Authors: James Scott Bell
Paula and I were in bed. I’d just finished getting Maddie settled by letting her read Dr. Seuss to me. I chose
Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!
All the way through I was thinking about Paula. She would be going soon.
“Good,” I said. “A woman who thinks is very sexy.” “Not about that.”
“Can I change your way of thinking?”
“Will you listen?”
“I’m listening.” I folded my hands on my stomach and looked
I hadn’t noticed it before. Did it come after the last rains? “It’s about you and Maddie.”
“What about me and Maddie?”
“I think maybe we can work something out while I’m gone. To
help.”
“Help?”
“You know.”
I got up on one elbow, looked at Paula. “No, I don’t know.” Paula sighed. “About taking care of her.”
“What, you’re saying I can’t handle the job?”
“You said so yourself.”
“When?”
“When you were bagging on me going to Europe. All that about
your career suffering.”
“What are you, an elephant? Never forget?”
“It was three days ago. It’s not like last year.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?”
“Duh, because I’m about to leave.”
“Forget about it. We went through this.”
“No, you went through this.”
“Then you said okay.”
“When did I say okay?”
“When you didn’t say anything. That was a silent okay.” She shook her head. “This is starting to sound like a bad Seinfeld script. I’m telling you I’ve got an idea. You want to hear it, or do you want to bat around lines?”
She pulled away from me. “Stop it. I’m serious. I’ve been talking to Mom and she’s willing to come out here.”
The dreaded
M
word. “You want your mother to come out here for the entire time you’re shooting?”
“She says she doesn’t mind. She’ll lease a house.”
“A
house?
“That’s not a problem.”
“I guess not. But I’ve got a problem.”
“Mark, you—”
“No.” I rolled off the bed. My feet hit the floor like asphalt pounders. “I don’t want your mom taking care of Maddie.”
“It’s only to help, while you’re—”
“It won’t stay just helping. Your mom will try to take more and more—”
“Maddie will still live here.”
“Well, thank you.”
“This is for Maddie.”
“You don’t think I can do this? Take care of my own daughter by myself?”
When Paula didn’t say anything I got mad. “I don’t want your mom within five states of this apartment.”
Paula got up, so she could face me. Fighter to fighter. “That is so unfair. She is Maddie’s grandmother.”
“And about as fond of me as, what? A rash? A festering boil?”
“Stop.”
“That’s what she thinks.”
“You won’t give her a chance.”
I pounded my chest with an open hand. King Kong. “What chance has she ever given me? Huh? She thinks her precious daughter got hooked up with a loser!”
Before Paula could say anything we heard a pounding on the wall, coming from Maddie’s room. And then her voice, muffled but emphatic: “Hey, some people are trying to sleep around here.”
Now that
should
have been funny. Coming from a five-year-old with perfect timing. But I didn’t so much as smile. Neither did Paula. We let a chill settle between us, silent and misty.
“Paula?”
“What.”
“Don’t worry about Maddie and me.”
She did not reply.
“Hey,” I said.
“What now?”
“Remember when we went to see
Doctor Zhivago
? At the Dome?”
“Yes.”
“Remember the part where Lara’s leaving the hospital? After Zhivago’s fallen in love with her? And the cart pulls out and watching it go, you can see on his face he thinks he’ll never see her again?”
“Yes.”
“And he walks back in and that yellow flower is starting to die—”
“I remember, yes. What about it?”
“That’s how I feel right now.”
I felt the bed move, and then she was up against me, her breath on my face. “Dope, this isn’t a movie. I’m just shooting one, okay?”
“Don’t make me go to Russia looking for you.”
“Deal,” she said.
And then, sooner than I could imagine, it was time for Paula to go make her movie. We—Maddie and I—did not take Paula to the airport. The studio sent a driver around. For some reason that made me feel like a forgotten man. But I kept a smile on my face, for Maddie’s sake.
Paula kissed and hugged us. Maddie cried a little, but tried to be brave. Paula promised to phone her a lot.
