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.