Going Off Script Read online

  “Okay, so what is your name?” the examiner asked. I spelled it for him.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Since I was a little kid.”

  “Okay, you’re good to go.”

  I was dumbstruck. That was it? What, did the INS subcontract the screening process out to the Barbizon School of Modeling? C’mon, throw some tennis balls, I can take it.

  “Wait, wait!” I practically shouted at the examiner. “Don’t you want to ask me some real questions?” What about the two longest rivers in the country, the thirteen original colonies, Ben Franklin’s résumé, the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment? If I didn’t use my archived knowledge of the Louisiana Purchase and the Federalist Papers right then and there, when would I ever? Where was the trick stop sign?

  “Would you feel better if I asked you questions?” the puzzled examiner asked.

  “Yes! I mean, no! Thank you!” I forced myself to zip it and leave before I got myself deported under some “undesirable lunatic” clause.

  I was the first in my family to get U.S. citizenship, but I don’t remember it being a big deal. It wasn’t, in our culture, considered a rite of passage, like getting your period or learning to drive. The entourage of relatives didn’t accompany me to the citizenship test or to my swearing-in ceremony in Baltimore. I drove there alone and clutched my little souvenir flag along with my fellow new Americans. I was expecting to be in a pissy mood, but once I was in that big room with all those people who were so proud, tears streaming down their faces, it made me a little weepy. It suddenly hit me that I was living in a country of incredible potential and opportunity, a country that had helped my entire family realize their dreams. First my uncles, then my parents, followed by my older siblings, who were both happily launched on their own careers by then. I looked at all these overjoyed strangers and wondered what their dreams were. We all wanted something from this, right?

  My Hallmark moment was too little, too late: Karma has a way of dealing with jaded little teenage bitches who regard American citizenship as nothing but a box to check so they can enter beauty pageants. I found myself an official contestant in the Miss Maryland USA pageant, all right, but I also found myself marching and saluting while wearing a sailor hat emblazoned with the letters USA in puffy paint, a cheesy white T-shirt tucked into denim shorts, and white Keds in an opening number so awful I would agree to Pine-Sol injections directly into my brain if I thought it would scrub away the memory. It was nothing like the glamorous, high-production opening numbers I’d grown up watching on the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. My favorite had been a riverboat number from Miss USA. The contestants came out holding these gorgeous masks to their faces, which they revealed when their names were announced. They were surrounded by professional dancers and singers. And now I was skipping around stage in a cheap sailor hat in some DIY state pageant.

  Most of the contestants were more experienced and less interested in a possible Miss Congeniality consolation title than I was. My roommate was nice enough—I think she went on to become an adult-entertainment star, or maybe just a Hooters girl—but most were cutthroat. One girl even slashed the gowns of two other contestants. I was a little insulted she didn’t consider me worthy of sabotage. In the official pageant program, I thanked my family, my parents’ business, and my dog Curly for their support. I hadn’t even tried to rally any outside sponsorship. I went home crownless but undefeated.

  Lose or not, I did learn important life lessons from the seasoned pageant girls in Miss Maryland, like how to use this special butt spray so you wouldn’t get a wedgie during the swimsuit competition. That was the least of my worries about appearing onstage in a swimsuit, though: I experienced a fluke growth spurt at the start of college, and my curved spine was more pronounced than ever. I had to get special permission to wear a one-piece in the pageant so my uneven hips and protruding shoulder blades might be less noticeable. I entered the competition again the following year and made it all the way to the semifinals that time. I choked on the supposedly idiot-proof interview question: What would you do if you were Miss Maryland?

  A genius answer immediately popped into my mind about how the title would give me the access I needed to help deserving people in the community, but for some reason, when it was time to speak, the word access was deleted from my brain. “Well, I, uh…If I was given the title,” I stammered into the microphone, “that would give me the…key I need to the city and the state, and that, um, that would be great because I can go in different places and help!”

  I heard shouts of Bravissima! from the audience—only my Italian family was cheering. The judges, meanwhile, all exchanged confused looks before quickly looking down in unison to consult the official pageant guidelines. You could practically see the giant thought bubbles appearing above their heads:

  Key? What key? It says here they get a Caboodles makeup kit and a free year of tanning, but there’s nothing about any key!

