Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster

by Kristen Johnston

  What I really said might have been somewhat lamer, but in my memory, that’s what I said. After a weighty moment of stunned silence, I heard a twitter. Then a snort. Then full-out laughter, which has always been my favorite sound in the whole wide world. It filled me with such joy because, for once, it wasn’t directed at me, it was because of me. Even Amy’s cohorts snickered until she glared at them. I wish I could say I was never teased again. I was still made fun of, but much, much less often. And Amy never spoke to me again.

  Finally, graduation came. A perfect procession of tiny girls all in white dresses, followed by slightly taller boys in their smart blue blazers and ties. But right there, dead center, was a giant Freak. But for once I didn’t care. People could stare all they wanted, because never again would I have to sit through a plodding, endless mass right before lunchtime as my stomach made embarrassingly loud noises (the cafeteria was helpfully located directly beneath the church). Never again would I have to be taught English by a nun who knew less about books than I did. Never again would I want to die of shame as the loudspeaker screamed, “Miss Johnston, please report to your special education class,” to the entire school. And never, ever, again would I have to see Amy Grable. Apparently, she was sent to an all-girls Catholic high school, where I’m sure she continued mastering the fine art of torturing the special and unique.

  About thirteen years ago, on a break from filming 3rd Rock from the Sun in LA, I came back to Milwaukee for Christmas break. It was snowing like crazy, and out of boredom Julie and I decided to go to the local mall. Suddenly, I heard a scream so high-pitched and loud that I almost dropped my Orange Julius.

  “Oh. My. Gaaaad!”

  We quickly turned around and saw an overweight woman with pockmarked skin and dirty-blond hair, pointing at me, her mouth open. Even from fifteen feet away I could see she lived by the bold but erroneous credo “The more makeup you have on your face, the less people will look at your ass.”

  From the extreme volume of her voice and the feverishly excited look in her eyes, I assumed she must be a huge fan of 3rd Rock, and I promptly put on my “gracious and charming” face. That’s when Julie, who has an encyclopedic memory of almost everyone who’s ever lived in our area, urgently whispered, “Wait, Kristen!”

  “What?” I said, smile planted on, as the woman hustled toward us.

  “That’s Amy O’Connor, she used to be Amy Grable.”

  “Wha. . .?”

  Holy crap. I stopped in my tracks. “Used to be” was a shocking understatement. This hideously over-made-up horror show bore zero resemblance to the gorgeous girl I had always secretly held up as the Ideal of Beauty.

  She hugged me. For a long time. A very, very long time. I looked at my sister for help, but she was hysterically laughing behind a fake bush. My eyes watered as the overwhelming stench of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds singed my nostril hairs. Thankfully, Amy finally released me, and she giddily introduced me to her two sullen boys.

  There was an awkward pause. I glared at the plastic bush. Julie, you are fucking dead in two minutes. All of a sudden, Amy did something I shall never, ever forget as long as I live. She fished around in her enormous purse and took out a pen and a receipt. Oh, no, please not my number, I thought as she held them out to me. But then, as if she were terrified of being rude (oh, dollface, I’m afraid that ship has sailed), she asked me for my autograph.

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Sure, why not?” I replied magnanimously, while inside I was screaming, Haha, hahaha, you ugly cow! I win! I win! Ding, dong, the queen is dead! Then I wrote:

  Oh, come on—I’m kidding! I would never do that, mostly due to the woman standing right in front of me. Because of her, I have an intimate understanding of how utterly devastating words can be. Besides, my mama raised me better than that. So instead, I wrote:

  She lumbered happily away. Sensing I was going into shock, Julie sat me down on a cement bench outside the Gap. I just can’t believe it.

  “I’m getting a fake tattoo, want one?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “What, how fat she is?”

  “No. Well, yes. But mostly I can’t believe that for the very first time in, like, twenty years, I’m so grateful I’m not her.”

  Julie laughed. “Well, duh!” and walked over to the tattoo stand.

