Living with PTSD, at 18 the patterns were just beginning to develop

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Part of the patina of living with PTSD, for me at least, is I can’t let my brain be empty. Always I have a headphone in my ear, a TV set on, music coming from somewhere, and I'm working at the computer with at least seven Windows open, always, all at the same time.

It’s dangerous for me to let my brain get empty. It used to happen accidentally. I'd be long gone into the mania before I realized the radio got turned off.

If there is a sound, a visual, or other sensual element that's not covered, this stuff just seeps in.

Today no matter what, if I'm out walking, I have to have talk radio on in my ear (there's only KTLK Progressive Talk). It has to be talking, music on its own isn't enough. If I'm going to take the subway I bring something extra to fill my head when we're underground and can’t get reception.

If the distraction gets removed, like if a computer crashes or there's a power outage, it can catch me off guard, and before I know it, the mania is running through my head. I'm repeating a phrase like, “this is what you deserve” or “they've always hated you always will” or my favorite, “this is what happens to old whores.”

"This is how old whores end up." Shoot. Just as I wrote that I let out this sob.

An actress would have a hard time playing the part of me these days, the emotion is so intense. I can hear a sound or in this case write a few words and the thought in my head trips a mechanism - SOB - erupts out, then large globular salty wet tears. My tears can be projectile.

I feel very much that I'm at a turning point, that from here I can real easily self destruct, or from here I can emerge like Ursula in The Little Mermaid. The image I see inside of what I'm going through right now is Ursula lying on the bottom of the sea, fuming. Then emerging, expanding, taking in power with every breath-

Nothing the Catholic Church and its behind the scenes PR machine can do can stop Kay aka Ursula the Sea Witch.

Occasionally in digging up the stuff I find about pedophile priests, at City of Angels 5, I’ll get to an impasse. Maybe it’s feeling overwhelmed. I'll say, I don't think I can do it anymore. Sometimes I even become immobilized, or take to the sidewalks, stick the radio in my ear and don't take it out for a week.

Then Ursula emerges again in my room and hollers all over the keyboard.

I wail out onto the blogosphere.

One reader at a time, no idea who the readers are.

AS TO THE PTSD
Smothering Techniques

In talking to other adult victims of pedophile priests at City of Angels 5, I find many of them share this need to keep their heads occupied all the time. “Intrusive memories” are what psychologists call that stuff that pours into the head of PTSD patients, the ones who find ways to stifle them, so the ones who are able to stay alive.

Right this moment, here I sit, TV muted so I can read news captions, music playing from wall, I'm at the computer screen with 5 Word files open and 7 or 8 Windows active online. Always ready to go to Google and go somewhere else, act on any distraction, change the subject, run away. Even grateful for the police helicopter hovering overhead.

*************

My friend asked what happened to my laptop. I told her I have this anger management problem.

Didn't have to say more, she understood and laughed.

Because she too is an adult victim of a pedophile priest.

I didn't get mad and throw the laptop, I just slammed my fist down on the table so hard that it caused the laptop to jump a bit and land splat back down. Then a green line lit up and slashed vertically down the screen. I've seen these slashes on monitor screens before, so I knew this could be the beginning of the end of my laptop. If that green line starts to widen or more lines appear, any time it will happen. One day you'll turn on the machine and the screen will transmogrify into thousands of digital bits looking like the inside of a transistor, then die before your eyes.

I can’t let that happen so within seconds of pounding the fist on the table, I began to whimper and panic, There's a green line. How am I going to do my three jobs without a computer.

I reached out with love and grasped the laptop lid, then, mm ... channeled a Timothy Leary moment. Holding the lid, my tension feeding from all the damaged nerves inside me through my fingers, mixed with the electricity buzzing all around the room. I found the place. If you hold the laptop lid just like this, the circuitry inside reconnects.

It became like a meditation. Whenever I was at the machine and the green line appeared on the screen, I'd stop and fix it. Om, hold the laptop, feel the electricity. It takes the concentration and mind control of an Indian swami to carry it out.

It became my key to calming down.

You grasp the laptop lid, pull it forward with the right hand just a little, push it back a little with the left, until the transistors or whatever they are inside reconnect and the green line disappears. Then carefully with one finger get the mouse over to Shut Down. Then hold the laptop lid in that position until the computer totally shuts down which can take long moments.

Time you are suspendeing, healing the machine.

Let the machine cool down. ...

Then reboot and the green line is gone.

That worked for me for months, but then I went through another phase of anger mismanagement, slammed my fist on the table again, and the green line came back, got real adamant about staying this time. To make things worse, if I pulled and pushed the laptop lid just a little bit out of synch, a new line, a RED LINE, appeared, next to the green one, which to me seemed way too ominous. My going into a state of Samadhi while shutting down was not going to keep the computer alive much longer.

I tried duct tape, electrical tape, scotch tape, nothing would hold the screen in place more than a minute, before green and red slammed back. Frenetic, I tossed the contents of several drawers.

Then in a cabinet I found some blank “Hello my name is (Blank)" stickers that I bought I think back in 1996, when I was running a support group in San Francisco. I don't think I ever even used the little Hello My Name Is stickers, but I carried them with me through five moves including two years of being homeless. I unpacked them here in L.A. and put them in this cabinet in 2005. Now I finally have a use for them.

Now the laptop is cemented in place. The Hello My Name Is stickers have glue like you do not find in any crafts store. Perfect for this job, the stickers wrap around my laptop at the top of the screen, then stick tightly down the back, then behind the laptop I put two broken audio speakers that I’ve propped to hold the lid in place. The stickers go from the back to the speakers and clamp it all tight in place, and as long as I never move the laptap or anything around it again, the screen will have eternal life.

It doesn't look that great. The gold trimmed stickers aren't lined up evenly, a couple edges are folding. Along witwh the stickers are remains of Scotch and duct tape from my earlier attempts to cement down the screen.

The patchwork design on my desk complements the Midnight Cowboy décor of the whole apartment.

It’s shabby, it’s held together with duct tape and prayer, but duct tape and prayer work.

Now even when an air conditioner blasts on somewhere in the building or there’s seismic activity in this part of L.A., the 2’s and 3’s on the Richter scale shakes we get a few times a week, my monitor stays unlined and serene.

I just had to become one with the laptop, feel the screen.

**********

It’s hard to imagine Los Angeles in the 1960s when you look at it today. For one thing it used to rain a lot here, rain in deluges for days at a time.

When I walked into the audition at New Playwrights Theater in Silverlake I was drenched. I think I hitchhiked, I might have taken a bus, the theater was up this country like street - Hyperion Avenue.

Yes, Hyperion Avenue in L.A. was this country like street that you got to off Sunset Boulevard, where Fountain Avenue crosses. There was only a smattering of houses then, lots of shrubbery, it was all residential quiet and subdued. Because of all the rain the week of the audition and not even sidewalks in some parts of Hyperion, it was so country, the two lane road was sort of moist and curvy as it ran up and down the hills going north from Sunset towards Glendale, which was a whole other place not part of L.A. at all.

Half a mile up Hyperion from Sunset Boulevard was New Playwrights Theater.

Look at a map today and you see Hyperion is now a major thoroughfare between the 5 and the 101, but in 1969, it was still quiet and idyllic, an empty area between towns.

Last night I Googled and found this, the only information about New Playwrights Theater online, from the obituary of the guy who ran it in 1970s, Roy Schallert:

Born in Los Angeles, he established the New Playwrights Foundation, converting an empty building on Hyperion Avenue into a small theater where original plays were presented in the 1970s and '80s. He also worked for the L.A. County Health Department for over 40 years.

They don't quite get the dates right. It was 1969 when I got the lead role in RSVP Snodgrass Invitational at The New Playwrights Theater.

And pouring rain the day I went to that audition.

In the rolling hills of Silverlake. The road looked like it was sinking into the soil along the side from all the rain.

It was the tail end of an 11-day long storm. Honest. It used to rain like that here.

When I bustled into the theater I was blustery, wet, hyper. I’ve only realized today as an old lady looking back, it's as if I was built like Marilyn Monroe, but I just didn't know it.

The playwright and the director sitting in the audience area came to a stunned stop when I flurried in.

