The Chrysanthemum Palace

by Bruce Wagner

  At that age, friends come and go in superheated fashion. After the kiss, for reasons both simple and complex, Leif and I managed not to lay eyes on each other for almost a few months. In the end, we were friendly, though never like before. One could say we fell out over betrayal as much as embarrassment (it was almost as if Leif and I were the ones who’d kissed) but I think the estrangement was mostly the growing pains rhythm of how things go—or went. Anyway, Leif had lots of tribes, a whole clique on the other side of Wilshire who I’d never met and I was absolutely certain were as possessive of him as the richies. Looking back, it’s probably better that fate conspired to separate us before he died a year later in an accident on PCH. (Losing a friend on that highway was a Westside rite of passage.) I can’t remember who told me or where I was when I heard, and never learned the exact how of it. I avoided such knowledge—he may or may not have been in a VW van, he may or may not have been on a motorcycle, he may or may not have been on the back of a chopper or hitching or even dashing across the highway with a surfboard to the beach.

  At that age, fatal details are never important.

  A short time after he died, another loss occurred that didn’t have the same impact but haunted me into adulthood nonetheless.

  The death of Roos Chandler was announced in the media as “an adverse reaction to prescription drugs.” Loyal to Clea and in my own naïveté, I was a wholehearted believer. Soon, whispers at school became cruel chatter, exposing the official version as one of those lies to be forever scribbled on and defaced, tagged, retagged and erased, sandblasted, whitewashed then painted over in a thousand hues of confederacy and martyrdom, before the cycle of slanderous graffiti reshuffled and relooped its mordant canticle. Being public property, Clea’s mother’s exorbitantly tumultuous life was long since archived in preparation for the entombment of popular myth—prefab obits had been updated, polished, and honed in clinical anticipation; once the offering of that ruined, voluptuous body’s bleached bones were borne aloft by the collective unconscious, their passage lit by the eternal flame of tabloid tiki torches, her remains made their more worldly exit upon the ample, profiteering shoulders of agents, false friends, gossipmongers, and trademark attorneys who passed for pallbearers.

  This is how I wound up being haunted: Soon after the announcement of Roos Chandler’s death, I performed a vanishing act of my own, and it was twenty-five years before I spoke to my own flickering old flame. The news mortified me to my core and I’d run for my very life—as if death had leaped the fence like a brush fire, threatening to transform me into the gnarled, nubby-fingered girl who’d been caught in the Roxbury conflagration and returned to the flock a blackened sheep in head scarves. It wasn’t long before I assiduously avoided my poor, dear, bedraggled Clea, so as not to catch what she had. At least she had the elegance not to press me on the matter, though maybe native fragilities bade her shrink from confrontation. (I wouldn’t have been easy to find.)

  As I one day would learn, her own haunts took precedence over mine.

  It’s funny what draws us to people; funny we don’t often see the design of it. Sons dramatically rebel against fathers in order to expunge debts owed to the one who sheltered though did not nurture—it’s hard to forge an identity while paying the metaphorical rent, even harder when that patriarch is wealthy and power-driven. But who’s to say? I divorced Dad but it still wasn’t enough. I knew his weaknesses, and delighted in giving the knife a further turn.

