Love Life (4 page)

Sometimes at pickup, waiting for my boys to get out of class, I would see my old team on the playground. We’d play a little horse. I’d teach them the Xs and Os, the fundamentals of the pick and roll, but they showed me something, too. From them I learned (or relearned) how important adolescent friendships are, how impressionable young boys can be and how much male, adult attention means to their development. I learned that they rise to a challenge, crave it and desperately want a responsibility they can meet. I saw their humble appreciation of being recognized for a job well done. And I realized that maybe that’s all anyone really wants, including me.

When Matthew finally opens the college-acceptance letter that we all prayed would come, I know it will be the beginning of his life without us. This is almost too much for me to contemplate. I prefer to live in denial that my relationship with him will be irrevocably changed.
Instead I goad myself into focusing on the bright side of having my beloved firstborn leaving home, of having the empty bedroom full of his boyhood touchstones, the sudden quiet when his incessant techno dubstep electronic dance music no longer blasts through the floorboards down into my office as I try to read a script and maintain my sanity. Yes, instead I think about the amazing! fantastic! wonderful! gifts that will come from being completely cut off from his daily life and academic experience.

And those would be what, exactly? First and foremost: No more field trips to chaperone!

My wife, Sheryl, once volunteered me to chaperone my son’s third-grade class on a weekend trip to SeaWorld in San Diego, making Matthew and me captives in a six-hour van ride with a parent we barely knew.

In spite of being professionally gregarious, in my nonpaid hours I’m a bit of a hermit. After being around a crew of fifty people for twelve hours a day on a film set, I really like my alone time and as always I abhor small talk. I love to delve into subjects one doesn’t in polite conversation, but idle banter, after about ten minutes, makes me wish I was still guzzling kamikazes at the Hard Rock Café. Or, in severe cases, leads me to consider reenacting John Gielgud’s warm-bathtub wrist-slicing suicide scene in
Caligula
.

The van ride would provide lots of time to get acquainted with the other class dad. The boys sat in the back doing their thing. I was riding shotgun in what reminded me of Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine, but without the charming paint job.

Things went south quickly.

I had become suspicious of a Styrofoam cooler in the foot well between our seats and eventually the dad noticed.

“Help yourself to a cold one,” he said, opening the lid to reveal that it was packed with bottles of Budweiser.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I often play one on television, and I think I know enough about California law to be squeamish about having an open container of booze in the car.

I spent the rest of the drive on alert to his opening one for himself, but he never did. He must have been saving them for his tour of SeaWorld. Soon we were driving through the heart of Los Angeles, down the 405, the busiest freeway in the country.

“What do they call this city?” he asked, looking around in wonder.

“Um, Westwood,” I replied, trying not to pass a judgment on him for asking that question when he’d just finished telling me he had lived in Southern California his whole life.

“So, this would be LA, then?” he asked.

“Yes. That is correct. We are passing through LA,” I answered. I thought, “Maybe I should have a beer.”

Later, at SeaWorld we met up with the other parents and kids and took our tour, which all the kids loved. Soon it was nighttime.

One of the dirty little secrets about having lived three-quarters of my life in show business is that I have developed a stress-reducing mechanism of only focusing on the matter directly at hand. This is great for navigating the uncontrollable uncertainty of life on film sets but probably not ideal for life in the real world. And so it slowly dawned on me that I hadn’t fully comprehended the reality of that night’s sleeping accommodations. I’m not a complete idiot; I knew I’d be participating in, and had packed for, a campout at SeaWorld. But I did not realize that we would be sleeping inside the manatee exhibit.

My traveling companion, now happily drinking his Bud, told me that this was a rare treat—SeaWorld offered this only to select schools. He then grabbed his son and bolted into the exhibit to “get a good spot to sleep.”

The manatee exhibit is an enormous tank/ecosystem with a
crowded observation area and an underwater viewing area. The place is usually jam-packed with spectators, reminiscent of center court at Flushing Meadows. The elephant-like creatures float around lazily and sometimes stick their walrus faces out of the water for a slightly disturbing stare-down. But that night, as the park closed down, even the manatees were looking to get some shut-eye.

My son and I entered a bunkerlike space under the grandstands. The air was thick and humid, oppressive to the lungs and cold. There were cement walls on three sides. On the fourth wall, we could clearly see the beautiful beasts swimming, in what seemed like slow motion. Apparently, ours was not the only school to be allowed this aquatic backstage pass; the place was infested with screaming, scrambling kids, several of whom, from the sound of their hacking, had debilitating head colds. Through their screeching, I could barely hear my son ask, “Where do we sleep, Dad?” I looked around. The parents and kids had staked out their areas, spreading out their sleeping bags. The floor was tough, hard industrial carpet over cement. I picked a spot in the corner away from the glass tank wall, figuring (correctly, as it turned out) that the light illuminating the tank was on for a reason and would stay that way through the night. I’m not a hothouse flower; I camp often and am not the type to bring air mattresses. I have also camped in the dead of winter. But this was different because I was surrounded by elements I could not control that would in all likelihood
disturb my sleep
. And know this about me: I. Like. My. Sleep. It probably is some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder left over from surviving the decade of the 1980s, where no self-respecting person
ever
slept. As I unrolled our matching Timberland sleeping bags, I hoped against hope that I could find a way to fall asleep among the hacking, yammering kids, floodlights from the tank illuminating the cold cement floor and gentle thumps of manatees banging against the glass.