The last thing Paula said to me, after a final kiss, was, “Be good.”
In a morbid, ugly, horror movie sort of way, that
is
funny.
After Paula left, Maddie was very clingy. She had hold of my jeans and wouldn’t let go. I walked around the apartment with this five-year-old growth on my leg.
“Don’t go away, Daddy,” Maddie kept saying.
“No, cupcake,” I said. “I’m here. I just have to go to a meeting this afternoon.”
“No!”
“Honey, it’s for my work. Mrs. Williams is going to watch you.”
She pulled my jeans hard. “No! I wanna go with you.”
“It’ll be boring. I’m going to have to wait around and—”
“I can color.”
How could I argue with that? We packed up a couple of her coloring books—SpongeBob SquarePants and Powerpuff Girls— and hopped in my Accord for the ride to CBS on Radford.
The gate guard, a skinny old guy in a dark jacket (even though it must have been ninety outside), gave Maddie a scowl as I checked in.
“She’s not on the list,” the guard said, looking at his clipboard like it was incriminating evidence.
Before I could open my mouth, Maddie said, “That’s my daddy!” She had a look on her face that was not to be trifled with.
I smiled sheepishly at the guard. Who broke out into a toothy grin. “Go on,” he said. Maddie the charmer had done it again.
My audition was in a production office next to Studio C. In the reception area, in between potted plants and ostentatious urns, sat about half a dozen guys roughly my age.
The competition.
I recognized one of the guys from my acting class, Steve Monet (pronounced like the painter). He gave me a half smile and wave, the kind that said,
I know you’re up for this, old buddy, but I sure hope you drool during the reading.
The receptionist handed me my “sides,” the two pages of dialogue I would be reading in order to land this national spot for Colgate. I sat in the one empty chair, put Maddie on the floor in front of me, and started reading the lines.
“That’s pretty desperate,” Steve said.
“Huh?”
“Bringing your little girl to the audition. Going for the sympathy factor?”
“Funny.” I went back to my sides.
“I mean, you really going to bring her in with you?”
“She wanted to come with me.”
“Oh. That’s right.”
“That’s right
what?
“I read about Paula. She’s doing the Troncatti film.”
“Yeah.”
“Making you Mr. Mom?”
“Something like that. Hey.” I held up the pages, a signal that I needed to get back to business.
“Troncatti’s a wild man,” Steve said. His half smile slid from one side of his face to the other.
That was too much. He was playing with my head, I was sure, because he wanted me to flub the audition. But his ploy worked. My mind created a picture of Paula and Troncatti, laughing it up on the set, having a good old time. Too good?
Snap out of it. This is Paula’s break. Yours is coming. Read the lines.
“What’s the kid’s name?” Steve asked.
“You mind?” I said. “I want to get ready.”
“Take it easy, man.”
Maddie looked at him. “My name is Madeleine Erica Gillen and I’m five years old.”
“Whoa,” Steve said, throwing up his hands in mock surrender.
Maddie went back to coloring Powerpuff Girls.
When my turn came to read, Maddie wanted to go in with me. I got a cold eye from the casting director, a man, and a tepid smile from the producer, a woman.
“Nice touch,” the producer said.
I read my lines to the camera and got the traditional “We’ll call you” from the casting director. It sounded like a door closing and being locked from the inside.
Actors are paranoid, but then again, everyone is out to get us.
I wouldn’t be Oprah’s first pick as the model of fatherhood. My own parents met dropping acid in San Francisco in 1968. Mom got pregnant, and I guess the two of them decided this was
groovy
. They were never officially married, though I think someone chanted at them one night as they sat on a bed of flower petals and bayed at the moon.
I was born into a commune outside Santa Cruz, one the cops broke up not long after my birth. I was not the cause of the dispersal. A thriving marijuana field maintained by my dad (who had taken to calling himself Kalifornia) was the real reason.
Dad ended up doing some time in a California prison, by the way. I think I wrote to him once. He never answered.
