Bruce Wagner - The Chrysanthemum Palace

Jack Michelet, cold-blooded killer of the Modern Library.

However you sliced it, the burgeoning threesome provided more than enough material to bring psychoanalysis back into vogue.

Thad’s case was a bit more complicated than ours, perhaps because he was older and had traveled further distances upon more perilous roads, perhaps because he was more complicated himself. It’s no shame for me to admit that of the trinity, I was the dullest of the lot. (Ultimately, my saving grace.) I always thought of Clea as fragile, yet at her toughest—“tough” being one of the more helpful chromosomes she’d acquired from Roos — she was tougher than me by a long shot. While I can’t really claim to have been an intimate of Thad’s, I never thought of him that way — fragile, I mean — though he definitely possessed what one critic noted as the “tragic element.” Even on first sight, there was something of the comic desperado, a charismatic pathos, hopeful and hopeless all at once, a kind of wounded-animal magnetism that made a person rush to hug the man or prop him up, fix him a sandwich or syringe: whatever it took to calm his nerves and make the agonized world (all other worlds were sure to follow) right again.

The reader has been patient with my exposition, and kind enough to recall this as a virginal effort. Some of you, I sense, may be tiring of my voice, so I’ll take the bull by the horns and lunge into that very first meeting, which took place in the cavernous, Benedictine sanctuary of the Chateau Marmont lobby.

“My God,” said Thad, with dumbfounded, courtly amplitude as I approached.

Clea knew that my meeting her old lover was a momentous occasion. (Proud, fresh-scrubbed, and beaming, she looked like an excited bureaucrat on a day the inaugural ribbon is cut.) There were so many glasses, dishes, books, scripts, and scarves on the table before him that it seemed as if he’d been living on the commodious, tasseled sofa rather than in a suite of rooms somewhere skyward.

“He’s just…”—he took me in a while longer, then looked to Clea for theatrical approbation—“well, I’m shocked. I mean, well — he’s exactly as I imagined him!”

“Thad knows everything about you,” she said, slyly.

“I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” I said.

“It’s a good thing,” said Thad. “Thus spake the Vorbalid.”

He smiled devilishly, as did Clea, his scampish lady-in-waiting and all-around acolyte-in-cahoots. His ambience — and fizzy, frizzy physicality — was at once raw and cultured, cultivated and kitschy, a curious commingling of scholar and clown. Thad’s eyes hungrily surveyed the topography of human detail unfolding before him like a jet devouring a runway at takeoff (recall that I am a beginner; forgive the turbulence of simile), his bristly brows, courtesy of Holbein or Cranach the Elder, hovered gnomishly above balding pate. His clothing, out of style and synch in our town and time, was cut from seventies-era flannel: Pendleton and corduroy that collected thread, clusters of tiny twigs, dust-ball tumbleweeds, bread crumbs, and other couch miscellanea miniatures. Like a creature in a storybook, the most delicate boughs and tendrils of hair tended to grow within and without the cartilaginous folds of his ears, and from small hands — the backs of which sported alarming tufts of fur — sprang unlikely, attenuated finger-bouquets with effetely polished nails: snapshot of a friar in cozy recess of library or den accompanied by Scarlatti (harpsichord) in those charged yet leisurely hours before transformation to werewolf. His manner of speech was a charmed slurry of murmured hesitancy and ballsiness. I would eventually chafe at this dichotomy (blend of wolf and leprechaun, of capricious qualities both simpatico and cruel), but at this moment the feeling that prevailed was of complete and familiar, blood-close ease. In fact, I found myself exhilarated upon meeting the final element of what was to be a pivotal, self-historic ménage à trois; I don’t think it too melodramatic to say that something inside me knew my life was about to change and would never again be the same.

“How long have you been in town?” I asked, stiffly. It was always like that when I met someone formidable.

“Town?” He looked curiously at our mutual friend and said, “Clea, what does he mean by ‘town’? Haven’t we already warped into Vorbalidian Space?”

I wrote the unscintillating reference off to jet lag and general drunkenness.

“Forgive him,” said Clea. “We just got back from Cedars. He had a migraine shot.”

“Wow,” I said lamely, though I actually felt for him. “My mother used to get them.”

“ Cluster headaches,” said Thad, with lurid emphasis. “They should call it cluster fuck. That should be the official medical terminology! They say in the lit’rature that when a cluster fuck gets beyond a certain point, all the Percocet in the world won’t touch it. Won’t do shit. It knows you’re trying to find it, they’ve proven this with CAT scans, it’s like fucking Al Qaeda. (Or being fucked by Al Qaeda.) Thing stays one step ahead of whatever you throw at it — moves to different parts of the brain. Nomadic. That’s actually the word they use. Like a storm system. I’ve seen ’em map it, with dye — cluster fucks look like gypsy thunderstorms. Rollin’ thunder!”

He rambled on, interspersing arcane physiological factoids with Starwatch jargon (I soon understood why). As he spoke, a stream of hipsters and admirers who were staying at the hotel — Ed Lachman, Rachel Griffiths, Philip Seymour Hoffman — either waved or dropped by to pay brief homage.

Twenty minutes in, a gregarious, attractively mousy woman named Miriam joined us. Thad baroquely introduced her as his book agent. Then another Philip, this one the actual manager of the Chateau, discreetly interrupted to officially welcome the actor-author to the premises. An agent from ICM offered praise while a preteen German girl (from The Jetsons demographic, probably the daughter of some international film financier) stood gawking not too far off. Amid this friendly tumult Mr. Michelet gathered his things and broke camp, inviting everyone in earshot to “take the party upstairs.”

Though he’d arrived only hours ago, the airy, legendary penthouse was redolent with the scent of his moppish, matted being, a potpourri of pot, herbal teas, longneck bottled Fig & Olive bath oils (courtesy of Clea), and seemingly, his very (busy) brain itself. At first, both women tried to curtail Thad’s alcoholic intake, as it was contraindicated to whatever opiates the ER had seen fit to dispense. He put up his dukes, but folk wisdom, folk medicine, and feminine wiles prevailed. As Miriam and Clea changed him into a favorite soft sweatshirt, they marveled at a physical constitution that, after the travails of the afternoon, would still leave their old friend “upright.” At least he was in a jovial frame of mind.

As it turned out, Thad was in L.A. to meet with the Starwatch: The Navigators team, who had written an episode expressly for him. It was news to me. The two-parter commenced filming in a month or so; Mr. Michelet’s face needed to be fitted for prosthetic appendages, that sort of thing. I shot Clea a glance and she shrugged, indicating it had been a surprise to her as well. I was irked, without exactly knowing why. The fact was, just because I’m the son of the show’s creator, I had no more an inside track of the goings-on, stunt-casting strategies, or “event episodes” being cooked up than did anyone else. As a rule, I had no interest — to care enough to be curious would have been an added humiliation — yet there I was, suddenly feeling left out. The explanation for my annoyance was actually quite simple: I was jealous, not only of Thad Michelet’s bigger, messier, brillianter, more glamorous life (and that he had the profound luxury of a temporary docking aboard the loveboat Demeter instead of taking up slaveship residence, as I had), but of his father’s loftier progenitorship as well, rendering my own, in comparison, more to that of blue collar than blue blood.