Born Savages

by Cora Brent

  “Yeah,” I respond once again in the same bored voice when reminded of my confidentiality clause.

  Of course I told Brock about everything, but it’s not like he’ll be phoning the tabloids as soon as I’m out the door. If he does, then Gary Vogel can feel free to sue me for my handful of nearly worthless belongings and the pocket change in my bank account. My financial status isn’t as bleak as I’m making it sound. I just don’t have much use for acquiring stuff. If there’s anything my early life taught me it’s that too many shiny things aren’t good for you.

  Before I head out I give Hal Johnson two months of rent, which he happily pockets. I don’t expect there will be a problem returning to my apartment whenever I want to. There’s not exactly a thick line of people scrambling to live upstairs to a foul-smelling old man who’s got a few checkers missing from the board and likes to use his shotgun on the gray squirrels who tiptoe their way into the front yard.

  Brock, however, is sorry to see me go and gets suddenly worried about the whole thing . “So they, the Savages, really don’t know you’re coming?”

  I can only shrug because all I know is what Gary Vogel has chosen to tell me. “I don’t think they know.”

  I’m sure it’s true. After all, the whole point is to inflict return-of-the-prodigal-Savage surprise. Gary never asked me too much about my history with the family. That leads me to think he somehow already knows it all. Men like Gary are relentlessly calculating. They have no patience for any bombshells they don’t light the fuse to.

  Of course I always knew I wasn’t to the manner born, not a blood Savage. My earliest memories include a woman with thick bristles on her upper lip and a warped left hand with six-inch fingernails. She used to hit me over and over again and shove me into a closet for long stretches of time that might have been hours as easily as they might have been days. Strangely, being inside the closet was better than being outside of it. That might explain my tendency to hang out underground.

  I don’t know at what point the lip-haired, club-handed child abuser disappeared, but for a while I slid from one messy home to another. Mina Savage always insisted I was five years old when she ‘found’ me, although she invented my birthday. She always used that term to describe it though. Found. Like I was sitting primly on some urban street corner and just waiting to be discovered by a carefree fairy godmother with Louis Vuitton fixtures.

  In truth, Mina went to some trouble to find a kid when she decided she wanted one. She knew she didn’t have the patience for a squalling, shitting, diapered blob, so she had her lawyers fan out and search for something more to her liking. Something cute and endearing, something that knew how to wipe its own ass and didn’t have any nearby family who might object to creative legalities. Something like a little boy who had already spent years in a system filled with crooked bureaucrats who would gladly face the other way if it meant a they could cuddle an armful of crisp green paper.

  Something exactly like me.

  I don’t mean to sound bitter or to make it sound like Mina Savage was a horrible woman. I’m not bitter and she wasn’t horrible. Careless, self-absorbed and perennially confused, but terrible? No.

  She was the daughter and granddaughter of legends, born into the fishbowl of fame and privilege. Maybe that burden alone had fucked her up at an early age.

  Mina was beautiful, stunning. Men were easily captivated by her looks and her name. They had to get a lot closer before they realized that beneath all that auburn-haired glamor was a messy patchwork of scars, despair and addiction. Mina had already been discarded by three husbands who were glad enough to open up their checkbooks and purchase their freedom.

  Shortly after I was swept into her care we left the country. We didn’t return for over a decade.

  Those years were pretty good for me; a sequence of posh boarding schools and fantastic adventures throughout old Europe. Americans always seemed to be everywhere so it was easy to believe we were in some floating version of our homeland.

  Believe it or not, failed politicians, woeful ex-movie stars and a packs of disgraced corporate elites tend to run amok in international lands. Think of it as a contemporary version of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.

  Still, I remain grateful to Mina for paying attention to my education, even though she seemed to forget my existence for large swaths of time. Whether she’d stashed me in the picturesque Alps or deep in the fabled moors of Yorkshire, I could always count on her to eventually show up in a perfumed cloud and rediscover her motherhood.

