#RockGodDad & #TheEvilStepmom by Annie Holder

Vidar Rasmussen is a global superstar – at nineteen.  Everybody wants a piece of him.  He sells millions of records, breaks legions of hearts, takes buckets of drugs, and has just carelessly fathered a child.  That’s the last thing he wants.  He can’t be tied down with a kid and responsibilities.  Life is for living.  He’s got a universe to conquer.

Fast-forward thirty-one years, and Vidar is a respected musician with the world’s best-known back catalogue.  He’s clean and sober.  He’s thoughtful and measured.  He’s finally grown-up.  Can the same be said for his long-neglected, vituperative son?

(This snippet may contain swearing or sexual references which may not be suitable for younger readers.)

 

He got married.  That’s what made me start it, the sarcastic twitter account and the mocking hashtags #RockGodDad and #TheEvilStepmom.  It was a knee-jerk reaction to something I supposed I wouldn’t care about (in the unlikely event of it ever happening), but I discovered bothered me deeply when it actually took place.  It wasn’t just the detail-devoid press releases I scoured for snippets of information as desperately as any obsessive fan.  It wasn’t the natural spontaneity of the informal wedding photographs, obviously designed to show how very ordinary they were.  It wasn’t the twee little quotations everywhere about how they’d wanted to ‘do it quietly, at home in Denmark, surrounded by family and close friends…’  It wasn’t even that they looked so nauseatingly happy and into each other.  It was the fact that everyone I knew started saying to me, “Well, Daddy’s finally done it, huh?  Are you ever gonna?”  I got so sick of people stopping me in the street and asking, ‘Hey, you’re Vidar’s kid, right?  What was the wedding like?’  I’d just screw my face up into the politest smile I could manage, force a ‘no comment’ through clenched teeth, and get away from them as fast as I could.  Everyone assumed I’d been there.  Most people’s kids get invited to their middle-aged, second-time-lucky weddings, right?  I wanted to give the impression I’d been some kind of guest-of-honour, whilst simultaneously hating myself for being pathetic enough to care.

I look like him. In fact, so much like him, it’s scary.  Pictures of him as a younger man could be pictures of me.  I get recognised everywhere I go.  My youthful Dad would have lapped up the attention.  It terrifies me, mostly because I know I don’t deserve it, because I’ve never done anything of note in all my life.  He made a lot of very public mistakes, but my Dad is undeniably a skilful, talented, determined guy.  A child prodigy.  A superstar of global renown.  The list of his accomplishments is long and illustrious.  His fame is deserved, earned the hard way.  He came from nothing, and he made it on his own. 

I’m famous too, you know.  I get spotted at the Mall, and when my Dad’s in the news for doing something either controversial, amazing, or both, reporters and photographers mass outside my gate and wait for me to leave the house so they can shout questions at me that I can’t answer.  Why ask me about my father’s wedding?  It’s not as if I was invited or anything.  Haven’t they read the articles a million times like I have?  ‘Family and close friends’, they all say.  No mention of only sons.

I guess I’m ashamed.  I’m recognised, sure, but not for anything apart from being someone incredible’s unwanted child.  I mean, everyone on the planet knows he denied my existence, insisted on a paternity test when I was born, and has never had a single thing to do with me, ever. That’s why I started the account.  It was vindictive, childish, but when I did a tweet it made me feel better for a while, as I chuckled over the comments and racked up the retweets…and then I’d come to my senses and realise the only reason it got read, shared, and travelled so widely was because it was about him.  It was nothing to do with how clever I was, or how rapier-sharp my wit.  Any mention of my Dad went viral.  That was just how it was.  I had to shoehorn Dad into everything I did because the only thing anybody wanted me for was my link to him – the fabled musical genius; the coolest Danish dude on planet earth.  Why else did I choose the handle @VidsKid?  All I was doing was cashing-in.  Petty backstabbing from a rejected, neglected little boy trapped in a man’s body. 

If I screwed my eyes up nearly shut and squinted through my lashes at his wedding photographs, it could be me beside my beautiful new wife, smiling with relaxed ease because we celebrities are used to being photographed.  It doesn’t faze us like it does your average joe. 

So, I bitched about his life choices from behind the safety of my computer keyboard – a nasty, underachieving troll who’d literally have nothing, and be nothing, without him.  Part of me wanted to stop, because I knew it was cruel and unprovoked – but I couldn’t help lashing out.  If I was miserable, how dare he be happy?  He was supposed to feel guilty for everything he’d done!

And then my Mom died. 

