Seesaw

There’s this time. I’m 21. I’m in a sushi bar on Sunset Boulevard. “Sushi on Sunset.” Really, that was the name. I’m sitting in a booth with my publicist, the formidable Nanci Ryder. Maybe some other people are there, I don’t know. She had a copy of a tabloid. She shows me the “piece.” The headline and the picture. The headline was, “Justine Bateman’s Trial Marriage Collapses,” and it says that I’m “in shock” because my boyfriend “dumped” me. Pack of lies. Here’s the thing, if you ever want to control a situation, here’s the thing: when you tell more than one lie at a time, the other person will be so consumed with “setting the record straight,” with rectifying the multitude of lies, that the objective of dealing with the actual liar, himself, will be lost. So, the tabloid used that, that tactic.

Yes, we’d been together, but it was never a “trial marriage.” (Christ, I was only 21.) Yes, we had broken up, but I broke up with him. Neither here nor there, but hey. And no, naturally, I wasn’t in shock. What I was in shock from, though, was this fucking assumption, this gall to just print whatever they fucking felt like. I sat there, looking at this. Looking at this statement, this assessment they were putting in every goddamn grocery store in America, that said something that wasn’t true. Something that categorized me, that painted me like this, like something I wasn’t, feeling emotions I wasn’t. Characterizing me as someone who had reacted the way I hadn’t. I mean, yes, we were together, yes, we broke up, but not like that, not with those reactions, not in that way. That’s not me. They were spraying. Spraying their “reality” over me. I wasn’t different. I hadn’t changed, but they were spraying something on me and now everyone was going to see that spray and not see me. They were not going to see what really happened, how I really felt about it all.

Shit. I sat there in that sushi bar booth and just felt fucked. Not only had the reality of Fame been imposed on me (there were some advantages, sure), but here, now, someone else was deciding the way in which everyone, millions of people, were supposed to look at me. I HAD NO SAY. So, this is on the cover of this tabloid. Inside, I open and look inside, and there’s a big picture of me and my (now ex) boyfriend. My face has been altered in the photo. There’s a picture of the two of us and the expression on my face has been changed by using what looks like a pencil eraser. It looks like the job that woman did on Jesus’ face when she attempted to “restore” the Spanish fresco painting of him. Pre-Photoshop. Terrible. There I am with eraser-face, so I don’t look like I’m smiling, so I have an expression on my face that fits the article, and I read the “quotes” that surround the eraser-face picture. Quotes, as if they actually interviewed us, or people we know. Just made up. Complete fiction. Just made up every quote they attributed to both of us. “Says a pal of the actress” and all that shit. Anyway, what are you going to do. But there, that moment, the first time a publication had pushed me out there as something I’m not, something I’d now see reflected in strangers’ eyes on the street, something I had no fucking say in, no way to stop. So UTTERLY UNFAIR.

Yeah, I can hear it.

“That’s what you get. That’s what you signed up for. That’s the price, the cost of being out there.” See, these are the assumptions you get. Think of it. Maybe you’ve had something like this happen. Someone spreads a rumor about you. Something untrue or that twists the truth and it spreads like a virus and you can’t get it back. Now everyone who heard it will look at that spray on you, and not see the real you. And you had nothing to do with that. They are imposing a reality on you that you had no say in. Maybe that drives it home. That’s how it feels. But hey, I’m not here to pull you under the waves. This is me, in the water.

It kept going, the lies, over the years. Lies about my relationship with the cast and crew on the set, lies about my picking a fight with Madonna in a nightclub bathroom, lies about romantic relationships I’d never had. Lies, lies, lies. I’d live. I mean, here I am today, but it kept going. Hit after hit. Sometimes it was a hit from a publication, sometimes it was a hit from someone in the public, and sometimes from a family member. You’d get hit with stuff. Why are they hitting you? Did you do something to bring this on? Nah, you just have the Fame. You have the ball. No one is trying to tackle the players who don’t have the ball. You touch the football and you are the target. Bring him down.

It’s for a lot of reasons, why they do it, the hitting at you. Resentment, or fear that they won’t reach their own goals, or that they don’t measure up, or that they’re more deserving of your Fame than you are. For some, the hitting completes a “perception of balance.” What if every life is a seesaw. There I am, I’m famous, 21, making money like that. There I am, sitting at the top of my seesaw. The other side is down, resting in the dirt. I’m sitting high. Another person, the one hitting me, is on her own seesaw and she’s on the end that sits on the ground, against the dirt, that’s under a layer of sand. This person looks up at the raised, empty end of her seesaw, with the sky behind it, the upper end of her life, her as-yet-to-be-lived “highlight of her life,” and she believes she will get there one day. That the end she is now sitting on, there in the dirt and the sand, will rise to that height someday. Rise up, and the other side will descend to the ground and rest on that thin layer of sand. OK, so that’s the assumption, that “perception of balance.” You see where I’m going? In order for that to be true, me, sitting at my height, I must descend. I must fall somehow, I must eventually come to rest in the sand or the whole thing is shit, this theory. Just a shitty lie someone fed this person to give her hope, to make her think that “things are going to be better.” Just a shitty, shitty lie. If I stay up there, if I never descend, then I disprove the “theory” that these seesaws move, and that’s a motherfucker.

“Oh God. What if it doesn’t move. What if that is my lot in life. What if I am always down here? Always stay here. Always.” Then, “NO. No, that can’t be true.” Knock those seesaws into motion. That’s what the hits do. The lies, the gossip, the rumors, the hits. They knock the seesaws of the famous into motion, so that “perception of balance” theory can be true, Goddammit. Make it true.