Babylon Confidential

language—the rude ones. I was driving this crappy Chevy Citation that my dad had given me. It was about as maneuverable as a Sherman tank and ugly to boot. I was getting nervous, not because they were being rude and offensive, but because I was a new driver and really needed to concentrate, so I flipped them off, hoping they would back off and leave me alone. And they did, but not before ramming me with the side of their van and pushing me into the center divider. I hit it at just the right angle to launch my car into the air. The Chevy flipped over and hit five other cars on its flight to the slow lane. By the time it came to a halt it was completely crumpled and I was trapped. My right leg had come out of its socket and my head was swimming. I looked up and saw a bridge over the freeway where people had gathered, hands over their mouths, horrified expressions on their faces. Luckily an ambulance had been traveling right behind me, and its crew saw the whole thing. They used the Jaws of Life to open up the Citation like the cheap tin can it was. A paramedic knelt down beside me as they cut away my seatbelt.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

I couldn’t remember anything.

There’s never a shortage of drama in my life. Sometimes it feels like I’m trapped in a soap opera. (Living in Hollywood can do that to you.) Well, here’s the icing on the cake—I had amnesia. I had to go to memory therapy at UCLA after the accident.

They pulled me out of the car, and the ambulance took me to the Queen of Angels Hospital. As I was being rolled into the ER on a gurney I saw a pay phone and remembered that my mom was working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Costa Mesa, but I couldn’t remember her name. I begged the nurse walking alongside the gurney to help me call her. I got through and I was yelling at her and crying.

“I’ve been in an accident. I’m in the hospital.”

That was the only coherent information I managed to get out before the nurse pulled the phone out of my hand, informed me that the doctors were waiting, and hung it up.

I passed out and when I came around it was to the sound of chanting. I opened my eyes. My hospital bed was surrounded by chanting Koreans.

“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”

Then I saw a face I recognized: my aunt. Memories came flooding back. She was a Buddhist and had brought her friends along. I remembered that she chanted for money. She’d chanted for a new Volvo and got it. She’d chanted for a real-estate portfolio and it had been granted unto her. I remembered that she was eccentric and funny. Like all the women in our family she had a bent toward the spiritual, albeit tempered by a practical streak.

And then I saw my mom.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I just got in my car and it took me here.”

It might sound strange, but despite the disagreements and feuds that have taken place between us over the years, despite the estrangement and family divides, my mom and I have always shared an invisible, unbreakable bond.

* * *

I stood in the Hamlet Gardens lobby and wouldn’t budge, just waiting for something to happen, and Gary was done standing around. He was heading back to the car when all of a sudden my mom came walking out of the dining room, arm in arm with Tre. It was an amazing thing. Somehow I’d been led to her, but if it was a minor miracle it was tarnished by the unavoidable truth that she was still hanging out with my asshole ex-boyfriend.

My mom and dad had split up years before, and I’d just assumed that Tre and my mom had run their course. Now I found myself in an extremely uncomfortable position. We swapped some forced pleasantries, I introduced my new husband, and then we went our separate ways. When I got home, though, I fell to pieces. I was an emotional wreck, and Gary had to hold me the whole night. In the back of my mind, I kept justifying her decision by thinking, “Well, he’s giving her the attention my father never did, or else she needs a friend and I left home and I’m not around for her.”

I don’t know what force had led me to her, but I knew I’d been given a choice. I could either reach out and extend an olive branch to her or leave things as they were, a festering wound. I knew all about crossroads; I’d stood at one in the aftermath of my rape. You either let something ruin you or you take action.

I called up my mom, and we started talking again. She explained to me that I’d misinterpreted the incident with Tre’s car—the event that had created a seven-year wall of silence between us. It had been out in front of her house because she’d borrowed it from him—her car was at the mechanic’s—and after that they’d stayed in contact as friends. We talked things over. I put the past behind me. It was such a wonderful feeling to have her back in my life. We had missed each other immensely and had miles of ground to cover.

I called up my dad as well and started rebuilding bridges. I was married, I had a career, and now I was setting right the sins of the past. I was an adult, and finally my parents were actually listening to me. Now all I had to do was turn things around with Gary.

* * *

Gary, though, was heavily invested in misery. None of his writing opportunities had panned out, and the IRS bill was a monkey on his back, driving him into ever-longer bouts of depression.

I got a job working on Jon Turteltaub’s first movie, Think Big, starring the “Barbarian Brothers” Peter and David Paul. They were these ridiculously over-steroided body builders who played two mentally impaired truckers transporting toxic waste across the country. The movie earned me enough money to take Gary to Hawaii in the hope that he could shake his writer’s block. We were staying in a condo, and after a few days I ran out of things to read. The condo had a small shelf of bestsellers, all of them by John Grisham and Danielle Steel. I’ve never been a big reader of blockbuster novels, but I’ve always been a bookworm. I was desperate, so I picked a book at random, Steel’s Kaleidoscope, read it from cover to cover, and thought that it would make a great movie.

Not long after we returned to L.A. I learned that the film Kaleidoscope was scheduled for production, and I was cast as Jaclyn Smith’s little sister. Jaclyn arrived on set, right off the plane. She was exhausted, wore no makeup, and was still without a doubt one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in real life.

My character was a gynecologist who couldn’t get pregnant. And as with Clean and Sober, the role I’d play in Kaleidoscope would be a bitter foretelling of a personal tragedy.

* * *

After Hawaii I got pregnant, and that seemed to turn around my relationship with Gary. We were both really happy about the news. I felt that I was at a time in my life when I was ready for a family. I started buying pregnancy books. Gary and I started picking out names. We still loved each other, and I hoped, however naively, that the baby would help us forge a working relationship. These were the days before Dr. Phil or even Jerry Springer. We were not yet blessed with the universal talk-show wisdom that keeping a marriage together for the kids seldom works out.

I needn’t have worried. I booked a job with a location shoot in Hoboken, New Jersey, working on Maniac Cop 2. It was the dead of winter. I was three months pregnant and not really showing. I didn’t want to take the job, but we needed the money. We agreed that after the shoot I’d take the rest of the year off to have the baby.

Problems arose with my co-star Robert Davi, the James Bond baddie with the pockmarked face. He was always puffing cigars on set, and one day when I had really bad morning sickness I asked him not to smoke around me because I didn’t want to throw up on his clothes. He told me to fuck off, flat out, just like that.

About two-thirds of the way through the shoot I was doing a stunt scene that involved being handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car. I was outside the car, and it was supposed to appear that I was running alongside it, unable to escape. The techs had built a little platform for me to stand on that I had to share with a camera so they could get some close-ups. It was too dangerous to have the car running on its own steam so they hooked it up to a truck that would pull it along.

On the third take the platform broke and I fell and hit the road at forty miles an hour, still handcuffed to the steering wheel. I hit hard and was dragged for what felt like a hundred feet before they realized what had happened