  I remember being happy to see her. Happy, even though I knew I’d be yanked from yet another cozy situation and taken on a frenetic holiday until Mina found a different cure for her loneliness. Then she would deposit me in another luxurious setting thickly populated with more American castoff kids.

  Mina was a hell of a parent when she made the effort. After all, it was Mina who showed me the Ufizzi and the Louvre, Mina who photographed me standing proudly in front of the Colosseum, and Mina who arranged for a tour of the caves of France’s Dordogne region when I mentioned learning all about the Lascaux cave in school.

  She didn’t talk about her family, the Savages. Movie stars and sad stories. All I ever knew of them were the things I had read. The fact that I had aunts, uncles and cousins seemed irrelevant. It didn’t occur to me to want to be around them. In fact I didn’t give them much thought at all until Mina, bedraggled and exhausted from another heartbreak, dragged me out of a converted castle in the Scottish Highlands and announced we were going ‘home’.

  I can remember objecting, sputtering something like “Shit, now? Really? I’ll be a senior.”

  But when Mina got an idea into her head – adopting a kid, marrying a sheik, dragging a teenager back to the Home of the Brave – there was no getting rid of it.

  I found myself riding over an ocean in the private plane belonging to one of Mina’s old friends as I moodily destroyed tins of caviar and pouted about the fact that I’d been this fucking close to porking the new girl in school, a Russian beauty distantly related to some royal family that’d been shot a hundred years ago in Siberia.

  Everything was different that time. But I didn’t realize it until Mina left me on her brother’s doorstep somewhere in the Arizona desert and then ducked back into the luxury Town Car for the ride to Scottsdale’s finest rehab facility.

  Two months later I learned the hard way that Mina’s failures were much worse than I’d ever suspected.

  “Oz?” calls Brock and he’s got the Concerned Friend grimace on his face again.

  I realize that I’ve been nervously clicking a pen while my thoughts strayed. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about Mina over the past five years. She was a fickle woman with her own set of demons. There’s not much point in trying to understand her now.

  “I need to get on the road.” I reluctantly set the pen down on Brock’s desk.

  If I push it I can reach western Arizona in two days. Surely they’re all there already. Surely she’s there already. Gary had assured me she would be, even though I hadn’t asked, not specifically, not about her. Like I said, Gary must know a few things already. He wouldn’t have called me in the first place if he didn’t.

  After bending down and giving Brock an awkward man-hug in his wheelchair, I notice that he’s staring at me with a worried frown.

  “You remember who you are, Oz-man” he says, nodding. “Don’t let them edit you into something else.”

  “I will. And I won’t.”

  Flimsy promises. I don’t give a god almighty fuck what they do with the footage. They could cast me as King Kong With Testicular Scabies and it would bother me as much as a paper cut.

  There’s only one good reason in the world for me to go down this road. One. And I don’t even know whether she wants anything to do with me. Or if she’s even worth the trouble at this point.

  Shit.

  First love.

  Only love.

  A strange and turbulent summer tha
t was the best and worst part of my life.

  I keep the windows wide open in the pickup as I slowly thread my way down through the cool greenery of the mountain roads. I appreciate it all; the fresh wisps of summer, the fluttering hands of the forest.

  Where I’m going will be much hotter, much harsher. There’s no place to fucking hide there.

  Thinking about her, even the most fleeting of memories, tends to lengthen my dick. That’s no way to start a long road trip. So instead I think about the long, wandering years since then; a thousand adventures and disasters that blur together and are all equally trivial.

  No good. Today it all leads back to her. After all, nobody who spends twenty-three years on this earth is a blank slate. We are the sum of our pains and trials, joys and heartaches. It’s impossible to guess them all. And to really understand anything about what’s happening today you have to go backwards first.

  You have to understand what happened five years ago….

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Five Years Ago: Part 1

  Almost as soon as they land in New York they are leaving.

