After bagging the last of the garden clippings and mess, she pats me on the shoulder and says, “It’s okay if you help, but your father is the one who really needs your help.”
We look over. Dad is struggling to lift two large bags of clippings and deposit them in her Mustang. The bags are so overfilled and top-heavy they look as if they are ready to split at the seams. Just as my father starts to toss them, the top bag explodes like an overstuffed Mexican piñata, and everything rains down on him at once, covering him in dirt, leaves, branches, and debris. It is like a scene out of a slapstick comedy. Esther and I giggle under our breath. Suddenly Dad blinks his eyes open. After he wipes away the grit, he hollers comically, “Lor-en-zo!”
Esther and I start laughing, and Dad does, too. He realizes the silliness of the moment and embraces it.
Lola has never had any children herself, and so she always treats me like her little prince any time I visit. In fact, she gives me the book The Little Prince to read and is always encouraging my imagination. When I turn five, she takes me to Disneyland, introducing me to all of the great Disney fantasy characters. Her property is expansive, with clusters of big and small trees she calls her “Enchanted Forest.” I find it all very enchanting indeed, spending hours there with her, taking long walks with her through the forest. I discover empty Coke bottles and leave messages in them in the trunks of those trees. Every time I go back to Lola’s with Dad, I want to see if my bottled messages are still where I have left them. One message I write to Pinocchio asks, “Why does your nose grow?”
One time, to my astonishment, a message I left is missing. “Lola, where did the message go?” I ask.
“Pinocchio took them,” she says, enchantingly.
I have all these foster people in my life—Emmy, who fills that maternal need, and then Lola, who is like the grandmother I never had. My parents are busy and distracted, and so I am very lucky to have these loving people spend time with me growing up, giving me good advice and helping me realize there is no limit to what I can accomplish. I feel so fortunate to have such guiding help from people who have my best interests at heart.
Dad sells his Alfa Romeo and is soon driving a gorgeous red-leather-on-black, four-door Jaguar Mark X sedan. His new toy for the moment, he drives it everywhere. It is so luxurious he can never get enough of it. One day we are heading home on Sunset Boulevard after he picks me up from school—I am six years old at the time—when suddenly we hear the sound of a bad blowout. We assume somebody’s tire has blown.
“Boy, that’ll be one unhappy amigo when they find out,” Dad jokes.
Just as he says that, kerthump, kerthump, kerthump. The sound grows louder. Dad realizes the person with the flat is him. He is very unhappy about it, especially after just joking how some other poor amigo must have blown his tire.
“Wonderful!” Dad moans. “Just my luck.”
We are near a blind curve on Sunset Boulevard. Dad quickly pulls over and jumps out. The left rear tire is flat. He walks back to my side of the vehicle, picks me up, and sits me down on the grass to play with my Hot Wheels away from the traffic while he jacks up the car to change the tire. Before doing so, he smartly grabs two emergency flares from the trunk. He lights them and puts them out in the middle of the street to alert drivers as he changes the tire in the face of oncoming traffic. With a speed limit then of twenty-five miles per hour, drivers have plenty of time to change lanes and go around us.
Dad is busy changing the tire while I am busy playing. Suddenly, he hollers, “Look out!”
Loud screeching of tires as Dad hurdles over the back of the Jag, lands and rolls, and ends up a foot from me on the grass. Then Kablam! It sounds like a bomb going off. We look up. Dad’s Jaguar is suddenly in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. A small red MG convertible has plowed head-on into its trunk. The driver, who is racing another car down Sunset in the lane next to him, doesn’t see Dad or his Jag until the very last second. By then it is too late. Meanwhile, the other car races right past us, never stops, never waits to see what happened.
Thanks to his swift reaction, my father avoids being sandwiched between the Jag and MG and emerges unscathed.
“Are you okay, amigo?”
I nod as Dad slowly rises to his feet and walks over to assess the damage.
“Yeah,” I tell him as I start to stand up.
Dad’s eyes nearly pop out of their sockets at what he sees. He throws his hands in the air as his voice goes up an octave like Desi Arnaz moaning, “Ay ay ay!”
Now buried inside the trunk of his expensive Jag is the MG, its back end sticking out where Dad’s imported sedan once ended. Worst of all, the driver and his passenger are unconscious. Dad quickly says to me, “You wait here,” and takes the flares from the curb lane to the middle of the street to divert oncoming traffic around the crash site so he can pull the drivers out of the wreckage.
“What happened?” the driver asks groggily.
“I was going to ask you the very same thing,” Dad says. “Didn’t you see my flares in the street?”
The man shakes his head and as Dad moves him, he winces in pain. He looks as if he hit his head on the dash and suffered a concussion.
“You okay?” Dad asks.
“No,” the man says. “I feel as if I just went up against a three-thousand-pound gorilla and the gorilla won.”
Just then, the passenger awakens. Blurry-eyed, he looks over at the driver as Dad finishes pulling him out. “What happened?”
The driver says, “That’s what the man here is asking us.”
The passenger’s eyes get as big as saucers as he screams, “Oh my God, my MG!”
“Your MG?” Dad asks.
The driver says, “He owns the car and let me drive it.”
“Amigo,” Dad says with a laugh, “you just totaled my brand-new Jaguar Mark X and you are worried about your piece-of-shit MG?”
Under different circumstances, my father would have taken on both of them at once. Instead, he holds back as a police squad car pulls up behind them. An officer gets out and asks, “What happened here?”
My father smiles. “Ask them. That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”
Within minutes, an ambulance is on the scene, and shortly after that two tow trucks come to haul off my father’s Jaguar and the piece-of-shit MG that now really is, well, shit. The story has a happy ending. With his insurance settlement, Dad buys himself a new Jaguar XKE convertible but after that avoids that blind curve on Sunset Boulevard and is wary of MGs anytime he sees one on the road.
Every life has its changes, of course. Unfortunately, my changes are often extreme. After Mom divorces my father, the men come in and out of her life as though through a revolving door. We move around so often I change schools five times in eight years; it seems I am constantly leaving old friends and trying to make new. It is all very unsettling for a six-year-old who is seeking nothing more than normalcy in his life. As crazy as it seems at the time, it will prove good preparation for my career as an actor. And I believe it is why I become so reserved in my emotions, always ready to enjoy my life but without revealing much. But that’s later; this is happening to a six-year-old