I snuggled my boy up next to me (he was having a blast) and shut my eyes.

“Hi! Hi there! Rob, right?”

My eyes snapped open to see a mom dragging two kids behind her toward our little campsite.

“Hi! Hi! Hope you don’t mind, you seem to have
such
a great spot!” she said, unloading what looked like a week’s worth of supplies right next to me. “Box juice? Box juice?” she offered.

“No thanks, I’m just turning in for the night.”

“Cool. No problem. Someone said you were here and I didn’t believe them. I was like, what would Rob fucking Lowe be doing at SeaWorld?!”

My son, who always appreciates the proper usage of a good piece of profanity, said, “My dad’s our chaperone!”

“Ooooh, he looks just like you!” she said, staring at him like he was a puppy in a pet shop window.

It was a rough night. I had a disturbing dream. In order to pay the bills, I was forced to star in a direct-to-DVD sequel to
Free Willy
, but with manatees instead. The plot centered around an emasculated dad (played by me) going through a divorce from his übersuccessful, highly strung wife (played by Sarah Jessica Parker, although at some point it was also the actress from
Footloose
—you know how dreams are). Our adopted Sudanese son took comfort and mentorship from a handsome whale specialist at the local aquarium (Scott Bakula, I think) and helped him save a sick sea elephant. After our marriage counselor (Paul Giamatti) fell into the tank during a “family healing day,” he was saved by the manatee and so was our marriage.

At some point, I awoke, startled, heart racing. I was relieved, just as I am when I awake from other recurring nightmares, of unwittingly drinking a fifth of alcohol or giving a speech while my teeth fall out.

I rolled over, trying to get comfortable on the cold, rigid floor,
among the chorus of adult snoring and juvenile sniffling and coughing. The light from the manatee tank illuminated the room as if it were noon instead of three forty-five
A.M.

My neighbor, the talky mom, was also wide-awake. And staring at me. I smiled uncomfortably. She kept staring, unblinking. I had a passing thought that she might, in fact, be no longer living.

“You don’t even remember me, do you?” she said in a flat, robotlike monotone that managed to convey an element of accusation and craziness. “We met. Before,” she said finally, without offering any additional information.

I meet a lot of people, doing what I do, and as a single guy in his teens and twenties who starred in movies and traveled the world, I made a number of acquaintances, many romantic, most wonderful, and a few quite bat-shit dangerous and malignant. I chose my words carefully.

“I’m so sorry, forgive me, where did we meet?”

“The Sunspot,” she said, naming a horrific old-school nightclub on the Pacific Coast Highway that has been closed for over a decade. I had only been there once, in my wild phase, and my only recollection of the evening was a police car plowing at full speed into a row of parked cars and ensuing ambulances.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure, right!” I offered with feigned dawning recognition, calculating that acknowledgment would be the safest and most polite response. (There are people and a number of actors who can pull off the blunt and unrepentantly honest “I’m sorry, I have no idea who you are,” but I am not one of them.)

This seemed to break her trance and soon the whole
Fatal Attraction
vibe had passed, and she returned to being just another parent surrounded by elementary school kids sleeping in a manatee exhibit.

“Well, good to see you again,” she said.

“You too.”

“Good night.”

The rest of the field trip was uneventful but fun; Matthew and I begged off returning in the Scooby-Doo van and took the train instead.

It is a wonder, what we remember. Small, seemingly forgettable details feel like present, hard-edged objects you could actually hold in your hands; major events go lost until jarred out of unconsciousness by a song or smell or getting reacquainted with an old friend. I remember that field trip. I can’t remember my sons’ voices as little boys. Time, unfolding in all of its mystery, moving both fast and slow, has made its edit. Some of the things that have fallen away, I try to remember as I hold on to my memories of Matthew as a child. Before they are replaced by those of him as an adult. Before he heads away.

There is a movie called
My Dog Skip
, starring my
Outsiders
costar Diane Lane. I do not recommend it. If you have a child, particularly one about to leave home, watching this film is to be emotionally waterboarded. The story follows a little boy through young adulthood through the eyes of his beloved Jack Russell terrier. It is a great, yet admittedly manipulative, meditation on family, youth and mortality, and I defy you to watch its ending sequence and not have to be medevaced out of your present location.

The boy, now a young man, prepares to go away to school and he worries about his childhood best friend, Skip, now so old and arthritic that he can no longer jump up onto his bed. The boy leaves home; the Jack Russell sits in the boy’s room waiting for his return. In the middle of the boy’s freshman year, Skip dies. The boy’s parents bury him wrapped in his master’s Little League jacket.

My son Matthew’s beloved dog is a Jack Russell. His name is
Buster. Matthew picked him as a puppy, when he was tiny himself. They sleep together to this day under Matthew’s down comforter. The vet has told us that Buster has arthritis now and soon might need to be carried up our stairs. Matthew has asked me to do this for him while he is away at school.

“Will you take care of him for me, Dad?” he asks me one day, not long after we’ve returned from our college tour, greeted by Buster’s howling.

“Of course.”

I catch Sheryl’s eye but look away. We’ve both been preparing ourselves in our own ways for this new phase, and both of us are struggling.

“Thanks, Dad,” Matthew says, scooping Buster into his arms and heading up to his bedroom.

They take the stairs together, Matthew tucking his dog into the chest of one of my old shirts he’s now grown into. I watch him stride away, confident and happy. As I listen closely I can hear him talking to Buster.

“You are my good boy. And I’m going to miss you.”