Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  MY DAD WAS living with Morgan in Redondo Beach, and we went to visit them—he wouldn’t let Morgan come to our place. Ginny was behind the wheel in the yellow Cadillac she had managed to hang on to from Diskin, with Landi along for the ride in back. I sat in the passenger seat, explaining to Landi the complicated history of my parents’ relationship, which I had put together from years of snooping around. For instance, I knew from poking through the metal fireproof box where documents were stored that my birth certificate was dated November 11, 1962, and that the date on my parents’ marriage license was February 1963—which at first I had assumed was a mistake: it should have said February 1962, nine months before I was born. But I’d since realized that they don’t make mistakes on that kind of thing. Obviously, it took Ginny a while to get divorced from that guy Charlie she was with when my dad went to college, so she could marry my dad, who got her pregnant with me, and . . .

  I stopped. I turned toward my mother. And out of my mouth came the words, “Is he my real father?” Somewhere deep down, though, I already knew the answer.

  She snapped, “Who told you that?” But nobody told me. Nobody had to.

  A flood of questions came into my head. Who else knows about this? Everybody, as it turned out: all my cousins, even the younger ones, knew that Danny was not my biological father. I thought of all the times I’d told them about the ways I was like him, how I inherited my eye problems from him, my love of spicy food, and they had stood there, looking at me, knowing I was clueless, deluded. Why wasn’t I ever told? “Because your dad never wanted you to know,” Ginny said. “He made everyone promise because he thought you wouldn’t feel the same about him.”

  Ten minutes later, we were at my dad’s impersonal stucco two-bedroom apartment. My mother dropped the bomb the second we walked in the door: “Demi knows.” In no time, she had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she seemed high on the drama of the situation—the power it had given her to hurt him.

  He avoided meeting my eyes. He looked numb. It was only one in the afternoon, but he had likely polished off a six-pack before we got there.

  Nobody asked me if I was okay, or if I had questions. Neither of my parents seemed to care about what this revelation meant to me.

  They went into the bedroom and kept fighting, or maybe they started having sex . . . with them there was always a fine line.

  I felt exposed and stupid and somehow dirty. So I did what they’d taught me to do when the shit hit the fan. I got in the car and took off. Not for good—yet. I had nowhere to go but back to my mother’s apartment. But I was practicing.

  Chapter 4

  Not long after the bombshell dropped, I was visiting my aunt Choc in Amarillo, Texas. I told her that I knew about my dad. “It’s about time,” she said. She’d always liked my biological father, Charlie, she told me, and had happy memories from the time she spent with him and my mother. “You know, he lives in Texas,” she added. “We could try calling him.” She did, and the next day he showed up at her door. I didn’t know what to feel or how to behave: he was a stranger, but he was my father. He was handsome, about five-ten, with brown hair, probably around thirty-five years old at the time. I looked to see where I might connect. In fact, my eye problem was something I’d inherited from my father—this father. He had been devastated, he told me, when my mom left him, and he had always wanted to meet me.

  I was fourteen, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with this situation. And it only got worse: Ginny showed up. Never content to let drama unfold without her at its center, she got on a plane the second Choc told her that Charlie was coming. When she arrived, she whisked Charlie off into a room alone. I spent the entire day compulsively rolling joints and smoking them, acting like I was just fine and didn’t need a thing.

  Charlie, on the other hand, was excited, and invited me to come and visit him and meet my grandparents and half siblings. A few months later, I flew to Houston and he picked me up at the airport—with his mistress. He dropped her off on the way to see his parents, who were so happy to meet me; they’d always wanted to, they said. As it turned out, my grandma Marie had snuck them a few photos over the years, knowing how much it would mean to them. I stayed with them that night.

  Charlie’s wife felt insecure—and rightfully so: he’d introduced me to his mistress first—and was reluctant to meet me. I went over to his house on my second day to meet her and my half siblings—one of whom was a brother from yet another one of Charlie’s marriages who looked exactly like a male version of me. It was awkward. I didn’t know where I fit in or even why I was there. I left feeling clear about one thing: Charlie may have been my biological father, but Danny was my dad.

  The justification for having kept my paternity a secret from me was that Danny feared that if I found out, I would feel differently about him. But the reality was that once I knew, he pulled away from me. Even before my parents’ split, he had become distant, withdrawing into drinking and drugs. And, of course, once they decided to divorce, it was my brother he couldn’t live without, not me. But after my discovery, our relationship completely deteriorated. He ceased making any effort to see me; he stopped calling; when we did see each other—when my mom and I visited Morgan—he barely looked at me and his hugs were awkward and forced. He was just . . . gone.

  DISCOVERING THAT I’D been lied to my entire life about something so profound wasn’t great for my relationship with my mother, either. Whatever fragile trust we had shared was shattered now that I realized she had gotten pregnant with me when she was still with Charlie, and then just come up with a lie that was more convenient than the truth. But like every child in history who has been let down time and again by her parents, I held out the irrational hope that my mother would change and become someone I could count on.

