Miss Fortune (3 page)

The lawyer opens the door to his office and motions for us to come in. We both stand, and he asks David if it's okay to speak with me alone for a moment.

“As Jason's stepmother, is there anything about this incident that you'd like to let me know about before I speak with you and David together?” The lawyer is thumbing through papers in his file and seems to be half listening and half thinking about lunch.

“Well, I'm not his stepmother, and his name is Jack, and no, I don't think so. I just know that this whole thing is going to be tough on David. I mean, he's been scared to set boundaries with Jack because of the guilt from Jack losing his mother. I've been begging David to bring Jack to therapy, but he just won't do it, and now, well, here we are.”

I nod toward the door, knowing that David is seated on the other side having a mini nervous breakdown.

The lawyer looks up from the file and asks me, “So you're a performer?”

His question strikes me as a bit out of left field. Perhaps I'll follow suit and ask him if he's ever seen a grown man cry.

I'm about to tell the lawyer that, yes, I am a performer, but today is maybe not the best day to discuss that, but if he wants more info he can look me up on IMDb after we leave. Before I can, though, he takes out a piece of legal paper from the file and starts reading it aloud.

“His dad's girlfriend had made a joke in a newspaper article about wanting to move a photo of his mother, who is dead, during sex, and when his dad confronted the girlfriend, Lauren, about making jokes like that in interviews, she brushed him off.” The lawyer stops reading and looks directly at me with his eyebrows raised. I want to speak but my throat is constricting. What is happening?

He continues, “According to Jack's girlfriend, whom we spoke to, to get some background, you were also interviewed by a newspaper for a theater show in New Jersey, and he read it online and saw that you made the same joke about Jack's deceased mother and when Jack told you how upset he was about it, you ignored him. Does that sound right?”

New Jersey. The lady from the Trenton paper had chided me for not providing better “newspaper-friendly quotes” about the play. To win her over, I'd started telling her my life story. Including the one about how when I was first dating David, I had to ask him to move the photos of Hannah that were right by his bed while we were having sex. She'd printed everything I'd said. Jack read the article and came into my room one night when David was gone and told me that he didn't want me writing or talking about his mother.

Oh god, now I'm remembering how I said to him, “I'm an artist, Jack. I write from my life. I talk about my life.” Oh god. How awful. He asked me why I did that. Why couldn't I make things up? Wasn't that what a good writer was? Someone who could create something? I'd defended myself instead of listening to what he had to say or caring about how hurt he'd been.

Now Jack is in juvie being ordered by gang members to hand over his pudding or else because of me.

I open my mouth to say “Excuse me” to the lawyer but no sound comes out. I mouth the words and run from his office. I run past David and out into the street and start sobbing.

David follows me out. He sits in the car with his arms around me.

“I really thought that this was all going to be pinned on you,” I cry into his shoulder.

“I know . . . ,” David says. “Me, too. And, listen, it's not you. He didn't steal your car to get back at you. I promise you that.” David's the calmest he's been since this whole thing began. I should have started sobbing years ago.

•   •   •

Jack's day in court is endless. Waiting for the trial to begin is almost as traumatic as the trial itself, because we're stuck doing nothing but sitting and worrying that the judge will send him to a work camp.

At the beginning of the trial, the judge asks for the family of Jack Thane to please stand. David stands up and I stand up right next to him. It's the first time that anyone has officially called us a family.

Eventually, Jack is released and we all walk out together into the blinding Los Angeles sun. Jack hugs his father and then, unable to look at me directly, tells the concrete sidewalk, “I'm sorry.” I
can't look at him either, so I tell the sidewalk to tell him, “It's okay, Jack. It's really okay. Now, let's eat.”

We find a Jamaican restaurant a block away from the jail. Jack tears up at lunch from the stress of what's just happened.

David and I wait until Jack's hands and eyeballs stop shaking and ask him what we've been dying to ask him: Why did he do it?

“Okay, first of all, Lauren always leaves her keys right out on the table, so I just grabbed them—that's why I took her car.” David kicks me under the table. “And I know I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but in the movies and stuff, nobody just pulls over. Everybody runs. Everybody.”

If only I had some pudding or a Jolly Rancher I could give to Jack. Some gesture of jail respect that spoke to him. Jack could so easily pin this on me and nobody would have blamed him for doing so, not even me, and he didn't.

