That might be enough to bring him back to Hidden Beach.
I send my father the picture.
31
“I got divorcedfrom my parents,” says Brock. “When I was fourteen. It was beyond ugly.”
Meer has gotten us up ridiculously early to go clamming. He’s got a set of car keys hidden in the garage, plus a set of house keys in the box markedSpoils of Warin the mudroom. “That way I can open the office. I mostly respect my mom’s suggestions, but we do watch movies or whatever, when she’s not around. Except that these days, she’salwaysaround.” Basically, today he stole the Mercedes before June could wake up and say no.
Now Brock and I squat at the edge of Lake Tashmoo, which is really a cove. It’s low tide. In the water, Meer and Tatum stand with a pair of long rakes. They have a kids’ blow-up floatie, and inside the floatie is a mesh bag where they put their catch.
Brock and I have smaller rakes and a bucket. He’s shown me how to look for depressions in the sand that suggest a clam isunderneath, then rake through to dig it up. “My parents had a vicious divorce,” he says. “They lost their minds and spent most of the money fromMen and Other Critters—on drugs, in my dad’s case. And on lawyers. And it freaking wrecked me, ’cause I realized there was literally nobody capable of taking care of me. In fact, I had been taking care ofthemfor years. I was making all the money, and they were just spending it.”
“What made you decide to come here?” I ask.
“I got legally emancipated and lived with a nanny the studio set up for me ’cause I was still working. I didn’t see my parents anymore. I wouldn’t even speak to them on the phone. I was so full of rage—just absolute fury. I honestly felt like I’d do something terrible to them if I saw them, so I didn’t. I still won’t. I just stuffed all that rage inside and did my job all day, grinning and cracking jokes.”
He says he worked for two more years like that. And in that time, he was essentially raised by the coke-snorting comedians whose charm keptMen and Other Crittersrenewed season after season. Those guys taught Brock many disgusting and illegal things, but at least they paid attention to him.
When the show was canceled, he rented a house in a small town on Cape Cod and planned to finish school there. He was sixteen. He liked the idea of being far away from Hollywood and being a regular kid. But fame didn’t make him popular. “Those kids could smell the Hollywood on me,” he says, digging with his shovel in search of clams. “They hated everything about me that had made me so much money—how I looked, my hair, the way I laughed, everything.”
At first he got beaten up. Then he got ignored. Sometimes he’dget tired of being ignored and he’d run his mouth. Then he’d get beaten up again.
“My skin broke out. I had a growth spurt. I couldn’t get work on TV. By the time I graduated high school, I was washed up and had no reason to be anywhere on the planet. After a few months of absolute insanity in New York, I was high all the time and I had to check into rehab.”
“What did you take?” I ask.
“Ritalin, mostly. And cocaine. I would just go, go, go. It made me feel important. But then one of my guys fromCritters,he had gotten sober. When he saw me like that in New York, he told me I had to get off it all. Immediately. And he was right.”
I look over at Brock. His blondish hair is lit up by the sun. He’s wearing a bright green fleece and board shorts decorated with SpongeBob. There’s a Meer Sharpie drawing of a dolphin on one side of his neck. He looks like he’s never worked a day in his life, like he’s never had a problem.
“When I was well enough to move to this group home for outpatients who were under twenty-one,” he says, “I saw a painting of Kingsley’s online. The one with your mom in it, actually. Persephone escaping the underworld and looking—well, she looks so happy and relieved, you know? Like I wanted to feel.” Brock examines the clam I just dug up. “That one’s too small, you gotta put it back. We can only clam the big grown-up clams. We gotta leave the babies to grow so we can get them later.”
I glance up at Meer and Tatum. They’re shirtless, Meer soft and graceful, Tatum made of burnished wood and copper wire. Meer’s hair is in a high bun, and he’s wearing reflective sunglasses. He’s splashing around and only half clamming. Tatum digs methodically.
“I was newly sober when I got obsessed with your dad,” says Brock. “I traveled to see some of his paintings, like at LACMA and MASS MoCA and stuff, but that didn’t really scratch the itch. So I hired a private detective to find him. Because you know, his gallery won’t say where he lives. The detective dug around and sent me here, to Hidden Beach. I just showed up.”
Brock pauses because he’s hit a spot in the sand that has a lot of clams. It’s a small jackpot, and we dig them up together. “How did you end up moving here?” I ask.
“I think Meer was lonely. And maybe Tatum, too. There used to be a whole community. Like, when Meer was little and Tatum lived with his parents in the pool house, there were other people, other kids. All these creative people, playing music and taking photographs and weaving or whatever. But by the time I came, all of them were gone. Meer and I got along right away even though I was like, not even a functional person. And Kingsley saw me as having escaped something terrible. And that was a big deal, actually, because it was a new way for me to see myself. Like, I thought I’d been banished from Hollywood, lost my family, become an addict, and all that was shameful. But he saw it as escape. You know how there are escapes in his paintings? Persephone escapes the underworld, Odysseus escapes the island of the Cyclops.”
“Sure.”
“And I had escaped the trash fire of my addiction, and the trash fire of Hollywood. So Kingsley liked that about me, like I was one of his artworks come to life. He wanted to put me in a painting, and the painting took weeks and weeks, and by that time, it was pretty clear Meer was happier with me here. And like I said, maybe Tatum, too. So June said I could stay as long as I needed, for myrecovery.”
“What’s the painting of you like?”
“There are these fairy tales where people are trapped in the bodies of animals. A bunch of different tales. And in the stories, they take the skin off and burn it—and after that, they can be human all the time. It’s very weird.”
“You had a skin in the painting?”
“He painted me standing next to a bonfire that’s burning an old donkey skin, yeah. Like burning the old version of me. The canvas isn’t here anymore. Kingsley sold it not that long after he finished it. To a private collector. But it really looks like me. It was wild tosee.”
“What’s the name of it?” I ask.
“It’s calledSammy,” he says.
32