I’ve tried to describe this before. I wasn't that stunning, yet I'd often have that effect, where they'd see me and stop, stare, be stunned. My legs were always bare, no stockings. I was always a little stocky. I'm built short and wide. Unless I was in one of my total control anorexia-bulimia periods or active on amphetamines, I really didn't look that good. Hmm. I was taking a lot of pills during this period.

Today, still, to this day though, I don't see what the allure was. But that happened a lot, where I’d walk into a place and there would be a stunned silence.

It's at a cellular level.

When a Catholic priest rapes you at age five and convinces you- I mean whispering in your ear while lushing all over you- that this is something special you have that you do. If it’s done at that early an age, it gets into your DNA because your cells are still forming.

That's why consenting adults can do whatever they want, but it's NEVER OKAY to do sexual stuff with a kid, because their cells are still building.

You damage them at a cellular level.

So even though I wasn’t that stunning, there was something implanted in me, literally, by Father Horne's fingers.

I spewed pheronomes.

So when I blustered into a room, even all wet and droopy from the rain, I still had this pheromone wielding presence.

The playwright and the director recovered and started joking with me, from where they were sitting in the dark of the audience area. They were about to call it a day, they said, glad I was able to swim by, that kind of thing.

And I got the lead role.

This theater was so tiny and- well I guess part of the allure of doing theater is the shabby dressing areas, dusty greenrooms that in this case was just a hallway outside the john.

I was so clueless as to how to become a professional actress, on my own age 18 in Hollywood. Things weren’t real cut and dried back in 1969, but I knew performing in these showcase productions helped you get an agent, which then helped you get real work. I was, as always, coming in on the ground floor, but it was okay, I mean, I was still a teenager.

The role was a young ingénue, but she had to be able to say one thing while performing the opposite thing, sort of like, “Oh I can’t stand you,” while kissing someone. The entire play was people saying the opposite of what they were physically portraying.

Experimental

But I really got it and worked it hard. And I made a real connection with the playwright. He drove me home from the audition in the rain. He told me I was the only person at the audition who understood what he was doing in his writing, and I believed him.

I had no boundaries. I just opened up to anyone and they were all so willing to enter…

Robert Houston was a tiny man, effeminate, he was in his forties I think, no, he must have been even older, had white hair and that sophisticated look of old Hollywood. Moustache, tailored suit, like you would see in the Brown Derby in the 1950s. He lived up in the hills with his mother. His love life was complicated, he said. He was awkward making moves on me, who was still a teenager, but I was showing him what to do.

Strange thing is, looking back now, this happened to me a lot.

Men who were really gay would use me to try to make themselves straight.

In the 1960s when you just were not allowed to be ga, so they would find their ways to me and think I could cure them.

If anyone can cure you, she can, I guess they'd think. I think sometimes guys even fixed me up with their friends who had this “problem” as it was still seen in the 1960s even in Hollywood.

Just like being in porn movies meant you could never do anything else, back then.

I'm pretty sure playwright Robert Houston was a horribly shamed closet gay guy, but his flaccid attempts to be with me didn't deter me.

It was what I did, this sort of service to man, kindly, this compulsion implanted in me so early in my life at age five by Father Horney that I just figured whatever a man needed, I was there to provide it.

I was like Little Annie Fanny with brains.



Like Little Annie Fanny With Brains

RSVP Snodgrass Invitational was directed by Mark Jessurun-Lobo, who I also spent nights with, as that's what I did.

After rehearsals, I'd go with Mark to his tiny hut on a hillside somewhere between Silverlake and Echo Park. Mark only ate macrobiotic food he cooked on two gas burners. He spoke with a hint of accent, clipped pronunciation of each syllable, German or Austrian, but he wouldn't tell me his country of origin. He stood straight backed barely as tall as me and he’d lecture on cinema genres, while at the same time grinding sesame seeds with salt to make gamacio to pour over the brown rice and steamed vegetables, giving detailed instructions about each, wining and dining me at his hot plate.

He smelled of rotting produce all the time. "That's part of the cleansing process," he'd explain and pop a raw radish in his mouth.

I ran into Mark about a year later, when I was downtown L.A. He was in a bookstore and saw me, tried to avert my eye, but I persisted. It was 1970. My dad made me get a job as a secretary after I came home from tripping with Timothy Leary the summer before, as reported here at City of Angels 1.

Coming out from where he was hiding from me in the religious books section, my former director said, “I'm studying Yoga now, at a place in Burbank, an ashram. That's a house where about 20 people live, all practicing Yoga together and teaching classes. You’d probably like it. It’s called Integral Yoga Institute and they teach chanting in Sanskrit and give instruction in meditation …”

Kaboom - blam - the little lights and synapses inside me went off - religion, meditation, sky, Beatles Mahareeshi songs, group living. My special power implanted in me by Father Horney was as compulsive about spiritual pursuit as about pursuit of sex with men in high places.

I went to the Yoga Ashram in Burbank and took a class, moved in within a month.

***************

Lobo is on the internet today only as a result of someone scanning and posting a New York Magazine from December 1974. There in the calendar of events it states Mark Jessurun-Lobo directed a play then at 321 W. 14th Street, The Downstage Studio. It was Niccolo Machiavelli’s “seduction play," said the magazine, "Mandragola (The Mandrake Root)."

I figure Mark must have moved to New York in the seventies and probably died soon after of AIDS… I think he was gay too, but I was aggressive, hardly anyone turned me down.

I was a sexual predator.

*****************
This is relevant to me, because I was a sexual predator beginning at six years old:

ScienceDaily (May 13, 2008) - A University of Georgia study that is the first to systematically examine a large sample of female child molesters finds that many of them were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children. The finding, published in the April issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, has the potential to help break the cycle of abuse by improving treatment for offenders and their young victims. "This study informs us about the pathway to becoming sexually deviant for females," said study author Susan Strickland, assistant professor in the UGA School of Social Work. "With that knowledge, we can improve treatment and reduce the likelihood of future sexual assaults on children." Strickland said the sexual abuse of minors by women has been largely ignored by the general public, the legal system and by academic researchers.

Many people believe that women are not capable of committing such acts, she said, and the abuse of boys by women is often dismissed as the boys sowing their oats or even being lucky. The truth is that both boys and girls are molested by female perpetrators and these victims often suffer a myriad of consequences affecting their sexuality, relationships and beliefs about themselves and others. Childhood sexual abuse also has been linked to a host of emotional and behavioral problems, such as substance abuse and eating disorders.

The true prevalence of female sexual abuse on children is unknown, but a commonly accepted figure is that five to seven percent of sex crimes are committed by females. Studies on female sex offenders are rare, and most have been descriptive in nature, used small samples and have not used valid statistical measures or control groups.

Strickland's study, the largest of its kind, surveyed 130 incarcerated females - 60 of which were sex offenders and 70 of which were nonsexual offenders - and examined factors such as childhood trauma, substance abuse, emotional neediness and personality disorders. While the majority of both groups reported being the victims of childhood maltreatment, the sex offenders were significantly more likely to experience pervasive, serious and more frequent emotional abuse, physical abuse and neglect. "We've pretty much known that the majority of women in prison have had bad childhoods and that many suffered childhood sexual abuse," Strickland said. "But the subgroup of female sex offenders has suffered significantly more abuse, particularly sexual abuse."

The entire Science Daily May 13, 2008 article

So pathetic. Even at photo shoots to get headshots, I was stoned, you can see it in my eyes. I never could stand who I was without alteration. When I was not going as fast as I could, I was anesthetized.



See the resemblance?




**********

Am I turning into one of those stereotypes? The silver haired lady lives in a dusty room on a Hollywood side street and spends her days poring over photo albums and her cherished news clippings, yellowing even under plastic protective sheets … it would be stereotypical, except there are only a smattering of clippings, reviews of the few shows I did, in the first career I destroyed, my acting career. (Click clips to enlarge)

For anyone reading here for the first time, I was raped by a priest when I was five years old and it had a direct effect on the rest of my life. The pattern that lasted from age 5 to 45 was I’d get a great job or start some great new thing, then act out sexually and get fired from the job or ejected from the great new thing, I even got thrown out of Brownies. I never held a job for longer than one year… but I did put three (?) years into a try for an acting career. I moved on my own to Hollywood when I was 18 years old and left at 21.

