Trophy Kid (7 page)

At that point Dr. Moody advised Robert and Greta that it might be best to let me adjust at my own pace and in my own way. He was leaving on a six-week promotional tour for his new book,
My Kid Would Never Do That: Ten Steps to Taking Children off Their Pedestals,
and would check on me at the conclusion of the tour.

Greta and Robert were not pleased. Why would they be? The entire world was in love with them, and this one three-year-old was ripping up their head shots with gleeful abandon.

Fortunately, an event took place that took Robert and Greta’s attention off me. Guava was born. They had their “love child,” and the pressure was off me to accept them as my new mother and father.

Several weeks after Guava’s birth, I took my belongings out of my shoe box and placed them on the Aladdin table next to my bed. On my own, I gave the battered shoe box with the egg, tomato, and coffee stains on it to Hana to throw away.

“You see how they are?” I asked Tom.

“What?” he said, looking up from his notepad, where he was probably scribbling a few key words for when he went home to write up the story. “Yeah, I guess so.” It was not exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

“Tell me something lousy that happened to you,” I said.

Tom let out a little laugh before saying, “All right, that seems fair.” He thought for a moment. “Okay, I’ve got one. I was playing for Chattanooga in the Southern League. Double-A team for the Reds.”

“What position did you play?” I asked.

“Third base. Anyway, I’d just gone four for four against the Carolina Mudcats, including a double and a home run. After I’d changed into my street clothes, the manager called me into his office.

“‘Close the door,’ he said when I walked in. I was thinking I was getting a bump up to Triple-A and he didn’t want the other players to hear. Ballplayers hate it when someone gets bumped up to the next level. It can be your best friend; it doesn’t matter. That’s one less spot on the roster for you.

“So Terry, that was my manager, says to me, ‘Tom, I’ve got some bad news. Management has decided to cut you from the roster.’

“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘But I just went four for four.’

“Terry goes, ‘Let me ask you something. What pitches did you hit?’

“I suddenly knew where this was going. ‘Fastballs,’ I said. ‘They were all fastballs.’

“‘Exactly,’ Terry says.”

“Wait, I don’t get it,” I jumped in. “What’s wrong with hitting fastballs?”

“Nothing,” said Tom. “Except there’s about a million guys who can hit fastballs. What gets you to the majors and what keeps you there is hitting the curve, and I couldn’t hit a curve ball to save my life.”

“So that was it?”

“Yeah. At least I can say I went four for four in my last game.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s so cold.”

“That’s professional sports. I still get the heebie-jeebies every time spring training rolls around.”

“So is that when you started the band with Rusty?”

“No. I spent about six months doing absolutely nothing except feeling sorry for myself and thinking about what might have been. All I’d ever wanted was to be a professional baseball player. Then I met Jessica, and she sort of made me realize that my life wasn’t over. I’d been drafted by the Reds right out of high school and hadn’t given much thought to getting an education, which my mom told me I’d regret. She was right, of course. So I enrolled in Pasadena City College and started taking writing classes.”

“What about the band with Rusty?” I asked.

“I met Rusty in one of my classes. I think it was English lit,” Tom said. “I’d been teaching myself how to play guitar; Rusty had been playing for a while. We started hanging out together and learning as many songs as we could. Pretty soon we were writing our own songs. Most of them were terrible.” Tom shook his head and laughed. “I’m what you might call a professional failure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve made money as a baseball player, a musician, and a writer, but I’ve never been good enough make it to the major leagues or get a record deal—”

“Or write a book with your name on the front cover,” I said, finishing his thought.

“Exactly,” Tom said. “But I’m not complaining. All in all, I have a pretty good life.”

Tom’s gaze shifted away for a moment, and then he looked me directly in the eye. “Robert and Greta may be movie stars and all that, but they’re still just two people with an impossible task.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“To raise a child who will never love them as much as he loves his real parents.”

eight

“We’ve been getting into some things that I don’t think Robert and Greta are going to be too crazy about,” Tom said the next morning. “I mean, from everything you’ve told me, this isn’t the book that is—how did Robert put it?—‘based on your best self.’”

“I know. But it’s about who I really am,” I said. “And who they are, too,” I added.

“That’s the part I’m worried about.” Tom sighed. “Okay, let’s push forward. We’ll put it all in and worry about the consequences later.”

