Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (20 page)

So I asked myself: How will I feel every time I look in the mirror and see my altered looks staring back? I am the only one who will have to live with this decision. The doctors, the agents, the managers, the producers, my parents will all go home at the end of the day. I will be left alone with my nose and my boobs for the rest of my life. And even if my new looks helped me achieve the career of my dreams, would I spend my life worrying about whether I was popular for my acting or for my plastic boobs? Here’s a dark thought: imagine people telling you that you’re beautiful and fabulous and that they love you, but you know that they’ve never seen the
real
you.

Suddenly, I was overcome with a feeling of peace. I had made a decision and wasn’t the least bit confused about it anymore. I thanked Mr. Fairbanks and God and went home. I told my parents I’d thought about it, and I wasn’t going to do it; if I had to starve to death with this nose and these boobs, so be it. They didn’t put up much of a fuss. They may have privately fantasized about having a perfect sex-symbol daughter with a perfect nose and perfect tits, but they were not prepared to drag me to a surgeon against my will. They had taken their best shot, and it was simply no sale.

While I was trying to figure out my future, I moved out of my parents’ house and bought my own two-bedroom condo in West Hollywood, just above the Sunset Strip. I had cashed in my trust fund, and money was burning a hole in my pocket. I had an interior decorator fill the rooms with all this absurdly fancy Queen Anne furniture. I don’t know what I was thinking. The show was being rerun both in prime time and in syndication at this point, so the residuals checks were pouring in. I was a thousandaire! I had money and, for the first time in my life, no family to feed or share the bathroom with.

I loved the idea of being “on my own,” but, frankly, I was never alone. I was surrounded by not only the occasional kooky live-in boyfriend but a never-ending parade of out-of-work actors, trust-fund brats, and assorted visiting Canadians and Euro trash. They all seemed to be trying to “find themselves,” and for some reason they all decided to begin their search from the comfort of my living room couch. I invited them, of course. It was actually a great system. True, none of them ever paid rent or a phone bill or anything like that (hence, my pad became known as “Auntie Alison’s Home for Wayward Boys”), but they fulfilled a number of important functions. First off, it was very difficult for me to find friends my own age who were not completely weirded out by the fact that I had money. I know everyone thinks that if you become rich and famous you’ll have more friends. It’s not true. Getting a lot of money, especially very suddenly, actually alienates most people, who worry that you won’t want to be their friend anymore, or who feel like failures by comparison. Not knowing quite what to say, they start to drift away. For the first few months after buying my own place, I couldn’t tell if I’d cashed in on my trust fund or caught a contagious disease.

So gradually, these other people appeared. Most were nineteen or twenty and didn’t have jobs. Those who did worked part time as waiters or movie ushers. But they all owned new cars and nice clothes and seemed utterly unconcerned about money—mine or theirs. They had apartments but preferred hanging out at my place. But they never commented on the size of the place, the furniture, or asked how much it cost or how I paid for it. They didn’t care. For them, money was something people simply
had.
They were trust-fund kids.

It was the most blessed relief to sit around all night (well, all night, all day, all the next night—we didn’t have a lot to do) with people who didn’t give a flying one that I had more money than any kid my age should or that I was on TV. Actually, we didn’t care about much. We became the Condo of Lost Souls. We had a schedule of sorts:
Twilight Zone
reruns started at eleven a.m.,
Al—ed Hitchcock Presents
was later, pizza was ordered in between. We were on a first-name basis with the manager of every pizza place in Hollywood and began inviting them to parties. We also made a lot of Jell-O, those big, solid Knox Blox. We didn’t eat all of it; some of it was for throwing. If we decided that a particular TV personality was annoying, we would throw blocks of Jell-O at the screen. We even had a color-coding system signifying which shade of Jell-O was appropriate for which celebrity.

My new friends stayed at my apartment on and off, in droves. The record was eight at once: one person sleeping with me in my bed, two people in the spare bedroom, three on the pullout sofa, one on the floor in the living room next to them, and one on the balcony. (The one on the balcony was not there by choice; he had annoyed us and was in exile.) Some came to my house to get sane, others to go crazy.

