Lassie

The first time Taylor’s grandma almost came out to California was when she was eight years old and a rich couple rode through town in a fancy carriage and heard her singing in the church choir. They took her daddy aside and told him she was real pretty and mighty talented, and if he’d like they’d take her off his hands and give her a good life. It would have been a good deal for her daddy, since they were dirt-poor Kansas farmers and she provided the least help of all the nine kids, ever since she’d gotten bit by a rattler and almost died. But she was the baby and her daddy was partial to her, snake bit and all, so he told the couple that he was much obliged but where he came from folks took care of their own.

When Taylor was younger and heard the story of her grandma, she used to think that if a rich couple ever drove down her street looking for a kid she’d definitely figure out a way to go with them. She couldn’t sing worth shit but she could steal stuff for them and tell stories and take care of their horses. She knew her dad wouldn’t mind so long as he made a profit on the deal. He was always hustling something up, like when he talked the doctor into taking her out of her mom a few weeks early on December 30 because he heard he could get an income tax write-off if his kid was born before year end. Then he made side bets with the other expectant dads in the waiting area about which kid was going to get born first, but of course he didn’t tell them Taylor was going to be cesarean and he’d seen the doctors’ operating schedule. The other dads were pissed, but what could they do? He got their money and the write-off, too.

The next time Taylor’s grandma almost came out to California was in the ’20s. She’d married a traveling salesman/auctioneer who told her he was on to something big and as soon as he made it out west he’d send for her. But he never did and she just kept on scrubbing toilets and taking in laundry and sewing while her boy worked his ass off all day and studied theater at night. He was going to be a famous actor and then he was going to beat up his daddy for leaving them all the time and making his mama work till her hands bled.

The third time, Taylor’s grandma actually got to go to California—her boy won the “Gateway to Hollywood” contest, packed up his mama and little baby sister, and took them all out west. He never did get to be the serious actor he dreamed about, and she scrubbed California toilets and laundry for the next fifteen years. But by the time Taylor was born her uncle had married a Hollywood actress who paid his way until he got to be the super famous star of the Father of the Year TV series, and then things were going pretty good for him.

A few times Taylor got to go down to the Universal Studios back lot to watch them film the show. It was always really funny because her uncle hated the kids who played his son and daughter—called the boy a bucktooth little snot and the girl a spoiled princess bitch— and when the cameras weren’t on he’d yell at the kids just like he was a real dad. Then they’d start shooting and he’d turn into this stern but loving father that people still talked about.

One time Taylor’s mom got her all dressed up, tight shoes and all, to go to an awards ceremony for her eleven-year-old cousin Kevin, who had won this big citywide contest for an essay he wrote on “Why My Dad Should Be Father of the Year.” It was in the news and everything and Taylor’s uncle proudly showed the paper to all his friends. Taylor and her mom got seated right up front with her uncle’s family, and when the lights went off and her cousin started reading his essay, she almost died because Kevin was telling stories about the television character instead of his own dad and some of the stories were right out of the episodes. Taylor snuck a look at her other cousins, but they looked scared and she couldn’t laugh or anything because she could tell her uncle noticed too and he was definitely not amused. His jaw was clenched and the veins were pumping on the side of his forehead, and she knew Kevin was going to see the wrong end of the belt that night.

Taylor thought it was a pretty good joke and possibly worth a licking, but later she found out Kevin wasn’t even trying to be funny. She understood it all better when she went to live with her cousins for a while and saw how when her uncle got drunk he didn’t get all mean and violent like her mom but instead got real serious and tried to have these heavy talks with the kids, but his words always came out as lines he’d said on the TV show. It made Taylor feel creepy as hell, but apparently it was really comforting for Kevin and he loved it when his daddy talked to him that way. So he meant his essay to be sweet but he got a whupping anyway.

Taylor’s grandma was always telling stories about how great her husband was (and never about how he walked out on them all), but she couldn’t ever tell them in front of Taylor’s uncle because he was still pissed about having to be husband, father, and son before he was eighteen. One time he got a big check for doing a fancy detective movie, and it must have given him ideas because he hired a private detective to track down his daddy. After a while the detective gave him an address in Memphis. When her uncle got there he discovered his daddy living with a woman who claimed him as her husband. Taylor’s uncle was going kill him, but his wife called to say his agent had gotten him a good part on The Lassie Show and so he came home instead.

