The Wootle’s on Fire
When all else fails, blame it on an evil eye. That was what I told myself after yet another migraine. I mean, I was sick again. Or I’d never gotten better.
That December night, after decorating the tree, Dean took Liam upstairs for a bath. Stella was asleep, so while the shepherd’s pie baked, I sat down and forced myself to read Martha Stewart Living. But I couldn’t unwind. I felt like I was cheating. A ghostly voice inside my head whispered, “You should be wooooorking . . .” I tried to ignore it and keep reading, but I was too weak, powerless to stop myself from doing something. So as I went through the magazine, I started marking potential Christmas presents. Then I pulled out a piece of paper and started making yet another Christmas list. And then I started composing a tweet in my head—about Christmas lists and shopping for colleagues. And then . . . the headache. I hadn’t been sitting for twenty minutes when I felt it coming on.
Maybe my body was protesting the way I’d been treating it. My father was a workaholic and so was I. I was too damned exhausted, and this was my way of forcing myself to take a break that I would never otherwise allow myself. It’s no accident that when I was hospitalized the first time, it felt like more of a vacation than my trip to Maui or my summer in Malibu.
Dean thought I was like an addict who hadn’t hit rock bottom yet, sneaking off to get a fix of checking Little Maven catalogue shots and approving HSN jewelry samples when no one was looking. I spent all day every day working, being a mom, being a wife, crashing, and doing it all over again.
I was building my life, but I wasn’t leaving any space to enjoy it.
Was this really all my fault? Was it stress? That was so . . . middle-aged. I was too young to be suffering from stress, wasn’t I? Couldn’t it be something a little more original like, oh, an evil eye? I’d once before had an evil eye lifted by a world-renowned voodoo priestess named Mama Lola. And the very next day I’d met Dean. Did Mama Lola really free me from an evil eye, or was it simply the mere belief that she’d cleared me that gave me the confidence to move forward? Answer: who cares? If placebo healing worked on me, then I was all for it.
Then I remembered the red bracelet. When I was newly pregnant with Stella, I met a psychic who told me that people were putting evil eyes on me. As she pulled cards she said, “A woman’s put an evil eye on you. I think it could be your husband’s ex.” I said, “Why would she do that?”
The psychic reminded me that people don’t always intentionally put evil eyes on people. That made sense. How often do you hear about people going around saying, “I’ve got like three evil eyes to put on people tonight. Can we take a rain check on dinner?” She said that evil eyes can just emerge if someone has negative thoughts about you. Mary Jo could have done it without even being aware of it. The psychic gave me a little red bracelet for protection. Don’t ask me how this works: it’s like electronics to me, wondrous and magical. She told me it was from Israel and blessed it. I faithfully wore it for over two years. Then, this August at the beach in Malibu, I took it off and forgot about it.
August. That was when Dean and I started having fights. In September I went into the hospital with stomach problems. In November it was H1N1, then the relentless headache, and I hadn’t felt right since. It was an evil eye, I was sure of it. I’d had nothing but trouble since I took off that bracelet.
That Saturday, when I took the kids to sit on Santa’s knee, a bird shat in my hair. Now some people say that that’s good luck, although to me it’s always sounded like one of those BS things people say when there’s no upside, like rained-out weddings. You know what’s really good luck? Not getting shat on by a bird. Still, I needed whatever I could get. I would have bought a pigeon and walked around with it superglued to my hair so it could infuse me with regular foul doses of luck if I thought it might help. Between the bird shit and the dead poultry I knew Mama Lola used in her voodoo, my life improvement methodology was all about the foul fowl. I should have kept Milton the pig. He was so uninhibited about his feces. But then I realized: good luck might win me five bucks in a scratch-off game, but it couldn’t lift a genuine evil eye. For that I needed to bring in the big guns. This was a job for Mama Lola.
As luck would have it (oh, thank you, bird shit?), Mama Lola was coming to L.A. Through her goddaughter Brandy I asked if she could perform a cleanse on me and we made a date. I did have one special request. During my first cleansing Mama Lola had shocked me by killing a chicken before my eyes. It was rough. I wanted to lift my theoretical evil eye, but I wasn’t willing to off another chicken for the cause, so I asked that there please be no slaughtering of live animals during the ritual. Yes, I felt like that annoying friend of a friend at a restaurant who asks, “Do you have any vegan options?” But I was adamant. Brandy said she’d pass on my request to Mama Lola.
