“Yeah,” I respond once again in the same bored voice when reminded of my confidentiality clause.

Of course I told Brock about everything, but it’s not like he’ll be phoning the tabloids as soon as I’m out the door.  If he does, then Gary Vogel can feel free to sue me for my handful of nearly worthless belongings and the pocket change in my bank account.   My financial status isn’t as bleak as I’m making it sound.   I just don’t have much use for acquiring stuff. If there’s anything my early life taught me it’s that too many shiny things aren’t good for you.

Before I head out I give Hal Johnson two months of rent, which he happily pockets.  I don’t expect there will be a problem returning to my apartment whenever I want to.   There’s not exactly a thick line of people scrambling to live upstairs to a foul-smelling old man who’s got a few checkers missing from the board and likes to use his shotgun on the gray squirrels who tiptoe their way into the front yard.

Brock, however, is sorry to see me go and gets suddenly worried about the whole thing . “So they, the Savages, really don’t know you’re coming?”

I can only shrug because all I know is what Gary Vogel has chosen to tell me.  “I don’t think they know.”

I’m sure it’s true.  After all, the whole point is to inflict return-of-the-prodigal-Savage surprise.  Gary never asked me too much about my history with the family.  That leads me to think he somehow already knows it all.  Men like Gary are relentlessly calculating.  They have no patience for any bombshells they don’t light the fuse to.

Of course I always knew I wasn’t to the manner born, not a blood Savage.  My earliest memories include a woman with thick bristles on her upper lip and a warped left hand with six-inch fingernails.  She used to hit me over and over again and shove me into a closet for long stretches of time that might have been hours as easily as they might have been days. Strangely, being inside the closet was better than being outside of it.  That might explain my tendency to hang out underground.

I don’t know at what point the lip-haired, club-handed child abuser disappeared, but for a while I slid from one messy home to another.  Mina Savage always insisted I was five years old when she ‘found’ me, although she invented my birthday.  She always used that term to describe it though. Found.  Like I was sitting primly on some urban street corner and just waiting to be discovered by a carefree fairy godmother with Louis Vuitton fixtures.

In truth, Mina went to some trouble to find a kid when she decided she wanted one.  She knew she didn’t have the patience for a squalling, shitting, diapered blob, so she had her lawyers fan out and search for something more to her liking.  Something cute and endearing, something that knew how to wipe its own ass and didn’t have any nearby family who might object to creative legalities.  Something like a little boy who had already spent years in a system filled with crooked bureaucrats who would gladly face the other way if it meant a they could cuddle an armful of crisp green paper.

Something exactly like me.

I don’t mean to sound bitter or to make it sound like Mina Savage was a horrible woman.  I’m not bitter and she wasn’t horrible.  Careless, self-absorbed and perennially confused, but terrible?  No.

She was the daughter and granddaughter of legends, born into the fishbowl of fame and privilege.  Maybe that burden alone had fucked her up at an early age.

Mina was beautiful, stunning.  Men were easily captivated by her looks and her name.  They had to get a lot closer before they realized that beneath all that auburn-haired glamor was a messy patchwork of scars, despair and addiction.  Mina had already been discarded by three husbands who were glad enough to open up their checkbooks and purchase their freedom.

Shortly after I was swept into her care we left the country.  We didn’t return for over a decade.

Those years were pretty good for me; a sequence of posh boarding schools and fantastic adventures throughout old Europe.  Americans always seemed to be everywhere so it was easy to believe we were in some floating version of our homeland.

Believe it or not, failed politicians, woeful ex-movie stars and a packs of disgraced corporate elites tend to run amok in international lands.  Think of it as a contemporary version of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.

Still, I remain grateful to Mina for paying attention to my education, even though she seemed to forget my existence for large swaths of time.  Whether she’d stashed me in the picturesque Alps or deep in the fabled moors of Yorkshire, I could always count on her to eventually show up in a perfumed cloud and rediscover her motherhood.

I remember being happy to see her.  Happy, even though I knew I’d be yanked from yet another cozy situation and taken on a frenetic holiday until Mina found a different cure for her loneliness.  Then she would deposit me in another luxurious setting thickly populated with more American castoff kids.

Mina was a hell of a parent when she made the effort.  After all, it was Mina who showed me the Ufizzi and the Louvre, Mina who photographed me standing proudly in front of the Colosseum, and Mina who arranged for a tour of the caves of France’s Dordogne region when I mentioned learning all about the Lascaux cave in school.

She didn’t talk about her family, the Savages.  Movie stars and sad stories. All I ever knew of them were the things I had read.  The fact that I had aunts, uncles and cousins seemed irrelevant.  It didn’t occur to me to want to be around them.  In fact I didn’t give them much thought at all until Mina, bedraggled and exhausted from another heartbreak, dragged me out of a converted castle in the Scottish Highlands and announced we were going ‘home’.

I can remember objecting, sputtering something like “Shit, now?  Really? I’ll be a senior.” 

But when Mina got an idea into her head – adopting a kid, marrying a sheik, dragging a teenager back to the Home of the Brave – there was no getting rid of it.

I found myself riding over an ocean in the private plane belonging to one of Mina’s old friends as I moodily destroyed tins of caviar and pouted about the fact that I’d been this fucking close to porking the new girl in school, a Russian beauty distantly related to some royal family that’d been shot a hundred years ago in Siberia.

Everything was different that time.  But I didn’t realize it until Mina left me on her brother’s doorstep somewhere in the Arizona desert and then ducked back into the luxury Town Car for the ride to Scottsdale’s finest rehab facility.

Two months later I learned the hard way that Mina’s failures were much worse than I’d ever suspected.

“Oz?” calls Brock and he’s got the Concerned Friend grimace on his face again.

I realize that I’ve been nervously clicking a pen while my thoughts strayed.  I haven’t spent too much time thinking about Mina over the past five years.  She was a fickle woman with her own set of demons.  There’s not much point in trying to understand her now.

“I need to get on the road.”  I reluctantly set the pen down on Brock’s desk.

If I push it I can reach western Arizona in two days.  Surely they’re all there already.  Surely she’s there already.  Gary had assured me she would be, even though I hadn’t asked, not specifically, not about her. Like I said, Gary must know a few things already.  He wouldn’t have called me in the first place if he didn’t.

  After bending down and giving Brock an awkward man-hug in his wheelchair, I notice that he’s staring at me with a worried frown.

“You remember who you are, Oz-man” he says, nodding. “Don’t let them edit you into something else.”

“I will.  And I won’t.”

Flimsy promises.  I don’t give a god almighty fuck what they do with the footage.  They could cast me as King Kong With Testicular Scabies and it would bother me as much as a paper cut.