by Suzan Saxman
When Gavin was about four, a girl I used to know from the Renaissance Faire came to me for a reading about her work. I hadn’t seen Nancy in a couple of years, and after the reading, she started catching me up on her love life. She was spending a lot of time at the home of her boyfriend, who was into computers, and she started explaining his work to me. This was 1996 and not everyone had a computer yet (David and I certainly didn’t), and people weren’t on the Internet all the time. She told me that her boyfriend consulted with this teenager who was a total whiz kid when it came to electronics. She was telling me we should drive up to her boyfriend’s place, which was about an hour away, and talk to this kid about what kind of computer to buy.
“Everyone in town goes to this kid,” she went on. “He’s the master, and he’s only fifteen years old.”
All of a sudden I felt chills prickling up my arms. “What’s his name?” I asked. I had an intuition about something. This kid mattered in some way.
“Josh.”
Now I was really suspicious. “Who does he live with?”
“His grandmother. Way up in the woods, kind of hidden away from everyone. She’s a strange duck. She doesn’t let Josh go to school very much. She keeps him home a lot, kind of a homeschooler, but he really is a whiz. I’m telling you. He’ll get you and David completely set up.”
I was cold all over now. My mouth was dry. Josh was the name of the son David’s mother had disappeared with fifteen years ago.
“Do you know what his last name is?” I asked Nancy.
“Wilson, I think.”
It was David’s mother’s maiden name. We had found David’s long-lost son at last. Or the spirits had found him. Someone had found him and brought him back to us. No question about it. Nancy called me back after she’d talked to her boyfriend and Josh. Josh didn’t know his father, and his mother had abandoned him with his grandmother. It was David’s son, all right.
At first David’s mother resisted our attempts to get together, but eventually we wore her down, now that we knew where to find her, and David was reunited with his son at last. It was awkward, particularly for Josh, but slowly we found our way back into a relationship with him. We went to their house. Josh came to ours. I tried to forgive David’s mother, because it was clearly better for him to be reunited with her, even if he was still furious about her betrayal. When she died a few years later of pancreatic cancer, it meant a lot to David to be with her.
If Nancy hadn’t come to me for a reading out of the blue. If David and I hadn’t met her at the Renaissance Faire. If. If. If. Is life filled with synchronicities and coincidences, or are some things destined to happen? What if the girl hadn’t started talking about computers to me and mentioned this boy? What if?
One day, out of nowhere, when Gavin was about six, I flipped on the television and one of those entertainment shows was on (I didn’t even have to change the channel), and they were talking about Jack Wild. Where was he now? asked the host. What had happened to him? I almost laughed out loud. That’s what I wanted to know. The universe was on my side and answering my questions. The moment had come; the stars had aligned. I sat down on the couch to watch the show.
First there was the retrospective of his career. Academy Award–nominated teen actor. Star of a hit sixties TV show. Gradual obscurity and alcoholism. I knew all this, but what I didn’t know was that at last he’d finally gotten sober with the help of evangelical Christianity.
The show had some pictures of him today, and he looked terrible, ravaged by alcohol and cigarettes, his boyish good looks vanished. Still, his brown eyes, dark and soulful, were just as I remembered, and when I looked at him the desire to find him was too overwhelming to resist.
I asked David to find out what Jack was up to, and he began searching the Internet, using the computer Josh had recently given us. “He’s going to be in California next month,” David told me after just a few minutes. “Some kind of Hollywood autograph show.”
“Really? Next month?”
“That’s what it says. At the Beverly Garland Hotel.” He read from the screen: “‘Meet the stars up close and personal in one thrill-filled extravaganza! Guaranteed over one hundred and twenty celebrities in one room, including former child stars, Western heroes, sitcom favorites, pop heartthrobs, talk show hosts … even Academy Award nominees like Jack Wild, the star of Oliver!’”
“I’m going,” I announced.
“Of course you are,” said David supportively. I didn’t have any secrets from David. It wasn’t like I was heading out to California to seduce my childhood heartthrob. I had to meet this guy at long last. For some unknown reason. It was a psychic thing. I’d felt it almost my whole life. David understood that, even if the rest of my family thought I was completely nuts. That’s the thing about David; he may not consult me, but he understands the spiritual life and its whims.
“Are you really going to waste money on this?” said my mother when she heard about my plans.
“I am,” I said. I’d already bought my plane ticket and made a reservation at the hotel. I was going to stay at the same place the conference was being held.
I was trembling with excitement when the cab let me off in front of the Beverly Garland Hotel. I’d left winter in New Jersey far behind. The sun was out; there were palm trees and a pool and a fountain out front splashing water. I headed inside to check in. The conference started the next day, but I wanted time to settle myself and figure out what I was going to wear before I met Jack Wild at last.
A small, rumpled man was checking in ahead of me. He had dropped something out of his wallet and had stooped to pick it up. He had on a leather vest over a T-shirt and was wearing the same ankle-high Doc Martens with the fake crocodile skin that I was also wearing. They’re unusual shoes, so I noticed them right away. Then, all of a sudden, this light went off in my head and I realized that it must be Jack in front of me checking in at the very same moment I was. I felt a connection to him that was beyond anything I had ever felt with anyone in my entire life. There was electricity, but also a deep inner sense of calm. I’d never felt anything like this in any reading I’d ever done. It was psychic energy, only much more powerful. This was a reunion. I knew it.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hi, Jack.”