You see, the self destruct pattern hadn't kicked in yet.

But it was in development.

That's right, that's me, "Jesica Leland" because back then people still made up stagge names. I lived on Leland Way .... Do not remember at all where the Jesica came from or why I spelled it that way.

**************************

Read Ongoing Coverage of Pedophile Catholic Priest Crime Current Events at City of Angels 5

RE PTSD TRIGGERS:

It’s really bad when I happen to ride through the central Hollywood section of Sunset Boulevard, where the Seventh Veil exotic dance palace still seduces from its spot at the top of a hill, near the beginning of The Strip.

Just blocks from where Lizzie was born.

Sunset Boulevard is the one constant in my life

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Gotta get this story back on the boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, the only constant in my life.

At different times since the 1960s, I’ve lived on different parts of Sunset Boulevard, so this story could almost be told by starting downtown and going west all the way to the Pacific, with stops along the way to describe what happened in that block.

There was a doc office at Echo Park and Sunset where I got diet pills in mass quantities back in the 1968 when I lived a half block up the hill in a $20 a month flat. In 1970 when I was living at the Yoga Ashram in Burbank, we’d drive down to the farmers market somewhere on Sunset near Echo Park to buy fruits and vegetables.

Sunset and Vine was My Corner for selling L.A. Free Press in 1969. I'd pick them up down in Silverlake in a stack for 15 cents each, then sell them on the corner for fifty cents.

This story does not, however, go chronologically from downtown to the Coast, with me ending up a serene old lady in my condo over the Pacific. More like it takes loops and detours, especially once the storyline moves into Hollywood. Actually it always was in Hollywood.

I was seven years old when we left Illinois to move to California. Even then, in that early PTSD state, I was babbling and jabbering, “I'm going to California to become a Mouseketeer.” I’d say that to everybody I saw, when they mentioned, oh you're moving? “I'm going to California to become a Mouseketeer.”

My dad had just built his dream house in Bartlett, a town outside Chicago that was still rural in 1955. My dad drew the blueprints.

Then suddenly we moved. It was right around the same time I took the neighborhood kids up into the tree house to show them what Father Horne had showed me. Also around that time I’d been thrown out of Brownies because of some nasty comment I made while we were gluing feathers onto construction paper turkeys for Thanksgiving. Right before we moved, my dad and I drove down the two-lane Highway 20 all the way to Chicago to a big building where a “bishop” stood over me and told me to stop babbling about what Father Horne had done to me.

Evidently I just couldn't stop babbling, maybe that's why we moved. We picked up and moved from the dream house. And I was so excited, babbling, “I'm going to California to become a Mouseketeer.”

I think Father Horney may have molested my friend Mary Feeney too, because of the way I keep remembering her from St. Mary's Elementary school in Elgin, first through third grade. Her family picked up and made a sudden move at around the same time we did, only they went to South Dakota.

One of the last things Mary Feeney said to me before she moved was, “Remember my birthday, March 19th 1948.” Or maybe she didn't say that. But for some reason I always have remembered her birthday. And that her family moved suddenly, and they were also a slightly dysfunctional family going to St. Peter Damian Church in Bartlett, founded in 1949 by Father Thomas Barry Horne-y.

Yes, there really is a Father Horney. God blessed me with a perpetrator whose name Father Horne lends itself so well to blogging this truth and memories.

I didn't become a Mouseketeer when we moved to California. I became fat. I remember exactly how the fat started. I was in the bath, my mom came in and said, “Oh Kathy, if you keep gaining weight like that, none of the boys will like you.” That began an eating frenzy that did not stop until I reached puberty and realized I wanted the boys to like me. Boy did I.

So Sunset Boulevard and all it represents was reaching out to me, even back then in the early 1950s, a little girl sitting in the backseat of the family Ford, driving across the country on Route 66 for our family's new life in California, where you just found Walt Disney at the local five and dime and asked him and you became a Mouseketeer. . .

**************

The main place this story goes in loops and detours is on Sunset Boulevard from East Hollywood where I live today to West Hollywood, where I preyed in my nadir days.

A few weeks back I tried yet another time to connect with a Church. Funny, after all that's happened, I still crave a church in my life. This one I thought would work, because I've seen the music director play at the place I go for occasional Bible study a few blocks from where I live, and he is SUCH a talented singer, songwriter, musician.

I decided to try the church where Pastor Patrick is music director.

Such a funny coincidence. It turned out that this church is geographically same place as another stop on my Sunset Boulevard trolley ride.

The Hollywood Church meets behind The Guitar Center, in the auditorium of Gardner Elementary School. If you walk outside during church service to have a smoke and look out on the street, you look almost directly into the apartment where I lived when my daughter Lizzie was born in July 1988.

Just off Sunset, behind the Guitar Center, up a few blocks, the apartment I moved to in Central Hollywood when I was about five months pregnant, a totally strange neighborhood, out of range of any of my old friends in West Hollywood. I moved in around April and started buying baby furniture.

Now in 2009, I forgot that a few months back I’d told Patrick the music pastor of The Hollywood Church the subject matter I write about, on other City of Angels pages, pedophile Catholic priests and the havoc they wreacked. I told Pastor Patrick I need spiritual guidance while I'm writing these stories. I was asking for help.

I also thought I needed therapy while I'm writing these stories. I may need both, but the very nature of the problems caused by being raped by a pedophile priest keep me from being able to seek help for the problem.

From other human beings, that is.

Patrick is about 26 years old but he looks 19, and he was not raised Catholic, his father though is a Baptist minister at a church across the hill in Burbank. Maybe that's why he got so hesitant.

When I told him about City of Angels blog subject matter, he stood very still, then said after a moment, “Wow, that's really intense,” then suddenly had a reason he needed to be on the other side of the room.

I forgot about that conversation, and at another gathering asked him, “What time is it again that your church behind The Guitar Center on Sunset meets on Sunday?"

He answered, “Eleven o'clock.”

I said, “Oh, I thought you said last time you had to arrive by nine AM?”

He forgot he had said that, then he looked at me again and remembered why he'd said that. "No, it starts at eleven."

I said, “Great, then I will be able to get there after all."

But he was already in conversation with someone on the other side of the room.

I should have seen the signs, it wasn’t going to work out, but I didn't, I went to the church, and had the usual experience a person who publicly admits they were raped as a child by a Catholic priest and want justice has when they go to a church. They never called me back.

You fill out their forms, "Welcome cards" or sign the "Visitor Book" saying, yes, contact me, or fill out a form that says "Fill this out if you want someone to call you."

I write down, I'm a journalist, I sing, I want to be active any way I can in the church. I will volunteer.

And they never call.

Maybe they Google my name and see City of Angels and decide not to call me.

I guess. I don't care.

Because at that church everyone was about 40 years younger than I am.

PLUS

At a lunch they serve after the service, I sat across from a woman who had just moved to L.A. from the Midwest. She's working in a mall, but she's really a singer-dancer-actress, with amazingly beautiful eyes, a lot like my daughter's. . . and a gazillion other singer-dancer-actresses in L.A. Her eyes still glimmer with hope, my daughter's don't.

Inevitably there in the lunchroom, the conversation strayed, and I mentioned, Yes, I was an actress here in Hollywood myself in the 1960s. Big mistake. Because then she started to ask me questions about it.

I could not say a word. I must have looked tragic through her eyes. How could I describe the lurid scene I fell into, making porn films- I hesitated--

"It's, it's a lot different now," I finally murmured.

***************

I would be so much better off if I could move away from this place that is so full of horrible memories.

But today I don't even have five dollars for a transit day pass, how can I think of moving? Yesterday I missed a hearing on the new Father Michael Baker civil case in L.A. because I could not get to the Civil West courthouse.

Well I had the five dollars, I had been holding onto it to get a transit daypass and go to the October 26 hearing, but then my daughter needed the five to get to her job, as her ride didn't show up. And I really am pained up lately anyway.

