While on Circle of Life, Amber and Storm fell ever more deeply in love. In real life, Peter and I fought bitterly. Miraculously, the press had not yet gotten wind of our breakup. I managed to be polite and professional on the set, but at night after work, I’d get drunk, call Peter, and scream “Ass fuck!” into the answering machine at his beach house and then beg him to come home. One month became two. I couldn’t bring myself to move out of Peter’s house. I kept hoping he’d come to his senses. Any minute, he’d burst through the door, flowers in hand, begging my forgiveness.

Then, in March, as the show was due to go on hiatus, I came home to a police car in my driveway.

“What’s going on?” I asked the officer.

He handed me an official-looking document.

“What’s this?

“Sorry, Miss Gold. You’ve been evicted.”

That night, I got so drunk I called Peter over and over until I passed out with the phone still in my hand.

My immediate options were limited. I couldn’t go back to living with Nicole. We hadn’t spoken since I’d moved out, and last I heard she was living somewhere with Steffi. In desperation, I took a studio at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, a temporary living compound comprised of transient actors, corporate workers, and fucked up people like me who were just trying to figure out their next chess move.

With the show on hiatus, I had nothing to do. Each day I drove to Laurel Canyon and cruised by Peter’s house. I longed just for the sight of him. At night I went to my dealers in Van Nuys where I would buy a few grams of coke and hang out until the morning hours while his customers came and went. Roger was a nice Jewish boy dealing as a way to “pay for law school.” After snorting a few lines, he became interesting and I was desperate for company.

Usually, when I arrived several people were already crowded around a mirror on the coffee table in his small dark living room. His apartment was on the first floor of a complex two blocks off Ventura Boulevard. The ceiling was low and there was one street-level window with heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes, drawn against the neighbor’s prying eyes. Leaving Roger’s perpetually nocturnal apartment in the daytime was like walking out of a movie matinee.

One of his regulars, Debby Davies, was an actress on Welcome to Mary’sville, a popular sitcom. She was petite with brown hair and eyes, small features, and tiny hands; cute in a chipmunky way. Roger’s longtime crush on Deb was of the hopeless romantic variety and he’d grown comfortable in his misery as if it were an old favorite recliner.