Taylor thought it was pretty cool that her uncle got to meet Lassie until he laughed at her and explained there wasn’t really a “Lassie” but actually seventeen Lassies that looked almost the same but got used for different things. Turned out there were Lassies for falling down cliffs and Lassies for swimming across rivers—actually lots of swimming Lassies because when they’d reshoot a scene they had to start over with a dry Lassie each time. Then there was the Lassie that barked for Timmy and the one that lifted up his paw and whined. Taylor didn’t believe her uncle at first, because for one thing she couldn’t trust anything anybody in her family said, and for another, even though she was a pretty tough and savvy kid, she’d really believed Lassie was real and it frightened her to think that maybe the TV people made up a dog that saved kids just like they made up parents that didn’t drink or hit.

Her uncle brought back photos of lots of Lassies in cages on a studio truck. That was always a good adult joke—finding something a kid believed in and then showing her how stupid she was for believing it. Taylor didn’t get tricked very often, mostly because she didn’t talk when adults were around, but that time she did and her uncle told that story for years at her expense.

It was okay, though; Taylor had her share of jokes. Her favorite was actually her mom’s boyfriend’s joke, but she got to see it once so she claimed it as her own.

Sometimes the family would get all dressed up and go out to fancy movie-star restaurants with her aunt and uncle. Taylor’s mom would get to borrow one of her aunt’s elegant dresses, and her uncle would give the boyfriend a nice sports jacket and tie. The first part of the joke was that the boyfriend was a vacuum cleaner salesman, but when he dressed up in the uncle’s clothes he looked just like the actor Richard Widmark. Later, when he got older, he looked like Gerald Ford, but that’s another joke.

The second part of the joke came when they were all sitting down to eat at this fancy-ass restaurant and a group of autograph seekers spotted their table and began to make their way over, all giggly, whispering and pointing. Taylor’s uncle puffed up real big and prepared to be the gracious star, but the group went right up to her mom’s boyfriend instead and said, “Oh, Mr. Widmark, could we please have your autograph. We just love your movies.” The boyfriend laughed and joked with them for a while, asking which of “his” films they liked best. When Taylor’s mom saw how pissed her brother was getting, she kicked her boyfriend under the table and he kissed the girls’ hands and signed their books, “I will always remember this night, best regards, Dick.” It was a perfect night, and during all the commotion Taylor got to pocket three of the extra forks they give out at places like that, plus a silver linen napkin and two ashtrays.

Taylor took care of her grandma every day when she got out of school, and they had a pretty good time. Taylor hated cooking meals so some nights she’d fool her grandma and tell her they’d already had dinner—she was pretty forgetful by then—and what they were doing now was making pies for dessert. Grandma would just say, “Oh,” and then settle into making the best crust in the world while Taylor made the lemon meringue or double chocolate Jell-O pudding fillings. Then they’d eat pies together and Taylor would get to hear those famous tales.

Grandma loved to tell stories—about rattlesnakes, rich people, and the crazy folk in California—and Taylor loved to listen to her. She sometimes got teased about how when she was little she always used to ask, “Grandma, is that true?” Grandma would laugh and say, “Honey, you look around us here in this family in this town and you tell me something that’s true, and then I’ll tell you about my stories.”

When Taylor’s grandma died, her mom kind of went off the deep end and Taylor had to move out of the house before someone— usually her—got hurt. Crazy as they were, the streets actually felt safe, predictable by comparison.

Years later, Taylor was living with a high-end sex worker in West Hollywood and working at a place called Eddie’s Speakeasy over in Pasadena when she heard that her uncle had died. Eddie had been born male but always felt female. After she transitioned to female she still liked dressing like a man so she kind of looked like a big-breasted dyke in drag. She spoke in a higher-pitched queen’s voice but she could throw a guy clear out into the street if someone broke the rules of the “speakeasy.” There were rooms in the back for turning regular tricks, but Taylor worked out in front where there were these tacky booths built for johns who wasted the prostitute’s time when they wanted to talk rather than fuck. Somebody came up with the idea as a joke, but it took off, and Eddie charged these guys thirty bucks a half hour to sit and talk with a girl—no touching allowed. It was great. Taylor had a job, didn’t have to touch the motherfuckers, Eddie made good money, and the women in the back could get down to business. So, that’s where she was when her girlfriend called and said she’d read in the paper that Taylor’s uncle was dead.

