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Chapter 6
Where am I?Griffin thought as he woke up from an exhausted sleep triggered by one airplane cocktail and an Ambien chaser. He was in the back of a limo looking out at a lot of cow butts. He remembered catching the red eye from LAX and landing in, what was it, Chicago? Philadelphia? Mexico?
“Where are we?” Griffin asked his driver.
“We just got off 90 and are now on 14 South. Should be there in twenty-five minutes.”
Griffin had no idea what those numbers meant. He didn’t even drive a car. Well, he could drive a car. Just not legally, since his license was taken away for too many speeding tickets. The last one was not his fault though. He was driving through Ohio. That was his excuse. He wanted to get out of Ohio as quickly as he could. He had some crazy relatives there.
“I’m going to need more to go on than that, my friend.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. James. I picked you up at the Buffalo airport, if that helps.”
“That explains the red and blue hat with a Buffalo on it.” It came back to him. Drew suggested landing in Buffalo to avoid the paparazzi. There was a direct flight from Los Angeles to Buffalo. And Buffalo was a few hours’ drive to the set. Griffin was coming right off another movie. He was worn out. It wasn’t the paparazzi that worried Griffin. It was his fans.The Griffineers.That unruly,let’s rip off his shirtmob who followed him wherever he went. Such was the price of fame. It hadn’t always been that way.
***
It started when Griffin had been a TV tween star. He had played a warlock in a sitcom who accidentally got enrolled in an all-girl witch school. It was calledBroommates. Hijinks ensued. So did his Q rating.
“Your Q score is forty,” his manager-mother said. “This is great. Tom Hanks is forty-six.” At the time, Griffin was fourteen years old and not even aware of what a Q score was. “It measures your popularity and our brand. The higher the Q score, the more highly regarded the person is,” his manager-mother explained.
“I have a brand?” Griffin wondered.
“Yes, you’re the guy who every girl wants to lose her virginity to,” his mom said matter-of-factly. Griffin did not like talking to his mom about that. He was fourteen and was not going to use his celebrity to achieve his manhood. But the girls he knew personally distanced themselves, and he didn’t know why. “Your father’s been doing a great job on social media.”
His father, Greg, had a beer on his stomach as he was typing away. “I love flirting with your classmates on Instagram!”
Griffin was aghast. “I don’t have an Instagram! Let me see that!” He took the phone and looked at it. “‘The real Griffin James’? I’m the real Griffin James!”
“There are a lot of people who might pretend to be you,” his dad said.
“Like you?” Griffin said, raising his voice. His dad chuckled, caught his beer as it fell off his belly and gulped.
Griffin started scrolling. He was shocked by what he read. Not just from the fact that his father was capable of this but what he had written. It was creepy. Griffin stammered while reading one entry. “‘You must be from Iraq because I want to Baghdad that ass!’ What the hell! You sent this to Lena Goenka! She’s the class president. This is racist.”
“No, it’s multiculturalism,” his mom said. “You’re being diverse!”
“Lena is from India. Not Iraq.”
“Same difference,” his mom said.
“Iraq and India are not the same!” Griffin exclaimed. He told his parents to stop his social media immediately. But the damage was done. Lena, his first crush, broke his heart when she called him a creep as he tried to explain his dad controlled his Instagram.
How did this even happen?Griffin’s dad and mom had met in Ohio. In high school, his dad was the star quarterback and his mom was the cheerleader. Great looking couple. His mom still held it together. His dad did not. His body was now shaped like a beer keg. Short. Round from neck to toes. And like the keg, filled with beer. They came to LA to pursue their dreams of acting. As with so many others, they didn’t make it. They stayed in LA, found other jobs, and had Griffin. “That’s why there are so many good-looking people in LA. All the good-looking people come here and reproduce,” his dad had once told him with a mixture of bourbon and bitterness.
