Trophy Kid (3 page)

Pink’s on La Brea was one of Tom’s favorite hangouts. We got chili dogs, root beers, and a basket of fries large enough to feed a village in one of the third-world nations Robert and Greta were always running off to raise money for.

“Tell me about Guava,” Tom said, taking a bite of his chili dog.

“Well, she was born about eight months after Robert and Greta adopted me,” I said.

Tom took a pen out of his pocket and jotted this fact on one of the tiny, thin napkins the restaurant provided. “What else?” he asked.

“She’s crazy,” I said, rolling my eyes for emphasis.

“Doesn’t surprise me. You name your kid Guava, you’re asking for crazy.”

I was liking Tom more and more.

“You wanna know why Greta named her Guava?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Well, when Greta and Robert were on their honeymoon in Cancún, they developed a fondness for guavas. Greta says she named her Guava because she’s the fruit of her and Robert’s love. Isn’t that gross?”

“It’s only gross if I think about it, which I’m not going to do,” Tom said, chewing, a little bit of chili sliding onto his chin. “So how is Guava crazy?”

“Well, for one thing, she thinks she’s a princess.” I pointed at Tom’s chin to make him aware of the chili there.

“That doesn’t sound so weird,” Tom said, wiping his face with a napkin. “A lot of little girls, and some women I’ve dated, think they’re princesses.”

“No, she
really
thinks she’s a princess. At one of our weekly family dinner’s she announced that she was the reincarnation of Princess Diana.”

“That’s hilarious,” Tom said before taking a swig of root beer. “Wait a minute, weekly family dinners?”

“Yeah, Robert and Greta are so busy that they enter ‘family night’ in their appointment books like they’re scheduling some event they have to attend. And now Guava is as busy as they are. She just finished her first movie, she’s going to be in a TV sitcom, and she has a CD coming out around the same time as her movie and her TV show. Greta is really into everything Guava does. She even gave up a big movie role this summer to be with her.”

“Does it bother you that Greta is so devoted to Guava?”

“Not really,” I said honestly. “She’s like an extension of Greta; it’s like they’re one person in two bodies. If Greta has to go out of town for a movie shoot, she always takes Guava along.”

“You never go?”

“No. But I don’t want to,” I said.

“If Robert’s also gone, who takes care of you?”

“Nobody. I mean, Rulia is always here, and when I was little it was my nanny, Hana, so there’s always someone around.”

“How does Guava treat you?” Tom asked.

For the first time that day, Tom’s questions were making me uncomfortable. “You don’t take very many notes,” I said, taking the conversation off myself for a moment.

“I remember everything,” Tom said. “Sometimes it’s not such a great thing. If it’s something really important—a date, a name, some fact or other—I jot it down. I like to be listening to you instead of writing.”

“Why don’t you just use a tape recorder?” I asked.

“I tried that for a while, but for one thing, it sometimes makes people uncomfortable, and for another, I never ended up listening to it. Like I said, I pretty much remember everything. It’s faster for me to write down any important details or ask you again later. Otherwise, I end up fast-forwarding and rewinding the tape recorder for twenty minutes looking for one little bit of information. Anyway, about Guava.”

“She used to think I was pretty cool, and not just because I was the orphan kid from Croatia. We’d make up games and stuff. But after a while she got all superior, and now she hardly ever says anything to me at all.”

“What about friends?”

“Sometimes,” I said quietly.

“Sometimes? That’s a funny answer.”

“I don’t have that many friends…at least not right now, you know, ’cause school is out,” I said, embarrassed.

“You don’t have a best friend?”

“No. Well, I did. Max Haycroft was my best friend when I was eleven. He just kind of got me, you know what I mean?”

“We all need people who get us.” Tom slurped, dredging the bottom of his root beer with his straw. “What happened to him?”

“His family moved to Seattle, and since then it’s been hard to find people who…”

“Get you.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen,” Tom said, wiping his mouth and chin with a handful of napkins, “you’re just going through a friend drought. It happens.”

“Really?”

“Really. Things change. New friends come along.” Tom held out a pack of gum. “Want a stick?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “So who’s going to the baseball game with us?”

three

Tom had four tickets in the reserved section along the right-field line. His girlfriend, Jessica, and a buddy of his named Rusty took up the other two seats.

I’d been to Dodger Stadium before, always sitting near the Dodger dugout, or in the seats directly behind home plate, or in the Stadium Club. One time, I’d even thrown out the first pitch. As usual, it was my dad’s attorney’s idea. Who needed a publicist when you had Larry Weinstein on retainer? Robert had gotten a lot of bad press because he had helped raise money for a relief organization whose leader—a friend of Robert’s from college—had been taking two dollars for every dollar that went to starving children in Turkey, after an earthquake had devastated the country. Robert hadn’t done anything wrong except put his blind trust in a college friend, but he was still taking a beating in the press. Larry figured that by bringing me out for some public events, they could deflect the negative publicity over the scandal. I was the symbol of all the good work Robert and Greta had done.