Lizzie and I are both waiting for our next checks. We often run out of food and cash the days before the next check. I should be skinny, but when there is no food, you end up eating lots of starch with oil and salt on it... or pastry. About the only place giving food away through foodbanks in L.A. today is Starbuck's, so if you are hungry and go to one of the places for free food, you leave with a sack of pastries.

That's why poor people in America are so overweight.

I decided, we are better off just being hungry for a few days.

And this, I have only told one person the following, and he said I should post it on my blog, but I didn't, until now, two years later, and not in the promoted part at #5, but here at City of Angels 2:

In 2007 when I started the blog, sometimes I would go downtown to Superior Court to document dive and I couldn't do it, because I get really nauseous if I stare at a computer screen with an empty stomach. We used to go weeks with no food in the house back in 2007.

Now in 2009, it's only a few days that we go without food each month.

I guess the economy is recovering.

I've gotten used to going without food now, it's helping me lose weight.

Involuntary fasting.

What I used to call the George Bush Diet: If ya ain't got no food, ya don't eat.

Still, I missed the hearing last Monday and will probably miss the rest of them.

Will have to just write what I can write from my bed for now. I've gotten a lot more crippled and a lot more sick the last few months, and honestly, it hurts to walk to the bus stop anymore, it's just not worth the pain.

Will just have to write. Write and write what I can without leaving my bedside.

*****************

So I may not have had any epiphanies at The Hollywood Church behind the Guitar Center on Sunset, but standing outside the auditorium, I could remember me back in 1988, pushing little Lizzie in her stroller around on those very sidewalks.

(God, there’s so much misery in my life. This story has way too much Poor Pitiful Pearl in it, but what can I do? It's all true. Maybe I'll turn things around while I'm writing over the next months and that will be part of the story .... )

Standing there outside the elementary school auditorium filled on a Sunday with young Christians from the Midwest moved to L.A. to break into show business, I could see yet another chapter of my life and its connections to Sunset Boulevard, what should have been a happy time.

Me with my newborn baby.

But instead as I stand there what I remember is having to call a cab to go to UCLA Medical Center 9 months pregnant, and the Iranian driver wouldn't carry my suitcase, then having the baby in a welfare ward where all the other women were surrounded by extended family members babbling in strange languages while me and Lizzie were in our bed alone, never had one visitor. Then my insurance wouldn't cover more than three days in the hospital, even though I’d had a C-section.

So I had to come back to that apartment that is today across from The Hollywood Church, one day after giving birth, in all that post surgical pain, and take care of a newborn baby, again all by myself. In that one bedroom apartment that looks out on the alley almost directly at the school auditorium where The Hollywood Church now meets, and where a few weeks ago I was standing on a Sunday because 21 years later I could not stand to stay through to the end of a church service ...

*****************

After the baby was born, I kept working. I had a lot of freelance writing jobs, for trade magazines, work I'd lined up after being fired as editor in chief of ASD-AMD Trade News in West L.A. in 1987, one of the numerous jobs I've had that lasted less than one year.

I thought, maybe it's even a godsend that I got fired and then got pregnant. I'll work at home. Then the baby will be in her playpen, I’ll be writing all these easy articles for 80-90 dollars each, and we’d be fine.

We weren’t.

I tried carrying newborn Lizzie with me to do in person interviews, thinking, no problem, she’ll stay quiet in her baby seat while I interview these people and take my pictures.

One story was for ASD-AMD, a feature about an army surplus store in Santa Monica, an assignment I got from the guy who got my job, after I'd hired him and trained him as my assistant. The movie Baby Boom came out right when I got pregnant too, with a similar storyline, but it really did happen.

I boarded the bus with the child pouch on my back and rode to Santa Monica, where I parked baby Elizabeth on a shelf in the store and started taking my pictures. Then the baby took this unbelievable bowel movement, a liquid one that overflowed her diaper, went all over the inventory on the store shelf where I'd set her down.

Within minutes the owner maneuvered us outside onto the plaza. I was trying to clean the baby and put a new diaper on her, there on a bench outside the army navy store. The owner did not want to be interviewed anymore.

I did turn in a story, but it wasn’t very good. It was lacking details.

So I tried to just take assignments that I could do from the apartment, newborn Lizzie by my side. For one article, I called a politician, a state senator I think.

I left a message, went about my little life as a new mom in that Martel Avenue one-bedroom, playing goo-goo gah-gah with the baby, then just as the Senator returned my call, Elizabeth got hungry.

No problem, I thought.

I put the baby on my left breast nursing, so I could still use my right hand to take notes and tried to do the interview with the Senator, the phone balanced on my shoulder- wait, which shoulder.

Needless to say, I could not concentrate, the senator got annoyed, the story died and did not even get written.

Then a kind of post partum psychosis set in, or maybe just panic at reality. I knew I’d never make enough money for us to live on if we stayed in that $970 a month one-bedroom apartment I'd moved to from the $1100 a month studio in West Hollywood, all good prices for L.A. in 1988.

It was late October and it had now stoppd being hot hot hot since July with record smog levels. I was convinced L.A. was about to have an apocalyptic disaster and the baby and I had to get out of there fast.

I got newspapers from around the state to figure out where to move. The only place that had apartments I could afford that seemed livable was Humboldt County, California. I’d never been there, but I'd smoked their product. I packed up and moved to Arcata with my three month old daughter, because that's where the closest airport was.

I had this image of Northern California: idyllic lifestyle, warm hearths, redwood trees, lumberjack men who were still intelligent conversationalists.

Always dreaming.

Left Sunset Boulevard and all the memories it holds for me behind, I thought, never to come back.

And here I am again. And Lizzie still lives with me, she's twenty-one now.

***********

At the Hollywood Church, I could not sit still during the service. I kept paining up and having to go outside. So I was holding onto the chainlink fence and stretching, standing outside the church meeting place staring at my old apartment.

God, I thought, if I’d stayed there, my daughter could have just gone to this school, had a solid stable life, more or less, considering we were still living in Hollywood.

Instead I took us on this PTSD induced roller coaster ride, running away, always running away running away. We moved I think 13 times before we ended up right back here anyway, now in East Hollywood, on a side street that runs between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.

Always drawn like a magnet back to Sunset Boulevard.

Grotesque images go with the subject matter, how to evade them

.
Three times it’s happened now since I’ve been doing stories for City of Angels. This image pops into my head that is so evil and obtrusive- usually when I'm interviewing one of the former altar boys, or guys who were in early adolescence when the priests found a way to get to them, the image comes in.

Pant pant pant, the guy is breathing hard and eyes, like a maniac. Rolling eyes, with a jeer in them that says pure evil. Then just off screen in my head is the rest of the body and it’s bouncing bouncing bouncing, obviously the guy is humping and getting lots of sexual pleasure from it. What adds to the madness of the whole image is that he is wearing a priest collar, in fact as I describe it now, I see one of those rimmed black hats the priests wear in Europe, and he turns into Father Guido Sarducci.

The image intrudes, not surprisingly, when these former altar boys now adult men are describing the actual sex act that took place. Usually in the interview, we've been talking about how the priest groomed the young boy, and so often it’s the same- Joy Juice of one kind or another, alcohol sometimes drugs, then the boy is whoozy maybe passes out then wakes up, suddenly realizes, “Father Horney is banging me.”

And into my head pops this panting panting clergy collared creature, his face twisting with combined extreme pleasure and extreme evil.

Panting over the tiny undefended child’s body.

Guys who I’ve interviewed may even have noticed when it happened. Because as we are talking, before I know it I’ve taken the interview to a totally different topic.

One time the image intruded when I was interviewing Michael Baumann several months ago. He said, “It was like a monkey on my back,” when he was describing the memory of what Fr. Robert Gibson of Scranton did to him as a young teenager. Michael was faltering, stumbling, but also just about to get into deeper description, in fact he was READY to go into deeper description. He repeated, “It was like a monkey on my back-“

And in a flash I chimed in “Oh you know what I’m right in the middle of reading that book right now, isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”

Michael went, “Uh, huh?”

