I Like You Just the Way I Am
Page 7
So, as bad as I could have felt for Baz, I really didn’t. She wasn’t an idiot. In an effort to self-preserve, she overlooked the bad and embedded herself in his family. She was a “yes woman” who went along with anything Jason wanted (including his occasional desire to hit up a Chuck E. Cheese’s on the way to LAX) and voiced concern only when he wouldn’t let her move in with him.
“You know, only a woman who isn’t secure with you would feel the need to kiss your mother’s ass so hard,” I told Jason as I tossed one of his mom’s cats across the room like a Frisbee. I stared up at a five-by-seven of Baz and Jason’s mom in Mouseketeer ears, still hanging above the mantel. “That seems healthy.”
Jason conceded, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
On the last night of our visit, Jason’s older sister Holly pulled me into a coffin-sized laundry room to have a chat out of earshot of their mom. She sat opposite me and took a deep breath.
“I just had a baby so I’m really emotional right now,” she started.
Not sure if she was going to offer me a joint or ask if I wanted to try her breast milk, I kept my mouth shut.
“I still talk to Baz,” she confessed in a wispy voice that belonged on someone less than half her age.
“Okay.” I was bummed she didn’t have any weed.
“She knows you and Jason are engaged and she said that out of respect, she thinks it’s best that she and I stop talking. I just can’t imagine not having her in my and my children’s lives. She knits us each a Christmas sweater every year. What do I tell the kids? She’s just gone?”
She had worked herself into hysterics. If it weren’t for the tears pouring down her face, I’d have thought she was joking.
“I don’t know how to deal with this. Will I ever get to see her again? Does she know how much she means to me? Is she thinking about us—?”
I stopped her. “If I were her, I would do the same thing,” I lied. “She is being mature. It’s just a weird position for her.”
“But what I had with her has nothing to do with you and my brother. It’s just not fair for me to have to lose a friend in all of this.”
“I’d say one day you’ll be able to be friends, but my ex wants me to have absolutely zero contact with his family and I broke up with him, so, you know … You guys will probably never speak again. It’s weird,” I said bluntly.
Realizing she wasn’t quite ready for such a heavy dose of reality, I switched gears.
“Oh, come on, you know you guys are going to be friends. This is all just temporary.” I felt like I was walking an eighth-grade girl through her first breakup.
She went on to some rant about Jesus that I tuned out, and eventually let me out of the room.
What I gleaned from that weekend was that Baz was more than just a girl to these people. She was their perestroika. She represented a time when Jason was still not able to voice his own wants and needs. From childhood, his mother made him responsible for her happiness, an ever fluxuating ideal that was, for the most part, impossible to attain. When the money came, his older sister also looked to him for caretaking and security. Jason knew Baz was in love with him so he tried to do what he did with the rest of the women in his life—be the “good boy” and love her back. By forcing himself to be happy with Baz, Jason was also ignoring the growing need for boundaries within his own family. Breaking free from Baz symbolized his growing up. He was an adult and was no longer willing to carry anyone’s happiness on his shoulders but his own.
I tried to stay out of most of it because, frankly, I had my own enmeshment problems to worry about. Also, Jason’s family was all under five foot, so I knew if they tried to attack me, I could take them in a fight.
* * *
On the flight back to L.A., my thoughts were consumed with Baz. I realized I knew relatively nothing about her aside from the fact that she was the human manifestation of every issue Jason had had with his childhood. But there were other things I was still learning. Crazier things. Things I couldn’t help but become completely transfixed by.
I cataloged the small details I’d discovered over the course of the last three days: Baz was married once. She’d lived in Peru. She hated traveling. She had an outy belly-button. She “danced” in college. She knew how to make seventeen different kinds of chili. She had a fake nose but no boobs. She was a painter but didn’t believe in selling her work. She was half Asian but only admitted to her Jewish side. She once appeared in the background of an Old Navy commercial. Wore tiaras. Hated sushi. Only spoke in a baby voice in the bedroom. Never drank water with ice. And hosted an online radio show about cocktails made with Splenda.
Who the fuck was this chick? I thought as I looked over at my sleeping fiancé, silently judging the fuck out of him.
When we were back home, I decided I needed to do a more thorough investigation of this complicated-yet-fascinating woman. The first thing I stumbled upon (stumbled upon = spent hours scouring the Web for) was a Web series she’d recently made about Jason breaking her heart. The videos were roughly ten minutes each and depicted my soon-to-be husband as the biggest dickhead on earth.
Was I offended? Hurt? Concerned that I might be engaged to the biggest dickhead on earth? No way! This was the greatest thing ever. Unlike Lance and Carmen, Baz still thought about her ex and, by default, me! Sure, she seemed a little jaded. But I knew with time her anger would settle into commonplace obsession. I probed further and found entire blog posts dedicated to the topic of Jason and Baz. The posts were always signed “Anonymous,” but I was able to trace them back far enough to find one signed, “Baz35.” While Carmen’s ego couldn’t handle knowing my middle initial, Baz probably knew what color dildo I had (purple). More important, she cared!
Her Dating Jason Biggs became my favorite YouTube show. Sadly, I was unable to share this information with my fiancé, Jason Biggs, because he thought it was unhealthy.
