Going Off Script Read online

  Some girls would no doubt see this as a bad thing, but I was not one of those girls. My imagination hit the “Play” button on its favorite biopic in progress, and I saw them walking back to me with huge smiles on their faces as they looked me dead in the eyes and told me I had what it takes to go to New York and become a supermodel. My brilliant potential defied any label. This had to be how Naomi Campbell felt the first time she walked into a modeling agency, and now this was happening to me. It was the most exciting moment of my fourteen-year-old life until a voice rudely interrupted my reverie. “Julie,” the bitchy voice said, “you are what we call an athletic model. You’re tall and lean like an athlete, and we see you modeling a variety of athletic wear in catalogs.” It was bad enough I was being told I was a catalog model, but to be told I would basically be modeling for the Sports Authority’s newspaper inset was even more of a blow than modeling mediocre fashion pieces in the annual Spiegel catalog.

  Before I could start crying, they thrust a sporty outfit into my skinny—lean—arms along with a tennis racquet, a white Izod visor to squash down over my short permed-mushroom bob, and size ten white tennis shoes that looked like a size fifteen with my teeny-tiny bony ankles poking out. Not a cute look. But Barbizon was not done with me yet: They stood me in front of a white screen and started throwing tennis balls at me, urging me to swing energetically. I kept missing and the tennis balls kept hitting me, and I tried to fend off the Barbizon attack by twisting the racquet every which way but up. It was awful.

  I waited a month for the contact sheets to arrive, praying that maybe a couple of shots had miraculously turned out fabulous. When the envelope finally came, I opened it upstairs in my bedroom and immediately started bawling into my favorite stuffed animal, a dog named Curly who was named after my first real dog, Curly, who was run over by a school bus when I was eight and replaced by another little poodle, who was also named Curly. Neither the stuffed Curly, the memory of the late Curly, nor the concerned face licking of the current live Curly could begin to console me over my sabotaged modeling career.

  Every single picture in the Barbizon shots showed me with my eyes shut tight or a look of sheer terror on my face. I didn’t even look like I was playing tennis. I looked like I was using the racquet as self-defense while being attacked, like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. And I was so shell-shocked over being labeled “athletic,” I hadn’t even realized how awful the outfit I was modeling actually was. The least they could have done was dress me in a flirty little tennis skirt, but nooooo. I was defending myself from killer birds while wearing what appeared to be prison pajamas—an oversized shirt with broad stripes and matching Bermuda shorts. Both were at least four sizes too big on me. I called Barbizon to ask for a reshoot. They agreed, for an extra five hundred dollars. Pass. I was done.

  Even I could see that putting my career in Barbizon’s hands was not going to get me anywhere other than another expensive level of Barbizondom, so I cut out the middleman and became my own junior talent agent. Every Sunday, I would settle in with a stack of Chips Ahoy to dunk in my latte while I carefully scoured the classifieds section of the Washington Post, looking for audition notices. These cattle calls invariably took place in some conference room of a nondescript office building in a skeezy part of town, but Mama would always give in to my excitement and patiently wait for hours until I was rejected yet again. The biggest one was the casting call for the lead in Return to the Blue Lagoon, which I thought I was perfect for even though my acne, scoliosis, and bad eighties perm made me look more like Bon Jovi’s hideous sister than Brooke Shields 2.0. When we showed up at the audition, all the pretty almost-Brookes and their barracuda mothers looked at Mama and me as if we’d misread the ad and thought it was a remake involving the black lagoon, not the blue one, and I was trying out for the “creature from” role. No callback on that one. Or the next one or the next. I had a hard shell, though, and just kept going to whatever audition I could. When I spotted a casting call for a feature film called Broadcast News, my one-track mind was officially blown: this had to be fate! I persuaded Mama to drive me downtown to wait in a long line yet again. When my turn came, and the casting director asked how old I was, I tacked on a couple of years to match the minimum age requirement and said I was sixteen.

  “Okay, you got it.”