And babble away I did, that book The Man with the Golden Arm, I'm reading it right now, don't you know about it, Frank Sinatra was in the movie, he played this junkie, well he’s a returning World War two vet who got addicted to heroin in the VA hospital and he is walking around saying, “I got a monkey on my back, monkey on my back.” So that's the first time the saying Monkey on my Back came up, or maybe even sooner and the author Nelson Algren just used the expression but I'm pretty sure that's where that expression comes from.

And the mood is broken. There’s no way Michael is going to continue into that dark place he was about to enter, as now we're talking about the Nelson Algren revival going on in Chicago…

It happened again when I was interviewing Joe Capozzi a few weeks back. He was in a deep emotional place, he was working with the emotion, he was about to give another detail and I started babbling about maybe he could come and do his play in L.A. The mood again was broken.

***********

A while back I tried to get therapy, because I realized, while I'm doing City of Angels, some of the stories I hear are going to make me go insane if I don't have therapy. But then I tried seeing a MFPT or whatever, and realized the therapist was not in any better shape mental health-wise than I am, and it just felt awkward sitting in a waiting room then sitting in a room with a person and talking, I mean what is that going to do to solve the myriad problems I'm facing. It seems silly to pay all this money for therapy when what I really I need is new teeth…

There is a trust that pays for therapy for victims set up in Santa Barbara, and I'm grateful for that. I haven't found a trust yet that pays for teeth.

Anyway. I don't go to therapy anymore. I'm still writing City of Angels stories, and just going nuts.

So I will just try to write the insane stuff over here in City of Angels 2, knowing someone will read it.

That's therapy enough for now.

***********

Funny thing is, I started City of Angels blog originally because I wanted to do something about the isolation I'm experiencing. See, when you tell someone you're a priest rape survivor and getting justice has kind of taken up 90 percent of your life, they don't really want to spend time with you. I’ve lost so many friends since I started writing this blog. Well, I can pretend the reason I lost the friends was the blog, even though I know it’s really something inherently wrong inside of me.

I’ve always felt that way, something inside is wrong.

And I see it reflected in people.

A kind of nausea, revulsion, when they look at me.

My aura drips.

It drives people away.

I think I wear my damages out where everyone can see them and it's revolting. I don't have the right kind of mirror to tell me where the damages are showing, or I would apply some kind of concealer.

It happens all the time though, people meet me, they look at me for the first time, and a kind of revulsion washes over their bodies, flashes through their eyes. In polite company it will only last an instant, and the person recovers and smiles and acts polite, but still you sense they are looking for the quickest way to make an exit.

In fact, the real reason I am not continuing therapy is that even the therapist got revolted by me. She was the one who stopped showing up, not me.

I have this effect on people.

What's really upsetting is I thought if I found out the cause of the disgustingness inside me, it would stop. But the damage is so deep inside, it’s just part of who I am, even now that I know it probly comes from having such a bizarre injurious experience at an early age.

From age six, I have been driving people away, because of that aura around me, with a drip drip drip.

I really wish I could have gotten a settlement, as I’d like to just become a hermit, live somewhere that I never had to leave the premises, I could just have things delivered, walk only a few feet for everything, have enough yard space I don't need to go onto city sidewalks ever again. . .

Because I'm tired of seeing that nauseated reaction in people, and now that I know whatever I have that causes it never going to go away, I just want to find a way to avoid human interaction, to prevent it.

Funny thing is I’ve seen that same kind of damage in the few survivors I have met in person, and I think I've even gotten nauseous myself, from looking at them.

Truth is I haven’t really met that many survivors in L.A.

I started the blog out of frustration that SNAP wouldn't start an L.A. meeting, and wouldn't let me start one. So I figured, I’ll meet someone by starting a blog and going to hearings, there have got to be some other people damaged by priests like me in Hollywood.

I mean, I ended up living in West Hollywood in the 1980s just because it was the only place a person of my sexual proclivities could be accepted. When I brought a football team home for the night, my West Hollywood neighbors did not get outraged, they just got jealous.

Drip Drip, something about these memories involves dripping, leaking, body fluids exiting your orifices after a night or orgiastic sex, the smell of it in the rugs and couches.

Thing that's not funny is writing the blog did nothing at all for my isolation. I still have no one to call, no one comes by. I can’t understand how there could have been 500 plaintiffs in L.A. in 2007 and yet not one local person shows up when SNAP does hold an event downtown. The three or four people you see all the time at local SNAP events have all traveled in from far flung suburbs, even other counties and states.

So who am I ever going to meet with later for coffee- or dancing?

Where did all the L.A. plaintiffs go?

Plus now and then I’ll read about a settlement in another city and it will quote so and so from Los Angeles, and I'll think, where the hell are they?

It's easy to get in touch with me, why doesn't anybody?

Okay.

So I see now that probably the reason there is no SNAP meeting in L.A. is I am probably the only person here who wants one. One person does not a support group make, especially when that one person makes people nauseous.

I started City of Angels blog thinking, I’ll meet other survivors in L.A. this way, and ???

I’ve met dozens of people through the blog, people who I can call on the phone almost any time and they're there to talk, but they're in the Midwest and Boston and New Mexico, no one is in L.A.?

Where did everybody go?

I have this part of me that wants to put up a post and say, “I'm done.” Because I'm not really getting out of it what I wanted, i.e., a social life. But I'm getting something else out of the blog. There are all those people in other places writing to me, and calling me, and there’s the occasional PayPal click that gets me through a crisis and all of a sudden I'm able to pay pay the cable bill.

So I have to leave it all in the hands of the Tao, the perfect Tao that I know is in the middle of all the chaos. Again, be grateful I'm not in Calcutta or Iran or Darfur. The human beings in worst anguish on Earth are not low income Americans in the slums of L.A. as bad as that is.

I didn't get the network of local friends I wanted out of the blog, but to stop producing City of Angels now would be suicidal, definitely self destructive, as the blog is giving me a launching pad, a platform from which to begin something better than City of Angels 5.

Maybe it will happen at City of Angels 6.

See how well I got off the topic of the panting priest?

*********
PS: I'm paranoid enough to think SNAP is really holding regular meetings somewhere close by, it's just nobody wants me to know.

Some are sicker than others.

(PSS: The City of Los Angeles took away our car because of parking tickets, when we were homeless, living in our car.

Does anyone else see the irony in that?)

.

MONEY, BUGS, and a SLOW SLIDE DOWN

.
Our home is just a few steps above a squat, in fact there are people squatting in buildings nearby. There is a bedbug epidemic all over the central part of L.A. now as well, they're in the walls. It’s not necessarily because of dirtiness, more because of too high a concentration of people living in a small area.

The bugs just arrive there, just burst out of thin air it seems, and once they're in the building it’s near impossible to get rid of them. Add to that the fact these buildings are owned by absentee investors, not even landlords, just people who own buildings, and spend as little on them as they can while deriving maximum profit. If this were a luxury building and their profit came from the difference between high ceilings and a loft or a normal living room, I can see where cutting corners for profit would be okay.

But these owners are people from third world countries who’ve come to America to spread third worldism. So they're cutting corners on things like toilet pipes that leak and make your bathroom floor brown. They treat that kind of leaking sewage by occasionally removing the toilet. Well they hire Mexicans to do it, the owners never come near this neighborhood.

They just arrange to have Mexicans scrub out the accumulated feces, then rescrew the old toilet into the aging pipes, and carry the sewage out in a plastic bag. Then the day laborers replace the same brown stained floor pieces. It is less costly for the Korean or Middle Eastern or Central European owners to hire Mexicans to do this work than it is to hire plumbers and replace the pipes, put in a new toilet and then replace the flooring. So that's why this entire part of town is slowly becoming overrun with vermin, and I'm beginning to feel like I shouldn't go into other neighborhoods, it’s irresponsible, I might spread germs.

A lot of people come to L.A. and learn Spanish before they learn English for the very purpose of being able to order around the Mexicans.

The USA is now a third world country. You hear it today a little bit more in mainstream, I’ve been saying it for five years or so, but it’s been obvious for maybe decades.

America is becoming a third world nation.

Has already become, indeed, while we were all looking the other way.

It’s not just my mid-city block. It’s Los Angeles from the center downtown, through the acreage of Skid Row, then spreading out into the town, in buildings and in people sleeping in tents they carry on their backs, as they walk- walk- walk through town throughout the day.