It was hardly unexpected.  She’d been in and out of rehab for years.  She was an alcoholic; a festering mess of bitterness and regret – perhaps that’s where I get it from?  She had a heart attack.  The lawyer called.  The maid had found her dead in bed, alone but for a Jackie Collins paperback and an empty vodka bottle.  It wasn’t a cry for help, but a normal Sunday night bedtime; a little pick-me-up to ease her gently into another long and pointless week.  I didn’t get involved in dealing with her affairs. We had people to do that kind of thing.  I had no interest.  Losing my Mom was a wrench for sure, but a release too.  I loved her – she was the one constant presence in my life – but I was more ashamed of her.  She’d turn up drunk at my exclusive prep-school events, make a show of herself and a laughing-stock of me, and the embarrassments didn’t stop once I hit adulthood.  It was only after she’d died I realised how subconsciously tense she made me all the time.  Once she’d gone, I only had my own conduct to police.  Life was easier. 

When the lawyer said Mom didn’t own the house or one item of the furniture inside it, and I asked who did, the answer truly floored me.  The lawyer’s tone was incredulous – who did I think owned everything?  Who did I think had paid for every stitch of my clothing, morsel of food, millisecond of education and leisure since the accident of my conception?  I’d never given it a moment’s consideration.  I’d assumed it was my mother.  How naïve I was!  It couldn’t have been Mom.  She’d never had a job that I knew about.  She’d never done anything but get drunk, court the media, and stir up trouble (how touching that I seemed to be continuing the family tradition of being a Grade A pain-in-the-butt).  No, he’d paid for the house, my education, my clothing, my food, every club and pastime, vacation and treat.  My mother had badmouthed him and caused him nothing but aggravation my entire life – thirty-one years and counting – and yet he’d financed it all , from the drain of her useless, talentless kid to the booze she chugged like it was soda. 

Now Mom was dead the house had reverted to my father, and he naturally wanted to sell it.  Even in its state of disrepair, a Bel-Air mansion is still a Bel-Air mansion…and this one had a heck of a back-story!  I felt no emotion concerning the house.  I hadn’t lived there for years.  When I was twenty-one, my Dad gave me a lump sum of money – through the lawyers, of course.  The only condition attached to this coming-of-age birthday present was the stipulation to invest in property.  I bought a pricey little Malibu villa, and the one across the street too.  That’s how I live.  I kick around in one – idle, callow, ungrateful – and I rent out the other as income.  I don’t have a job.  I don’t need one.  I’m Vid’s Kid. 

Losing my childhood home therefore didn’t upset me or cause me any financial qualms over inheritance.  My mother had nothing to leave me but disquietingly-awkward memories and a shameful sense of relief at her passing.  What got in my head and disturbed my slumber was the discomfiting anxiety I had it all mixed up.  If I’d got the wrong end of the stick about the money, what else didn’t I know the truth of?  Unsure of my ground for the first time ever, the usual torrent of vitriolic tweets slowed to a trickle.  My insides churned with guilty unease over the stuff I’d already put out there in the world. Then the letter arrived.

A brown package couriered to the house under the auspices of the lawyer.  Something I had to sign for.  I assumed it was more pointless junk concerning Mom that I would skim dutifully, but never read in detail.  It wasn’t.  Instead, there was a cream envelope sealed with a monogrammed sticker to prevent chance tampering-without-detection.  Written on the outside in flowing black ink, the characters strikingly like calligraphy in their composition, were the words: Private.  Mr Z Rasmussen ONLY. 

Also in the envelope was a compliment slip with Mom’s lawyer’s familiar scrawl: ‘Zachary, this arrived this morning (Friday), forwarded from your father’s attorneys with the instructions that we pass it to you, unopened, and without delay.  We have duly complied.  Naturally, I will be happy to advise you upon the contents as necessary.  BR, Miles.’

Miles: my Mom’s slimy, shiny-suited, high-billing bulldog.  I bet he’d longed to open it.

I examined the envelope like a forensic investigator.  The tamper-proof seal undamaged, classily understated design with iridescent gold on the logo that caught the light. Expensive stock; watermarked, ridged, and heavy.  Did that eye-catching, artistic handwriting belong to my father, or his lawyer?

My heart thudded.  Was this saturation-point for him?  Mom was dead.  He was disposing of the house he’d bought us.  It was ten years since he’d ceased paying for my maintenance; his legal obligation to me concluded.  Was this the point at which he washed his hands of the whole irritating situation?  Over thirty years…  Quite a punishing sentence for a moment of youthful carelessness.  He must have thought it would never end.  Finally, no more drunk, haranguing ex.  No more deadbeat son.  Was this envelope something from the lawyers saying if I didn’t quit the malicious tweeting, there’d be consequences?

