The day before I was scheduled to head home, I went shopping down in Venice Beach for some souvenirs. If I had spent my time in Los Angeles fruitlessly searching for the clichéd Hollywood scene, Venice Beach is where I found it.
The promenade had a stretch of shops and restaurants along the sand. It is there where I saw bikini-girls rollerblading, meatheads working out at Muscle Beach, a group of guys playing a pickup game of basketball like a scene straight out of White Men Can’t Jump.
There was a Rastafarian on roller skates playing electric guitar. There were random people on soapboxes, speaking to the gathering crowds. And there were lots and lots of tourists like me.
I took advantage of the fabulous shopping, however, and found two different wind chimes for Sylvia and Lisa’s parents, and a hand-carved pipe for my father, all of which were purchased from an aging hippie wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and love beads. I picked up an awesome black leather saddlebag for Bruce’s motorcycle, then stopped at a children’s boutique to get T-shirts for Caleb, Julia, and the new baby, scoring an adorable little bikini for Skylar while I was at it. I was finishing up my shopping with a watercolor from a streetside artist that I knew would look perfect in Lisa and Pickford’s sunroom when I headed next door to the newsstand for some gum.
That’s when I saw the naked pictures of me on the cover of The Backlot.
Oh my God!
I immediately scanned my eyes around the store, hoping my ass wasn’t recognizable to the oblivious patrons milling about the magazine display. I could’ve just died right there by the racks of cellophaned doughnuts.
I’d promised Trip I wouldn’t bring home any more of those awful tabloids, and it was kind of hard to avoid buying up every copy of the one with the picture of my naked body on the front cover. But, with great restraint, I kept my promise and didn’t get a single one.
I stood there staring at the headline: “Trip Wiley and Mystery Vixen Heat Up Poolside”.
The picture was of me sprawled out naked on his chaise lounge in the backyard, Trip still wearing his shorts, but between my knees. It was the day I’d gone dress shopping and came home to surprise him with my newly waxed nether regions. The photo was obviously taken from far away, probably from a freaking helicopter or something based on the angle of the shot. It was fuzzy—thank GOD—but clear enough that they still had to black-bar out some private parts.
And that was the thing. That was the private part of our life. That moment was never intended to be broadcast to the world. I couldn’t even think about the collection of pictures they didn’t publish, probably stashed away in some pervert’s literal spank file.
What the ever-loving fuckity fuck fuck???
It was unsettling and weird, to say the least. I mean, I didn’t sign up to be famous. Yes, I was a slightly well-known author, but even a public career like that was fairly detached. Faceless. Anonymous. Private.
There was nothing private about my naked body sprawled out across the cover of a nationally-distributed periodical.
Oh dear God. Please, please don’t let my father see this.
I may have promised not to bring any more tabloids into Trip’s house, but he hadn’t said anything about me reading them when I wasn’t there. And there was absolutely no way in hell I was not reading this. I mean, those were my hooters on full-out display. My all-natural hooters that up until that moment I had always found to be one of my best attributes, even in The Land of Unnaturally Perky Fun Bags.
So that’s how I found myself standing in the middle of a run-down magazine stand on my last day in California reading a brazen article reveling in my sexual escapades.
Prior to this story, any time I’d seen a photo of myself in a movie magazine, I was normally referred to as: “and date,” which was just fine by me. However, The Backlot had taken things a step further that day. The pictures were bad enough, but I cringed when I saw that they actually printed my name!