She Was Only 19

 

On my way to work this morning a 90s boy band song came on the radio. The predictable waves of nostalgia washed over me, embarrassing tears pooling in my eyes. It was not dissimilar from the way my mom reacted the night before to the Rolling Stone’s Angie. She’d been in college when the 70s rock ballad had debuted on SNL, I’d been a freshman in high school when the sappy overproduced love song hit the airwaves. At the time, I wanted nothing more in the world than to have someone sing those precious words to me- “I’ll be the one, who will make all your sorrows undone, I’ll be the one”… How desperately I wanted to be a guy’s “one.” At 15 years old, the best thing that could ever happen would be having a member of a boy band sing those things for me. Four years later, one of them did.

When an infant comes into this world, their senses are overwhelmed, bombarded with all kinds of sensorial information we adults take for granted. The light, the shapes, the sounds – all is fascinating and none of it makes sense. This is exactly how I felt landing in Los Angeles. The Sunset Strip where I worked, the studio lots where I was auditioning, the celebrities casually dining at Beverly Hills cafés – it was all more than I could handle. I didn’t know how to process the city, the industry, the people, but I did the best I could. In other words, I partied. A lot.

That first year I went to more clubs and met more “Hollywood” types than the rest of my LA days combined (9 years and counting). This was all the more impressive considering I was attending my freshman year at USC, working 4 days a week as a restaurant hostess, taking 2 nights of acting classes, and auditioning. I had a tumultuous relationship with a somewhat successful actor, I managed to end up in Vegas with strangers not once but twice, and I developed a mild eating disorder (it’s not really bulimia if you only throw up once every couple of weeks, right?) What’s that Eagles’ song, Life in the Fast Lane?

It was April 2005, nearing the end of the school year, when I met him. My relationship with the actor had just imploded, and so my clubbing days reached their zenith. I was going out and getting wasted a minimum of three nights a week, which seemed totally reasonable considering the 4.0 GPA I was pulling. This particular Tuesday night I was at Element, by far the hottest venue in those days. When I think back on Element, and Hyde, and Spyder, it seems like the Golden Era of clubbing- all of young Hollywood came out to play. (In retrospect, the scene was probably no different in 1996 or 2013, I just happened to be 19 in 2005.) I sipped Grey Goose from a table near the stage with some girlfriends, and surveyed the surroundings. The usual suspects were there – Michael, Lindsay, Paris – but I spotted someone I had never seen before: the guy who had once sang “I’ll be the one.”

He kept staring at me as the night raged on, and finally I decided to take a solo bathroom trip, being careful to pass close to his table. It worked- he pulled me aside. We talked for a few minutes before I asked him a little white lie of a question: “so what do you do?” He looked at me, surprised, then said he was in a band. “That’s awesome, what’s it called?” He told me, and I laughed. “Oh my God, I didn’t even recognize you!” He smiled, and didn’t let me out of his sight the rest of the evening. (To this day I wonder if he really believed my fake naïveté. I’ll never know.) He called me on my flip phone before I even got home that night, and I practically died. I so wished I could teleport back to 1998, when all of my friends and I had posters of him in our room. He had since fallen from those starry heights, but he was still sexy, and I was still struck.

We hung out non-stop for the next several weeks. He loved the fact that I had only slept with one other person, and saw me as this sort of innocent, this pure being. In some ways he was right, but in other ways completely wrong. I was smart, and sensitive, and emotional, and compassionate. But I was also caught up in the scene, enchanted by the fame and the fortune of Hollywood. One night he invited me to the studio to listen to them record their new album. “I remember thinking, she was only 19,” he sang. I turned to his producer. “He wrote that line for you,” he smiled. This was real. This was happening.

A couple of weeks later I flew to Florida to see him on tour. My friend Sarah from USC lived in Miami and was home on summer vacation, so I stayed with her the first couple of nights. (That’s a whole other story unto itself.) We made our way up north a couple of hours to the Hard Rock in Ft. Lauderdale, and spent the night with the boys. The next day we saw them play for an arena full of pre-pubescent girls. The whole experience was surreal, and slightly tragic. Who he’d been, where he was now, the way his career had consumed his entire life and sense of self. For weeks we’d been intimate, sharing details of our lives and our thoughts and worries and joys. But nothing was as revealing as this night, seeing him on stage, and then when he returned to the hotel hours later, drunk, angry. I barely remember how things went down, but lines were crossed, I was a bad friend to Sarah, and we ended up driving back to Miami before the sun rose. The fairy tale was over.

We still dated for a couple of months after that trip, but it was never the same. The end of innocence, as they say. The band went on tour in Europe, and his phone calls became more and more sporadic. Finally, I met someone else and he became “the one.” He was not rich, he was not famous, he was just this funny, charming guy. I turned 20 two weeks later. I was no longer a teenager.

It sometimes feels like my past doesn’t belong to me. Was that really me doing those things, saying those words, having those thoughts? I talk about those early days in LA every so often- the Vegas trips, the boy band. Sometimes it’ll come up casually in conversation. But I experience a strange disconnect from this former self. It’s almost as if these various life stages are occupied by different people- baby Amy, teenage Amy, mid-20s Amy. I saw it in my mom last night too, as we sat in my parked car, listening until the end of the song. She was back in another time, those old dorm days, long before she met my dad, had her career, had children.

It’s amazing what a lost tune can dig up.