The nicest goddamn dame.

I keep a photograph of Bette Davis on my desk.

She's there shooting me a slightly skeptical, plenty amused look whenever I've fallen into a screeching, maudlin fit (or as I call it, every day). She's the patron saint of fighters: People who fight for life, rail against it, battle for success, pummel obstacles, claw themselves across the finish line. 

I became a fan almost before I saw her; perhaps I really did. My first impression was a waking dream I had, a fragmentary scrap of something, the morning her death was announced. I was 13, and had just started Grade 8. (Grade 8! The nadir. No wonder I discovered B.D., and thank heaven I did.) My radio alarm switched on at 7 am one morning to tell me that an actress I'd never heard of was dead--the person who said, "I'm the nicest goddamn dame who ever lived."


I still get a nervous, thrilled burst in my stomach when I hear those words. I was practicing meekness to survive junior high, which only established me further as School Pariah. Here was a great lady saying, if you're going to be nice, don't be.

Think back to when you were young and you'd tucked a book (like me, was it a biography of Bette Davis or a book of Dorothy Parker's reviews?) into your science textbook and your teacher didn't reveal you because, as he later explained, he'd thought, "Well, at least she's reading." They all had an unquestioned confidence in the potential energy that emanated from you, and you could coast on that energy--and more so, on that confidence--for twenty years, being the bright one, the promising one, gimlet-eyed and flinty.

And then--

There's no resounding clap of thunder, no cymbal crash, just a gradual, sinking apprehension. You realize only when it's gone that potential energy dissipates. Or even worse, you realize that you are the outcome of that potential. This is all there ever was; and what you are is what you were going to be.