The next time I saw Mehran he told me that he’d seen some shows about voodoo. He said that voodoo only really works with the sacrifice of live animals. You need to move the bad energy into something that was living. If you don’t, the voodoo doesn’t work.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I wailed. “I can’t sacrifice a bird. What about my children?”
Mehran sounded shocked. “You want to sacrifice your children?”
“No,” I explained. “What kind of lesson would I be teaching them?”
He said, “But you have to lift the evil eye for the sake of your children. So you can stop being sick and be a good mom.” He had a point. I decided to worry about the slaughter when the time came.
• • •
Mama Lola arrived on a Friday afternoon with Zaar, the reader and spiritual consultant who works with her. Before we started the cleanse, Zaar made the rounds of our house looking for evil spirits. He cleansed all the mirrors and blessed them. I told him to be sure to check the mirror in Stella’s room because every night when I walked by it I felt like I caught a glimpse of something creepy out of the corner of my eye. It was an antique standing mirror that I’d purchased back when I was in the money. It stood next to the crib in the corner of Stella’s room. Indeed, when Zaar examined it, he found an old spirit lurking there, a spirit with bad energy. Zaar blessed the mirror, which meant that the spirit was supposed to leave, but according to Zaar that stubborn evil spirit was stuck in the mirror. I know, I know. At first it sounded like the Exorcist’s version of a shady auto repair shop: “Ooh, this is a bigger problem than we thought it was gonna be. We can’t unstick the negative spirit, so we’re gonna have to replace the whole spectral transmission.” But Zaar was really concerned. He went into the other room to tell Mama Lola. All I heard her say was “Get it out! Get it out!” The mirror had to go.
Mehran turned to me and said, “What are you going to do?”
I said, “Are you kidding? It’s got to go.” I wasn’t about to let some creepy spirit hang out in my daughter’s room! So Zaar and Mehran picked up the beautiful, heavy mirror and inched down the front stairs with it.
When they got the mirror down to the front hall, Mehran said, “What are we going to do with it? It’s too ghetto to just put it out on the street.”
Zaar told me I couldn’t give the mirror to anyone and I couldn’t sell it. I was supposed to wrap it in a white sheet, smash it, then bury it and plant a gardenia over it. Well, that sounded like a fun weekend-long do-it-yourself project. I asked them to put it out by the side of the house until I got around to it (in some other lifetime).
I knew from my last experience that the first part of the cleanse—the “bad bath”—was the part where the slaughter was supposed to occur. Now the bad bath was upon us. I’d made my request, but the issue still hadn’t been resolved. Mama Lola asked if we had the live chicken ready for the sacrifice. I turned to Zaar. “Can it be a worm? From the dirt?”
My producer Megan, who was there because (of course) we were filming the cleanse for Tori & Dean, added, “Can it be a hamster? A guinea pig?”
Zaar said, “It needs wings.”
/> Mama Lola said, “It has to be a chicken.” It was now seven p.m. on a Friday. The producer left the room to do some research.
When Megan came back she said, “The only live chicken we can find is an actor animal named Liz Taylor. She can be here within an hour, but she has to be returned tomorrow. Um, alive.”
I said, “No, this is real!” An actor chicken missed the point entirely. Finally I just said that I refused to kill anything, even if it meant the voodoo wouldn’t work. We told Mama Lola we couldn’t find any live chickens in all of Los Angeles.
Mama Lola, undaunted by my chicken restrictions, began to mix the bad bath that she would use to rid me of the evil spirit. In a large bowl, she combined cornmeal, dried beans, vegetables, and chopped-up yams. She added gin and Florida water, a cologne from the nineteenth century that’s still popular in South American and Caribbean cultures. I know: worst gazpacho ever. I stood on newspaper wearing a tank top and underwear while Mama Lola chanted and told me to say that I wanted everything bad to be gone. As she chanted she slashed my clothing into strips. It was very Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing.
I wanted to be in the moment, but there were cameras in the room. It was hard not to worry about what I looked like and how the scene would play on our show. I must have looked self-conscious, because my producer Bobby said, “Do you want us to put the cameras down?”
But I said, “No, it’s fine. Let’s just film it.” Having an evil eye cleansed at the same time as I executive-produced a reality show—that must have a place in the Guinness Book of Workaholic Records. Weirdest multitasking ever.