I smiled. “Good.”

“Of course, I want to warn you, not worrying about the consequences has always gotten me into trouble in the past.” Tom pulled out his notepad. “All right, the last time we talked about your real family…I guess birth family would be more accurate, since your family here is real, too.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” I joked.

Tom just nodded. “You were telling me about your father. He worked as an engineer.”

“A mechanical engineer,” I corrected him.

“Right. Do you have any other memories of him that stand out?”

“Just doing what he used to call our gymnastics, which basically was him throwing me up in the air and catching me or pulling me through his legs from behind and then tossing me into the air. That was my favorite.”

“And your sister…”

“Suzzie. She was a couple of years older than me. I mostly remember her teasing me until I cried. Then she’d tickle me, and I’d be so mad at her I didn’t want to laugh, but I couldn’t help it.”

“Do you remember anyone else from your family? They didn’t find any other relatives, right?”

“Not at the time,” I said cautiously.

“What do you mean?”

I hesitated before saying anything else. I trusted Tom, but I still wasn’t completely sure I should tell him this story.

“Something happened to make you think otherwise?” Tom asked.

I nodded but still didn’t speak.

“What? What happened?”

It was my eleventh birthday. Greta threw a big party for me at the house, populated by children I didn’t know and their celebrity parents.

I’d been looking around for Guava, who I’d overheard earlier promising Greta she wouldn’t “steal focus” at my birthday party. That was when I noticed a bullish-looking man with a bushy gray and black mustache and pasty white skin standing in the corner of our sunken living room. He stood behind the grand piano, sipping from a plastic cup and stuffing mini-quiches into his mouth.

It was obvious that he didn’t fit in with the actors, agents, publicists, attorneys, and other entertainment-industry personas who had brought their children and expensive presents to, for the most part, make a good impression on Robert and Greta, and to a lesser extent, celebrate the anniversary of my birth.

The strange man was searching the room, flakes of mini-quiche crust making a home in his mustache and on his white shirt, when our gazes met. He quietly set his plate and cup down on the otherwise-bare $25,000 piano and walked toward me.

“Josef,” he said with wide a smile, revealing crooked yellow teeth, “I am your uncle Vladimir Petrovic.”

Before I could even begin to process what he was saying or what it meant, he’d wrapped his torpedo arms around me and tears were dripping down his face onto my forehead.

“My brother, God rest his soul, was married to your father’s sister, God rest her soul,” he said with a heavy Eastern European accent. “We are relatives!”

I knew that what this man was saying didn’t add up to his being a “relative.” But in the “it’s all relative” sense, this was the first person I’d ever met who had any connection to my real family, and despite the fact that he was pretty gross, I felt a little leap in my heart.

He pulled away enough to “get a good look” at me with his twinkly gray eyes. I was still in a state of disbelief when two of my father’s security men swooped in, separating me from Vladimir Petrovic.

Security man number one said to Vladimir, “Please come with me, sir.”

“But this is Josef,” Vladimir said, pointing at me.

“We know who he is,” said security man number two. “And we know who you are, and you’ve been warned not to come within two hundred yards of this property. Now please leave quietly with us or we will have to turn you over to the police. You don’t want that, do you, sir?”

Before I could hear Vladimir’s answer, security man number one was whisking me away, saying, “Don’t give that man any concern, young man; we won’t let him harm you.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw Vladimir Petrovic looking over
his
shoulder as he was escorted toward the back entrance. I hadn’t thought for a moment that Vladimir Petrovic wanted to harm me.

Later that night, after all the guests had left, I was in my room alone, halfheartedly unwrapping my gifts, when I heard Robert’s voice over the intercom asking me to come down to the library.

“Close the door and sit down, Joe,” said Robert when I entered the room. I sat in an overstuffed armchair opposite him.

“I’m sure you’ve been wondering about the man who snuck into your party this afternoon,” Robert said in his most serious voice.

“He said he was a relative,” I said anxiously. “Is he?”

“You’re too young to understand this,” Robert said, “but there are people in the world whose only aim is to take advantage of those who have more than they do.”

I understood what he meant, but I didn’t think it applied to the man who’d been whisked away by his security team.

“These people,” Robert continued, “are too lazy or lack the skill to achieve success on their own, so they prey on those who
do
have wealth or talent, or in your mother’s and my case, both. The man you met today is one of those people.”

