Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life

by Quinn Cummings

  Until the other person says, “Yeah…” in the die-away voice, which means, “I like talking about this, but I don’t dislike this situation enough to actually do something about it.”

  Sometimes I will forget Medusa’s lesson. I’ll try to nag and pester the person into a state of improvement that just seems to annoy everyone involved. And then, out of the blue, I will hear her smoke-throttled voice saying, “You can’t want it more than they do,” and I will stop midharangue and say something along the lines of, “If you ever want help, let me know.”

  I’ve modified Medusa’s credo a bit over the years. If the outcome is something that affects you and the other person, you can want it as much as they do. You can even want it more, but only briefly. If two people are in something together, they each have to pull their own weight. But if it isn’t your goal, don’t take on the responsibility for achieving it. You can only help someone as much as they genuinely want to be helped.

  I think that’s what the spiders were trying to tell me.

  Something Inappropriate About Canada

  WHEN CONSORT AND I FIRST STARTED DATING AND WERE shin deep in the Oh, aren’t you just the most wonderful thing! How amusingly you breathe! flush of romance, we attended a fancy party. Later, on the way home, he turned to me and said, “You know what’s so great about you?” I shrugged, hoping it wasn’t something like The way you hide those fat ankles.

  “How equally comfortable you are with everybody,” he continued. “Every time I looked over, there you were chatting away with some new person.” This was indeed a compliment. To Consort, thumbs and graceful small talk are what separate us from the animals. I modestly accepted this tribute to my outgoing nature as we drove through the shiny urban nightscape.

  About a year later, when Consort still loved me but the warm bath of bond-inducing chemicals had worn off, that previous conversation came up. He squinted affectionately and said, “I was wrong. It’s not that you’re equally comfortable with nearly everyone. It’s that you’re equally uncomfortable with nearly everyone.”

  Well, yes. There’s that.

  What separates me from other shy people is that I am an actor by training; I’m practiced in the arts of public deception and entertaining sound bites. In fact, a significant part of my energy is spent not appearing as uncomfortable as I feel. For me, appearing at ease and relaxed is exhausting. This is because no matter how well everything is going, I know that I am seconds away from saying something horrible.

  I have never gotten high on pot. I don’t say this out of a desire to run for Congress (although I would appreciate your vote), or because I think marijuana is the demon leaf. Statistics prove that alcohol is a far more dangerous drug, and I’m doing my best to keep that industry vibrant. No, the reason I don’t smoke pot is because all through my adolescence I kept hearing stories about the effects of getting high; specifically, about getting stoned and fixating over whether you were not talking enough, or talking too much, or saying out loud what was meant to stay in your head, or whether you were making any sense at all. All I could think was: other people need drugs for that?

  Somewhere within my brain resides an eighteen-month-old child. I know this because when Alice was right around that age she became obsessed with mauling our then-dog Polly’s tail. Polly had come to us when Alice was six months old and Polly was about seven years old—the shelter wasn’t exactly sure. Polly had been owned by an elderly woman with whom she watched daytime television and ate snacks. This explained her build. When Alice first set eyes on her, she shrieked in delight. Alice, that is. Polly assumed a look of polite horror, which told us our new family pet hadn’t spent much time around actual children. Fortunately, for a dog with minimal small-child experience, Polly took quite gracefully to being loved well but not wisely by the under-three crowd. She was generally patient and accommodating with Alice and her elfin friends, except for one thing: no one—repeat, no one—was to touch her tail.

  As far as Polly was concerned, her tail was like the parts of one’s body covered by a bathing suit. She, and she alone, got to decide who touched it, and to our best knowledge she never met anyone who merited such favor. Of course, this made her tail unbearably desirable to my newly running daughter. She wanted to touch it, pull it, sing to it, and use it as dental floss. At least twenty-five times a day, twenty of which were while I was trying to make dinner, Alice would make a running lunge for Polly’s tail. Polly, sensing disaster, would tuck her tail where only she could find it and race for her bed. My daughter, the thrill of the hunt exciting her blood, would shriek and chase her prey while I called after her, “Alice, don’t touch Polly’s tail. Leave her tail alone.”

