Thin Skin Read online

  ‘God, your pussy feels so good.’

  And in my head, the voice whispered: ‘Here pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy. There’s a good tabby cat.’

  In my haste to get away from him, I had forgotten my earrings and, though they had only cost twenty bucks, the loss made me cry. When I was little, I hated my mom leaving me so much that, when she’d go out for the evening, I’d have her stick a pair of her earrings through a tissue. Then I’d sit the tissue on a chair by my bed and pretend it was her. ‘You’re a weird kid,’ she’d whisper as she kissed my ear and, one hand already petting the tissue, I’d solemnly agree.

  I rearranged myself in the first-class seat, trying to take the pressure off my aching crotch. Squirming, I opted to watch the movie with the sound off. It was awful. I was in it.

  scott says

  Oh my God, that girl knew how to fuck. I’ve had a lot of girls in my time, but I’ve never had the sexual connection that I had with Ruby, I’ll tell you. The sex between us was just un-fucking-believable. It was too beautiful. I can’t imagine either of us will ever have sex that great again. I always think that’s why she left. Because it was too intense. She’s young. She couldn’t take it.

  to do list

  The first thing I did when I got into Manhattan was have the cab pull over at a McDonald’s. I ate a Big Mac in the back, my hand lolling out of the window between bites, burger juice dripping over my rings and onto the sidewalk.

  I checked into the Chelsea Hotel. I could have gone to my apartment, but I wanted to stay some place that had someone else’s dreams and nightmares in it, not my own. They gave me a good-sized suite painted mint green, less sleazy than the usual Chelsea room. I had wanted to stay there because of the sleaze, but the management overruled me. I wonder how often they do that to red-eyed waifs buckling under the weight of their carry-on luggage and failed affairs. Blinking inside walls that suggested refreshment, I washed my face and hands of dead cow. In this beautiful light, good-person’s light, they felt as filthy as if I had slaughtered the beast then anointed myself with its innards. I threw up and washed myself again.

  Stumbling out of Chelsea where a few gay boys noticed me but pretended not to, I steered my way to the East Side to buy records. Every other girl on St Mark’s Place was a mélange of piercings. I wanted to ask them if the metal was holding them together, or did it mean they were falling apart? I opened my mouth a few times to talk to my fellow young people, but they brushed past me – these people with rings through their lips brushed past ME – because they could tell I was weird.

  ‘You’re a weird kid. You’re a weird kid.’

  As long as I bobbed my mouth open as if to speak, nobody recognized me. Film stars don’t actively pursue conversation with strangers.

  I went into Kim’s to look at CDs. I picked up some Joy Division, Patti Smith, Gram Parsons and Laura Nyro, then put them all down and bought what I really wanted, which was the soundtrack to Fame!.

  Purchase in hand, I drifted upstairs to videos and books, where I wandered hesitantly into the section for comic-book porn. I found one, once, under the bed of a one-night stand, and I liked it because the drawings in it seemed more human than the bloodless beings who star in porn films. I looked over a man’s shoulder as he browsed a comic depicting two female room-mates climbing into bed together because they were cold. He was taking too long to turn the page and I tutted impatiently. Seeing me behind him, he put it back on the rack and moved anxiously away.

  I was just getting to the good part when a bunch of Goths recognized me. ‘Hey, aren’t you Ruby?’

  I replaced the comic as delicately as I could and nodded my head sheepishly. The youngest of the Goths, a fifteen-year-old girl, apple-cheeked and sweet beneath her pancake make-up, pushed to the front of the group.

  ‘We loved the one where your father saves the world from the asteroid. You looked dope in that spacesuit. What was that film called again?’

  ‘I like your hair extensions,’ I said, because I didn’t want to answer the question. I knew I was the girl in the Claude Chabrol film. But no one else did. Because in the film, the one in the multiplex, not the one in my head, I was still just the daughter. And it took so much time to be the daughter. I was in make-up for three hours every morning so I could look appropriately wholesome. They gave me a tear stick the day we shot my ‘father’s’ death scene. Nothing happened. They held it closer to my eye. Still nothing. The director stormed off of the set. I tried to explain it wasn’t my fault. ‘Hey, I’m crying twenty-three hours of the day and you just caught me on my hour off.’

