Hollywood Animal (110 page)

Joey yelled: “I don’t have to go to this stupid school! I hate my stupid teacher!”

Nick yelled: “We’re moving out of this stupid house!”

John Law yelled whatever Joey and Nick yelled.

Luke yelled, “Dada! Dada! Dada!”

And when they were falling asleep that night Nick said, “Thank you, Dada, for moving us out of this stupid house.”

And Joey said, “I hope I don’t have another stupid teacher.”

I realized with a start that John Law and Luke would have no California memories at all. They would remember that life for them began in Cleveland.

I decided I wouldn’t tell my father that we were moving back until we were actually there.

If I told him before, I feared, he’d have his nurses call us ten times a day and drive us even crazier than I knew we’d be during the next six weeks.

I knew he would be happy that we would be near him but I also knew he would be decimated. There was no way around it: his nurses kept calling to tell me they couldn’t take care of him anymore. I would have to deport my father from the house that he loved and put him into a nursing home as soon as possible after I moved back.

I still hoped that he would die before we got there. But I also wondered if this would be God’s final punishment for my father’s sins:

You lost everything during the war, Steffen, your career, your money, your country. You lived in dire poverty from the moment you left Hungary. You lost your wife, and then in a different way, you lost your only son. Now, Steffen, you will even lose your little house. Your son will force you to leave it
.

The moving company we picked was just planning another big move from Malibu.

“Darcy Hughes,” the moving company’s appraiser said to me. “Maybe you know her?”

I did, but when I had known her it was Darcy LaPier, soon to become Darcy Van Damme. She and Jean-Claude were visiting Gerri Eszterhas and me at our house in Tiburon for lunch and afterward we played pool in the game room.

Steve and several of his friends were there but as the game went on, I noticed they were starstruck not by Jean-Claude but by the sexy and voluptuous Darcy.

Then Darcy and Jean-Claude had gotten married and divorced—and Darcy met a guy named Mark Hughes, who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mark Hughes dropped dead three months later; Darcy inherited $30 million, and now Darcy was going to Portland, going home like me … just another Hollywood success story taking the fruit of her labors back to her hometown.

Darcy had her thirty mil and I had Naomi and the four boys, both of us getting home thanks to the same moving company, one-way from Malibu.

“Tell me some more great things about Cleveland,” Naomi said to me.

“You scared?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said, “are you?”

“Terrified,”
I said.

“Good,” she said, “me too.”

“Well,” I said, “it was settled accidentally. The original founder, Moses Cleaveland, was drunk and he thought he was someplace else.”

I said, “Sylvester Stallone saw a fight in Cleveland. Muhammad Ali and a barroom brawler named Chuck Wepner. Sly got his idea for
Rocky
from that fight. The whole
Rocky
franchise, billions of dollars, all because of Cleveland!

“Bruce Springsteen owes his career to Cleveland. He kept playing a little club called the Agora when nobody knew who he was. It was the beginning of his reputation.”

I said, “Listen!
Elvis
wouldn’t have happened without Cleveland. A disc jockey named Bill Randle started playing him when nobody else was. Cleveland and Bill Randle
made
Elvis!”

Naomi said, “I don’t care where we live as long as you’re there.”

I said, “I don’t, either.”

I said, “That’s probably the best possible attitude with which to move to Cleveland.”

I kissed her and said, “No bad dreams.”

She said, “Are you kidding me? I won’t sleep a wink.”

No one knew their origin, although the rumor locally was that their leader, a bull mastiff the size of a small boar, had once been one of Bob Dylan’s dogs, a runaway who’d tired of the rock and roll life and gone howling into the Malibu hills.

There were about eight to a dozen of them, mostly big dogs—the mastiff, a shepherd, a Newfie, two pit bulls—and they were occasionally spotted running as a pack through the rugged canyons and burned-out treelines.

Wolves and the rare mountain lion were their prey and one resident on a hilltop overlooking Calabasas came back from Kauai to discover that everything in his house had been torn to pieces, including the hand-tooled Santa Fe couches.

