Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (5 page)

It was my grandpa’s grudging generosity that allowed us to live with him and to attend the best schools in the county. But we had to live by his rules. All of them. All the time. So when my grandfather decided I needed religion, my parents had to support the cause or risk eviction. I would now accompany him to Saturday morning and High Holiday services, and, I was informed, begin my studies to become a Bar Mitzvah. I may as well have been converting to Greek Orthodoxy.

I did have friends who were being Bar Mitzvahed, all at the very Reform Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The huge Moorish building had an interior decorated in gold inlay, black marble, and ornate biblical murals commissioned by the studio head Jack Warner. It had been built at the height of the Depression, when regular Americans were selling apples and jumping out windows.

I would be Bar Mitzvahed in one of the tiny synagogues in the Fairfax section of West Hollywood. I spent seventh grade playing Little League, studying for my Bar Mitzvah, and going to other boys’ Bar Mitzvahs—all held at the members-only Hillcrest Country Club and the Beverly Hills Hotel and in huge private homes north of Sunset.

My friends’ fathers all had jobs with titles—VP of Production, Director of Business Affairs, or Executive Producer. When their parents asked what my father did, I said he was in “business.” A businessman. But “business” had nothing to do with “The Business,” and when fathers with important jobs in The Business found out I was short an article, they did one of two things. Either they went off to refresh their gin martinis or they stayed to tell me the story of how they worked their way up from nothing.

“You know all of this is bullshit, right kid?” I was listening closely to my best friend Alan Rothman’s dad, who was a senior agent at Franklin Morton. Alan knew pretty much everything about my family, which made me both more comfortable and more nervous talking to his father.

In fact, it had been Alan who’d broken the news to me in the first place. Well, sort of. I was eleven when I heard it from Alan who’d heard it from his brother who’d heard it from a kid in his grade who had a job there after school. But I didn’t believe it. “That’s bullshit,” I told Alan.

We were playing catch on the playground at recess and I wound up and threw the ball hard. He caught it a few inches from his face.

“Hey, I’m just the messenger.”

“Sorry. How the hell does this kid even know what my father looks like?”

“Apparently, your dad’s been throwing your name around a lot. ‘My son Greyson this, my son Greyson that. You know, proud father crap. Sorry, Grey.”

But I needed proof. So at lunchtime we snuck past the teachers on monitor duty—which didn’t exactly require a Houdini act—and biked to the Chock full o’ Nuts all the way over on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights. I peered around the side of the building into the big front window.

Alan was right. He was sitting at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee. Pop’s jacket was on the stool next to him. At some point he’d actually slipped his shoes off and the twice-resoled brown oxfords were lying on the floor under his feet. There was a hole in his left sock.

Alan put his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe he’s just having lunch.”

“Yeah, I suppose it’s possible. But I bet the other businessmen aren’t having lunch twenty miles from where they work. Or
say
they work.” I remember that as the first day of feeling contempt for my father for the rest of my life. Of giving up trust and security and strength and replacing them with suspicion, cynicism, and resentment. And I think it was the beginning of my chronic heartburn.

“C’mon Grey,” Alan said. “We have to get back.”

“Alan?”

“Yeah?”

“Promise you won’t—”

“Tell a living soul? On my mother’s life.”

Eventually, in bits and pieces, I’m the one who told Mr. Rothman—or let slip enough pieces of information for him to put the puzzle together.

“Sir?” I’d lost track of what he was saying.

“
This
. This exclusive, members-only crap,” he said, gesturing around the main room at Hillcrest, which looked out onto the golf course. “They built it because the gentiles wouldn’t let us join theirs.”

“Right. I see what you mean.”

“Everybody’s gotta have somebody to step on. Makes ’em feel important.”

“But there have to be better, more productive ways of proving your worth in the world—ways that don’t involve crushing other people. Isn’t that why we fought the war?”

He turned to me with a slightly surprised look on his face, which slowly melted into a smile.

“I sure as shit would like to think so, Greyson.” Then he squeezed my shoulder. “Do me a favor, Grey?”

“Sure, Mr. Rothman.”

