My friend Jenni calls them Sunshine Stealers. Men who have been at it a little too long, who are tired of the ride but can’t get off. They’re looking for some new form of energy, of approval. It’s linked with sex, but it’s not the same. What they want to take from you is way worse than your thong in the back of their Lexus. It’s ideas, curiosity, an excitement about getting up in the morning and making things.
“Oh,” she’ll tell me when I mention the only guy I talked to at a boring dinner party. “Another Sunshine Stealer.”
“That one,” she says about a seemingly charming visionary. “He’s the OG Sunshine Stealer.”
When I’m eighty, I’ll describe the time I sat with a director in his hotel suite while he told me girls love it when you “direct” their blow jobs.
“Oh, wow,” I answered. I mean, how else do you answer?
“I don’t know,” he said. “They just dig it.”
I’ll describe the pseudo-date I went on with a man whose work I admired. I wore a white dress with only one stain, and we barreled downtown in a cab, and I leaned back against the torn pleather seat and thought, I’ve really done it, I’m a grown-ass woman now. And at 4:00 A.M. when I tried to kiss him he stayed stone faced. I hit his side mouth, and I turned on my heels and took off down the block at a speed I’ve never achieved before or since. I felt so ashamed. My first and only misstep of this kind, and he’d be able to tell them all: She’s weak, she’s just like the rest of them. She wants it.
I’ll describe another, even-older filmmaker and how, following him down the street after a drink, I realized that he limped a little, unexplained. And I’ll describe the email he wrote me after I said I couldn’t work on his film because I was making my own show. “How could you dismiss this opportunity to be a small part of a film that will be taught in colleges for years to come in exchange for the utter ephemera of a ‘TV Pilot.’ ” In quotes! He put it IN QUOTES!
And I read the email again and again, shocked, jaw set with rage so that I couldn’t make a sound. And I imagined my own pain, my anger, magnified by fifty in the man who would send that email, the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating. And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.
I’ve imagined the Sunshine Stealers, around a long conference table like the members of the Cabinet, in dialogue about me. She’s sly and manipulative, one says. She’ll do anything to get what she wants, says another. You have to be a hell of a lot prettier than that to fuck your way to the top. An especially old one chimes in: I had some great times with her, man, nice girl, wonder what’ll become of her.
But the scariest thought of all is the one that pushed me to keep making contact well past the point that I became uncomfortable, to try and prove myself again and again. The reason I didn’t stop answering their calls, that I rushed to drinks dates that were past my bedtime and had conversations that didn’t interest me and forced myself to sit at the table long after I’d grown uncomfortable. The thought I worked so vigilantly to ensure they would never entertain: She’s silly. She’s no threat.
My friend, a woman whom I admire for her independent spirit, told me she had a similar experience. “I made my first movie and all these men crawled out of the woodwork, looking for … something.” She was once a punk. The real kind, not the kind who buys her clothes at the mall. “But they didn’t get it: I’m not here to make friends with you. I’m here to destroy you.”
I told her I was out of the danger zone now, but for a moment there my phone ringing at 2:00 A.M. became an instrument of terror. Who had my number that didn’t know how to use it appropriately? A message, delivered in low tones: “If you have a moment, I’d love to talk. You’re a good listener.”
You know why I listened? Because I wanted it so bad. Because I wanted to learn, to grow and to stay.
Oh, look, they said to themselves, it’s a cute little director-shaped thing.
Just wait until I’m eighty.
I AM EIGHT and I am afraid of everything.
The list of things that keep me up at night includes, but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.