Bad Reputation

By Rebecca Parr Cioffi

As a once-thriving sitcom writer, I wrote this as my fictionalized story of ups, downs and maybe some gossip. Part memoir of a 30-something woman, Valerie, who wrote for sit-com; part love story of how Valerie and an unexpected man fall in love, almost lose their minds and each other only to fall more deeply in love by book's end; and part travelogue of a long-term trip to Sydney, Australia during the 2000 Olympics, a place where everyone's beautiful but drunk and the landscape is sharper than anyone living there.

Instead of a linear tale of each in sequence, these three threads weave together and dovetail to tell a story where by each chapter's end, a new view of Valerie is revealed. It's a high profile and yet down-to-earth journey of a woman looking to make her life work when nothing around her makes sense at any given time. Particularly her work in sit-com, a place where women are not considered funny, but toilet jokes are.

Bad Reputation also delves into Valerie's complicated and unique family life (a much-married mother and Christian Fundamentalist step father who leaves her notes asking her to dinner and telling her that Satan is her Master).

It's also a story of Valerie's' search for love of her own, made particularly difficult since she makes more money than most men she meets in a world (LA) where only male power is based on money and female power is based on looks.

Finally, it's a first-person narrative of how Valerie gets it all, loses it, and then gets it back for real.

Bad Reputation is for those who love a funny book with emotions and tons of heart, yet also want to know what kind of person Roseanne really is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca Parr Cioffi
• Release date: Aug 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476009131

Rebecca Parr Cioffi

Arpy Beck is my "nom de novel" for Rebecca Parr Cioffi, TV sitcom writer from the eighties and nineties. Why a fake name when I have a perfectly good real one? Well, number one, why not? And number two, we're in an age of self creation and while I enjoy who I was and all the things I did (Cheers, Roseanne, Hearts Afire, and a bunch of junk that no one would remember but paid well), I look forward to doing more and letting life take me in new directions. So I used the email name I've been using forever derived by taking "Rebecca Parr" and making the initial R.P. hence Arpy. The biggest surprise was when, about 11 years ago I went to register the email for the first time, "Arpy" was already taken, so it became the ubiquitous "Arpy123". So much for originality.

Book preview

Chapter 1

A person dies from the feet up. Actually, it goes from the extremities inward toward the heart, but since the feet are furthest away, a body has to start dying somewhere.

I didn't know this until I became a hospice volunteer and I became a hospice volunteer kicking and screaming and threatening people that they would need hospice for themselves if they kept asking. Not the best way to begin a career working with people in crisis, but there was a great need for this kind of volunteer in our small town and the director of the hospice program was overly concerned about how few new volunteers she had. But she spent so much money taking me to lunch (which is hard to do in a small coastal town, but there's always lobster) that I finally had to agree.

Okay, Margaret, I'll do it. I'll be one of your hostile volunteers.

Valerie, it's Hospice.

I know. I was joking. I mean if all this time you thought I was volunteering to be hostile to dying people, you spent too much money on shellfish.

I knew you were joking.

You're sure? I mean this doesn't seem like a job where joking should go on without being understood.

I understand, Valerie.

Partly, on Margaret's part, this was competitive. Now why in a small town of 7,000, we have had two hospice programs, no one can remember. All we know is that it has lead to all kinds of rivalries and ugliness that makes the whole thing that much more stressful for the people who need stress like Samoyeds need extra fur in the summertime. I mean here you are with a dying relative, spouse, or God forbid it's you about to leave this mortal coil and here comes two opposing groups waving brochures and fighting like so many aluminum siding salesmen. Thankfully, this was a time of healing for hospice. I was going to be Margaret's last recruit as CEO. She was stepping down to Director status to make room for the other program's head to now be our new CEO. He was legendary as a great fundraiser. Margaret acted thrilled and deep inside really tried to be.

So late in my 35th year, having had two failed marriages and a relationship taking a last swirl around the bowl, I went into training and became a person who essentially helps dying people die better. At least I had my once bright career as an example of how to die professionally, so now I knew the signs to watch for. All the signs I missed as I became as good as dead in Hollywood.

I was not raised for this kind of altruism, nor did I long to be of service all my life. How I came to it and how I came to a particular death is one of those roads that seems more knifed than...forked? Okay, it was long and winding and if it wasn't for all the time to read on this job, I would have to say that it would be almost unbearable, not because someone is dying but because it's not anybody I would love to see off, feet first or any other way.

When I worked in Television, another form of watching the dying die, I sometimes used the highly underused sense I had for character and story and pictured in my mind's eye a few people I knew going the way of all flesh. Sometimes the way of all grinding metal, flames and exploding gasoline.

