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...