  What my Alice would hear was “Alice…(inaudible sound)…touch Polly’s tail…(inaudible) (inaudible)…TAIL…(inaudible).”

  Everything else on the dog, being available to Alice, was dreary. That tail, by sheer virtue of its being forbidden, was better than ten My Little Ponies, an afternoon at the park, and themed footwear all wrapped up with a big purple bow made of candy. That’s how my brain works too. The mere suggestion of “don’t,” especially when it precedes any sort of social prohibition such as “Don’t say something stupid,” “Don’t say something weird,” or “Don’t say something stupid or weird,” and my brain takes on the gravitational characteristics of Jupiter. This is a state whereby a random thought, especially a random thought with ample fuel for embarrassment, gets sucked in from the black abyss of space and shoots right out of my mouth. In the natural laws that shape my world, this force is especially strong when strangers are present. Upon meeting someone for the first time, I might notice something about them that is completely out of the range of polite conversation and, of course, this becomes all I can think to talk about.

  Quinn meets new person. This woman has a luxurious moustache.

  NEW PERSON: Hello, Quinn. It’s nice to meet you.

  QUINN’S BRAIN: MOUSTACHE!

  QUINN’S MOUTH: So nice to meet you. Have you been to the Frida Kahlo show?

  NEW PERSON: Uh, no. Why?

  QUINN: I…thought maybe I had seen you there. It’s…good…

  Agonizing silence.

  QUINN’S BRAIN: MOUSTACHE!

  QUINN’S MOUTH: You should try to see it.

  NEW PERSON: I will.

  More agonizing silence. We both sip our drinks. She looks for other people who might save her from me. I look anywhere but at her upper lip, where I swear her moustache is leering at me.

  New person gives up waiting and bolts for freedom, her moustache waving in the breeze.

  At the start of Alice’s preschool career, I made an offhand remark to her teacher, something to the effect that I thought another child was behaving like Satan. (Oh, stop looking at me like that. If you knew this kid you’d have said it too.) Turns out, this sweet woman, being a devout Christian and all, took some offense with my having referred to an innocent (ha!) child as the Dark Lord of Hell. So I apologized, sincerely. And, to the degree that I regretted having made the teacher uncomfortable, I meant it. (I do, however, stand by my assertion. Trust me, this kid reeked of sulfur.) So, could someone please explain to me why, for the next two years, I could not speak to this teacher without injecting sin or perdition into every conversation? There was no subject so ordinary that I couldn’t drag malediction into it somehow. “Sorry, I’m late, but the traffic was hellish. It was evil and Godless. And damned if I could get a single green light.”

  To which the nice Christian teacher could only reply, “I’ll be praying for you.”

  It’s not just the Christians or the hirsute. If I meet observant Muslims, I’ll blurt out something about the joys of bacon. If I meet someone in a wheelchair, I’ll drone on about how much I’m enjoying the treadmill these days. If the other person is blind, I won’t rest until I have extolled the architectural details of the room we’re in. If you’re British, I mention dental work, if you’re French, I’ll bring up World War II. If you hail from Colombia,
I’ll blurt out something about drug trafficking; Swedish people get to hear about their suicide rates. If you’re Canadian, I’ll just stand there in stupefied silence because I can’t think of something inappropriate about Canada, and that leaves me with nothing to say.

  I wasn’t always like this. When I was a small child, I had no problem chatting with anyone. Since most children are usually asked things like “How old are you?” and “Do you want another slice of cake?” I experienced only smooth sailing when it came to small talk. I was no Gore Vidal but I could hold up my end of a conversation. So what caused things to go so terribly wrong for me? Journalists, that’s what.

