Hollywood Ghost Story: Scared of Love Edition

GHOST STORY: AFTON PLACE, PART 1

This is a ghost story.

It’s a real ghost story about a real house.

You decide who the ghosts are.

It was a dark night in the late, late 90s. I was sitting on a couch, because that’s what I did a lot. I was sitting on the couch in a 1928 craftsman in the middle of Hollywood, before Hollywood was cool and it was just scary in a survival crime, street drug, and typhoid ridden rats way.

I had come to LA to be, well, me. It turned out that was a dangerous thing, so I had to become fatter. I was in a 12-step program for anorexia and I was 12 month in to the sentence of being a girlfriend to my boyfriend. Let’s call him Tony, only because he was so not a Tony. Tony was in love with me and had told me we had to move in together otherwise he would die. This was also the way he had wooed me. "If you are not my girlfriend I am going to die," and it was also insinuated that I might in fact be a slut. I was in a relationship with his roommate, but it was clear that if I didn’t want to be a slut, I should be with Tony. Needless to say, there were some issues that I needed to work out in the childhood trauma department, but at the time I just thought that I now had boobs and therefore was fat and therefore a slut. Basic weird math, but it worked for me. Tony, in his deep, non-problematic love to me, had sworn to me that he would kill himself if I:

1) Booked an acting job

Or

2) Left Him

Or

3) Both

At this moment, on the couch, I knew that he had survived number one twice. I had not only booked a job on a series in New York, I had also had the stupidity to be in production on and star in a short film. It shot when we first met, or when I first switched bedrooms.

It was a film about kissing the right person—obviously apropos nothing in my life. For a short film, it was a freaking long story and the women who wrote it ended up trying to sue me, along with one of the owners of a location because she was having an affair with the cinematographer. Yes. This was the explanation—All in all, a very normal movie making experience. Your average horror story of a short romantic comedy. The star of the short was someone I had briefly met before. He starred in a play somewhere in Hollywood, Touch of the Poet, I think. I had gone to the play to support a friend and had met him, Brett, and because I felt fat and ugly, I couldn’t speak to him. He was talented. He looked like Richard Gere. He was kind. I naturally assumed I was going to meet a lot more people like him in my life and chalked up my emergency level low self-esteem and deep self-hatred to a survival mechanism. Instead I got a sense of humor, so it’s almost the same. Also, he spoke to me like a person, which I didn’t really know what do with.

To my absolute terror, our brilliant casting director had decided that Brett should star opposite me in the movie. I had mainly blacked out when he came in to the audition. If I had been a normal person and this had been another life and a much better movie, I would, of course, have seen this as a sign. It was the kind of coincidence you’re not supposed to have in a script, but there it was, as life tends to be a lot more exciting that what’s allowed in a three act structure.

Brett and I got to know each other, and he was amazing. But I had promised Tony that I would never leave him, because, you know, death, and I felt bad that I wasn’t attracted to Tony or in love with him, and therefore I was a slut and should stay with Tony for at least another 10 years. However, I had one hundred percent fallen in love with Brett, and for lack of time for me to deliberate whether or not he had fallen in love with me, he had. So what did I do? Reader, I…

…I moved in with Tony. Naturally. Tony had found this old house in Hollywood. The front part of it had been built in 1928. The back part had been added in 1935. Now that I know about codes etc, I know that no one needed the city to approve this exact “remodel” and because it was added before 1939, it can stay. But that was not all that stayed. When we moved in, there was a full wardrobe of a tiny little woman who had lived there. Tiny little shoes of a grown woman who had died and the landlord had bought it and now I lived there with a man who cried when I threw the remote.

The reason we moved in together was because Tony had procured a wolf. Yes. A wolf. Not a wolf hybrid. A Timber wolf. He was a puppy. Two months old. They are cute, but they hate people. It’s in their DNA. Obviously. I had wanted a pug. Tony wanted a child. He got a wolf, as he needed me for the child and only needed an illegal breeding house in Sylmar to get a wolf. I had sworn I wasn’t going to take care of the wolf. But Tony was at work during the day and because he would rather not have me running around pursuing my career, which I would never have dreamed, because Tony’s obvious impeding suicide should I choose to. Tony threatened death a lot. This, I realized, would be a twist, but twists are in real life are a lot more, well, real, than in a movie and fairytales and horror movies are not so distant cousins and the ones who threaten death are never the ones who die.

Brett and I had spoken a couple of times. We had lunch. Nothing ever happened. We just talked around something that should have been very, very simple. We ran into each other a couple of times after Tony and I had moved in together in the old, terrifying house in Hollywood. My friend Julie-Anne was living with us. She had recently come back from Australia. I have a long history of opening my homes to people I love. That might be the real horror story here, but for now, it was just about the couch I was sitting on and being way too young to have given up and way too old to think that I was put on earth to make people feel better about themselves. But at this moment, this is where I was hiding out from the rest of my life. I was watching Seven. You know that movie. It’s fucking terrifying. It was the end of the movie. It’s brutal. The cops appear. Gwyneth Paltrow’s head is in a box. Brad Pitt is heartbroken. Morgan Freeman is horrified, Kevin Spacey was whom Kevin Spacey used to be and Brad Pitt would eventually go on to date the rest of Gwyneth Paltrow.

