FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

I Blame Dennis Hopper
By Illeana Douglas

PAGE THREE:
Also, not many people can brag and say they saw a Grateful Dead concert as a toddler.

There's a lot of drama associated with being poor. It's probably why I became an actress. Being poor and being an actress go hand-in-hand. I was already starving. So I just had to become an artist. I decided to move to New York. I found a cheap one-bedroom apartment. Unfortunately there were three other girls already living in it, but I moved in anyway.

We were so poor that -- you know that store Crate and Barrel? It was actually based on our apartment. It was made entirely of crates and barrels. It's true. I remember once we ran out of toilet paper and my roommate brought home this industrial size roll of toilet paper she had stolen from the Actors Equity lounge. A gigantic wheel. Like a wheel of Gouda cheese only it was toilet paper.

We couldn't afford to turn the gas on so we cooked things in a coffee percolator. Boiled eggs, hot dogs, long tall food worked the best. Times were lean and I did some things I'm not proud of. The sex for food program was probably one of those things. "Sure, I'll go out with you. Is there food involved?" And one year I'm pretty sure I lived on popcorn.

I was fired from my job at Macy's for sitting. I was hungry and tired and so I sat down. I got fired for that. Then at Christmas I got a job at Saks Fifth Avenue. All I had to do was cart around an Estee Lauder Blockbuster Makeup Kit. It was perfect for me because I was very lazy and hated to work. Don't tell me I'm not my father's daughter!

On the 12th day of Christmas, or something like that, I was holding my Blockbuster, and it was heavy. It had like 50 shades of eye shadow in it, and ten hideous shades of coral lipstick. They were playing this Phillip Glass version of "Hark How the Bells," and I started feeling dizzy. I hadn't had any breakfast. I was still poor remember. People were coming towards me and moving away, and coming towards me and moving away, like fish. All to this Phillip Glass Christmas music. I don't know about you, but listening to Phillip Glass music makes me feel like I'm guilty of a crime. Dum-da-da-dum-Dum-da-da-dum. Dum-da-da-Dum.

I only had a dollar and my break was coming up and I was debating whether I should spend 50 cents on a cup of coffee, or the hot chocolate for 75 cents, and that would be like a whole meal. Then I'd skip lunch and have that apple for dinner. I mean these are the kind of things you debate when you're poor. The Christmas music was very hypnotizing, and I started to daydream, and I remember thinking maybe that's the reason poor people are so lazy. It's because they're starving and too exhausted to work! I mean I'm debating whether hot chocolate is a meal or not!

I heard this clatter as my Estee Lauder Blockbuster hit the ground. Salmon lipsticks rolled everywhere. I was so hungry that I had fainted on the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, where just an hour before, I had sprayed Kitty Carlyle Hart with perfume. I even made her laugh when I said, "Come on down, the Lauder's fine."

Now, lying on the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, I prayed that Kitty Carlyle Hart had seen me faint. She would take pity on me, and buy me lunch, and then she'd invite me to live with her in her Park Avenue Apartment. There I would live the rich life I was supposed to have lived, and over tea and crumpets, we'd laugh about my poor hippie childhood and how Dennis Hopper had ruined my entire life.

When I looked up I only saw my supervisor, Vicky, standing over me hissing, "What's the matter with you? Are you on drugs? Get up!"

I blame Dennis Hopper for what happened next.

Before Vicky fired me, she sent me to the basement to wrap like 100 Blockbusters for rich Estee Lauder customers like Cindy Adams and Barbara Walters. Bitter and still light-headed, I thought it would be funny to scrawl "Merry Christmas from a Saks Satan Worshipper!" inside all the pre-addressed cards. I want to apologize to anyone who got one. Mystery solved, Barbara. It was me.

All around me poor, shall we say "ethnic" types, stole gifts from stock to give to their girlfriends. They were poor after all, and didn't know any better. That's why I took a 50-dollar Chloe perfume set. I didn't care that it was stolen. It made me feel special. I vowed to myself that one day I wouldn't have to steal expensive things to feel special. When I was a rich and famous actress, people would give them to me in the form of gift baskets.

Oh. Here's the thing. This is what I really blame Dennis Hopper for.

Even when I finally started making money, even when I was rich -- I still felt poor. I remember coming to LA for my first time and I was invited to this big premiere, and at the after-party I was stuffing my face, and the director of the film came up to me and said, "Have you ever met James Woods?"

And I said, "Free food, did you see? There's free food. Nobody's eating it."

"Yeah, Illeana. Tell Jimmy Woods that story you told me. He'll love it."

I was holding this cracker with a huge amount of goat cheese on it, and I didn't want to waste it so I thought OK. I'll tell James Woods the story, and then I'll eat my cheese and cracker. So I meet him, I tell the story, and he laughs. Then James Woods starts telling a story, so I go to eat my cheese and cracker, and I see that the cheese is gone. It's just a cracker. And I'm looking around like, where did my cheese go?

So James Woods gets to the end of his story but he sees that I'm not laughing so he says, "Don't you get it? You don't get it," and starts to tell me the story again.

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