I Blame Dennis Hopper by Illeana Douglas Page A

you think of Gerry Haines?” I was completely thrown. She was the kind of girl I used to see Henry with before we started dating. She was kind of horsey-looking, wealthy, a complete snob, and a bully.
    A week before, she had pushed me against my locker and said, “You look like a frog. Ribbit. Ribbit.” Then she gave me this smug look and said, “Your family’s poor, and you’re ugly, and you’re not half good enough to date Henry. You’ll see.” It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We had driven maybe a hundred feet and he gushed, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “It’s a great ride.”
    â€œNot the car, doofus. Gerry Haines!”
    Then he blurted out, “I’m in love with Gerry Haines, and I want to break up with you.” Henry seemed to feel better after he got that off his chest. He even accelerated to a cool thirty-five miles per hour. I was speechless, and we drove in silence until we got to the end of the street—where, instead of heading out to the highway, Henry started to turn the car around. He turned it around so carefully, so slowly, like a really good driver. Not at all like those crazy dangerous rides I had taken with my grandfather. But this drive was much scarier, because I realized he was driving me home. My romance had been doomed, just as Gerry had predicted. My ride was over. Henry dropped me off in front of my house and said, “We’ll still be friends.” Of course, he never spoke to me again.
    Was my fascination with doomed love planted in me the night I saw Romeo and Juliet at the Fairlee Drive-In? Or maybe, as in They Came From Within , it had snuck up inside me while I was taking a bath and planted itself like a leech. Maybe I would always be chasing that same doomed love. Faster and faster, never arriving, but never driving fast enough to get away from it. Drive-ins are no longer here, but that’s what dreams are for. I can always remember my grandfather’s swinging open the door of his ’59 Mercedes that summer night in Vermont and saying, “Hop in, Peaches. Let’s go for a ride.”

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    Camelot

    My first attempt at a head shot, age fifteen. Obviously I hadn’t realized that the MGM studio system had collapsed. Still, it launched my career as a cocktail waitress.
    â€œDon’t let it be forgot / That there was once a spot / For one brief shining moment that was known / As Camelot.” Those are the famous words King Arthur utters to an idealistic young boy about the magical kingdom of Camelot.
    My entrance into show business could not have been further from the magic of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot except that it was brief, it lasted for a moment, and it was called Camelot.
    I got my start at the Camelot Dinner Theatre, in Connecticut.
    Don’t remember it, you say? That would be accurate. It lasted about six months. The Camelot was the kind of joint you performed in on your last stop out of show business on the way to the graveyard. Donald O’Connor was there for a week—died a week later. Richard Kiley toured in the musical Man of La Mancha for fifty years—he played the Camelot and never did the show again. The Camelot spared no one. One night a man actually died in the audience. In the middle of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, we heard a crash, followed by a scream of “My husband, my husband!” Snoopy and the chorus slowly stopped singing “Happiness,” the lights came up, and I saw a man literally killed by show business–his head facedown in mashed potatoes and prime rib. His wife cried while the firemen slowly shook their heads and wheeled him away in a stretcher. They say the show must go on, but it’s kind of hard to get the audience back after a thing like that. The highlight of the Camelot for me was meeting Rudy Vallée, and