There was another dynamic at play. This was the first time in my life that I was in a relationship with a famous person. What I didn’t realize when we first started dating was that being with someone other people care about makes you feel like you are unimportant, worthless, and a total failure at life. Yet again, I was being forced to confront the demons in my head telling me I didn’t matter. My dad introducing us to people as “my daughter Jenny and The Actor Jason Biggs” didn’t help.
So I’d be lying/writing-a-fucking-lie-of-a-book if I didn’t admit to feeling jealousy toward my husband’s notoriety. Before I met Jason, I could walk into a room and know people were looking at me because I was dressed in the cutest outfit of all time. After I met Jason, I was just a random nondescript chick standing next to Jason Biggs who you hoped knew how to work the camera on your BlackBerry. All the free apple pie desserts and easily made dinner reservations in the world didn’t make up for feeling utterly invisible and like my outfit didn’t even matter.
Baz offered something I desperately needed at this particular juncture in my life (and perhaps always had): a fan. She was interested in me for me. She thought about me when I wasn’t around. She appreciated pictures of me looking skinny. How could I not be drawn to her? Baz was providing me with attention. Sure, it may have been accidental attention and directed my way only because I was with Jason, but nevertheless, I was on her radar. I was her boyfriend’s new woman. In essence, I was his “Carmen” (minus the pencil-thin creepy eyebrows). Through Baz, I had the chance to do all the things Carmen should have done for me. I was thrilled to offer her my friendship, my compassion, and a chance to babysit my dogs if I ever left town.
* * *
“Jenny, I don’t want us to have anything to do with this person,” Jason said to me one night. “She’s a part of my past for a reason, and that’s where I’d like her to stay.” He’d caught a glimpse of my Google history and staged an impromptu intervention.
A sloppy trail of Internet Movie Database comments made it increasingly obvious that Baz was watching my every move. For fun one day, I t
ried to imagine myself through Baz’s eyes. Having never met me, she could only guess what I was like through press photos and MySpace. The two-dimensional me was so much cooler than the real me. She didn’t bite her toenails or eat food out of the trash. She was flawless and bronzed, with no boob stretch marks or butt zits. Grooming my online image to suit Baz’s liking became a full-time job. I took pictures of myself in my underwear, scoured iTunes for obscure songs that I felt pertained to our situation, and even refurbished quotes from Henry Miller to make them look like my own. I was starting to care about her as much as I imagined she cared about me.
In retrospect, I wish I’d had the discipline to stop there. I knew what I was doing had serious consequences. Whenever Jason confronted me about my online performance art for a target audience of one, I found myself lying. I’d promise myself I wasn’t going to look her up, feel guilty about my misdeeds for a day, and then go right back to it. It was almost as if beating myself up somehow purged me of my sins. It only made me hungry for more. I started covering my tracks on the computer, and wearing fake eyelashes to Whole Foods on the off chance that I’d run into her. Objectively, I knew I could never live up to the me that I had helped her create in her head, but none of that seemed to quell my longing to meet her in the flesh.
* * *
Just around the time production started on a short film Lance asked me never to make—an uproarious romp about kidnapping Jaggy and Carmen (“Kidnapping Caitlynn” on YouTube.com)—Dating Jason Biggs had its series finale. I watched the last episode next to a sleeping Jason with the kind of stillness I typically saved for masturbating. In the final act, Baz’s character declares that she is finally over Jason and ready to start her life again.
What. The. Fuck, I thought. I nudged Jason’s sleeping body and screamed, “Quick! Honey! Do something cute! She’s over you!”
The idea of Baz moving on killed my soul. It was even worse than Lance moving on. (And not quite as bad as my parents never loving me.) Who was I going to keep wearing cute outfits for? Who was I going to picture watching me run on the treadmill? Without Baz, what direction did I even have with my life? If a pretty actress falls in the woods and there’s nobody obsessed with her, does it make a sound?
The next morning I changed my MySpace security options to “free for all” in the hopes of showing Baz everything she was missing out on. I figured if I commented on pages she was likely to visit, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of her and she was staring at an eight-by-ten JPEG of me in a wedding dress.
For days, there was no sign of her. Overcome with feelings of rejection, I started to go insane. Baz was giving me little to no choice. Like Lance, she too was moving on, and that was unacceptable.
What happened to the good old days where after you broke up with someone, they still hung around and built IKEA desks for you and shit? I thought.
I had no choice. If I wanted her back, I had to meet her in person. She had been a really good stalker to me, and she deserved a stalkee who would fight for her. I was convinced that if she saw me, her fire would reignite and she’d love me again … or at least wanna look at my MySpace updates every day.
I started driving by her apartment with increased frequency. I’d never seen her outside, but knew she had dogs, so I’d make it a point to go during shitting hours. Still, there was nothing.
My morning ritual became: coffee, followed by e-mails, followed by a complete Internet sweep for Baz. We weren’t friends on MySpace, nor did we share any mutual friends. When she and Jason broke up, she severed all ties. This fact alone told me she was more mature and less trashy than the Marilyn Monroe tattoo on her ankle suggested. It also told me I was going to need to up my game.
