Authors: James Scott Bell
I drove Maddie to Brentwood the next day. The address where I was to go was on the court order.
Hold the anger, I kept telling myself. For Maddie’s sake. You’re an actor. You are supposed to be able to turn emotions on and off. Do it. Don’t let her see that things are blowing up all around her.
Maddie was singing a little song to herself.
Mommy, Mommy. Gonna see Mommy.
I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my wrist muscles started to hurt.
Add to that the traffic on the 405. I knew I should have left earlier, but something held me back. A fight for some sort of control maybe. This court order thing was making me jump through a hoop, like a trained dog. Well, this dog was going to make a little noise.
I still held onto this crazy hope that everything would clear up. Like a Valley fog, it would soon melt away, letting in the sun again.
You think a lot of stupid things while driving in LA traffic. So I decided to switch to something else. I started thinking about God.
Just a little bit, but enough to make it more than a passing thought. If there was justice in the world, then God had to be in charge of it, right? When you got into deep water, you were supposed to call out to God, right? No atheists in foxholes, that sort of thing.
Well, if I wasn’t in a foxhole yet, I was sure sinking. So maybe I’d send up a real flag to God soon. I’d been going to church with Maddie. Wasn’t I supposed to get some benefits?
I got off at Sunset, hit more traffic, then reached the address in Brentwood at 10:37.
It was a huge place. I could see some of it through the iron gates that protected the premises. I didn’t need a neon sign to know this was Troncatti’s southland residence.
A black limousine with darkened glass was parked in front of the gate. I pulled my Accord to a stop on the street.
The limo door opened on the driver’s side and an olive-skinned man with a shaved head and goatee got out. He had a white shirt and black pants. He opened a rear door. Paula got out.
She looked like an international movie star. Dressed, once again, to the nines.
Maddie jumped out of the Accord and ran to her. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
I watched them like some prisoner on Devil’s Island looking at the mainland.
Paula lifted Maddie and hugged her, spinning her around.
The driver glared at me, his eyes saying
This is Brentwood. Get that hunk of junk off the street.
Instead, I walked toward Paula. The driver stepped in between us.
“Come on,” I said to Paula. “This is ridiculous.”
Paula was unmoved. The driver had muscles. I could see them under his tight shirt.
“Do you mind?” I said to the driver, who I called
Igor
in my mind.
“Is far enough,” Igor said. He had some sort of Middle Eastern accent. Maybe he had been one of Saddam’s bodyguards.
“I want to talk to my wife.” I took another step, but Igor got chest to chest with me.
“That’s Daddy,” I heard Maddie say. She was trying to help.
“Farid, it’s okay,” Paula said.
Grudgingly, Igor (I was not about to give him the dignity of a real name
)
allowed me to pass.
Paula put Maddie down and bent over to talk to her. “Honey, I want to talk to Daddy a minute. Why don’t you hop in the big car? We’re going to go for a ride.”
“Really?” Maddie said.
“Shopping,” Paula said. “For toys.”
Oh, how smooth. Maddie turned to me, waved with a big smile, and practically dived into the back of the limo. Igor walked a few feet away, his version of giving us privacy.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Don’t fly off the handle, like you did at the restaurant.” Paula’s tone was clipped and cool.
“A court order? You tracked me down?”
“You knew I wanted to see Maddie, but you took off with her.”
“What gives you the right to order me around?”
“I’m her
mother,
remember?”
“You sure work quick.” I was fighting my feelings like crazy. I wanted to choke her. I wanted her to fall into my arms. “What’d you do? Call Roland to find out where I was?”
“My lawyer did.”
“Oh. Right. Silly me. I thought you and Roland were friends.”
Paula sighed and shook her head. “This isn’t accomplishing anything.”
She was right. I tried to calm down. “We have to talk about this.”
“I tried, remember? You threw a bottle at me.”
“I threw it at the
sidewalk.
I’m not stupid.” The breeze must have switched then because suddenly I could smell Paula’s hair. Honey and cinnamon. And then my whole body changed. From anger and anxiousness to a sense of falling, away from light and hope, into some pit. In a few seconds I was going to bust out in tears. But I didn’t want Igor to see that, or Paula. I clenched my teeth and took a deep breath to keep it from happening.
I had felt this way before, and knew immediately when it was. Back when the call came about my mom. She was dead and suddenly everything was wrong and ripped up and bad. And would never be the same again.
“Can we try again?” I said. “Can we maybe get some counseling?” That was supposed to be the thing to do, wasn’t it? Find some professional and the broken pieces would be put back together again?
“We have to talk about what’s best for Maddie,” Paula said. “If we can do that in a way that doesn’t upset her, then let’s.”
“What about the two of us?” I said, feeling like a movie cliché. Feeling like the guy who loses the girl to Clark Gable.
“I’ll call you.” Paula turned toward the limo.