Okay, some days working in TV was the way I had always dreamed it would be, even though the dreaming was short lived because the reality came fast. It was hardly overnight; I did get breaks and got to show my stuff to people to whom stuff mattered.

But now there is nothing but time. To think. To rehash. To rewrite what might have been. To comfort and to help.

And to remember.

Chapter 2

When I, Valerie Jean Lanier, came into the world (head first I might add, I wonder if anyone has noticed that distinction from how one leaves?) my mother was named Laurie. She was twenty three and had a marriage to my biological father like many girls of her time did, meaning she met him in school and after a natural amount of time and heavy petting, they got married so they could have actual sex involving actual intercourse.

Eventually the female part of the couple got pregnant because there was no way to stop it and depending on the male part of the couple, a family evolved or a nightmare began.

Laurie and me got the nightmare version. Arthur, bio-dad, at twenty-three years of age became a father and simply wigged out. Now he was a dad and this girl he married to have sex with was a person with an attached other person who needed him to come home at night. His reaction was to not come home and to start sleeping with other girls who weren’t his wife and to not make any other babies.

But she's your daughter, too, Laurie was heard to shout more than a few times.

I did all I needed to do for her already. She's born, isn't she? What the hell else am I supposed to do? You're her mother.

Soon, Laurie and Arthur got divorced and Laurie became a new phenomenon in the world - a single mother in the seventies with no job skills and no way to support herself or her child. So she did what every other girl did at the time, she remarried as hastily and badly as possible.

Honey, this is Bruce. He's a very wonderful man and I just know that you and he will get to be really good friends.

Why?

Well, he and I are going to get married.

Are you kidding me? I mean you got divorced like, what, fifteen minutes ago?

Bruce found his voice. Laurie, you said she was a sweet little girl. What is this? You allow her to talk to you like this?

Mom, why is he talking like I'm not here?

Honey, dammit I'm marrying him so just shut it, do you hear me?

Bruce, Poor Bruce as we eventually called him, got Laurie and seven-year-old me. He’d never married before and fell in love with the beauty that always was a huge part of Laurie’s life. He took on the role of step-dad because it was the only way he could get to have (and sleep with) Laurie.

Bruce (Poor Bruce) Dauber was a stockbroker in that brief period in the seventies when people first got really involved with stocks. For his efforts, he made a pretty good amount of money and always had company cars like Lincolns and Cadillacs that were completely freakish to our family who were strong Volkswagen and Mustang fans.

But Bruce had a small gift for the borderline confidence game that was selling stocks and he got many people, including members of his extended family, to pony up money and make some for himself.

He also took on the role of stepfather in the only way he knew how, which was to bring to bear on the situation the only previous experience he’d had with discipline - the Marines. Home for Laurie was his version of romance and her version of tolerance. Home for me was boot camp. I had rules and regulations and chores that were rigidly etched in stone. I had eating regimens and TV drills that now might seem sensible, but then were Draconian and alienating at a time when success at school meant having seen Laugh-In the night before.

Bruce was also into health food before it was fashionable. His reading was in-depth and his eating regimen was grotesque and frankly - smelly. He drank a mixture of carrot juice and a desiccated powder that made him as aromatic as the putrefied liver it was. He bathed without soap using only vinegar to rinse his pores. His suits were well cut and his body trim, but he always had an odd air, not just a scent, but a curious internal freakishness that somehow oozed from his pores. A sense of otherness that never goes down in suburbia but went down really bad in 1978 and particularly with Laurie.

Laurie avoided him and intimacy with him and Bruce made her his life. He made this clear to me one afternoon in his office. He called me in, nine years old, and drew me a little picture. He placed a dot in the center of a circle and one outside the circle. He said, This dot, the inside one, that’s your mother. The circle is me. The outside dot - that’s you. I just want you to know where we stand. And then he sent me out to mix him up some carrot juice and smelly liver powder.

All this isn’t so terrible, but it was the first impetus for me to become the mouth I was and am. What I developed was the humor that later in life led me to become the highly in-debt hundred-thousand-aire that I became. What it meant for Bruce was that he had a short, not too terribly cute kid who let him know that outside his circle was a splendid place for me to be. And then he paid me back. He adopted me. I was now Valerie Jean Dauber.

Valerie, you are part of the Daubers now and I expect you to behave yourself and make us proud.

By proud you mean...what?

Laurie, what is wrong with her? Why can't she be nice, just this one day? Here I go and adopt her so she can have a name and this is the way she acts?

I'm right here, Bruce. And I had a name. I don't really need yours

Valerie, please try, honey.

