Paternity

La Mirada Ave.

In my Mother's loving arms.

My mother and I shared a studio apartment at 6212 La Mirada Avenue, number 204. It was a two-story, low-slung building built in the 1940’s, shaded by banana palms and hedged with Birds of Paradise. Neighbors wandered freely through each other’s open doors, sharing secrets over coffee or cocktails. Sun streamed through the venetian blinds; light danced on the striped daybed below. I freely wandered down the hallway, crawling along the carpet like a little human tank in my diaper fastened with blue plastic lamb safety pins. Our landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Cobb, lived on the first floor in the apartment behind the front desk. Mr. Cobb swept me up and held me in his arms. He wore a striped Banlon shirt with four buttons. He was balding but had plenty of hair in both ears. He smelled like pine trees. He wore a chunky silver watch that poked my baby fat. His bushy moustache was speckled with white, and a tiny fleck of spittle hung on his lip. His smile was wide and warm. I wanted a father. He gave me a kiss on the top of my head. I would often wander into the Cobb apartment to get away from the smoldering ashes of my mother. I’d play with the brass keys Mr. Cobb kept, opening and locking imaginary doors that only I could go through. Keys that fit into locks and turned, keys you could hold in your hand and feel their weight. Our phone number was Hollywood3-1769, and I’m sure whenever my mother repeated that number, she was reminded how she beat the rundown streets of Dayton, Ohio and made it to the promised land. Our building was just east of Vine Street and just a stone’s throw from Paramount studios. You could almost smell the movies being made and the crushing of dreams wafting through the air. So here we find ourselves, me and my mother, surrounded by what promises to be glamorous, only to find ourselves in a one room studio apartment with bills to pay and not enough money to pay them. I’ve always imagined being conceived in the backseat of my father’s Corvette on an unusually warm February night in the parking lot of the Cock N’ Bull restaurant where the two first met. Two good looking people in their twenties, three sheets to the wind, looking for love where it doesn’t exist, numbed by booze and the indestructability of youth, seduced by money and fame. My mother went out with her roommate that night, to see and be seen, down a few cocktails and small talk, find some connection in a perilous sea, and there she meets a lonely man, a son of Bing Crosby, forever being compared to and measured by his movie star father, the same man who will father her only child but will deny paternity, the same man who will tell my half-brother how proud of me he is when he sees me on TV, and the same man who in 1991, alone in Novato, will put a shotgun to his head and pull the trigger. In a press release it says he was married twice and had five children. Does that include me?