At first, I rejoiced in my newfound free time. I was giddy with the idea that I had nowhere to be. I could sleep, I could party, I could do whatever I damn pleased because I had no daily grind, no set to report to, no lines to memorize. My life was like a never-ending vacation. But then, all of a sudden, one day about a year after I left
Little House,
my past hit me like a ton of bricks. I had time to think, and all of the issues that I had willfully avoided came flooding over me in a tidal wave of fear, dread, and anxiety.
Little House
had been such a great escape for seven years; I had been blissfully distracted. I had had no time to think about what my brother had done to me, or even to allow those feelings to bubble close to the surface.

But now I had plenty of time to think about it. I hit a period around age twenty when I had not a single job on the horizon. I was auditioning for all kinds of nonsense, but it seemed that every part I read for required me to play a cheerleader, someone naked, someone dead, or a ghastly combination of all three. Yet not even these bleak prospects came to fruition. I was suddenly confronted full force with my old demons. The feelings not only bubbled up, they drowned me. I had trouble sleeping at night: my heart raced for no reason, I broke out in a mysterious rash, and I often felt so anxious I thought I might pass out from the stress.

I had blocked out my emotions for so long, I’d assumed they had gone away. But when you’re abused, the pain doesn’t just “go away.” It sinks down under the surface, invisible to casual observers. You might even convince your best friends that you’re okay, but the pain is still there, growing like a seething tumor. Abuse lives on in the very cells of your body, carved into the neural pathways of your brain. Your friends can’t see the scars, but they are present every minute of every day.

Now I found myself in a very dark place, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. But I was depressed and scared. I felt like I wanted to die. I was throwing up all the time. It wasn’t bulimia; I knew I wasn’t fat, and I wasn’t putting my finger down my throat. If anything, at 102 pounds, I was emaciated. When I heard on the news that Karen Carpenter had died from anorexia, I was taken aback to hear that she had outweighed me by six pounds. I knew I had to do something.

I was a little skittish about going to a doctor, so I went to one of the few physicians who I knew for sure wasn’t nuts—my gynecologist. Being a Hollywood doctor, she did have an immediate prepared response. As soon as I said I was unhappy, had trouble sleeping, and was feeling anxious all the time, she chirped brightly, “I can get you some Valium!” I realized that a bottle of pills was probably what most of her patients really wanted. But it was just what I was trying to avoid, and I told her so.

“Yes, I’m sure you could. And I’m sure I could take them. Lots and lots and lots of them, every day for the rest of my life. Which is exactly the road I am trying not to go down.”

“
Ohhh,
” she said, understanding perfectly, “you actually want to
do
something about your problems!

“In that case,” she continued, “take this number. She’s a therapist, her office is upstairs from me. She’s great.” I did. And she was.

I had heard about how people spent years in therapy and never got around to telling the therapist what was really going on in their lives. I always thought that was a strange thing to do, especially at those prices. I couldn’t imagine shelling out a couple of hundred dollars to sit around for an hour and lie to a total stranger. Maybe I’m just cheap, but it seemed like a waste.

So I walked in for my first appointment, sat down, and said, “Hi. My-name-is-Alison-my-father’s-gay-and-I-was-sexually-molested-as-a-child. Can you do anything for me?” She stared at me for a minute and said, “Can you come in three times a week?”

“That bad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

With the trust fund and the residuals, I had the money. I certainly had the time for intensive therapy, and unlike some people, I really did have the inclination. I was only too happy to go in three days a week and spill my guts psychologically. I was spilling them physically several times a day anyway, so what the hell did I have to lose?

And the treatment worked. I didn’t miraculously get better overnight, but even within days of just talking about what was bothering me, I stopped throwing up. My therapist asked me to promise not to kill myself, which wasn’t a difficult promise for me to make. I didn’t want to actually kill myself. I just wanted to stop feeling like I
should.