  I gave up my Miss USA dream after that. Being around the hard-core pageant queens had made me realize that it didn’t matter how much work you put into it; if you weren’t the prettiest, you weren’t going to win. These girls were gorgeous, and I knew I wasn’t ever going to win on looks alone. When I got to E! years later, I would actually end up judging Miss USA in 2007. Donald Trump, the pageant’s owner, addressed the judges before the show. “We’re going to find the most beautiful girl in the country tonight!” he declared. He sat right behind me in the front row and watched the entire pageant. The winner was a super cute girl I gave straight tens who went on to work online at E! as a reporter before becoming a red-carpet hostess for ABC.

  I had spent my high school years daydreaming about becoming an anchorwoman, but I never sought any guidance on how to go about achieving that goal. The University of Maryland had a well-regarded journalism program, but my near-negative GPA and low SAT scores ruled out my chances of getting accepted there. Or to any other college with or without a communications department, for that matter. I was restless. I had ten years’ worth of ambition pent up inside me, and no place to unleash that energy. I wanted something to happen. I wanted my real life to begin. It was Monica, of all people, who swooped to the rescue. Since she had moved out on her own, we had switched gears from mortal enemies to devoted friends.

  After finishing her studies at Boston University, Monica had gone to New York City to pursue a career in, no surprise, the fashion industry. She was instantly snapped up by the House of Versace and had quickly risen through the ranks to become a U.S. rep working out of corporate headquarters on Fifth Avenue. She was living the Carrie Bradshaw life while sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a college friend named Larissa. Larissa had become an FBI agent, assigned to a task force investigating the Colombia drug cartel. A fair number of the drugs themselves were busy making their way up the nose of Monica’s boss, Donatella Versace. The Italian designer, by her own (much later) admission, was a coke fiend who was midway through an eighteen-year binge when I wiggled my way into her company as a temporary receptionist. When I first encountered Donatella, however, I knew nothing about the drugs and was too naive to figure it out—I assumed she was just batshit crazy. Why else would anyone have security guards block off the entire women’s room and plaster a sign on the door reading RESERVED FOR DONATELLA?

  At lunchtime, Donatella would have her male assistants don white gloves to serve her greasy Chinese takeout on exquisite Versace dinnerware. One time, I witnessed one of Donatella’s infamous nuclear meltdowns when she accidentally locked herself out of her smoked-glass office. It began with a scream that brought the whole office running. “My cell phone is in there!” she shrieked. “I need my fucking phone!” Everyone instantly started scrambling to find another key to the sacred domain, but the still-shrieking Donatella merely stood there and pointed at one of her huge security guards. “Go!” she ordered him. “Get me in there!” There was a sudden shattering of glass as the guard kicked his way in. The whole o
ffice froze, and we all gaped in stunned silence. She had been locked out of the office for all of thirty seconds, tops. “What are you all looking at?” she snarled. “Get someone to fix this fucking door.” I see Donatella at the Met Gala all the time now, but I’m too nervous to say anything. She’s a crazy gangster diva. There is absolutely no one else like her. I think she’s fabulous, but I know the firepower of an Italian temper, and with Donatella, you do not want to wander across the shooting range. She wouldn’t remember me, anyway: my stint as a fashion industry receptionist lasted about as long as a cheap knockoff, and I quit after just a few months before they could fire me. It turned out that I had very little aptitude—and even less motivation—for taking phone messages. If it’s that important, they’ll call back, right?

  Things were equally tense at home. I was living with my sister and her roommate in their tiny apartment. Every night, Monica and Larissa would go out barhopping. Occasionally I would tag along with my fake ID. Larissa would wear some hot little dress, which she accessorized with a concealed weapon. I thought Larissa was awesome. The feeling was not reciprocated. When you’re a sexy, single twentysomething, having your roommate’s teenage sister camped out on the couch can get old pretty fast. Plus, I’m a slob by nature, so I wasn’t exactly trying to ingratiate myself by being helpful around the apartment. I finally wore out my welcome when the phone rang late one night. I pounced to answer it, because I was waiting for a call from a hot guy. I could barely hear the voice on the other end.

  “Larissa,” the voice whispered urgently. “Larissa?”

  “No. Can you call back in the morning?”

