Back in Wilmington, I tried to get my footing on the show. It was clear that what I was used to on Freaks and Geeks wasn’t how things worked on the Creek. There was no room for improv, and I would be corrected if I said one word wrong. On set, it was clear that Katie was the star.
One day I was having an issue getting a fairly long speech out “word perfectly” and the director came over to me. “Listen, yeah, that was terrible but don’t worry if you can’t get it. We’ll just cut to Katie. That’s what we mostly do anyway, because . . . I mean. Look at that face!”
He laughed and walked back to the monitors. Katie looked at me sympathetically and reached out to hand me the script. “Here. You want to look at it again?”
“Nope!” I said. “I’m good.”
I wasn’t good. I was barely okay. I was homesick already and I missed Craig. We talked all the time, but between my work schedule and the time change, it was difficult. Finally, I was able to fly back to Los Angeles for a few days. My friends and I had tickets to see Madonna at the Staples Center and I’d been away for over a month. I was going to miss Michelle’s birthday while I was gone, but I got her a cute present and we had plans to go to Deluxe when I was back and celebrate.
But at the end of the trip, on the morning I was supposed to head back to North Carolina, I woke up to my mother calling me super early. “Busy! Busy! Do not go to the airport, honey. Something horrible is happening.”
Sometimes my mother sounds hysterical even when it’s just like, the dog needs new cataract eye drops. So it’s difficult to tell when something terrible really is happening. But for some reason, that morning, I just knew.
I went into the living room and Emily came out too, fresh from the shower. “My mom says to turn on the TV.”
We turned it on and watched in horror with the rest of the world as the events of September 11 unfolded. I yelled for Craig to wake up and come out of my room. Our friend from high school worked in one of the towers, but no one knew which one. Jeff’s girlfriend Liz still lived in the city and he obviously couldn’t get in touch with her. All the phone lines were jammed. We didn’t know what to do. Emily wasn’t sure if she should go to work or not, so she got dressed and went in. I called Caleb, the production coordinator on Dawson’s Creek.
“Hey, darlin’,” he said. “You didn’t already go to the airport, did you?”
I told him I was at home.
“Yeah, just stay there. I don’t want you waiting there all day. It doesn’t seem like there will be any flights out today. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call you when I know.”
In retrospect it seems so insane, like there would have even been a possibility that I would’ve been able to fly out later that day or even the next day. No one knew what the fuck was happening. All day, Craig and I watched TV and cried. His brother didn’t go to work and came over to my apartment and hung out with us. Around lunchtime, we decided we couldn’t cry anymore, so we turned off the TV and walked to a weird sports bar in my neighborhood. We sat there, shell-shocked, and drank beer and hung out with a ton of other people who didn’t know what else to do but drink at 11:45 a.m. Emily called and said everyone was going home, so she met us at the bar and we sat there until six or seven, when we decided we probably should eat and we all walked back home.
We found out our high school friend was okay the next day, although he got covered in white soot and debris from when he ran away from the collapse. It’s hard to explain to millennials and younger kids what was such a fundamental shift in the world. What it felt like before and then after. I remember asking my mom if she felt that way after JFK was shot.
“Oh, Busy. That was horrible. Just horrible. We were all so devastated. But this is different.”
I flew to North Carolina the very first day they reopened the airports. Despite the national tragedy, the show literally had to go on. They were able to take one insurance day shutting down production, but after that, we had to keep shooting. So on September 13, I got on a flight from L.A. to Charlotte. There were very few flights going out; they were only for those who had to travel. I was panicked and crying and smoking outside when an actor named David Monahan—who was also going to Wilmington to guest star on the show—found me. “Hey,” he said. “You must be Busy? Caleb told me I needed to find a crying blond girl and make sure she gets to Wilmington.”