  Instead, one afternoon when I came home from school, I found her sprawled across the bed, surrounded by empty pill bottles. I remember calling the hospital for an ambulance in a kind of frozen trance, a dissociated state that would become increasingly familiar to me as years passed, in which I would leave my body and just cope without really being present. An ambulance came and took us to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. Everyone in the building saw the arrival of the paramedics and her departure from the apartment on a gurney. I was somehow simultaneously embarrassed, numb, and terrified.

  My mother survived that incident. But her faux suicide attempts became a regular occurrence, a routine. Back would come the emergency medical teams with their sirens and gurneys, and off we’d go to get her stomach pumped again. She didn’t want to die: she was crying out for help, and she wanted attention. Often, her overdoses followed some sort of devastating interaction with my dad. The man I thought of as my dad, anyway.

  I was in a constant state of anxious vigilance. I never knew what I’d find when I walked through that apartment door: my mother’s self-destructiveness was boundless, narcissistic, and unstoppable. And yet I was developing armor: I took comfort in my ability to deal with her crises and the knowledge that I could handle whatever came my way. I never felt I was going to fall apart, never turned to anybody and said, “I can’t take this.” I could get through anything she threw at me: if she tried to kill herself; if I had to peel her off of a bar stool; if she told me Danny wasn’t my real dad. I would survive, no matter what. But I would survive by being on guard. And then, when crisis struck, by exiting my body: functional but frozen.

  Everyone knew about my mother in our apartment complex, of course, and I adopted an invulnerable, self-sufficient persona in response. My character was on her own, unfettered by curfews or rules. Every time I tossed off “My mother doesn’t care if I . . .” or “I can do whatever I want . . .,” I rode the wave of that dubious freedom, but I also felt the emptiness of it. I did not feel particularly sympathetic toward Ginny. Even as a fourteen-year-old I realized that her self-absorption and “suicide attempts” came at my expense.

  Her accelerating self-destructiveness lent an urgency
to my attempts to define myself in opposition to her. I’m a different person, I kept telling myself. I’m not like that. But the insecurity that had been nipping at my heels was intensifying.

  I was the girl whose mother was always trying to kill herself. I was the girl who’d been abandoned by two fathers. My wandering eye suddenly seemed like an obvious physical manifestation of the truth about me: I was just off, and everyone could tell. I had surgery just before I turned fifteen that finally fixed my eye, but in my own mind, I remained marked as broken.

  All of this coincided with puberty. My transformation from a skinny, lazy-eyed kid to a young woman who men desired was confusing. The unfurling of my sexuality was linked for me on the deepest level with shame. It would be decades before I could even begin to disentangle the two.

  I STARTED SPENDING time with a couple of guys who lived down the hall and were very friendly to me. They were older, in their mid- to late twenties, but I thought I could impress them and join their crowd by acting cooler and more mature than I actually was. I was alone a lot in my mother’s apartment, and sometimes they’d stop by to visit, or I’d wander down the hall and hang out with them at their place.

  One evening, I was in their apartment drinking beer, and we were all flirting. It was fun at first: I was still quite innocent, just beginning to discover the effect I had on guys. But I wasn’t in any way prepared for the consequences. One of them made a move, and the other one disappeared. That was evidently what he had wanted from me all along, and somehow, I felt I had no choice, that it was my job to give it to him—like I was obligated to fulfill his expectation just because he harbored it. I blamed myself for acting provocative and older than my years.

  Afterward, I was left with the hollow, empty feeling of being used. A new kind of lonely.

  GINNY WAS NOT really interested in how I was doing at my vast new school, Fairfax High, and she didn’t care about my report card or even seem to register that such a thing existed. When we spent time together, it was as if we were a pair of girlfriends out on the town. She never offered me any guidance; there was no talk about college, for example, or discussion of my future. Instead, the conversation revolved around how unfairly life had treated her, what she had missed out on, and how she wanted to find the kind of relationship she deserved.

  She succeeded for a while when she took up with a great guy named Ron Felicia, who owned a recording studio. They actually had a seemingly healthy relationship, and he really grounded her for the short time they were together. For a few months, we even moved in with him. I didn’t have to change schools, though I wouldn’t have minded—I wasn’t really involved in anything at Fairfax High. By that point, I was numb to the whole high school scene and was just trying to get through it. I’d managed to make few friends out of the thousand kids who were my classmates. (I’m sorry not to have crossed paths with Flea or Anthony Kiedis, who were at Fairfax at that time but whom I didn’t befriend until decades later—though I seriously doubt I was cool enough to run with their crowd.)

  Through Ron, I met a guy who was kind of a pretty-girl-type agent. It was difficult to get work because I was inexperienced and underage: Helen Hunt, Jodie Foster—people like that had all been acting since they were very young. I was on the outside looking in at the entertainment industry, and as I had always done, I learned by the fake-it-till-you-make-it method. I’d love to say that the underlying drive came from a fascination with plays that I encountered in school, or from the thrill of performing classic roles in drama class. I wish that was how I came to acting, but, in truth, Hollywood was like one more school I had to figure out, one more system to game. I chipped away at it, trying to grasp how it worked. It would be years before I made a living as an actress, but that first agent did get me a small role on a TV show called Kaz playing a thirteen-year-old prostitute. My big first line that got me my SAG card was, “Fifty dollars, mister.”