“Keep being friends with Alan.”

I laughed. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“No reason. Just—you’re a
mensch
, Grey. You know what that means?”

“I’ve heard—”

“It means you’re a good person. A good man. In here,” Mr. Rothman said, tapping on his chest above his heart. Then he drained his drink and looked around. “Look at these putzes …” He put his arm around my shoulder and rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “I think you may be the only one in the room,” he said.

I have never before given much thought to that exchange. But for a moment, it makes me feel hopeful, optimistic. Mr. Rothman thought I was a good man. And then the moment is gone.

“It’s never too late to start again,” he says. “God will always welcome you back.”

“Trust me, Matt, God wants nothing to do with me. I’m not a nice man.” As if to prove my point, I nudge the shot glass closer to him. Because I feel like getting drunk. And I don’t feel like doing it alone.

“Maybe just one,” he whispers.

“Just one.” I give his shoulder a squeeze. “They’ll never know.”

And come dinnertime, I’m happy to pick up the tab for all the Italian-Irish fish-and-chips those doughy, greasy-haired, pasty-faced Montana teenagers can eat. So Matt and I can get just a tiny bit shit-faced. And Matt tells me his story. It turns out he wasn’t always so good.

“I was addicted to smack,” he confesses when he’s several shots in. “I mean, you know, before I was saved.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. I was a young man in trouble. Drugs. Women.”

“And look at you now,” I say, slapping him on the back.

“I’m living proof, Jesus can save anyone.”

“Trust me, Matt, keep Jesus and God for you and those kids and whoever else believes. Leave me out of it.”

“Why? Because you think you don’t deserve His love? What did you ever do that is so unforgivable?”

“Well, there were the drugs. They almost wrecked my marriage.”

“We do stupid things when we’re high. But you got clean—”

“Doesn’t matter. There were nights … parties … business things … women. I’d stumble in the next morning smelling of alcohol and another woman and I’d kiss my wife on the mouth. And then I’d sit down at the breakfast table and eat Cheerios with my perfect little girl.”

“That’s the drugs,” Matt says, coming to my defense. “You’d never do that now. And every marriage goes through difficult times.”

“Does every husband rape his wife?”

Matt is silent.

I pour him another round. “It was the late seventies and people were getting high and fucking right out in the open. Right next to the buffet tables. I came home from a party one night—I had wanted Ellen there with me and she wouldn’t come—and I came home all coked up, and I really wanted to fuck. I told her I’d spent the whole fucking night staring at a bunch of naked models, and I hadn’t touched a single one. She asked me what I wanted, a fucking medal?”

I pour myself another shot and knock it back fast so I can feel it burn going down. “Well, you know what, Matt? I did want a fucking medal. Hadn’t I made good on all my promises—my financial promises? And she liked it a little rough sometimes. Didn’t she? Or maybe I did … Anyhow, she didn’t make a sound during it. I don’t know if she was trying not to wake our daughter or if she just didn’t want to give me the satisfaction. But she bit her lip so hard it bled.” I swallow another shot. “We never talked about it after.”

The bartender is looking at me like I am scum and I can’t tell whether he is repulsed more by my story or the fact that I have lured the Catholic school teacher into wanton drunkenness. But I don’t care because I am undergoing a single-malt baptism. I also do not care that its effects will not remain—that when I wake, I will be a sinner once more.

“That’s pretty bad,” Matt says, “but if it makes you feel any better, I’ve heard worse. Billings is a shithole. Men put their wives in the hospital every day. Twice on Christmas.” Somehow, the fact that I haven’t fallen quite as far as the wife-beaters of Montana doesn’t bring me much solace.

New York, 1994
. I am standing unsteadily in front of the activities board reading the menu of options: Horticulture Club, Creative Writing, Collage, Current Events, Pet Therapy. The social worker assigned to me has encouraged me to participate in Group. On some wards Group is mandatory. Blessedly, here Group is optional. For some reason, none of these choices seems to appeal.