  “No way!” I blurted. Thank God, I had the good sense to shut up before they reconsidered, and I eagerly agreed to return the following Saturday at six in the morning to start filming. The adrenaline rush was probably going to keep me awake until then anyway. When the big day arrived, I got to the set and found out that I was going to be an extra in the scene where a young Albert Brooks delivers his graduation speech (“Thank you, and go fuck yourselves”). I would be a member of the graduating class he was addressing, which, at the rate I was going, was as close to a commencement ceremony as I’d ever get. It took over four hours to shoot the brief scene. Everyone else sitting there in a mortarboard and gown grew increasingly bored and miserable, but I had this huge smile plastered across my face. I was so happy to be on camera, I couldn’t stop smiling.

  I ended up getting the close-up, and when the hit movie came out, I made like I was starring in it (Holly Hunter was just photo-bombing). My face flashed across the screen in approximately half a blink, and most of my friends never even saw me. I can’t remember what I got paid, and my sister probably stole it, anyway. None of that mattered: I had been on screen.

  Every time I interview Holly Hunter, I have to resist the urge to blurt out, “Do I look familiar, Holly? Remember when we were in Broadcast News together?” But she isn’t exactly the easiest interview in the first place—very serious, hates personal questions, redirects with one-word answers—and I don’t think she would be amused by my silly childhood pipe dreams. Broadcast News turned out to be a huge hit, but not my big break. I never got another part, and, contrary to Barbizon’s big promises, I never got any callbacks for modeling jobs, either. As a suburban badass, however, my star just kept on rising. I was fifteen when I picked up my first stalker-fan.

  Officer Pervy, as I came to call him, had pulled me over on yet another one of my grand theft auto escapades. This time, at least it was my own parents’ car I jacked. They had gone out to dinner in their Jeep Cherokee and left the Mercedes behind, and my best friend Andrea and I decided to go cruise River Road, the major thoroughfare that connects suburban Maryland to D.C. We headed for the Universal Church of Bored Teens Up to No Good, aka the 7-Eleven. Just as we hoped, a group of bad boys stood smoking outside, obviously waiting for a German luxury car full of good girls to show up. I homed in on a boy named Lance. He had black hair, shocking blue eyes, and pale skin. He wore an old T-shirt and baggy jeans with about three inches of his boxers on full display. When it was time to go, I was so busy trying to be cool as I pulled out of the parking lot that I accidentally jumped the curb turning back onto River Road. The all-too-familiar flash of police lights instantly appeared behind me.

  My streak of juvenile delinquent luck had just run its course. I tried the forgotten-license trick using my sister’s name, but I screwed up her birth date. After running my bogus information, the cop ordered me out of the Mercedes.

  “What’s your name and who are you?” he demanded.

  “Let me explain,” I began. He cut me off.

  “We’re not explaining anything.” He noticed the 7-Eleven boys watching us.

  “Who are those guys?” the cop now wanted to know.

  “They go to Monroe,” I answered. Monroe High School was as close as you could come to being on the wrong side of the tracks in Bethesda, which wasn’t saying much.

  “What are two pretty white girls doing with thugs from Monroe?” the cop said. It wasn’t so much a question as a not-so-subtle racist remark. Two of the Monroe boys were black. I deflected the interrogation by shrugging and saying we didn’t really know them. Which brought Officer Pervyracist back to the central issue: Who was I?

&nbs
p; I attempted to plead the Fifth and refused to provide contact information for my parents.

  “You can either tell me, or I lock you up for driving without a license,” the cop said.

  To his surprise, I pounced on Door #2.

  “I need to be behind bars when my dad shows up,” I explained. I wasn’t kidding. This was not a Mama-with-kitchen-utensil kind of offense.

  The cop cracked a smile, and I sensed my opening.

  “I’m telling you, Officer, I’m a great driver! I’m Italian. Like Mario Andretti. Driving is in my blood! My birthday is on August 17, and I’ll pass the driving test without missing a point, I swear.” I had learned from enough trips to the front office at Walt Whitman that fluttering my eyelashes, dusting off the Italian accent, and tossing in a few ciao bellas went a long way when I needed damage control. I had stellar flirting skills, and zero shame. It was a useful combination.

