Corrupt Practices (40 page)

“You’re to wear this,” my handler says. He shows me a black cloth. A blindfold.

“You’re joking, right?”

He stares at me with vacant eyes.

“That wasn’t part of my agreement with McCarthy. Besides, I already know where we’re going. The compound in the hills above Trancas Beach.”

“You’re to wear this,” he repeats.

I want this meeting, and it won’t happen unless I agree to their demands. I nod, and he wraps the blindfold tightly around me. I wait for him to bind my hands, but he doesn’t. I guess I’m on the honor system.

The driver starts the engine and pulls away. For the next twenty minutes, the car weaves in and out of traffic and stops and starts and makes sharp city turns. Then the ride gets smoother. We must have reached the coast highway.

I sit in darkness, listening to the hum of the tires on the asphalt. I begin to welcome the variety of the
click-rumble
of the car going over the Botts’ dots when changing lanes. The men don’t speak, to me or to each other.

“How about putting something on the stereo?” I say.

No response.

“How about some smooth jazz? Your church founder liked smooth jazz.”

The man next to me takes three deep breaths, forced and evenly spaced, as though he’s trying to control his temper. I wait for a minute. There’s no music. I sniff the air for a hint of the ocean, but the air conditioner has filtered out any hint of an odor. With nothing to see or hear or smell, I have no choice but to remember.

For most of my childhood, only one part of my mother’s life was stable—her involvement in my acting career. She effectively kept the agents and the lawyers and the directors under her thumb, making sure that my financial and creative interests were served. She would flatter and cajole and reason with such people, and if that didn’t work, she would terrorize them.

To this day, I don’t know how she did it, because the rest of her life was a shambles. Over the years, Hollywood pusher Billy Ness sold her everything from marijuana to magic mushrooms. With her wavy light brown hair, roundish face, slightly crooked nose, and boyish figure, she could have been viewed as plain, especially compared to the curvaceous, classically gorgeous actresses on the set. But her flower-child eyes exuded, I’ve come to realize, an invitation to chaos that men found irresistible. When she wasn’t shouting or in hysterics, she had the melodic voice of a mythic Siren. And I’d often overhear guys on the set singing the praises of her lips in words unsuitable for my childish ears.

She hopped from one man’s bed to another, falling desperately in love with the hunk actor or the brilliant director or the powerful producer. If she couldn’t hook up with one of them, she’d choose someone from the crew. Her romances had one thing in common—they all expired at the completion of principal photography, leaving her as astonished and broken-hearted as a lovelorn teenager.

How could a child know this? Because on so many mornings-after, my still high or hungover mother would come into my trailer and tearfully spew out the mistakes that she’d made the night before, often in terms too graphic for me to understand. Her behavior frightened and confused me. Once, in the early eighties during the height of the AIDS epidemic, she shared with me—that’s what she called it,
sharing
—that she’d had unprotected sex with strangers and that she was worried about getting sick. I was a child, so I was sure she was going to die. Even after she told me that she’d tested negative, I still had nightmares in which she was infected. For months afterward, I would obsessively monitor her for symptoms of the disease.

Harriet hooked up with Bradley Kelly in 1986, when he and I were both cast in
Doheny Beach Holiday
along with Erica. Kelly was one of those dark-haired, square-jawed men with perfect teeth who managed to keep working because he fit a particular character type. Never the star, he played the put-upon father, or the comic lothario who served as a foil to the leading man, or the top cop’s partner. I assumed that he’d be history by the end of shooting, just like all the others. I was wrong.

In front of the camera, he was a mediocre actor. Off the set, though, he was a master performer, a storyteller whose stories featured his own exploits—his heroism under fire in Vietnam; his court martial for protesting the war when he recognized its evils; his life as an itinerant musician, waiter, avant-garde photographer, street performer, actor, drunkard, junkie, time traveler, and quantum explorer able to straddle universes. In the early years, he feigned reluctance to talk about the spiritual transformation that he experienced in 1978 when he passed through a crease in the universe and communed with the Celestial Fountain of All That Is. It seemed as if his listeners had to pry the precious secret out of him with a verbal crow bar.

His other stories masqueraded as self-deprecating anecdotes about his personal history. But they weren’t self-deprecating at all, because they always ended with an epiphany about some mystical truth that only he knew, imparted to him through his encounters with the Fount. It was insidious and highly effective proselytizing. Though all of his stories were fiction, what was true was that he held the deepest conviction that he was God’s divine messenger on earth. Most people ended up rolling their eyes and recoiling from him. But he didn’t care. Convince just one in fifty and soon there will be millions of adherents, he preached. He had a magical ability to make certain people believe in him—wounded souls desperate to find God or sobriety or earthly success or spiritual awareness or love or immortality. My mother yearned for all of those things, and she was willing to give Kelly everything she had to get them. She was even willing to deliver up her only child.

By anointing Harriet Stern
Quiana Gottschalk
—an absurd bastardization of Hawaiian and German meaning
celestial servant of God
—Bradley Kelly saved her life. In the months after they got together, she soaked up his pop-religious doctrine. She came to believe that he truly purged her cells of contaminants—drugs, pride, depression, lust. The trade-off: she provided not only the business acumen that he sorely needed to build his nascent church, but also the obscene millions that the studios paid me to star in their movies. Together, they were crafty enough to evade the Coogan Act, which was supposed to protect my money. They found a loophole that let them get a court order to invest money in my future. They diverted that money to Kelly’s embryonic Assembly. He rewarded her by appointing her an Assembly elder, which allowed her to realize her life-long dream of becoming someone important. He needed her organizational and business skills. Once a wild social butterfly, she withdrew into the Assembly’s cocoon, a kind of reverse metamorphosis. Even the upper echelon of the Assembly rarely saw her. She became a divine shadow, which gave her a powerful mystique.

