by Judy Greer
I did use my dirty money for a cab ride home that night, although in retrospect I should have left it in the bathroom attendant’s tip jar—she had a thankless job and no stealing opportunities to speak of. I never stole again, and shortly after I got promoted to bartender. I started working at the downstairs bar, in a more quiet, lounge-type room. I made a lot of money for a twenty-one-year-old, and the hours were perfect for doing theater. I only worked weekends and didn’t have to be there until 11:00 p.m., so I could do a play and then head to work. The weekends were long, but I had a direct line to Diet Coke at my fingertips, I was making my rent and still able to act, what more did I need?
I was lucky, and once I moved to L.A., I didn’t have to get another job besides acting. But I wouldn’t trade my previous jobs for anything. They played a major part in the person I am today. I firmly believe that everyone should have to work in the food service industry at least once in their lives. Like joining the army in Israel, when all Americans turn eighteen, a mandatory year of waiting tables. Yes, you’ll have your bitter moments. You will cry during a shift; you will snap at your co-workers, customers, and boss. You will eat combinations of food you would never admit to now, some of it off the plates of strangers, you’ll learn to roll silverware in your sleep, go through more bottles of Febreze than shampoo, you’ll learn swear words in other languages, but ultimately it will make you a better person, or at least a bigger tipper.
2 B
MY COLLEGE GRADUATION GIFT FROM MY PARENTS was a car. I don’t remember when my mom and dad decided on that as a gift, and I don’t know why I felt I needed one when I was living in Chicago, which had amazing public transportation, but that was what was decided and that was what I was going to get. I’d made it through four years of acting school, and I deserved a reward. Since my dad worked for Ford Motor Company and we got an awesome employee discount (in fact, we still do!), our family has always bought Fords. My first car was also the first exception, since I got a Dodge Charger when I turned sixteen. It was purchased used from my cousin Brett, who was a used-car dealer somewhere in Michigan. The only reason my parents made a non-Ford purchase was that Brett was family and we must have gotten a really good deal, which is almost as important as being loyal to a brand if you’re from the Midwest. If you’re loyal to a brand, you get a good deal, and a family member works for the company, that is a midwestern trifecta. You’ll talk about that for years to come. The Dodge Charger was two out of three, so we didn’t really mention it much.
My Charger is what I would have described as a burnout car. It had a hatchback and smelled of old cigarettes, and not mine (I didn’t start smoking until months later), so I insisted on burning incense in it. Sometimes I even burned a candle in the cup holder. Not smart, but it improved the stench a bit. My biggest hurdle with my Charger was leaving the lights on. I could never remember to turn those damn lights off. Ever. I started by putting a Post-it note on my steering wheel that said “lights.” Well, I got so used to that Post-it being there that I had to add another, and another, and another. Soon there were Post-its all over the interior of my car. My father eventually had to buy me my own jumper cables because I was constantly asking strangers for a jump, and if they didn’t have their own cables, I had to wait for the next stranger to walk/drive by. It could end up being hours before I found a willing driver who was packin’ his own cables and didn’t look like he would rape/murder/kidnap me. Those cables were and remain one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. I got really good at jumping my car and at flagging down random people in the parking lot at Laurel Park Place, the mall where I had my after-school job. I’m certain that just about everyone who worked at that mall gave me a jump start at some point. I always got unnecessarily annoyed at people who weren’t willing to help me out—especially considering how deft I’d become at jump-starting my car. I know it probably didn’t add up—here I am so stupid that I left my lights on, but smart enough to know how to conduct electricity from one car to another without killing myself or blowing up either car.
Putting those pesky lights aside for a moment, I loved how much crap I could fit in the hatchback of my Charger. One Halloween, my high school boyfriend Eric and I went to pick up my dog from the kennel. There were hundreds of pumpkins on the lawn and the woman in charge told us we could take as many as we wanted for free. I think we took around fifty. We took so many pumpkins that it weighed down the hatch of my car so much that it was almost dragging on the ground. We definitely grounded out when pulling in to and out of parking lots. However, the pumpkins proved to be a great bribe for people skeptical of my battery-jumping ability. Turns out people will let anyone under the hood of their car for a free pumpkin. I probably would. Why not? Eventually, I added an empty gas can to the loot in my hatch for the (many) times when I ran out of gas on the side of the road.
You see, these were pre-cell-phone days, when it was easier to just take care of shit myself than walk all the way to a pay phone, call my dad/mom, and wait for them to come to my rescue, or call AAA and wait for some strange man to come to my rescue. Or worst of all, wait for my mom/dad to call AAA to come to my rescue. I have come to believe, though, that the only modern-day Prince Charming comes in the form of a AAA tow truck driver. Every other Prince Charming is just an impostor who will, no doubt, end up borrowing money from you and eating the leftovers in your fridge you were saving for after work. I guess I’m just a do-it-yourself kind of gal. I’m also way too controlling to be a good damsel in distress.