  But by then the studio head had been screaming at him for ten minutes and he was almost in tears. So I just held the tear stick right onto my lid and I cried him and his boss a river. Then I went to hospital for the rest of the afternoon.

  The boss thought I did a great job. The director, whose name me and the boss both forget, thought I did a great job. And evidently the Goths, twitching under purple eyeliner and fishnet stockings, thought I did a great job.

  nap time

  I had been at the Chelsea a week when my agent handed me a film the Goths could really sink their fangs into, a film that three of CAA’s other young, female clients had already turned down. It was too low-budget and too sexually charged. They would have had to take pay cuts and show their tits. Since directors usually have to request that I put my tits away, they knew it wouldn’t be a problem for me.

  ‘Well, I suppose I might as well go meet the director.’

  I sighed, feigning disinterest, for fear they would take the offer back if they realized how good the screenplay was. Although it did have nudity, briefly, in a scene beneath a desk, it was the subject matter that was really contentious. The film was called Mean People Suck. The director, Sean, was a young man who had done well in off-Broadway theater, a Mormon from Utah. Sean had spent two years trying to get financing for his romance set during a school shooting.

  ‘The friendless, bullied, Gothic girl takes her class hostage. She has already wounded the teacher when a handsome, popular athlete has the nerve to try and talk her into surrender. It takes all day but by the end of it they have fallen in love. By then the love is doomed because cops are outside waiting to arrest her. I like to think of it as Romeo and Juliet across the anger divide. Or the relationship between Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club if it had been written post-Columbine,’ he’d tell potential backers, before the door bumped him on the way out.

  I met Sean at a fancy hotel in SoHo, where he was noticeable a mile off amongst the men and women talking into cellphones as they tapped on their laptops. Sean has a face from the nineteenth century, but it’s quite nice when you get used to it. At first, though, I was a little shocked. Soon his big, Victorian head was aquiver with twenty-first-century cuss words as he described the laborious process of getting his film made, and I found him less alarming. They wouldn’t let us order drinks in the lobby unless we were guests, so he booked a room, even though all he ended up drinking was tomato juice. There wasn’t an inch of anger in the swiftness with which he pulled out his credit card. He shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘Well, if this is what I need to do …’

  Four to five is usually my nap time and I wasn’t very coherent. When the meeting ended I asked if I could use the room he had just booked. He handed me the key. As I dozed, he rang my agents and handed me the role of the psychopathic student. By the time I awoke from my nap, plans had been drawn up at CAA for how I might tone up in time for shooting. Sean told them to forget it, saying he wanted me just as I was. Nevertheless, as the film went into production, I did lose a little weight, because I was so excited I couldn’t eat. I took dialect classes to ditch any semblance of Brooklyn twang and slip into a Texan drawl. I worked hard and felt happy.

  It felt odd when I turned up in Page 6 of the New York Post, the next morning, linked to Scott. I looked at his photo, millions of dots in gray, black and white, and found I had trouble placing him.

>   the red-knuckle ride

  The last night I stayed at the Chelsea, I almost died in the bathroom of Krispy Kreme donuts. I love Krispy Kremes because you don’t have to chew them. You can just hold them a foot in front of your face and inhale. Your skin will be left with an oily residue, as if you have been up all night shaking and sweating from a drug with more rock’n’roll than one deep-fried in fat.

  I had done a week of filming and I was frightened. I hated handling the guns. I was getting claustrophobia from a scene shot three days in a row from inside a broom closet. Sean was so kind and patient that it made me long for a tyrannical director, a screamer, a pincher. He was trusting me to know what to do, when I had so little trust in myself. That day I had met my co-star for the first time, more of whom later. Suffice to say that he was so pretty and so Zen that he made me feel like a big, confused oaf. Just looking at him put the idea in my head and I was back on the bulimia bandwagon, the red-knuckle ride that leaves my index finger flaming puce.