He held my hand through security and onto the plane and asked the woman who was sitting next to me to switch so we could be together. Everyone was really quiet. In the airport and on the plane. It was eerie. Like people were concentrating so hard, willing things to be normal and okay. It was a giant plane, like one of the ones you take to Europe, and it was probably only half full. The pilot came out and gave a little speech on the loudspeaker about how things were going to be okay, that he had personally made sure that all the security inspections were done, and then he walked up and down both aisles of the plane and said hi to everyone.
We made it to Charlotte, where production had hired a stretch limo to drive us the four hours to Wilmington, since there was only limited airline service and commuter flights were still suspended. I felt so silly at work the next day, dressed in a costume for the Halloween episode. The world was fucking ending and I was trying to get Joey Potter to come to a party with me. I remember there were a lot of pep talks about how this is what we do. We make entertainment for people so that they can escape the real world for forty-three minutes a week. It’s not without value or merit. It’s important to not just tell stories, but also to remember to entertain. And anyway, someone’s got to. May as well be us.
And so we did.
Not long after that, I got an apartment downtown; Caleb helped me find it. It was in a big Victorian house that had been cut into four units, two downstairs and two upstairs. I went to a Ross Dress for Less and outfitted it with pillows and blankets and candles to try to make it feel more like home, but I never felt right in the house. I was always kind of creeped out by it. I was sure there was a ghost. A woman. I thought a few times in the middle of the night I heard someone crying outside my door and would open it and find no one. The South is haunted like that, though. There’s weird energy flying around.
Also, I was just so lonely. Tracey and I would go out most nights, and I would try to get just drunk enough that I would be able to fall asleep before scaring myself. I called the police twice because I was convinced there was someone in my house. I should’ve moved to the beach and been closer to the rest of the cast, but I thought I wanted to be near the downtown strip so I could walk to bars and restaurants and not worry about driving drunk out to the beach, which seemed so far. Plus it was more expensive, and I was responsible for paying my rent in Wilmington since I had been given a “relocation fee,” which means they pay you a lump sum and then production is off the hook for your rent and plane tickets. As a rule, relocation fees are never advantageous to the person relocating. I also had to buy a car in Wilmington. So this job was costing me money.
For Halloween, Michelle, Tracey, and I went out together. I dressed as Valentine’s Day Barbie with this amazing vintage dress I’d found. Michelle went as Angelina Jolie with a vial of Billy Bob’s blood around her neck. I did her makeup and was really proud of myself. Tracey went as Miss Patriotic USA (there were a lot of random patriotic costumes that year, as well as many people dressed as the twin towers, which still makes me feel weird). We went first to a party at Katie’s house, where she was dressed like Marilyn Monroe and her boyfriend Chris Klein was dressed kind of like a farmer, though his costume was unclear.
I frowned at him. “Wait. What are you?”
“I’m half a scarecrow!” he told me proudly, like that was a thing, “I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio, ’cause, you know, Marilyn, but we couldn’t find a costume in time, so this is what I am!”
“You could’ve just been Arthur Miller, I guess? That would have been pretty easy.”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Ummm. Okay. I’m half a scarecrow, Busy.”
Got it. Cool.
The three of us went out downtown afterward, and Michelle and I got trashed; then she slept over. It was fun for her, I think, to be in costume and not have people know who she was. She was clearly very famous, and in Wilmington, the college kids who attended UNCW were always seemingly on the lookout for one of the Dawson’s kids, which is why I think that by season five they’d all retreated to the beach to be left alone. When a group of college kids would recognize Michelle, and later me, they’d rudely scream out across the bar, or across the street at us, generally something lame about the show: “HEEEEEYYYYY, GIRL FROM DAWSON’S CREEK!!! WHERE’S JOEY????” Or “ISN’T GRAMS GONNA GET MAD AT YOU????”
It wasn’t super fun. It was confusing (to me, anyway). I had spent my whole life wanting people to notice me, and then all of a sudden it was happening and it felt invasive and rude.