  But Julie had been pretty, petite, kind, and popular. Therefore, one would think I would have despised her or at the very least been eaten alive with jealousy. However, even though Julie may have looked like an angel, she’d also been blessed with the dirtiest mouth of anyone I’ve ever met in my life. And the fact that she thought I was the funniest human alive didn’t hurt, either. Regardless, despite how cool Julie was, there was no possible way I could explain how I felt to a girl who had once been crowned homecoming queen.

  As I sat there on that cement bench, next to a plastic fern, it struck me that maybe I had triumphed, after all. Not because of dumb stuff like looks or fame or success. Or even lack of body odor. Maybe I had triumphed because instead of crushing me, this person had unwittingly forced me to become someone interesting. A person who knows that the greatest curse in life is when it’s handed to you on a silver platter. Someone who knows it’s so much better to have to fight for what you want. Someone who understands that the more people tell you you’re going to fail, the more you’re driven to prove them wrong. And at the end of the day, funny and interesting will always kick pretty and perfect’s ass.

  I mean, think about it—if there weren’t people like her to torture people like me, would people like me even exist?

  Now, I wish what I’d written was this:

  three

  ANYONE BUT ME

  I think once you’ve been different, you remain overly sensitive to being labeled for the rest of your life. After all, isn’t label just a fancy word for name-calling? I’ve always found it kind of weird that even though I was incessantly bullied about it throughout childhood and am still reminded of it constantly to this day, my height never occurs to me until someone says something. Which is daily. I’ll be innocently walking my dog, Pinky, and some dashing gent will walk by me and feel the need to say, “Damn, you one BIG girl!” and only then will I think, Oh, that’s right. I’m not normal. I’m one BIG girl. The only other time it occurs to me is when I’m talking to another tall person, but even then it’s only because I’m thinking, Well, isn’t that nice, my neck doesn’t hurt! And then, as she walks away, I think smugly, Damn, she is one BIG girl.

  We like to assume we outgrow labels when we become grown-ups. But for most of us, it’s just not true. “The Goth” has become “The Soccer Mom.” “The Nerd” has blossomed into “The Rich Guy Married to a Playboy Bunny.” “The Bad Boy” is now “A Registered Sex Offender.” And “The Football Hero” throws it all away to become “A Fat Drunk.” I do it, too. It’s human nature, I guess. It’s easier for us to put a label on someone; for some weird reason it makes us feel better about ourselves. As if putting others in a definable little box gives us power over them and keeps us from having to admit that we’re miserable in our own skin. Just like in high school, labels are always said with a hint of derision and judgment. “She’s just an artist”; “He’s really gay”; “There goes that hick”; or “Damn, that is one BIG girl.”

  I can’t remember my first drink. All I know about alcohol was that, like the perfect pair of Levi’s, it felt as if it had been there my whole life. I loved drinking, being drunk, and all drunk people. Suddenly, my voice wasn’t the loudest in the room, and my terrible habit of blurting out comments without editing them first was now “the funniest thing ever!”

  Once I got to high school in the early eighties, I worked very hard to make sure I was no longer the Jolly Green anything. I was now the Party Animal/Drama Nerd! I know, I know, they don’t usually go together. But I think I made it work beautifully. For example, when I played Smitty in How to Succeed in Business Witho
ut Really Trying, I always had a loud, drunken cheering section. Since then, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for a tipsy audience.

  Things had definitely improved since grade school, but physically I was still a disaster. I was never the girl boys liked. I became the girl boys talked to about the girl they liked. I can’t imagine why. After all, what’s hotter than an enormous, sexless loudmouth with a bad perm who can outdrink the entire football team? Blind fools.

  In my high school, drinking was just what everyone did. Because I grew up just outside of the city known as “the beer capital of the universe,” all one needed to buy a six-pack of beer was two dollars and a hilariously bad fake ID. In the eighties, all this entailed was writing 1965 with a black marker over 1967 on your driver’s license. There weren’t a lot of drugs around, just a little pot, but there was always booze, and lots of it. We mostly drank on the weekends, but as I got older, it became more pervasive. By the time I was a senior, birthdays were just an excuse for all of us to get breakfast at the local Howard Johnson. We would all pour vodka into our glasses of orange juice under the table, and then go to school hammered. I’m not quite sure what the point was; however, we thought it was just fantastic.

