After Perfect

by Christina McDowell

  “I just want to make sure you’re safe.”

  The buzzer went off as I passed through. It must have been the wires in my corset. The security guard, recognizing me, let me in without any frisking. The nightclub covered four levels of what was once the Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building downtown. It looked like an abandoned art deco warehouse with giant clocks covered with projector screens and strobe lights on the middle level known as the “Trading Room.” I imagined West Coast Wall Street men in their Brioni suits and Hermès ties up at three thirty in the morning yelling over phones and watching growing numbers as the giant clocks ticked by above them—only now it was a place to come to exude money and power over alcohol and women.

  And in thinking about it, not a lot had changed.

  I convened in the women’s bathroom with the other girls as we applied our red lipstick and curled the ends of our hair before we took our designated places at the VIP tables around the dance floor. The girl standing next to me in an identical uniform was one of the most aesthetically pleasing women I had ever seen. My eyes kept flicking back to her perfect bone structure, dark wavy hair, elegant nose and jawline, and glowing skin. I asked what her ethnicity was. Ethiopian, she said. We started talking, and I asked her if she had another job. The nightclub was open only on weekends. I was still collecting unemployment checks and not reporting the money I made at the club each week. I didn’t think I’d get caught. Any corners I could cut to save money for my own apartment someday, I would. I heard my father’s voice in the back of my head: “Bambina, what you want to do is the least amount of work for the most amount of money.” But I knew I’d have to find a second job soon.

  She looked straight at me. “Girl,” she said, “you need to come to Miami with me.” Then she whispered, “You’re hot enough. I know these basketball players. They’ll fly you out on a private jet, pay you five thousand dollars, take you shopping. All you gotta do is dance with them at the club and sleep over. Plus they’re cute. How do you think I bought these?” She pulled back her hair to reveal sparkling diamond studs. “Think about it,” she said and then strutted back to her table.

  I stood at the top of the staircase in my sky blue, floor-length gown, soft curls, and clear lip gloss, my sterling silver Tiffany charm bracelet with its dangling heart loose around my wrist. My father pointed his Nikon camera at me. “Movie star! Smile!” I struck a pose at the top of the staircase, when the doorbell rang.

  Sam stood tall: tousled dark, blond hair, black suit, shiny silver vest, and gray silk tie. He looked up at me, and his clear blue eyes made my heart beat fast. I walked down to face him.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

  I stood there thinking about the night I lost my virginity. About where I was and the darkness that has the power to encapsulate one’s outer beauty, forcing me to believe this was all I had. It was all I was worth. Staggering beneath the spinning strobe lights, swaying side to side in my platform boots, the eyes of cocky men with pockets full of cash, howling on tabletops, fists pumping aggressively to the illusions of power, of money, of drugs, of sex, while their eyes burned through me like I was there just to be to be fed upon, to be touched and served like a bloody little lamb spinning on a spit.

  I’d be walking into Ellie’s house later, staring at photographs of the family with President George H. W. Bush, and here I was pondering the idea of becoming a prostitute inside of an old stock exchange building downtown because I felt I had run out of choices.

  I had never felt more ugly.

  -24-

  Red Porsche

  He drove a red Porsche—like my father.

  His words of multimillion-dollar film deals were like dominoes tumbling out of his mouth, and all I wanted him to do was shut up and drive faster. He was in film finance. Only later would I see in him the striking resemblance to Christian Bale’s character in American Psycho.

  Weaving up Laurel Canyon, passing shrubs of old trees and abandoned cars with each curve, I watched my mother’s Chanel purse tip from side to side at my feet. Mara had taken the purse first from Mom and Richard’s house, and then I took it from Mara. My mother didn’t even notice it was gone.

  We were heading to his mansion up Mulholland Drive. His name was Paul, and we met through a friend of a friend—I don’t remember—at a bar one night. An exclusive bar. One with a red velvet rope. He had gone to an Ivy League college, and his brother was famous, and it turned me on. He was older and loved to play Eric Clapton’s single “Change the World” on repeat while we snorted cocaine off the side of his pool table with lucky $2 bills.

