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  “Oh, Janeane Garofalo lives here,” he said when he walked me to my building. Janeane and I left each other funny stuff sometimes with the doorman—pumpkin seeds from Trader Joe’s, some sea-salt-spray hair product. I asked if he wanted to see the roof, which was through the lobby. When we got up there, I stepped on the edge of a heavy potted plant to bend over the ledge and see the Empire State Building. “No, no! Don’t do that!” he yelled, and I looked at him like he was crazy and saw his writer’s mind working. He shared his mental note with me, saying that he’d read somewhere that the reason some people are afraid of heights is because the fantasy of suicide is closer to the forefront of their minds, and so the possibility of jumping is more at the ready—easier to make that leap.

  He left soon after that. He was living on the Upper West Side in the same building Nora Ephron lived in, the Apthorp. After a few day dates, he picked me up in his car (I think a Porsche), and I helped him with Christmas shopping for his girls. We went to Purl Soho for sewing gifts, and he bought a table at a local store near Union Square. He had a bundle of hundreds with him, like a gangster, that he took out of his pocket and showed me and he told me a story that now I don’t remember about a laundromat we’d passed. As his car pulled away from a stop, I shouted to passersby: “Louis CK’s in this car, everybody!”

  When I went over to his apartment to read his material, a friend asked if I would take some of the hairs from his bathroom floor for her. I didn’t. I could have, easily, but instead chose to stare at the dust bunnies on the floor, along with the hair, and look at him like women look at those kinds of men and think, “Do you live in a cave?”

  I brought over beets and salad stuff because he’d complained about being unhealthy. I was surprised that his kitchen was so foreign to him because on his show he wasn’t scared of it. On television, he was totally adept at chopping vegetables, even while talking on the phone at the same time. It’s sexy when a man can cook, but he was in some relationship drama at the time, which had him holding his phone, mainly. “No, you can’t cut with that,” I said, and pointed to his phone. I opened drawers and found what I’d needed, which was a knife.

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  The material he handed me was so well written that I fell in love with it. I played Liz, who works in a bookstore. Louie and I connect, have a night-long date, and then I disappear, leaving him searching. We shot it very quickly, spanning five days. On an early call at the bookstore where I worked, in Brooklyn, I remember waiting a few hours for him to show up. I’d brought my yoga mat, so I could lie down and relax if I needed to. I sang songs like Billy Joel’s “Big Shot” to keep my spirits up and goaded Louis when he came in about arriving late, like a rock star—but he was a rock star and that’s what rock stars do. I had seen U2 at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA on a Wednesday night, and Bono came out to a standing ovation and said, “It’s so great to be here! On a Saturday night!” For rock stars, every night is Saturday night.

  Louie did some really interesting things when we shot our bookstore scenes. For my first line, he wanted me to kind of take the words out of his mouth, so he mouthed the line while I said it aloud. The line, I think, was “Do you need any help?” or “Can I help you?” There was another scene in which he was coming up behind me to ask me out, and when we rehearsed it, he scared me and made me jump. He said he wanted to keep the jump and when we acted the scene for the camera, he said casually, “I’m a monster,” before leading me to an aisle of books to ask me out. The line didn’t make the cut, though.

  For the scene where I’m telling him the story about my mother, when I was throwing up on chemo and comforting her at the same time, he said, “I’m gonna shoot this ‘walk and talk’ like you’re talking to a ghost.” He’d make his way into and out of the frame, so it seemed like I was talking to no one, to the air. I remember there was a full moon that night, the reflection of which was caught on a car across the street, and he was excited about that.

  We ended that night’s shoot with our scene in the thrift store, where I make him try on a ladies’ sequined dress. We had to come back the following day to shoot it again because he couldn’t zip it up. It made the shame of being in the dress the next day even more authentic and he blushed, which was soulful and real and funny.

  The shoot was seamless since he’s such an auteur and knows every line he’s written. I caught him once laughing to himself as he was looking at someone. I asked him what was so funny and he said, “I’m such an asshole,” and shook his head.

  I die at the end of the season, and shooting my death was really hard. There were real nurses there who hooked me up to a life support system, and who genuinely took care of me, saying I was going to be alright. They held my hand and comforted me with their protocol “You’re doing great.” In between the takes, I went into the bathroom and cried on the floor. I was upset that Liz was dying and mad at Louie. After the first take, he shooed everyone out of the room and we sat on the bed, side by side. He looked at me with intense concern and it seemed that it was difficult for him to find the words to say what he wanted.

  “What? What is it? What am I doing wrong?” I asked. We were staring at each other. “You can tell me.” My voice had become small and worried. Then he said something I couldn’t understand:

  “I wrote a death scene but you don’t get to die.”

  “What? What do you mean? How does that affect what I’m doing? Can you be more specific?”

  “It’s before the last scene of the season when I leave for China. This will be a continuous shot with Steadicam and no cuts, so it has to be shot in one.” My breathing was shallow and I wanted to just die and get it over with. We did the small but brutal scene around seven or eight times. He’d look at me with disappointment and regret. I’d mumble, “I don’t know what you want. Was that take better? I don’t know what you mean. I’m sorry.”