I heard them howling down on the beach beneath our house in the hours before dawn and saw them in the moonlight: from above in the darkness they looked like spectral beings, their sheer size astounding me as they roared headlong down the beach road.

They came to the bluffs around the beach mostly when a movie was being filmed down there at night. They spread out on the hillside, primordial sentries crouched down in the brush hundreds of feet from each other, watching the klieg lights and the spotlights and the sound trucks—howling, incessantly howling—themselves a part of the show now as movie stars on the beach below tried to spot them with their infrared binoculars.

· · ·

The boys were upstairs. They had gotten up with the rising sun and Nick, our four-year-old, saw a splash of sunshine on the little table they ate their snacks on.

“Look, Nana, look how bewteeeful,” he said, touching the sunspot.

“God is painting,” Naomi said to him.

“I heard that voice again,” Joey, our six-year-old, said. He had told us about a voice that he heard “in his heart.” A voice that kept telling him what he said to us now.

“God is stupid,” Joey said. He started to cry, ashamed that he had heard the voice he didn’t want to hear again.

Naomi comforted him. “Don’t cry,” she said. “God is great and good and wise and kind. He isn’t stupid.”

“Yeah,” our three-year-old, John Law, said to Joey. “
You’re
stupid!”

“No I’m not!” Joey said to John Law. “
You’re
stupid!”

“Uh-uh,” John Law said. “
You!”

And as they yelled at each other and Naomi tried to shush them, I saw Nick. He was still looking at the table, his hand still trying to hold on to the sunspot.

Suzi called me and said, “I forgive you, Dad. I know that you must still feel guilty about you and Mom, but really I forgive you and I think I am beginning to understand. I’ve been waiting for the right time—the right moment—to say that. I have accepted your new life. I love my little brothers with everything inside me.

Steve called me and said: “You’ve always been my best friend. But now—since you came up to Oregon—I consider you one of the homeboys. I love you, Pops.”

Gerri Eszterhas was working with a group of handicapped kids in Marin County, teaching them to dance, dancing with them onstage during their special programs. She was sixty years old.

I remembered how proud she’d always been of appearing in various small-town productions of
Oklahoma!

I remembered that when she’d been a young woman going to Ohio State, the fraternities had given her a trophy for having the nicest legs in school.

I imagined my ex-wife at sixty up onstage dancing with those kids and I found myself moved to tears by the image, happy for Gerri, happy for the kids.

Like my great-grandfather, the stagecoach robber and Wild West outlaw, I was going home.

Where spectral old hags in black babushkas could see me playing in the cellar …

Not with the devil but with my sons …

Playing Ping-Pong, not cards …

Playing not for my soul but for …

Fruit Roll Ups!

Louis Bromfield lived happily in Mansfield for fifteen years before he died, just another Ohioan in a straw hat drinking his coffee in the coffee shop on the courthouse square, expressing very strong opinions about his beloved Cleveland Indians.

Sometimes some stranger would approach him shyly and say, “Excuse me, aren’t you Louis Bromfield, the famous writer?”

And Louis Bromfield would say, “I used to be,” and walk on.

Naomi said, “What I want for the boys is catching fireflies at night … kissing their scrapes and bruises and mosquito bites … playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians … seeing them run until they’re out of breath … pillow fights … seeing them laugh so hard that their stomachs hurt … hearing “Eeeny meeny minee mo” and “Olly olly oxen free” … and Yoo-hoo … and Marco Polo … telling them to stop jumping on the bed … hearing their bikes with baseball cards in the spokes … helping them build the street’s biggest snowman … making gallons of Kool-Aid … More than anything else, I want them to know the feeling of not hearing the screen door slam until you’re halfway down the drive.”

The last thing I did before we left our house in Point Dume was to take the mezzuzah off the front door. It had been put there by the previous owner.

The house had been good to us. We had four beautiful, healthy children while we were living here. I wrote eight scripts and a book here. We cooked or grilled thousands of tasty meals. We clinked wine glasses or beer bottles to hundreds of dazzling sunsets and five spectacular and rare rainbows.