  Tap, tap, tap went the American Express card. His was metal too. Black like my father’s. So sharp a terrorist could slice someone’s throat with it. I watched him roll the $2 bill, lean over, and snort. Quick. Then exhale. Then sniff again as he passed me the dirty bill. I didn’t ask him how to do it. I thought about Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface and Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights. I leaned over, plugged my left nostril with my left hand, took the rolled-up bill in my right, and sniffed. Slowly. Moving to the left, watching as the white line disappeared. Like a pro, I handed Paul back the $2 bill.

  “Keep it,” he said. I tucked the bill into my purse, and I remember all I wanted to do after that was look at myself in the mirror. I wanted to see what I looked like high from cocaine for the first time. I walked up the staircase along the glass windows overlooking the city of Los Angeles and swallowed hard as I felt the drip trickle from the back of my nose down my throat. Paul watched me climb the stairs with his hand beating on his heart as Clapton’s “Change the World” kept cycling through: “If I can reach the stars / pull one down for you . . .” My parents loved Eric Clapton. Paul continued singing to himself as I walked into the bathroom. My stomach felt like bunches of heavy butterflies tangled around one another trying to get out. I looked at my gold hoops, curled hair, red lips. People always told me I looked like my mother, but I never felt as beautiful. I thought about her in her strapless velvet dress, her red lips. The way she and my father looked together as they drove down the driveway in his red Porsche after a charity event. The smell of Chanel No. 5 on her neck as she tucked me in under the covers, her breath familiar, like rosé and chocolate. I missed her butterfly kisses and my father’s Eskimo kisses when I would fall asleep to the sound of descending airplanes along the Potomac River.

  I set down her Chanel bag on the counter. That’s when I noticed the needle, the tinfoil, and the silver spoon. I had never seen heroin before.

  A few months later, I would see Paul in the news: he had dragged a girl thirty feet, hanging by the side of his Porsche, after a fight. She was trying to grab her purse at the foot of the passenger seat when he revved his engine and took off.

  Sex for power, for freedom—liberation. I ran farther in the direction of an opposite extreme under the guise that it would set me free, when the simple need for love remained the same.

  I remember taking off my clothes in the dressing room, putting on the white bathrobe, and dropping half an Adderall in my pocket. My hair was tied up in a loose ponytail, with a black ribbon around the rubber band to make me look sweet—innocent, maybe—except it didn’t. It was my fuck-you to the world.

  I opened the door, and a couple, also in white bathrobes, smiled at me but didn’t say a word. I could hear techno music coming from the pool area. I walked over to meet Jason, who was also in a white bathrobe, sipping on a piña colada next to the bar and holding another one for me.

  The hotel was hidden down a private road, way out in the empty desert. It felt intimate as soon as you walked in, as though it were family owned. Jason and I were by far many years younger than everyone else. It appeared to be filled with middle-aged couples trying to save their marriages. I met Jason in an acting class I took back when my father was sending me money. It became a place to brag about one’s pain, to continually receive validation from the people around me while I was up on that stage. Jason and I had done a scene together. A brea
kup scene, and that’s when we started sleeping together. He told me about this place, and he wanted to bring me.

  Jason handed me the piña colada. He was still wearing his sunglasses. He reminded me of Channing Tatum. He took my hand, and I followed him over to one of the lounge chairs next to the pool.

  He dropped his bathrobe first and stood stark naked, flexing his six-pack and unafraid, like he had been there before. With someone else. I chugged my piña colada, swallowed the half Adderall, and then dropped my bathrobe with confidence despite feeling insecure about my small breasts and bigger bottom. If I was going to do this, I’d have to fake it.

  “You’re not allowed to touch anyone but me. I have rules,” I said, as if I were in control.

  “Of course.” Jason laughed as if this were no big deal. “Same goes for you.”