  The woman surrounds herself with people who are paid to tend to her belongings, offer her drinks, escort her to the decadent lounge where the wealthy are not required to mingle with ordinary people. She is agitated, clawing at the inside of her palms with her fingernails, as is her habit when the universe has gone out of order.

  Oscar suspects the city has bad memories for her. His mother is a collector of bad memories. They are finally overcrowding her mind.

  He is disappointed to be leaving so soon. He knew this place once, New York. This was where he lived, although he remembers little about it except bad smells and cold alleys. He looks out the windows and sees nothing of beauty; only the industrial background of a major international airport. It manages to look ugly even in the balmy spell of early summer. But he had glimpsed the legendary skyline as the plane descended and badly wanted to see it up close. Briefly he considers leaving the woman here and disappearing into the throngs of weary travelers.

  “Oscar,” the woman croaks and holds out a thin hand to him as a weak smile tries to take custody of her face.

  Much of the time she forgets he exists but now she would like him to sit beside her. He sinks into a plush armchair and tries not to look at her face. It’s cracked and drawn, a face of pain, a face that seems even more ugly because for so long it was beautiful.

  He decides he must be a complete asshole for even noticing these things.

  Oscar searches for things to say to his mother. They should have things to say to one another. But she’s fretful and distracted. Anyway, his mind keeps going in odd directions, thinking about the strangeness of being in his own country again. Then he starts thinking about the girls he knew from his latest school. Some were girlfriends for brief stretches of angst-filled time. Others were just dirty hookups. Oscar doesn’t miss any of them. But he idly catalogues them in his mind because it’s something to do while he sits beside a ruined woman, waiting for their plane to refuel.

  “You’ll enjoy being there,” says Oscar’s mother as she rubs at her temples and then slides her large sunglasses back onto her thin face. She has acquired a curious, affected accent from all her years of travel. Oscar has no such accent. He’s convinced hers is deliberate.

  She smiles at him again and he sees his distorted reflection in her dark lenses. “I loved Atlantis as a child. My father filmed seven movies there. You’ve seen them, haven’t you, his movies? Yes, I’m sure I showed them to you. When he bought the place he decided to live there part time and had a house built. None of the artificial buildings they added to the set could tame that wild beauty, just as it couldn’t tame your grandfather. I wish you’d known Rex. He was a king. He was…”

  Oscar’s mother loses her train of thought as she stares off into the past. Her lip quivers. Oscar reaches for her arm. He knows something is wrong with her, something much worse than what’s usually wrong with her. It seems as if she is decaying into the folds of her Chanel pantsuit.

  She shakes off the gloom, pats his hand and smiles another terrible smile. Her voice is a tuneless singsong. “It’s so perfect that August moved the children out there. It’s a magical place for children. I’m glad he remembers that. You will see, Oscar.”

  Oscar has only a vague idea what’s she’s talking about. His adopted mother, Mina, is a Savage. Oscar knows that when he mentions this fact to other Americans they will usually understand what he means. Mina was never an actress though. She never did much at all except frolic with rich, abusive men and impulsively adopt a child. The Savages were a legendary Hollywood family, although they’ve been cursed by scandal and heartbreak for decades. Oscar has never met any of them. They don’t even really matter to him.

  But now he is caught up in Mina’s latest odyssey. They will be flying to Arizona, to the old film ranch in the desert that was Mina’s childhood paradise. Mina apparently plans for them to remain there for some time, in the place where her brother’s family lives.

  Oscar objects to it all, but only in silence. He’s not a child for fuck’s sake. He’s a month past his seventeenth birthday and capable as any man. Usually if bullshit even comes sniffing in his direction he smacks it back with two mighty fists. And this is major bullshit, this bizarre trek to another continent, to a lost era.

  He could easily have scoffed at Mina and refused her pleas when she made her announcement two days ago in the bleak confines of the headmaster’s office. She wouldn’t have known what to do if he had.

  “Oscar! We are going home! Back to America. You will meet your cousins!”