I paid for Craig to fly out to see me. He only wanted to come for a few days, because he didn’t want to take too much time off work. I’m not sure what he was doing at the time. I think working at California Pizza Kitchen as a waiter and trying to figure out what he was going to do next. I offered to pay for headshots and he took me up on it. I even asked him to come to Wilmington and live with me. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t. I mean, he was just waiting tables in L.A., which he could do anywhere. He obviously thought that was ridiculous and didn’t understand why I couldn’t see that it was a totally unreasonable request.
I just loved him and wanted us to be together. But more than that, I was lonely. I was used to being around a ton of people I knew. I spent a lot of time on the phone with friends back home and with my high school friends in Arizona. I flew back to L.A. as much as I could, but I was low on the totem pole in terms of scheduling. They would obviously need to make Katie and James and Josh and Michelle happy before me, so getting a Friday and a Monday off was rare.
The flights were always empty in those months following September 11, and they would always use those huge planes. I got used to flying coach and having three seats to myself and being able to lie down and sleep the whole five hours. Then when I got to the Charlotte airport, I would buy two Chinese chicken salads from the CPK ASAP and bring them on the commuter flight back to Wilmington for Michelle and me to eat together for dinner. (Michelle usually flew direct to New York, so she didn’t go through the Charlotte airport very frequently, and we both loved that salad.)
One morning, as my flight from Charlotte to Wilmington took off, I looked out to the right side of the plane and saw a ton of smoke on the ground at the airport. When we landed, Caleb was waiting for me and told me the commuter flight that took off right before ours, which was heading to Greenville, South Carolina, had crashed and everyone was killed. CNN hadn’t been sure which flight it was that had gone down at first. He handed me his phone and said, “Call your mom.” My mother was, as you can imagine, apoplectic. But I assured her I was fine and would be fine; after all, my guardian angel told me when I was fifteen that nothing bad would ever happen to me on a plane, remember? “Oh! That’s right, Busy. Well, I guess I won’t worry then.”
In general, I tried to be good at my job. I got used to people staring at me in airports. But it was hard to feel settled or like I had any ownership over my involvement in the show, since I’d been added in the fifth season. Even recently, when I was asked to participate in the reunion for Entertainment Weekly, my first reaction was, “Are they sure they want me involved?” Also, even though my friends and Craig had agreed to watch me on the show, I don’t think they actually ever did. Truthfully, even I stopped watching after a few episodes.
I settled into the weekly wardrobe humiliations, where I was tucked and pulled and my body looked at with such disdain by the woman doing the costumes, all while she would talk about how Katie can just WEAR ANYTHING, you know? Because she just WORKS SO HARD at it. She LOVES running and SPIN CLASS! I knew it was pointed. I’m not an idiot, lady. But guess what? I’m depressed and away from my friends and boyfriend and living in a city where I’m basically friends with two people, so forgive me that I want to eat turkey burgers and fries and drink vodka cranberries on the regular.
Michelle started dating a guy who lived close by, so she was basically gone all the time. Tracey and I would go out almost every night, especially if I didn’t have an early call. But even when I did, I got fairly used to working with a hangover. The only thing that temporarily made me forget my loneliness was drinking—and passing out before the ghosts had a chance to freak me out.
Work was fine. I liked everyone okay and everyone seemed to like me. I was neutral territory, since I had no drama and history with any of them, so I could work with anyone with no problem. One day, the whole cast was sitting around a table filming the Thanksgiving episode, and James looked at me and said, “See? You got lucky. Your show was canceled after the first season.”
I was so shocked by his complete lack of perspective, I was speechless. I mean. YOU ALL are the lucky ones, here on SEASON FIVE of your HIT TV SHOW. Your LIVES were changed. No one gave a fuck who I was after my one season on Freaks and Geeks. So what if they had some personality clashes? They were green-lighting movies. James had gotten a million dollars for Varsity Blues. Katie was working with huge directors.