Expecting it to be a typewritten letter of threatening legalese, I inched open the seal and slid out two pages of plain sheet music, pre-printed with the staves for composition, but blank.  Puzzled, I spotted something showing through the sheets.  Flipping them over, I discovered the same quirky writing as on the envelope, squashed close together and hard to read, the liquid flamboyance of the words running into one another, as if the text had been poured out as one stream of consciousness, regurgitated onto the page as fast as possible, before the writer lost their thread…or their nerve…

A letter from my father.

The first communication I’d ever had with a guy who’d cast such a shadow over my life not a day went by when I didn’t wonder about him.  A guy I was obsessed with, painstakingly read every article on, saved every publicity picture of to my hard drive – and didn’t know at all.

Zachary,

I hope I’ve spelt your name correctly.  I had no say in what you were called – your mother named you – so I have no idea whether this is the spelling she chose or not.  If I’ve got it wrong, I’m sorry.  I don’t mean to cause offence.

Forgive the direct nature of this letter, but I’ve just been informed about your mother.  I can’t say I’ll miss her – it’d be rather two-faced to pretend otherwise, wouldn’t it? – but I expect you probably will, so I wanted to say I was sorry for your loss.  I’m also sorry about the state of this note.  First impressions count, they say…I just never have any decent notepaper around when I need it, but I always have reams of this stuff, so I hope you don’t mind it being on the back of sheet music.  It’s just a vehicle to convey a message, so I guess the paper doesn’t really matter.

I’ve just read this through and I sound like a lunatic, already!  I don’t have enough time to start over, so I’m just going to push on, and perhaps when I explain why I’m writing I’ll seem a little less nuts.

Now that your mother no longer needs it, my advisors tell me the Bel-Air house should be sold.  They’re saying it would be most sensible to auction it and we could – their words not mine – ‘be shot of it by the end of the month’.  That got me thinking: I never visited. I was obligated to provide you both with a suitable place to live – so I did.  David, my manager, bought it brand new off plan, and you and your mother moved into it as soon as you were well enough to leave hospital.  It was your home right up until you bought your own place.  They tell me Malibu; is that right?  I’ve looked at some houses there, it’s real nice.  Too crowded for me, though.  I like my privacy.

I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but I got married recently.  Yeah, I know, pretty funny…  Everyone says they never expected it of me.  I never expected it of myself!  I just realised my life was real empty.  Just as I started to figure that out, somebody came along – out of nowhere – and filled that emptiness.  Her name is Grace.  She’s an abstract artist.  She’s in the doorway of the office right now tapping her watch at me because we’ve got a plane to catch. 

This is all over the place, isn’t it?  Everything that’s happened recently just got my brain working overtime, that’s all.  Getting married, and then your Mom passing away…then selling the house.  I try to butt out, Zachary, but people who work for me keep an eye on your life, and answer my questions if I want to know what’s going on with you.  I tend not to get involved – because you’re your own man…because it’s none of my business – but they tell me you’ve no lady in your life, no kids…and I just thought maybe it might be too much for you, losing everything that anchors you all at once; your mother gone suddenly, and then your childhood home disposed of as fast as possible, as if we’ve only been waiting for an excuse to get rid of it.  It occurred to me you might have a strong attachment to it.  You might not be ready to let it go so easily.  You might not want to let it go at all. 

I don’t imagine your Mother made much effort to maintain it, but I’m sure we can organise to fix it up if you want to keep it.  I don’t need the stupid money, so if you want the house – if it has meaning for you – then I guess you should have it.  We can do it properly, legally, if it’s what you want.  Just let me know.  Tell your lawyer…or ring the office, talk to David Leader.  He’s my first point of contact with the world – my gatekeeper!  He handles absolutely everything for me. 

I have to finish.  The car is here.  Grace is out the door.  She’s yelling at me to move my butt.

Once again, sorry about your Mom, sorry about this awful note, sorry if I spelt your name wrong, sorry that I have no idea how to write to my own son.  You’ll never realise how many regrets I have about the hash your mother and I made of everything.  I missed so much I can never recapture.  Pointless to talk about it now…but I want you to know I am fully-aware of how utterly I fucked up.  If I could have that time over again!  But I can’t.  It’s too late.  I have to live with the guilt and accept it as my punishment for being a selfish, stupid, egotistical fool.

If you want the house, you can have it.  Just let me know your decision promptly so I can call off the dogs if necessary, otherwise they’ll auction it before I have time to put the brakes on.

I don’t really know how to sign off this letter.  I can’t exactly put ‘Dad’, I haven’t earned that.  I guess I’ll sign this the way I sign everything.  Authentic signatures go for quite a lot on the internet, so they tell me!  Or should I just put #RockGodDad?