I was only nine at the time, so they let me throw the ball to the catcher from about twenty feet away instead of from the pitcher’s mound. I got to shake hands and have my picture taken with the Dodger catcher. That was cool. But then some wise-guy reporter asked me if I thought my dad was making money off orphans and starving children.

“I don’t know,” I said to the reporter.

Robert pressed his hand hard into my shoulder and whisked me away from the reporter.

“Why did you say you didn’t know?” he said, his carefully tweezed and separated eyebrows coming together for a reunion.

“I don’t know,” I said again, afraid of Robert’s anger.

“Is that the only thing you know how to say? ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’” Robert mocked. “We’re going home.”

“What about the game?” I cried.

“There isn’t going to be a game for you—or anything else—until you start to appreciate what your mother and I have done for you. You’d still be in an orphanage in Croatia if it wasn’t for us.”

Later, Robert made a rare trip to my room to say he was sorry. He said he’d overreacted at the ballpark, but I had to learn to be very careful with everything I said, especially to reporters.

“Reporters are predators, Joe. Do you know what a predator is?” Robert asked.

“They’re like lions and tigers,” I said.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Robert said. “They have an acute sense of smell. They can smell blood and they can smell fear,” he continued, as if we were engaged in a vital lesson of survival. “Well, reporters are like lions and tigers. And their victims are celebrities like your mother and me and you and Guava. And when they smell our blood, they move in for the kill, just like a lion or tiger. Do you understand?”

I was thinking,
You’ve got to be joking,
but I just nodded and said I understood and would be more careful from then on.

“You don’t really think I did anything wrong, do you?” Robert asked.

“No,” I said.

Robert gave me a pat on the shoulder. “I guess we both need to be more careful in the future,” he said.

With Tom, it was fun to be at a ball game and just be a fan. But I quickly realized that you don’t need to be a celebrity to get unwanted attention.

Tom’s friend Rusty hollered at every umpire’s call he didn’t agree with and yelled in frustration whenever the Dodgers made what he called a bonehead play.

Tom, for his part, carefully explained the inner workings of baseball strategy to me, telling me why a bonehead play was a bonehead play.

Jessica sat on my left; I think she wanted to be as far away from Rusty as possible.

“How do you know Rusty?” I asked Tom between innings, when Rusty had gone to the bathroom.

“We played in a band together when we were in college. He’s been going through a rough time lately.”

“What happened?”

Tom took a look over his shoulder, just in case Rusty had come back. “He lost his job and then his wife left him.”

“I’m amazed Kim stuck with him this long. I’m amazed
you
stick with him,” Jessica said.

“He’s not so bad,” Tom said.

“Not so bad? He blew almost twenty thousand dollars from Kim’s parents on gambling. And he was fired because he was playing online poker at work.”

“Where did you hear that?” Tom asked.

“Kim told me.”

Tom looked back at me. “Anyway, he’s going through a lot.”

“So is Kim,” Jessica said, not letting Rusty off the hook. “And it’s been especially hard on Gary.” Jessica looked from Tom to me. “Gary’s their son. He’s a couple of years younger than you, actually.”

There was a loud curse from the aisle, just above where we were seated. It was Rusty. He seemed to have gotten himself into an argument with another fan.

“You bumped right into me, you stupid jerk! Look at my shirt!” Rusty pointed at his shirt, soaked and dripping with the four Cokes that, a moment before, had been in the cardboard tray he was carrying. “This shirt cost me a hundred bucks!” he screamed. “It’s a Tommy Bahama, you idiot!”

The fan Rusty was arguing with was probably close to eighty. Two young guys who looked like they could play pro football came to the old man’s defense.

“What’s wrong with you, man?” one of the linebackers yelled at Rusty.

“He’s an old man, man!” the other linebacker screamed.

“Mind your own business,” Rusty hollered back at them.

Tom was getting out of his seat.

“Tom, stay out of it,” Jessica pleaded.

“It’ll be okay,” Tom said, making his way up the aisle.

My heart was pumping really fast when Tom reached the scene.

“Why don’t we all try calming down,” he said, reasoning with all the participants.

“Stay out of this, for your own good,” linebacker number one said to Tom.

“Don’t talk to him like that. He’s a buddy of mine, and worth the two of you put together,” Rusty growled. “You’re the ones who butted in here.”

“We just wanted to take care of the old man,” linebacker number two said, looking around for the person he was defending.

But the old man had disappeared.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” Tom said, trying to defuse the situation. “Why don’t we all go back to enjoying the game?”

That was when one of the linebackers called Rusty a dirty @#%. Rusty threw what remained of the Cokes on the guy, who responded by grabbing Rusty by the throat and forcing him to the pavement while Tom and the other linebacker tried to separate the two.

