A Son Of The Circus (60 page)

Writing a script under such pressure was a process Danny Mills referred to as ‘ball-busting,’ which had long been a favorite expression of Gordon Hathaway’s. As Martin Mills lay awake in his cubicle at St Ignatius, the new missionary couldn’t stop himself from remembering these houses belonging to strangers, who were always people in a position of power over his feckless father.

There’d been the house belonging to a director in Beverly Hills; it was on Franklin Canyon Drive, and Danny lost the privilege of living there because the driveway was so steep – that was how Danny put it. What happened was, he came home drunk; he left the director’s car in neutral (with the brake off) and the garage door open, and the car rolled over a grapefruit tree and into the swimming pool. This wouldn’t have been so damaging had Vera not been having an affair with the director’s maid, who the next morning dove naked into the swimming pool and broke her jaw and collarbone against the submerged windshield of the car. This happened while Danny was calling the police to report that the car had been stolen. Naturally, the maid sued the director for having a car in his pool. The movie that Danny was writing at the time was never produced, which was not an infrequent conclusion to Danny busting his balls.

Martin Mills had liked that house, if not that maid. In retrospect, Martin regretted that his mother’s sexual preference for young women had been passing; her appetite for young men was messier. As for Martin’s particular bedroom in the house on Franklin Canyon Drive, it had seemed nicer than the rest. It was a corner room with enough natural ventilation that he could sleep without the air conditioner; that was why he’d heard the car sinking into the swimming pool — first the splash, then all the bubbles. But he’d not gotten out of bed to look because he assumed it was his drunken father; by the sound, Martin suspected that Danny was cavorting with about a dozen drunken men – they were belching and farting underwater, he deduced. He had no idea a
car
had been involved.

In the morning, up early (as always), Martin had been only mildly surprised to see the car resting on the bottom of the deep end. Slowly it occurred to him that his father might be trapped inside. Martin was naked and crying when he ran downstairs to the swimming pool, where he found the naked maid; she was drowning under the diving board. Martin would never be credited with rescuing her. He picked up the long pole with the net on one end, which was used for skimming frogs and salamanders out of the water, and he extended this to the brown, feral-looking little woman of Mexican descent, but she couldn’t speak (because her jaw was broken) and she couldn’t lift herself out of the pool (because her collarbone was broken, too). She held fast to the pole while Martin towed her to the pool curb, and there she clung; she looked beseechingly at Martin Mills, who covered his genitals with his hands. From the depths of the pool, the sunken car emitted another bubble.

That was when Martin’s mother exited the maid’s bungalow, which was next to the shed for pool toys. Wrapped in a towel, Vera saw Martin standing naked by the deep end, but she failed to see her floundering lover of the night before.

‘Martin, you know what I think of skinny-dipping,’ Vera told the boy. ‘Go put on your trunks before Maria sees you.’ Maria, of course, was also skinny-dipping.

As for putting on his clothes, that was the moment when Martin Mills identified one of his dislikes for his repeated use of someone else’s bedroom;
their
clothes were in the drawers – at best, the bottommost drawers had been emptied for Martin – and
their
clothes hung lifelessly but prepossessingly in the closets. Their old toys filled up a chest; their baby pictures were on
the
walls. Sometimes their tennis trophies or horse-riding ribbons were displayed. Often there were shrines to their first dogs or cats, apparently deceased; this could be discerned by the presence of a glass jar that contained a dog’s toenail or a tuft from a cat’s tail. And when Martin would carry his little triumphs ‘home’ from school – his ‘A’ papers and other evidence of his accelerated education – he wasn’t allowed to display these on
their
walls.

Then, in Los Angeles, there’d been an actor’s virtually unlived-in house on South Lorraine – a huge, grandly conceived mansion with many small, musty bedrooms all boasting blurry, enlarged photographs of unknown children of a conspicuously similar age. It seemed to Martin that the children who grew up there had died when they were six or eight, or that they’d uniformly become uninteresting subjects for photography upon reaching this approximate age; but there had simply been a divorce. In the house, time had stopped – Martin had hated it there – and Danny had at last outworn his welcome by falling asleep while smoking on the couch in front of the TV. The smoke alarm woke him, but he was drunk; he called the police instead of the fire department, and by the time that confusion was sorted out, the entire living room was consumed in flames. Danny took Martin to the pool, where he paddled about on an inflated raft in the form of Donald Duck – another relic of the permanently six– and eight-year-old children.

