Here’s what happened when lanky Leif, eight months older than Clea and I, and more than a little stoned, stumbled into that borrowed love nest one warm Santa Ana — scoured night. He brought a bottle of scotch and that high-pitched, infectious laugh that would have sounded silly coming from the throat of anyone else. Startled by the intrusive bright light of the hall, Clea and I, fashionably mussed, awkwardly disengaged. Closing the door behind him, Leif passed us the amber bottle. I swigged first — it took all the macho I could muster not to vomit — then handed it off to Clea, whose face wore a rosy, newborn look on account of our aborted petting session. (At the time, I wondered why she was so introverted though now the Family Ties syndrome seems obvious: knowing she couldn’t outwild her mother, she instinctively went the other way. That was probably what attracted me — had she been crazy like Roos, it would have been too much to handle.) Before I knew it, Leif was kissing her and somehow that was all right, though it didn’t exactly feel all right… more like some casual rehearsal for future heartbreak and generic grief. Yet because I loved Leif in a way as much as I did Clea, I was forced to let it go. I knew she must have loved him too, perhaps even more for the sheer boldness I was incapable of. I’ll admit at the time the subtleties were lost upon me; my immediate concerns were more primitive. I hoped and prayed the night wouldn’t end with the two of them going “steadily”—these tide turnings weren’t all that uncommon and in such cases, the prescient student body already knew of the cuckold’s infamy when he arrived at school the next morning, head hung low. Nothing to do but wear one’s scarlet letter jacket and get on with it.
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.