled with dramatic roles, like the one I’d won an award for onHeart of the City.Comedy was so not what I was.
I hated myself.
And I hated Kelly Bundy.
But there was more—the hair band generation as depicted in the character of Kelly? It was so not my thing, so not my style.I was from the Canyon, from Joni-land. Stephen Stills was my godfather. By fifteen, I’d discovered Janis Joplin and I rued the fact that I’d missed Woodstock every day. I wore patchouli, which some people told me meant I smelled like goat BO. (They were not wrong.) I was the child of arealhippie. I was not comedy; I was not Kelly Bundy.
Some days my friends and I would walk all the way down to Melrose from Lookout Mountain. Back then, Melrose was a scene. There were clothing stores like Aaardvark’s, grimy and grungy and awesome. Those stores smelled like crack. Sure enough, I found out later that a friend of a friend was smoking crack in the back of one of them. Out on the street, homeless teenagers slept and waited and begged for change. They were mostly runaways, or kids who had been kicked out of their homes. There they were, lounging around on Melrose with their mohawks, in tattered clothes covered in zippers, smoking cigarettes and waiting for something good to happen. It felt like we were all punks back then: on Melrose, at Aaardvark’s, in the alleys sniffing glue, at Fairfax High School, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers would come from one day soon.
I didn’t go to Fairfax HS. I went to Excelsior HS, just off of Highland Avenue in the very heart of Hollywood.
Excelsior was a school for working kids. We went there from 9 a.m. till noon only, leaving us plenty of time to do our real jobs.
Excelsior claimed to be a “college prep” school. In reality, it was so lax that we would regularly get away with changing the clocks so the head of the school would think we were done for the day. He’d go to the bathroom or to the office, and we’d immediately nominate someone to go up and move the hands of the clock to read noon. When he returned, he’d look at the clock and announce, “Ah, looks like we’re done!” He was probably as relieved as we were.
It was a weird little school. There were only about thirty of us in the student body at any one time. I went to school with people like Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, and Milla Jovovich, as well as a bunch of kids who had to work for their parents in the afternoons in stores, restaurants, and other family businesses. Originally, I had tried going to Taft High School out in Woodland Hills because my manager lived there and all the high schools down in Hollywood sucked—Hollywood High and Fairfax were scary places to go in the early eighties. I lasted at Taft for one week, and every day I was there I thought I was going to lose my mind. I’d never seen so many cheerleaders and what the character John Bender inThe Breakfast Clubdescribes as “Sportos” in my life. I was horrified by these people. I would wear pillowcases as skirts with fishnets and Doc Martens. I was a messy, weird, punk chick who, when I started onMarried…with Children, was making $20,000 a week. Normal high school culture was not for me.
I made the switch to Excelsior, which was more my people, and anyway, it was also the kind of place where you didn’t have to goevery day if you had a job—they would send you home with the schoolwork, which you’d then just hand in to a tutor, if you did it at all.
A typical month for me would consist of three weeks on an acting job, and then during the week that we had hiatus I’d go back to Excelsior. That was my routine right through eleventh grade.
All I wanted was to get my GED.
Alas, all I ended up with was a high school equivalency.
To complete my high school education, I drove myself to a test center in my white Honda Accord. It was a piece of shit car, but I’d named her Pearl after Janis Joplin. The day of the test was one of those fall days, the leaves starting to come down, the air crisp and bright. I was so excited. I still get butterflies when I think about that moment, the drive there and the way the sun was hitting the leaves and reflecting on the ground, the rest of my life just waiting on the edge of this feeling. Though I probably couldn’t have expressed it then, I knew something big, life-changing, was on the horizon—I could feel it in the way the weather was filled with possibility and spark.
I went into the test center and found myself surrounded by a bunch of pregnant girls. We were taking a test that some of us would never need—I sure as shit knew I didn’t need it, even though I was a straight A student—and a lot of those young women were about to have something way more important to deal with. As for me, I was already a full-time actor. All I had to really do was sign my name, sit there for a couple of hours, get my certificate, and then… what, exactly?
Oh, I also remember that they asked me if I had any income.