Mom, whose real name was Estelle Gillen but who preferred to be called Rainbow, returned with me to her mother’s home in Chatsworth, a suburb of Los Angeles. My early memories are of my grandmother, Joyce Gillen, a widow who worked reception at Hughes Aircraft. Even when I was six or seven, I saw her as the mother figure in my life.
Mom was trying to come back from her years as a brain-fried flower child. She hooked up with another man, a guy named Barza who ran a Harley shop in Canoga Park. Mom, in photographs from the time, is very beautiful in a natural sort of way. I suppose she thought he was the epitome of
groovy
. That must have been the reason why she announced one day, to me and Gram, that she was taking off for a ride across the country, “like in
Easy Rider.
Someone should have mentioned that
Easy Rider
didn’t turn out so good for the guys on the bikes.
We got the call at night. Gram took the phone while I was in the living room watching
Dukes of Hazzard.
I heard her wail “Oh God, no!” I ran in and saw her collapse onto the floor. I was eleven years old.
Later we found out that Barza had tried to outrun a trooper in Alabama and skidded off the highway into a split-rail fence. He survived. Mom did not.
It shook me in a way I could not understand at eleven. But I would always feel a punch in the stomach whenever I saw a rainbow after that.
Gram did her best with me. But not having a father or mother in my life, or even a grandfather, was not the best thing that could have happened to the spawn of LSD-induced passion.
I started shoplifting, smoking, hanging out with the people I thought would help get me in the most trouble. If you were to look at me at twelve, you would see a poster boy for Future Skinheads of America. I stayed away from the house as much as I could. I loved Gram and did not want to see her hurt.
But the cops dragging me home after I stole beer from a 7–Eleven did that well enough. And so did the vice principal at school who suspended me for selling cigarettes on campus. Gram cried a lot over both of those things and I hated myself for that. But I didn’t stop doing what I could to catch the slow train to state prison.
It was baseball that saved my life. Literally. I believe that to this day.
I’d always been good at the game, never taking it seriously. Mom put me in Little League for one season when I was ten and I ripped up the opposition. I was wild with the bat but usually made contact. Hard. My average was .782 for the season.
I also had a cannon for an arm. I was usually put in right field, because my glove work was not the best. Yet. But there was many a time when a hard one to the deep corner turned into a spectacular out as I gunned the guy down trying to stretch a double into a triple.
I was named to the All-Stars and had a great postseason, too.
The next year Mom died and I lost interest in Little League.
But one of the dads from that Little League year remembered me. He coached at Chatsworth High, and when I got there he sought me out. Got tough with me, got me back into baseball. My life got a little straighter after that. Much to Gram’s relief.
I rose through the ranks, and by the time I was a twelfth grader I was among the top prospects in LA. I was named first team All-City.
The Red Sox offered me a contract. I had an agent and everything. Off to the minors I went, ready to embark on a glorious and highly paid future.
Then, in a game in Omaha, I blew out my arm. I was trying to make another legendary throw from deep right. The players were much faster up there than I was used to. I gave the throw everything I had and could almost hear the tearing of muscle and cartilage. It was like someone had napalmed my shoulder.
Coupled with the fact that I was still a wild swinger and could not catch up with a professional curveball, my baseball career came to a sudden and inglorious end.
At the age of nineteen I was out of baseball, out of work, out of options. Alcohol seemed like the traditional way to dull the misery. I went for it. That was the start, too, of what they now call
anger issues.
At least I gave up drinking when I found out Paula was going to have our baby.
The anger, though, was about to have a field day.
We had a game, Maddie and I, that was her all-time favorite. I called it Maddie’s Buried Treasure.
I did not simply give her gifts, or candy, or something fun. I put it in a little box or bag and hid it somewhere in the apartment. Then I’d tell her, in my best Long John Silver voice, “Treasure is hid, ahhrrrr, and ye best be lookin’ for it.”
Which would make her giggle and scurry all over the apartment. I had to get more and more clever about finding good hiding spots.