What was he saying? That the man who had identified himself as my “relative,” Vladimir Petrovic, was trying to get money out of him? If that was his only aim, he was a better actor than Robert, because those tears rolling off his stubbly chin seemed real.

“This man,” Robert went on, “started sending you letters several months ago.”

“What letters?” I wanted to know.

“It’s not important.”

Someone who knew my family was sending me letters, and it wasn’t important?!

“But I didn’t get them,” I said, totally confused and frustrated.

“No, of course not. Joe, I’m your father and it’s my job to protect you…mine and my security team’s. They check the mail every day for any suspicious packages. This man…”

“Mr. Petrovic?”

“Don’t say his name,” Robert said disapprovingly. “This man sent you several letters trying to establish a relationship with you. He’s not a relative, Joe.”

“I know that, but he said his brother was married to my father’s sister. That’s almost related, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t. All this man wants is money. He somehow got the name of my attorney—”

“Uncle Larry?”

“Yes, Uncle Larry.”

“Uncle Larry’s not really my uncle, but you let me see him. Why can’t I see Mr. Petrovic? He’s closer to being a real relative than Uncle Larry.”

“You’re confusing the issue, son. Don’t be obtuse.”

Yes, my so-called father called his eleven-year-old son obtuse. (I looked it up immediately after that conversation was finished; it means thick-headed or dim-witted.)

“When we refer to Larry Weinstein as Uncle Larry,” Robert continued, “the word
uncle
is being used as a term of affection. Anyway, Uncle Larry and I met with this man, and—well, you saw him, he’s disgusting. He said he was in the country for a short while and wanted to spend some time with you.”

“That sounds okay, right?”

“No, not in this case. He wanted us to give him money to visit with you.”

“Maybe he’s poor and just wanted a little money to take me somewhere, like to the zoo.”

“The zoo?” Robert scoffed. “When we told him we’d give him money
not
to visit you, he took it.”

“Maybe he was confused,” I pleaded in Vladimir’s defense. “I don’t think he understands English very well.”

Nothing I was saying was having the slightest impact on Robert, who leaned forward in his chair and stared into my eyes. It reminded me of his performance in a movie when he played a hard-boiled detective who had to tell a woman she was never going to see her husband again.

“The only reason he showed up today was to get more money out of us.
Not
to visit you. I’m sorry you had to know about this, Joe, but believe me—all that man wants is money. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but he has a criminal record.”

“He does?”

“Uncle Larry did a security check on him. He was in jail in Croatia.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a thief and he still is. Don’t worry; we’ll do everything we can to keep him away from you. If he makes another attempt to see you, we’ll have him arrested.”

“Maybe I have other relatives in Croatia he knows about,” I said.

“You see the damage he’s already done, filling you with false hope?”

“Maybe it isn’t false hope. Maybe it’s true hope.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No,” I said. “He seemed nice.”

“People like that always do,” Robert said.

As was his usual practice, Tom had listened to my entire story without taking more than a note or two.

“Did you ever hear from or about Vladimir again?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Do you think Robert was right? That all he was after was money?”

“No,” I said, the bitterness starting to leak out as I spoke. “I think Vladimir just didn’t understand English very well and was confused.”

“What about his being in jail?”

“Maybe it was because of the war,” I said. “Maybe he stole something to take care of his family. I think Robert totally overreacted and kept me from seeing someone who knew my family.”

Before Tom had a chance to respond, I heard somebody bounding up the stairs. It was Robert in his tennis outfit.

“We need a fourth for doubles,” Robert said to Tom. “You interested?”

“What about Joe?” Tom asked.

“It’s only for an hour. You can get back to the book after we play.”

“No,” Tom said, “I meant what about Joe for your game?”

“That’s not a good idea,” Robert and I said simultaneously. The first and last time I tried to play tennis with Robert, he’d decided it was better to come over to my side of the net and correct my grip every three minutes, rather than have fun batting the ball around the court. Still, I appreciated the way Tom was trying to look out for me.

“We probably should keep going here,” Tom said, also for my benefit.

Robert didn’t seem to catch it. “Come on down. I insist,” he said. “There’s some extra shorts and T-shirts in that closet behind you. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.” Robert bounded back down the stairs two at a time.

It wasn’t easy to say no to Robert.

“I guess I’m playing tennis,” Tom said.