  It was startling to see the woman’s head bobbing up and down in her husband’s lap on the steps of the swimming pool. The sun was down, and everyone suddenly felt uninhibited in vulnerable skin—a little looser, a little freer despite what no one could see. Trapped in unrequited love that no matter how we fucked in front of one another no one could seem to feel or understand. My black ribbon had fallen off. It was pushing and pulling in the filter of the swimming pool. I saw it and left it there.

  Jason led me into the open bedroom and placed me on the bed. Candles were lit in all corners of the room; three bodies were entangled below us that looked like a sprouting lotus flower on the dirty floor. The room spun, tipping sideways when Jason climbed on top of me. A couple stood close to the side of the bed. They were plain-looking and stroked each other as they watched Jason slide into me. It was too late to ask him to put on a condom. I had never desired or been turned on by any kind of exhibitionism before, but I used curiosity and freedom as justification. When I performed, in those moments, I remember looking past Jason’s sweaty shoulder and seeing the faces trying, as I was, to reach climax, to reach some kind of Nirvana, but instead I felt numb. Had I not been so drunk and high, I might have felt the pain. I didn’t want to let anyone down, as if I had some sick responsibility to entertain, so I did what I did best: I acted. I threw Jason over and arched my back in that room that smelled of sweat, chlorine, and tequila; a room filled with hopeless love and people whose hearts were just as broken as mine.

  When I got up from the bed, the husband from the couple standing watching us said to me as I passed by naked, “You are so beautiful. Thank you. It’s our three-year anniversary,” as though I had been a gift. And then it occurred to me: I wouldn’t go on a private jet for $5,000 and have sex with a basketball player, but I would do it with someone else, in front of other people. For free.

  I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t remember driving back to the hotel where we stayed. I don’t remember if I had broken the “no touching anyone else” rule. I don’t remember falling asleep.

  When I woke the next day, Jason suggested we grab a bite at the sports bar, Hamburger Mary’s, before we drove back through the desert. I sat there staring at my undercooked cheeseburger. I wasn’t very hungry. Jason mauled his like a lion across the table.

  “So do you come here often?” I asked.

  Jason swallowed, and then looked at his burger. “I mean, I would never take my future wife here,” he chuckled.

  I suppose it was a silly question.

  I picked up my burger. I set it back down. And I looked out toward the sun.

  It was fall. The leaves were yellow, orange, and red as we sped down Georgetown Pike. My father accelerated, reaching forty-five miles an hour, and Mara sat next to him with her hand on top of his as he shifted his red Porsche Carrera into third gear. Chloe and I sat in the leather bucket seats behind them.

  “Blowout!” Mara cried. That was our code word for rolling down all the windows. He’d let us stand up and poke our heads out the sun roof, our hair whipping across our eyes.

  “Faster, Dad! Faster!” we screamed, and before each shift in gears, my father yelled, “Hold on to your hats, girls!” jerking us forward as we belly laughed. And I remember watching the car’s hood, bearing the Porsche emblem of a black horse on a gold, black, and red crest, swerve back and forth across the yellow lines, letting the world know we didn’t need to live by any such rules.

  When I woke up, everything was white as I opened my eyes and squinted at the bright fluorescent ceiling lights. My mother was sitting in the chair by my side, and Liam stood behind her. I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, just as my mother had been. An IV needle protruded from the back of my right hand, dripping fluids. I had told the doctor earlier that my head felt like thunder. All I remembered was Liam coming over and picking me up off the floor of Ellie’s mansion and carrying me out to the car because I couldn’t walk. I must have called him. He must have called my mother. I was throwing up violently and couldn’t stop. It felt like my guts were unraveling.