The car makes a sharp turn and lurches to a stop. I hear muffled voices and then the metallic scrape of an electronic gate opening. We’re at a security checkpoint. I still remember the barrier after more than twenty years—an imposing wrought-iron fence topped with razor wire that destroyed any illusion of stateliness. I reach for the blindfold. The man sitting next to me grabs my arm. I lower my hand.

The car creeps forward, the tires making a crunching sound on what I remember is a graveled private road. We drive another few minutes up a steep hill. I hear the car door open. The man next to me takes my arm.

“Come with me,” he says. “Watch your head.” He puts his hand on the crown of my head as though I’m an arrestee exiting a police car and guides me under the doorframe.

“Walk slowly,” he says, keeping hold of my arm. “Don’t stumble.”

I stop for a moment and stretch my body. I smell eucalyptus trees and salt air, beautiful fragrances individually, but in combination enough to send a chill through my body.

“I know where we are,” I say, in a show of false bravado. “We’re at Bradley Kelly’s compound up above the Pacific Coast Highway. Near the Ventura County line. I told you this blindfold’s a joke.”

“We have to go up some stairs,” he says.

We ascend seven steps. A door opens. My minder guides me inside the house. But instead of leading me forward to where I remember the staircase, he takes my shoulders and spins me a quarter turn to the right, and suddenly I feel disoriented. The illusion that I have even a modicum of control evaporates, and my legs begin to quiver. I strain to remember—am I facing a wall or a closet or the entrance to another room? There’s a loud rumble, and without warning the man gives me a half-shove forward, and my toe catches on something, and I stagger, but before I go to the ground, he grabs me and holds me up, wrenching my shoulder in the process.

“My apologies, sir,” he says. But I’m sure the push was payback for taunting him with my knowledge of Kelly, knowledge that a Philistine like me shouldn’t have.

He’s taken me into an elevator that didn’t exist twenty years ago. The doors close. We ascend so slowly that it doesn’t feel like we’re moving at all. At last, the doors slide open. He leads me out of the elevator and down what I take to be a hallway. We make a right turn and walk another ten steps. He pulls off my blindfold.

“Wait here,” he says, and leaves before I can turn and look at him.

It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the light. When they do, my heart ripples. They blindfolded me not to hide the location of the residence, but to make sure that the first thing I saw was this room.

They’ve converted the space into an elegant library with a parquet floor and red-oak paneled walls. They’ve installed modern recessed lights in the high ceiling. The curtained windows have an unobstructed view of the ocean. The walls are divided into alcoves that house bookshelves. There are two dark-stained double doors at the far end and a smaller door behind me. There’s a long leather sofa on one side of the room and a walnut desk on the other. In the middle of the wall across from me is a massive oil painting in a gold frame. Kelly is shown on one knee with his arms outstretched. His luminous face is bathed in the radiance of the Fount. His alternate universe has elm trees and babbling brooks and maidenhair ferns and palisades and blue-winged angels.

I expect them to let me stew for a while, but the door swings open almost immediately. She strides into the room, swinging her arms purposefully—in the old days, her signature grand entrance. Over the past two days, I’ve tried to imagine my mother at fifty-seven. I’ve pictured a wrinkled grandmother, a surgically altered Barbie doll, a hideous crone scarred by wickedness, a fleshy earth mother, and any number of other permutations of Harriet Stern twenty-three years after I last saw her. She looks nothing like I imagined, precisely because she’s unmistakably the same woman. The aging process hasn’t passed her by, of course. She’s dressed in a cream silk blouse and dark pants, stylish and tasteful. She never dressed tastefully when I was a kid. Though she’s still slender, the lines of her body are softer, fleshier. She appears shorter than I remember, but that makes sense because I grew three inches after I left. She still has light brown hair—out of a bottle now—which she wears pulled back in a tight bun. She’s plucked her eyebrows and filled them in with pencil or maybe tattoos. Her face has become more angular, verging on severe, which accentuates her curved nose, but also gives her a reserved, almost regal bearing unimaginable in the mother I used to know.

She comes over and stands a foot away from me, as if we’re a normal mother and son greeting each other at the start of our weekly visit. I reflexively step back. I don’t feel a twinge of filial affection or guilt or regret. I spent my reserves of those emotions when I visited Erica Hatfield. She turns and walks over to the leather sofa and sits, then pats the space next to her. Is this an act, an attempt to disarm or unsettle me? I pull up a chair from the desk and sit across from her.

“Tell me, Parky,” she says in her still familiar fluty voice. “What is this mess?”

“The Assembly has hurt people very close to me. But I’m sure you know all about that.”

“True adherents do not harm anyone. The Fount promotes peace and tolerance for all people. You were taught that when you were a child. You’re here because of our lawsuit.”

“I’m here because Harmon Cherry, Richard Baxter, and Deanna Poulos. All dead because someone inside your church killed them.”

“Would you like something to drink, Parky? Some tea? Or water?” Her composure astonishes me. She waits a moment for my reply, but I can only gape at her. She shrugs daintily. “I think I’ll have some tea.” She goes over to the desk, pulls open a drawer filled with bags of exotic teas, drops one into her cup, and pours steaming water from a ceramic kettle. She sits back down, balancing the cup and saucer on her knees. “Harmon Cherry was a friend of the Assembly. His suicide was a tragedy. We could have helped him.”

“Rich Baxter told me that Harmon was murdered.”

“Rich Baxter was a thief and a drug addict. He took millions of dollars destined for good works and killed himself when he was found out. I don’t know anything about this third person . . . Diana?”