Danny waded back and forth in the shallow end of the pool, although he wore long trousers and a wrinkled dress shirt instead of a bathing suit, and he held the pages of his screenplay-in-progress against his chest; clearly, he didn’t want the pages to get wet. Together, father and son watched the firefighters subduing the disaster.

The actor,
who was
almost famous and whose living room was ruined, came home much later – after the fire was out and the firemen had left. Danny and Martin Mills were still playing in the swimming pool.

‘Let’s wait up for Mommy, so you can tell her all about the fire,’ Danny had suggested.

‘Where’s Mommy?’ Martin had asked.

‘Out,’ Danny had replied. She was ‘out’ with the actor. When Vera and the actor returned together, I Martin imagined that his father was slightly pleased with the smoldering wreck he’d made of the living room. The screenplay wasn’t going too well; it was to be an opportunity for the actor to do something ‘timely’ – it was a story about a younger man with an older woman … ‘something bittersweet,’ the actor had suggested. Vera was hoping for the role of the older woman. But that screenplay was never made into a movie, either. Martin Mills was not
sorry
to leave those permanently six– and eight-year-old children on South Lorraine.

In his stark cubicle at St Ignatius in Mazagaon, the missionary was now looking for his copy of the
Pocket Catholic Catechism;
he hoped that these essentials of his faith might rescue him from reliving every bedroom he’d ever slept in in California. But he couldn’t find the reassuring little paperback; he presumed he’d left it on Dr Daruwalla’s glass-topped table – in fact, he had. Dr Daruwalla had already put it to use. Farrokh had read up on Extreme Unction, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, for this fit rather neatly into the new screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin; he’d also skimmed a passage about the crucifixion – he thought that he might make some sly use of it. The doctor was feeling mischievous, and the earlier hours of the evening had seemed interminable to him because nothing mattered to him as much as beginning this suddenly important piece of writing. Had Martin Mills known that Dr Daruwalla was about to re-create him as a character in a romantic comedy, the unfortunate missionary might have welcomed the distraction of remembering his itinerant childhood in Los Angeles.

There’d been another L.A. house, on Kings Road, and Martin had cautiously loved that one; it had a fish pond, and the producer-owner kept rare birds, which were unfortunately Danny’s responsibility while he lived and wrote there. On the very first day, Martin had observed that the house had no screens. The rare birds weren’t caged; they were chained to their perches. One evening, during a dinner party, a hawk flew inside the house – and then another hawk flew inside – and to the considerable alarm of the assembled dinner guests, the rare birds fell victims to these visiting birds of prey. While the rare birds were shrieking and dying, Danny was so drunk that he insisted on finishing his version of how he was evicted from his favorite beach-view duplex in Venice. It was a story that never failed to bring tears to Martin’s eyes, because it concerned the death of his only dog. Meanwhile, the hawks swooped and killed; and the dinner guests – at first, just the women – put their heads under the dining-room table. Danny kept telling the story.

It had not yet occurred to young Martin that the declining fortunes of his father’s screenwriting career would occasionally result in low-rent housing. Although this was a step down from freeloading in the generally well-to-do homes of directors and producers and almost-famous actors, the cheap rentals were at least free of other people’s clothes and toys; in this sense, these rentals seemed a step
up
to Martin Mills. But not Venice. It had also not occurred to young Martin that Danny and Vera were simply waiting for their son to be old enough to send away to school. They presumed this would spare the child the continuing embarrassment of his parents’ lives – their virtually separate existences, even within the confines of the same residence, their coping with Vera’s affairs and with Danny’s drinking. But Venice was too low-rent for Vera; she chose to spend the time in New York, while Danny was pounding the keys of a portable typewriter and dangerously driving Martin to and from Loyola Marymount. In Venice, they’d shared the ground-floor half of a shocking-pink duplex on the beach.

