There was a particular moment in my life when I found myself hiding under my bed. I was in my early thirties and my life was a disappointment. My divorce was final, and I decided my career was over because a show I had a lot of hopes for was canceled. I slipped off my bed, looked underneath, and thought, Well, that looks cozy. So I scooted myself in, intending to stay there, oh, I don’t know, forever.
My dog Bubba Sparxxx came into the bedroom to investigate my disappearance.
Bubba was a huge dog, about 130 pounds of Mastiff–American bulldog mix, but he was determined to do a marine crawl under that bed to get to me. His path to me was precise, like a longtime soldier carrying out a mission. We did have history. We had found each other in the middle of the night while I was shooting Cradle 2 the Grave at Los Alamitos Army Base, near Long Beach, California. It was a night shoot, and at 2 A.M., my costar DMX decided he wanted to buy some dogs. He needed a litter of dogs brought to the set right then. People just stood there, dumbfounded. I said, “I think I can help you.”
So I called my then-husband Chris, who knew a guy who bred Royal Bandogs, mastiffs bred specifically with American bulldogs. So Chris called the breeder and this man showed up to the set at 3:45 A.M. with laundry baskets full of puppies. There were probably five or six dogs in total, all of them brown except one little white one. They were all so cute, and DMX picked out two, quickly naming them Pebbles and Bam Bam.
“You can take one of the dogs, too,” the breeder said to me. “You got me the sale.”
They were all adorable, but the little white one with a few brown spots seemed to call to me. I picked him up, round and white like a seal, and looked in his little amber eyes.
“Aw, you have an outie,” I said, rubbing his little stomach.
“That’s actually a hernia,” said the breeder. “He’s the runt. The hernia will either retract as he grows or he’ll need surgery.”
We needed each other.
“He’s the one,” I said. I named him Bubba Sparxxx after the white country-rapper, and he became my soul mate and best friend. He could tell when I came home frustrated. He’d stay very chill and wait for me to come around, without being pushy or needy. If I had big news, he was hyped about it before I even had a chance to articulate it to him. Whenever I had parties and he had the sense that some plus-one might be the least bit shady, he wouldn’t let them walk around the house. Bubba never growled at anyone who wasn’t foul.
He was just super intuitive. Which is how he knew to be under the bed. This huge lug of a dog crawled under the bed to look me in the eye. We regarded each other for a long time.
“Is this what we’re doing today?” he said with his eyes. “Okay. It’s cool, I just want to know. ’Cause I’m under here.”
When I didn’t respond, he began to lick my face. It was one of those moments where you just realize, Well, this is the most pathetic scene ever.
“Bubba,” I said, “I think this is what the lady was talking about.”
The lady was a trainer and life coach who had been hounding me at events. I had literally run from her at red carpets. It was like she could see through the façade. “When you’re ready, call me,” she’d say, pointing at me like a black female Tony Robbins. “You’ve got my number. You’ll know when you’re ready.”
I reached up to get my cell from the bed. I had put her in my phone as Coach.
“Gabrielle,” she answered, like she’d been waiting.
“I think this is what you were talking about when you said I’d know when I was ready.”
WE MET IN A GYM ON A RAINY NOVEMBER DAY. SHE IMMEDIATELY PUT BOXING gloves on me. I started punching the heavy bag, going strong to impress her.
“What’s on your Happy List?” Coach asked.
“My what?”
“You gotta do a Happy List,” she said. “Tell me the things that make you happy.”
I stalled, hitting harder. She asked me again, pointedly this time. Like a drill sergeant. “What makes you happy?”
I had nothing. I couldn’t think of a single thing or single recent time I’d even been happy. Right away, I felt like I was failing a test. I started to cry, and my heart raced as my anxiety kicked in. I couldn’t even do this right. My arms started to get numb from punching, so I slowed down.
“Come on,” she yelled. “Give me three things and I’ll let you stop punching the bag.”
I kept punching, finally saying through gritted teeth, “Real butter.”
Punch.
“Ground beef.”
Punch. What else? Punch.
“Imitation crab,” I said.
Punch.
I stopped, exhausted. Coach was looking at me with a mix of disgust and concern.
“Bitch,” she said, “did you say imitation crab?”
In my mind, it was the best parts of the crab but so much less expensive.
“You don’t even love the real thing?” she asked. “Can we just start there? The fact that they’re all food items, we’ll get to that later. Let’s stop here, because there’s so much more that we gotta get to before we can even think about nutrition.”
She gave me the homework of writing down ten things that made me happy. We agreed to meet twice a week.
I went home and I couldn’t get past the three. Real butter, ground beef, and imitation crab meat. I went back to her with the same three things the following week.
She shook her head at me again, and that session we didn’t work out at all. We just sat in the gym and she threw out questions, dissecting the smallest pleasures of life.
“Do you like sunsets?” she asked. “Do you like sunrises?”
Even that made me cry. I didn’t know.
“Um, uh,” I ugly-cried. “Sunsets.”
“Do you like crushed ice?” she asked. “Whole cubes?”
I panicked again, weighing the merits of both. “Um, when there’s a bowl of ice . . .” I paused. I had something. “I like really, really cold Coronas.”
“That’s five,” she shouted. She was the Annie Sullivan to my Helen Keller, helping me make sense of my world. I couldn’t think of any more.
“You can’t even think of ten things that make you happy,” she said. “What made you think you were ready for marriage? How is someone else supposed to make you happy if you don’t even know what makes you happy?”
We started in November, and by January I had finally found my ten things. Bubba was on the list. Before that, I couldn’t say he made me happy because he was such a good dog I didn’t think I deserved him. Coach and I started examining that kind of thinking, too, and started unraveling my life decisions from there.
One night I took Coach along with me to a party. By then I was less guarded with her and feeling bold. We were in a room at the party and I started holding court, using my well-honed ability to turn a phrase to tear down an actress who wasn’t present. It was well honed because I used to feel I had to do it for survival, but now it was like I was killing for sport. As I ripped this absent woman to shreds, I felt like I was being fed as these people laughed and looked at me with faces that said, “More, more.”
When I was done, there was nothing left of my target.