* * *
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After I was born, my parents decided that Mom would stay at home. When I was five or six months old, Mom had lunch with another young mother, who mentioned that there was a lot of film and fashion work going on in South Florida, and they were always looking for new faces, especially for children’s clothing catalogs. Her son, just shy of a year old, was making decent money, and sometimes they even let him keep the clothes! She gave my mom the name of a couple of talent agents.
Because babies grow and change so fast, there’s no sense taking formal headshots of them. Dad, eager to put his photography skills to use, took pictures of Mom holding me, and they sent them to the agents. I began to book work right away, but one of the agents also noticed Mom. She wasn’t interested in acting or modeling, but the family’s finances were in such rough shape she figured she might as well give it a shot. She ended up as a recurring extra on Miami Vice, the back of a head in Crockett and Tubbs’s office. Occasionally, she played other roles: a pregnant corpse at the city morgue, for example. She was on the show for four of its five seasons.
I have a few muddled memories of the Miami Vice set from the mid-’80s: the craft services tent, a Christmas party. Mom says Philip Michael Thomas was a friendly guy, and that Don Johnson wasn’t. She once spent a day on a boat with Frank Zappa, who was playing a drug dealer; he was seasick the entire shoot.
Mom’s acting career started and ended with Miami Vice, but mine was longer lived. I loved attention and was loud and energetic, always happy to ham it up. Because I was an early and avid reader it was easy for me to memorize dialogue, often the single biggest problem when it comes to working with young performers. I did print, radio, and television commercials. My first and probably biggest TV success was a commercial for the Florida Citrus Growers Association, shot when I was in first grade. In it, another little boy and I are in a school cafeteria negotiating a trade for my very desirable thermos of orange juice. He offers some of his sandwich, then a doughnut, which I finally agree to take in exchange for half the orange juice. He takes the thermos and drinks the whole thing. I say, “Hey, you drank more than half!” He says, “I had to, my half was on the bottom!” This commercial ran nationwide for at least a year, and in Florida for longer than that.
At my agent’s urging, my mother and I spent the summer of 1992 in New York, so that I could pursue bigger roles. We lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, Ellen and Henry, in their house in Baldwin, Long Island. Every day Mom and I took the LIRR into Manhattan so I could go on auditions, sometimes two or three in a day. This was the summer I turned ten years old. My father and my sister (who was three years old at the time) stayed behind in Florida, because it would have been impossible to put us all up at Ellen’s house, and because Dad—who had found his place in his industry, and was working as a stockbroker—was the sole breadwinner. Splitting up the family, even temporarily, put a lot of pressure on my parents’ relationship, as well as on their roles as parents. They were each, in effect, single-parenting: Mom navigating the New York City casting scene while Dad worked in an office all day, then rushed off to pick up his toddler from his in-laws or the sitter. This wasn’t what they had imagined for their marriage, but here was this huge opportunity—right? It seemed foolish to let their son’s big chance slip by.
There were a few close calls with success, most notably a lead role in Conversations with My Father, a play about first-generation Jews assimilating as Americans after the war. The play would premiere on Broadway, be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and win Judd Hirsch a Tony Award. When I got the callback for it, instead of being excited I was terrified. Not about memorizing the lines or performing live, but about having to stay in New York all through the fall, away from my friends, and with the family divided indefinitely on my behalf. I did my best at the audition, but was relieved when I didn’t get the part, which in the end went to some kid named Jason Biggs. (The other big callback was for the movie The Good Son, the role that ultimately went to Elijah Wood.) I booked nothing that summer, but the experience proved important for an entirely unrelated reason.
Mom had suggested that I keep a diary while we were in New York. I did, and continued to keep it intermittently for the year that followed. It was largely a list of desserts consumed, toys acquired, and tourist attractions visited, but there were passages where I wrote about how I was feeling: happy, sad, homesick, confused about whether I should keep trying to act. The diary doesn’t contain any big revelations, and I’m not sure whether it’s still extant. (I’ve seen it as an adult, but not recently; it may have been misplaced or thrown away.) Its real value, I now believe, was to help me develop a writing habit. By the middle of fifth grade I had lost interest in diary-keeping but was writing stories that ran the gamut from Stephen King–inspired monster-and-vampire fare to more realist riffs on friends and school; I even attempted poetry! I took this work seriously and it became something I was willing to prioritize and make time for. I can only imagine how strange it must have been for my parents when their eleven-year-old started talking about his writing hobby as “work,” but they were never anything less than encouraging and supportive. That said, there were a lot of fights about my conviction that this work was more important than, say, the homework I got at school, or getting a full night’s sleep. By the time I finished elementary school I had what could earnestly be described as a writing practice.
My acting career, meanwhile, had stalled. I became increasingly ambivalent about the enterprise, and there was the unavoidable fact that puberty was not being especially generous to me. Being able to memorize dialogue was no longer the impressive feat it had once been. I didn’t want to take acting classes or go out to LA for pilot season, and becoming a teen heartthrob didn’t seem to be in the cards. I got asked to audition less and less often, and that was fine with me, though when a call did come, I still went, if only for the chance to make some money.