‘It was the best place we ever lived, because it was so fucking real!’ Danny explained to his cowering dinner guests. ‘Isn’t that right, Marty?’ But young Martin was silent; he was noticing the death agonies of a mynah — the bird was succumbing to a hawk, very near where the uneaten hors d’oeuvres still occupied a coffee table in the living room.

In truth, Martin thought, Venice had seemed rather unreal to him. There were drugged hippies on South Venice Boulevard; Martin Mills was terrified of such an environment, but Danny touched and surprised him by giving him a dog for a pre-Christmas present. It was a beagle-sized mongrel from the pound – ‘Saved from death!’ Danny said. He named it ‘Whiskey,’ because of its color and in spite of Martin’s protests. This must have condemned the dog, to name it after booze.

Whiskey slept with Martin, and Martin was allowed to put his own things on the ocean-damp walls. When he came ‘home’ from school, he waited until the lifeguards were off-duty before he took Whiskey walking on the beach, where for the first time he imagined he was the envy of those children who can always be found in public playgrounds – in this case, those children who stood in line to use the slide on Venice Beach. Surely they would have liked a dog of their own to walk on the sand.

For Christmas, Vera visited — albeit briefly. She refused to stay in Venice. She claimed a suite of rooms at a plain but clean hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica; there she ate a Christmas breakfast with Martin – the first of many lonely meals he would remember with his mother, whose principal measure of luxury was drawn from her qualified praise of room service. Veronica Rose repeatedly said that she would be happier living on reliable room service than in a house of her own — throw the towels on the floor, leave the dishes on the bed, that kind of thing. She gave young Martin a dog collar for Christmas, which profoundly moved him because he could remember no other instance of apparent collaboration between his mother and father; in this isolated case, Danny must have communicated with Vera – at least enough for Vera to know that Danny had given the boy a dog.

But on New Year’s Eve, a roller skater (who lived in the turquoise duplex next door) fed the dog a big plate of marijuana lasagna. When Danny and Martin took Whiskey out for a walk after midnight, the stoned runt attacked a weight lifter’s Rottweiler; Whiskey was killed by the first snap and shake.

The Rottweiler’s owner was a contrite sort of muscle man wearing a tank top and a pair of gym shorts; Danny fetched a shovel, and the apologetic weight lifter dug an enormous grave in the vicinity of the children’s slide. No one was permitted to bury a dead dog on Venice Beach; some civic-minded observer called the police. Martin was awakened by two cops very early on New Year’s morning, when Danny was too hungover to assist him and there was no weight lifter available to help him dig the dead dog up. When Martin had finished stuffing Whiskey in a trash bag, one of the cops put the body in the trunk of the police car and the other cop, at the moment he handed Martin his fine, asked the boy where he went to school.

‘I’m part of an accelerated educational program at Loyola Marymount,’ Martin Mills explained to the cop.

Not even this distinction would prevent the landlord from evicting Danny and Martin shortly thereafter, out of fear of further trouble with the police. By the time they left, Martin Mills had changed his mind about the place. Almost every day, he’d seen the weight lifter with his murderous Rottweiler; and – either entering or leaving the turquoise duplex next door — the roller skater with a fondness for marijuana lasagna was a daily presence, too. Once again, Martin wasn’t sorry to go.

It was Danny who mindlessly loved the story. In the producer’s house on Kings Road, Danny seemed to prolong the telling of the tale, almost as if the ongoing bird deaths were an enhancement to the suddenness of poor Whiskey’s demise. ‘What a great fucking neighborhood that was!’ Danny was shouting to his dinner guests. By now, all the men had put their heads under the table with the women. Both sexes were fearful that the swooping hawks would mistake them for rare birds.

‘Daddy, there are
hawks
in the house!’ Martin had cried. ‘Daddy–the birds!’

‘This is Hollywood, Marty,’ Danny Mills had replied. ‘Don’t worry about the birds – the birds don’t matter. This is Hollywood. The
story
is all that matters.’

That screenplay wasn’t made into a movie, either; this was almost a refrain for Danny Mills. The bill for the rare, dead birds would reintroduce the Millses to more low-rent housing.