  The doctor didn’t have a diagnosis. Maybe a bug, he said, but it didn’t seem like it. I knew I was having a nervous breakdown. It had been a year and a half. It was the longest I’d gone without speaking to my father, without a letter, an email, or a phone call. It was 2010 now. I kept waiting for him to show up on my doorstep one day; to call on my twenty-fifth birthday. I would replay conversations over and over in my head of how it could go. But there was nothing. No card. No email. No phone call. He had vanished. Why couldn’t I let him go? I had told myself I wasn’t worth fighting for. Mara and Chloe never heard from him either. I blamed myself for it, that he didn’t call on their birthdays because I had written the email to him about the Hermès Birkin bag. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t at least fight for their love, when they hadn’t confronted him like I did.

  The debt was still mine to handle, with creditors still calling my cell phone. I didn’t know how I would pay for the hospital visit. My driver’s license was about to get suspended for failure to appear in court. I was flipping off officers, being pulled over for reckless left-hand turns, and speeding on a regular basis. I received a notice in the mail that my bail amount was $849, and if I didn’t pay it, I was at risk of getting arrested.

  It was hard coming home each night to Ellie’s mansion. I couldn’t relate to her on any level. I could see that money couldn’t buy happiness, love, or freedom. Her father was always disappearing somewhere in the Middle East and couldn’t be reached. People kept trying to take advantage of her. Everyone wanted to get to know her: Be a producer on my film! Start a production company with me! It was all bullshit. Damned if you have money, damned if you don’t. Watching it, I was paralyzed by both ends, the juxtaposition of each where the solution was neither here nor there. I could see how money changes you, molds you and folds you, and when you have it, you still can’t see any more truth than when you don’t have it. And whether you’re trying to attain it, or just trying to keep it, there still doesn’t seem to be any understanding of what is real and what is not. So whom and what are you supposed to trust when you can’t even trust the very thing that’s dictating how you’re supposed to survive? I couldn’t think about it anymore—poverty and wealth—it was making me sick.

  -25-

  Mom and Jordan Belfort

  My mother saw how sick I was. Lost on the edge of defiance. After Mara had been hired by another tech company and moved in with a friend of hers, my mother spoke to Richard, and he agreed to let me stay in their guest bedroom until I could get back on my feet. The thought of living with my mother and Richard was horrifying—it was humiliating having to move back in with a parent—but it was either that or go to the homeless shelter downtown. I’d exhausted the only friends I had and was determined not to depend on any man I dated for money.

  A few days into my stay, Richard offered me a job at his furniture factory filing paperwork and drafting up orders from clients. As I’d predicted, though, the company was on the verge of going under, struggling to make payroll, pay vendors, barely breaking even each month. It was a sinking ship I willin
gly jumped onto. On every block in West Hollywood, furniture and other retail stores continued going out of business. The Blockbuster across the street: gone. More homes with foreclosure signs and For Sale signs planted in grassy front lawns. The world as I knew it, like my past, was ending. Facebook and Apple were exploding, and Occupy Wall Street was all over the news. And all of the wreckage from my past was catching up to me.

  I stuck out the job for a year despite feeling like I was in purgatory. Richard resented my upbringing, always reminding me of my poor work ethic and financial irresponsibility. I began to think he thought of me as a mere extension of my father. But I kept my mouth shut. I needed that paycheck; it was my only way out. I saved as much as I could. And I was grateful for the opportunity and was willing to withstand his comments about my father and me until I had enough money. I did nothing but eat, sleep, and work. I eventually got fired from the nightclub downtown for not being a “team player.” Then I got another job cocktail waitressing at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood part-time while I babysat friends of friends’ kids when I could.

  When 2011 rolled around, I could finally remove my bad credit history. It had been more than seven years since I’d discovered the debt in my name. As long as seven years have passed from the time of the delinquency date—the date that my father had defaulted on payments—I could remove it. There were still two credit card debts that would remain on my report for another year and a half, but at least I could start cleaning up the mess. And compared with the rest of America at the time, my financial situation didn’t look so bad. I finally qualified for my very first studio apartment in Hollywood. I collected my furniture out of the storage unit, cocooned once again by my childhood bedroom, yet I still wasn’t happy. As I kept working at the factory, which continued to struggle and cause tension between my mother and Richard, I had no direction in life.