The last commercial I did was in 1996, for the debut of a new roller coaster called the Mantis at the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. The commercial was shot in two parts. The first part was shot in South Florida. The camera sits at bug’s-eye view in the grass and I hold my foot above it, threatening to squish. “Should I or shouldn’t I?” I sneer at the bug. “Ever wonder why you’re not supposed to step on a mantis?” the announcer asks teasingly as the screen cuts to black. (You can find both parts of the Mantis commercial on YouTube; if the orange juice commercial exists anywhere online, I have not been able to locate it.)
For the second part of the commercial, they flew Dad and me out to Cedar Point and I spent twelve hours riding the Mantis. It was early spring and bitterly cold. Part one of the commercial had been running for weeks already. (My wife, who grew up in Michigan, remembers seeing it on TV.) As we walked around the theme park I saw people doing impressions of me, raising a foot up and shouting, “Should I or shouldn’t I?” to their friends. My reaction to this was mixed: It was cool, but also weird, and not entirely welcome. But Dad was unequivocal in his excitement. He was impressed. He was proud. He wanted me to walk up to people and introduce myself. “Meet your fans,” he said. I wouldn’t.
There’s no question that Dad found some vicarious satisfaction in my fame (such as it was), but the money was also a major motivation. A few hundred bucks here or a few thousand there was a lot for us in those days, and though there were times when the family probably could have used that money, they didn’t take it. When I booked a commercial or got an unexpected residual check, I was typically allowed to spend some small portion of my earnings on something I wanted—toys, later books and video games—and then the rest was put away for college. I knew all this at the time, but money and college are pretty abstract concepts to an eighth grader whose main concern is not embarrassing himself in front of strangers. After the Mantis, I decided I was done.
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&n
bsp; For ten solid years, from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, Dad was a broker at a firm called Corporate Securities Group. At one point they tapped him to open and manage a new branch office. The story of how and why this fell apart is convoluted, probably not worth telling even if I could do it justice, which I can’t. Basically he had a massive falling-out with a few people in his office, possibly in the course of attempting to expose some kind of malfeasance or fraud that was going on in-house. At a guess, I’d say he was correct on whatever business decision or question of ethics instigated the conflict, but that he became so aggressive and implacable with his colleagues and superiors that he lost any moral high ground he might have had, and gave his enemies all the ammunition they needed to protect themselves and take him out. It’s likely that his presence, rather than the issue he raised, came to be viewed as the primary liability in the office.
When Larry Taylor flew off the handle, he flew all the way off, and there was never any telling how long it would last or what the consequences would be. His life—our lives—were marked by these outbursts: ejections from ball games, restaurants where we were no longer welcome, broken friendships, screaming matches followed by days of silence. He was often Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man” (“with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand”), a song he loved and occasionally quoted, usually in the context of an apology. He would insist—despite all available evidence—that he was no longer the self-destructive hothead Joel describes.
For what it’s worth, his apologies were always sincerely offered because his remorse was always real. Among family and close friends these apologies were usually accepted, though forgiveness could hardly erase the memory of what had been said in the heat of an argument, or the scorch of the heat itself. But with colleagues and bosses, of course, it was an entirely different story. He was, again per Joel, “proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost,” but he was running out of battles to fight. And he was no longer young.
The last year at Corporate Securities Group was disastrous for him and for our family. He ended up with no job and powerful enemies within the industry. His career never recovered.
During my last few years of high school he was home a lot, and then he was home all the time. He kept a stock-tracking program open on the family computer and CNBC blared all day from the living-room TV, but I understood at some level that whatever he was doing, it was not actually work. My parents fought more and more often about money.
Dad and I fought too, bitterly, over ludicrously minor things. Thrift-store shopping, for instance, enraged him. He found it offensive and insulting that while most of the guys I’d grown up with were wearing Tommy and Polo, I elected instead to “dress like a homeless person in other people’s garbage.” When I wanted a chain wallet, he said only criminals and bikers wore them. Eventually I was allowed to get a small chain, but then I upgraded myself to a much longer, heavier one—it was actually a dog collar, purchased not at Pacific Sunwear or Hot Topic but in the pet aisle of a Walgreens. I can still hear the fury in his voice, see the anger in his eyes, when he caught me with it.
A lot of this had to do with class. I understood myself as engaged in a rebellion against the stultifying suburban values all around me, whereas my parents understood themselves as trying desperately to present a facade of middle-class stability that was always just out of reach. If I’d understood this at the time, I would have better understood Dad’s sensitivity to my presenting myself as being as poor as we actually were. (That said, this was the ’90s, and pretty much anyone who wasn’t dressed like a Backstreet Boy or a Young Republican was dressed like Kurt Cobain.)
We had the requisite confrontation over drug use, though the way this archetypical moment played out was highly unusual. I’ve never met anyone else with a story quite like mine, and I think it says something about who my father was, and what our relationship was like.