Griffin remembered playing basketball at the YMCA in Burbank. He was a good defender, but he could not shoot straight. Turned out his vision was bad, but his parents didn’t like the way he looked in glasses. No wonder Griffin’s grades got worse and worse the harder the classes got. During one of Griffin’s basketball games, his mom flirted with one of the dads and got invited to the end-of-season party for the kids at a very nice house in Mandeville Canyon on the toney West Side of LA. Griffin remembered his mom didn’t bring his dad, but she brought her skimpy red bikini. As she teased the director, Griffin played in the pool looking out over the mountains. A woman was watching him. Taking his picture. Griffin was confused. Who was she? She was talking to his mom. His mom stopped flirting and started chatting it up with this woman. Griffin remembered hearing his mother say, “I’m not just his mom. I’m his manager.” He had no idea what any of that meant. The woman turned out to be a casting director. Griffin was soon auditioning for a national television commercial. He got it. It was fun, but he was bummed he was missing school and the trip to the zoo. He loved the zoo. His mother loved being on the set, the ex-cheerleader/failed actress that she was.
Everyone at school thought the TV commercial was cool. They asked Griffin if he was now rich because he was famous. Griffin had no idea about money. He remembered something about his parents setting up a Coogan Account. It was a bank account that protected the money child actors had earned. It was named after a child actor, Jackie Coogan, who had earned millions of dollars as a successful child actor only to discover, upon reaching adulthood, that his mother and stepfather had ripped him off.Oh, the irony,Griffin thought. From the commercial, he got the TV showBroommates, and that ran for five years.
Griffin dropped out of middle school and had a series of on-set studio teachers from fifth grade through twelfth. After the success ofBroommates, he was offered a family, four-quadrant movie. This was a movie that would appeal to men, women, children, under twenty-five and over twenty-five. It was calledA Boy’s Best Friend. Griffin played second fiddle to a CGI dog who had the ability to talk in aChicken Soup for the Soulkind of way. Griffin hated it. America loved it. He had to do the sequel. Griffin became a very bankable piece of talent. Offers came in.
At fifteen, he bought himself a car, even though he didn’t have his license, and a new house for him and his parents. It wasn’t until he walked in on his mother riding reverse cowgirl on his business manager that Griffin found out what was really going on. His mother had been cheating on his dad with the manager. His dad had been cheating on his mom with the second assistant director ofA Boy’s Best Friend.Griffin had to fire them all. Agents. Managers. Lawyers. His parents!How do you fire your parents?It wasn’t as hard as it sounded. But during the litigation, Griffin expressed he didn’t want his parents to go to jail. He was emancipated at sixteen, and his parents were ordered to pay him back the two million dollars they had stolen. To do so, his dad sold Griffin’s childhood memorabilia on eBay and his mom wrote a tell-all book which should have been atell all liesbook about what went down on the set of the TV shows.
Griffin was feeling all alone in the world. He refused to do the third dog movie. He started rejecting everything that was sent to him, looking for a smart script. His agents got mad at him and dumped him. He had one more commitment—a really bad sci-fi movie—after that, he would figure out what to do next. His dream was always to own a movie theater. It was the only place he was ever truly happy. He was definitely not happy doingMoonGlow, where he played the grandson of anApolloastronaut who had walked on the moon and claimed he’d seen aliens. When Griffin first read the script, it was charming. Now it was an over-bloated, CGI mess. Just like the overbearing Euro-trash director he had to listen to yelling, “Cut! Do it again!” Griffin was suspended thirty feet in the air in front of a green screen as the director was screaming at his director of photography. She was screaming back adding lots of F-bombs. The film was already behind schedule.
Griffin’s cell phone rang. It was Drew Fox, FaceTiming him. Drew’s father had produced theBroommatestelevision show. Drew was always very nice to Griffin, almost like an older brother.
“Griffin, it’s Drew.” Griffin was genuinely excited to hear from Drew. He was one of the good ones in Hollywood. He had recently produced an independent film about a dead cowboy that Griffin adored. “How are you?”