“Wait. When? When do I get Maddie back?”
Paula’s head was disappearing into the limo. “I’ll call you.”
That wasn’t good enough. I stepped toward the door as it closed. Igor took the cue and got back into character.
“No more,” he said. He had his hand in the air like a traffic cop.
I stood there as he got in the limo, fired it up, and pulled out of the driveway. I wondered if Maddie was looking at me out of the darkened windows.
“You
told him?
“Hey, man, I didn’t want to. But he was a
cop
.”
Roland seemed genuinely sorry. And who could blame him for
“I didn’t know they’d send somebody up there,” Roland said. “The cop just said you could be in a lot of trouble, and all I gave him was the phone number.”
“They got the address from that.” I threw myself on his couch. Roland rented a little house in Silver Lake. “Paula is playing for keeps.”
“Come on, man. Let me play you a little Brubeck.” Roland sat at the piano. “A little ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk.’” His fingers started to fly over the ivories. It was delicious.
I’d met Roland Turner at a place in the Valley about ten years ago. When I found out Roland loved baseball like I did, we hit it off. Turns out we liked the same player best—Frank Thomas.
And we had the same sense of humor.
The Simpsons
was funny.
Roseanne
was not.
Roland played more Brubeck (“Kathy’s Waltz”) for me. I stared at his ceiling. Suddenly he stopped.
“You need to see a lawyer,” he said.
When he said
lawyer,
something went off inside me. The reality of it. I saw the pictures in my mind again, the memories I had on that movie reel. Maddie as a baby, growing up; Paula beautiful, loving me.
I couldn’t help it. I started crying and covered my face with a sofa pillow.
Next thing I knew Roland was sitting there on the edge of the sofa. “Hey, man, I know.”
That’s all he said. He squeezed my shoulder. I was glad he was there.
My cell phone bleeped. That brought me to a sitting position as I quickly wiped my eyes. I had this crazy hope it was Paula, ready to come home.
It was Nancy, my agent.
“You ready for some good news?” she said.
I almost laughed out loud. “You have no idea.”
“They want you for a callback on
Number Seven.
”
It took me a moment to sort this out.
Number Seven
was a major new dramatic series about firefighters, being developed at NBC. John Hoyt, the veteran actor, was already attached, playing the chief.
In other words, this series had major hit written all over it, and anybody in the ensemble had an almost guaranteed shot at a major career boost. I’d read for it a month ago, along with every other actor my age in town, and thought nothing more of it.
“Are you serious?” I said.
“As a heart attack at Disney,” Nancy said. “Your call is at 10:30 in the morning, tomorrow. Make me proud.”
When I got off the phone and looked at Roland, I felt like I’d been put through several spin cycles.
“Life truly stinks,” I said.
Next morning, Monday, Paula still hadn’t called me about Maddie. Though I knew Maddie was happy to be with Mommy, I also knew I didn’t want her staying up there while Mommy and Troncatti played house.
A callus was starting to form in me with regard to Paula. Maybe it was a natural defense mechanism, but I was sort of glad it was there. Especially since I had to concentrate on the biggest news my acting career had ever received.
I had a real opportunity for television stardom. Emmy Award city. On the couch with Jay or Dave. Cover of
People
. Real money rolling in for the first time in my life.
All through the morning I psyched myself up. In the shower, I
became
Vance, the macho firefighter with a heart. That was the part I was up for.
I did some of my acting exercises, the ones Marty North had drummed into me. How would Vance take a shower? How would he move? Marty disdained pure Method acting, which was only concerned with feelings. The outside was just as important.
So I showered like Vance, toweled off like Vance, drank coffee like Vance. I remembered what I could of his background. There wasn’t much in the script, but I’d done another Marty thing and invented a whole past for Vance for my own use.
Driving to the studio in Burbank, I began to talk like Vance. Out loud. To myself. It did not matter that people in the other lanes were looking at me. This was LA. That’s what people do here. Stand on the corner and talk. Ride in cars and talk. Talk, even if no one else is around.
I had a parking pass waiting for me at the gate, and when I walked into reception, it was like I was royalty. This was no cattle call. The office wasn’t stuffed with dozens of versions of myself. I was here because they were
really
interested. In
me.
The receptionist, I was happy to see, was Lisa Hobbes. We’d done a showcase scene together a few years back, something from a Mamet play.
Lisa smiled. “I gave up the acting thing. I’m going for the producing thing.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“As things go. Hey, you want anything? Cappuccino?”
This was almost too good to be true. “Water’s fine. Thanks.”
Lisa came back with a bottled water and a few pages of a script to read. I was the only one in the reception area. A framed poster from
On the Waterfront
faced me. One of my all-time favorite movies. I looked at the big picture of Marlon Brando and nodded at him.
You and me, Marlon.
