Babylon Confidential - Claudia Christian

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      UNDER THE INFLUENCE

      It was 1973. I was eight years old, and about to learn that fate can be a stone-cold bitch.

      That was the year that Shell Oil ordered my dad to pack up our lives and move to Texas. I found myself in the sauna that is a humid Lone Star September with my parents, James and Hildegard, and my three older brothers, Patrick, Jimmy, and Vincent. In place of the beautiful autumn foliage that we’d left behind in Connecticut, Houston greeted us with shrubs, flatlands, and mosquitoes. None of us were happy about leaving our home back East. There was a palpable tension in the air. My mom had stopped eating and had lost thirty pounds; she’d had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen.

      Less than six months later, we would return to Connecticut, having suffered a blow that would continue to impact us until it eventually destroyed our family.

      Before the move to Houston, I grew up in Westport and Weston, Connecticut. That was where we were at our happiest. I would tag along when my brothers built snow forts and tree houses and was appointed the unofficial fourth boy, unless they needed someone to gross out. Then I would revert to being their little sister and be forced to watch while they fed live mice to their pet snakes.

      Patrick, my oldest brother, wanted to be Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans. He beaded things and worked with suede. He used to find dead animals and skin them for his projects. He even made his own moccasins. In the past the Paugusset tribe occupied the land near where we lived, and Pat would lead us in the hunt for old flint arrowheads that were still scattered around the woods.

      Some little girls fantasize about being princesses or models. When I read stories about the Pilgrims and their problems, I used to side with the Indians and hope that one day I’d be carried away by a chief to live with his tribe.

      Patrick was suitably impressed when, at age five, I landed my first big role: playing Chief Massasoit in a school play. This was a revelatory experience for me. I had three rowdy brothers—I could barely get a word in edgewise—but when I stood on the stage, everyone was quiet, their attention completely focused on me. When I delivered my heartfelt Thanksgiving monologue, I saw adults in the audience listening intently with tears in their eyes, and it astonished me that I could affect them on that emotional level. After that experience, I was hooked. I auditioned for as many plays as I could. The desire to connect with others in that meaningful way, to bring people with me, out of their everyday lives and into another space as I perform, that’s exciting and powerful. It has sustained me in my career for over thirty years.

      We were close to nature in Westport. The sea was nearby, and if I was good my mom used to let me camp out in the woods and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken with my girlfriends (that being the staple diet of woodland survivalists). Sometimes we’d even spend the night out there, unless someone started talking about murderers or ghosts, which would send us running back to the house, shrieking loudly enough to wake the dead.

      So when my dad announced that Shell was transferring us to Houston, land of 64-ounce Slurpees and steaks the size of hubcaps, we were horrified. My brothers threatened to run away from home, I retreated sullenly into my books, and my parents’ arguments broke out into full-scale war. The word “divorce” was overheard on more than one occasion, leaving us kids huddled in the corners of the house, drawing straws to see who got to live where. My mom usually got her way, but this time the decision had been made by a higher power­—Shell Oil Company—and if my dad wanted to get ahead in his career, then he had to go where they sent him.

      So my mom stopped eating and started crying all the time. She clung to us and kissed our heads as if we were all she had left. Her desire to stay was more than a fondness for Weston. She’d always had an amazing sixth sense. It wasn’t uncommon for her to tell one of us to get the phone before it rang or to dream about things that would come to pass. She was sure that some terrible storm was brewing and that we were sailing right into it. My dad didn’t want to hear about it; he just started packing.

      My dad, Jim, was eighteen years old when he was stabbed, right in the heart. He was a student at the University of Southern California and used to drive around in a red Corvette Stingray. He’d been walking to Van De Camp’s drive-in with some friends when they got jumped by a Mexican gang. My dad was walking in front and got the worst of it. The gang leader’s wife had been cheating on him with some gringos; my dad and his friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the leader went looking for blood. When my dad reached the hospital, he became one of the first recipients of open-heart surgery. Back then they hadn’t invented the small, vertical chest incision, so they cut him in half and left him with a long scar that looked like a magician’s trick gone wrong.

      The surgeons saved his life twice that day. The first time with the heart surgery—he appreciated that—but he was bitter about the second. Since he was laid up in the hospital, he couldn’t ship out to the Korean War with his buddies. None of them came back. Dad had been sent to military school from the age of five, and there was an expectation that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, Charlie, who’d received a Purple Heart and the French Croix De Guerre in World War I. He was hit by shrapnel in the left lung while leading a French-American force in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

      Charlie was a second-generation Irish immigrant, born in Boston to a well-to-do family. He was a real-estate tycoon, a respected surgeon, an all-round society type with one large skeleton in the closet.

      He’d bought a large parcel of desert land in Palm Springs and fitted it out with a trailer. There were no neighbors, no passersby, no one to come between Grandpa Charlie and the trunk-load of whiskey that he would use to drink himself into oblivion. When he was done with his binge he’d dry out for a few days, head back home, and go on with life as usual until the trailer, like the nesting ground of a migratory bird, would irresistibly draw him back.

      My mom, Hildegard, was, and still is, a stunningly beautiful woman. Born in Germany, she lived through World War II being evacuated from one small village to the next. She was five years old when Hitler passed through town in one of his flamboyant, goose-stepping parades. Pushing through the crowd to see what all the fuss was about, she found herself face-to-face with the man himself, who passed her a little swastika flag. She turned to run home and show her mother, but as she did she fell and the sharp end of the flag cut her chin open. She decided it was a bad omen and that Hitler was not to be trusted. To this day she still has what she calls her “Hitler scar.”

      And, of course, she was right about Hitler. He led Germany to ruin as well as her family. They lost everything when the Nazis evacuated them and took over their home as a base camp.

      As a little girl my mom sometimes had to steal cabbages so they had enough to eat, and most evenings found her walking the streets searching for her papa until she found him asleep in a bar or singing with his drinking buddies. Both wartime poverty and her father’s drinking were deeply humiliating for her.

      When she was older, she was sponsored by a fiancé to come to America and work as a dental hygienist. That relationship fell through, and she ended up living with the owners of the Brown Derby, the famous Hollywood restaurant. She worked on Mae West’s teeth and dated William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy. She never sought out celebrities, but she was classy and extremely attractive and so naturally found herself moving in circles that attracted them.

      Even in middle age, when a future governor of California tried to hit on her in their shared Germanic tongue, she gave him short shrift. It was at my birthday party, and she came over to ask me who he was.

      “Mom, that’s the Terminator.”

      “I don’t care who he is, he’s a very rude man. You should have heard him. He’s been living in America too long.”

      When my mom’s friends tried to set her up with my father, she wasn’t interested and tried to push him onto another friend.

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