Some pockets of town are dark and more dangerous than others, but there is still a neighborhood full of mansions in the midst of it. Mansions with encroaching bedbugs, but the residents probably don't even know.

My daughter’s friends are going to be the ones to bring in the bedbugs to our house, I'm afraid they may have already to her room, and then she comes and sleeps on my bed, it's just a matter of time. So far all I have biting me at night is spiders. But her friends live in nearby buildings where the bedbugs have taken up commands in the walls.

So even if you scrub your rugs and change your linens every day and spray the mattress with Lysol, you're going to go to bed and in the middle of the night they jump out from the wall onto the beds. They don't live in the beds, they just come to bed for feedings at night- on the humans.

I know about bedbugs now. I’ve studied up on them.

Money.

For the past 3 years I’ve been thinking, well maybe I’ll get a settlement from the Catholic Church too, since I'm one of the 70 thousand or so Americans with claims against the Church for their pedophile epidemic, and it looked like it could happen, until last month. Then in Illinois where my rapes took place, the State Supreme Court said, too bad, if you were born before 1964, you can’t file a lawsuit against a corporate entity that allowed sexual molestation to take place, which is the charge most people make when they file lawsuits against the Catholic Church. Not in Illinois.

I probly won’t ever get a settlement.

Even though I can document that I lost every job in my life because of skewered sexual behavior. I'd always get fired within the first year, I never held a job longer than one year, except NASA, because it took the U.S. Government three years to fire me.

I have to watch as all over the country, people my age get settlements for crimes that took place around the same time as mine. But I don't, because I was raped by a priest in Illinois, where laws are made in back offices and other covert places where the Catholic Church operates best.

I even had to watch, since I live in Los Angeles today, as people in my own town with crime victim experiences similar to mine got settlements, 500 of them at once in 2007. They got settlements because they were in the state of California when it happened to them, but since I was in Illinois at age five when I got priest-raped, I don't get my life fixed.

What's worse? I know I could produce a pilot webcast with $50 thousand dollars. And from stories I hear $50K is about the same size as the bar bill some of the L.A. plaintiffs ran up after the settlements, or as was lost in Las Vegas or squandered on cruises and aimless trips. Others made investments with shady people, went on shopping sprees, finding themselves still damaged and unsatisfied in a room full of plastic and boxes from all the new products.

A lot of them lost more than $50 thousand since the settlement, and imagine what City of Angels could have accomplished with a budget like that, to travel and cover trials and report more stories. I didn't realize that in 2007, or I would have asked ...

Money

All those Los Angeles plaintiffs got to move away, and I get to stay in L.A., as the vermin closes in.

I’ll be sitting at this little table in my Midnight Cowboy style decorated flat, cranking transcripts out on the computer every day to keep the rent paid for another decade. I'm working as a typist so the multi lingual people in Babel who own this building can keep their cars and vacation homes, probably be doing this job until 2018 or so when I'm seventy years old and the Government finally frees up some Social Security for me.

Money

It doesn't matter how sick you are, you will be treated badly in this city, and probly the rest of the country, over and over again.

There is a nonprofit that I use to get rides to doctors’ offices and other appointments, it’s through Department of Aging. They get grants to help people my age get where we need to go, I need the help a little early because I have this weird nerve disease and often can't walk. It's a result of PTSD from being raped by a priest at age five, or so that's what MD's tell me.

Last week the Department of Aging left me stranded. Something went wrong and the driver never came back and picked me up after I went to an appointment in Burbank. I waited for them in the heat and smog a good hour, the one day I didn't bring my cell phone, finally realized I’d have to find my way home.

I was wearing shoes that were more like slippers, not walking shoes. And I was already in a lot of pain. Now I was going to have to walk God knows how far to find transit in Burbank.

When I went a few blocks, I got to a bus stop, and a guy was sitting there.

As I groaned by, he said, "Hey, do you know when the next bus is supposed to come."

I said, "I saw one go by about 10 minutes ago when I was waiting for the senior center driver who never showed up."

The man scowled and said, “Shoot, that must have been the bus I heard go by then. Now I’ll have to walk to Hollywood Way to make my connection. It just went right past me about ten minutes ago, and it was early.”

He got out a white cane and used it to find his way into the crosswalk and go off as fast as he could on foot.

So I'm not the only one in L.A. feeling like it's third world. First thing that disappears from civilization as we know it is aide for the disabled. What a pipe dream that is to think a society could take care of its disabled.

I pulled out my pipe and inhaled my allotment of medicine for the rest of the day, pretended my legs weren’t hurting, and walked about six blocks to catch a different bus. Then for 30 minutes I stared at the entrance to Warner Brothers Studios at a bus stop where no other person ever joined me, there was just masses of cars driving by, endlessly.

Three hours after the driver from the senior center was supposed to pick me up, I was back home from Burbank, which is really just over one hill from here.

So, I've canceled any more appointments where I have to rely on the Department of Aging to get there. Maybe after Obama has been president a few more years... My legs did not hurt that bad when I got home. But now two days later I'm crippled and demobilized in pain.

But I have my computer and TV set right next to me on the table and a kitchen nearby, a refrigerator and the senior center does deliver Meals on Wheels, not always the best, but there is food in there.

I think the meat is Soylent Green, but what can you do ...

I'm better off than a crippled old woman in Calcutta, so I should be more grateful. But isn't it pathetic that we have to compare ourselves to Calcutta to convince ourselves things aren't that bad?

Los Angeles in 2009 is already third world, where a blind man gets passed right by as he tries to use the bus to make it to an appointment. He then has to try to run with his white cane to make a connection blocks down the street. This is a city where a sick old lady can be left stranded in Burbank using crippled legs to walk miles back home instead, where no one from the senior center called later to see if I was okay.

And whatever you sleep on - Midnight Cowboy style - push it into the middle of the floor so the bedbugs can't get to you from the walls, and sweet dreams.

I should have just been a prostitute, I would be better off now

*
The real reason I think I should get in touch with Charlie Sheen to produce these stories is I envy his ability to just be who he is, even if society and even the law frown on his activity in life. The buzz is he’s still inviting prostitutes to his home, in groups even, paying four to five figure prices for a night’s entertainment, and why not, he’s parlayed his sex addict partying character into the highest paid man in sit com TV this year, getting paid something like $876K per episode.

I'm not hot for Charlie Sheen, I'm not trying to get him into bed, in fact his dad is more my age, and well, way too Catholic for me, still I hear showing up at demonstrations with his favorite Franciscans up in Santa Barbara and other points north of L.A.

I envy Charlie Sheen because he can just be who he is and damn anyone who doesn't like it.

I mean truth is, I would have been better off if I’d just been a prostitute. The biggest mistake I made in my 40 years of sexually deviated compulsions was to still try to live a life like a straight person. I mean I went to work at NASA, just being an ex-hippie I was already out of place there. Every job I’d get, there would be some asshole executive trying to trade sex, and I’d never take anyone up on the offer.

I never traded sex for cash or a better job, instead I’d pull the guy into the closet and do him for nothing, then wonder why my head rolled down the hall and out the door a few weeks later when someone saw us.

I would have so much more money right now if I’d just done it for money, instead of doing it in such a way that I ended up losing most the jobs I’d get after six months or so. Well, the joke I tell is, I never held a job longer than a year, because of the sexuality, I’d always get fired before I’d been there a year.

Except at NASA. It took NASA three years to fire me.

And they didn't fire me. you can’t fire a civil servant. So they make you want to leave. They make the job so bad and the surroundings so hostile, you have no choice but to leave. I put up with that the second two years I was there . . . not the best memories in my life.

After NASA I couldn't live anywhere but West Hollywood. It was the early 1980s, I still couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong with me, but I knew it had something to do with sex, and that since at that time West Hollywood wasn’t yet a city, but a stretch of libertarian land in the middle of L.A. between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, where it was pretty much anything goes. Men had sex with other men on car rooftops. A woman could have twenty different men spend the night with her in a month and the landlord would not want to evict her.

