“I think I get the idea,” Tom interrupted.
“She would have returned me if she could,” I said.
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
“No. But sometimes I feel like I’m not the kid she thinks she bought.”
Tom leaned forward, propping his right elbow on the desk and setting his chin in the palm of his hand.
“Who’s the kid she thinks she bought?” Tom asked.
“The kid they take out in public. The one who’s forever grateful to them and praises them for rescuing him from his pitiful, tragic, orphan life. I mean, what kid wouldn’t want to be adopted by movie stars?”
“I know Greta and Robert aren’t perfect, but they don’t seem that horrible, either. In their own way, I think they’re doing the best they can.”
I was ready to tell Tom something important, something that would make him see how inept Greta and Robert were as my so-called parents.
“You don’t know what it was like when I first got here,” I said.
“Tell me.”
Before I left Dubrovnik with Robert and Greta at the age of three, one of the soldiers at the military base squatted down and gave me a shoe box. Inside were photographs of my mother, father, and sister they’d taken from our apartment. There were also several small toys: a top, some hand-carved animals, a snow globe of Dubrovnik, and a tiny metal fire engine. Another soldier handed Robert a small travel bag containing some of my clothes.
I kept the shoe box in my lap all the way from Dubrovnik to Los Angeles; I even took it with me each time I went to the bathroom.
I held it tightly in the limo that took us from the airport to Robert and Greta’s Bel-Air house.
When Robert carried me up the stairs to my new bedroom, I clutched my shoe box as I twisted and turned and cried to be put down.
While in Dubrovnik, Robert had hired a Croatian woman named Hana to be my live-in nanny and translator until I learned English. Greta had gone all out in putting together the perfect boy’s room, and Hana explained that it was now mine.
The walls were powder blue. My little bed was covered with a comforter decorated with Winnie-the-Pooh characters. There were at least a half-dozen stuffed animals on the bed.
On the walls were framed cels from Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, 101 Dalmatians, and Lady and the Tramp.
There was a Mickey Mouse dresser with Mickey stenciled onto the drawers, and a Donald Duck entertainment center.
There were tables on either side of my bed, one with the image of Aladdin and the other with the Genie.
I later found out that Disney had donated most of the furniture and even the highly valuable cels because the room was to be featured in Home and Style magazine.
There was a huge treasure chest that Greta opened, revealing dozens of toys.
“And look at this, Joey,” Greta said enthusiastically through Hana.
Greta turned off the light: the entire ceiling glowed with stars. Even though I was amazed, I was determined not to like anything about my new home, so I kept my pout on.
After a moment, Greta flipped the light back on.
Robert finally set me down on the floor. “Do you like your room?” Hana translated for Robert.
I ignored the question, sat on the Song of the South rug in the middle of the room, and opened my shoe box. One by one I took out the photographs of my mother, father, and sister; the top; the hand-carved animals; the tourist-shop snow globe of Dubrovnik; and the tiny metal fire engine and placed them on the rug in front of me.
Greta tried to remove my old clothes and get me into my brand-new Goofy pajamas, but I refused to let her. She finally gave up and left the room, along with Robert, leaving Hana to get me changed, washed up, and into bed. Robert and Greta then came back into the room and attempted to kiss me goodnight, but I flopped onto my stomach and buried my head beneath my pillow.
When I awoke after my first night in the house in Bel-Air, the pictures of my mother, father, and sister, along with my old toys, had been placed on the Aladdin table on the right side of my bed. On the Genie table, there was a picture of Robert and Greta and me taken in Dubrovnik. In the photo, Greta and Robert wore movie-star smiles, while I had a surprised look on my face, like the photographer had made flowers appear in one hand while he snapped the picture with the other—which was exactly what he had done to distract me from crying.
I knocked the picture of me with Robert and Greta onto the floor. I then looked around for my shoe box. I wasn’t planning on staying in this house and wanted to be ready when my real mother and father came back from heaven, or wherever they were, to take me home. It wasn’t anywhere in the room, so I took the long journey down the stairs and screamed “box” in Croatian over and over again.
