He put her off with vague vows and cited his Hollywood connections. He was pals with Mickey Rooney and a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He knew people with pull. He could parlay his friendships into something sweet.
I spent a lot of time on the couch with my father. He drew pictures for me and taught me to read when I was three and a half years old. We sat side by side and read separate books.
My father favored historical novels. I dug kid’s animal stories. My father knew that I couldn’t stand to see animals mistreated or killed. He skimmed the books he bought for me and shitcanned the ones he knew I’d find disturbing.
My father grew up in an orphanage and had no blood family. My mother had a younger sister in Wisconsin. My father hated his sister-in-law and her husband, a Buick dealer named Ed Wagner. My father said Uncle Ed was a draft dodger and a kraut. He killed lots of krauts in the First World War and had no use for them.
The Wagners thought my father was a bum. My father told me my cousin Jeannie tried to scratch my eyes out once. I don’t recall any such incident.
My parents’ friends conformed to a type: older people naively impressed with them. My parents looked good and hobnobbed with Hollywood swingers. They dazzled in the short run and only fought, carped and bickered in the privacy of their own home. They kept up a united front and limited their offensive broadsides to one witness— me.
Their life together was one long skirmish. She attacked his sloth; he attacked her nightly booze intake. Their squabbles were strictly verbal—and the absence of physical violence made them that much more protracted. They argued in measured tones, rarely yelled and never screamed. They did not break flowerpots or hurl dishes. Their lack of overt theatrics cloaked the fact that their collective will to reason and reconcile did not exist. They fought a self-suppressed war. They worked themselves into the picayune state of the perpetually aggrieved. Their hatred escalated over years and peaked at a level of low fury.
It was ’54. I was six years old and in the first grade at West Hollywood Elementary School. My mother sat me down on our living-room couch and told me she was divorcing my father.
I took it hard. I threw tantrums for weeks running. My histrionics were fevered and a cumulative response to years of chickenshit parental battling. TV had taught me that divorce was permanent and binding. Divorce stigmatized little kids and fucked them up for life. The mother got custody of all minor children.
My mother kicked my father out of the apartment. She tolerated my hurt-child routine for a few weeks, gave me a concise whack in the head and told me to stop it.
I stopped it. I got a crazy little-kid notion to forge an all-powerful separate thing with my father.
My mother hired a lawyer and filed for divorce. A judge granted her temporary custody and allowed me to spend weekends with my father. He rented a bachelor pad a few blocks from his old apartment.
I holed up with him for a string of Fridays-to-Sundays. We cooked burgers on a hot plate and made meals out of Cheez Whiz and crackers. We read books side by side and watched TV fight cards. My father began to systematically poison my mind against my mother.
He told me she was a drunk and a whore. He told me she was fucking her divorce lawyer. He said he had a shot at gaining custody of me—if he could prove my mother morally deficient. He urged me to spy on her. I agreed to snoop out my mother’s indiscretions.
My father got a job in downtown L.A. I snuck out and met him on his way home from work every chance I got. We rendezvoused at a drugstore on Burton Way and Doheny. We ate ice cream and talked a little bit.
My mother discovered this treachery. She called my father and threatened him with custody injunctions. She hired a baby-sitter to watchdog me after school.
I ditched my school bus the next morning. I hid out in the courtyard by my father’s apartment. I wanted to see my father wicked bad. I was afraid of the Salk vaccine shots scheduled at school that day.
My mother found me. She drove me to school and arranged to inject me with the Salk vaccine herself.
She shot me up in her nurse’s uniform. She was skilled with a needle—it didn’t hurt at all. She looked good in white seersucker. It offset her red hair alluringly.
The divorce case went to court. I had to testify in closed session. I hadn’t seen my father in a while. I spotted him outside the courtroom and ran to him.
My mother tried to intercede.
My father whisked me into a men’s room and hunkered down to talk to me. My mother stormed in and dragged me out. My father let it happen. A man standing at a urinal with his dick in his hand observed the whole transaction.
I testified. I told a kindly judge that I wanted to live with my father. He ruled otherwise. His decree stipulated a weekday/ weekend split: five days with her, two days with him. He sentenced me to a bifurcated life divvied up between two people locked in an intractable mutual hatred.
I caught both sides of that hatred. It was resolutely scornful and eloquently expressed. My mother portrayed my father as weak, slovenly, lazy, fanciful and duplicitous in small ways. My father had my mother categorized more concisely: She was a Lush and a Whore.
I lived by the divorce decree. Weekdays meant restricted drudgery. Weekends meant freedom.
My father fed me tasty food and took me to cowboy movies. He told me World War I stories and let me leaf through his girlie magazines. He said he had several sweet deals cooking. He convinced me we were just moments shy of great wealth. Big money meant big-time lawyers and big-time legal pull. Those lawyers had detectives who could dig up dirt on the Lush and the Whore. They could get him full-time custody of me.
My mother moved us to a smaller apartment in Santa Monica. She quit St. John’s and got an industrial nurse job at Packard-Bell Electronics. My father moved to a one-bedroom pad on the Hollywood-Wilshire District border. He didn’t own a car and transported me by bus. He was well into his fifties and starting to look like a gigolo past his prime. People probably thought he was my granddad.
I transferred to a private school called Children’s Paradise. It was unaccredited and set my mother back 50 bucks a month. The place was a dump site for kids from broken homes. Passing grades were guaranteed—but the hours of confinement stretched from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily. The teachers were shrill or beaten-down passive.