  I ate three hot donuts, then went to the bathroom and, because I couldn’t lock it properly, had to do it as fast as I could. I stuck my fingers down my throat. I had, by then, developed a quasi-sexual method: if I thrust my fingers down my throat in short stabbing movements, I could make myself gag faster. The donuts came out in heavy globs. I couldn’t breathe and I felt my eyes popping.

  As I bent over the bowl at Krispy Kreme, I said a little prayer for Scott’s ex-wife. I hoped she was praying for me. My prayer stuttered to a halt in little clogs of blood. I didn’t understand at first. Chocolate looked like blood to me when it was coming out of my mouth. Twizzlers looked like blood. So when blood came up I thought it was chocolate. They used chocolate in place of blood for Psycho, I reasoned. You can get away with more in black and white.

  What’s a Hollywood star to do, when she sleeps too much during the day, when she can’t listen to her favorite soundtrack all the way to the end because she hasn’t the concentration? I had emancipated myself from my dad when I was fifteen because I wanted to be able to work the long hours on the film that would surely be my breakthrough. In the event it ended up going straight to video. I kept my clothes on all the way through and it was still pornographic. Everyone else in that film got their tops off, and I was the one who came out looking bad. The emancipation was set, though. I left my dad. I left Brooklyn. I left myself.

  I told myself I was leaving home to advance my career, but that wasn’t really true. Although I got an agent pretty easily, I would do just enough work, and no more, to pay for hotel rooms. Then I would check in and watch television all day. There’s nothing like watching TV in a hotel. It’s better, the way that food off someone else’s plate tastes better than your own. In LA, if I wanted to watch TV, I’d go to the Chateau Marmont. One time it was full, so I drove around downtown Hollywood and went into the first place I saw. The Magic Hotel. Down the road from the Magic Castle. It has posters of turn-of-the-century magicians on the walls. But I never got round to switching the damn TV on. I lay on the ancient mattress and stared into space. I saw myself disappearing into the posters. In the posters I could wear spangled leotards that I could never get away with in 3-D. In the posters I didn’t have to impress anyone, I just had to help. I was the distraction from the trick. I wasn’t the faker, just the accomplice, and even then it wasn’t my fault everyone was transfixed by my breasts, my smile, my feathers, and that, as they stared at me, the magician fucked them over. It made me feel better.

  There was a time I enjoyed spending days by myself, buying clothes. But I gained ten pounds in a year and the experience became more humiliating than pleasurable. I should move to Europe because it’s only in America that they have a size zero. The perfect woman, in this land of dreams, is a nought. On my last film, the costume designer gave my outfits ruches and ruffles to hide my hips and ass, and then would bitch about me before I had even left the room.

  Finally I was working on a film that I could truly say fed my soul, and yet I couldn’t stop eating. When I wasn’t needed on set, I would raid the snack table, then go to my trailer and throw up. I would ignore as many knocks on the door as I could reasonably get away with and, when I could ignore no more, I would answer the door with tousled hair, squinting my eyes as though woken from a nap. The Mormon director started to get nervous. I stopped throwing up just long enough to reassure him of my commitment to the project.

  Under the Krispy Kreme lighting I saw that I had really nasty scars on my arms where I had cut myself the day I got to New York. My hair was growing in jagged where I’d hacked it off and the ink in my flesh was starting to spread from the very first tattoo. And I couldn’t think of any other way to hurt myself so I ate too many donuts and called it pain. It’s funny. It was funny. Until I came to, choking on the bathroom floor.

  I looked in the mirror. My eyes were popped, as if I had been strangled. I looked into the basin of the toilet as if a nice pair of shoes might have emerged with the puke. Or a job. Or a new direction in life. A better life. My new, better life in the toilet.