One time I bought a box of Nerds, her favorite candy, and a little squish ball and left them in the Rite-Aid bag along with the receipt. I just rolled the bag up and put it on the middle bookshelf, behind a copy of
Respect for Acting
by Uta Hagen and John Grisham’s
The Pelican Brief.
And promptly forgot all about it.
Three days later Maddie let out a scream while I was in the kitchen burning some toast. I ran to her, thinking she’d cut herself or something.
But she was jumping up and down, delighted. Holding the Rite-Aid bag in her hand.
“I found it!” she yelped. “And you didn’t even tell me it was buried!”
“Ahhrrr!” I said. “Ye must be the smartest pirate on the seven seas!”
“Silly,” Maddie said. “I’m a ballerina!”
The other ritual we had was when I gave Maddie a bath. I loved doing that. When I shampooed her hair with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo (she could do this herself but I always wanted to, and she’d let me), I would lean her back in the water to rinse and her face got this beatific look. She’d close her eyes and smile. It was complete trust in me and pure enjoyment of the moment. Her hair would float like kelp in a calm sea, and I’d be thinking that I was really doing something here—making my daughter clean and fresh. I loved the smell of Maddie after a bath.
Our ritual was this: Maddie could ask me any question she wanted to.
So, one evening, she came up out of the water and said, “Do you like God?”
I laughed. “Yes, I like God.”
“What does he look like?”
This was just a bath, but all of a sudden we were in deep theological waters. When your daughter starts asking questions about God, even if you’re fuzzy on the concept, you tread lightly, because you think one wrong answer could start her down some strange path. You see your child, twenty years hence, hanging out in some waterfront dive as the piano plays, cigarette dangling from her mouth, telling sailors the funny story about what her dad said God looked like.
“I don’t think God really looks like anything,” I said. Good. Introduce a concept she won’t understand and you cannot explain. Not look like anything? How can anything not look like something? “I think God looks like you,” Maddie said.
Perhaps I ought to take this more seriously
, I thought, though I did appreciate the compliment.
So I told her the only Bible story I knew about God. I didn’t have a Bible background, so I was running on fumes. I tried to make it exciting.
“One day,” I told Maddie, “there was this big war going on and one side had a giant named Goliath fighting for them. It was really unfair.”
“How big was he?” Maddie asked.
“Oh, I’d say about one hundred feet tall.”
“How big is that?”
“Like a telephone pole.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. And he would growl at the other army, which happened to believe in God, by the way.”
“Cool.”
“But they were all afraid of this giant, see? But there was a boy named David who was not a soldier, just a kid.”
“What did he look like?”
Richard Gere? Nah. No way.
“He was good looking, let’s put it that way.”
“I don’t like boys.”
“That’s a conversation for another time, okay? Listen. This kid David doesn’t have any armor or swords or anything like that. All he has is a slingshot.”
“Like in cartoons?”
“It was more of a thing that you whirl around your head with a rock in it, and it throws rocks real hard.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“You’re telling me? But this big giant Goliath has a big old sword and spear.”
“And a gun?”
“Maybe he’s hiding a gun in his pocket, who knows? But he marches out and starts making fun of the army of God, calling them names and laughing at them. But no one wants to go out and fight this guy.”
“He was too big.”
“You got it. But David says he’ll do it.”
“Was he short?”
“Yeah.”
“Was he scared?”
“Nah. He believed in God, see? And he knew God was stronger than any old giant any day. So David marches right out there with his slingshot, see, and some rocks. And that big old Goliath starts laughing at him. And David puts a rock in his slingshot and zips it and
BAM!
Maddie yelped, then giggled.
“Right in Goliath’s head.”
“Owie.”
“Big-time owie. It killed him.”
Maddie’s eyes got big with wonder.
“So David became a hero and a king and got to have his own castle and everything, because he believed in God.”
“Wow.”
“Big-time wow.”
I kissed her freshly shampooed head and knew that I needed some boning up on God. Because if I knew Maddie, she was going to ask for more stories just like this one.