Free Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction by Claudia Christian, Morgan Grant Buchanan

the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?
    In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.
    I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.

    But as one nightmare ended, another began. I was a real movie actress now and, as I would learn the hard way, things change when you appear nearly naked on the big screen. Someone, somewhere out there, is looking at you and thinking that they’d like to get close to you—real close to you.
    There was this guy who had seen The Hidden and decided that I was from Venus and had brought the AIDS virus to planet Earth. No kidding, this is what he actually thought. This guy would park outside my place and masturbate, and sometimes tail me in his car. I called the LAPD but their hands were tied, because this was before Rebecca Schaeffer was killed—the event that brought about the anti-stalker laws of the ’90s. I went back and forth with the police until one cop took pity on me and said, “Look, we can’t do anything about him masturbating, but I do think he could be dangerous. Do you own a gun? You’re going to need one. So you wait until he’s out front, put on something nice, and invite him in. Make sure he’s inside the house and then shoot him. When we come over, you say that he broke in. But you make sure he’s deep inside the house. Otherwise you’re the one we’re going to have to arrest.” Really? No thanks. The guy creeped me out but I didn’t want to shoot him.
    I drove to a lunch meeting a few weeks after that and realized the stalker was following me in his car. He was really freaking me out, and as I tried to get away from him I accidentally ran a red light and got hit by a van. My engine blew up, my car was totaled, but all I could think about was my number one fan, who’d climbed out of his car and was now heading toward me. I was convinced he was going to try to kill me. A crowd started to gather, so my stalker vanished, but in the meantime someone saw me trying to start my engine to try and get away. When the police arrived, I was arrested for trying to leave the scene of an accident. I explained about the stalker and why I was trying to leave, but they didn’t believe my story. I ended up having to perform six months of community service at the old Globe Playhouse. I was back, not to perform Shakespeare, but to make cookies for the audience. I lasted three weeks in baking hell (all the while wishing I’d invested in a handgun and a lace teddy like that cop had advised) before I offered to pay to have the theater’s roof repaired in exchange for their filling out my community service book.
    The stalker vanished after that. He was the first but he wouldn’t be my last. There would be a dozen other stalkers that would plague me to varying degrees over the