Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography by Rob Lowe Read Free Book Online Page B

from you,” the man says with a smile. I run home and compose a letter to Mr. Spelling. It takes some time to find an address for him but finally I do, care of the 20th Century Fox Studios. I drop it in the mailbox and wait for his reply.
    *   *   *
    As seventh grade came to an end, I couldn’t wait to spend my appointed time back in Ohio with my dad. I would see my old friends and tell them of my California adventures, and I’d get my spot back in Peanut Butter and Jelly. It would be good to be onstage again, as I hadn’t done any acting since I moved to California.
    My dad and my new stepmother, Kay, had a baby boy named Justin about a week before Chad and I returned. We all shared a room and Chad and I took turns giving him bottles. I was happy to be back with this branch of the family, but could have done without having a screaming baby as an alarm clock.
    When I called the man who ran Peanut Butter and Jelly, he told me that the group wasn’t doing any performances “at the moment” and there was nothing on the horizon. It was strange. I had known this man for years and had never heard him use this kind, patient, and encouraging tone of voice with me. It would take me years of working in Hollywood to recognize this truth: When someone in the entertainment business (even in Dayton, Ohio) uses this tone with you, nine times out of ten they’re lying. And indeed he was. Peanut Butter and Jelly was playing all around Dayton. They just didn’t want me back.
    After a month, Chad and I returned to Malibu, and only then did I realize that I was already beginning to prefer it to Dayton.
    Malibu summers were epic. Each day was cookie-cutter consistent: eighty degrees and sunny, no thick midwestern humidity and no rain—ever. I had made some friends and we would spend endless hours exploring the mysterious overgrown gullies that ran to the ocean and bodysurfing in the crystal waves that made Malibu famous.
    A ninth-grade girl had taken an interest in me, and I often rode my bike to her house to fool around with her. Like Julie the Jitterbug, she took great pleasure in teaching me the finer points of what my parents would probably call “heavy petting.” She was not, by any means, one of the girls in the popular set. In fact, I took a lot of shit for being linked with her, which seemed unfair to both her and me. We were both misfits in a way, which made us a good match. And let’s face it, when a ninth-grader is interested in a seventh-grader, it’s pretty cool.
    As the summer drew to a close, I somehow got invited to the birthday party of the Queen Bee of Malibu Park Junior High “in crowd”—a stunning blonde, sometime teen model, and surf goddess. Pulling out of the driveway, I had my mom stop to check the mailbox, as was my custom since I wrote my letter to Aaron Spelling. It had been well over six months, but I still held out hope. And today, amazingly enough, I was rewarded.
Dear Rob,
I was happy to receive your letter. You seem like a very nice young man and I would welcome you to visit me at the studio anytime, providing it is fine with your parents. Please call ahead though.
Sincerely,
Aaron Spelling
P.S. I have a funny feeling you might have my job one day!
    I was floored. It was on 20th Century Fox stationery! It was better than a letter from President Ford, as at the moment, Spelling was probably more powerful and popular than Ford.
    At the party no one cared. The cool kids of the seventh and eighth grades were much more focused on the top-secret gift the birthday girl was sharing with everyone. It was a tiny amber-colored bottle with a black lid, filled with some sort of white powder. I asked Peter the Surfer what it was. “It’s coke, you idiot.” I didn’t know what he meant but knew enough to get that it was clearly a drug of some sort. By then, I was used to seeing kids smoke pot. A number of them had brought their parents’ “water pipes” to school and often set up a rudimentary bazaar