  “Okay, I’m going to let you go, but here’s the deal,” Pervy said. “On August 17, you are going to take your driver’s test, and if you don’t pass, I am going to come find you, and when I find you, you are going to be in trouble. Then I’m going to arrest you.” I thanked him profusely and was sent illegally on my way. Pervy followed closely behind to make sure I drove straight home.

  My sixteenth birthday rolled around, and the second I got home from school, I began lobbying to go to the DMV. The hurdle wasn’t so much getting Mama to agree to drop everything and take me ASAP—it was waiting for her to corral every other blood relative within a thirty-mile radius to go with us. In an Italian family, you never know what is going to be decreed a major life event requiring the presence of not just parents and siblings, but grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who count as “just like family.”

  My entourage of a dozen or so spectators assembled noisily in the DMV parking lot as I climbed into the car with the examiner. I smiled brightly. The examiner regarded me with flat shark eyes. Charm was going to get me nowhere with this one. For the next fifteen minutes or so, I chauffeured her around the prescribed course, executing every three-point turn, blindspot check, and lane change perfectly. When I slipped smooth as butter into a tight parallel parking space, the examiner let out an involuntary “Beautiful!” and I knew I had nailed my test. As I drove into the homestretch, I could see my family shouting, clapping, and jumping up and down. I was so excited, I started giving them thumbs-up, and accidentally blew right through the last stop sign. I put the car in park, gushed my thanks to the examiner, and waited for her to hand me my prize. She sneered at me triumphantly.

  “Do you not know what you just did?” she demanded. “You just ran that stop sign.”

  What? I looked back over my shoulder and spotted the trick stop sign.

  “Holy shit, noooooo!” I said by way of apology.

  “Yep. And that is not good, so maybe you better tell your family to stop acting all crazy.” They were still jumping up and down. This was starting to play like a Saturday Night Live skit. I couldn’t believe one little mistake was going to cost me my license. No way was I going down without a fight.

  “This is the worst day of my life! And on top of it, you are being such a bitch!”

  “Oh, really?” She looked down at her clipboard and furiously jotted something down. “That’s an automatic sixteen points taken off for Attitude. You’re done,” she concluded, thrusting the failing score sheet at me.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I shrieked.

  “You better stop cussing,” she warned.

  “No! This is fucking ridiculous! I want my fucking license!”

  She got out of the car and marched up to my parents, who smiled proudly, assuming she had come to congratulate them on raising such a wonderful driver.

  “Your daughter has a real attitude problem,” she informed them. “I failed her for running a stop sign and for her nasty behavior. She just called me a bitch.” Everyone else stopped jumping and applauding. Babbo briefly studied the examiner and considered her complaint before responding.

  “Well, that’s-a because you are a beetch!” he shouted.

  Oh no, here we go, I thought. The only thing that could possibly make the situation any worse would be if Officer Pervy made good on his threat and swooped in to cuff me. Mayhem was prevented only because DMV Beetch realized that a couple of carloads of crazy Italians would easily take out every examiner on duty in a parking lot brawl. We all went home to finish celebrating my birthday. If I laid low for a while, I might be able to retake the test and pass before Officer Pervy hunted me down.

  I flunked the second time, too, but without the drama.

  I was relieved that Officer Pervy had forgotten all about me and my little unlicensed driver escapade, which, after all, was nothing compared to all my other unlicensed driver escapades. Just before I was eligible to take the driving test for a third time, I came out of school one afternoon to see a familiar face waiting for me.

  “I hear you failed your driving test,” Officer Pervy said. It was pretty obvious why he hadn’t shot up the ranks and made detective yet. Half the school knew I had failed. Freshmen knew I had failed. I nodded my head and tried to look dejected. Officer Pervy had a pretend sad smirk on his face. “You hungry?” he asked. “C’mon.” He took me to my favorite fast-food joint, Roy Rogers, where he watched me eat chicken legs dipped in mayo and smack my fingers while I chattered on about my fascinating life as a high school student.

