I actually had the cab drop me off on Third Avenue, half a block from the condo, and I floated into Kiehl’s to buy Mike a particular type of shampoo I remembered he kept in my apartment. Over the store’s speakers Elton John was singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” and the song followed me back out onto Third Avenue. It had been a song my father had liked, and one night while we were driving through Westwood during the summer of 1976 when I was twelve he had even asked me who sang it, and when I told him he turned the volume up, and the fact that he liked the song made me grateful. Outside Kiehl’s I ran into a college classmate who had moved to Manhattan the same year I had and had just gone through his second divorce. (This wife had left him for someone on the Mets, and I vaguely remembered reading about it.) He was tan and had gray in his hair—which I immediately noticed, and I was suddenly ashamed of the coloring I’d had done to mine the day before in the Avon Center in Trump Tower. He had read about the disappearance of my son (actually taking hold of my hand as he told me how deeply sorry he was, a man I barely knew) and commented wryly about my breakup with Jayne (“Marriage is about love, and divorce is about money”), and when I answered certain questions he observed that I was speaking too slowly. I made vain gestures with my hands, trying to explain things. He had been through rehab recently, and as we compared notes I could tell—as he hurriedly walked away—that he knew I was high. His last words were “Well, maybe next time?” I walked across the street to a deli on the corner, where I bought a Post since I was now reading my (and Robby’s) horoscope daily (follow the tea leaves, avoid tragedy, ignore pentagrams, guess the hint, reconcile the future, the possible blazing, sleeper awake). And as I shuffled slowly back to the condo, I stopped in the middle of the block and turned around. Someone had been singing softly behind me, but no one was there. The song was so familiar that I shuddered. It wasn’t until I lay down in my empty space that I realized it was “The Sunny Side of the Street.”
And then I floated into a very soft place, surrounded by all the framed photos of Robby I had clipped from newspapers and magazines concerning his disappearance. This grim shrine to his biography sat in an orderly row on a shelf above my bed (“Your dark throne,” Mike called the sloping shelf, shivering). The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a booth at Maple Drive as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember: disarm. Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction? And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie? Did it matter? Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning. The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you. I remember staring at the white tablecloth as I contemplated saying this. Could I actually do it? I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. For one moment, as my father ordered another vodka (it was two in the afternoon; this was his fourth) and started ranting about my mother and the slump in California real estate and how “your sisters” never called him, I realized it could actually happen, and that by saying this I would save him. I suddenly saw a future with my father. But the check came along with the drink and I was knocked out of my reverie by an argument he wanted to start and I simply stood up and walked away from the booth without looking back at him or saying goodbye and then I was standing in sunlight, loosening my tie as a parking valet pulled up to the curb in the cream-colored 450 SL. I half smiled at the memory, for thinking that I could just let go of the damage that a father can do to a son. I never spoke to him again. This was in March of 1992 and he died the following August at the house in Newport Beach. Lying in bed on 13th Street, I realized the one thing I was learning from my father now: how lonely people make a life. But I also realized what I hadn’t learned from him: that a family—if you allow it—gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope. What we both failed to understand was that we shared the same heart.
There was one last story to write.
I went back to Los Angeles in August and on the afternoon of the anniversary of my father’s death I waited in the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. It was 2:30. After composing myself sufficiently I left the car and limped into the restaurant (I was still using a cane). I ordered a hamburger, a small bag of fries, a child’s Coke—I wasn’t hungry—and I took my tray and sat at a table by the window. The 450 SL pulled into the parking lot at exactly 2:40. A boy—seventeen, maybe eighteen—who looked strikingly like Clayton—stepped out of the car. He was taller now, I noticed, and his hair was short and even though he had sunglasses on I recognized him immediately. I was holding my breath. I watched as he walked hesitantly toward the entrance. He had a shadow—this was evidence. Once inside, he spotted me and moved with confidence toward the table I was trembling at. The world became hushed. I pretended to be absorbed in the task of opening the paper the hamburger came wrapped in and then I lifted it to my mouth and took a small bite. Robby was sitting across from me but I couldn’t look at him or say anything. He was silent as well. When I looked up, he had taken off the sunglasses and was staring at me sadly. I started crying while chewing on the hamburger and wiped my face while trying to swallow. All I could say before turning away was “I’m sorry.”
