Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  He pushed me against the shower door.

  “You can’t do that to me,” he snapped.

  I had never seen him angry. I had never seen him care about anything.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He calmed down. I removed his hand from my elbow, lit a cigarette, and closed the bathroom door behind us. It was the only place left in the house where one could have privacy.

  “It would be nice to know what you were doing, going through my clothes.”

  “I’m working for your parents. I’m doing wardrobe for the film with you. We’re using your stuff plus stuff from the store.”

  “My stuff? Who said you could use my stuff?”

  The soporific smell of my mother’s baked biscotti wafted under the bathroom door. Through the small window overlooking the backyard we could see my father and Max. They had fixed the camera and were now auditioning actors en plein air. The yard looked like an insane asylum, everyone walking in circles, talking to themselves.

  “God, they’re everywhere,” I said. “In the living room, in the yard, in my bedroom! And now you? My parents have no boundaries. You shouldn’t have accepted.”

  “Well, I did. So get over it. And by the way, you should get out of Topanga. Your clothes smell like cow shit.”

  He opened the bathroom door and stepped back out into the kitchen where my mother was getting ready to bake a second batch of sweets. They hugged.

  “Biscotti?” she offered with a fifties housewife smile, identical to the one she put on for the Spam commercial in Rome.

  “Sì, grazie, Mrs. Petri!”

  “Call me Serena, please. And good job on your Italian!” She put on a maternal face and handed him a Tupperware container. “Cotoletta alla milanese for your mom!”

  “Thanks, Serena. Say goodbye to Mr. Petri for me!”

  Henry gave me a cold nod and stepped out through the back door.

  “What?” my mother asked in an innocent tone, noticing my disbelief.

  “What do you mean what? That’s some surprise you were keeping from me.”

  “Oh, Henry? Yes…he’s a sweetheart.”

  “Why is he working for you? You didn’t even ask me if he could use my clothes.”

  Two actors passing through the kitchen perked up their ears. The word “working” scared them—or the idea that someone else would be working who wasn’t them, did. My mother gave them a reassuring smile.

  “We met him when you flaked on him. He told us about how you started to work at his store for fun. We all think that’s great, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “He seemed interested in Dad’s film. So we offered him the job.”

  “Are you paying him?”

  “Yes, of course! Seventy-five dollars a week.”

  “That’s nothing! Why did he accept?”

  “It’s extracurricular.”

  “Henry’s not even in school anymore.”

  “Well. We became friends. We like him. I promised to teach him and his mom Italian recipes.” She blew on two biscotti and bit off their tips. “Yummy. My best ever.”

  Max came into the kitchen. He was on the portable phone again, arguing in Spanish.

  “¡Lo sabía! Esto no es posible! Hay que decirles a bajar el alquiler de la suite de Valentino!”

  “Get out!” I exploded at him.

  “Don’t scream!” my mother screamed.

  “I should have stuck to writing song lyrics for rock stars. A much easier life,” Max mumbled to himself and left, slamming the door behind him.

  I wanted to run away but had nowhere to go, so I stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door. The truth was I’d stopped caring. I didn’t want Henry’s gloom lingering around me. How could he understand my Topanga days when he never even took his eyes off the screen of his arcade video game. Since I’d started hanging out with Deva, I wasn’t interested in him or the store, or anything that didn’t involve green pastures and communes. At home we only talked about Ettore’s movie and the actors and whether Johnny Depp’s agent had called. Max drifted from room to room leaving a wake of dirty plates and ashtrays. I heard him and my father laughing into the night, watching and studying horror films, but I was under a new spell. Topanga was like a force, a magnet that pulled me out of my bedroom, out of my classrooms. It was a new version of the Sicilian island, a place where I could get in touch with something primal. When I wasn’t in the canyon, I was thinking about the canyon, and when I was in the canyon, I spent hours watching hawks circle the sky, feeling the rough wind blow in from the foggy beaches below. I let it strike my face. I felt the sunlight slash through the clouds and scorch my head. I allowed that savage, hungry nature to beat me and took the beating joyfully. I felt stronger. I could take in unpredictable weather changes without tuning out. I learned to not be afraid of stray coyotes, spiders, snakes, and growling frogs penetrating my sleep and dreams.