She said that many people don’t start dealing with the things I was talking about until they’re in their forties. To show up all by myself at twenty—without being sent or hospitalized—was an accomplishment on its own. She didn’t insist that I talk to my parents, but suggested, since I was so young, and they did live just down the street, that maybe asking about “the gay thing” and seeing how much they knew about the sexual abuse would be useful in my therapy.

I didn’t like the idea at first, but suddenly, the issue came up in a context my parents could grasp: an audition. I was asked to try out for a movie about a girl who was sexually abused as a child. The script was terrible, and the film never did get made. But my parents thought it was a meaty role and insisted that I audition for it. I didn’t want to—and I told them why.

I talked to my mom first. She came over to my condo, no doubt thinking it was just some sort of stage fright, or lack of confidence, fully prepared to give me a pep talk on why I would be great in this film and had nothing to worry about. I explained I didn’t want to get up and perform this scenario on screen because I already had experienced it in real life. I told her what Stefan had done. I reminded her that I had repeatedly begged not to be left alone with him.

She was silent for a few seconds. Then she said simply, “
Oh, shit
.”

Well, I gotta give credit where credit is due: at least my mother believed me. In fact, she was suitably appalled and upset. I had for years questioned whether, at worst, she knew what was going on and condoned it, or suspected and actively chose to ignore it, or, at best, really was in the dark. But when I heard and saw her reaction that day, I knew she’d been clueless. Nobody is that good an actress; she was in shock. She assured me I could simply forget about this entire audition nonsense at once and that she would tell my father immediately. Since we were on the subject, I had to ask, “Oh, by the way, he
is
gay, right?”

She explained that indeed he was, but it was all on the up and up, as far as she was concerned. He’d never lied about it, and she didn’t mind. I told her that the endless denials on this subject had been rather confusing, to say the least, and she said she was sorry about that, but they had been told back in the old days that they shouldn’t tell the kids. They thought they were doing me a favor.

My therapist was pleased with my conversation with my parents and saw it as progress, but she wasn’t done. She wanted me to now confront Stefan. It was the ’80s, and everyone was so full of “forgiveness” and “healing” and “reconciliation,” it had become a downright fashion statement. I didn’t think we were exactly going to “kiss and make up,” but I didn’t like the idea that my brother could do all those horrible things to me every day for years and expect me just to forget about it and let him get away with it. Did he really think his behavior was acceptable? Had he blocked it all out? My curiosity overrode my fear, and I decided there was only one way to find out. I had to talk to him.

Stefan was sober now, or so he said. Well, he was changed. He had recently fallen—or jumped, or was thrown?—out of a third-story window and woken up in the hospital in traction with metal pins in his body. That would definitely kill anyone’s buzz. He was clearly no longer doing the mountains of drugs he had been doing in his teen years and early twenties, so I figured maybe there was hope. To break the ice, my mother talked to him first so he knew what was coming. I didn’t initiate the conversation in person. With his long history of physical violence toward anyone who even so much as contradicted him, I wasn’t taking that chance. Over the years, he’d beaten most of his girlfriends black and blue, and he wasn’t above fighting his own mother—he’d even caused her to break her arm once by shoving her during an altercation. So I played it safe and called him on the phone.

At first, I thought I had gotten lucky. I expected denial, loss of memory, threats, yelling. I wasn’t getting any of that. Stefan remembered the abuse, all right, and he admitted to everything. He said he was “very sick,” and he blamed the drugs and alcohol. He even said he understood if I never wanted anything to do with him.

Just when I thought I had witnessed a miracle of reconciliation, that he understood how much he had hurt me, would never do anything like this to anyone again, and maybe even felt bad about his behavior, he had to go and keep talking. He didn’t say he was sorry. He said: “Sexually molesting you was the greatest sexual experience of my life, and everything else has been downhill from there.”

Really, that’s what he said. He was dead, cold sober. As totally aghast as I was at this statement, I had the presence of mind to reply: “Wow. You
really
need to get out more.”