We did not actually do this in front of the younger actors. They only came to set for their coverage. Off camera we pretended Gertrude only twisted Sylvia’s arm.
The Coke bottle scene culminates in her being dragged toward the basement steps. Screaming and crying, she is hurled down the stairs. Smashing her head on the cement floor, Sylvia is left with serious blunt force trauma.
There were scenes in my previous films that had been difficult to shoot—violent, sexual, and physical. But this was different. Moments in this film were unspeakably brutal. As a teenager, I did not have the skills to turn it on and off as abruptly and easily as I can now. To leave the work at work. The scenes would linger, feelings stuck. It took longer to dislodge from the body.
During Sylvia’s last moment alive, she was branded. Gertrude straddled her while one of the kids held Sylvia’s hands above her head. Someone passed out in the theater during this scene when the film premiered at Sundance in 2007. I don’t blame them. Sylvia died not long after that. Torment written in her flesh.
Sylvia’s body faded away until it broke. Knowing that the story was true made it all worse, the details even more gut churning. I couldn’t escape Sylvia, and the days came home with me.
If I was alone in my apartment, I would pace. Walk then sit. Up again, pace. Look out the window, pivot to the bathroom. Windowsill again, sit and smoke. Cigarette done. Grab the backpack and get out. My incessant, underlying need to flee, my new normal. Stopping is too risky, that’s when the feelings jump out. Playing a character that was partially starved to death allowed me to lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself.
“It’s for a film,” I’d say in response to a mention of my small bites, the annoying, concerned tone, almost a challenge.
I’ll prove to you all that I need nothing. The little voice would brag with the creak of a side smile.
In agony, Sylvia would scratch the concrete floor until the tips of her fingers wore off, she chewed her lip compulsively, biting through the pain. When they found her body it looked as though she had two mouths.
I’m hungry.
Two more hours, then you can eat.
What am I going to eat?
Steamed vegetables and brown rice … half of it.
How much more time?
One hour and forty-five minutes.
I’d shower at night, washing off the burns, the bruises, a reminder that I had nothing to complain about. How dare I acknowledge my silly pain as anywhere near hers.
I listened to “Downtown” by Petula Clark incessantly. It was one of the most popular songs in 1965, the year Sylvia was murdered.
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand
Walking, I would listen. On the bus down Sunset, I would listen. In the house, sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette, I would listen. It was compulsive, a way I tend to be with songs, some for stranger reasons than others.
I would walk down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, catching the bus west to Hollywood. I’d get off around Vine and wander into Amoeba Music, a warehouse-size new-and-used record, CD, and DVD store in Los Angeles. The tack tack tack of potential buyers flipping through the hard plastic cases filled the ears as much as the latest, hippest songs they played, a metronome setting the speed. It helped the time pass.
Characters affected me in various ways, how could they not? It’s an exploration of another human’s experience. A never-ending exercise in empathy, opening the heart, hoping it all sinks in, waiting for that release of emotion. My eyes would close, and it would strike me, an inconceivable depth of despair. I wondered how she even made it as long as she did. How she didn’t just give up. I guess that is what torture is, dragging you to the end and pulling you back, again and again.
I was staying in Silver Lake in the top floor of a two-story house that had been converted into its own apartment. A one-bedroom with large windows that offered a beautiful view of the city. It was tucked into the hill on Lucile, not far from Sunset Boulevard, but isolated, a substantial, steep climb. I was alone; I had next to no friends in Los Angeles at the time.
I remember Keener scooping me up in her black sedan and taking me to a July Fourth BBQ in the backyard of a house formerly owned by Buster Keaton. I think she wanted to help me, sensing a struggle I could not speak to. We sat down across from her friend Karen O, who I idolized. Show Your Bones, a quintessential record for me at the time. But food was stressful, drinking was stressful, my eyeballs darted around, calculations in my brain that refused me the moment.
I was lightly seeing a guy at the time. We would go to dinner and I would just stare at the menu, dazed. I wanted none of it. We sat in a restaurant in a train car that served only pasta. Without ordering, we left, and he drove me home.
“I’ve already dealt with my issues,” he said before pulling away.
“I think I’m gay,” I said once while we were fucking. Closed off, disassociated, not even performative.
“No you’re not,” he responded, continuing with the pumps.
I was barely eating, barely sleeping, delirious on set. I smoked compulsively. Hoping to blow out all the thoughts. Or as Kurt Vonnegut puts it, “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
The shoot became increasingly difficult. I’d crash at Keener’s sometimes, especially after the more horrifying days. I felt taken care of there. We’d drink tequila and sit around her firepit. We would blare music and dance dance dance, a wide expanse of unknown adventures ahead. We met making a film wherein she murders me. In the real world she was the only thing saving me.
By the end of the shoot, I had lost a significant amount of weight. And it continued to plummet when I returned to Halifax, where I was still living on and off. I dropped to eighty-four pounds. My arms were so skinny I could take the outer sleeve of a to-go coffee cup, stick my hand through and slide it up my arm, beyond my elbow and to my shoulder. Wasting away. Later that year, I dressed up as a coffee cup sleeve for Halloween—WARNING HOT BEVERAGE INSIDE—spelled out with a thick black marker.
No matter the words or looks of concern or how many rich pastries people tried to get me to eat, I could not see it. I refused to. Hurting my body to that extreme must have been a cry for help, but when the help would come, it made me angry and resentful. Where have you been? An unfair question really. I had never communicated what I’d been grappling with to anyone.
When I first returned home my mother’s face was filled with panic. The worry in her eyes shattered me, a look of anguish I had not seen before, and the culprit was me. I had crossed a threshold, my weight so low the emaciation had become visible. The sunken cheeks scared me.
My need to fix her, to protect her, forced my eating issue in an alternate direction. Now I did want to eat, I was desperate to. I didn’t want her to feel that way.
Finally motivated to eat, I couldn’t. I’d prepare to take a bite of a sandwich, something simple, nothing fancy. My throat would clench, the back of my neck would grow moist, my chest swelling with deep dread. Spinning into a full panic attack, I could not swallow the food. Having been obsessed with maintaining control, I’d now lost it. Squeezed far too tight. My body, understandably, was done with me.
That will not go in. That will not go in. That will not go in.
My days revolved around the moments I was supposed to get food down. There was no hiding it now, my face cadaverous, body skin and bones. I could not escape the stress, the concern omnipresent. And I could not shake Sylvia. I thought of her all the time. No role had stuck with me like that. Flashes of the basement. The hunger. Forced to eat her own vomit. Screams ignored.
“How about you try putting cheese sauce on your broccoli?” a well-meaning therapist suggested.
I sat in her office near the Dalhousie University campus, a white room, credentials framed, she had long, wavy, light hair and wore glasses. She had a smile that was stuck on her face.
“Nuts are a great snack to have around.”
The conversation revolved around when and what I should eat for breakfast, when and what I should eat for a snack, outlines of what should be on my supper plate. I wasn’t supposed to exercise, no push-ups or anything of the sort. Nothing beyond food. And it was all beyond food.
I avoided the few friends I had in Halifax. I was ashamed. The “actress” goes off and returns like all the others. I was such a goddamn cliché. Social anxiety was already a prevalent aspect of my life and as my mental health suffered, my isolation intensified, just a text to a friend seemed out of reach. The idea of making a plan unfeasible.