  The third time was a charm at the DMV, but Officer Pervy didn’t forget about me. He would pop up every so often to take me out for fast food, and I would tell him about the kids at school—who was smoking, who was hooking up with a football player, who got busted for making out in a bathroom stall. As far as looks went, Pervy was never going to make the cut for a first responders calendar: he was fortyish and paunchy, with brown hair and a mustache. Nonetheless, I still thought it was proof of my coolness that a cop actually seemed fascinated by my stories and wanted to pal around with me. One day, he showed up in the Whitman parking lot while I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends. He kept trying to signal me to come over. “What’s that cop doing here?” my friends wondered. “What’s he want?” I shrugged along with them, and ignored Pervy’s insistent gestures. Finally he called out, “Giuliana, can I ask you a quick question?” I sauntered up to his car.

  “What?” I asked. I could feel my friends watching while pretending not to, everyone urgently speculating about what kind of trouble I had managed to get myself into.

  “What did you want to ask me?” I asked Pervy again. He fidgeted with a bag in his hand and looked nervous. Our relationship was 100 percent platonic, but we both understood without saying so that the power had shifted between us many McNuggets ago. He was no longer an authority figure. Now he was just an adult who seemed awkward and confused.

  “Uh, well, I, uh, have a new girlfriend, and I was hoping you could tell me whether I should give her flowers or lingerie for Valentine’s Day. What do you think?” He pulled a red teddy from the bag.

  “Omigod, definitely lingerie. That’s so sexy!” I felt grown up to be asked for such advice. “Okay, so, I have to go now! Good luck!” I turned and rejoined my friends.

  “What was that all about?” one of them wanted to know.

  “Oh, nothing, he just wanted my opinion about some lingerie for his girlfriend,” I said. There was a collective outcry of “Eeew!! Gross!! That’s so creepy!!” My friends convinced me that there was nothing innocent or remotely normal about a uniformed cop taking a sixteen-year-old girl out for after-school snacks in her short shorts and seeking her advice about underwear. The next time Pervy appeared out of the blue, I breezily waved at him and kept walking, and that was the end of that. I didn’t need or want his attention, anyway; I had a boyfriend.

  I was dating Lance, the 7-Eleven bad boy. Lance was one in a series of losers I gravitated toward. I was all shoot-for-the-moon when it came to pranks or outrageous behavior, but when it came to romance,
I purposely aimed low. Little ventured, less lost. I boasted a perfect record of never being dumped only because I was accomplished in the art of preventive dumping. I never wanted anyone to see me hurt. My working assumption was that anyone who chose me would never want to keep me, except maybe the bottom-feeders who couldn’t get anyone else. If I sensed that a guy I liked was losing interest, I would bolt before he publicly confirmed how unworthy I was by leaving me first.

  When I pulled the plug on a relationship, everyone was going to know. I was not the type to beat a quiet retreat. Even the DMV knew that. Not everyone was that perceptive. There was Sam, for example. Sam was a cute Middle Eastern boy who hung out with the Euro crowd of kids whose parents were diplomats, World Bankers, and the like. Sam and I were briefly a couple in my senior year, until I left early one night when we went clubbing, only to hear later that he had made out with one of my friends, a hot Latina named Sophia. The next day, I went to school ready to kill them both. I waited for Sam after first period and slapped the crap out of him in the hallway in front of an appreciative audience. After second period, I found him again and did the same thing. Sam offered a very sincere apology and begged my forgiveness, which our hallway audience also appreciated. I started to melt, then changed my mind.

  “No! You know what? I’m going to slap you every period!” He had five more to go.

  I got a hall pass during third period, and spotted Sophia through the glass of a classroom door. I started gesticulating wildly until a few kids noticed me, and my mimed message was somehow relayed across the rows of desks to Sophia. Sophia looked up to see my angry face in the window. “I am going to kill you,” I mouthed, slashing a hand across my throat for emphasis. I then gestured for her to come out into the hall for her murder. Sophia shook her head. I gestured more vehemently. She pretended to pay attention to the English teacher droning on about Shakespeare. I decided that if Sophia wasn’t going to come out to get killed, I was going in. I opened the door, marched up to her desk, and dragged her out of her seat. She resisted by trying to hold on to anything in her path, like desks and heads. The teacher stood frozen in shock. Things like this did not happen at a school like Walt Whitman.