  In the scene, it begins outside the hospital, where the nurse tells him that I don’t have much time or something, that I’m going fast. And then he just comes in and I say, “What’s happening? Am I dying? I’m not ready. What’s going on?” It’s just a few words and I especially now don’t want to watch it again to tell you what I said exactly. But before I die, I just say, “Bye?”—and it was written as a question.

  In between all of this he reminded me I had wanted to die—the actor part of me was into it—but now I was strongly feeling, But I don’t want to. I got so mad at him that I couldn’t remove myself, couldn’t not take it personally. It was difficult not to, lying on a hospital bed. I’d get out of the bed after “Cut” and run to the bathroom to close the door in agony.

  No one had ever written a part like this for me and it was the kind of character I thought I’d be playing my whole career. He’d captured my voice. That’s probably why he wrote a scene where he realizes he forgot to ask me my name and I tell him, “It’s Tape Recorder.” It was his voice, not mine, played back to him. Is that what he meant when he said that I didn’t get to die? Because he created the story? Had I forgotten that it was dance?

  There’s the Minotaur myth, where the god Zeus sent a bull to Queen Pasiphaë and she gave birth to a half man/half bull. Her husband, King Minos, the king of Crete, was embarrassed about all this so he had a labyrinth built for the Minotaur to never escape from—he was a monster and slayed people and literally devoured them. There was all this Crete-and-Athens drama going on. The king of Athens, King Aegeus, had a son named Theseus, who wanted to kill the Minotaur—he had lost a lot of his friends who’d been sacrificed to the bull and was determined to end this feud between his dad and King Minos.

  King Minos’s daughter Ariadne is struck by Venus and falls in love with Theseus. She wants to marry him after he kills the Minotaur. She gives him a sword and some red string to tie to the entrance so he can find his way out. This labyrinth is pretty much inescapable but Th
eseus finds his way and slays the Minotaur. When he is free, he doesn’t run to find Ariadne, though—by reasoning of the gods or more obligations to his father or he just wasn’t in love with her. She’s left on the bathroom floor—crying with a red piece of thread—which is where I was.

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  After I had died several times, Louie was nowhere to be found and I heard he’d driven home. “He’s not going to give me a ride home?!” I shouted, abandoned and furious. “After all that?!” I was shaking with rage. Then the makeup artist asked me to put fake blood up my nose to record it for him, to see if it would be believable for the next day’s scene. I shook my head and looked to my babysitter, Blair Breard, from Monroe, who also happened to be the producer of Louie. I’d run into her for the first time in more than thirty years at Bigelow pharmacy when she was shopping for something decorative to put in her hair for an awards show where she was nominated. She was leaving for Hollywood the next day and we hugged and I wished her good luck. It must’ve been three years prior to the moment we were sharing now, where I was deranged and saying, “What? What?! This is acceptable to you?” over and over again, and laughing in that horrible angry way you do when you don’t want to cry—that passive-aggressive way. I snatched the plastic funnel-tipped bottle, squirted the blood-red Karo syrup up my nose, and looked into my makeup artist’s iPhone to record it. “Is it believable? Is it believable?”

  The next day began with setting up the shot in the bus, which would take place before the scene we’d shot the night before. I had called Louie once I got home, to make nice—I was upset she had died, I explained, and was just sad and troubled it had ended so abruptly. I could hear that he was in his cave/labyrinth and his voice was low and disconnected from himself, like he was very tired. I hoped the tensions would be dropped for the next day of work, but they weren’t.

  He was confused that morning as to how he was going to shoot the scene where I magically run into him on the bus. In it, my character is happy to see him, and I say, “Louie!” and go to him for a hug. Then my nose starts bleeding and I collapse, holding on to his shoulders. He had his camera lenses out in front of him at the back of the bus—lenses he was proud of and knew so well. I heard them talking about setting up a dolly track for the camera, which seemed like a bad idea. “A dolly track on a moving bus probably won’t work,” I said, to no reply. I went on, “Since the bus will be moving . . . over the bumpy roads . . . all the construction on the Bowery.” I was met with blank and confused stares and a heavy mood of disappointment—or was it remorse? In the end, the shot was handheld and made less complicated.

  I got to end the day with a shot from an earlier episode, where I was screaming at Louie and somewhat cheering him on, leading him to a view that I want him to see. He’s out of shape and winded, and directed me to really shout at him, which I said would not be a problem. I shouted the lines “Just do it! Breathe! And step! Breathe! And step!” as we climbed the many flights of stairs to the rooftop, which mirrored my own heavy climb out of this realm. I got to tell him, as I sat casually on the ledge, that I wasn’t going to jump. That he was scared of my jumping because it would be so easy for him to jump, but I would never do that, because I was having too good a time. Then a wave comes over Liz that’s imperceptible to Louie (and us)—an unknown darkness too intimately confusing to be shared or expressed, and he’s become a curious witness to that. It’s then, when she’s retreated into her own cave, that she can walk slowly and say her name, her voice low and disconnected—a ghost of herself.