"Mom, I try everyday. I do more chores than any ten other kids I know and I eat what he demands I eat and go to bed when he says to. What am I doing that's so wrong?

See, that's what I'm talking about Laurie. She simply doesn't get what being a family is all about.

Maybe if you actually spoke directly to me you might get somewhere. Dad.

But what turned him from Bruce into Poor Bruce were two things coming about the same time for obvious reasons. Seeing that Laurie married him to provide for her and me, he stood a chance of holding her attention while he did just that. But Bruce was not equipped to play the real game that stock and investing was to become. Before long, Bruce lost all the money he invested of his own, my mother’s and his family’s, as well as all his clients. And soon the Cadillacs and Lincolns and the suits were gone. What quickly followed was the little attention and affection Laurie deigned to show him.

He became Poor Bruce literally when he did the only thing a decent man could do in that situation. He got a job. But the job he got was night janitor at the local Nabisco plant. He left at seven at night and came home at five AM smelling of 'Nilla Wafers. It was the instinct of a decent man to provide, but it didn’t go down too well with beautiful Laurie. And God knows he hadn’t exactly stocked up any affection points with me to defend him.

Laurie's and my life became a world of deceiving Poor Bruce in any and every way. For my part, I stopped listening to a word he had to say and only had the courtesy to shut off the TV when I heard him drive up. By twelve, I was coming and going as I pleased and surprisingly did a fine job of taking care of myself. I hated getting up for school, but since it provided a place to go during the day when Poor Bruce was home, I consistently came home and went to bed by midnight to get up and off to school on time.

For Laurie’s part, she got secretarial work in the booming Orange County California real estate market and started, well, fraternizing with her bosses or any other men who ate something other than powdered liver and did something other than clean out the presses that made dough into cookies all night long.

I became my mother’s confidante and girlfriend. We’d sneak junk food into the house and eat candy in her car, a cute little Karman Ghia that took us back into the world of imported compacts we knew so well. We also shared secrets. For my part they’d be about thirteen- year-old-boys in the neighborhood. For hers, she told me of her interesting lovers at work and cried on my shoulder when they threw her over and, naturally, fired her.

But she always got another job and another man. Poor Bruce came and went and ended up sleeping in that same office where he drew me the picture, now with windows covered with blackout paper so he could sleep in the daylight. Now he was his own circle and his own dot.

As I started Junior High, I got some looks that were long overdue given that my mother was routinely mistaken for Ann-Margret anytime she went to Las Vegas. And Laurie started an affair with my Junior High School Principal. Sadly she didn’t share this with me soon enough to get all the privileges out of it that I could have if I’d have known. As it was, I ended up getting straight A’s in all my subjects (pretty fairly) and never had to go to P.E., the hated place where you had to change into gym clothes and shower with strangers.

By graduation from eighth grade, I had a shockingly smart-ass personality, an academic medal from the local American Legion and a mother who’d thrown over my principal for a rich gynecologist who gave her money for trips into Beverly Hills where we’d both get our hair cut at Jon Peters' salon and then have lunch at the Brown Derby.

Meanwhile, Poor Bruce slept all day and worked all night and smelled like vinegar and cookies. The marriage was dead and divorce began. Which is what threw Poor Bruce over the edge. Sadly, the place he landed was the new Christianity that was so rampant in Orange County, California at that time. A place of bible study and guitar masses. A place where Pastors called Chuck would reassure him that in God’s eyes he’d always be married to Laurie, divorce or no. And even as he moved out, he held on to his self-respect. He told us it was simple, we were obviously possessed by Satan and that explained everything.

What Poor Bruce didn’t realize was that if Satan let us eat Taco Bell and get groovy haircuts, then we’d be Satan’s minions before we’d ever listen to him again.

And in our hearts, we knew that Satan had nothing on us. Poor Bruce had taken his life into his own hands and destroyed what he had built for us, his new family, and for his own blood family, by losing all the money they had ever thought of saving.

So Laurie worked and I packed up the house I’d known since I was nine. By this time I was fifteen and felt so old for my age that I seemed to wear my experiences in my appearance. I’d already been served drinks in so many bars that I’d given up any idea that I’d ever need a fake ID. Something about me was adult and sophisticated. It was all external, but that’s all it took to become my mother’s best friend and to hit the single scene with her. So we took our act on the road and ended up where divorcees come to sweat out the details, Newport Beach.

I was 15 years old and I had already racked up two last names.

Chapter 3

When you work as a Hospice Volunteer, you don't really have a set schedule or an idea of what you should or shouldn't do, except DO NOT EVER RESESITATE A CLIENT.

That means, if they have decided to enroll, or to be enrolled in