After a trio of security guards had escorted us all to the parking lot, Rusty was apologetic to the point of weeping. He apologized to Tom and to Jessica and to me. He even wanted to go back into the park to find the old man and apologize to him.

“I ruined everything,” Rusty wailed.

Jessica had a
yes, you did, you jerk
look on her face but remained silent.

“It’ll be okay,” Tom said. “It was a lousy game anyway.”

The moment after he said it, an enormous roar erupted from the stadium. It seemed to last for a full minute.

“I’ll catch the replay on
SportsCenter,
” Tom deadpanned.

We’d missed the game’s highlight, but it was Rusty’s mini-brawl that
I’d
be replaying in my head for the rest of the evening.

four

The morning after Rusty had gotten us thrown out of Dodger Stadium, we were back in the writing room.

“How did it happen, exactly?” Tom asked.

“Don’t you do any research?” I asked back, not really wanting to talk about the day I’d lost my mother and sister.

“Some,” Tom said. “But I’d rather hear it from you.” He said it in a way that made me feel like he really cared, not like he was some reporter just wanting a story that might lead to a big paycheck or even some sort of journalism prize.

I told Tom everything I could remember, as if it were happening right in front of me. He just let me talk, without comments or questions.

When I got to the part where the soldiers took me to my neighborhood and found the apartment where my family lived, it became more difficult for me to speak without crying.

“That’s when they got the names of my mother and sister and the army was able to confirm…” My voice trailed off as my throat became tight. I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “…That they had been killed in the bombings,” I finished.

“Who told you?” Tom asked.

“No one. I overheard them talking to each other.”

“No one said anything to you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing except that my mother and sister were with my dad in a better place. I knew they were talking about heaven. I started crying because my family had gone on a trip and not taken me.”

“Okay,” Tom said softly.

We sat in silence for a few moments, Tom scratching a few notes on his pad. When he had finished, he said, “How much do you know about your real dad?”

I hesitated before saying, “Not that much.”

“Didn’t your family, I mean Robert and Greta, do anything to find people who might have known him—or your mother, for that matter?”

“They made some inquiries, but most of the people who contacted them were more interested in telling Robert and Greta their own life stories than in giving them, or me, any information. Everyone thinks their life should be a movie.” I smiled. “A couple of the letters were sincere. A man who had worked with my dad before the war said my dad was the smartest engineer at the company and that he was kind and always willing to listen to others when they were having problems. He said my dad was the best man he knew.”

There was something I wanted to tell Tom about my real father, but I wasn’t sure if I should yet. What if he didn’t believe me? The matter was decided for me when I heard someone coming up the steps. There was a pattern to how she was ascending: two steps up, one step back, two steps up, one step back. Finally, Guava appeared in the doorway.

“I thought you were at rehearsal for your TV show,” I said, unsure if I was upset or glad that Guava had interrupted us.

“I finished and the director said I was great,” Guava said, doing a shuffling tap dance into the room. Upon getting a good look at Tom, she stopped dancing and walked straight to him, holding out her hand.

“I’m Guava,” she said.

“Nice to finally meet you. I’m Tom. You’ve always been gone when I’ve been here.”

“I know. I’m in a TV show. It’s going to be on Sunday nights on FOX.”

“I’ll be sure to watch.”

“Do you want to go bowling with us? My mom said I should ask you.”

I had completely forgotten that we had an event to go to that night.

“It’s bowling for the homeless,” I explained.

“The homeless are bowling?” Tom asked.

“No, silly,” Guava said. “We’re bowling for them because they have no money to bowl themselves.”

“It’s a charity event for an organization that gets people off the street and back to work,” I said.

“Sounds like a good thing,” Tom said. “Sure, I’ll come.”

“It costs more than regular bowling,” Guava said.

“Well, it’s for charity. How much?”

“It’s a hundred and fifty dollars,” I said.

“No problem,” said Tom.

I didn’t think it would be, having seen Tom give ten dollars to the homeless man in the park. He was generous without asking a lot of questions, as opposed to Robert, who, although he had far more money than Tom, wanted to be sure that every penny he doled out to the poor was used wisely.

“Nice!” shouted Guava. “I’ll tell Mommy.” She then bolted for the door and went down the stairs the way she’d come up: two steps down, one step up, two steps down, one step up.

“Where were we?” Tom said after we finally heard Guava reach the bottom of the stairs and tear across the walkway toward the main house.

“We were talking about my real dad.”

“Right. Is there anything else you found out from people who worked with him or were in the army with him? Anything about him at all?”

There was but I still wasn’t ready to talk about it. Not just yet. “No,” I said.

“Okay. Why don’t we call it a day?”

“Sure,” I said, a little disappointed that Tom hadn’t pressed me to say more.

“So what kind of bowler are you?”

“The kind that misses the pins,” I said.

Tom laughed. “Well, maybe I can help you hit some of them.”