How do you up your game when you’re already trying to bait an emotionally fragile Internet stalker? By luring her in with somebody seemingly harmless, who of course would be me in disguise.
I had to be smart. I needed someone credible, someone whom she’d instantly trust and someone who wasn’t obviously affiliated with Jason in any way. After days of labor-intensive research, I settled on my agent, Sarah. Sarah didn’t really understand her MySpace page, so, after several beers, she seemed fine with giving me her password to add a few friends for her. Since I’d deleted Sarah from my own friends, there was no way Baz would be able to make the connection back to me.
I watched Sarah’s friend request sit in the “pending” category for a solid week before—EUREKA!
“Baz took the bait and added me!” I blurted out to myself in the middle of a movie starring people less attractive than me.
Chills ran up and down my spine. I did a cartwheel through the theater lobby (which garnered way less attention than I was hoping for). I was granted access to Baz’s inner circle, and all my questions were about to be answered. Wanting nothing more than to get to my computer, I went straight home. I locked myself in the study and spent a solid two hours reading every inch of Baz’s profile. I had so much insight into her mind, I started to think I knew her better than my husband ever did. I’d find myself watching TV or strolling through the mall, see a pair of leopard furry handcuffs and say aloud to myself: “Oh, those are so Baz.”
We were the very best of imaginary friends. Then, one day, Baz posted a note to her MySpace page, asking if anyone had a large leather chair she could borrow for a photo shoot. I guess I was feeling particularly boundary-less that day because, as Sarah, I instantly responded.
“I do!” I sat in my chair killing myself laughing at how ballsy I was.
My diabolical cackle was interrupted by a notification in my in-box. I looked to see what it was.
Wha— Wait— No! Holy shit, Baz wrote back!
The note was short. It read: “Could I use it?”
Oh my God, Baz just spoke to me! I picked up the phone and called Sarah at work.
“Hey, so remember when you gave me your MySpace password and you made me promise to never use it for evil? Well, do you have any large leather chairs in your apartment you aren’t currently using?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone before Sarah finally replied, “Actually, I do have one. Why?”
Sarah has a large leather chair! This is obviously meant to be.
I almost couldn’t believe how everything was playing out. All the stars were aligning. The universe was conspiring for my success just like Joseph Campbell always promised it would.
“You have one? Great, because Jason’s ex-girlfriend needs it for a photo shoot.”
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“What?”
“Jenny, did you make contact with Jason’s ex as me?” I could hear her containing herself from screaming.
“She has a photo shoot, she’s in a bind—”
Click. Sarah slammed down her phone.
I knew what I was doing was teetering on the verge of insane, but I couldn’t stop. I was too close to meeting my soul mate’s ex–soul mate to turn back now. In less than a week, I could actually see Baz in the flesh. I needed to devise a way to casually insert myself into the chair exchange. Maybe I’d jog down Baz’s street just as Sarah pulled up, or maybe I’d ask Sarah to do the exchange at her place, where I’d be hiding in the closet.
I called Sarah back to present this option to her, but strangely her line went straight to voice mail. I took it upon myself to let Baz know she could use the chair. She, in turn, gave me all sorts of juicy details: her phone number, e-mail address, current employment status.
I then called Sarah back to apologize and delicately inform her that our plan was now completely green-lit. She picked up this time, quickly learning that when you’re trapped with a madman with a gun, it’s best not to point out that the pantyhose on his head are too sheer and you can totally see his face.
“Our plan worked!”
“Our plan?” she said.
“Well, more mine than yours, but I wanted you to feel included.” I really am a great friend.
“No,” she said.
We compromised. I agreed to hide in her trunk.
* * *
The morning of the drop-off felt like prom. Baz didn’t want to meet till eight, so I had ample time to organize my attack. I went to the hairdresser, had my roots done, and even got my toes painted You Don’t Know Jacques! gray. Technically, Baz wasn’t supposed to see me at all. I’d be hidden under a blanket in the back of Sarah’s SUV, but I was pretty confident that if I looked my best, my hotness would shine through anyway. Also, I fantasized about popping up and pressing my face against Sarah’s back window as she sped away in an attempt to make Baz think she was hallucinating. I always try to look super hot in people’s hallucinations.
The plan was for Sarah to hand off the chair, then launch into a series of casual remarks about how she thought they might have a friend in common: me. She’d then drop details about my relationship, my career, and my adventurous attitude toward sex.
Evil? Horrible? I swear I didn’t mean it to be. I just wanted Baz’s attention. And I would stop at nothing to get it back.
I positioned myself in the rear of Sarah’s SUV so that I’d still be able to see Baz’s face to judge how much older she looked than me. I also wanted to see her expression when Sarah, as instructed, disclosed my jeans size.
Sarah reluctantly stuffed me in the plush back section of her hybrid Lexus SUV, bitching the whole time that if I ever told anyone about this, she would break my face and ruin my career, which was like threatening to cut the balls off a dog that was already neutered.
Parked outside Baz’s house, I could feel anxiety-diarrhea boiling up inside me. From the front seat, Sarah made phone calls and waited for Baz to show up.