Lisa and I talked about old times for a while, and then her phone buzzed. She walked me down a hall and suddenly I found myself in a conference room with six other people—and John Hoyt.
I was about to read with an Oscar-winning actor, a man with one of the great careers in Hollywood. I tried not to shake.
I am Vance. I am Vance.
The producer, Barbara DiBova, made some small talk, introduced me to everybody. Their names went in one ear and out the other. She explained the scene to me. Vance was confronting the chief for reprimanding him over an incident where Vance had rushed back into a burning house to save a little girl’s pet iguana.
Whenever I was ready, she said, I could read with Mr. Hoyt. In baseball, I learned there were days when I just didn’t have it, no matter how hard I tried. The ball would look like a white pea coming at me at two hundred miles an hour. My legs felt like they had sledgehammers in them. And all my mental tricks couldn’t get me out of it.
And then there are days when everything falls into place. Players call that being in The Zone. Everything seems effortless. The ball is as big as a watermelon, and you get the fat part of the bat on it every time.
Most of baseball, and life, is spent somewhere in between these two places. But when you have the most important audition of your life, you pray that you are not in the pits but in The Zone.
As soon as I started reading with Hoyt, I knew where I was. All my training and desires and hopes came together, and everything else disappeared for a few amazing minutes as I read that scene for all it was worth.
When it was over, Hoyt smiled and extended his hand. “That was fantastic,” he said.
Everyone else in the room said something to the same effect.
All I could think was
Wow.
And I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to keep reading with Hoyt. I wanted to start work on the show.
Barbara DiBova walked me outside. “I wasn’t going to say this until later, but you were our number one choice on the callback list. We have more people to see today, but I just wanted to tell you that was one great reading you gave in there.”
“Thank you.”
“Stay by your phone,” she said.
I sailed through work at Josephina’s, smiling at everybody. Got good tips as a result, even from the lunch crowd.
And I wanted to celebrate. So that evening I went over to hear Roland play some jazz at Club Cobalt in North Hollywood. NOHO had become something of an artists’ quarter in recent years. There were small theaters, art galleries, cafés, clubs.
I sat in a little booth and drank Coke, with a plate of jalapeño poppers as my meal. Very bad for the stomach, but it tasted oh-sogood. And with Roland wailing on the ivories, I was feeling better than I had in months.
The whole Maddie mess was still there, of course, sitting inside me like a ball of deep-fried grease. But at that moment I had hope. My trend line was heading up. Maybe the momentum would carry over into my dealings with Paula.
After his first set, Roland joined me, as did Milo Ayres. Mr. Ayres owned the club, and I’d met him before. He was an affable guy of unknown ethnicity, at least to me. He might have been Greek or Italian or some mix in between. He wore a goatee and always dressed sharp. He had assorted rings on his fingers and gold chains around his neck. Very old school, if by old you mean the 1970s.
“Good to see you again,” Ayers said in his accent of unknown origin. His handshake was strong and sure.
“Likewise,” I said.
“Mark here just got some good news,” Roland said. “Big part on a new series coming up at NBC.”
“Not final yet,” I said. “But it’s very close.”
Milo Ayers rubbed one hand on his lapel. “Very nice. Congratulations.”
“Mark needs a good lawyer,” Roland said.
I looked at him like he’d mentioned I wore Barney underwear. “Oh?” Ayers said.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Roland put his hand on my arm. “Mr. Ayers knows some of the best attorneys in town. You need a referral.”
“What’s the problem?” Milo Ayers sat down. Now I had to come clean. I would break Roland’s fingers later.
“I may have a family matter coming up,” I said. My words told me I was still clinging to that thin reed of hope.
“Divorce?” Ayers asked.
“Yeah.”
“You go see Gregory Arsenault. He’s the best.”
Not wanting to get more into this, I said, “It really hasn’t reached that stage yet.”
Milo Ayers took on the look of an understanding uncle. “Mark, you listen to me, eh? Speaking as one who has been through the mill myself. Divorce can get ugly very fast, and if you don’t have somebody looking out for you, your ex will have the shirt off your back before you know it. You gotta know she’ll be doing everything she can to squash you.”
I couldn’t believe that about Paula. Yeah, she had a lawyer and she had Maddie and she was serious. But squash me? No way. For one thing, she loved Maddie and wouldn’t do that to the daddy our daughter adored.
“I still have a shot to talk things out,” I said.
But Milo Ayers shook his head. “That’s naive, my friend. You got any kids?”
“A daughter.”
“How old?”
“Five. Almost six.”
He reached inside his coat for a business card and pen. He wrote something on the back of the card. “You call Arsenault. It can’t hurt to talk to him. Tell him I sent you his way, he’ll give you a free consultation.”
Ayers finished writing and slid the card across the table to me.
“Believe me,” Milo Ayers said, “you need protection.”