  As much as my mother wanted a relationship with a kind man, and Ron Felicia was that, she couldn’t sustain it. Instead, she felt compelled to ruin it and managed to—dramatically—when Ron came home one day to find her in bed with my dad. Ron was understandably furious, punched Danny, and threw my mother out. She and I hastily moved to a little studio in Brentwood right off Sunset—I drive by it all the time, and I always feel a little pit in my stomach.

  There were always men. Ginny and I got a lot of attention from them when we went out together at night. I remember sitting at the bar at Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a trendy Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood. She was drinking too much and eyeing the guys at the bar flirtatiously. Whenever I recognized her boozy, blowsy come-hither look setting in I cringed. One of the men took the bait and came over to us. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. (It was Ginny’s favorite question.) “No.” She grinned. “This is my daughter.” The man protested that she couldn’t possibly be old enough to be my mother. And really, she wasn’t: she was a thirty-four-year-old woman with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She chuckled as he leered at me.

  I was beginning to resent my role as her bar companion; it seemed like she was just using me as bait for these men—and as her designated driver, albeit one without a license.

  When I look back, it’s incredible that we never got caught, but then again, in those days Ginny could have taught a master class at defying expectations (and odds). For somebody who was getting by on a thread, all the apartments we moved into, though small, were clean, often newly built, and generally in safe neighborhoods. We were never “slumming it.” Maybe she was continuing the game she and my father used to play, staying one jump ahead of the landlords by using aliases, but whatever the reason, in the first two years after my parents split, we moved seven times. One move was a matter of safety, after a guy she’d been dating got angry at her: I came home from school one day to find all the electrical wires cut and the smell of urine in our apartment. He’d come by and marked every corner of the place, like a dog.

  The stress of being on the run from apartment to apartment was contributing, I’m sure, to my mother’s instability as well as my own anxiety. One night when I came home late, she was waiting by the door. “Where have you been? You know you’re supposed to be home by eleven,” she shrieked. Home by eleven? Never once had she mentioned a curfew or asked where I’d been or where I was going. When I gave her some smart-ass rejoinder, she raised her hand to hit me. I lost it. “How dare you suddenly try to be a mother!” I yelled at her. “Everything’s about you! So don’t pretend for a minute you care about me and what time I come home.” And instead of her slapping me, I slapped her. It felt good. She never raised a hand toward me again.

  THE WORST COLLATERAL damage from all these moves was my education. When I went back to Fairfax to sign up for tenth-grade courses after our short stint in Brentwood, there were none available, at least not to me. I needed to make up credits, the school explained, and those courses were all filled. Why no one had told me about my lack of credits before I have no idea. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe I didn’t.

  The choices Fairfax presented to me were either to take noncredit courses like driver’s ed or to switch to a special “continuation” school that was attached to Fairfax and attended by kids who were misfits or had drug issues or learning disabilities. I didn’t fit into any of those categories, but that was the school I opted to attend, and I surprised myself by actively liking it and doing quite well there.

  One thing was clear: I had to figure out a way to support myself so I could start leading my own life and escape from the crazy unpredictability of my mother’s. And that’s exactly what the continuation school offered: I entered a program called “four and four,” which entailed four hours of classes and four hours of paid work, for which you earned credit. My very first job, which I got through a girlfriend at school, was with a collection agency. My slightly husky voice made me sound older than my age, and every afternoon I called and threatened people to pay up, or else. I kept waiting for my mom and dad to appear on the call
lists.

  It felt good to have my own pocket money and not have to rely on my mother, and it enabled me to enroll in an acting class—which turned out to be my salvation.

  Chapter 5

  Despite her financial straits, from time to time my mom and her friends would hit L.A. hot spots like Le Dome, where Jackie Collins always went for lunch with her friends. We were there one night when a man who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties came over to our table and introduced himself as Val Dumas. He said if we liked Le Dome, we should come by his restaurant, Mirabelle, sometime. He had a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance; I remember thinking he resembled Bijan, that quintessentially eighties icon who was always splashed across billboards in a tuxedo flogging his perfume. Val was a tall, elegant man with an air of superiority or money—or both—dressed in a soft button-down shirt and neatly pressed slacks, and Italian loafers. He chatted us up for a while, and then when my mom couldn’t find her car keys, he offered us a ride home in his brown Mercedes but insisted I sit next to him in the passenger seat.

  I had lunch with him at Mirabelle not long afterward. There were lots of plants, it had a relaxed, California-casual vibe, and the whole thing felt fun and harmless: it was broad daylight, and we were in public. I didn’t question why a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a fifteen-year-old girl.

  He started showing up at school, waiting for me outside in his car after classes let out. It was easier not having to take the bus, and often we’d stop at Mirabelle and have something to eat at his regular table. I told myself he was like a friend of the family, but there was something about him that made me slightly uneasy—an unsettling sense I had that he wouldn’t always be so helpful and pleasant, a vague anxiety that there was something not quite right. I began to make excuses to avoid him.