So, there was only one other little hiccup: I got in the car one morning to go to school, and the driver-side door wouldn’t close. The damn thing opened mid-ride! Have you ever driven a car while holding the door shut? It’s, like, really hard to do. The door is heavy, especially on a two-door hatchback made in the late 1980s. Turning a corner was torture, and I was extra thankful for my seat belt that day. I had to rethink my usual route in order to turn less. Eventually, I had the door fixed for good, but the fewer-turns route became my usual route, since, as it turns out, fewer turns spilled less wax out of my burning candle. So, you could say my Charger did me well for about a year.
After I left for college, my parents immediately donated the car for the write-off, and I felt a little sad that I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. It was my first material object that offered me independence and seemed to signify my parents’ trust in me. My best friend, Nicole, made the two of us these clay figurines for our cars that hung on a rope. I still have mine. I have had him in every car I’ve ever owned. Sadly, Nicole’s is gone because she got carjacked in Detroit after we graduated and it was stolen along with her car. I felt really bad (but not bad enough to offer her mine). Mine has lived in my Escort, my Explorer, both Lincolns, my Audi, and now in my Prius. I call him my hang-in-there guy because he hangs on, no mater what. I think he is good luck. I hesitate to even type this, for jinxing purposes, but I think he is the reason I haven’t gotten in a terrible accident, even though I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m a horrible driver.
So, back to college graduation. As the date neared, my dad asked me what color car I wanted. He told me it would probably be a Ford Escort but wanted to know if I had a color preference. I was getting a free car; I wasn’t going to be picky about the color! Bad move. He chose pink. Hot pink. My dad bought me a hot-pink Ford Escort. It shimmered. It was my new car, my graduation present. It is the car I would have to drive until the second I could afford to (a) buy a new one or (b) have it painted a different color. The best/worst part of my new car was that my sweet dad painted a vanity plate for me. In Illinois at the time, you didn’t have to have a license plate on the front of your car, so you could put anything you wanted or could fit there, or leave it empty. Well, my father painted me my very own vanity plate that said “ 2 B” on it. I know, I know, I should have just taken the plate off, but I couldn’t do it. Something about taking the front plate off made me feel like I was embarrassed by my dad and how much he loved me. I fel
t like that plate was my dad in a way, and I didn’t want to forget him as I embarked on my postcollege life. I didn’t want him to think for a second that I didn’t love all the work he put into it. Just like the lunch bags he drew pictures on for me every day when I was a kid, it was an artistic expression of his love and support, and for an engineer that’s a lot. Besides, when you’re driving an iridescent fuchsia car around, people don’t really notice the license plates.
The miraculous thing was that eventually I sort of forgot about how embarrassed it all made me. I had my own car, so anyone who made fun could suck it. I think my friends knew if they wanted to borrow it or needed a ride to the airport, they’d better keep their mouths shut about my star—and they did. One day I drove past my friend JP walking in Wicker Park. I honked my horn and waved at him, and he yelled out, “Hey!! It’s the Star 2 B!!!!!” I remember being totally embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop laughing anyway. For as long as I can remember, my father seemed to be the only person who had faith in my future STARmeter (that’s the thing on IMDb.com that tells you how famous you are at that moment. It is horrible and I am sure has driven many people to drink). My father was beyond confident that I would someday be a star … of some kind. Did he think, all those years ago, that I would be a movie star? Maybe? Probably. My father has loved me more unselfishly than any other human male I have ever known, and seems to have never-ending faith in my career and abilities, and even though I think the plate should be changed to read “Co 2 B,” I know my father would tell you he painted it right the first time.
My dad taught me to drive the day it was legally possible to do so. I was fifteen years old, and in Michigan you could sign up for drivers’ ed on your fifteenth birthday. So I did. I took the class, did the driving part, got my permit, and hit the road. It was very important to my dad that I have a lot of driving practice before I went out solo. And I did. My parents were really into road trips, so I drove them all over the Midwest. I drove when we went to visit family in Ohio, I drove to downtown Detroit to Red Wings games, I drove anywhere and everywhere. I learned to drive in our Lincoln Town Car, and to this day that is my dream car. I ride in them often now for work, since they are the go-to car for car services that get hired to drive actors around because we can’t be trusted to get places on time. And every time I ride in one, I secretly wish I was driving it. It was a lovely car to drive. It was giant. It was comfortable, like driving around your living room, and trust me, if you can parallel park a Town Car, you can pretty much parallel park anything. Once I moved to L.A. with the 2 B and got some decent-paying acting jobs, I was urged to lease a car for the write-off. I leased a Ford Explorer (still brand loyal) and decided to donate my fuchsia Escort to a charity. I was going to go with the Red Cross, but a friend told me I should choose a charity that could really use the donation, and people donated millions to the Red Cross every year. Why not choose a local charity that was overlooked? I chose a shelter for battered women in downtown Los Angeles. It seemed like a good one, it was local to L.A., was a great cause, and could, no doubt, use the donation. Well, it turned out it did need the donation, but it also needed someone to figure out what to do with that kind of donation, and unfortunately all I had to offer was the car itself. A man came to my apartment to pick up my car and do the paperwork. I gave him all the papers I could find that said “Escort” on them, signed some of his papers, and that was that.