  The first interview I ever did was right before The Goodbye Girl started shooting. Three actors, one director, and about a hundred reporters staring at us like we were the new panda exhibit at the zoo. I have no recollection of the question that was asked of me, but I do remember my answer: “I’m very lucky. I don’t have a stage-struck family and a pushy mother.”

  It wasn’t a long answer. I didn’t mumble. My voice carries across a room even when I whisper. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the quote in the paper the next day:

  “I have a stage-struck family and a pushy mother.”

  True, he only missed one word, but it was kind of an important one. That one word might have been the difference between a reasonably normal childhood and Quinn, two years later, hoovering lines of Bolivian flake off the belly of a bartender at Studio 54. Even a nine-year-old knew that statement didn’t reflect well upon my family. I cried. I flung the paper around my room and then around the house. My mother threw it away. I retrieved it from the trash and flung it around some more. Finally, after long periods of comforting me and stepping over flung paper, my mother sat me down. “Quinn, it’s over,” she said. “He made a mistake. I know you didn’t say that. Papa knows you didn’t say that. It was one line in a small article, and it won’t happen again.”

  Some of what my mother said was true. The event had taken place in the past and therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, met the definition of “over.” My parents knew I hadn’t said that, and they were all that really mattered. It was one line in a small article. The part that might not have been true—that the reporter made an honest mistake transcribing my taped words—is between the reporter and his god (and the paper’s ombudsman). But the part where my mother said it would never happen again was pure wishful thinking.

  During the publicity push for the movie, I estimate I did five hundred interviews and there was a misquote in about four hundred of them. Mostly, they were benign. The cat was named “Pooh,” not “Winnie.” I grew up in West Hollywood, not Hollywood. I had never indicated any great interest in Charlie’s Angels nor had I longed to be confused with Kate Jackson. Some of these journalistic blunders could be easily traced to a lapse of objectivity—they were more about the interviewer than the interviewee. One very elderly reporter in New York talked to me for a few minutes at the post-premiere party and subsequently wrote a little piece about how I complained the music was too loud and that my feet hurt. I’m guessing her editor cut the part where I ranted about how bad Geritol tasted and that nothing good had come out of Hollywood since actors started talking. The rest just followed the tried and true journalistic traditions of taking things out of context and making shit up.

  It wasn’t like I did myself any great favors when given the chance to speak without an intermediary. The first talk show I ever did was The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. My mother, knowing my tendency to obsess a subject into separate atoms of anxiety, had neutrally said, “Oh, that should be fun,” giving it no more weight than a field trip to the planetarium. Unfortunately, everyone else in my life thought it would be best to take me aside, look deeply into my eyes, and explain in portentous tones, “This is a very big deal.” Nobody actually added “So don’t screw up!” At least not out loud. But, really, we all knew the fate of this interview was in my grubby hands, right next to my flayed cuticles. As the day loomed, I mutated from a pleasantly excited nine-year-old into an overcaffeinated Yorkshire terrier. Some genius told me millions of people would be watching. Had someone drawn my blood that day, it would have registered as a mixture of adrenaline and jet fuel.

  The afternoon of the show, I was in the makeup room having what I would now describe as a teensy, weensy, preadolescent anxiety attack when the publicity woman breezed in. She hugged me, careful not to get too close to my lip gloss, and said warmly, “Just be yourself. Be funny. It’ll be fine.” What I learned within the next hour is that when I’m nervous, being told to be funny acts upon me as a Bic lighter acts upon a plume of hair spray. During the interview, I was aware of the heat of the stage lights, the thudding of my heart, and the constant yapping of some unbearably obnoxious individual with a taste for insult comedy. Gradually, I grew to suspect that the voice was mine. Anyone watching the show would have thought “My God, she’s the hellspawn of Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, only less appealing. I’m taking extra birth-control measures tonight!”