“I'm so incredibly glad you're okay, but no, Jack. You don't run. When the cops show up, the gig is up. You aren't Lucky Lightning. You are Jack. Fifteen years old. You are not in a movie. You are like the rest of us assholes who have to follow the rules.”

Normally if I say or do anything remotely stern or parent-like with Jack, I run away right after I do it so I won't have to see the look of “Who do you think you are?” on his face. But considering the circumstances, running away now wouldn't be the best choice.

Jack nods. He looks tired but I can tell that he's so incredibly grateful to be sitting with us at a Jamaican restaurant across the street from juvie that he'd agree to anything.

Three months later, David and I are engaged. Every few weeks I still find a reason to scream “DISENGAGED!” But David and Jack both know I'm not going anywhere.

On a trip to visit Hannah's parents, Jack's grandparents, in Berkeley, California, David asks me to marry him. Looking out
over the East Bay Hills at a spot called Inspiration Point, he tells me how he's tired of living in fear. Tired of waiting to get things together before he goes after what he cares about. He tells me how difficult it was to find parking downtown when he went to pick up my engagement ring and how Abraham Lincoln's marriage to Mary was a rocky one mostly because he struggled with depression, which David was fairly sure he didn't struggle with, but man, did Lincoln go through a lot in his life.

His proposal covers a lot of different topics and goes on for so long I almost forget what his point is. But thank you, Jesus and Mary and Peter, Paul and the Mamas and the Papas he never once feels the need to tell me that I'm the love of his life. It's not necessary. I don't want to be the love of his life. I just want to be loved by him, preferably during my lifetime. If he had tried to stick that in, it would have felt scripted and forced, and I would have run like Lucky Lightening whether the police were chasing me or not.

A
t one point in my adult life, I owned a dog. He was a border collie mix named Carlos, who survived on a diet of couches and cat poop he dug out of the kitty litter.

Dog ownership wasn't something I understood. In my simple mind, owning a dog meant petting it, feeding it, and once in a while tying a sock around its head, hiding, and making it find you. That's what it had been like growing up with our schnauzer, Katie, so that's all I knew. Strangers would see me trying to walk him and yell, “Don't let him pull like that!” Carlos taught me a lot about what it meant to care for a living being. He also taught me that you can't choose a dog based on how soft their ears are—the breed is important.

Carlos taught me many life lessons, which is why when a certain storytelling show that airs on NPR asked me if I had a true story about pet ownership, I said, “Yes!” I'd always wanted to be on a radio show like
This American Life.
I'd actually come close a few years earlier but was bumped at the last minute when David Sedaris turned in a poem about Christmas told from the viewpoint of a squirrel.

It worried me that after I recorded the story for the show I'd be cut because my voice wasn't nerdy-sounding enough or, worse, that I sounded like a stand-up comic. My “fully covered by mediocre insurance” therapist, Judy, who I went to years ago, opened the door before each session and burst out laughing as soon as she saw me. “Oh, get in here, Lauren! Now what happened?” She referred to stories from my childhood as “bits.”

NPR is trustworthy. Good enough for Cokie Roberts, good enough for me.

The Carlos the Dog story had some “jokey” bits, but it was mostly just the journey of one misguided, self-absorbed woman-child in her twenties who adopts a dog. The theme of the episode was “domestication.” The host of the show told me that my story would be sandwiched between a woman talking about the greatest cat that ever lived and a story by a man whose pet chicken had been his childhood companion and role model.

The day after the show aired, I went to the NPR website to listen to it. “I'm so curious how they ended up editing it,” I said to myself.

This was a lie. I had no intention of listening to it. All I wanted to know was if the show had a message board and if people were talking about my story. I've read enough message boards in my life to know that there's always going to be a crazy man who lives in his basement reading the Bible to dolls he's dressed up in his mother's clothes who is going to write comments demanding that I burn in hell for not loving Jesus. My stepson, Jack, says that people talk shit about Martin Luther King Jr. on YouTube message boards. He shared this with me after he caught me collapsed on my keyboard mumbling, “Can't I have saggy titties
and
be a good actress?”

The comments loaded. I prepared myself.

I certainly wasn't a hero in the story, but who needs more
heroes? Apparently NPR does. I was not prepared. After the story aired, I received death threats from dog owners all over the world.

I'd assumed at least some of the comments would be at least sort of positive, maybe, if not glowing.

The less death-threaty ones went like this:

“What a self-centered obnoxious person. Not fun to listen to. She didn't learn a thing from it.”

“Her story was predictable and tired.”

