Him: It is no laughing matter.
He would then leave the room straight-faced, but I would hear him chuckling from the other room.
At the party, he asked me out on a date. We went out a few nights later, and as I got ready, I suddenly became overcome with nerves. I mean, he was seventeen years older than me. I was eighteen at the time so . . . there was almost a whole ME in between our ages! I assumed this meant that he just knew everything better than I did, that he was just better than me at life.
This is all to say that I simply didn’t know what to wear to this date. What do older people wear? Jewelry and stuff? I opened my jewelry box and pulled out every piece of jewelry I had and slipped them all on. Fourteen bracelets and four necklaces. The more bracelets I had on, the older I would look.
When he arrived, I jingle-jangled over to his car and got inside. He saw me and said very matter-of-factly, “That is a lot of bracelets.”
I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Thank you.”
That was the gist of our relationship. I tried to ignore things, cover things up, and pretend to be something I wasn’t. He called things out for what they were. He didn’t let anything slide. I loved him very much and I quickly moved in with him.
He was the sweetest man, with a genuinely kind heart. You can imagine how huge of a departure this was from Damon. I think Rudolf could easily see that I was living an immensely chaotic life and he did his best to help me step away from it. He wanted the best for me, and for the first time I had some structure in my life. After my drug-and-alcohol-filled insanity with Damon, I ate up all the structure Rudolf could give me.
For the previous six months in LA, I had gotten so far away from what I had originally come to LA to do. I wanted to act, but I had gotten so distracted. Rudolf helped me focus again. He was against drugs. He loved to have a glass of wine with dinner, but he was in no way an alcoholic like I was. It was amazing to witness.
I slowed down on my partying ways and started getting up early every day. He would swing the curtains open in the morning and pull me out of bed in order to get some morning sun, as he called it.
I would squint angrily at him. “Dude. It’s seven a.m.”
“You are correct and we are late for the sunrise. Get up, get up, get up!”
“No!”
“We need our ten minutes of vitamin D.”
No, I would not do anything for the D. Sorry Rudolf. He literally dragged me out of the house, while I engaged in passive resistance. I was not a morning person at the time. But slowly I started to change. I started to like the stupid early morning sun. It felt kind of . . . good. Damn it.
He taught me how to cook and eat right, and that healthy eating didn’t mean binge eating a bunch of carrots after binge eating a bunch of Cheetos. (Orange foods cancel out, right?)
“Go to yoga. It’s good for your head.” He handed me two dollars. Two dollars? He continued, “Yoga at the Jewish Senior Center is only two dollars. Also, it is wonderful.”
So I did it. I took his yoga mat and my two dollars and walked over to Plummer Park in West Hollywood, where I took yoga three times a week with Jewish seniors. Rudolf was right again. I was obsessed with this class and I became one of the regulars with Bending Norma and Angry Mildred. Everyone but me was eighty-five years old.
The only bad thing about this class was that sometimes you’d get there and ask, “Hey, where’s Jerome?”
And then everyone in the class would look down sadly. “Oh . . . Yeah. Jerome . . . you know, he had a good life.”
Damn, they were dropping like flies. But other than that, these people were amazing. They were doing headstands and handstands and downward dog. They would do it all. I’m actually kind of surprised they let me, a young gentile, in the room.
The instructor at the Jewish Senior Center was an ex-con named Ralph. He was covered in tattoos and had this brash New York accent that cut through the typical soothing yoga effect quite a bit. His teaching method was to bark orders at us. “ALL RIGHT, EVERYONE, WE’RE GETTING IN SHAVASANA, CALM DOWN. CALM DOWN.”
He would get into arguments with all the old people, too, especially Betty.
“You know, Ralph, you shouldn’t have all those tattoos,” she would nag.
“You know what, Betty, there are no judgments in yoga class, so I don’t want to hear another word from you!”
“Ralph, don’t you talk to me like that. I could be your mother!”
“Well you’re not! My mother is dead! Shavasana now!”
One of the ladies there even knitted a little sweater for Comet. It was like I was part of a weird little elderly community. It was the greatest. I just . . . started to feel good. All of these things have since become such important aspects of my sobriety today: eating right, getting up early, doing yoga. I owe it to Rudolf for giving me those tools.
With Rudolf’s encouragement, I also started working again. A model friend insisted I meet her agent, and I agreed—because I had such a great history with it. Might as well take another shot . . .
Today, when people ask me if I’ve modeled or if I’m a model, I usually respond with, “Oh, I could never. Doing something based completely on my looks just sounds so superficial and shallow. I could never.”
Now, this has a grain of truth. I love doing work that I think is meaningful, where I get to be creative. But also it’s because I tried modeling when people told me to and it did not work out. For whatever reason, my life is peppered with failed modeling endeavors, bookended with me wondering why I even tried to do something that I don’t care about.
When I was fifteen, this model came up to me, stunned by my height and perhaps by my bony elbows. I really don’t know. But she told me to go downtown to meet with Wilhelmina in Chicago. I sat down across from Wilhelmina for thirty seconds before she said, “You need to lose ten pounds and grow your eyebrows out.”
I distinctly remember thinking, Oh, fuck this lady. Fuck everything here.
Admittedly, my eyebrows did need some help. I tweezed a bit too hard that summer. But ten pounds? Asking someone to lose ten pounds who was already very thin was ridiculous. Don’t tell anyone to change their physical appearance. I’m more than that, and that’s how I grew up. It was always about who we were on the inside.
One of my neighbors was this beautiful, arrogant Israeli model. She would say things like, “You know what is so annoying to me? I am trying to take a bad selfie and I cannot! I just cannot for some reason, it is like I don’t have a bad angle. Like I am trying so hard and I cannot.”
On this particular day, Rudolf was out of town shooting a movie and I was hanging out by the pool. She had a model friend over and they both saw me and said, “Oh you haaave to be a model; you are fabulous.”
I didn’t have a lot going on otherwise. So I said sure.
I let her drag me along to different agencies that they had connections to—and I kept getting rejected. For a split second, I wondered if they were just doing a long-form prank on me with the intention of making me feel bad about my appearance. BECAUSE IT WASN’T WORKING. OKAY? IT WASN’T!
Finally, we got to this small agency called Photogenics. The people at Photogenics said to me, “Okay . . . okay . . . we like your look. But we want you to cut your hair off and dye it dark.”
I had long blond hair at the time. “Oh . . . kay.”