  “Larissa, it’s me, I have information for you…” At that moment, the call waiting beeped, and I clicked over; it was Hot Guy.

  “Sorry, she’s sleeping,” I told Larissa’s caller. “Call first thing in the morning, okay? Gracias!” I hung up on her and went back to flirting with Hot Guy.

  Larissa was up by then and came charging out of her room to interrogate me. “Did I just get a call?” she demanded.

  “Yeah, it was some young girl with an accent but it’s cool, she’s gonna call back in the morning!” I replied with a dismissive wave.

  “IDIOT! THAT WAS MY INFORMANT!” I felt bad. I had assumed it was some relative who could wait. Who gets urgent work calls at midnight, anyway? (Answer: FBI agents do.)

  New York and I just couldn’t find our groove, and I left before the summer was up. I hated how hot and loud it was, and how rank it smelled. I fled back home to my Laura Ashley bedroom and enrolled in community college. I was starting to grow up a little, and knew I had to get serious if I wanted a future for myself. I made the honor roll for the first time in my life and got accepted to St. Mary’s, a small public college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There was no journalism or communications major at St. Mary’s, but I was thrilled to land a gig at the campus radio station. I hosted the after-midnight show, when every student within listening range was either asleep or getting wasted. Since I had spent my childhood broadcasting to nonexistent audiences in front of my bedroom mirror, I was a natural for the job. Between songs, I would talk and talk and talk, with no one listening. Then I would convince myself that they were out there, and just too star-struck to engage with such a big-time deejay. As the lonely minutes ticked by, I would start begging people to call in. “If you’ve ever been in love, call me, let’s talk,” I’d coo into my mike, waiting for the phone to light up. Nothing. “If you have ever taken a breath of air, call me.” Silence. “If you have lips call me. Call me even if you have only one lip!” Nothing. “If you’re at St. Mary’s College and hear this, for the love of God, please call me!” Nada.

  I was ecstatic when I was finally promoted to the evening shift. I still wasn’t getting any callers, but the possibility seemed more real in prime time, and the better hours meant my friends could come up and hang out with me in the deejay booth, which resulted more than once in dead air because I was too busy acting cool to remember to play another song when one ended. Dead air might have been a better choice than what turned out to be my dinner-hour swan song. I love hip-hop and R & B, and on the night in question, I thought everyone else would enjoy my favorite 2 Live Crew hit as much as I did. The catchy chorus was soon thundering across the crowded dining hall:

  Me so horny, me so horny, me so horny,

  Me love you long time

  The song gets a whole lot raunchier after that.

  Finally the phones lit up.

  So did my boss, who came running into the booth. “Turn that off!” he yelled. I didn’t think he needed to get so worked up over it; this was Maryland, not Florida. Some D.A. in Florida, I vaguely recalled, had successfully prosecuted 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges, and record clerks selling the controversial album were actually arrested. The conviction would eventually be overturned on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court, but that day was still nearly a decade away, and even if I was willing to fight the good First Amendment fight on behalf of horny rappers, my station manager, Me So Uptight, was not. It was time to change schools again, anyway. My transcript was decent enough for me to get accepted at last by my first-choice school, the University of Maryland, where at long last I became a journalism major.

  That summer before my junior year, I was hanging out in the little espresso bar in the back of my father’s store one afternoon when I heard a customer come in to pick up some tailored suits. I peered over the little half wall and spotted a handsome guy around my age. He smiled at me, and we exchanged pleasantries before he left. The store manager hurried up, breathless with excitement as he told me who the visitor was. “He asked who you were! He wanted me to give you his number if you ever wanted to call.” I was flattered, but not willing to show it. “Just have him call me,” I told the manager. He did, and just like that, I had a date with one of the hottest bachelors in town.

  The son of a prominent car dealer who was a regular customer of my dad’s, Richard was two years older than I was. He had attended an exclusive private prep school and had his pick of the prettiest debutantes in D.C., not to mention neighboring Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. He was widely known as a party boy who liked to tear around in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, but I was the one who was going to prove to be hell on wheels in this particular romance. Richard picked me up in a grampa boat of a Chrysler off one of his dad’s lots. Smart, I thought, realizing immediately that I was being tested. He may have been downplaying what he had, but I wasn’t going that route, myself: if the shorts I wore for our first date had been any skimpier, they would have been a thong.

