softly out of her room so we wouldn’t wake her. Our house was very cold, with lots of marble and white couches that were all puffed up and glass coffee tables and white rugs with plastic on the corners to protect them. Everywhere were things that we could ruin, so we didn’t want to screw up and make the puffed-up couch deflate or leave marks on the glass tabletops. It was complicated to find a groovy place to hang out in. We usually ended up hanging out in the kitchen. That’s where it felt the homiest.
Now, my stepfather, Harry Karl, was not a handsome man but because he was wealthy and well-groomed he was said to be distinguished looking. That’s ugly with money. They actually made a movie about Harry Karl and Marie McDonald and their multiple marriages called The Marrying Man, and Alec Baldwin played Harry Karl. I think the resemblance is astonishing.
Harry had his own room with a closet that was pristine and beige. We had a laundress named Leetha who came in once a week just to do Harry’s shirts. His shirts were monogrammed, and he also had monogrammed slippers and paisley pajama tops and a lot of neat gray suits. There was one of those black and red things that twirls around and shines your shoes, and a secret drawer to hide his gold coins and a wooden coatrack to put his jackets on.
He also had a man named Phil Kaplan who helped him dress. And then there was a barber and manicurists who came in to help him get distinguished looking.
But the most unique room we had was on the way to the projection room. It was like an exercise room, but what stopped it from being an exercise room was that it had a barber chair in the middle of it.
We found out later that the barber who came every day turned out to be a pimp with a talent for hair. And people who have pimps know that they can’t do hair for shit. So those manicurists that the barber brought with him every day? They were probably doing more of a French manicure. The word “hangnail” comes to mind.
My mother, on the other hand, did everything herself. She was a very energetic human and could be unbelievably fun. Harry, though, was not fun. Not deliberately, anyway. But he did get out of bed wearing just pajama tops so the back of his penis was proudly displayed, and to top it off, he farted a lot, thus becoming a subject of great hilarity for my brother and me. We used to bring our friends over for a tour of the house, and if Harry was home, there were always gales of laughter.
Anyway, the whole manicurist thing made marriage to my mother awkward, so she took a musical in New York to get out of the marriage, which is a legal way to dissolve a union in Hollywood without involving lawyers. And so when I was about sixteen, my mother took us out of high school, and moved my brother and me to New York for the year, and put me in the chorus of her show.
I don’t care what you’ve heard—chorus work is far more valuable to a child than any education could ever be. I grew up knowing that I had the prettiest mother of anyone in my class, as long as I was in class. But even after, she was the funniest, the prettiest, the kindest, the most talented—I had the only tap dancing mother.
In New York, we all lived on a nice little street on the Upper West Side, sandwiched conveniently between a music school and a funeral home. Anyway, on one particular evening I was out on the town with some of the other “kids” from the chorus of the show, trying my best to be very grown up, as they were all at least ten years older than I was.
Well, somehow my mother knew what restaurant or club we were all at, so at about 10:00 or 10:30 someone comes and tells me that my mother is on the phone. Well, I’m not thrilled to have my hijinks interrupted by my mommy—reminding everyone I’m with that I’m far younger than they are and not to be taken seriously. Shit. So I grumble my way through the people and tables, making my way to the waiting phone.
“Yeah, Mom, hey—could I talk to you la—”
She interrupts me.
“I’m at the hospital with your brother. He shot himself in the leg with a blank.”
“What???” I say.
“He’ll be fine,” she continues. “He’s in surgery now—they’re cleaning the gunpowder out of the wound. He’s very lucky. A few inches up and—”
“He could’ve blown his penis off?”
“Dear—please—language. Anyway the police are here and they want to come to the house to examine the gun. Apparently, if it can shoot blanks—oh, I don’t know—they’re saying it might be an unregistered firearm—or unlicensed—something, I don’t know. Anyway
Where was I?”
“The police,” I reminded her.
“Oh yes—now, dear, I need you and Pinky (my mother’s hairdresser’s name was—naturally—Pinky)—I need you to get to the house before the police to let them in, but also I need you to go through the house and hide all the guns and bullets and—what else
Oh yes! I need you to flush your brother’s marijuana down the toilet. So you think you can do this, dear? Let me talk to Pinky.”
Well, this part was kind of thrilling, I have to say. Who knew we had bullets and guns in the house? Granted, they were my stepfather’s show guns that he wore ridiculously in some Christmas parade some years back, but it turned out it was considered a firearm! We were suddenly more like a mafia family than a show business one!
So Pinky and I rush back to our town house and hide the guns and bullets in the washing machine (they’ll never look there!). And we sadly flush an enormous plastic bag filled with practically an entire lid of particu larly pungent pot. Then I go out to check the scene of the crime—my mother’s bedroom—where the shooting had occurred, and I have to say, it was quite something to behold. There are flecks of blood all over the walls and a considerable amount of blood on the bed. A sheet had been shredded in an effort to make a tourniquet. Wow, this was truly drama and it was happening in real life, of all places. My real life, surreal as it all too frequently became when I was living with my show business family and not the Regulars of Scottsdale.
But if I thought it was surreal at this point, it was about to get a whole lot surrealer. (I know—not an actual word.)
So now it’s Saturday night in New York—you would normally think that this wouldn’t be a particularly slow night for crime in New York—but you wouldn’t know it by our living room, because we’ve got about five homicide policemen milling around, asking my mother pertinent questions about the crime like, “Did you know John Wayne? What kind of guy was he?”
Finally, they tell us that after examining the weapon in question that my brother used in commision of the crime of shooting himself in the leg with a blank, the five policemen establish that said gun could actually discharge live ammo and as such shoot actual bullets. What all this means is that my mother is in possession of an unlicensed firearm and needs to come down to the local precinct where she would be officially booked for possession of a firearm.
So now its about 4 A.M. and my mother and I are taken down to the police station for her mug shot and to be fingerprinted, along with the rest of the hookers, dope fiends, murderers, and thieves.
So by the time we get home it’s close to six and my mother and I are at the kitchen table totally exhausted. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door and we look at each other. Who could that possibly be at this hour? My mother gets up to see while I wait nervously. When she returns, she’s laughing.
“What?” I ask. “Who was it?”
“It was a couple of reporters,” she explains, catching her breath. “They heard Todd had been shot in the leg and they wanted to know if I had done it for publicity for the show. You know, to drum up additional ticket sales. I so badly wanted to tell them ?yes, and now I can only do one more Broadway musical because I only have one child left to shoot for publicity.’”
It’s almost dawn and we’re both so tired by now that we’re a little punchy, so we begin to invent other reasons why my mother might have shot my brother. We came up with everything from he wouldn’t clean his bedroom to he’d stopped feeding his turtle to his grades were down. (All perfectly credible, as far as we were concerned.)
The next day there’s a photograph of my brother in the hospital with my mother in a mink hat smiling beside him on the front page of the Daily News. The headline read, “Picasso Dies.”
Now, one detail I neglected to mention is that right after the gun discharged the blank into my brother’s upper thigh, my mother was naturally frantic seeing all the blood on her only son. So she did what any mother frantic with worry for her child’s welfare might do—she called a cab.