Mama Lola took the mixture. She put it first on my hair, then on my face. It stung my eyes so badly that I couldn’t open them, but Mama Lola said, “You’re fine, you’re fine.” Sure, tell that to my ophthalmologist.
Mama Lola poured the mixture all over me. I was soaking wet, smelly, almost naked, and so cold that my teeth were chattering. It was the middle of winter and I had the immune system of a goldfish. Mehran was laughing at me, which pretty much killed the spiritual vibe in the room, if the cameras hadn’t already. But Mama Lola wasn’t daunted. She was very businesslike about her voodoo.
Then Mama Lola said, “Take it and wipe yourself with it.” She indicated that I should scoop a handful of her mixture, then reach in my underwear and wipe. Mehran’s jaw dropped. The sound guy coughed and made an odd face. This was a new level of public humiliation, but what could I do? I’d come this far. So in front of Mama Lola, Zaar, Mehran, two cameramen, two producers, and a soundman, I wiped myself with the mixture. Yeesh, it burned so badly. I yelped, “The wootle’s on fire! The wootle’s on fire!” (Jennie Garth taught me wootle back in the 90210 days. Her word. Credit where credit is due.)
I flashed back to when I made the sitcom So NoTORIous, based on my life. For one episode we re-created my first cleanse; Whoopi Goldberg played Mama Lola. Now we were filming the real thing, and Mama Lola (on reality TV) was even better than Whoopi Goldberg (on TV) playing Mama Lola (in reality). There was a life lesson in that somewhere, but I was in no condition to parse it. My hooha was burning. But at least no chickens had died. The bad bath was over.
Mama Lola cut off my underwear and tank top (believe me, I wasn’t sorry to see them go) in front of everyone (that I was sorry about). I wasn’t stark naked in front of the crew: she handed me a towel just in time. She put them in a trash bag and beckoned to Zaar and my producer Vidas. She told them to drive at least three miles away and to dispose of my underwear at a crossroads. I thought about Vidas, a happily married man, going home to his wife that night. She’d say, “How was your day, dear?” How would he respond?
I turned to him and said, “Vidas, I’m sorry that after a long day you’re driving my soiled underwear three miles from my house to a crossroads.”
He said, “Not a problem, T. Not a problem.”
During the cleanse Dean was in New York doing publicity for his movie Santa Baby. A few days later he was checking on Stella and he noticed the mirror was gone. I sheepishly explained where it was. He said, “You know, I think there’s an evil spirit in those lobster dishes you kept from your first marriage.” Ha-ha.
Dean was cool with the cleanse—maybe not the mirror trashing (it was a nice mirror!) or the public underwear slashing (he wasn’t there to watch!), but the rest of it. He thinks I’m out there with my beliefs, but he likes the idea of Mama Lola because he loves the story that she brought us together after my first cleanse.
A few days later Mama Lola came back to administer the good bath. I knew from before that this was the easy part. The only preparation she asked me to do was to find seven different perfumes. Mehran and I went to CVS to make our selections. It would have been a much shorter trip if I hadn’t brought Mehran. He nixed the five-pack of Paris Hilton scents and then we fought over Céline Dion Chic and Britney Spears Believe. Finally we settled on Elizabeth Taylor Passion in honor of the stage chicken named Liz Taylor that we hadn’t chosen to hire. And because Mehran had taken to calling me Elizabeth Taylor because of all my sicknesses.
The good bath began with a shower. I had to wash myself down three times using a soap into which Mama Lola had hammered a penny. Then I gave the soap to Zaar and Vidas and again they had to drive it away and dispose of it.
Mama Lola told me to put on new underwear. Maybe it says something about my marriage that I didn’t have a fresh new set of sexy or pretty lingerie. Instead I came downstairs wearing matching boy shorts and a racerback cashmere bra that a company had sent me.
I stood in the den on a fresh patch of newspaper. Mama Lola had a jar of healing oil and I expected her to, I don’t know, maybe drip it lightly on my shoulders? Instead she went straight for my lower back. She touched my spine and said, “Does this hurt?”
I said, “Yes, it’s because I’m always lifting the kids.”
Mama Lola said, “Wait, lie down.” I lay down on the floor, on my back. The cameras tilted down, staring at me with two big worried eyes. I looked up at Mehran. He looked down at me.