So I moved back to L.A. and gave it away in an arena where a woman like me could have been charging in the four figures for a night. Looking good was so important to me at that time that I spent a lot of time on it, dance classes, bulimia, whatever it took to keep the body perfect. I had that education, hell, I had been training to be the voice of mission control on Spacelab One when the process of eliminating me began at NASA in 1980.

If I’d played the cards right, I’d at least have a condo on the west side now.
I probably wouldn't have my daughter, not this particular daughter, I might have another child. I also might be dead. God knows, when I was doing it for free I had to make fast escapes so many times, they became a kind of part of the morning after experience. Back home, I’d be nursing not only a hangover, but bruises and cuts, and a kind of revulsion.

But I didn't charge for it, and when anyone offered a trade for a job, I’d become incensed. Storm out of the room.

1969- the year I screwed up my acting career by performing in porn - when porn was still simulated sex, in fact what we did on screen in X rated films is a lot like what you see on daytime dramas these days. Still in 1969 performing in porn ruined your career. I was so head in the clouds thinking sex was something I did with whoever whatever and happened to live in Hollywood where there was a lot of work pretending to have sex on film - I left the whole city when they started really doing it. That's a whole other story===

1969 was also the year I got an interview with a casting person on the Universal lot. I think it was Universal, it might have been down in Culver City. It was an office building on a studio lot. In 1969 I wore real short skirts, Often wore no bra (and I'm large), never got my hair done professionally or my nails, and I think my legs were bare under the short skirt, and my skin tone is very white with uneven freckles, my legs don't tan. I’ve always been a little bit overweight, except when I’ve had the bulimia in full gear, so I doubt I really looked all that great when I went to this casting interview at this studio.

I carried an 11 by 14 portfolio of really crummy pictures, I still have the portfolio, hmm, maybe I should scan those silly pictures in here with this post, I’ll have to think about that.

THE CASTING GUY WHO WANTED TO PIMP ME OUT FOR ACTING JOBS
And how a neophyte whore stormed out of his office irate at the thought

Carrying this portfolio under the arm of my all but five foot two frame, I bounced into Mr. Bald’s office, past a row of secretaries, all of whose eyes followed me ‘neath judgmental lids as I jiggled by. I don't think I wore face makeup then either. We're talking straggly hair, forced to look neat but not quite making it, freckles, puffy face as I used lots of drugs and alcohol since I was thirteen,

And I never wore face makeup. Never did my nails…

I thought I was an actress, had no agent or manager just sent out photos to the casting directors of the world, which is likely how I got this interview.

Okay, it might not have even been his office, and maybe he wasn’t even in Casting. These details are foggy.

What did happen was, he outlined a kind of - well when I think of it, it was a lot like the Administrative Technician program under which I’d been hired in the late seventies at NASA. You entered at one level, performed such and such for a year, then moved up two levels every two years until you were set loose on your own as an Administrator. If I’d stayed at NASA entering as a G-S 7 in 1978, I would have been a G-S 11 I think it was in the mid 1980s and then you have “career status” which means you can move around and go to any other state, any other agency, have a job for life . . .

Today I live in squalor in an area of East Hollywood where the ambiance is so bad, I can’t go outside as I'm surrounded by bad experiences on my own sidewalk, and these days I also can’t go to any other neighborhoods, as I feel like I'm covered with the grime vermin and even bugs and bacteria from the squalid part of town.

Yeah.

Mr. Bald outlined the program for me. First I have sex with him, then he takes me to the commissary, introduces me to an assistant director, another casting agent. I have sex with that guy, and if everything is still hunky dory, I go on from there to have sex with a guy farther up the pecking order, and in a year or two I’d be screwing a major motion picture producer and either marrying him or starring in one of his major motion pictures.

I listened stunned, pulling my mini skirt down suddenly aware of how creepy this guy was, and listened. I remember at one point he took me to the window and even pointed out where the commissary was, where these offices were that these trysts would take place. He saw I wasn’t buying, so he made the pitch even better, “Why you know B---B--- and S-- S-- and ---?” (He named a few actresses with so-so careers, so-so talent, yet they were doing well, had done enough work that I knew who they were.) “That's how she got started, and her too.”

“No.”

For three seconds I was naïve and believed him.

But I would not even consider his offer. Looking back now, he could have been just some perv who saw my headshot and arranged to use this office for a few hours that afternoon to get me to come with him to some gang bang in the hills that night.

I didn't let it get that far.

I became irate.

“What makes you think I would do something like that, sleep my way up the ladder. I'm an Actress.”

I said those words with all the drama of true performance, grabbed my portfolio, and stormed out of the room, bouncing past the row of secretaries, who now watched stunned stifling little laughs, they seemed to know something I didn't know but I didn't care.

How could he think I would be interested?

When I asked him that question, he reached down and held up the headshot I’d put in the mail a few weeks back.

That's when I stormed out.

I found that headshot the other day, in a folder, wrapped in a plastic so you can’t see it. I should throw the few I have left out. They're astonishing. It’s a picture of me in this thin sweater, my back arched, no bra, pointing everything out straight at the camera, “headlight’s on” as they say in the ghetto. I sent that picture out from my little one room apartment on Leland Way in 1969 knowing I was literally sending a picture of me and my boobs to a whole list of strangers…

I remember sending them out. I was almost trance like. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do but my arms just by rote went through all the motions, from selecting that shot, to getting it printed, to stuffing it into 25 or 50 or how many envelopes in the list of addresses of casting agents I got from some catalogue. Just mailed out this picture.

Then was stunned, astonished, shocked, when a guy came after me for bartered sex.

Today I envy people like Charlie Sheen because they just go for it.

I should have just set up with a suite on the West Side and become a professional, back when I was 18 or so. And banked the cash. Bought some real estate.

I would have been better off if I'd just been what I was instead of trying to make myself into something I could never be.

When compulsions are put in you at that young an age...

And I never even knew they were compulsions. I was 35 before I realized other people didn't have sex - or even want to - the way I did... and living in West Hollywood until age 39 when I came up pregnant...

Laugh at it or it will kill you

.
I floated back to my desk, “I’ve got to get out from behind this computer. I have to find a way to get out, meet people, stop sitting here at the monitor screen for hours and hours, this can't be good for me.” Floated around the chair, full circle, back to the desk.

“I know, I’ll go to Craigs List and see what I can find under Activities.” Three hours later was still at the computer.

***********
My daughter emerged from her room to get ready to go to work and mumbled something to me like, "Are you still angry?"

“Hmmph, it has nothing to do with the Illinois Supreme Court decision last month.” With that the room got silent from both ends.

But not for long on my side. “I have to live in one state and have a lawsuit in another state. Bad enough. Since people in California had cases going back at least as far as mine, some even to the 1940s.

Geez, I'm already dealing with getting old, now my child molestation case is denied because I'm old...

In every state where they ARE changing the laws, it’s still only going to be for people whose claims go back to like the 1970s.

Why isn't the AARP jumping on top of this?

And plus do you know how much money my dad donated to the L.A. Archdiocese since we moved here in the 1950s, yet I have to go to the Chicago Archdiocese for help, I mean what the f--, I mean what the- what the what the-!!!!!!!"

“Mom. Mom. Mom.”

“Oh, come on, you going to tell me I don't have a good reason to be mad? I'm mad? I mean I'm mad. “

“It doesn't matter mom, yeah you have a damn good reason to be angry. You don't think I have a lot of reasons to be angty too? You think I wouldn't rather be in college than working at Walmart?

It’s just it doesn't do any good, mom. No matter how real your reasons are for being angry, all anybody else sees is a little old lady going nuts.

Don't get mad, mom, let me just tell you this because it's true. Nobody wants to listen to you because all they see is this little old lady who’s so angry that she's shaking and sputtering all the time and mom, you're not- they don’t- nobody wants to hear it.”

Stunned, I stared at the computer. The screen went dark and my face reflected back, so scarred from scowls the impression is more evil than righteous. She’s right. I'm too angry, even if I do have a lot of real good reasons to be angry, at this point, it’s not hurting anyone else but me - but us.

And god knows how much it's already hurt the female who is trying to grow up in my home with me.

