An excerpt from a piece that will be published in the 2016-17 Trillium Magazine coming out this Fall:
Family
Money in my family didn’t make its first appearance in the wake of Dad’s Hollywood success; wealth and affluence went back for several generations of the Johnson clan. While my mom’s side made out well enough financially, my dad’s side was made up of home grown patriarchal elites who used their tremendous wealth acquired through entrepreneurship, finance and business to live comfortable, exorbitant lifestyles and bring up children who would never want for anything. And where the men were entitled to their undeserved cut the women married into the families of other members of the American elite, the vicious entitled fortunate sons met at Ivy League schools, not dissimilar from their own brothers. The unions forged between the Johnsons and other upper class families through the bonds of matrimony served to keep the money flowing and the production of the next generation of needy, damaged children moving along. I always believed the bloodline had connections to some iteration of European royalty, the kind consisting only as a figurehead to mask the truly important people. We were old money that only my dad was able to translate into new money via the Jimmy the Mick movies.
But where my entire family on my dad’s side loved the decadence and excess of L.A., it was these exact qualities about the city that drove dad away, across the whole country to a quiet New England town. Despite the expansive continent between them, my dad still made it a point to fly us all out once a year around the holidays to visit, or at least this was the case until his dad passed and he cut off all ties with his brothers and sisters over disagreements over his funeral and the handling of his body. I was around Nathan’s age when we made the trip one year. We were greeted at the LAX terminal by Grandpa’s limo driver, Anju. The whole drive over to his 3 story, 80 acre, in ground pool, and movie complex containing mega mansion, I was playing the green Gameboy Color my parents had gotten me that year for Christmas along with “Pokemon Yellow Version.”
My mom was intent on my putting it away the moment we got to grandpa’s house, claiming my little cousins would be there and were it to get lost or broken she wouldn’t be getting me a new one. Looking back though I think the real reason she was so adamant I put it in my travel bag was so that I wouldn’t find an empty room in the house and play it the whole time we were there, only emerging for fresh batteries, a Capri-Sun and a cup full of mini Oreos. At the mention of my cousins a sickness permeated throughout my concave chest and spindly arms and legs. The game became tainted as each step my Pokemon trainer took through the tall grass at risk of getting attacked by wild Pokemon felt the same way each rotation of limo tires did in bringing us both closer to unavoidable trouble, the only difference was that I had no backup while the little character in my game did.
Even though I was technically 3 years older than Grant, the next oldest cousin, they exploited my smallness and outsider status for their wicked games. Each year I arrived at grandpa’s doorstep experiencing a tidal wave of dread and anxiety, mind set on the horrible, unexpectedly expected prank my cousins would pull on me that year. For how big grandpa’s house was it wasn’t big enough to hide from the unprovoked wrath of those children. I couldn’t even stay by my mom’s side as the moment we got there the kids were expelled from the immediate vicinity of the outside patio for the purpose of “letting the adults talk.” The reality behind our excommunication from the patio was so that our parents could construct fictionalized versions of us and all of our accomplishments, each couple trying to outdo the other in order to make themselves seem like the best parents, having been able to create such a wonderful child. In the best interest of these fabrications, it wouldn’t do well to have one of us waddle on by to the bathroom right through the glass doors behind the patio, clutching the bulky seat of a shit filled bathing suit or laughing so hard Coke spilled from our noses.
The whole time while my dad sat out on that patio with his family, doing his best to participate in the fibbing going on between his brothers and sisters, grandpa would just sit there in his cushioned deck chair smoking Parliament lights. By the way he’d take deep drag after deep drag, taking care to watch each exhalation of smoke descend in tendrils up into the California sky, it seemed like he wasn’t even there. The little acknowledgement anybody at that table paid him made it hard for me to discern whether he had gone mute, lost a lot of himself through his old age or if he was just waiting for somebody to look him in the eye and address him, Simon Johnson, the one who had, for the most part, paid for the cars, education, DUI and possession fines and bail outs, marriages and divorce proceedings, studio apartments and houses. Mom chalked it up to loneliness after his wife died. Dad made no mention of it. So there he’d sit for the last 5 years of his life, face expressionless, eyes hiding behind thick lensed Ray Bans smoking cigarettes and wearing ash stained Lakers T-shirts that held in his gut and displayed his enthusiasm (or lack of something better to do) for a franchise he’d been a season ticket holder for for well over a decade, driving down from the hills to the Staples Center alone, a solitary activity practiced amid the backdrop of thousands of roaring fans. Like many people in my family I don’t think I ever loved him.
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