  Richard and I had instant chemistry. That very first night, he asked me what I was doing over the summer before going back to college that fall.

  “I just started working at Houston’s,” I told him. I’d been hired as a waitress, but I took food orders the way I took phone messages and had been demoted to hostess after just one shift. I didn’t mind. Better clothes and more opportunity to chat with customers, I figured. Let someone else deliver all those house salads and glasses of Chardonnay.

  “Well, I hope you had fun, because you’re going to be quitting that job to spend more time with me,” Richard informed me. His confidence was a more natural fit than the cocky swagger of boys I’d fallen for in the past. With Richard, my “type” did a seismic shift from bad boy to businessman. There was definitely something to be said for grown men dressed in nice suits instead of hoodlums in baggy jeans with three inches of underwear showing. True to Richard’s prediction, I quit my job that week to spend more time with him. I loved the envious looks from other women when we were out clubbing or eating at the hottest new restaurant in D.C. With his impeccable clothes, olive skin, blue eyes, and seductive lips, Richard looked like he had stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. And he was as generous as he was good-looking: he loved to take me on shopping sprees to Neiman Marcus. It all seemed too good to be true.

  When September rolled around, I answered a roommate-wanted ad with Student Housin
g and moved into a student apartment with three other girls for the semester. On my second night there, I took a break from unpacking to get ready to go out. The new roommates wanted to know more about my boyfriend.

  “What’s he do?” one of them asked.

  “He works for a car dealership,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s sweet, good for you!” they said, exchanging quick stifled-laugh looks that said loser.

  The condescension was cut short by the deafening roar of a motor gunning outside our open balcony door. “What the fuck?” my roommates said in near unison. We all ran to the balcony to see who was causing the commotion. I had a good hunch. Sure enough, there was Richard sitting in a red convertible Ferrari. He smiled up at me and waved.

  “Be right down!” I shouted over the rumbling engine.

  “He works for a car dealership?” one of the roommates asked skeptically.

  “Yeah,” I said with what I hoped was supreme nonchalance. “He owns the car dealership. And,” I added as a little take that, bitches, P.S., “something like thirty others.”

  Academically, I didn’t have such an auspicious start at UM. Leafing through the course catalog, I had been on the lookout for sliders, and a class called TV Westerns 101 had caught my attention. Watching TV shows for college credit sounded like an easy A if ever there was one. In hindsight, I probably should have watched at least one western before committing to an entire semester full of them: they basically pitched me into an instant coma. There were bawdy women of ill repute, but no one ever had sex. There were saloon brawls, but no one ever bled. There were cattle ranches but no steakhouses. The plot lines of TV westerns generally involved the hero and his men giving chase on horseback to the villain and his men, until the latter were caught and/or shot (again without bleeding) or hanged from the gallows (minus any gruesome sound effects or entertaining word games).

  I hated westerns. And the one I hated above all others was Bonanza, which, in terms of popularity and longevity, was like the CSI of its time. So of course Bonanza turned out to be the topic for our final paper in TV Westerns 101. Half of my grade would hinge upon my scholarly dissection of life on the Ponderosa. The Ponderosa, in case you are blissfully unaware, was a large ranch in need of a good landscaper and a decent security system: viewers saw lots of dirt and tumbleweeds, but never anything actually being ranched, per se. Nevertheless, rustlers seemed to make off with the off-screen herd of cattle every other episode or so. Maybe it was an insurance scam—don’t ask me, I never stayed awake through an entire episode. Ponderosa patriarch Ben Cartwright spent most of his time organizing posses with his wildly mismatched sons from different mothers. There was big, dumb Hoss and sorta hot Little Joe (where and who was Big Joe? And while we’re at it, why wasn’t anyone investigating the deaths of three Mrs. Cartwrights in a row?). Ben also had a third, prodigal son named Adam who showed up every tenth posse or so. Despite all this galloping, brawling, and gunslinging, the Cartwrights never broke a sweat (or, obviously, bled): Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe wore the same exact clothes on every episode. And the show ran for fourteen seasons. Where was Fashion Police when the nation needed it? I couldn’t find a damn thing to say about Bonanza when I went to write my final.