  I still loved acting, even more than drinking. Most of the time. Even though my biggest dream of becoming a FAMOUS ACTRESS was still all-consuming, over the years I had tacked on another goal: to someday move to my favorite city in the universe, New York, and then become a FAMOUS ACTRESS. When I was a kid, I loved Judy Blume books, but not for the mild pornographic elements that intrigued everyone else. I would read them because they were either set in New York, or in New Jersey, which was right next to New York. In high school, countless hours of other were devoted to imagining my future life there.

  Even with my continued devotion to other, I somehow managed to just scrape through math and science, and for a “former retard” I scored high enough on the SATs to get into NYU’s Tisch School of Drama. Two of my dreams were coming true: I was going to learn how to become a FAMOUS ACTRESS, and I was living in my dream city while doing it.

  It was on my very first day of NYU that my life and goals changed forever. That was the day I met the most magical, complicated, and influential man of my life: David. He was my age, but far smarter and turned me on to all things brilliant and fabulous and funny. He was terrifyingly smart, and no one I have ever met in my life has ever made me laugh harder than he did. He adored the film critic Pauline Kael and introduced me to Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Brian De Palma. I’m only slightly ashamed to say that my happiest memories of college were spent in his dorm room (usually smoking pot), watching movies like Mommie Dearest, Imitation of Life, The Fan, Dressed to Kill, The Exorcist, and Eyes of Laura Mars. He remains to this day my favorite stage actor of all time. I sometimes wonder what kind of boring actress I’d be if I hadn’t met him.

  Apropos of nothing, he was the first man to ever tell me I was beautiful. He was gay, but when you’ve spent your whole life desperately wishing someone would saw your legs off at the knee, a compliment’s a compliment. Up until then, I had been saddled with the one label all girls fear: I had a “good personality.” Ick. Translation: I was funny, smart, and repulsive. Once I moved to New York City, however, my height started to become a positive thing. It took a while for it to sink in. A tiny, adorable girl would come up to me at a party and say, “I would give anything to be your height!” and it was only after I’d say, “Shut the fuck up, you midget bitch,” and she’d burst into tears, that I understood that she’d meant it.

  It was also in New York that I discovered that having a good personality was, in itself, an attractive quality. I was starting to blossom, finally. By the time I was in my early twenties, and if I was having an especially good hair day, I could (if one squinted) be described as “decent looking” and occasionally even “striking.” Okay, only my mom called me striking. But gay men? Gay men used words like “gorgeous!,” “stunning!,” and “beautiful!” Which might have something to do with why my relationships with gay men tend to be more successful than my relationships with straight men.

  And it all started with David. Also because of him, my ambition slowly morphed into a fierce desire to be good. Which, I suppose, included famousness, but to me all that really meant at the time was that people would compliment me a lot, and that I could afford a summer home in Maine.

  Looking back, I think one of the happiest times in my life was after NYU, when I was a “Waitress-Slash-Out-of-Work Actor.” Everyone I knew was in the same boat, so it was a tight club of warriors whose members included just about everyone I loved. And hated. And was jealous of. And was proud of. And hated.

  We all worked our asses off. We’d hold down miserable jobs and spend every free moment hanging our own lights in some Lower East Side, rat-infested shithole, handing out flyers, headshots, and meager résumés to anyone we could. I was a member of the Atlantic Theater Company, which is now a massively successful and powerful theater and production company. But back then, things were very different. We’d spend our summers in Vermont, producing and acting in plays, and sometimes bringing a play back to New York.

  There were three gorgeous blondes in Atlantic who had seniority over me, which meant for four or five years I was Cinderella. I’d be the prop girl, or the assistant director, or sometimes run lines with one of the blondes. Sometimes I was thrown a bone and at the end of the summer I’d be given a role or two in the annual evening of one acts, which is where the playwright Howard Korder saw me perform.