A few months passed, and one afternoon a police officer knocked on my door asking if I was the owner of a hot-pink Ford Escort. I could finally say no to that question! Well, it turned out I was lying to the cop because I was still, legally, the owner of that car. The people at the local charity of my choice hadn’t done their part and transferred the title; instead, they left it parked outside somewhere, and it had collected enough unpaid parking tickets that I now had a warrant out for my arrest. It now seems like a miracle that I got that officer to go away that afternoon without me in handcuffs. I explained to him what I had done and produced the documents that showed I had donated the car (another miracle that I still had those papers and could find them). I still believe in donating money and stuff to small local charities that really need it, but maybe make sure there is an infrastructure to support the donation as it comes in. I found out after I followed up that the 2 B was ultimately sold to a junkyard for parts, and it really depressed me. Still does. It makes me sad for two reasons. One, that the car was just basically wasted. My friend JP moved to L.A. later that year, and I could have just given him the car. He didn’t have one, and you kind of need a car in L.A. And two, that I was so embarrassed of my car that I felt I needed a new one for my new life. But the truth is that that car was my life. It was representative of who I was, where I came from, and how much I was loved by my parents. But I wanted to start over. I was in Hollywood, I was an actress, and I thought I was better than that car. Fifteen years later I finally learned that no one is better, especially me, than a hot-pink Escort and a vanity plate painted with love.
My Stupid Trip (Alone) to Spain
I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE KIND OF WOMAN who traveled by herself. I loved reading books about adventurous women who would just travel somewhere, anywhere they were curious about, with or without a travel companion, just because they felt like it. Those women were independent, confident, mysterious, sexy, and interesting. They had great stories to tell, could appreciate art and architecture, had friends all over the world, and the coolest clothes purchased at international flea markets. OK, maybe the last reason was number one on my mental list. If I heard one more girl respond to a compliment on a skirt or jacket with “I got it in a flea market in Paris,” I was going to scream. I wanted to be the flea-market-in-Paris girl. But the other stuff was important too. I wanted to learn about all the things that I didn’t get to in college because I was acting all the time. I had made a promise to myself when I realized what a conservatory was and that I was in one that I would self-educate when I graduated, and what better way to boost my intellect (and wardrobe) than international travel? Instead of just reading about history, why not go see it for myself? I was an only child. I was used to spending time by myself. I had traveled a little already for work, I mean to Phoenix, Casa Grande, and Kenosha, but still, I was adventurous. I moved to L.A. by myself … that’s something, right? So I decided that if I wanted to be that kind of woman, I should just do it. People traveled alone all the time—so why not me? If you want to do something, just do it, right, Nike? So I did it!
I decided to go to Spain—Barcelona, to be exact, and spend a week and a half there. I didn’t know anything about Spain, I didn’t speak Spanish, but I chose Barcelona anyway for a few reasons: (1) my friend Martin had gone there alone the summer before and said it was beautiful and safe and everyone was nice and spoke English; (2) I loved the movie Barcelona by Whit Stillman; (3) I knew a guy from high school who was living there, so I had a local emergency contact.
The first thing I learned about myself, minutes after deplaning, was that I am not one of those people who should travel by herself. I don’t like it. I didn’t like walking through the airport. I didn’t like trying to get a taxi. I didn’t like riding in the taxi to my hotel, and I really didn’t like it when I got to my hotel. You see, the night before there was a riot in the neighborhood where I was staying, so the streets were deserted and all the storefronts were vandalized. There was spray painting everywhere, not that I could read it, but I’m pretty sure whatever words were spray painted under the Chanel store sign weren’t words of social encouragement and positivity. Many windows were broken and boarded up, and there was still glass and garbage littering the streets and sidewalks. I’m not sure if I would have been any better off had things been totally normal, but my trip was off to a rocky start, and I can’t say that I ever fully recovered from my immediate conviction that this was a bad idea for me.