Taylor called her mom, who said she was going to have a special memorial service at her house—no, the others didn’t approve, but goddammit he was her brother and the service was going to be at her own goddamn house, and yes, she could use Taylor’s help. When Taylor arrived her mom explained there would be newspaper reporters and a lot of important people, so the place had to look really classy. Taylor laughed, looking around at the orange carpet, peeling linoleum, and three-foot-high weeds in the back yard. “Right, Mom. Classy.”

She had her mind set, though, so Taylor just went along for the ride and let her mom do her thing, which turned out to be pretty incredible. She was a great cook when she was sober, and the house cleaned up pretty good, and Taylor mowed the weeds down low so they almost looked like grass. Her mom gave her a can of green spray paint to cover over the dirt spots, but the Santa Ana winds picked up and blew wet, green dirt everywhere, so she gave up on that. Then, an hour before people were supposed to arrive, her mom looked up and panicked. “The walls! Classy places are supposed to have pictures on the walls.” Taylor told her to forget it but she was on a roll. “No, I know just the thing. Come on!”

She dragged Taylor to the hardware store to buy some one-by twos and nails and then across the street to JCPenney’s, where she’d seen huge beach towels on sale. Rummaging through the pile she found two velour ones and then they tore out of there and back to the house. In ten minutes Taylor’s mom had hammered together frames and pulled the towels tightly over them, stapling it all together in the back. Then she stood up on the back of the couch, hammering into the wall, and Taylor handed her the “prints” to hang as high up as she could reach. When someone knocked on the door, she stashed the hammer behind the couch.

Taylor went out back on the “lawn” to smoke a joint and watch people arrive. There were some people from her uncle’s church, a lot she didn’t know, all her cousins and then, in a surreal parade, the cast of the Father of the Year show, all fat and grown up. Darin Saunders, the guy who played the son, was looking pudgy and wannabe suave with a woman in a tight black evening dress, loitering right under the new “prints.” Taylor had to admit the pictures looked pretty damn good—they were two abstract silhouettes, global continents all shiny black against a shimmery gold background that actually did tie in nicely with the orange carpet and black couch. Taylor appreciated the joke. She wished her grandma was there to see it, but figured she and her uncle were probably watching the whole show from above. Or below.

She came back inside to find Darin, with tears in his eyes, telling her cousin Kevin how her uncle had been just like a father to him. And Carolyn Chandler, who looked exactly the same and talked just like she had on the show as the “good housewife,” had a drink in one hand and Taylor’s mom’s arm in the other and was telling her how absolutely stunning her two prints were, and where did she possibly find such lovely abstract representations of the world?

Taylor’s mom took a long drag on her cigarette. She struck a dramatic pose, paused for effect, then exhaled real slow. “Oh, those old things.” She smiled, flicking her hand in the direction of the prints. “They’re just a little something I picked up on a trip somewhere. I’m so glad you like them, Carolyn dahling.” Taylor wasn’t sure which movie star her mom was imitating, but she was riding pretty high, thoroughly enjoying herself.

She glanced over at Taylor, arching her eyebrows and pursing her lips in a familiar what did I tell you? look. The girl raised her glass in a mock toast. Then she moseyed over to the makeshift bar, where her uncle’s old publicity lady was hustling a former stunt man who said he was Tony Curtis’ double in Some Like It Hot. It was a pretty good joke because he thought he might get a part out of her, but he didn’t know she was just a rich old drunk who didn’t have any clout left in Hollywood. The agent thought she might get some hot sex from his still-studly body but Taylor knew that wasn’t going to happen because she’d already seen him outside hitting on her two gay friends, whom she’d traded dope to in exchange for providing “valet parking services,” which in reality just meant making sure the cars were still there, hubcaps and all, when people wanted to leave.

But the best part of the joke wasn’t either of these clowns. It was the gold-sequined pocketbook dangling off the back of the publicity lady’s barstool. Taylor had spotted it earlier when the lush interrupted her story of all the women Taylor’s uncle had fucked to clasp the girl’s head to her damp lilac-scented bosom, rock her around a little, and mutter, “Oh dear, what a loss. What a tremendous loss this must be for you kids. He was such a god. A true icon.” The right side of her face was pushed into the gold sequins of the lady’s sweaty gown straining against her breasts, but out of her left eye Tayor glanced down and saw the matching gold purse, its clasp slightly open, revealing a gold-plated cigarette case and seriously bulging gold-sequined wallet. Now here it was again, that shimmering pocketbook right in front of her eyes, swinging just below the lady’s broad gold-sequined ass, gaping open in a sweet offer Taylor just couldn’t refuse.