Greta came running down the stairs in her robe and found me trying to open the front door. I don’t know why I was doing that. I guess I thought I might find the box that had transported my possessions outside. Or maybe I just wanted to go home. Greta pulled me away from the door and got down on the floor with me, trying to find out what was the matter.
“Box, box,” I kept crying in Croatian.
By this time our cook, Octavia, had arrived on the scene, her hands caked in flour.
“Octavia, go get Hana. She’s in the room next to Joe’s,” Greta ordered, in desperation. Octavia sprinted up the stairs, leaving a series of gradually fading flour handprints on the stair rail.
“Joey, what is it honey?” Greta asked, while holding me firmly in place so I wouldn’t run off.
“Box, box!” I cried.
Finally, a groggy Hana, also in her robe, came down the stairs and asked me what was the matter.
“Box!” I said again.
“He is saying ‘box,’” Hana said to Greta.
“Box?” Greta repeated several times, searching for meaning. “Oh, he must mean that old shoe box his things were in. Why would he want that?”
“Box!” I shouted louder than ever.
“Oh, my god!” Greta said, exasperated. “Octavia, look in the trash and see if you can find a shoe box.”
Several minutes later Octavia returned with the shoe box, which now bore tomato stains, bits of egg yolk, and coffee grounds.
“Box,” I said happily when she handed it to me.
I ran to the stairs and began climbing them. Hana picked me up and carried me to my room, with Greta following. Octavia had gone back to the kitchen to finish preparing breakfast.
Once in my room, I went to the Aladdin table and put all my possessions in the box.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Greta said.
She then spotted the photo of her, Robert, and me on the floor. She walked over, picked it up, and put it back on the Genie table.
“Hana, please try to explain to him that this is his home now,” Greta said. She then looked at the Goofy alarm clock that was next to their photo.
“Oh, no, I’m going to be late for the studio,” she said.
Greta got down on the floor with me. I didn’t look at her. “Joey, we want you to be happy here.” She looked at Hana. “Translate,” she ordered.
Hana translated, but I still didn’t look up. Instead, I shook the Dubrovnik snow globe and watched the snow come down over my city.
“Joey, Mommy has to go to work, but when I get home, we’ll make everything better for you.” She cranked her neck toward Hana: “Translate.”
Hana translated, but all I did was give the snow globe another shake.
“It’s nothing, really, right? Do I need to be concerned? I should go to work, right?” Greta asked Hana, who, having only worked for Greta for a few days, was reticent to offer an answer.
“Okay, I’m going to work,” Greta said to Hana, her voice uncertain. “Everything will be all right, right?”
“I will take care of him. Don’t you worry, Ms. Powell,” Hana said reassuringly.
“Okay. I’ll call you in a little while. Bye, Joey,” she said to me in a sweet v
oice, desperate to get even a nugget of sweetness in return. I shook the snow globe again, and she left the room.
My insistence on keeping my possessions from home in my shoe box continued into the next week. My face was in a constant pout and I screamed a lot.
Robert decided it might be a good idea to bring in an expert. A child psychiatrist, Filmore Moody, MD, PhD, and SAG (Screen Actors Guild—Dr. Moody had his own show on cable), came to our house to assess the situation.
After spending forty-five minutes with me, during which he tried to engage me by playing games with blocks and with the stuffed animals that normally were huddled together on top of my bed, Dr. Moody told Robert and Greta that there were no easy solutions to the grief I was experiencing. It was imperative that he see me no fewer than two times a week until I “took root” in my new home.
Eight months later, despite all the games with toys, blocks, and stuffed animals; despite all the crayon drawings and the application of every known modern technique for dealing with my grief—including having me rip up countless photos of Robert and Greta (old head shots were provided by the boxload from their respective talent agencies) until I burned out my aggression toward them—I still hadn’t taken root in my new home.
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.<
br />
“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.
Trophy Kid Page 5