“It was hard to listen to. Selfish nightmares like her shouldn't be allowed to own a dog.”

The rest of the comments were in praise of the chicken story.

“Loved the chicken story! What was the music used at the end?”

What?
I didn't try to drown Carlos in the river or sell him to a football player! I told myself it was because I'm a woman. People don't like stories about women who aren't sweet and nurturing. If a lady isn't a cat lady, then she's a bitch. Maybe what I needed was someone to offer to tenderly guide me through my next dog ownership. Someone to grab my hand and show me how to pet a dog properly, to guide me like Patrick Swayze teaching Jennifer Grey how to dance, “Shhhh . . . relax. It goes like this: [Pat, pat, rub. Pat, pat, rub.] See? Now you try it.” I immediately decided that the best way to deal with the onslaught of hate was to pretend it never happened. If anyone I knew actually had heard the story when it aired, I'd tell them it was Paula Poundstone and deny any involvement.

Two years later, I ran into Gary, the chicken-story teller. The first thing I did was ask him if he'd had any backlash after our stories
aired. I hadn't gone back to read the rest of the message boards after I'd read the comments about myself, but it was NPR—he must have offended somebody. Surely there was a community college philosophy professor out there, busy knitting sweater vests for his chicken companion, who didn't even hear the story but was set off by hearing the word “chicken,” assuming it was yet another story of chicken contempt.

Gary was too busy traveling the country getting paid to tell stories for the Moth storytelling series, and writing a movie for Disney about a chicken family, to indulge in self-flagellation.

“I didn't even know that NPR had message boards.”

He'd been back on the show several times, a fan favorite. There was a wealthy lady in the Palisades who after hearing his chicken story starting paying for him to tell stories at her cocktail parties.

Nobody was asking me to do anything like that.

All I got were people asking me how I got on the show.

Maybe I needed to be the hero after all. Maybe I was the hero but I was so opposed to coming off as the hero that I'd exaggerated myself into an abusive idiot for a laugh.

I went back and listened to the story itself for the first time.

Next time I consider revealing my character flaws or mistakes I've made, I'll know how to do it in a way that makes me sound charming, like when an especially cute toddler says, “I pooped.”

Cue tape . . .

So during my first marriage I was touring with a solo show . . .

Boom! Right off the bat I see mistakes. A better beginning would have been “So, there I was in the Congo, building a library out of mud bricks . . .” Or “So, there I was teaching blind teenagers how to fly on the trapeze . . .” Solo theater
and
a “first marriage”?
I'm surprised I've been able to travel freely within the United States. There's also a cockiness in my voice that is off-putting. A little more sad, nervous laughter wouldn't hurt, or maybe more of a “help me, I'm so hungry” nasal tone.

I was with some of the crew in the touring van driving around Aberdeen when we saw a bunch of dogs in a parking lot by a sign that said
PAWS PET ADOPTION
. Every single dog was completely insane. It was a madhouse of out-of-control dogs barking, lurching at passing people, squirrels, leaves. They all looked completely unadoptable.

Boom
again
. Why didn't I say how the dogs were acting out because they were scared? They'd been abandoned or possibly abused. I sound like the woman on the playground who complained about homeless people: “I hate bums! They drink too much, they're lazy, and they're always fighting!”

This was for NPR. To fail to acknowledge
why
the dogs were acting insane makes me sound like a Republican. Also, the show I was on tour for was actually a show about being adopted! I should have mentioned that!
I
was adopted! That very day in Aberdeen, Washington, I'd had a line of kids waiting for me after the show to tell me their stories of their nontraditional families—“My sister is my aunt but she doesn't want my mother to know because she never knew her dad but she lives with his ex-wife now who calls her Bunny even though her real name is Nora.”

Instead of saying those dogs looked unadoptable, I could have mentioned how my heart went out to adopted things, like children. And highways . . . and dogs.

Most important, I forgot to mention how country-song lonely I had been at that time in my life. How I was married to a bartender who came home at four o'clock every morning. It had been
so fun to date a bartender I hadn't really thought about how down to my last lonely teardrop it would be to be married to one.

Anyway, in the middle of all the chaos sat a little sweet black-and-white dog. He looked confused by it all, like, “Why am I here? These other dogs are insane. There's been a horrible mistake.” He was a half border collie, half springer spaniel. Very cute.

I go up to the lady in charge of the adoptions and say, “I'd like this dog.”