  Perry Krohn wrote short stories in college, immodestly considering himself a cross between Camus and Philip K. Dick (this, according to Mother, whose name, I should already have told you, is Gita), one of which, “Starry Night,” became the basis for a TV pilot that evolved into the sacred cash cow Starwatch: The Navigators. He grew wealthy beyond imagining yet in his darkest hours considered himself a failure and a hack. In moments of self-doubt, the money helped to assuage—as did the extramarital affairs, the weekly bridge game at the Friar’s (stag), the Saturday afternoon pickup games with The Simpsons gang on his private basketball court, the clarinet playing in a klezmer band—a fixture on Thursday nights à la Woody Allen at Chickpea, the restaurant he owned in West Hollywood—as did the Krohn Family Foundation, established to put inner-city kids through med school in exchange for their agreement upon graduation to spread the gospel of AIDS prevention in Third World countries, as did the collection of watercolors by D. H. Lawrence and William Blake, the fifty or so dioramas of Joseph Cornell, the eight Renoirs, the four Degas and five Courbets, the Schnabels, Hirsts, Barneys, Rodins, Ruschas, and eighty-ton Serra in the front—yes, front—yard . . . as did the fifteen nonconsecutive pages of van Gogh’s diary extracts, as did the so on and the so forth, each acquisition or cultural conquest acting as bulwark against the flood of Father’s shamefully mediocre talents, which is how he perceived them in his privately aggrieved heart: an actual menace to Art. Yet, as if to quixotically inoculate himself against a disease he was already dying of, our stubborn, stalwart Dr. Jekyll continued to collect sculptures, paintings, people, and nonprofits like they were the families of Jews to be saved from Mr. Hyde’s schlockmeister Holocaust hands, hiding them (from himself) behind secret bookcases from a crassly commercial, ratings-driven, compromised world, like blue shadows in a bejeweled underground subway, far away from the Gestapo eyes of revenue-streaming Starwatch storm troopers. To this day, my father remains a curious mixture of lowbrow and aesthete.

  Knowing these things were a hedge he’d made against the one magnificently wrong, winning bet of his life—Starwatch: The Navigators—and knowing too I could never, by conscience or proclivity, safely tread water anywhere near the great, churning engines of that lucrative enterprise, I resolved to torment the man by becoming a sunken treasure myself, or at least aspiring to embody one of those elusive objets he always won at auction yet could never truly possess. After a year at Oxford, I transferred to Berkeley and formed a theater troupe. We did Artaud in the nude and put up a controversial all-white production of A Raisin in the Sun. In my third term, I wrote a one-act, raffishly presenting it as a bona fide, newfound Beckett; after ten performances, French lawyers bade us cease and desist. Perry flew up in his Bombardier on opening night, sitting in back of the cold warehouse space with smiling, covetous eyes. I still held parentage against him, hypocritically spurning his attempts to give me cash while accepting it from Gita on the sly.

  I grew tired of the revolutionary life and decided to make my name as an actor in the movies. I quit the university and resettled in Venice. While fervently contemplating writing, directing, and starring in a film to be funded by my platinum Amex, I freelanced for a matchmaker (cupidsarrow.com) during the boom then apprenticed at a CGI house during the bust. I got a part on The Days of Our Lives, smugly resisting the call of little theater. I went to the right parties and clubs, becoming friendly with young, wild-assed agents and unshaven, supersmart promoters, nascent Brent Bolthouses. Somehow I met John Cusack and the director Miguel Arteta and took small roles in a couple of their films. I drank too much and ate too many pills, matriculating through the Twelve Steps—I drew the line at cold turkeying Wellbutrin, convinced it was helping me kick cigarettes—with the usual results: crushing depression and mood swings, white-knuckled sobriety, fruitless industry networking at Double A meetings with attendant amorous liaisons dangereuses. I landed a few more gigs before abandoning cinema for TV, even though I considered it Dad’s turf, my crossover smacking of capitulation and loserdom.

  Perry and I grew closer, but it was more his cancer scare than any mellowing of ambition on my part that affected our rapprochement. (I remembered the lesson of Roos Chandler and just didn’t have it in me to run.) I saw up close and personal how excreting into a bag for a few months had a way of breaking a man and it broke me a little too. To my surprise, I actually began to consider working on Dad’s show—as writer, actor, whatever. My therapist and even my friends saw the impulse as a sign of newfound health and maturity. I fought halfheartedly
against my own idea until one morning I looked in the mirror and said, Get over yourself. It was the new year after September 11 and the world no longer felt like a sure thing; the time was nigh, it seemed, to exercise squatter’s rights on a few, potentially very green Starwatch acres. Maybe in a subliminal way I was beginning to nest—terrible term!—anyhow, that’s what the shrink said. Get a job, meet a girl, buy a house (and a Chinese kid if the reproductive organs weren’t up to speed). Get a life, like everyone else.