Mama Lola told me to roll over. Then, with no warning, she pulled my underwear down, exposing my ass crack to all assembled. If I didn’t know and respect Mama Lola, I’d suspect she was being paid to create a billion-dollar scandal tape. I said, “Sorry, Ryan,” to our cameraman. Ryan laughed. Apparently the embarrassment was all mine.
Mama Lola was examining me from top to bottom. When she came to my tailbone, she said, “Oh my God!” Mehran said later he was sure she’d found an evil spirit in my ass. But Mama Lola had just discovered that my tailbone was crooked, something I’ve known for a while.
Just then Scout and Bill came in—Great! More people to join the party!—and everyone took turns feeling my tailbone.
Mehran said, “It’s like you have a tail.”
Bill said, “You’re turning into a reptile. It’s because you’re obsessed with V.”
Scout said it was from all the flying splits I did in the nineties. Maybe he was onto something. When I was in my ex-husband Charlie’s play Maybe Baby, It’s You, I did the flying splits four nights a week for four months straight.
Mama Lola ignored the wisecracking. She said, “Get me a leaf.” She stuck the leaf to my jutting tailbone with some healing oil, then used an Ace bandage to hold the leaf firmly in place. She told me that because of this complication she would have to stay two extra days to complete her work. Then she plopped down on the couch to watch Oprah. Mama Lola’s work for the day was done.
Okay, this may be hard to believe, but lifting the evil eye didn’t seem to help my headache. Maybe we should have slaughtered the chicken. (I would never.)
• • •
A few days later our friend Scott, who races with Dean and Santiago, saw me walking around the house with my headache relief roll-on stick. He said that his ex-girlfriend was an energy healer and past life worker, or something like that, living in Hawaii. Of course! My energy needed healing! Plus, I figured my past lives must have some ideas abo
ut how to fix the headaches. Why keep hunting for a solution when Lady Victoria Spellingshire might have solved it with some vinegar and opium poultices back in the Middle Ages? I couldn’t say no.
Scott called her and asked if she could do some energy healing on me. She said that she could do it over the phone, without even talking to me, if I just gave my permission. It was random and very long-distance, but I had nothing to lose except cell phone minutes. I gave Scott my permission, and an hour later she called back with the results.
Scott was on the phone with her, relaying what she said while I sat there awkwardly, feeling too shy to talk to her directly, occasionally wondering if it would be rude to tweet while he communicated my reading (answer: yes), and then wondering if I should go ahead and do it anyway (answer: again yes).
His ex-girlfriend told Scott that she saw a lot of pain radiating from the top of my head, and she knew why. She explained that Dean had been my husband in a past life—that we had been married before. I perked up. Of course that made perfect sense. No wonder we were soul mates. We both felt the powerful pull of our ancient love affair, back when we hung out in the Byzantine Empire and were followed around by a cart of scribes with large stone tablets, chiseling out our every move for the public to read about later.
But what was she saying now? I snapped out of my fantasy to hear Scott report that Dean had cheated on me in a past life, and I had caught him and confronted him. Oh. My momentary enthusiasm for this past life reading disappeared, but she wasn’t done. Apparently, in this past life Dean and I had gotten into a fight over his infidelity that ended with him hitting me on top of my head and killing me. Hence the headache. My head hurt where he’d whacked me. Aha! All of this was Dean’s fault! No wonder women get more migraines than men!
I said, perhaps not entirely accurately, “That makes perfect sense.” It did play into some of my fears. Given our history, I often get worried that Dean is going to cheat on me. If the phone rings and it’s a girl’s voice, I have to ask if he’s having an affair. Dean has never been anything but devoted, and he tells me over and over again that he would never do that. Deep down I believe him. Dean would never hurt me like that. But I can’t stop myself. For some reason I’m compelled to accuse him of cheating. Now I had an excuse . . . er, I mean, an explanation. Scott’s ex-girlfriend told me that the subconscious doesn’t know the difference between the present life and past lives. So I was confusing my Dean in this life with the past Dean, the Dean who was a cheater. That’s why I kept accusing him. The only part that didn’t quite make sense was that he defended himself so vigorously. Didn’t his own subconscious feel guilty for his past crimes of passion?
uncharted terriTORI Page 12
