Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

After Viv’s miscarriage and her epiphany that Siddhama was the child of Kit Lightfoot (a revelation she guarded from Philip and everyone else), Lisanne had begun to study vipassana in earnest, meeting regularly with a Westside group. They did their sitting at a Zen center tucked behind a post office in Santa Monica and at members’ houses too. Sometimes there were all-night yazas, but mostly they met on weekday afternoons. She liked vipassana because it was the oldest form of meditation, a technique the Buddha himself was said to have practiced. Philip was supportive even though he no longer evinced much interest in things Buddhist. (She wasn’t sure that he ever really had.) Still, he built Lisanne an airy cabin on the grounds where she could do her ashtanga and even let himself be dragged to a loving-kindness workshop just up the road, in Temescal.

• • •

THE SATURDAY RETREAT was led by teachers from a place up north called Spirit Rock. Lisanne and Philip joined about twenty others in sitting and walking meditations. No one was allowed to speak except to repeat four affirmations:

… May I/you be safe and protected from harm.

… May I/you be happy and live with joy.

… May I/you be healthy and strong, or if that’s not possible, may I/you accept my/your limitations with grace.

… In my/your outer life, may I/you live with the ease of well-being.

The affirmations were recited while visualizing first oneself; then a “benefactor” (someone who had bestowed kindnesses or generosity); then a friend; then a “neutral person”; a “difficult person”; and finally, beings one did not personally know.

The idea was to learn to transmit metta (a Pali word often translated into English as loving-kindness) to all creatures, human and animal, seen and unseen, newly born and newly dying. The teacher said it was a “practice of the heart.” He said that the source of all joy arose from wishing happiness to others and that the source of all sorrow arose from wishing happiness only to oneself.

Lisanne visualized Kit for each permutation. Kit Lightfoot was her Self, her benefactor, her friend, her neutral person, her difficult person, and someone she did not really know. Before the final walking meditation, they were told to send metta to all beings encountered on their way — the hikers, the birds, and even the trees. (“Though in classic Buddhism,” said the teacher, somewhat reluctantly, “trees lack true consciousness.”) The group dispersed, and Lisanne meandered before climbing the hillside trail. As she cleared the ridge, she could see five meditators standing in a small depression, staring down at their feet. She got closer and instinctively slowed, wondering if something lay dead in the dirt. Then she saw it: a snake, sunning itself in the path. Its rattle was translucent and dirty yellow, like a wicked pacifier. The metta -heads bombed it with love and then it started to move. All eyes followed as the reptile slithered through the grass, visible for about seventy-five yards before vanishing. She wished that Philip had been there, but he had gone off in a different direction. For Lisanne, it was the highlight of the workshop, but she never told him about the encounter. That would have been smug, and the teachings were against it.

• • •

THROUGH THE SANGHA of old and new connections, she became acquainted with a group of practitioners who knew Kit before the mishap. And that was how one day she casually, yet with great portent, came to be invited to do service in a modest home at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac.

The Banks of Riverside

THE OLD HOUSE sat comfortably in its skin.

Spiffed and restuccoed, spit-polished, refurbished, a wall around it now, nothing too tall or ostentatious but nicely done. Thick enough to be serious.

Some new additions graced driveway and curbside — Kit’s jet black G-wagen, for one. (A neighborhood boy hand-washed it each week.) His fab old forties pickup, for another. On the lawn, the storied Indian, teardrop Triumph, and Harley with the handlebar fringe luxuriously hibernated beneath a locked-down tarp. A silver Range Rover with little shark gill vents was there too, blocking the drive — for Burke’s use only. The stately, beloved, die-hard DeVille — the junk car gone up on blocks a month or so before Kit came to scan Rita Julienne’s love letters — was gone. Scrapped. Tula, the Fijian bodyguard, spent most of his time sleeping out front in a maroon Crown Victoria, a detective’s car acquired at auction.

A veritable auto show, but the neighbors don’t mind.

The actor, under his father’s imposing, vigilant care, could have been stashed anywhere: Arizona, Jackson Hole, Northern California. Canada, Cabo, the Dominican. Hell, anyplace at all could be transformed into a one-man state-of-the-art rehab. The decision might even have been made, with full cooperation of the trust, to fortify the (already secure) Benedict Canyon compound, bunking nurses, M.D.s, therapists, and cooks in guest rooms and guesthouse, stowing sanghanistas in the zendo. But Mr. Lightfoot knew such a maneuver would have, at least in the public’s eye, made him house nigger; easier for the powers that be to extricate him too, once his boy got better. No, it was all about perception — always was, always would be. He didn’t like the view from the back of the bus much. Never did. He would need a modicum of control from the get-go if he was to have a fighting chance against those legal Goliaths.

He lobbied for Riverside and won. Won big.

• • •

ALL THESE YEARS, the old room has been kept pristine, with its desktop aquarium and blackened-pocket catcher’s mitt straight off the cover of Saturday Evening Post. The shelves in the den were unapologetically lined with clippings from magazines (Cela found the beautiful frames at the Rose Bowl swap): Kit on the receiving end of the People’s Choice, the Golden Globe, the MTV-this, the Show West —that — Kit with Nicole and Bob Dylan, Meryl, Prince Charles, some crippled kids, the Dalai Lama, Rosie, Oprah, Giuliani and the Singing Fireman, Clinton, Sinatra, Mick, Hockney, Mandela and Sting, Kofi and Gwyneth, George W. and Condoleezza.

Shots of Viv had been weeded out.

• • •

(THE BACKYARD DIDN’T have a pool, but Burke installed an aboveground one with a therapeutic wave machine for Wonderboy to kick against. He bought a humongous steel sectional barbecue too. Cost four grand. Kit loved Cela’s burgers more than In-N-Out’s.)

• • •

ALL THE WHITE carpets Rita Julienne Lightfoot ghost-walked for years before the divorce, those bitching, toxic, whiny years before she got the crop of cooz tumors… All the white carpets, once compulsively scrubbed by that fucking harridan, now torn up and replaced with thick pile.

• • •

NO ONE COULD DENY there was a profound folkloric purity, a demoniac simplicity — the stuff of modern pop myth — in Burke’s arranging for the prodigal son’s rehab to be in Riverside. Keep it simple. (He told Cela that it was a case of “the swallowed returning to Capistrano.”) The homely, homespun formula was a major hit with the media too, featured by every conceivable outlet of the entire wired, warring planet. Lightfoot Senior became his own spin doctor, kiboshing rumors that he was trash, a mercenary, deadbeat dad: debonair Burke now vibed caretaker extraordinaire. The lawyers could be counted on to draw out the travails of executorship in order to continue collecting their hourly rape fee. Months went by with nothing resolved. Funds flowed minorly, purse strings tightly cinched; the battle was far from over, and enemies abounded. The estate paid a low-end stipend for a private security detail — Tula, force of one — and an allowance to Kit, which technically, his father could dip into. (The stipend did not pay for Tula’s meals or overtime, and Burke liked to say he was going broke with all the lunch and dinner runs to KFC.) The lawyers were trying to humiliate him, break him down — get him to settle, then book. To Vegas, or wherever. Out of their face. Classic war of attrition. Make him throw in the towel so they could exact their nefarious tolls, play out their godforsaken sociopathic entitlement motives. Rob him of what was his, by blood. Well, fuck them. Y’all can go fuck y’all. As they say in the South.