I knew every part of it was wrong. I felt sick and scared and sad.
I owe that abused five-year-old this witness. It’s not as if the adult I’ve become can effectively disassociate from what that girl went through either. It’s not so much ripples on a pond as a great tsunami through life, the abuse leaving me in the thrall of shame when it comes to my sexuality. And it wasn’t just my sexuality that was shattered; I have spent a lifetime with such incredibly low self-esteem I have put up with repeated ill use by partners and others.
But no, I never fully felt comfortable being touched, and that’strue still. I have never felt comfortable with it my whole life, really, and all because of that girl forcing me to do something I barely understood but that I knew was shameful. This is how abuse works: the shame should have been hers, and lord knows, perhaps it is to this day. But it’s damn sure mine. I already lived in a world where my safety was jeopardized every single day. I never knew if Lala was going to burn the house down, or beat one of us, and now the safety of being looked after by girls in the neighborhood was entirely compromised by this heinous, ruinous act forced upon me. Hurt people hurt people.
Damn a world in which a five-year-old girl is subjected to this kind of degradation. How I wish I never had to give words to what happened to her, but she is owed that at least.
In looking over my life, I’m reminded of a recent study suggesting a link between childhood trauma and an increased chance of developing MS. The 2022 study of eighty thousand Norwegian women, published in theJournal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry,noted three kinds of abuse of children that were possible factors in a subsequent diagnosis of the disease: sexual, emotional, and physical. Close to 20 percent of the women admitted to suffering one such form of abuse as a child (which is in and of itself a terrible number), but staggeringly, there was a 93 percent risk of an MS diagnosis if a child had been exposed toall three. And it’s here your devastated narrator slowly raises her hand to sadly admit to all three, and then some.
My mind reels at this. To understand that the very things I survived could possibly chase me down and ravage my body with MS leaves me breathless with rage. I have fought my entire life to create peace for myself in the face of what happened to me as a child, onlyfor that survival instinct to be rendered moot by damage to my telomeres.
It wasn’t long after he moved in with us that the physical abuse of my mother by Lala started.
When I was about five, Lala punched and kicked my mother in a fierce assault, one borne of evil and drugs. It started with one of their usual fights but quickly escalated when my mom kicked him. At this, his rage coalesced into a closed-fist punch to the head, as hard as I’d ever seen anybody punch anybody.
She was knocked out.
I heard the scream of a little girl. “Don’t do that to my mama!” It was me screaming, raising from my soul a sound as close to a banshee as I could manage with my tiny voice, from out of my tiny body.
“I hate you,” I screamed at Lala. With this, he grabbed me by the back of my hair, lifted me up, and carried me to my bedroom—me screaming all the way—where he hurled me across the room and into the wall.
“You stay in here,” he said. “You have nothing to do with this.”
That was the little girl found by her godmother, Leanne, a little while later; Lala had fled. Leanne was one of the girls on the street who looked after me, though she was a good one. Sensing, perhaps, that something was amiss, or sent there by forces I’ll never understand, Leanne had showed up and found me dazed by that wall, my mother beaten unconscious, sprawled out on our couch.
My mom would be out for the next day and well into the nextnight. I placed myself firmly at my mother’s feet, hoping, I guess, to be a barrier to any further violence.
I would not be moved. I didn’t care what anyone said: I wasn’t leaving my mother’s side.
“Christina,” Leanne said to me at some point, “you have to go to bed.” Night had already slipped up through the Canyon, the streetlights casting an odd glow across the room, as though this was the most peaceful scene imaginable, rather than a place of violence.
I kept my gaze fixed on my comatose mother.
“I’m not going to bed,” I said to Leanne without looking at her.
I had a little purple tumbler that I’d stolen from my grandmother back in South Bend. I loved that thing; I kept my toothbrush in it. Leanne, recognizing that there was no way I was moving anytime soon, kindly went and found it, and put some water in it for me. I just sat there, next to my unconscious mother, brushing my teeth over and over again, trying to clean away the stain of my five-year-old life, just waiting for her to wake up, waiting, waiting, brushing, waiting, the only sound in the room the dull clink of the toothbrush as I dipped it in the water over and over and over and over.
The fights between my mother and Joe Lala were terrible and violent, and I witnessed many of them. He would beat the shit out of her and then later, when the dust had settled, he’d say, “I love you so much, I was just drunk…,” and she’d accept his excuses—I won’t call them apologies—and on they would go.
But it wasn’t just the fighting. A whole bunch of circus freaks came by all the time to score and do drugs. I would watch all these kooky weirdos and my mom snort heroin in the house. I even had ababysitter who stole cash from me because even though I was just a little girl, I was making a lot of money doing radio ads.
I first got my SAG card in 1975, on the back of a series of Kmart radio ads I’d done before I’d even turned five.
I often went with my mom on auditions, and in the case of the Kmart ads, she had a couple of friends who had been contracted to create them. One of them was the father of Josh Richman, who was making radio commercials at the time, and as I was young and had a cute little voice, they would use me, too.
Kmart was one of the first major stores to process photographic film in bulk for regular consumers, and as part of the promotion for this newfangled service, they promised to refund amateur photographers if their pictures were bad. This promise—“goof-proof”—was to be advertised via the sweet, cherubic voices of Josh Richman, playing Jeffry, and a little young me, playing Chrissie. We were the goof-proof kids, and those ads ran for years. We even won a Clio advertising award during their run, and I earned enough from being cute and goof-proof that my mother could invest my income in property in the Canyon.
In one of the ads, Josh says, “When I say ‘Action!,’ you say, ‘You get a goof-proof guarantee on picture processing at Kmart.’ ”
“I can’t say all that,” I reply. “My mouth is too little.” And though it was a cute line, it was also true: the producers had to splice together consonants and vowels to make my toddler burble sound like actual, comprehensible English. But it worked, and suddenly I had a SAG card.
By the time I turned seven, I was earning real money for my mom and me—in fact, I have never stopped working since that time, at least until I got MS. I did ads for cat chow and canned ham, and then I started doing episodics, including classics likeFamily TiesandCharles in Charge.(It was in those days that I met dear, much-mournedMatthew Perry.) When I wasn’t working or in school, I was in acting classes, and I still tell people to never stop training because you’re never going to be as good as you think you are, a lesson I learned early and often.
From a very young age, working was my identity, my everything. Being on set was where I felt most comfortable. I had to be someone I wasn’t, and I found that in the guise of a character I could protect the little scared me. When I was working, I had to be on time and respectful and professional. That world was organized and had rules. I got to escape into someone I wasn’t.
From the start, working was survival. I was pretty much always the sole breadwinner at home. That’s been a bone of contention my whole life. I love my mom; she would do little acting things here and there or get the lead in a commercial, but the truth was, I was making all the money. It was hard for her—my dad never paid child support, meaning there were times when we were on food stamps, and other times when we had nothing at all. So working was never a conscious decision I made; it was how we survived. I got good at it because I had to do it. I had no choice.
That working kid bought a house, a place we rented out until I moved into it when I was seventeen.