I heard the sirens. The scene was quiet, but the sirens were so loud. It didn’t make any sense. The sirens were very loud. I finally turned the sound down, with the remote I had yet to throw. All that would come later. But right now—the sirens. I turned the sound down, but the sirens were still going. Loud, jarring. I heard the police radio. It sounded like an accident. I went over to the window. The windows were always open. We had no AC, and I was still enamored by the Santa Anas and the hot, cold and weird nights that they brought with them to old Hollywood. Yes, there was very little romance to my early 20s cohabitation, except for the old Hollywood feel. To add to the glamour, the house was next to Winchell’s donuts, so I went hard cliché and assumed that the sirens were coming from the Winchell’s Donuts’ parking lot. This was not unusual. There was always both crime and donuts going down on this particular corner. But the radios were so loud. Extra loud. The fact that I could hear them so clearly was so disturbing. I closed the windows, still loud. It was like the sound was coming from somewhere else. Tony and Julie-Anne had both come in to the living room, because, that sound. We concluded that the sound was coming from the stereo. Yes, the stereo. From the large speakers. Yes! Surely that was it. I turned the volume down, but the sound was still loud, blaring out of the speakers. Something was wrong with the stereo. I kept turning the volume down. But the sound didn’t stop. Sirens, radios. It hurt. You know when sound is so jarring and loud that it hurts? Tony and Julie-Anne, being taller and less blonde than me, decided to call out ideas of what to do. Are you turning the right knob? Did you break the stereo? Honestly? Tony, being an audio engineer, was just plain annoyed, when I decided to just unplug the whole thing. And not only that. I moved the stereo and the speakers away from the wall as if the proximity of the wall was a vortex where the sound was coming from. It probably wasn’t, but the sound was still there. Coming out of the speakers, only getting louder.

We all looked at each other, grabbed whatever one did in the late 90s to leave the house and ran to the nearest bar and didn’t speak of the speakers and the noise and the police radios and the fact that no one was in love and other things that couldn’t be explained.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting again, this time, in front of a computer. Something called email had been invented at some point and I was engaging in it. Tony had insisted we share an email account. This seemed like a great idea at the time. Or just an idea. My phone rang. The one connected to the wall. It was my manager. She asked me if I had spoken to Brett. I said, maybe a couple of months ago. We were supposed to get together. I had chickened out. Suicidal terrorism and slut’ism was real. I hadn’t gone. I assumed that I would have time to grow up, maybe Tony would just leave me, maybe I would, at some point deserve to love who I wanted to. She told me she had just heard from Brett’s manager. Brett had been in a car accident a couple of weeks before. He had literally packed everything up and gone back to Georgia with a friend. He was done. He had done my film and the newest version of Lolita. But he was done. It was not a life. He went home. Or almost. A truck on the freeway had hit him and his friend. On the way home. They were both dead. Brett was dead. It happened that night. That night. The night the sirens came out of my speakers. In the house I didn’t want to be in. In a relationship I couldn’t leave and with a friend who would not be for much longer. I had heard the police radios that night. Brett’s accident had been broadcasted, because he knew that things have to seem magical for me to understand that they are real.

Did my life change that day? No. I promised all sort of things. I was going to send a VHS copy to his parents. I never did. I was going to screen the film again. All of these things were hurtful to my relationship. It was heavy on my soul. The one thing I knew I couldn’t do was grieve. So I didn’t. Until now.

I stayed in the relationship I didn’t want to be in, in the house I didn’t want to be in, with a wolf and eventually a pug. Those two would become my big loves. I can train wolves, but not pugs. I can love people, but falling in love killed all the wrong people. And Tony and I were still living in the blue house off Vine.

Until the day I got a big job and I had to get off the couch. I realized I had to kiss another actor in another forbidden job. This turned out to be the kiss of death for the relationship. Not because Tony died, but because I had somewhat assumed it. He had assumed that I would quit the job and we were at a standoff. Instead of death he threatened that he would move out. I thought a threat was a promise, like that one time when this guy Darryl had pulled a gun on me and told me that he would shoot the next girl who rejected him and then proceeded to ask me to be his girlfriend. I knew for a fact that I would rather die than sleep with, kiss or talk to Darryl, so I said no expecting death like a normal person. But I didn’t die. He didn’t shoot, probably thinking it was illegal to kill a woman. But it was another threat that didn’t turn out to be a promise.

Tony and I broke up and never spoke again. He left the house; I stayed on the lease and anther love affair started for me. Old houses that have more secrets than me and need more help than it would be appropriate to give to a human you haven’t given birth to. And you know what? Tony never haunted me after he died from losing me. You know why? He didn’t die. He lived. I think he even procreated.

But Brett died. I couldn’t grieve. He wasn’t my boyfriend; he wasn’t someone I could tell anyone about. I fell in love with him. He fell in love with me. But someone else’s feelings were more important and you would think I would have learned that lesson then, but it took me many more lessons and many almost deaths of my own to actually live.

Ghosts follow you until you’re ready to walk alone. They remind you that they hang in a web in a house, in a moment, not until they’re ready to move forward, but until you are. Brett died and every time, over the years when I have tried to write about him, I can see his boots out of the corner of my eye and when I look up, everything has disappeared on the page, never to be found on my computer or anywhere again.

If you’re reading this, it’s a sign that we are all beginning to survive. We are beginning to survive the ghosts of what happened to us, what happened to people we loved, what happened to the dreams we had and all the promises we made. If you read this, it means that we all began to survive. Maybe it even means that we all began to live.

By Camilla Rantsen