Of all the rumors and bullshit that surrounds our family, that’s the one thing I don’t really believe.  My father was far too confused about everyday life to be capable of harming anyone else.  He never talked about any of it but the trial-by-media apparently devastated him and he lived like a recluse for a while.  He was probably so lonely and vulnerable by his early forties that when a twenty-year-old radiology student encountered him at a local diner she had no trouble sinking her talons into his bewildered flesh and becoming a permanent appendage.

Here’s where we join the story.

It would be rather pointless, though maybe therapeutic, to sit here and count all the ways my mother, Lita Cohan Savage, was a heinous bitch.  But I have a habit of not thinking about her any more than I have to.  She left my father shortly before his sudden death but she and I were on the outs long before that.

About a year ago I was thumbing through a magazine while I waited for a flu shot and paused at a paragraph describing how Lita Savage, once married to the late August Savage, was remarrying.

“Lita is presently estranged from her children and they will not be on the guest list.”   

Estranged.  It’s always struck me as an odd word.  As if one day the parties in question blinked and didn’t recognize one another.  The truth is liable to be a bit more ugly and complicated.  Like her.

Lita already had one foot out the door when August lost the crumbling deco-style mansion, among the oldest estates in Hollywood.  She demanded something better.  She demanded blood from a stone.

For once he stood up to her and moved us all out to the desert to the only piece of real estate his meager assets were capable of saving.

My father had always hated California anyway.

I have to believe that when he towed the lot of us out to the old western film set in the heart of the Arizona outback he had good intentions.  He said he wanted to remove his children from the cold scrutiny of stardom and give us a chance to live somewhere we weren’t known, weren’t sneered at.

But at the time all I knew was that I was sixteen and outraged. It was really a bad plan.  Eventually he learned that when you take a bunch of bratty teens out of their comfortable lives and deposited them in a dusty oven, miles from the nearest traffic light, something is bound to go wrong.

The place was called Atlantis Star but in a sarcastic twist, Monty and I rechristened it Atlantis Slum.  It was run down and isolated, a vague whisper of the bustling studio that existed in the 1950s when Rex Savage (pre-alien abduction) filmed a half dozen movies in the area.  Rex had been so taken with the backdrop he bought the entire make believe town when it went up for auction a few years later, after the old western film trend was finished.

These days my brother Spencer is the only one living there, ever since August closed himself in his study and was found dead three days later.  An autopsy confirmed cause of death was an untreated rattlesnake bite.

In case anyone’s wondering, being slowly overtaken by snake venom is a painful, ghastly way to die. There’s no way to know what was going through his mind when he sat there, staring at dark wood paneling, refusing to seek help.  About all he had left at that point was the skeleton of Atlantis, and even before he was gone, Spence had pretty much taken over the care of the place, though he’d barely graduated from high school.   The rest of us don’t see much reason to set foot within a hundred miles of it.

Until now, that is.

Today there is a producer sitting across from me over a pair of wedge salads at the Bellagio.  He is smiling.  He probably smiles in his sleep.

“So Loren, how do you feel about returning to Atlantis Star?”

Gary Vogel is on the well-preserved side of sixty and has flown to Las Vegas just to take me to lunch. It isn’t necessary; I already signed the papers just like I promised Brigitte I would.  I get the feeling he’s trying me out.  He wants to see how tough it’s going to be to get me to bare my soul.  I squeeze a lemon slice into my water glass and avoid an answer.

“Will you be there when filming begins?” I ask, coyly turning the tables with a question of my own.

Gary Vogel commands a half dozen of the most popular celebrity reality television shows.  To him, this is just another one, a typical project.  He hails the waitress for the check and offers me an artificial grin that he must practice ten thousand times a day.

“No, I’m afraid that’s impossible, Loren” he says smoothly pronouncing my name incorrectly as Lo-REN, like Sofia Loren.

But I am LAW-ren or just plain Ren.  No need to be pretentious.  I’m not Brigitte.

Gary gives me his best charming executive smile.  “But my wonderful assistant, Cate Camp, will be there.  You’ve talked to Cate.  Cate is incredible. Cate is my proverbial right hand. Cate will make sure everything goes off without a hitch.”

I merely nod at his answer.  I decide not to let him know that I’m glad he won’t be around when the cameras start rolling, which they will be doing exactly one week from today.

I haven’t packed.  I don’t know what to bring.  Production for this season will last for eight weeks.  My sisters are already there.  I haven’t talked to Spencer but he’s probably working hard to deal with the intrusion.  Monty, like me, is waiting until the last minute.

How long has it been since we were all in the same place for more than a few hours?  Four years?  No, five years. Five years since that wonderful and terrible summer when the ground shifted and opened a wide, permanent fissure in my heart.  Monty was the first of us to leave, abandoning August’s strange desert utopia.

No.  That’s wrong.  Someone else left before him.

Gary Vogel is a busy man.  He brusquely thanks me for a productive meeting and regrets that he must reach the airport within an hour to return to Los Angeles for a vague but crucial reason.  I get the feeling he just wanted to see me for himself.  He wanted to see if I was under control, if the infamous Savage volatility applied to me.

A little drama will be good for ratings.   Too much chaos will be disastrous for the show.  Gary has worried himself unnecessarily, at least on my account.  I shake his hand and nod mechanically.

“Thank you for lunch.  It was nice to meet you too.”

I don’t mean it at all.

But I can do this.  I can do it for my brothers and sisters.

I can be the backbone they sorely need right now.

If I bend, even slightly, no one will ever see it.

CHAPTER FOUR

OZ

 

“I don’t want your damn money,” I keep telling them, but the words don’t seem to be ones they understand.

They just ignore me and carry on about funds being wire transferred at the end of production.  The big cheese is a gold plated dick named Gary who forces his long-suffering assistant to call and/or text about every twelve hours to ensure I haven’t fled to Madagascar.  Apparently the earth’s ability to rotate on its axis depends upon me showing up for my five minutes of exploitation.

In our first conversation Gary seemed slightly ruffled that I didn’t know who the fuck he was but he recovered nicely and even stopped calling me ‘Oscar’ when I said it would be healthier for him to take the suggestion.

“Yeah,” I always answer robotically whenever they call for the guarantee that I will somehow materialize in the desert a hundred miles outside Phoenix the day filming is set to begin.

For a while they bugged me about flying to L.A. first.   They would really much rather have me land among the Arizona greasewood in a Lear jet or something, but screw that.  I will drive there on my own time in my own wheels and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.