Chapter 12

Haley

Brando brings a thick blanket out from his loft onto the wide balcony of his apartment and wraps it around my shoulders.

“Thanks,” I say, my voice trembling, only slightly caused by the cold. It’s the first word I’ve said since Brando caught me outside, embraced me tightly, and ushered me into the back of a cab to his apartment.

“You sure you don’t want to go back inside? I can make you something hot to drink. Get you something to eat, maybe?”

“No,” I say, eyes unfocused as I watch the red and white lights of LA cars snake through the traffic-jammed streets. “I need the fresh air.”

Brando smooths a part of the blanket over my shoulder, making it a little more snug. A gesture I can’t resist smiling at him for. He leans up against the balcony railing beside me, his bicep against my arm.

“So,” he says, setting the tempo to a slow one with the patient, neutral way he says it, “you mind telling me what that was all about?”

I stiffen again as I recall the moment.

“He looked at me,” I mutter, clenching my jaw.

“Who? Rex? Well yeah. He looked at us. Is that what this is about?”

“He looked at me,” I say, the exact same way, “and he didn’t recognize me.”

Brando pauses before speaking.

“Haley, don’t get ahead of yourself. Tonight was great, but it’s just a first step. It’ll take time before people recognize you. You’ve got to be pa—”

“You don’t understand,” I say, turning toward Brando with a fierce gaze. “Rex Bentley is my father.”

Brando’s chiseled jaw drops so heavily it looks like it’ll smash through the floor.

“What? Wait…I don’t understand. Are you sure?”

I nod slowly, before turning back to lean on the railing and gaze into the night.

“It was right after his ‘blue’ period, when he made those albums in Europe. He came to LA, bought a big mansion, mountains of cocaine, and started making hits again. My mom was a musician too. She’d tried to get an album together, but ended up as a back-up singer. He liked her, used her on some of the records, and eventually, used her for some other things as well. That’s when she became his ‘assistant.’”

Brando still looks confused. “But he was married then…”

“Yeah,” I shoot back with a bitter laugh. “He was. Which is why when she told him she was pregnant he fired her, gave her a thousand dollars, and sent her on her way to ‘take care of it.’”

“Fuck,” Brando says, drawing out the word until it becomes a long sigh of anger and disbelief.

“When I was born,” I continue, feeling the heat build up behind my eyes, sniffing back the fogginess in my throat, “my mom sent him a picture of me. A letter telling him where we were, how he could get in touch. He never responded.”

Brando’s arm wraps around me tightly, but even the feeling of protection, of being cared for, can’t remove the pain that’s stabbing at me inside. He brushes tears from my cheeks softly.

“When I was twelve, my mother decided to tell me. I was already—” I pause to swallow down the hurt, “I was already in love with music. Already sure of what I wanted to do with my life. I thought it was amazing—” I can barely get the word out, stutters and sobs interrupting me, “…amazing that it was him. I had this big hole in my life where a father should have been, and I would have settled for anyone. Any drunk, or loser. But instead it was him. It made me so h… ha… happy.”

It takes a full minute of Brando rubbing my back before I can stop the quivering in my lips and the sobbing in my throat enough to continue.

“My mom still had his address – the one he used for personal letters. I knew he checked them himself, rather than through a secretary. I started sending him letters, photos, cassette tapes of me talking mixed with the songs I was making. I don’t know what I thought would happen. Maybe that he would accept me back into his life. Maybe he’d see that I had his blood, musician’s blood, and realize he’d made a mistake.” I shake my head at my own teenage stupidity. “Yeah. I actually thought he’d realize he’d made a mistake. Maybe it was the drugs, the lifestyle, the career that got in the way. I sent him letters for five years. Five fucking years! Half a decade, hundreds of letters with my whole life in them. My deepest thoughts, my hopes and dreams. One hope and one dream most of all – to have a fucking father.”

I break down fully. The cracks too wide to close up. Pain and heartbreak flowing through every vein in my body. Brando pulls me toward him tightly, squeezing me as if he can push it all back out.

“Haley,” he says, as I weep into his chest, “I’m sorry.”

I gather the pieces of me that remain and stand back upright to breathe in the cool night air.

“Maybe,” Brando says, his hand still brushing my wet cheek, “he didn’t get the letters? Perhaps he had a different address? Or it just got stuck with all the other fan mail?”

“All he had to do was look, you know?!” I scream, loudly and angrily, as if it’s him standing in front of me rather than Brando. “All he had to do was look! We weren’t on fucking Mars; we were six hours away in Santa Cruz! Twenty-four fucking years and nothing. Not one fucking word! I thought maybe he was staying away, scared to come back after all this time. He had to know. Who could spend twenty-four years without checking once – just once – to see what his daughter looked like? And then tonight… He just looked right through me, like I was anybody, and I knew. I knew I was lying to myself.”

Brando says nothing, but his eyes show it. He wishes he could take this pain away, wishes he could do something, but he can’t. Instead, he reaches down to the six pack of beers he brought out onto the balcony, cracks two open, and hands me one. I gulp almost half of it, hoping the cold fizz and the alcohol will help clear away the bad taste that all the memories left behind.

“Thanks,” I say, drying the last of my tears with the edge of the blanket.

Brando nods and leans back against the balcony, twisting the bottle in his hands as he searches for something to say.

“You know, I can’t tell you how to feel, or how to think about any of that. I can’t tell you how to stop hurting – I’d be a therapist if I could. But the one thing I do know, for sure, is that it’s the shit that hurts the most, which hurts the longest and the deepest, that makes you tougher.”