“You're right,” I said. “The only way this isn’t going to destroy us, is to use it, turn it around. I mean when you have so much stuff falling apart and everything is going wrong, what else can you do but laugh at it. It becomes so bad it’s funny. I have to find a way to make this all into comedy.”

LIKE this:

I was molested by a Catholic priest when I was five years old and as a result I grew up with these weird compulsions. All I wanted was to do was be around men in high places, especially after puberty kicked in, you know what I mean?

You ever wonder why there used to be so many dirty jokes about girls from Catholic schools?

You have a guy in clergy collar towering over you when you're this high, and he’s got his fingers in that place that sends you to new heights, I mean for the rest of my life I confused sexual arousal with airplanes and space travel. I'm serious.

For a while in the 1970s I lived on a commune down in what used to be Laguna Canyon, where Timothy Leary dropped in out of a tree now and then to visit and we took LSD almost every day, honest. Or this other group would sit around the Buddha statue behind the hidden door at the Mystic Arts Bookstore and chant Om while we were peaking on not acid, but mescaline as acid was not organic...

But that wasn’t the weirdest psycho-sexual-religious thing I did due to compulsions placed in me by the fingers of Father Horne. See he used to get to me in the woods, with the daylight behind him, his body frame a silhouette even in his clerical robe. For the next 30 years or so I thought St. Michael the Archangel had come to me in the woods and placed this special thing between my legs-

When I was five.

So I went through life looking and looking for that connection between my unfinished orgasm and the sky.

So when I found myself in the late 1970s, in Texas -

Don’t even ask how I ended up in Texas -

I discovered NASA. Men uniforms sky.

At UT Austin you had to take five science courses to graduate, and the astronomy courses were often taught by professors who had research grants with NASA in Houston nearby. In one course I took, the professor got all excited talking about how man would someday to expand into space and what they were doing at NASA to make it happen and I went Ka-jjjjcccoing -

Men, uniforms, sky, exciting!!!!

I HAD TO GET TO NASA!!!!!

So by the end of my senior year there in Austin, I’d gotten references from all the astronomy professors who had contracts with NASA (No not using sex, I never traded sex for money or favors, that's not what this was about, it was more a mission from God).

I’d written 12 or 15 stories about the space program for Austin and surrounding papers, I’d inundated the Public Affairs office at NASA Houston with letters and work samples, begging for a job saying-

Boy would I be an asset.

NASA believed me. I can be so good at this.

I did such a good lobbying job, NASA actually created a job for me. In Public Affairs, I mean did they know in advance what I was going to do?

Public Affairs?

It all ended up being so public too. I ended up being a scandal. I left NASA three years later as a real live genuine scandal.

See the priest started this motor in me, and now I was 30 years old and I still needed to make that connection with men in the sky, I knew that had something to do with my screwy destiny.

That motor was running so hard and fast, that when I got to NASA I started trying to make it with every man who wore a skinny tie and looked like he might work in mission control, trying to make my way up to the Astronaut Office, but most of the astronauts were too classy to mess around with that slut in public affairs.

Most of them were.

Public Affairs, I had to end up at NASA Public Affairs.

It’s not funny yet.

******************
I'm trying to write it funny, but it’s not funny yet.

However, other stuff in this story could be funny.

Think of Catholic priests getting blow jobs from altar boys, then unruffling themselves to go out and perform Mass, with the same altar boy now holding Communion wafers for him.

No, that's not funny either.

Let me focus more on Charlie Sheen. . .

His dad Martin changed the family name to Sheen in honor of the glorious and wonderful Bishop Fulton Sheen, can't you just hear the Irish brogues around the family table as they discussed the name change? Can't you feel the smothering of Catholicism forced on kids whose parents are really busy elsewhere?

Charlie Sheen ended up a notorious sex addict.

Charlie Sheen would probably find a way to make these stories about pedophile priest crimes funny.

Or better yet, Sarah Silverman:


"It’s bad enough having to watch people around you get settlements for the same crimes you lived through because they lived in L.A. and you lived in Chicago, so now they get to move out of L.A., and here we still end up living in East Hollywood, I mean is that fair!!!!!?

Nobody talked about sex crimes in the 1950s, that's why it takes older people longer to come forward. But NO. I have to live with Illinois laws when I'm in California. Was our family the only one that moved to California in the 1950s? What the f---?"

"Mom! Mom! Stop!"

kay ebeling October 16, 2009

Maybe I can trick Charlie Sheen into reading this

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One reason I think Charlie Sheen would want to produce these stories is I had an encounter with him once. He’d remember me, I know he would, not like I'm a star struck stalker. Just-

When Lizzie and I were homeless back in 2004, we finally got into a shelter after living in our car on the streets of L.A. for six months. But you can’t stay in a homeless shelter without paying rent, so first thing the shelter made me do was apply for welfare. Then in order to keep the welfare checks coming I had to enroll in GAIN. So even though I'm a college graduate with a resume full of good jobs, in order to keep my $475 a month coming from Welfare for me and my daughter, I had to attend two weeks of training on how to find a job, things like, look the man in the eye, shake his hand, be confident.

Then in order to keep the checks coming I had to go out and apply in person for jobs that weren’t there. They made me drive my 1995 Ford Taurus all over the city where I’d then park, wander into an office, ask to leave a resume, and inevitably be told, “We don't applications in person, apply online.” Or they’d take your 2 cents worth of paper and throw it in the trash after you walked out. Still GAIN said I had to have a signature from someone and an address and a name of the person who I spoke to about a job, five of those a day supposedly or I would not get my monthly check and two weeks’ worth of food stamps.

I don't know if the other people in my GAIN class were going to five businesses a day and handing in a resume, but by the time I’d hit the welfare office I was so out of esteem, I wasn’t able to decide anything. Just point me in the direction, tell me what to do, I’ll do it. So I got in my car and drove through Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax LaBrea traffic.

I drove out Beverly, out Sunset, out Santa Monica, to the places where I used to be able to get jobs in minutes. Back in the 1980s.

That's what put me on South Robertson Boulevard one afternoon, in this Ford Taurus that had a layer of encrusted grit sunbaked into the ten year old paint job. I’d bumped into a lot of things in the past six months, so the car was decorated in dents. And me, inside, with my skin matching the color of my gray hair, a broken sun visor rubber banded to my head, I'm driving down South Robertson Boulevard looking for the address of I think it was Lions Gate USA offices, or something like that, some totally ridiculous place for me to even be applying for jobs, but these are the agencies and industry I thought I knew, the industry I’d grown up in, well at least on the fringe of it.

Okay, ahead of me is a conflagration of cars, I maneuver my way through. Turns out it’s this chi chi Bev Hills eatery and the jam up is because people are pulling up, getting out of their cars, handing the keys over to valets, and running in to have lunch with the people who give each other all the great jobs while the rest of us pick crumbs off the sidewalk.

I pull around to pass the clump of cars, and pull up beside this monster black windowed vehicle huge like they're all driving those days, and just as I pass the driver’s seat, out steps Charlie Sheen from behind the steering wheel. So as he steps out of his ATV by BMW or whatever it was, he ended up looking straight into the dented passenger side of my Ford Taurus, staring right through the gritty window, which was down because the AC had long since quit working - looking right at me, with my baggy eyes shaded under the visor, my mouth may even have been open revealing the new black spaces I have now where teeth used to be right in the middle of my smile.

Charlie Sheen looked up and saw me and got this look of HORROR on his face. Like he’d never seen anything so awful in his life. He was stunned, he stopped and gaped a moment and did not move as I chugged by at my ten miles an hour. In fact our eyes met, as far as you can tell when someone is wearing thick shades, and the revulsion was so obvious in his body language, if not the mouth hanging open in horror.

Horror. I was a living horror movie character, driving by Charlie Sheen that day in Beverly Hills spring 2004.

I know I made an impression on him.

So now I think Charlie Sheen is the person who would produce these stories I'm holding onto, these stories I'm sitting on.

Maybe I should invest in a pair of shoes, a designer dress from Ross or TJMaxx, really shop and find an outfit, and start lunching at that restaurant, if it’s still there on South Robertson Boulevard.

But I still have the spaces in my teeth. I fit in more with the invisible homeless people on the sidewalk outside.