My Hollywood Romance

To me, everyone in Los Angeles seemed really tan, wealthy and obsessed with the entertainment industry. It made me completely insecure. My fair skin didn't glisten in the sun like the throngs of olive-skinned gorgeous people walking down Melrose. My Jetta was beat to shit, not glimmering like the Porsches on Santa Monica. I was living a relatively meager grad school existence compared to the fabulous life I thought I should be living. I was 27 and I thought I needed to meet someone who was a little more Hollywood. I was certain this relationship would cement my identity as the rising writing superstar I knew myself to be. My whole life, I thought if I met the right girl, everything would be easy. Jane was not that girl. (nor is that her real name).

It was like a movie. We'd had a few grad school courses together and she'd even used my apartment to film a short for one of her classes. On the shoot, during a break, we were both in my roommate Katie's bedroom, sitting on the bed, chatting and I was pretty sure I felt a spark. However, I had a girlfriend at the time. But, when my girlfriend and I finally broke up, texting Jane was one of my first forays back into the world of dating. She seemed perfect. She was from the Midwest, had gone to Duke, she was in the prestigious Producing Program at USC and she lived a block away from me. Jane looked like if Claire Danes and Kirsten Dunst had a daughter with none of her mothers' sexual charisma. She wasn't just smart and pretty, she was rich too. Her grandfather had invented the sealed air compressor, which you will find on every refrigerator ever made, so Jane had a trust fund, drove a Beamer and lived in the same complex where they filmed MTV's THE HILLS. She was perfect for me, and not just because all I had to do was walk across the street to get laid.

In Act Two, we went to The Sundance Film Festival together, watched indie movies and snuggled. We stopped by Vegas on the drive home and stayed at the Venetian. For her birthday, we went to the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills where we saw Sylvester Stallone; though, to be fair, all I saw was a wrinkled leather cushion. She interned at Paramount Vantage and I got to meet her on the Paramount Lot a few times, which was a dream come true, except for the night her boss was introduced to me and, because of my white hair, assumed I was Jane's dad. While this moment was humiliating, Jane's connection to Paramount Vantage meant we got to go to their Oscars Party on Rodeo, get hammered on amazing Cabernet and watch BABEL take home the statue. We assumed we'd be a Hollywood Power Couple. She'd produce things I wrote. We would take over the city. It was us against the world. I thought I might be in love. My writing was improving considerably and I even quit smoking cigarettes when I was around her. But the third act twist was coming and, like everything else in Hollywood, beneath the glossy surface, this relationship proved to be empty, meaningless and pretty dark.

One night, we were talking about maybe getting married, imagining the wedding. We were talking about maybe having kids some day. During this romantic daydreaming, holding each other on her couch, Jane, who I would remind you is a fair-skinned ginger herself, had the audacity to say to me, “Of course, we'd have to talk to a doctor and see if there's something he could do to make sure our kids don't have albinism.” The anger I have from this is still visceral and white-hot. I want to say I spat in her fucking face and stormed out of there. I love women, would see that behavior as abusive and am still so angry I want spitting to be how this all ended. Even now, writing this essay, almost ten years removed from this event, I'm so angry about it I want to have screamed. I want to trash her in this essay. I want to talk about how she got a D in calculus like a moron and barely made it out of Duke, I want to talk about what spoiled, condescending whining wimps her dad and brothers were, I want to talk about how terrible she was in bed, or her hoarding habits and obnoxious fucking cats. I'm still so angry about this now because, in the moment, I said and did absolutely nothing. I just took it. If I remember correctly, we had some awkward rough sex and I dumped her two days later.

There was no talk of a sequel. We spoke once after that. In spite of her proximity, there were no backslides, no booty calls, no drunken “You Up?” texts. She met me on the corner to drop off some stuff I'd left at her place, I eventually mailed back her Netflix DVD's and that was the last I ever saw her. There was no contact whatsoever, not until a couple years later. Katie, the roommate whose bed Jane and I had sat on when there was first a spark between us, had moved in with her boyfriend Sean, who was also in my Writer's Group. One Sunday at Writer's Group, Sean let me know he had seen Jane. Apparently she and her fiance had moved into Katie and Sean's building. Jane's new fiance's name was also Nathan (that's his real name!) and I had a chuckle. But I doubled over laughing when Sean told me Jane had gained like 50 pounds.

I wanted a Hollywood Romance and I got just that: a superficial relationship full of gorgeous settings and predictable twists that was over relatively quickly. Turns out I met someone as empty as my aspirations and values at the time. While this experience was painful, the lessons from it have stayed with me. Jane wasn't the first girl with a trust fund I dated, but she was the last. A string of lower-class girls followed, then I dated a series of women without college degrees until finally meeting my wife, who is educated, level-headed, pragmatic and by the way adores my albinism and doesn't care one way or the other if the daughter we're having in April pops out albino. While I'll probably always be angry at her, I don't bear Jane any ill will. Honestly I'm happy for her because I know there's always something the doctors can do about how fat she got.

Further Reading:  Red, White and Blue