His parents hadn’t even wanted him to apply to UCLA, but he’d sent off the application along with the fee, paid for out of his savings from his part-time job at the movie theater.
It was during this argument that his parents confessed to taking his UCLA application out of the mailbox all those months ago. Max couldn’t believe it.
Alone with his dad one afternoon while his mother was at the grocery store, Max confronted him. “Stop hitting mom.”
Max’s father turned to face him. “What are you going to do about it?”
Max stepped closer to his father, and looked down at him. By this time in his life, Max was about an inch taller than his father. He also outweighed him by at least twenty pounds—all of it muscle.
“Touch mom again and you’ll find out what I’m going to do about it.”
Max’s father laughed, but said nothing.
“And there’s always the police,” Max added.
“So,” his father said, “what are you going to do? Blackmail me?”
Max just laughed and left the room. His father had been such an asshole to him, never giving Max the freedom he wanted or needed, always treating him like he was incapable of doing anything right, taking his belt to Max, or swatting him with the back of his hand, which stung due to Max’s father’s fake college class ring (an item he wore to impress people). Well, now that had all changed. Max had the upper hand on his father.
Max knew what he had to do, and he hatched his plan over the next couple of weeks.
He would leave home, taking the three hundred and sixty-one dollars he had to his name, and hitchhike halfway across to the country to Hollywood. But that probably wouldn’t be enough.
He’d never thought of blackmailing his father before he himself raised the possibility. Now it was looking like a damn good idea. Especially since Max had something else on his father. So, two days before Max skipped town, he went to the store where his father worked and said he needed five-thousand dollars.
His father didn’t ask any questions. He simply wrote the check. After all, what was he going to say when Max told him he knew about Annette and Roberta, the two women his father had had affairs with (Roberta was still in the picture, as far as Max had been able to determine). Max’s dad didn’t even look shocked, didn’t ask how Max knew.
When Max was leaving the office, he turned around and looked at his father. His dad’s eyes were weary, and he appeared to have given up all hope of having a normal relationship with his son.
Two days before his seventeenth birthday, Max told his mother to pack her favorite stuff, but only two bags. On the morning of his birthday, after his father left for work, Max and his mother boarded a Greyhound bus. It was bound for southern California. It was on this bus ride that Max’s mother said she always wanted him to do what he wanted, and only agreed with his father because of the hold he had on her. Max said he knew all along.
Over the next three years, Max worked in movie theaters, restaurants, and gas stations, while he finished high school. His mother got a job as a teacher’s assistant at a middle school.
He finally landed a job that interested him: as a PA announcer on a tourist bus. He had impressed the owner of the tour bus company with his vast, almost obsessive knowledge of Hollywood. This led to him making a connection with someone who worked as a junior production assistant at MGM studios. His foot was in the door.
Max started leaving his original scripts lying around the studio—in various conference rooms, mail-slots, under windshields of cars parked in spots that were marked with the names of bigwigs.
That’s how he sold his first script. He was a true self-made screenwriter, without an agent, and all before he had turned twenty years old.
By the time he was twenty-five he had three blockbuster films, an Oscar nomination, and the next step was moving into directing and producing. But he hadn’t been happy since.
“And,” he told me, “to this day I’ve never told my mom that I knew about my dad’s cheating.”
“You could have ruined him.”
He nodded his head. “I know. But it would have ruined my mom, too. But she’s happy now. She lives in Thousand Oaks. Not too far from me, but not too close, either. She didn’t want to be right in the heart of all the Hollywood action.”
“And your dad?”
“Haven’t heard anything about him in years.”
We were getting tired of sitting at the table, so Max suggested we take a walk through the vineyard. It occurred to me that throughout the whole story he had just told me, he didn’t mention any girlfriends.
FOUR
Rather than go out to eat, Max grilled salmon and made a giant salad, and we ate on the floor of the lodge. The original plan was to have an evening picnic, but the weather brought an unexpected—and rare—rain shower.
Max’s culinary skills turned out to be as impressive as everything else he did. The food was delicious, and the setting was romantic. Just the two of us sitting on a large blanket, a roaring fire going, and Harry Connick Jr. tunes providing the soundtrack.
Later, Max wowed me again. But this time we were in his bed. I had three orgasms to his one, and I teased him later that it seemed like a fair ratio.
Sunday morning, I woke to an empty bed. I called out for Max, thinking he might be in another room, but got no response. I got out of the bed, wrapped the sheet around me, walked through the den, and looked out on the large deck. No Max to be seen.
I looked around for a note. Nothing.
I was beginning to worry when I heard the door open and he came in, sweaty and catching his breath. “Morning.”
“Hey. Where were you?”
“Went for a run. I was about a mile away when I realized I should have left a note in case you woke up. Sorry.”
I moved toward him.
“I’m all sweaty.”
“I don’t care,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. The sheet dropped to the floor, leaving me standing there naked.
Max kissed me on the cheek, pushed me away gently, looked me up and down and said, “You’re wearing my favorite thing.”
Before I could respond, I heard my cell phone ringing. I got it out of my purse. It was Krystal calling. If she hadn’t been my roommate, I might have just let it go to voicemail. But I answered it.
“Are you okay?” she blurted.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“You haven’t been here all weekend. I was getting worried.”
I didn’t have the speakerphone on, but the volume was loud enough and the room was quiet enough so that Max could hear Krystal. I looked at him and rolled my eyes. Krystal, worried about me? I was surprised she even noticed I was gone.