The chasm between Steve and Suzi and Naomi had been nearly bridged here. Steve and Suzi had begun to love their little brothers here. And Naomi and I had watched our love for each other deepen and grow and become the unbreakable foundation of our lives.

As the limo pulled out our front gate for the last time, the boys sitting quietly for once, I kissed Naomi’s hand and waved Bob Dylan across the street goodbye.

I was going from Birdview Avenue in Malibu, California, to Island View Circle in Bainbridge Township, Ohio.

The son of an alleged war criminal, I was clutching a mezzuzah in my pocket.

CHAPTER 33

I Finally Meet Me!

CATHERINE

What happens to them?

NICK

They fuck like minks, raise rugrats, and live happily ever after.

Basic Instinct

WE LEFT MALIBU
on March 10 … Sharon Stone’s forty-third birthday … and moved into our new house in Bainbridge Township on March 11 … Joey’s seventh birthday.

We put the mezzuzah up on our front door.

We put the big ornate flag of the city of Cleveland … presented to me by Mayor White for
Male Pattern Baldness
, a movie never made, up on our garage wall, next to the Ohio State Buckeyes thermometer the old owners left behind.

As soon as we got to Cleveland, we moved my father into a Hungarian-speaking nursing home in Akron, not far from our new house in Bainbridge Township.

My voice was worse and I went to an ear, nose, and throat man at a Cleveland Clinic branch near us. Naomi came with me. I was tired of croaking, so I wanted to get my polyps taken out as soon as possible.

I said to the ear, nose, and throat man that I would need a good anesthesiologist for the surgery.

He said, “Why?”

I said, “Because I smoke four packs of Salems a day and drink way too much.”

He said, “You don’t need a good anesthesiologist, you need a good psychiatrist.”

I laughed at that.

He snaked a tube down my nose with a camera at its end and got it all the way down to my throat so he could see the polyps.

I told him that the ear, nose, and throat Guys to the Stars in Beverly Hills had done the same test and told me that I had two benign polyps wrapped around my vocal cords. I told him about my long history of benign nasal polyps and that I was a “polyp grower.”

He said nothing but looked at his screen and then looked at me. “These aren’t benign polyps,” he said.

“These aren’t any kind of polyps. They’re tumors. You have throat cancer.”

The first thing I did, of course, after leaving his office, was light up a cigarette.

I reassured Naomi. I didn’t believe this Cleveland Clinic ear, nose, and throat man. I chose to believe the hotshot ear, nose, and throat Guys to the Stars in Beverly Hills.

Two days later, I was in Dr. Marshall Strome’s office at the Cleveland Clinic. He had been at Harvard Medical School for many years. He was an internationally renowned throat surgeon. Some people thought he was the best throat surgeon in the world. He had done the world’s only larynx transplant. People flew from all over the world to see him.

Dr. Strome snaked another camera tube down my nose, looked at my throat, and said that, in his opinion, I had throat cancer and needed immediate surgery.

I called Steve and Suzi and told them. We cried together and they flew into Cleveland the next day.

Nervous, I drank more and kept chain-smoking.

To say that Naomi and I were in shock doesn’t do it justice. We had just moved across the country. Our children, removed suddenly from the world they had known, were crying much of the time. Our new house, with furniture and boxes all over the place, was a disaster zone. We had just put my father into a nursing home. And now we were told that I had cancer.

My father, at the Hungarian nursing home, called to say that he didn’t want to be there. He wanted to go back to his house. All the Hungarians there disliked him, he said, because his son was the man who’d betrayed Hungary by writing the movie
Music Box
.

I couldn’t speak to my father because I had no voice left.

Naomi couldn’t speak Hungarian and he couldn’t hear or understand what she was saying in English.

She spoke in English to a nursing supervisor, who then spoke to my father in Hungarian.

Naomi told the nursing supervisor, who told my father that as soon as we were finished moving in, we’d go and visit him.

We didn’t want my father to know anything about what the clinic doctors had said.

We were afraid that what they’d said might kill him.

After all, I didn’t want to be responsible for killing my father.

Naomi told my father again through the nursing supervisor about my “benign polyps.”