Thank god I kept this part short. At the time, I'd seen the woman as off-puttingly severe, with eighties hair and eyebrows drawn on with a Sharpie. Now I know these women are angels who are doomed to live in tiny studio apartments filled with the animals they save. They will never get laid or have a meal without a cat hair in it.

She tells me that I don't want that dog.

“Oh, but I do.”

“You can't handle this dog,” she tells me. “Border collies take a lot of work.”

“Excuse me . . . I can handle a dog.”

Actually this part is okay. It was a big deal to adopt a dog. It felt good to get one off the streets of Aberdeen and into my theater touring van. There was a chance it was the kind of rural small town where they fed any dog that wasn't a pit bull to a pit bull.

And I adopted him. He walked to the touring van very calmly. It was his last calm moment the entire time I owned him. As soon as we got to the van, he was out of
control. Out. Of. Control. He jumps into the van. Jumping everywhere. Barking, scratching. People are screaming like they're being attacked. Nobody could control him. We couldn't get him to sit down. The driver felt unsafe. Nobody knew what to do. I was in tears within five minutes. Why did I adopt him? I can't take him back. Oh my god, what have I done?

This was all true, but at the time, I had made up my mind to apply myself to the task of owning a dog. I was going to have to really learn how to take care of a dog. Take him to obedience school. Read that book by monks about raising dogs. Here may have been the time to talk about my beloved grandfather, the vet. He had scars on his head from being run over by a bull during a house call. He called me by the wrong name my entire life. My parents tried to convince me that Jason was his nickname for me, but I worshipped him. He was a vet, for god's sake.

The entire time I owned Carlos he was a stress to me. He needed constant attention. He ate a bag of makeup. He ate a couch, not an entire couch, not a full couch, half a couch . . .

Okay, here the producer saved me and didn't include the details about how Carlos loved to eat kitty poop. I'm sure I mentioned it when I was recording the story. “Kitty roca” was one of my favorite lines about the whole Carlos story. He'd come out of the bathroom with kitty litter all over his lips. Carlos also ate a lot of other dogs' poop.

Thank god I didn't get into how much Carlos was alone during the day, though actually that would have been okay as long as I mentioned how awful it made me feel, which it did.

Anytime he was actually sleeping, it was like having a newborn baby around. We'd whisper, “He's sleeping, let's get some stuff done.” My sister came to visit at one point. She tried to convince me that he was a good dog, that he just needed more structure. He peed on her in the middle of the night. My husband liked him. My husband took him to the dog park a lot.

At the dog park, I'd see Carlos chewing on something and reach inside his mouth to discover a mound of wet dog shit. I'd scream, “Oh my god!” and hurl it away from me. The other dog owners informed me that when Carlos had dog feces in his mouth he was simply masking his scent. It wasn't that I didn't understand that dogs were animals; I was just at an age when I found things entertaining rather than enlightening. The other dog park people had rational “That's very common in the animal kingdom”
responses, and I would say, “He had another dog's shit in his mouth!” and burst out laughing.

Listening again, I feel like I showed great restraint here in my storytelling. If I'd included more of what really happened, I would have had to live like Salman Rushdie.

Every aspect of owning a dog stressed me out. The dogs would be in a long conga line of humping each other and I would get the giggles. The other owners would say, “They're showing their dominance . . . that's all that is.” I was like, “I get it, but it's hilarious.”

We decided to move to New York. I was secretly excited that we couldn't take Carlos but I tried to hide it by saying stuff like, “This is a tough decision, but I don't
think he should go.” I had a friend who lived in a tiny studio apartment in New York with her golden retriever. She told me that dogs don't care where they are as long as they are with you. Her dog spent her days on an Ikea futon waiting to walk down a sidewalk. She was just saying that to justify her choice.

I gave him away to a woman who had never owned a dog before. Perfect. She didn't know about the whole border collie thing. I was excited about not having to deal with all the dog drama anymore.

Excited?

Bam! Bam! Bam!
What in the hell was I doing!? How dumb could I get?

It was horrible. I was trying to really play up how immature I was as a pet owner. I thought that if I had shared how painful it really was, deciding to move and figuring out what to do with him, it would have weakened the story.

It was about telling a good story. Who needed to be a hero? How boring. Not boring when you're living it but boring to hear about it. Though humanity does need heroes, it also needs demons to compare themselves to and realize what a hero they are. I've fought so hard against painting myself a hero I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting stuck in this idea of being an asshole that's not the real story. Reality may be getting a little lopsided simply for the sake of making sure everybody knows that I win—I hated me first.