I started smoking pot in tenth grade, and my parents caught on pretty quickly. Mom didn’t think it was a huge deal, but Dad, who abstained from all substance use (from hard drugs and alcohol to caffeine and Tylenol), thought it was a very big problem. He was worried about gateway drugs, overdosing, a life of crime—the whole DARE checklist. And yet his respect for my privacy was so absolute that he would not search my room, reeking as it was. Instead he took me out to breakfast one Saturday morning, itself such an unusual occurrence that I knew he must want to have a Serious Conversation. Given how little he’d been working in the past year, and how strained my parents’ relationship had become as the financial pressures mounted, I assumed that he was going to tell me they were getting divorced. We wound up at the mall food court, where I ordered a plate of bourbon chicken (at ten-thirty in the morning!), and he, characteristically, decided he wasn’t hungry after all. I sat there eating sickly sweet chicken, growing increasingly baffled as he laid out all of his circumstantial evidence of my pot use, and explained that it was circumstantial because he hadn’t actually gone through any of my stuff. I was so relieved that this wasn’t the Divorce Talk that I admitted he was right. But I told him that, if he himself believed everything he’d just said about the dangers and risks, then it was insane that he’d let me keep going for months while he gathered his evidence and harbored his suspicions. If this stuff was as bad as he claimed, why hadn’t he prioritized my safety over my privacy and raided my room right away?
He conceded the point. You might be surprised to hear that, but I wasn’t. Dad could be impossible when he was in a rage, but he was fully capable of a good-faith debate, and was willing to admit when he changed his mind.
As it happened, I didn’t find pot to be particularly enjoyable. It tended to leave me bored and boring, usually asleep before too long. By the time he’d confronted me I had lost most of the limited interest I’d had in the drug, and I told him that too. He believed me, I think in part because it was pretty close to his own experience with marijuana, though he didn’t come out and say so at the time. I told him, again honestly, that there was still some pot in the house and that I would get rid of it. He said that sounded fine. I finished my chicken and we left the mall. The subject was never broached again.
* * *
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I graduated from high school in 2000 and left for the University of Florida’s summer session a few weeks later. In 2003, my mother lost her job in Miami and was recruited by a company out of Nashville. At my father’s insistence, she moved there by herself to take the lay of the land before relocating the family. About a year later, after much stalling and negotiation, they sold the house in Miami and bought a place in a suburb of Nashville.
My father and sister joined my mother in the summer of 2004, between Melanie’s sophomore and junior years of high school. She was inconsolable and so was Dad: The scenario was an almost exact repetition of what had happened to him when he was her age, and it signified for him a sort of ultimate failure. The two of them fed each other’s sorrow, anger, and depression. I spent the summer of 2004 at the Nashville house also, helping them get settled and killing time. I had graduated from UF that spring, and come the fall I was headed for an internship at a magazine in New York City.
The misery in the air was palpable. Mom and I gamely attempted to get to know the area: We toured Civil War battlefields and the Jack Daniel’s distillery, saw Ralph Stanley at the Grand Ole Opry. For the most part, Dad refused to participate in any of this, though there was one particularly ill-fated family excursion to a kitschy motel-turned-restaurant called the Loveless Cafe. I remember it as a decent if unexceptional meal for which we’d waited perhaps forty-five minutes longer than we ought to have. Dad thought it exemplified everything wrong with Tennessee, and mocked my mother mercilessly for having brought us there. Later, he made what he thought was a very funny PowerPoint presentation about how shitty it was and what a bunch of asshole rednecks Tennesseans are, and shared this document with his personal mailing list, an assortment of f
riends and family to whom he sent occasional (sometimes more than occasional) missives and screeds. The main thing I remember thinking that summer was that something was going to have to give, that there was simply no way things could keep on the way they were going. I figured Dad would, however grudgingly, acclimate to the situation. It was neither the first nor the last time that I made this particular mistake.
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I spent the fall of 2004 in New York City, and the spring of 2005 in Portland, Oregon, living with some college friends who had moved there. I went back to Tennessee that summer and found things about the same as they’d been the year before—that is, grim. I left for New York again in September, to start my MFA. I ended up staying in New York for a decade and never lived in the Tennessee house again. I visited, of course, and was in regular contact with everyone. There was no point at which I would have described myself as estranged from my father, or vice versa. Our relationship remained intense, difficult, and close. But as his situation worsened, his behavior became more erratic, swerving between a depressive catatonia and an aggression that, even by his own standards, was troubling. He was aware that he was in an unhealthy mental state, but adamant—as always—in his refusal to admit there was a problem or accept any kind of help. Melanie finished high school in 2006 and she, too, left for UF.
After a particularly difficult visit to Nashville in early 2007, I decided to write my father a letter. I was neither subtle nor gentle. For the subject line, I just wrote “Letter.” I won’t quote the whole thing.
Riding with the Ghost Page 3