Sometimes people on TV shows get fooled into thinking that the very thing that made them to begin with is the thing that’s now holding them back. It’s a weird phenomenon that happens, mostly because I think their reps start telling them, “Just wait. As soon as you’re OFF THIS SHOW, the opportunities will be ENDLESS!” But the opportunities exist because of the show. And when you stop being in people’s living rooms week after week, the other opportunities start to disappear. Most people learn this the hard way. I felt like I already knew it.
After Christmas break, I somehow convinced my roommate from college, Diana, to come live with me until the end of the season. She had graduated the spring before and was back with her parents in San Diego, looking for work as a graphic designer. It was so much fun living together again. I wasn’t lonely, I was sleeping again, and I didn’t have to be drunk to fall asleep!
She’d only been there for a few weeks when I heard her on the phone in the living room screaming. I went in to find her pacing and near hysterics. She lit a cigarette. Her best friend from childhood, Sarah, had been in London working as an au pair and she’d been found unconscious and brain dead in her room. She’d been sick for a few weeks. I knew this because just a few days earlier Diana had been on the phone with Sarah while I was leaving for work, and as I walked out, Diana called out to me, “Busy! Tell Sarah to go to the doctor! She’s been sick for weeks!!” and I screamed into the phone, “GO TO THE DOCTOR, SARAH!!!”
She didn’t and ended up with meningitis. Her parents had to fly to London and take her off life support and bring her body home. It was truly tragic. I knew Sarah well; she was Diana’s Emily. Diana was devastated but I knew what to do. I got a cold washcloth and had her sit down and cry and I made the plans for her to return to San Diego to be with her and Sarah’s families.
After Diana left, I was even sadder and lonelier. I started drinking more. One Friday night, I was shooting a scene with Josh where we were in bed together making out, a classic WB sex scene. He had a new girlfriend who was in town visiting, and he brought her to set that night. I wasn’t ever really comfortable with the make-out and sex scenes, partially because I had been made to feel so bad about my body, but also because it’s just a really awkward thing to do. But having the other actor’s girlfriend there, watching me and making weird comments after each take, like how she was going to need him to Listerine his mouth before she kissed him again, was just too humiliating. I felt like shit. What the fuck was this job? This was the thing that was going to change my career? This was it?
After I was wrapped for the day, I told Tracey I wanted to go to Deluxe and get some shots. I drank so much. I can’t remember the number of drinks, but it was a lot. Too many. Chad Micha
el Murray was also there, with some other people from the show. It was almost closing time when I started hanging on the side of the bar and sort of swinging back and forth. Suddenly, my left knee gave out and I fell to the ground, knocking down a bunch of barstools. Tracey screamed and ran over to me, laughing. “Biz! Get up!!! What are you doing??”
I knew immediately. I couldn’t get up. My knee was dislocated (once again). I was too drunk for it to hurt, so I grabbed her shirt and pulled her down toward me.
“Tracey,” I said. “ Imma need you to call an ambulance. My knee is FUUUUUCCCKKKKEEEDDD. I have to gotoahospital.”
“Biz. What the fuck? Get up!”
“Tracey. My knee is dislocated; I have to have an ambulance.”
The bartender called an ambulance and Tracey and Chad Michael Murray sat with me while I laughed about what a fucking dumb idiot I was. I tried calling Michelle, but she didn’t answer. Tracey wasn’t sure if she should call someone from the show. She didn’t want me to get in trouble. I was laughing hysterically. How fucking dumb was I? Here I was, on this show and I should be so grateful. And I was miserable. I missed my boyfriend. I missed my friends. I missed my home. I wanted to go to sleep without panicking. I wanted someone to tell me I was doing a good job. I wanted someone to tell me I was pretty enough to be on the WB even though I WAS ON THE FUCKING WB. That my body was good enough and didn’t need to change or be hidden. That my moles were beautiful. That my acting was different than what they were used to but it was fucking refreshing.
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 15