  Thank God he did, because when I was twenty-four, he gave me my first “big break.” He decided to let Atlantic produce his brilliant new play The Lights, and only because of his insistence that I get cast in one of the pivotal roles. “Rose” was an exceptional part—a bossy, mean, sad, funny, very angry lush. Surprisingly, the role fit me like a glove. We did it in Burlington, Vermont, and I was just ecstatic. I remember thinking, There’s nothing that can top this!

  Turns out, as usual, I was wrong. The producers from the Lincoln Center Theater, Bernie Gersten and André Bishop, came up to Vermont to see The Lights and decided to move it right into their small theater, the Mitzi Newhouse, at LINCOLN EFFING CENTER! It wasn’t a smashing success, but it was the moment I was sure I was finally making it. I was right this time.

  Someone from the Carsey-Werner Company (producers of shows like Roseanne and That ’70s Show, among many others) came to New York and decided to see the play. The next day, he called my agent to say they were developing a show in the next year or two that starred John Lithgow as an alien and that I might be right for one of the roles. Wait a minute, sir. Are you saying that in a year, I’d MAYBE be allowed to audition to play an alien with that creepy guy from Cliffhanger and Raising Cain? What an honor, I’ll just sit here and wait for your call!

  Yeah, right, like that would ever happen.

  And of course, because I’m always wrong, it did. Once 3rd Rock became a huge success, one would think that I would’ve been giddy to be showered with the labels that came next. Especially after working so hard. I mean, hello! Who the hell wouldn’t? Therefore, imagine my overwhelming confusion and crushing disappointment when I discovered that the words “famous,” “star,” or “celebrity” did not suit me at all. In fact, all they really left me with was an overpowering fear that people would discover what I really was: a Freak in sheep’s clothing. They’re labels that bring to mind the kind of gorgeous, perfect, soulless, egomaniacal, self-absorbed people I laugh at and judge just as harshly as you.

  Not only that, but it always felt as if they must be talking about some stranger, a fur-sheathed glamour-puss who gets a French mani/pedi every morning, has an entire closet devoted simply to her shoes, and pettily tosses her hairbrush at her maid’s skull whenever the mood strikes her.

  One of the most unsettling aspects was to suddenly be considered a babe. After a lifetime of knowing I was a dog, when scripts for 3rd Rock would say, �
�All the men can’t speak, Sally’s so hot” or “Sally enters. Jaws drop” and the like, I was honestly baffled and terrified. I was positive that one day the producers would wake up and think, What the fuck are we doing? Let’s see if Brooke Shields or someone actually hot is available! And I’d immediately be shipped back to dogtown, where I belonged.

  Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing 3rd Rock. The acting part. It was just everything else that came with it that threw me for a big fat loop. Honestly, I suppose I just didn’t think the whole “famous” thing through well enough. I assumed that one could be “famous” whenever one felt like it, then go back to normal the rest of the time. It was a sad day when I had to acknowledge that I loved everything about being a FAMOUS ACTRESS except the FAMOUS part.

  I’m quite aware that it’s probably a bit of a stretch for anyone to feel any sympathy for the trials and tribulations of being “famous,” in fact, I think I just vomited a little in my mouth, so I won’t loiter here long. But before I move on, have any of you ever marveled at the sheer number of “famous” people who, since pretty much the dawn of show biz, have been cursed with drug addiction, sex addiction, or alcoholism? Or who’ve purposely sabotaged a career most people would (and do) murder to have? Or who’ve died a horrible, early death? Very often all of the above?

  It has definitely struck me, but then one of my favorite books of all time is Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. When a highly sensitive person with low self-esteem and a deep-seated need for approval becomes overnight famous, is suddenly “celebrated” everywhere they go, is stalked by knuckleheads with long-range lenses, and then is given truckloads of disposable income, the end result can be a human being who is simply a shell, a hologram of who they once were. They are now creatures consumed by an unrelenting emptiness that nothing will fill.