  After school Deva and I took the yellow bus to Topanga and hiked to the run-down cottage where we took long outdoor baths, soaking in boiling water and drinking cheap wine. On weekends I waited for her to sneak out and meet me at the end of her driveway. We cruised the canyon at night. I returned home on an early-morning bus while my parents were still sleeping, and collapsed in bed, happy. The good nights were the ones when we walked under huge moons, immersed in nature, when the canyon was quiet and beautiful. We hid in the commune shrubs and spied on Bob and his scream sessions from the darkness. The bad nights were the ones when Deva’s father overworked her or tried to lock her up. She sometimes had to take on extra shifts at the restaurant to help pay the bills. She came out of the restaurant completely drunk. She got high on Vicodin and felt like trashing things, breaking bottles in parking lots and stealing mail only to toss it out. I went along. No matter what she did, her warm laughter always sounded like a party. When I asked her exactly what she did for her father, she sighed and said something about his music and how that was a Topanga thing and I wouldn’t understand. Kids weren’t treated as kids there. All families were like that. There were days when working for him meant not showing up to school. I scowled, thinking how ridiculous that was, without admitting that my own father was asking me to do the same. Even though Deva occasionally complained, I understood there was some kind of canyon pact I was not grasping. That was the way things had to go there. Families were ancient clans who had each other’s backs. They were a tribe and if I didn’t understand their ways it was because I wasn’t part of that tribe. Plus Deva’s father was from Montana originally. He grew up with a big sky over his head and the sense of endless possibilities. He had raised twins alone. He knew work and grit and had dealt with bulls and ranches. He’d smelled success and failure, and throughout it all, he kept his children close to him. Sometimes there were grounding punishments and sometimes there were days when Deva just disappeared, but I rarely got her to talk about those. It made her nervous and angry when I asked too many questions. She was unpredictable. One moment violently playful, the next withdrawn and absent. She rashly diminished and increased the distance between us with nothing more than a flicker of the eye. You never knew which persona would appear, but I learned to navigate the abrupt mood swings. And it was always worth it because when I came back to Van Nuys after our adventures, I felt like a queen descending from a magic mountain. Every day I spent up there, I felt my shoulders grow wider and my chest stronger. I wandered the suburban streets with new eyes. I was not alone anymore.

  17

  My father thought all he needed to make a film was hire trusted family members to be part of it. And we believed him. Ours would be an Italian family affair, just like the Coppolas. The reason why family-owned restaurants had the tastiest food was because it was in everyone’s best interest to run a good business.

  “Same with movies,” Ettore said. “When it’s all in the family, stealing from the owners is like stealing from yourself.”

  On the first day of filming, Timoteo, Henry, and I arrived in front of
the Hotel Alexandria at seven a.m. to avoid rush-hour traffic. Henry had found a way to get his car back from the Disneyland parking lot and was in charge of driving my brother and me on set. We sidestepped the limp bodies of homeless people still asleep by the entrance. My mother was already in the main hall, flustered, walking around fidgeting with a walkie-talkie, screaming at my father in Italian.

  “Non ti sento! Pronto! Non ti sento! Questo coso non funziona, cazzo!”

  Henry and I were in charge of costumes and set design, though I barely communicated with him. Having him there felt as if another bedroom of mine, another secret school spot, another closet had been invaded by my parents’ personalities, another small thing I’d discovered that wasn’t my own any longer, so I kept away. A Hispanic woman from the beauty parlor on Spring Street came to help the hair-and-makeup girls—a couple of junkies from Portland who had a tendency to fall behind. I noticed one of them pass out in front of the mirror. I told my father I thought he should fire her because she was obviously still shooting up, but he said I was being cruel, that she was just tired from waking up early.

  “Plus they’re both working for almost free. We’re not going to get anything better.”