If, for example, there were a group like the table of patients I eavesdropped on last night during dinner—the ones who were comparing the graphic details of their suicide attempts—the single-edged razor blades, the cocktails of tequila, benzos, and Dilaudid—that would be a group I could get behind. But nothing like that is featured on the board today. And I don’t feel like scrapbooking. So instead I walk into my just-for-now private room and close the door behind me, appreciating the just-for-now silence.

When I walk into the bathroom, I am again confronted by the warning signs over the sink. The tap water in the hospital is contaminated with Legionella. Years ago, a dozen patients died from it. So now we are instructed to shower with our mouths closed, and all drinking and toothbrushing is done with bottled water.

We are not allowed to have dental floss or shoelaces and we must be supervised while shaving. But giving us unrestricted access to a deadly virus, that’s okay.

Really, you wouldn’t need much of a will to find a way out, would you?

THIRD

“Try to relax, hon,” Florence whispers. “There’s nothing to be a afraid of.” Florence, the ECT nurse, is short, fat, and maternal. She wears her glasses on a beaded chain around her neck and smooths my hair. As if I were a child
.

“Pick a happy memory,” she whispers. “Something that makes you feel safe.”

Happy? Safe? I am drawing a blank. Florence, who has worked here since 1972 and has seen everything, sees the confusion in my eyes. “Or maybe just a really good day. Something nice that made you feel good about yourself.”

They are all about building self-esteem here. And I know it hasn’t been all bad. So I close my eyes and try to dredge up a piece of history. I do not expect miracles—am in fact prepared for failure. But the biggest surprise is how quickly real happiness rises to the surface
.

Big Sur, 1982
. I didn’t become a real father until the year Ellen and I split up. The kind who knows that his daughter likes her peanut butter creamy, not chunky. The kind who knows that you never leave the house without Bunny, but Bear always stays home to babysit Piglet and Raggedy Ann. Unless you’re going on a vacation, in which case they all have to come. So they did. I remember all of it.

Dancing across my eyelids: Faint blue veins on pale skin. Black sky breaks open, dumping yellow stars. Counting. Wishing. The soft flannel of her good-night.

I borrowed the giant luxury motor home from Leland Costa, a brilliant director infamous as much for his mood swings as for his propensity to spend studio money like it came from a Monopoly set. It was my job to keep Leland on an even keel and on budget. It was also my job to keep him happy. The two were mutually exclusive. So in order to keep him from being sued and to make sure he continued to win Oscars, I gave up on the happy part. And he threatened to fire me at least once during every shoot. Afterward, remorse would set in and he’d send gifts, which I’d send back.

“Leland, we’ve talked about this,” I told him when he tried to give Willa a pony. “You don’t have to buy me things and you don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s not for you, it’s for Willa.”

So I asked to borrow his RV. And he was thrilled to be able to do something for me. Because Leland had once again gone from that place where he thought he was superior to everyone else to the place where he felt like he didn’t deserve to be alive. I didn’t need a map to get to either of them. So I was willing to forgive him—again—even when other studios were starting to toss around labels like “difficult” and “unmanageable.”

The best thing I could do for him now was to take something he had to give. The RV seemed benign, a loan. Nothing permanent would change hands. I had rules—learned as an agent and followed ever since. Over the years I’d turned down countless free trips to Aspen and the Caribbean. But each time, I maintained and increased my authority, my credibility, my power.

I was bending my rules with the RV. But Leland needed to give and I wanted the freedom of traveling on I-5, of slowly winding our way along the California coast—pulling over to walk on a beach or ride a Ferris wheel; sleeping in campgrounds surrounded by redwoods. Until, eventually, we reached Big Sur. The excitement and terror of our first trip alone. So I bent the rules.

“Which one is that?” Willa asked, pointing to a random spot in the sky. We were lying in a sleeping bag on the roof of the motor home picking out constellations.

“Oh, that one?” I asked, pointing to nothing.

“No.” She sat up. “There. There. The big one next to the little one.”

“Ohhhh, that one,” I said as she lay back down and put her head on my chest. I had no idea what she was pointing at. “That’s Cassiopeia.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Daddy?”

“Willy?”

She giggled. “Can we sleep up here?”