Five fucking years and I should be able to move on.  I should accept that I’m not the same person anymore and it’s for certain she isn’t either. I should learn how to connect with someone else at this point.  I should forget.

Of course I can do none of those things.

My cell phone reception is shitty this far into the woods.  I’ll need to drive back to town in order to make a call.  Which I have every intention of doing.  Right now.

Because it’s a family matter.

And because I used to be Oscar Savage.

CHAPTER THREE

REN

Most people possess at least a few scraps of unique family lore.

Stories.

They filter down for several generations if they are interesting and are lost sooner if they are not.   Usually they are not.  Usually the only people who might raise an eyebrow and care about the dusty skeletons hanging out in the closet are the ones who share blood with either the old corpse or whoever stuffed it in there.

The Savages are different.  Everyone knows everything about us. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web all you need to do is type our last name into the nearest search engine and you can learn more than you ever wanted to.

You can see that it started in the 1920s.

Charles and Mary Savage were Hollywood originals.  She was a socialite from Minneapolis and he escaped a long line of cattle ranchers in the Nebraska Sand Hills.  If they’d just stayed where they were they would have gone on to live quiet, ordinary lives and been long forgotten.

But they didn’t.

They landed in Hollywood at a fortunate time and became darlings of the silent film era. Their days of stardom were short-lived, ending with the popularity of sound in motion pictures.  Mary had a high, reedy voice that grated like nails and Charles was a low talker with a chronic lisp.  So instead they became powerful investors and iconic pillars of the film industry for the rest of their lives.   They are widely credited as being among the early founders of the motion picture industry.

My great-grandparents weren’t happy people.  They suffered a turbulent marriage punctuated by infidelity, alcoholism and the birth of three children.  Maybe that’s why they never smiled for photographs.

Charles was hit by a taxi in 1952 while jaywalking.  He died in the gutter of Hollywood Boulevard amid a throng of curious onlookers.   He might not have minded.  Reportedly Charles loved nothing more than a rapt audience.

Mary on the other hand hung around for more years than most human beings do, long enough to meet her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  My parents dragged us to the nursing home in Pasadena a few times to pay homage.  I remember her as a miniature ancient woman who wore a wig of absurd blond ringlets.  She yelled all the time, screeching “Get off my stage!” if you walked too close.  I was nine when she finally died.  A series of reporters came around to talk about her but no one was sad. After all, she was ridiculously old and her mind had been gone for decades.

My grandfather, Rex, was among the next generation of Savages.  His older sisters, Anne and Joan, were more celebrated for their lifetime feud with one another than for their films.  They traded husbands and lovers and publicly ridiculed each other, much to the delight of the fledgling tabloid industry.

Joan inherited her mother’s longevity and is still alive – broke and reclusive and living somewhere off the rocky coast of Oregon.  Every once in a while her name will be trending on the search engines when a bored reporter seeks her out for an interview about places long gone and people long dead.  Even in the twilight of her life she’s still obsessed with her dead (“That pasty witch was ALWAYS jealous of me!”) older sister.

Rex Savage, my grandfather, was the golden boy of his era.  Tall, dark-haired and powerfully built, he was full of testosterone and charisma.  An incorrigible ladies’ man who starred in a long line of pictures with names like Desperado Gunslinger and Cowboys on the Horizon, he was the archetypal Hollywood movie star and Hollywood was more than happy to have him.   Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of one of his film stills I can’t help but do a double take because he looks so much like my brother Montgomery, right down to the curled-lip sneer.  It’s fucking uncanny.

Rex met his match in a fiery Irish starlet named Margaret O’Leary.  She was his costar in the 1951 hit western Desert Honor.  It’s a rather ho-hum movie about a reformed desperado who shoots a bunch of leather-faced bad guys, adopts two orphans and marries the local schoolteacher.  It wound up being the only project they ever worked on together but it was enough.

There was a bad kind of chemistry between the two of them.   For a decade they married and fought and split and reconciled over and over, somehow creating two troubled children and a legacy of dysfunction.  They had just remarried for the fourth time in 1961 when Margaret was killed in a plane crash during a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Rex was inconsolable. In fact he kind of pitched off the deep end.  I guess it’s possible he would have turned into a blithering joke anyway, but to hear it told, the tragic loss of his wife and the upheaval of his film career had a lot to do with the downward spiral.  His later interviews show a baffled old man with tangled nose hair droning on about how in the year 1965 he’d been abducted by aliens while stargazing at the Griffith Observatory.

Then came a morning when Rex decided it was a good idea wander around his wealthy neighborhood drunk as a frat pledge.  He fell into a swimming pool and drowned, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a crucifix.

It was rather an ignoble end for a leading man.  Everyone says so.

Margaret’s films are the only ones I’ll sit down and watch if I happen to be flipping channels and catch a glimpse of her brilliant red hair in a midcentury Technicolor world.  My two sisters won the genetic lottery that gave them the same coloring, although Ava has been dying hers blonde since she was a teenager.

Not me though.  Like my two brothers I inherited the wavy dark hair and near olive skin of Rex Savage.

Speaking of me, it’s a good thing Rex and Margaret paused their marital wars long enough to produce a daughter, Mina, and a son, August.

An unauthorized biography written shortly before his death three years ago described August Savage as ‘gloomy and morbidly disturbed’ throughout his childhood.  He would collect dead birds from the corners of the family’s decaying Hollywood estate and leave them in various cupboards throughout the home.  Supposedly he even stowed some in his pillowcase and slept on them.  I have no idea if that’s true or not.  Regardless of his strange fetishes, in his day my father had the ruggedly striking Savage profile and he happened to be a decent actor.  In the late 1970s he starred in a series of critically acclaimed small budget films that were considered provocative, groundbreaking.  In fact he was nominated for an Academy Award for Fist, a harrowing story about a young man who develops a disturbing obsession with his elderly neighbor. It’s the kind of movie you see once and never want to see again because by the time the credits roll you feel vaguely ill.  He didn’t win.  But it’s an honor to be nominated.  Or whatever.

My father’s career came to a crushing halt in 1984 when a young photographer died of a heroin overdose in his bed.   Although there was never enough evidence to charge him with a crime, he was tried in the media.  According to their one-sided verdict, the strange, intense actor with a legendary family name had injected the drug into the woman’s veins while she slept. There were even whispers that he ah, abused the dead body afterwards.