Brianna South
by RM Vaughan
Yorkville
Bri blackout! What happened to
Hollywood’s “Baby girl”?
— Toronto Sun, September 12, 2008
The following excerpt from Brianna South’s diary was obtained by the Sun from unnamed sources, three days after her shocking disappearance. South, the controversial seventeen-year-old star of last summer’s breakout comedy, All the Nice Girls, and the upcoming live adaptation of the ’80s cartoon series Pulsar Girl, set to close the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, left her room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville on Wednesday evening for an unscheduled outing. South’s family have arrived from Fort Worth, Texas, and will make a statement later today. Police have released no further information.
September 4
Ugly. Okay, not the nicest thing to say, I know, but who said, “It’s not mean if it’s true”?
Probably somebody who came to Toronto and stayed a whole week in a room my grandmother would like, with thirty-six French TV stations and no hot towel rack and the worst warm walnut salad I’ve ever had, that’s who.
I’ve been outside exactly three times — from my hotel room to the service elevator to a town car to a raw food restaurant, then back, then to a TV station in an old factory that smelled like a hot dog cart, then back, then to a boring movie from Mongolia they showed in an opera theater.
Jayson said I should see it, or just be seen seeing it, or at least walk into the theater. Like I understood any of it anyway, like I understand Mongolian funeral rituals and polo. I hate polo. Then it was back to the car, back up the service elevator, back here. It’s so ugly. The view is of a museum that looks like another old factory, but with a bunch of bent aluminum siding sticking out of it, like a giant ugly metal rock. I think it’s supposed to be art. I hate my life.
Later
Nobody likes my film. I can tell, because they won’t shut up about it. If it was good, they’d be all calm and quiet.
I don’t even remember the Pulsar Girl cartoon, and I’m in the “target market” for the movie. Newsflash, idiots: Girls don’t go to comic book movies.
But you can’t tell them anything, they’re all fags. Only fags would make that movie. Everything is so funny to fags, stuff nobody else thinks is funny. Jayson said, “It’s already a camp classic” in the restaurant — he thought I wasn’t listening — and that is the fucking kiss of fucking death. You can’t make a cult movie. It just happens. Even I know that, but you can’t tell fags anything.
I hate Jayson. He leads me around like a dog. It’s his job to get me the best interviews and the best articles and so far all he’s done is drag me in front of people for show, not to talk. Nobody talks to me. They talk around me. I’m beginning to figure out that the whole point of this film festival is to just show up. I could be dead and they could drag my body from party to party and I’d still be the biggest news in town.
I mean, even Melanie Griffith got a newspaper cover, just for doing her own grocery shopping. She hasn’t made a movie in years, but the whole stupid city freaks out because she can pay for a braised chicken all by herself without a helper.
Okay, that was mean. I’m hanging around Jayson too much. I sound like a fag. I really, really need someone to talk to. I could be dead and nobody would notice.
September 5
He called again, just ten minutes ago. I’m too excited. I shouldn’t be this excited. I don’t know how he got my room number. Everything is supposed to be secret — where I go, where I stay, where I eat, where I shit (especially where I shit). But he found me. Hotels are cleaned by ex-cons, like Mom says, so it’s no surprise. What’s a few fifties up here — like, eleven dollars at home?
He is so smart, it scares me. He says he found forty-six minutes of Pulsar Girl on YouTube. He says it’s good, the flying looks real. I feel a little better.
[The remainder of the page is covered in drawings of hearts, vines, and what appears to be the same word, perhaps a name, repeated nineteen times. The word or name has been scratched out. Forensic textile experts hired by the Sun were unable to read the word.]
2:30 p.m.
I told Jayson to fuck off ten minutes ago. Fuck, that felt good. I should have done it before, like on Day One.
He wants me to go to this party in a science museum, a fundraiser for stem cell research. I told him I don’t believe in using unborn babies to cure varicose veins. So he said I didn’t have to pay to go, they only want me there for PR, so I wouldn’t really be supporting anything I didn’t believe in if I wasn’t paying. That’s Jayson logic.
I mean, I know I don’t act all Christian, but I do love Jesus and babies. And my parents would kill me. So Jayson says, “SharLynn Kashante Jefferson is going,” like that is supposed to make me all jealous or nervous or scared. SharLynn is okay. She’s nice and, okay, she is pretty, but come on — she’s on a stupid hospital show, with, like, four other black girls. And, I mean, really, only my father watches hospital shows.
So I told Jayson to fuck off. It just came out. Fuck. Off. Now he probably thinks I hate SharLynn, or that I’m racist. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. I mean, I don’t think they even get her show on TV up here.
He will be so proud of me when I tell him what I did. He says I have depths inside me, strengths and energies and powers I don’t even know about yet. He says I am all diamonds inside.
September 6
Worst breakfast press conference of my life.
I felt like this tree, this skinny, dry tree, like the kind that used to grow in the back of our first house, behind the gravel pile. Garbage trees, skunk wood, Dad used to call them. You just cut that kind of tree down because it’s no use. It’s a weed with pretensions, Dad said. So you cut it down.
That’s the way they treated me. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. One guy from France asked me about Iraq, if Pulsar Girl could stop the war (!!!!). Like I’ve been to Iraq, or even Europe. So that’s all I could think to say: “Never been there.” They laughed, mean laughs. Jayson just sat there. He said his microphone wasn’t working. He fucking lies so much. Every word.
I lit all the foxglove-scented candles he sent and turned on Canadian MTV — which is, of course, in French, but at least the music is American — and I got in the bathtub and filled it really slow. He says foxglove is a medicine flower and the Irish call it Dead Man’s Thimbles. Doesn’t sound all that healthy to me, but he’s the expert.
We connect over things like that. I mean, he’s an expert in old things, in legends and stories, and I’m an expert in acting. The first time he wrote to me, I have to admit my Creepy Guy Radar went off a bit, because his handwriting was so girly. But I kept reading (because, okay, I was bored on the set), and he wrote that he thought All the Nice Girls was really a remake of the Story of Rachel and Leah, who are sisters in the Jewish part of the Bible. I looked it up.