I lean over the railing, dangling my beer above the empty street below, watching the shadows of strays slide around the garbage cans of the alleyway.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve just never really spoken about this before.”

“It’s okay,” Brando replies softly.

“Let’s talk about something else. Please. I don’t want to think about this anymore.”

“Okay, let’s see…” he says, moving closer and leaning in.

I look up at him, searching his gaze. “Tell me about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What’s your story? We spend so much time together, and I still have no idea where you’re from.” I snort a little laugh. “Did you just emerge out of thin air as the very charming, incredibly handsome ‘Brando Nash’?”

“Yes?”

I laugh. “Funnily enough, I’d believe that.”

“Actually,” Brando says with a sigh, “the truth is a bit messier.”

“Oh?”

He turns his face back toward the skyline, as if he can almost see his past still happening way off beyond the city’s lights.

“I don’t really know where I was born, or who my parents were. They gave me up for adoption when I was two.”

“Jesus.” For some reason, this was the last thing I expected to hear. I turn to look at Brando. “You didn’t try to find out?”

“I didn’t have time to try. The first ten years of my life are just a blur. One group home to another, friends you make and lose in a single day, foster parents I eventually gave up on hoping would be long-term. I was always the new boy, always the stranger. I got bullied pretty bad. I learned pretty quickly to just keep my mouth shut and get through the days.”

I study Brando’s face. He stares outward, his expression stony, as if reciting a history textbook in his deep monotone.

“I had nothing. Owned nothing. Even my clothes were ‘borrowed’ from other kids in the homes. Except music. That was free. You couldn’t steal airwaves.” He takes a long draught of beer.

“True,” I say, starting to see the pieces of Brando come together. “You can’t.”

He shrugs. “I started hanging out in places I could hear music. Snuck into clubs, sat outside bars. Sometimes I’d just stop outside someone’s house if they had the radio on loud enough.”

Brando laughs at the recollection.

“Then something clicked. I realized that these songs weren’t just some alien thing that came from another planet, but that you could actually make music. Kids rapping on street corners, dreadlocked guys on the subway banging on drums. It was expressive, moving, powerful. And it made me feel powerful.”

Brando looks at me, a little embarrassed.

“I loved music, but I knew I couldn’t make it. That wasn’t where my strengths were. I was a smart-talker, a connection-maker – a hustler. I could see things. Make things happen. That’s what I was good at. I put on some showcases, networked like hell, and then started a small label, got a few local acts together. Persuaded people to give us some studio time, brought people together I thought would work. It was good. Underground, nothing major – but good.”

He drops his gaze to the alleyway a hundred feet below us.

“Then I met Lexi, and I knew it could be something huge. She used to make these tapes of her just humming melodies, and you’d have sworn they were classics. She wrote songs like that, just singing them into a cheap tape deck. And her voice was…mind-blowing. She was working in a fast food joint at the time, just doing the music for fun, for the love of it. It was me who convinced her it could be something more.

“I dropped everything. Gave the label over to some associates to handle, forgot all about the hustling, and from then on, it was all Lexi. I did everything for her.”

“You fell in love with her?” I ask, gently.

Brando nods. “How could I not? She was amazing. We moved into some shitty apartment in the Bronx. I started doing everything I could to get her demos together, get her in front of the people who mattered. But I was jealous, possessive, a control freak. Lexi, on the other hand, liked to party. We argued about everything, money, the music, us. But we knew we needed each other.

“Things started moving, and we both came to LA. I didn’t know anybody here, but I knew how to make friends fast, how to move in the right circles. It was coming together. I had the songs, had the connections. I got a job at Majestic Records. Everything was lined up.”

Brando smiles widely, but it’s a macabre smile, a smile that he’s putting on to stop the other emotions from coming out.

“And just when we were about to do it, about to make it big, the labels already making offers, the studio time already starting, the songs already there - Lexi left.”

He turns to me and stares, as if I might have an answer, might be able to explain why, or how. I shake my head slowly, in disbelief and sympathy.

“How? Why?”

“I asked myself that same question every day for the past three years,” he says. “Maybe I’d been so focused on her career, I forgot about her. Maybe I underestimated how much I hurt her; how much she hated me. Maybe we never had the same ambition all along. She disappeared for a week. I found out through somebody at the label that she’d signed with Davis. He’d promised her a number one record, mega-star status. She even cheated on me just to make sure I got the message – some pretty-boy from Davis’ label who I know she never even liked.”

“Brando…”

“It’s alright. I fucked the pain away, pretty much. Went out every night, making up for lost time. Became somebody else, in order to survive. Still a hustler, but even more so. If I stopped to think it would only hurt, so I kept moving – only faster. I started to treat women the way I treated my acts. I cared for them, had fun with them, gave them what they wanted, and took my share of that. But I didn’t get attached. Didn’t get emotionally involved. In that sense, I moved on. Or at least, I thought I had, until she showed up again.”

It takes a second for me to piece it all together.

“So that’s what you guys were doing at the open mic I played?”

“Yeah.”

We turn toward LA, the city that gave us our dreams, and then took them away.

I start laughing. It’s slow at first, but it gets crazier and crazier. I try to stop, covering my mouth, but the more I do, the more maniacal it gets. Brando watches me with confusion, until he starts breaking out himself. For a full minute, we howl like schoolkids, doubled over and clutching our stomachs.

“We are quite a pair!” I say, laughing harder.

“Two abandoned strays!” Brando shouts into the night. “Coming for revenge!”

“You hear that, LA?!”

“We’re coming!”