I wanted to run away but had nowhere to go, so I stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door. The truth was I’d stopped caring. I didn’t want Henry’s gloom lingering around me. How could he understand my Topanga days when he never even took his eyes off the screen of his arcade video game. Since I’d started hanging out with Deva, I wasn’t interested in him or the store, or anything that didn’t involve green pastures and communes. At home we only talked about Ettore’s movie and the actors and whether Johnny Depp’s agent had called. Max drifted from room to room leaving a wake of dirty plates and ashtrays. I heard him and my father laughing into the night, watching and studying horror films, but I was under a new spell. Topanga was like a force, a magnet that pulled me out of my bedroom, out of my classrooms. It was a new version of the Sicilian island, a place where I could get in touch with something primal. When I wasn’t in the canyon, I was thinking about the canyon, and when I was in the canyon, I spent hours watching hawks circle the sky, feeling the rough wind blow in from the foggy beaches below. I let it strike my face. I felt the sunlight slash through the clouds and scorch my head. I allowed that savage, hungry nature to beat me and took the beating joyfully. I felt stronger. I could take in unpredictable weather changes without tuning out. I learned to not be afraid of stray coyotes, spiders, snakes, and growling frogs penetrating my sleep and dreams.
After school Deva and I took the yellow bus to Topanga and hiked to the run-down cottage where we took long outdoor baths, soaking in boiling water and drinking cheap wine. On weekends I waited for her to sneak out and meet me at the end of her driveway. We cruised the canyon at night. I returned home on an early-morning bus while my parents were still sleeping, and collapsed in bed, happy. The good nights were the ones when we walked under huge moons, immersed in nature, when the canyon was quiet and beautiful. We hid in the commune shrubs and spied on Bob and his scream sessions from the darkness. The bad nights were the ones when Deva’s father overworked her or tried to lock her up. She sometimes had to take on extra shifts at the restaurant to help pay the bills. She came out of the restaurant completely drunk. She got high on Vicodin and felt like trashing things, breaking bottles in parking lots and stealing mail only to toss it out. I went along. No matter what she did, her warm laughter always sounded like a party. When I asked her exactly what she did for her father, she sighed and said something about his music and how that was a Topanga thing and I wouldn’t understand. Kids weren’t treated as kids there. All families were like that. There were days when working for him meant not showing up to school. I scowled, thinking how ridiculous that was, without admitting that my own father was asking me to do the same. Even though Deva occasionally complained, I understood there was some kind of canyon pact I was not grasping. That was the way things had to go there. Families were ancient clans who had each other’s backs. They were a tribe and if I didn’t understand their ways it was because I wasn’t part of that tribe. Plus Deva’s father was from Montana originally. He grew up with a big sky over his head and the sense of endless possibilities. He had raised twins alone. He knew work and grit and had dealt with bulls and ranches. He’d smelled success and failure, and throughout it all, he kept his children close to him. Sometimes there were grounding punishments and sometimes there were days when Deva just disappeared, but I rarely got her to talk about those. It made her nervous and angry when I asked too many questions. She was unpredictable. One moment violently playful, the next withdrawn and absent. She rashly diminished and increased the distance between us with nothing more than a flicker of the eye. You never knew which persona would appear, but I learned to navigate the abrupt mood swings. And it was always worth it because when I came back to Van Nuys after our adventures, I felt like a queen descending from a magic mountain. Every day I spent up there, I felt my shoulders grow wider and my chest stronger. I wandered the suburban streets with new eyes. I was not alone anymore.
17
My father thought all he needed to make a film was hire trusted family members to be part of it. And we believed him. Ours would be an Italian family affair, just like the Coppolas. The reason why family-owned restaurants had the tastiest food was because it was in everyone’s best interest to run a good business.
“Same with movies,” Ettore said. “When it’s all in the family, stealing from the owners is like stealing from yourself.”
On the first day of filming, Timoteo, Henry, and I arrived in front of the Hotel Alexandria at seven a.m. to avoid rush-hour traffic. Henry had found a way to get his car back from the Disneyland parking lot and was in charge of driving my brother and me on set. We sidestepped the limp bodies of homeless people still asleep by the entrance. My mother was already in the main hall, flustered, walking around fidgeting with a walkie-talkie, screaming at my father in Italian.
“Non ti sento! Pronto! Non ti sento! Questo coso non funziona, cazzo!”
Henry and I were in charge of costumes and set design, though I barely communicated with him. Having him there felt as if another bedroom of mine, another secret school spot, another closet had been invaded by my parents’ personalities, another small thing I’d discovered that wasn’t my own any longer, so I kept away. A Hispanic woman from the beauty parlor on Spring Street came to help the hair-and-makeup girls—a couple of junkies from Portland who had a tendency to fall behind. I noticed one of them pass out in front of the mirror. I told my father I thought he should fire her because she was obviously still shooting up, but he said I was being cruel, that she was just tired from waking up early.
“Plus they’re both working for almost free. We’re not going to get anything better.”
My mother was assistant to the director and also the caterer. My brother, the line producer, ran errands and tried to make people do things on time, or just do them. Max rounded up a team of film-school students to work in the sound and light departments. Four out of seven of the film’s principal actors were working actors. The rest lived on the fringes of show business. There was a thin line that divided the two categories. At first glance you couldn’t tell the difference. They all seemed adequate. They were in shape, had nose jobs, permanent eyeliner tattooed on their eyelids, and breast implants—just like all first-rate professionals. But there was something askew about them. You couldn’t put your finger on it until you had a conversation and discovered they were waiters, high-school drama teachers, nutritionists, and voice coaches. Still, the star, Vanessa Peters, had appeared in numerous episodes of Baywatch as well as Beverly Hills 90210. She was a runner-up to Drew Barrymore for the lead in a big romantic comedy. She was quirky and had a sexy, hoarse voice. She came on set with an assistant who had alopecia and a devotional attitude. She owned a cell phone and had dated David Lynch.
My mother took over the abandoned kitchen next to the ballroom on the ground floor. She scrubbed the old stoves clean and cooked pasta for the crew’s lunch every day. Actresses initially asked for “eggs on the side” on their carbonara dishes, but when she explained that pasta was a wholesome experience, everyone let go of their diets. “You can’t segregate the tastes that make the magic happen. Accept the chaos; welcome the carbs.” Crew members developed secret crushes on her because of the food she cooked.
“It tastes like the home I never had, Serena,” one of the runners kept saying with a dreamy expression.