  My mother was assistant to the director and also the caterer. My brother, the line producer, ran errands and tried to make people do things on time, or just do them. Max rounded up a team of film-school students to work in the sound and light departments. Four out of seven of the film’s principal actors were working actors. The rest lived on the fringes of show business. There was a thin line that divided the two categories. At first glance you couldn’t tell the difference. They all seemed adequate. They were in shape, had nose jobs, permanent eyeliner tattooed on their eyelids, and breast implants—just like all first-rate professionals. But there was something askew about them. You couldn’t put your finger on it until you had a conversation and discovered they were waiters, high-school drama teachers, nutritionists, and voice coaches. Still, the star, Vanessa Peters, had appeared in numerous episodes of Baywatch as well as Beverly Hills 90210. She was a runner-up to Drew Barrymore for the lead in a big romantic comedy. She was quirky and had a sexy, hoarse voice. She came on set with an assistant who had alopecia and a devotional attitude. She owned a cell phone and had dated David Lynch.

  My mother took over the abandoned kitchen next to the ballroom on the ground floor. She scrubbed the old stoves clean and cooked pasta for the crew’s lunch every day. Actresses initially asked for “eggs on the side” on their carbonara dishes, but when she explained that pasta was a wholesome experience, everyone let go of their diets. “You can’t segregate the tastes that make the magic happen. Accept the chaos; welcome the carbs.” Crew members developed secret crushes on her because of the food she cooked.

  “It tastes like the home I never had, Serena,” one of the runners kept saying with a dreamy expression.

  —

  The director of photography, a stoner from Big Bear Mountain with bags under his eyes, sometimes failed to press Record. The sound guys occasionally forgot to mention the roaring helicopters disturbing the live recordings, and the script supervisor usually failed to notice when actors wore different outfits within the same scene, but my father was Zen and coated each disaster with a warm balm and a smile. He never got upset. The gods were finally on his side, he said. Things would fall into place because the film had a higher purpose, a life of its own. No matter what, this was it. He just knew it and led the way like a minister preaching about predestination and unquestionable success. His Italian-style superstitions were amplified by his equally Italian-style film quirks: As long as nobody wore purple and everyone kept a red plastic corno in their pocket, we’d be fine.

  His dogmatic approach made us feel safe and our faith paid off. Variety ran an article about the film. The headline read: “Ancient Downtown Hotel Glory Revived by Independent Italo-American Production.” Something had clicked. We were gaining visibility. At night my father practiced his American slang in front of 90210 reruns so he could communicate better with his actors.

  He talked back to Dylan McKay. “What’s up, man? Ma-an? You’re not cool. You’re not cooool. What’s up, dude? Dood? Dud?”

  The importance of dude.

  He wanted to be affable and laid-back and changed his wardrobe to project this. He paid for my mother to keep up her Meg Ryan cut and platinum blond hair, started going to the gym at five a.m. before work, and wore white sneakers and ball caps.

  “That’s how they do it here. Have you ever seen Spielberg? He wears sweatpants for God’s sake. Sweatpants and fleece jackets and caps. I don’t know a director in Rome who would even get close to a fleece jacket. I threw my Church shoes out. I don’t want actors thinking I’m some kind of European snob. I want to be amiable and affable, dude.”

  The Hollywood crowd he’d met through Max over the summer read the news in Variety and began to stop by the set to take a look at the film. Johnny Depp liked the premise so much, he came down for a cameo as the bellboy in an elevator scene. My father and Max took a Polaroid with him inside the elevator. They were right. Courting his agent and creating “the necessary compost,” as my father called it, was paying off.

  The Hotel Alexandria had been magnificent and elegant during the silent-movie era, a witness to tap-dancing, smoky smiles, cupid lips, and brushed-out ringlets. Rudolph Valentino kept a suite there. Charlie Chaplin did improvisation sessions in the art deco lobby while Tom Mix rode in on his horse. It had been a wild place with luxurious rugs, marble columns, gold-leaf ceilings, and a mezzanine ballroom with a stained-glass skylight. Now it was a run-down dump. Only sinister tenants and ghosts lived here and this suddenly attracted film directors.