  Often, I’d look at the swirling in the toilet bowl and see Freudian patterns, Jungian dreams, Rorschach tests: a butterfly, a cloud in the shape of Ireland. Other times, after red vines or cherry jam, I’d see a shark attack, the remnants when all is quiet. With red pouring out of my mouth, I’d recall Robert Shaw spitting blood on a boat, his torso crushed by Jaws.

  I sat on the bathroom floor and remembered that, when my mother died and my father, cousins and their respectful colleagues were in the sitting room crying in turn like in a round, I edged out of the room. I always wanted to be with the grown-ups. But not then. Not anymore.

  I went to her room and lay in her bed. I wanted to smell her on the sheets, recall snuggleclub, when I’d press my little bottom into her tummy and she’d wrap her bangled arm around my waist. But all her bedroom smelled of was deep, deep sadness. The sadness formed a hand across my mouth, chloroform knocking me out as it had her. I wonder about genetic disposition to depression and mental illness. I think it happened to me because I crawled into her bed before she had left it. I could, in that moment, have stayed there forever.

  drew barrymore or natalie portman?

  My agent stared in disgust at the new tattoo on my wrist. He stabbed angrily at his filet mignon.

  ‘I mean, what the fuck is that, Ruby?’

  ‘It’s Latin.’

  ‘You couldn’t get a daisy or a butterfly?’

  ‘I don’t want a daisy or a butterfly. I don’t want insects and weeds that are going to die on my body.’

  ‘It’s not funny anymore, Ruby. It’s not sexy anymore. It’s not Drew. It just looks fucked up. I thought you wanted to do costume drama? There’s no chance in hell we can get you a Merchant Ivory audition if you’re going to keep going this way.

  ‘You know,’ he added slyly, ‘that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos?’

  ‘Why are you thinking about my burial? What do you know that I don’t, you filthy little kike?’

  ‘Enough, Ruby, enough. When I took you on, you had such potential. You were so willing to work. If you had done what I said, if you had just behaved on set and left your body alone, you would be a major star by now, instead …’

  ‘I did leave my body alone. I am not in my body right now; I gave it all up. And I got to be a minor star, which is OK because it means that the ones who are really looking, who are really interested, they’re the ones who see me at night.’

  ‘You’re wrong. Being a minor star means that you get paid less. And that I get paid less. Honey, we could have had you in the Natalie Portman league by now.’

  I laid my head on the table and put my napkin over my face.

  ‘Hmm. Natalie Portman. She seems so calm. She seems so happy. She still lives with her parents, doesn’t she? Could you really make me like her? I would,’ I whispered dreamily, ‘like that a lot.’

  ‘No, I can’t make you like her!’ he boomed. ‘You’re t
oo heavy, you’ve got too many tattoos and you have a horrible attitude.’

  ‘This director likes me.’

  ‘Nobody cares about this director.’

  ‘But he likes me. He thinks I’m talented. He says I’m embodying the role just as brilliantly as he knew I would.’

  ‘You’re playing a school shooter!’

  ‘A school shooter IN LOVE.’

  ‘Springtime for fucking Hitler,’ he muttered under his breath, then added, out loud, so loud that the other diners twitched behind their menus, ‘I can’t work with you anymore.’

  I only half listened, tipping back glass after glass of red wine. Soon I was quite drunk and it was time to go home. I rolled up the sleeves of my jacket and pulled back my bangs. We both looked at my arms, him horrified, me amused. Seemingly reacting with the wine, the white lines on my arms were bubbling up, as if inflated by a children’s party entertainer. ‘White lines,’ I chirped gaily. ‘Don’t do it.’

  best policy

  ‘Ruby is the worst client I ever had.’

  change of address

  ‘This is, um, ughh –’ Sean cleared his throat, his hand on my knee as he sat next to me on the sofa in my trailer. From the awkwardness with which he sat and the tiny, darting glances he kept shooting at me, one might have guessed he was going to ask if he could kiss me. Instead, he asked if I could stop being such a royal pain in the ass. Except, because he is sweet Sean, with his sweet, old-fashioned head, his doting wife and two children, he asked if I needed help.

  ‘Um, ah, I … I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through.’