  I finished my segment, walked offstage, fell into my mother’s arms, and cried. I cried as we walked backstage. I cried in the car. I cried as I did my homework. I cried as I scoured off the makeup. I cried and choked as I brushed my teeth. I cried as I went to sleep. What was supposed to be America’s first glimpse of my real personality had only established that the title of World’s Most Odious Child Ever was now a lock. I’m in no position to say whether or not under normal conditions I was a kid you’d want to spend time with, but what I had become on that night, on that show, was some weird drag-queen version of myself. And I couldn’t even pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was because for weeks afterward, people would approach me and say, “I saw you on Carson!” Then, realizing they had to complete the thought, would flail around a bit and add something like “Wow!” My appearance had been the talk-show version of a massive tire fire. Am I exaggerating? I was told later that Mr. Carson refused to invite children to The Tonight Show after my segment. It’s hard not to take that personally.

  In a matter of months, I learned that if I talked to other people and they wrote down my words I’d probably sound like an idiot; if I spoke for myself, I’d make people want to punch me. Now cripplingly self-conscious, whenever I was interviewed I’d blather mindless platitudes with an occasional inappropriate pronouncement thrown in for flavor.

  INTERVIEWER: So, how do you like acting?

  QUINN: I like acting very much. It’s fun. I like to have fun. Fun is nice.

  INTERVIEWER: But don’t you feel as if you are missing out on your childhood?

  QUINN: No, because I am having fun. Which is nice. I like fun, especially when it’s nice.

  INTERVIEWER: Oh…kay.

  Agonizing silence.

  QUINN: If I eat shellfish, I vomit.

  After The Goodbye Girl, I joined a television show that had already been on the air for two years. By then, every other actor on the show had told the publicity people they’d rather perform their own hemorrhoidectomy than do another interview, which is why I was frequently drafted to talk to reporters. The problem was that entertainment reporters sent out to interview children usually bear resentment so palpable it leaves a stain on the carpet:

  I’m the entertainment reporter from the Regional-Standard-Eagle-Picayune, a very important paper known in the tristate area for its coverage of the weather. There are three movies coming out this weekend; I might have interviewed the hot ingénue and maybe talked her into sex. I might have interviewed the famous old British actor and gotten drunk with him and heard stories about him banging Jacqueline Bisset. But, no, I was assigned to interview a child on a TV show. If I’m not getting laid or drunk, remind me again why I took those journalism classes at community college.

  This led to a string of frustrated reporters hoping and praying for me to say something—anything—stupid and inflammatory to justify their expense report. These weren’t the most subtle of predators. Oddly enough, man
y of them were named Skip.

  In most of these interviews I’d be sitting on my couch at home, while my mother was sitting nearby.

  SKIP: So…you have a dog?

  QUINN: Yeah. This one.

  Quinn points to the dog that has crawled on the couch between them.

  SKIP: Okay, yeah. And you like dogs?

  QUINN: Sure.

  The phone rings. Quinn’s mother leaves the room to answer it. The reporter waits until he can hear her on the phone, leans in over the dog, and speaks quickly.

  SKIP: How much money do you make?

  QUINN: I don’t know.

  SKIP: Of course you do. What do you make a week?

  QUINN: My mom hasn’t told me.

  In fact, she hadn’t. Brilliantly sensing it would prevent me from ever having to lie or accidentally slipping up, she didn’t tell me until I was eighteen. This added to Skip’s frustration.

  SKIP: This is a nice house. Do you parents spend all your money? I bet your parents spend all your money.

  QUINN: Of course they don’t.

  SKIP: If you don’t know how much money you make, how do you know they’re not spending it?

  QUINN: I…they wouldn’t do that.

  SKIP: God, you’re so naïve. I have an idea. Let’s take a look at your mother’s checkbook. If she’s innocent, there’s no harm in that, right? Where’s her checkbook?

  Then there were the reporters who would keep rephrasing the question until I gave them something not entirely unlike what they were already planning to write: