At First Sight

Chapter 6

The rest of the week we all hung out together.

Evelyn and I shared our power cabana with the Ellises. There were four chairs in there anyway, and after Melissa secured it each morning she disappeared. She told me she'd rather be staked out over an anthill than sit with us. My daughter, exercising her uncommon gift for colorful metaphor.

Evelyn actually got Paige into the workout room and started her on a light aerobic routine, using knowledge gained over years of Mickey D's training and my money to fashion a new body for a woman who could already stop traffic wearing a trench coat.

I let it happen, though, because I didn't think in four days Evelyn would be able to turn Paige's softness into the kind of anatomical gristle that she had struggled so hard to achieve for herself.

Now, just so you won't think that I was going over the falls in a barrel here, let me tell you that I really, really tried to put the brakes on my emotions, to rein myself in.

I kept saying what I'm sure you're saying: This is crazy. The woman adores her husband. You're much older, half as good looking. Your father didn't build downtown neighborhoods from Hispanic slums into architecturally renowned music centers, or city newspapers into global media empires. Your dad built opening-act comedians playing rathole dives like the Comedy Cabana into cheesy middle acts at transvestite clubs like the Cross Walk in North Hollywood. While Chandler Ellis was winning football games at Andover prep and then Georgetown, you were fighting for rectal purity in the Hawaiian state prison or throwing up in a Cost Plus wastebasket at rehab.

On every scale, the Chick Bests of the world didn't measure up against the Chandler Ellises.

I said all these things to myself.

I even locked myself behind the frosted, etched glass door in our bathroom, sat on the shitter, and wrote all of it down on a piece of hotel stationery.

Then I did something even more proactive: I started looking for flaws in Paige Ellis. I collected them, diving deep for each one like a bum in a supermarket Dumpster. I even cataloged her few physical imperfections.

For instance, she had a kind of goofy laugh, something between a squeal and a giggle. Of course, on further introspection, I found it irresistible.

She had a birthmark on her left calf that was almost the size of a quarter. The more I looked at that birthmark, the more I loved it.

She had an odd habit of constantly jiggling her foot when she was seated. I asked her about it, putting on my most friendly "you can tell the doctor" expression. She explained that she had suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder as a child. It's what first drew her to Chandler. They had that interest in common. She understood learning disabilities firsthand. She said that even though she had more or less grown out of it, she still found it difficult to sit completely still… hence the little foot jiggle. Adorable.

I found every one of these imperfections delightful.

After a week of constantly being with our new friends, Paige and Chandler, we had a farewell dinner at the hotel and promised to stay in touch. We all kissed each other goodbye. Our first kiss-only a cheek peck. But I swear, I almost fainted from ecstasy.

We exchanged digits and addresses, and under most circumstances, that would have been the end of it. We would have never seen each other again, except I was more hopelessly in love with her now than I had been in the beginning. I'm not just talking infatuation here, either. I'm talking deep, soul-defining devotion.

I was dreaming about her now almost every night, and every time I looked at Evelyn, I was shocked that I'd ended up with such coarseness when there were creatures like Paige in the breeding pool. I told myself if I'd married someone like Paige, Melissa wouldn't be as angry as she is, frowning with a face that had more holes than a pool-hall dartboard.

Of course, Melissa used our infatuation with the Ellises to get lost. During the week, I saw her now and again, usually at our changingof-the-guard ceremony under the poolside cabana each morning. She had taken up with a huge Hawaiian guy. A primo-warrior. Big, with lots of island tattoos. I cornered her once and asked her what was going on with him.

"Bite me," was her cute reply.

What do you do with kids when they won't listen to a thing you say, or care at all about any of the things you think are important?

We left Hawaii on January 8th and flew back to L. A. I reentered my nightmarish business fiasco. I was standing on the bridge of my fast-sinking Titanic, driving a leaking dot-corn straight to the bottom of a sea of bullshit.

The first couple of months back at work, I noticed that most of my executives were making new resumes and taking long lunches. Who could blame them?

A few weeks later, I took a walk through our warehouse. There had been a time, a few years ago, when I would walk through this acre-sized building and swell with pride, looking at shelves crammed full of studio movie DVDs and recording company CDs. I had been like a rancher surveying my livestock. Pallets piled high with American pop culture whizzed past on forklifts on their way to the loading dock, where twenty FedEx vans were parked, doors open, engines idling. Now, as I walked around the place, my own footsteps echoed in the emptiness. We had some old movies nobody wanted, a few Eagles CDs, some Steely Dan-all stuff that wasn't on the current hot list. As I said, none of the studios would trust us with product anymore, so we were imploding, crashing from the inside.

Then, as if watching years of my life dissolve like an Alka-Seltzer tablet wasn't a big enough load to carry, Melissa picked this exact time to get arrested.

We were called by the narc squad in the middle of the night and had to drive down to Juvenile Hall to talk to a vice detective. It seems she'd been caught in a Valley drug raid, arrested in a house full of crystal meth. She'd been sound asleep when the cops kicked in the door. The house was, of course, rented by Big Mac, but Melissa was the only one being held.