  I wore my own clothes in the episodes and my hair was in Heidi braids, like Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude or like Liv Ullmann, Ingmar Bergman’s main muse, sometimes wore in Bergman’s films. On the night we met at Beyond Therapy, Louie had said he liked the scarf I was wearing. They were all my own clothes, so I could bring Liz back myself. I could have my friend Jack record me on his iPhone, on a moving bus, wiping blood from my nose and smiling, happy to be alive. I’d keep my job, at the bookstore, as a zombie. I’d remember the day he brought his Bolex camera in and shot me on black-and-white film. His Super 8 camera, which shot me in color, also on film. How he made me say “I love you” directly into the lens of the camera. It was a shared love of cinema or a pact that I’d given my heart.

  I pitched “Zombie Liz” to the FX guys to no response. When they said they’d get in touch when something came up that I seemed right for, I looked at the posters of all the male-driven shows in their office—the Western show Justified stands out in my memory. “I don’t really know if I’m right for any of these shows.” “I’d want my own show,” I told them in a small defeated voice. One of them said, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and I turned to look at the poster, thinking, “How can it always be sunny in Philadelphia? That’s ridiculous,” and crossed my legs, which seized my lower back into a muscle cramp. I shared this with them and we talked about back pain for a minute—“It’s all repressed anger,” I said. One of the nicer gentlemen walked me out, as I was limping, and we stopped at a desk to make an appointment with his acupuncturist.

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  A few years later, Louie texted me to invite me over for Thanksgiving. My oldest, dearest friend, Tanya, came with me to his place in the Apthorp. After talking to the doorman, we found out that Louie didn’t live there anymore. We stayed talking to the doorman for a bit because it was Thanksgiving, but also because we wanted to make sure he knew we weren’t crazy. It was a pride thing, too. Louie wasn’t answering my texts, so we walked across the street to a diner with my big bowl of beets and Tanya’s bourbon. We waited almost an hour for him to give me his new address, which was way downtown in the Village. It was snowing and the streets were beautiful and empty with hardly any traffic, so we sped along. He answered the door, smiling and happy to see me, and me, him. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” He put his hand to his head and scratched it in the “I’m such an idiot” gesture. “I can’t believe I told you the wrong place. I’m so sorry.” We were laughing and hugged, then separated.

  “You didn’t tell me anything because we haven’t talked in two years!” I said. “I thought maybe you forgot where you lived!” Tanya and I told him how we had to do “that doorman thing,” where you overcompensate and ingratiate yourself to the doorman, and the doorman accommodates this. It could’ve been a scene from his show. There’s a particular kind of dialogue a scene like this produces, where it’s mainly all subtext, and Tanya and I found that hilarious and laughed about it on the way downtown. It’s a New York thing, when you go to someone’s place who lives in a doorman building. Doormen hold the keys to everyone inside, and they don’t let the wrong people in; they’re keen to furtive glances. An inspired doorman knows everything about the whole neighborhood.

  There was so much food on the dining room table because everyone brought something to share; it was so bountiful that Louie’d mention giving what wasn’t eaten to the homeless shelter. He’d lost weight and looked content—the vibe was chill and we all enjoyed each other’s company. I met Ellen Burstyn, who I’m such a fan of, and we talked about The King of Marvin Gardens and she said how all the actors hung out in the same hotel a few weeks before filming began—and how pre-planning for actors to chill out and get to know one another doesn’t happen anymore. I told her I read her memoir and that the chapter about The Exorcist was so scary that it made me believe in monsters—how people can be possessed by dark forces they can’t control. Art is the medicine the monster produces while trying to survive the labyrinth. When he or she is set free, the story is told and made human. Louie would squeeze past me and gently put his hands on my shoulders, like a good dad. He was out of the labyrinth and my thread was no longer.

  12

  Dad and the Stage

  I have a black-and-white picture of my dad in Vietnam, where he’s sitting by a window and holding a photograph of my mom up to the camera. He’s laughing or mo
cking the whole thing and angry underneath it all. A bullet going through his helmet, missing his head by centimeters, made him think, “Why would someone want to shoot me?” It didn’t make sense to him, even though that’s what war was, is. My uncle Tim, my mom’s brother, was there at the same time and the news of his daughter Samantha’s birth was radioed to him when he was in the line of fire, after he watched his fellow soldiers die in front of him. When he’d retell the story, he’d imitate the “krrrr” sound of the static on the radio . . . “Mr. Patton, krrrr . . . you have a baby girl . . . krrrrr.” He makes a run for one of the barracks: “Congratulations, Mr. Patton, you’re a father! Over and out! Krrrrr.”

  Whenever I heard a helicopter when I was playing outside, I got nervous. “Choppers,” my dad called them, which made sense because the heavy sound would chop my heart’s beat with its heavy vibration and the loud noise would shake the air. If it landed, the propellers would blow a wind so strong that it would stir up dirt that hit my eyes and almost knocked me over, like it did on the naval base in Baltimore when Nixon landed in the backyard and we all ran out to see him. My mom cried to the TV when all that shit went down but Walter Cronkite looked so comforting, like Santa Claus’s brother. “Watergate” sounded like something magical in the backyard.

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