  Nest or no nest, in the back of my head, or maybe the front, were the first rumblings of the dream to create a classy show for cable. I didn’t need more therapy to reveal an essential truth: I was too old to be kicking against pricks, be they paternal or self-generated. Still, I thought of myself as a tough customer, an independent thinker, a free spirit. Gita indulged me in my prideful little protests—I won’t be another asshole driving his BMW on and off the lot, I’d say, not me. During cozy tête-à-têtes, Mother would bolster, “Just do what you want, Bertie. Whatever decision you come to will be the right one.” She was so convincing I believed her every time. She was my “stick man,” or whatever they call the guy in the boxer’s corner who stops the bleeding between rounds, only in this case, the opponent was Me. Mom’s art was in making me think I had a choice: that pauper or prince would be OK—with her, and whichever God that ruled. The truth was that she loved me so much, none of it mattered so long as I was safe, moderately comfortable and close by. (The thing she hated most was the idea of my moving away again.) Gita knew what was best, for both of us, and that I needed to be protected against my own bullheadedness. She knew I needed the security and self-worth a regular job would provide, something, say, in the family business. I fought it all the way, articulate and convincing in my arguments—at the onset of middle age, one still has the vigor to put an aggressive spin on defeat—while sweet Judas goat Mom led me to luxurious slaughter. I will never hold it against her.

  So I huddled with the old man to lay it all out, and he couldn’t have been happier. Convened with the show runners and they couldn’t have been happier. Cruised with the casting folks and they couldn’t have been happier . . . and Gita, who not so secretly had savored the years of heartburn I’d provided her husband, was, in the end, undisguisedly thrilled. I was welcomed to the fold—street-legal—now eligible for the backstage pass and all that went with it. Life was good. Life was shit. I was even allowed input as to what role I’d play on that ridiculous-looking floating Emerald City, the USS Demeter. I requested a non-prosthetic look (the makeup people couldn’t have been happier) and some genius staffer came up with the idea of my playing a randy, all-American pilot on the good starship lollipop, a throwback goof on Top Gun. In just six weeks’ time, I was hanging on the bridge with the legendary captain (who’d renegotiated his fee in a recent PR dustup) and his band of merry men. I fell into episodic rhythm like I was born to it, which I guess I was. I wiled away off-camera time writing treatments in my trailer with the sensual torpor of a geisha having her feet soaked—writing and producing an epic, auteur/non-dumbshit series was where it was at. I would use my time creatively, and get paid for it too. Oh, I was clever! I’d write my ass off, until I could get my HBO shot. In training for the big leagues.

  Sorry for the digression.

  I was talking about how often we’re blind to the design of what draws us to others. It’s a constant shock how early one’s patterns are set, and one’s proclivities too. In hindsight, it’s easy to see the pull Clea exerted because, like me, she labored under the Promethean shadow of a parent whom she could never hope to outshine. (When we were kids, Starwatch was in the first few seasons of its astonishingly popular launch—so that in my proscribed world, Roos and Perry were on equal footing.) Our alliance was custom-made; like deaf children, or hearing children of the deaf, we were fluent in a shorthand that required no words. Classmates were mere embryos compared to our fully formed identities as The Children Of, and while we instinctively knew such status put us at a terrifying disadvantage in the long term, at that early age our social position was a boon, for along with blessed birthright came the aura and honors conferred upon any regal offspring. As said, we seemed darkly, precociously in possession of the secret knowledge that, like hemophiliacs, we would eventually pay an awful price, yet felt ourselves to be in a celestial grace period, a state of constant holiday. All children are attention junkies and we were titillated to be the recipients of the seigneurial perks incidental to our position: the crude currying of favor among peers, the indirect adulation of the latters’ parents, even the covert acknowledgment by schoolteachers of our prominent placement in the local, generally overprominent constellatory array. We were the brightest stars that hung by the honeymoon of those halcyon years.

  In such a lunar light, the chasm that I dug between myself and Clea upon her mother’s death can now be seen as an all-the-more-ruthless act: I had committed the paramount sin of abandoning my own kind. As blue bloods, slightly inbred, we could only flourish in the absence of adversity—how could it have been otherwise? We had always enjoyed divine protection, and there was nothing in the rule book about those (parental) gods succumbing to Death.

  I remembered, because at the time, I’d frantically—and futilely—scanned the index.