  Home?

  America?

  Cousins?

  These concepts are all strange to him. The headmaster did nothing to dissuade Mina. He was apparently tired of dealing with the parade of heartbroken girls that the charismatic Oscar Savage left in his wake wherever he walked.

  Mina had always seemed to hate America. How many times had she insisted to Oscar that the whole nation was nothing but a cauldron of scandal, gossip, and narcissism? Oscar didn’t exactly believe that was true. Mina assumes the world of cutthroat celebrities is universal; that it exists in Pocatello, Idaho in the exact same form as it is exists in Beverly Hills.

  Oscar could have dug his heels into European soil and refused to leave. Mina would not have known how to force him. But he didn’t have the heart to refuse her. No matter how careless of a mother she was, she was the only one he had. He could tell immediately that she was sick. He still didn’t know whether it was mental or physical, but she needed him. So Oscar quietly, if resentfully, packed his things and followed his mother out of the Scottish countryside.

  Tentatively, Oscar asks if they might remain in New York for a short time but Mina wearily reminds him that their posh traveling arrangements are the result of a favor that is nearly at an end. She will not consider a commercial flight. Moreover, her brother is expecting her out in Arizona. His entire family is expecting her, expecting both of them. According to Mina these Savage people are overjoyed at the prospect of finally meeting a long lost cousin. Oscar thinks about that and pictures them; a herd of displaced socialites squatting in the desert dust and clutching designer bags as their flawless faces expectantly scan the sky.

  The flight to Phoenix takes five hours. Oscar looks down into the wide expanse of his country. From the air it appears largely unpopulated. Every once in a while there will be a flash of metal in the sunlight, a hint at a pocket of humanity. They fly over interminable brown mountains that give way to a wide valley. It is a riot of beige neighborhoods riddled with aqua-colored dots that Oscar figures are swimming pools. It looks nothing like the place Mina described.

  There is a car waiting, of course. On the ground, Phoenix is a maze of concrete and asphalt that shimmers in the heat. Soon the city gives way to sprawling residential stucco in various shades of taupe. Finally, the long stretch of suburbia ends and they are careening through a cactus-riddle
d landscape ringed by distant brown mountains.

  Oscar grows uneasy as they turn off the freeway and spend miles on a bumpy road that dissolves into dirt. Mina has passed out beside him and the driver is nothing but a silent head.

  “Shit,” Oscar mutters, and by the time they reach a scattered collection of buildings he’s expecting the worst.

  Oscar slides out of the door as Mina struggles to pull herself back into the land of the conscious. The brilliant sunshine is so harsh, nearly painful.

  He curses again and rubs his eyes, seeing spots and beyond that, an imprint of a ghost town. When he opens them, a girl has materialized. She looks him up and down with a bored expression, then tosses a mane of wavy dark hair. Oscar figures she’s one of the Savage cousins. She looks about as friendly as your average fork-tongued lizard.

  Twenty yards away is a rambling, one story, rustically luxurious ranch home that was probably once quite something but now just looks like it’s seen better days. Beyond that is a splintery church, a rickety barn, a shabby general store with a teetering façade, and a narrow Victorian-style building with a sagging balcony and a wooden sign with the word ‘BROTHEL’ plainly spelled out in weathered lettering.

  “Welcome to paradise, cousin,” laughs the girl who seconds earlier had looked at him like he was a shit-filled paper bag. Her face is pretty, her expression mocking and even though she’s not as filled out as the girls Oscar usually likes he can’t avoid taking interest in what he does see.

  Then Mina spills out of the car and people suddenly start popping up from everywhere. The dark-haired girl is joined by a blonde and a redhead. Both of them stare at him and giggle like idiots. A teenage boy rides up on an arthritic pony and hops off, generating a cloud of dust. That pisses off a bigger teenage boy who has somehow erupted from the nearest cactus.

  “Motherfucker,” complains the larger boy and swipes at the rider.