The way it was explained to us was our sixteen-year-old daughter was claiming that the forty or more bags of "Go Fast" the cops had recovered in Big Mac's house were hers alone… that Big Mac had nothing to do with it, didn't even know she'd hid it there.

It was pretty damned clear to everyone that Melissa was taking the rap for McKenna, but they weren't even holding him.

"That's nuts," I told the cops. "This guy is the president of the Devil's Disciples. They sell meth. That's their main business. It's obviously his stash."

"Yeah, that's what we think, too," the ropy black detective with prematurely gray hair said. "But what're we gonna do? He's saying be never saw it. She's saying it's hers."

"Can't you see she's trying to take the blame for him? She claims she loves him," I said, thinking these cops can't possibly be this blind. They can't let this tattooed asshole with a shaved head get away with this. "He probably threatened her to get her to say that," I reasoned. "It's duress or something:'

"If you can get her to change her story, we'll work with it," he said.

So Evelyn and I went back into the holding cell where they had her and sat on metal chairs, talking through the bars. The place smelled of vomit and disinfectant. I had a flashback from my short jail term in Hawaii. I won't bore you with that misadventure here, except to say that I know my daughter had no idea what she was signing up for.

"Honey, you've gotta tell the truth," Evelyn said. She never calls Melissa honey, and I could see the metal in our daughter's face shifting light as she frowned.

"Melissa, believe me, you don't wanna go to jail on this drug bust," I said.

"You oughta know, right, Dad?" she shot back.

"Melissa, don't do this. You're going to ruin your life," I pleaded. "Would you two mind getting out of here? I can't listen to any more of this shit. You both ruined my life years ago."

An hour later, Evelyn and I were back in our three-milliondollar French Regency Beverly Hills home on Elm. We were in our overdecorated foyer fighting about what to do about Melissa. As always, we ended up with recriminations.

"It's because she hates you," Evelyn said. "You're such a hypocrite, telling her you never used drugs, then she finds out you did half a year in Hawaii for dealing hash." Forgetting to mention that she was the one who'd busted me to Melissa.

"She's punishing both of us for her feelings of emotional abandonment," I said, bringing two semesters of junior college abnormal psychology into play. "You haven't done a good job of raising her. You made a lot of mistakes."

"You've made the mistakes, buddy," Evelyn snapped. "I've always been there for her. I've been busting my ass!" I wondered if getting butt-fucked by Mickey D could technically be described as busting ass. Maybe.

We argued for almost an hour, did a nice two-out-of-three falls, while Melissa sat it out in a detention cell in Sylmar Juvie.

The next morning, I hired the best lawyer that money I didn't have could buy. He was a balding, skeletal guy with a Talmudic beard named Jube Shiver. I got him from one of my dot-com account managers whose younger sister had a drug history.

"Can you get her out?" I asked our new liar for hire, worried about what might happen to her in jail… visions of lesbian rape hovering at the edge of my every thought.

"I'll have her out by noon," he said with the confidence of a gunfighter cracking the knuckles on his shooting hand. "But the bigger problem is, what happens when this comes to trial. Her association with this biker isn't going to be helpful."

"But the biker is the one who got her into this. All that crystal isn't hers-it's his. She's taking the blame for him. Aren't you listening to me?"

"She confessed," Jube Shiver said, dismissing my argument with a wave of a freckled hand, leaning back in an office littered with B'nai B'rith awards and team pictures of the North Hollywood Little League Pirates. He steepled his fingers under his Talmudic beard, which was graying theatrically at the edges, and studied me like I had just tracked dog shit into his office. I was beginning to take an intense dislike to our new Jewish attorney.

"I know she confessed. That's because he threatened her," I said. "It's under duress."

"It's not duress unless the police force it. Let me lawyer the case. You just give me her personal background, answer my questions when I ask, and sign the checks."

He lost the whole Talmudic thing with that one sentence. Then he made some notes and nodded as I told him everything I thought would be helpful. I left out the bad stuff like all the cocaine we'd found in her purse and under her jewelry box; all the money and the portable electronic equipment she'd stolen from us and fenced to feed her habit.

I drove off an hour later with dark visions of Melissa heading to The Big House.

When I got back to the office, there was a message from my CFO. I went down the hall to see him. He told me he'd scared up an angel in New York who wanted to meet with me in the Big Apple tomorrow. This angel was a Wall Street arbitrageur who was interested in buying out my interest in our sinking dot-com.

"I've got this problem right now with Melissa," I told him.

My CFO, whose name is Martin Worth, frowned and shook his head. There were endless plays on both our names at the company. My favorite being-"At Best, he's Worthless:' Shit like that.

"This may be our last shot:" Martin said stoically.

Why did it always come down to these "no-choice" kinds of choices?

Melissa, or the business?

Nothing simple… nothing easy.

Melissa… or years of my life down the drain with nothing to show for it?

So of course I went to New York. I had no choice.

Biggest mistake of my life.