He whirled around and looked at me. He was scraggly and unshaven. He was no taller than I was.
He dropped something else, picked it up, and smiled at me, clearly a little surprised. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.” It was as if he’d been waiting for me, expecting me.
It was a surreal moment, outside of time. He wasn’t surprised to find a stranger tapping him on his shoulder. He was looking at me as though he recognized me and had been looking forward to seeing me. He knew who I was. I knew who he was.
I didn’t feel any of that nervousness you’d expect to experience meeting someone famous. I didn’t even really think of him as Jack Wild the movie star. No, instead I was flooded with visions of that loving family in London, singing together, the faded roses of the wallpaper. The longing and the love were overwhelming. This was my family. This was my brother. This was my soul mate. I would never in a million years have imagined saying what I said next, but the words just tumbled out.
“Can I have a hug?” I asked.
Jack expressed neither alarm nor even surprise. Without any other words of introduction or explanation, he just opened his arms and welcomed me into an embrace.
Everything fell away. Names. Faces. Places. Time.
I was home.
What I experienced next was an almost instantaneous replay of my past-life regression. A barrage of lifetimes swept before my eyes. The rubble of the Blitz. A Victorian garret. A cave. An army of blue-painted Picts. In every lifetime there was Jack. We were holding each other in the lobby of the Beverly Garland Hotel and I saw lifetime after lifetime flashing before me. It was like falling down a wormhole. I saw myself sitting alone as a little girl in a movie theater watching him. I saw him in his
house, his father yelling at him, his brother yelling at him. I could hardly breathe. We couldn’t let go of each other.
Finally, he pulled away and took my hand. I looked down at our intertwined fingers. His hand was the same size as mine, with the same slender fingers and narrow nails. A delicate hand. “Our hands look alike,” I said, amazed.
I knew I’d known this person for centuries, and that my connection with Jack was older than any I had ever known. We had found each other again. I noticed he had a huge silver cross dangling from around his neck.
Whoa, I thought, for the first time a little taken aback. This is a major holiness situation. This symbol of conventional religion was the only thing that worried me about him. Maybe he wouldn’t like that I was a psychic.
“So,” he said at last. “Do you want to go and have coffee?”
We hadn’t known each other for five minutes and already we had the easy familiarity of old friends.
Still, I could barely breathe. “Let me just put my stuff in my room,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
The moment I walked away from Jack, I felt bubbly with hysteria. This was so strange. It was too weird. It was insane. It wasn’t happening, only it was. I had thought I’d meet him in some big function room and ask for his autograph. Maybe I’d get a photo of the two of us together. Maybe I’d have the courage to tell him some of my intuitions about our connection. I had no idea that we’d fall into each other’s arms and he would seem to feel as powerfully about me as I did about him.
Quickly I checked in, raced up to my room in the elevator, and once the door was shut freaked out a little more. Okay, I admit it, I had a full-blown panic attack. I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t sit still. Was this real? Was this crazy? It felt like the weirdest thing that had ever happened in my admittedly very weird life. I’d never felt a soul connection like this. Never. With anybody.
I decided I needed to fix my hair. I forgot to mention that I change my hair color a lot. It’s one of the things I do when I need to calm down, and I’d brought some dyes with me. I don’t know why I decided at that moment that it needed to be orange, but I did. I also decided I needed to cut it. But I only had manicure scissors in my bag. Still, I began clipping away. Halfway through my hatchet job I realized I looked very strange and decided I could only fix it with real scissors. I decided to run down to the lobby and see if they had any at the front desk. They did, and I dashed back to the elevator. But when the door opened, Jack was standing there astounded. My long brown hair was gone. It was now orange and spiked. And I was holding a giant pair of cutting shears in my hands like a weapon.
“You’re a sad girl, aren’t you?” He laughed with his Cockney accent. “C’mon, let’s go for a drive.”
Jack had a rental, a little Toyota that he steered like a madman, puffing on one cigarette after another as we zoomed around Rodeo Drive. He could barely see—because he was diabetic, he told me, from all the booze. He was blaring the Bee Gees from the cassette player. They’d done the sound track for a long-ago film he’d been in with Mark Lester. I’d loved it; it was a movie about British schoolboys.
“I have this memory of you filming it,” I told him.
“How’s that?”
“I know stuff about your life.”
“Everyone does with celebrities.”
“No,” I explained. “It’s different. I know things no one else knows. It was terrible how you heard about your mother’s passing. You shouldn’t have heard that way.”
“What do you mean?” he asked sharply.
“You were in London in a play and you were just about to go onstage when someone appeared in the wings and told you. Right?”
“Yeah…” he said hesitantly, “That’s what happened.”
“I’m a psychic,” I explained. “And all my life I’ve been seeing your life.” I described the ramshackle building where he’d studied improvisation as a young teenager. I told him about his brother’s jealousies, about his father’s cruelties. I told him things no one could have known about the sets he’d been on, about how frightened he had been of the dog in Oliver!, about how he used to visit Houdini’s house to look for ghosts when he was living in Hollywood for his TV show.