  The Italian horror cult director Dario Argento flew in from Rome. The Weinstein brothers at Miramax, who loved everything Italian and produced and distributed independent and foreign films, called to congratulate Ettore personally, baffled that it had taken an outsider’s eye to discover and revalue one of the city’s most precious lost treasures. They offered to take a look at the film once it was complete with a view toward distribution. My father and Max were thrilled. Members of the Huston family began to drop by during lunch breaks. Someone had spread the word about my mother’s Italian cooking and Mario Sorrenti, the rising-star fashion photographer who had shot Kate Moss in the Obsession campaign, picked the Alexandria as the location for his next shoot. The words whispered at home were “See? Visto? We made it!”

  I had never seen my parents so happy and confident. It made me tentatively happy. Encouraged by the general enthusiasm around her cooking, my mother started giving demonstrations in the hotel ballroom. The Tiffany stained-glass skylight had remained intact, refracting a hazy light. The room appeared even bigger thanks to the large golden mirrors that stood stoically inside the arched nooks, rotting around the edges. The hair-and-makeup junkies who normally fed on the edible balls that floated in their Orbitz soft drinks—“You, like, can drink and eat at the same time. It’s amazing,” they said—were particularly happy about Serena’s culinary crash courses. My mother looked at their purple bottles, horrified.

  “That is not food.”

  She set up her workstation on a steel countertop, wrapped an apron around her hips, and pulled on her reading glasses. The frames pushed her hair down next to her eyes like blinders, but she kept going.

  She put a pot of water on the stove, peeled garlic cloves for the soffritto, then cleared her throat.

  “Don’t fry the garlic! Don’t burn the garlic, just let the oil take on some of its flavor.”

  Crew members stood by, looking at her with folded arms and tilted heads.

  They loved Serena’s bluntness and even started cussing in Italian to prove their solidarity to the family. “Che cazzo!” or “Madonna mia!” they invoked every time something failed to work, which was often. As long as they were eating or cooking, they didn’t complain about late payments and disorganization. Unions were never contemplated. �
�SAG” was not uttered once.

  Henry religiously attended my mother’s classes. The more he loved my parents, the less I wanted to have anything to do with him. I went on long solitary walks downtown—the only place in Los Angeles that wasn’t a mall or a boardwalk, where people used their feet. It smelled like smoking manholes and street food, like what a real city was supposed to smell like. Ethnic stores and pawnshops, Indians selling jewelry, Chinese offering household appliances, Thai food joints, Latino music stores pumping salsa onto the sidewalk with massive speakers. No cops, but plenty of homeless people and cholos smoking pot. Alleyways where crack was exchanged for money in the light of day. People walked around with their flimsy shopping bags like burned-out souls—zombie faces lurching forward and inhaling smog, remembering only faintly if at all the joys of a green pasture or a blue sea. Most downtown inhabitants had never even seen the Pacific Ocean. I walked next to them, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine that ancient wave of glamour. I could feel them there—dancers, producers, and actors with their tea parties, card games, and soirees. Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Rudolph Valentino chitchatting next to me on the sidewalks of Spring Street. I heard their ice cubes clink inside invisible cocktail glasses and smelled their smoke as it crawled out of ivory cigarette holders.

  In a building that looked similar to the Alexandria, I discovered a whole floor where Vietnamese ladies, curved over sewing machines, manufactured women’s tops with blossom and bamboo patterns in fine-ribbed weaves. A tailor welcomed me and asked if I was looking for something. I told him I was working on a film—my new business card for talking to store owners. His eyes lit up. He offered a series of silk and satin curtains for free.

  “Bring them on set. See if you want more. All I ask is you mention our company in the credits.”

  I made promises I could not keep in exchange for beautiful fabrics. A whole new chapter of vintage finds opened up for me and I began to put aside things I thought Deva would like. I collected bat-sleeved shirts from a Bombay shop, vintage haute couture, cocktail dresses, and antique-lace lingerie from a vendor in the basement of another historic building. I hauled everything back to the Alexandria and began arranging and cataloguing my finds in the back of the changing room, the same way I’d done at Henry’s store. My parents had fueled their passion and I was fueling mine. At home I opened my secret drawer and looked at the letter from the University of Southern California. We strongly encourage you to apply. I read the words over and over.