  I didn’t see her until my thirty-seventh year, when we ran into each other at an AA meeting in a Brentwood church. (Clea used to say they should just drop the A and call it Alcoholics—“There is no real anonymity.”) She had three months of sobriety and didn’t look well.

  Ten years ago, around the time I returned from the Bay Area and moved to Venice, Clea began making a name for herself as an actress. Her career hadn’t taken off but she’d done respectable work in small, respectable films, even winning an award at a prestigious festival in Berlin. For a while there were pictures of her in magazines—the lighting always seemed to emphasize the luminous bone structure and hooded eyes inherited from her mom—hobnobbing with pals, other groovy sons and daughters of icons, like Natasha Gregson Wagner or Charlie Sheen. I read all the interviews and saw all the movies (they screened mostly at the Sunset 5), following Clea’s career with a kindly stalker’s eye. She was good, sometimes very good. In a few films, she wasn’t fully dressed. All right, I’ll admit there was something slightly morbid about my attentions; maybe that’s not the right word. I flirted with the idea of contacting her but never did. I think—no, I’m certain—I was putting off a reunion until I had a degree of success to call my own. I wanted some measure of achievement before we broke bread or wine or heroin or whatever it was she wanted to break. I was actually quite amazed this almost pathologically shy girl not only chose to become an actress but had made real headway. I was also reminded—as if by the whisper of our old shorthand—that kids like us were genetically programmed to fly straight into the flames of their flamboyant heritage. Call it one of our fatal, masochistic charms.

  Her career blipped along a few years before dropping off the showbiz radar. There were bitchy murmurs of drug intake—the town had a great sense of rumor—and the usual gossipy, unimaginative “like mother, like daughter” psychologizing overheard at clubs, screenings, and premiere parties. I can remember Clea’s unfocused face staring from the cover of a newsstand tabloid, feeling all noble about declining to make purchase (I leafed through instead). A few more mentions in the press—random, unjazzy catalogues of a tailspin, because by then she didn’t even rate the front page—before relegation to obscurity. I went through a big Howard Stern phase and for a long time part of me listened with perverse dread for the inevitable sado-dissection riff. Thankfully, it never came.

  When I saw her at the church on San Vicente, Clea’s smile, lovely and bright, erased all the years—suddenly, we were twelve again. We sat beside one another and stood for the closing prayer, holding hands. After the meeting, overcome, I walked her to the courtyard and breathlessly made amends, confessing my shame and embarrassment over how I’d handled Roosevelt Chandler’s de
ath (as if that childish faux pas had been the great traumatizing event of Clea’s life, surpassing even the loss of her mother). But she had no recollection of my cowardice or how I’d fled, even going so far as to say I had always been her port in the storm. “The best boyfriend I ever had—the best” was how she put it, with the sweetest, slinkiest wink. Upon absolution, I experienced the proverbial weight literally lift from my shoulders. With boundless affection and enormous gratitude, I tearfully asked her to dinner. Her eyes crinkled up and she hugged me, saying how sweet I was. Then, saucily: “No more confessions.”

  We went for sushi across from Dutton’s. She’d been favoring her right arm—it relaxed in a silken makeshift sling—and midway through the meal I inquired what happened. She said that the last time she “used,” she’d nodded out and fallen asleep on it, sustaining nerve damage. I’d heard of that sort of thing happening to addicts but it was a keen shock it had befallen my precious Clea. She said a doctor weaned her off the heroin with pills and she was doing “tons” of acupuncture and physical therapy. Yoga was also a help and she’d recovered “about 70 percent range of motion.” When I asked where she was living, Clea said excitedly, “An amazing motel in Beverly Hills.” I told her I knew the place, over on Reeves (“Bertie,” she interjected, “I so want to write a reality show about the people who live there!”)—I remembered it from rare incursions to Leif Farragon’s south-of-Wilshire turf on my silver, high-handled ten-speed. As she spoke, I cruelly surveyed the parched plains of skin, flaky and blemished, and plumbed Clea’s half-dead eyes. Eyes that jauntily seduced, working overtime to camouflage the damage done through the years gone by.