“Who are you?” he asked. He lit another cigarette and I pulled it out of his mouth.
“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.
He laughed and grabbed another. “I’ve almost died three times,” he told me. “And the last time I saw the white light and Jesus waiting for me, the whole thing. But I kept coming back. I’ve wondered why. One day I woke up and said out loud, ‘Dear God, please, if I’m meant to survive, make me stop drinking.’ I’ve never taken a drink since.”
“If you smoke, I’m going to smoke, too,” I decided. I hated cigarettes, but I wanted to get his attention. I could tell he was killing himself, and I could see he was going to be dead soon. I knew it the way I knew these kinds of things.
But I didn’t tell him that. And I didn’t offer to read his cards, even though I’d brought them for just that purpose. I knew what they’d say. They’d say that he didn’t have long to live.
We talked and talked that night as we drove up and down the avenues.
I don’t think he was entirely human. Some people aren’t. I’m not, that’s for sure. Some of us are part fairy and Jack certainly was. He was one of the oldest souls I’ve ever met, but old souls don’t always prosper in the modern world.
When he’d been the star of H.R. Pufnstuf, they’d had a big puppet in it that wore what looked like a marijuana leaf on its head. But Jack hadn’t known that at the time. He told me he’d never really been into drugs, only booze. He told me even if he hadn’t been a child star he’d still have been an alcoholic. “It’s the way I’m made,” he said.
We discovered that many times we’d been just a few blocks from each other. Once he’d stayed a few minutes from my house in New Jersey, and we had been within walking distance of each other during that strange hurricane in London. He, too, remembered how strangely red the sky had been that night. He told me about the tree crashing down in his yard and how he prayed.
He told me a lot of stories about his movies. He’d had a bit part in Kevin Costner’s film Prince of Thieves a few years back and had hated it. “They got Robin Hood all wrong,” he said, lighting another cigarette.
With his nicotine-stained fingers, his black hair and brown eyes, he reminded me at that moment of my real father. “My father knew all about Robin Hood,” I said, and went on to explain how he used to dress up and frolic through Sherwood Forest.
“I’d like to meet that bloke,” Jack said when I was done. “Sounds like my sort.”
We ended up back at the hotel and sat in front of the fire for a long time. He asked about Gavin, and I showed him the picture of him I always carried.
Jack took it from me and was visibly startled. “What? Did we have a kid together? He looks just like me!”
I hadn’t noticed it before, but it was true. The same brown eyes, the same hair, the same expression on his face, even. I couldn’t fathom what the cosmic joke might be. He showed me a photo of his dog, but he didn’t mention the girlfriend I knew he had.
“Who are you anyway?” asked Jack just before we parted at the elevators.
“I’m your little sister,” I joked, remembering my past-life session. I hadn’t told him yet about those memories.
Jack nodded. “That feels right,” he said to me. “Okay, good night, little sis.”
The next morning we had breakfast together, and Jack asked if I could help him out during the show. His assistant had come down with the flu and couldn’t show up.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
“You know, help me collect the money for autographs, that kind of thing.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”
The show, which was in the ballroom of the hotel, was really a collection of losers. All the has-beens and might-have-beens and one-hit wonders we
re sitting in front of tables heaped high with glossy photographs they were hoping to autograph and sell. It was a pretty pathetic group, and I’m including Jack among them. Cory Feldman, Gary Busey, James Darren, the guy who played the Incredible Hulk, Linda Blair. Jack was glad his table wasn’t near hers, because he said The Exorcist had freaked him out for weeks. I went over to her and said, “Hi,” though. I knew she was a big animal rights activist. There were a lot of minor Star Trek actors and a midget who’d been one of the original Lollipop Guild Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. He was about a hundred years old and still going strong.
The thing is, we’re all has-beens and might-have-been and could-have-beens. We’ve all been someone else, so many times.
While Jack and I were getting set up, this man who’d been a star in the sixties when he was a kid came over to talk to Jack. He was feeling overly sentimental and already weeping about the abuse he’d suffered on the set when he was little. He was sobbing about how he’d been drugged and beaten. He wanted to compare notes with Jack, but Jack just sort of laughed. “Yeah, but look, mate,” he said to the guy. “Look at where you are now! Isn’t it great?” Jack winked at me. There were clearly losers even among this group of losers.
By now a lot of people were filling up the banquet room, mostly middle-aged woman but men, too, and even some people in their twenties. Jack was surprisingly popular. There were a lot of Oliver! fans and people who had grown up watching H.R. Pufnstuf. The only problem was that Jack had forgotten to bring enough glossies to sell. Luckily, I’d brought a lot of old movie stills and lobby posters for him to sign, and I gave these to him, which seemed fair since he was buying all my meals. The books he’d written hadn’t turned up either, but somehow I managed to get on the phone and track them down for him and get them delivered. But I didn’t ask for one myself. Jack was surrounded by these weird fans and I really didn’t want to seem like one of them. I wasn’t one of them. I was something else.