Vidar Rasmussen

 

Oh shit.  He knew.  The account, the tweets, the spiteful sarcasm.  Had he read them, or had someone just told him about it like they seemed to keep him informed of everything else - one of his ‘people’?  Either way, it was bad.  Shame made my face burn.  My clammy thumbs dampened the ink and transferred it onto my skin, smudging where I gripped the paper tight. 

My father had written to me – directly to me – openly and unselfconsciously sharing what was uppermost in his mind at the time.  #RockGodDad didn’t seem arrogant, or self-important, or distant.  In fact, he seemed pretty genuine and down-to-earth.  And within the confusion of jumbled thought and complex emotion, one monumental fact stood out. He’d offered me that house!  A multi-million-dollar mansion in a highly-desirable zipcode.  All I had to do was get in touch and tell him what I decided. 

‘I can’t write ‘Dad’, I haven’t earned it’.  Maybe not yet…but something in the tone of the hastily-scribbled letter felt like a cautious approach, a tentative testing of my reception of an overture of friendship.  Perhaps he'd been waiting for exactly this opportunity; for Mom to no longer be in the way?  Oh, it was tempting…!  I shied away from writing my own letter in reply.  I just knew I couldn’t bare my soul with comparable nobility.  The things he’d said – seemingly under pressure, #TheEvilStepmom herself in the doorway nagging him to finish up and get going!  Of course, he’s a creative guy – a lyricist, a composer.  He knows how to build atmosphere with a few words, tell a good story, engage an audience, so it could all be an artful construct by a practised performer, but it rang true to me.  I’m writing on this paper because it’s all I have to hand.  I’m writing because the events of the past couple of months are in my head.  Yeah, you and me both, Pops.

I’m sorry I don’t know how to spell your name…your mother named you.  Staggered by how little I really knew, I fretted all afternoon about the best course of action.  Should I call his bluff, test him, say yes to the house to see if he really meant it?  Run-down, way too big for only me, and full of bad memories - I didn’t want it.  What I wanted was an excuse to talk to my father. 

It seemed the house meant very little to him either, just an asset he’d been advised to dispose of.  Too rich to care how much it fetched at auction, was he therefore content just to give it away, or did he likewise want an excuse to talk to his son?

It was two in the morning before I decided on a face-saving way to extend an olive branch and pretend nonchalance at the same time.  A new tweet.  I’d always got the impression my notoriously-upfront father didn’t bother much with the often-snidey smokescreens of social media – which was partly what gave me the guts to say the things I did, because I was convinced he’d never read them.  I’d reckoned without the vast galaxy that clearly orbited his star.  Someone monitored what I did and kept him informed of it.  I didn’t know whether to feel comforted or unnerved that he had people observing my life, but nothing I did was exactly a secret.  Every gossip journo and paparazzi photographer in LA knew where I lived.  My private life, such as it was, unfolded in the public domain.  That was normal to me.  It had been that way since the day I was born.  Before I thought better of it, I tweeted:

 

@VidsKid

Life’s crazy right now. My Mom’s passing has left a million questions only one man can answer. How about it #RockGodDad? Shall we talk? #SecretLocation

 

Over the next few days, the internet went nuts.  My tweet was everywhere!  It got on the entertainment channel news – are Vidar and his estranged son about to reconcile?  All that bullshit where they talk and talk, everyone’s got an opinion, but no one knows a thing.  Commentators speculated.  Journalists asked damn-fool questions that were none of their business.  For the first time in my life, I cared about keeping something to myself.  The gaggle at my gate swelled to a crowd, all shouting when I drove out, flashbulbs popping…but from the one place I wanted a response there was only deafening, judgemental silence.  Perhaps I should have grown a pair, knuckled down, and composed a note of similar honesty to the one I received?  I’d ignored the clue in his words to me – ‘I value my privacy’.  Maybe he resented me going public with this, deciding I was irresponsible, not to be trusted with a secret, not worth contacting ever again?

A week passed.  Two.  Three.  I stopped checking my inbox because the crushing disappointment hurt too much.  I contemplated deleting the @VidsKid account.  I regretted opening that letter and reading it, getting my futile hopes up.  Then, one Wednesday afternoon just after lunch, there came a buzz on the entryphone.

On the camera screen was the black and white image of a slim, well-dressed, middle-aged man with glossy dark hair and a precisely-trimmed beard.  Unruffled by the surging crush outside, he stood amongst the earwigging gawpers exuding total calm and patient self-assurance.

“Hello?”

“Zachary.  Good afternoon.  David Leader.  I wonder if you’d be kind enough to admit me?”

David Leader.  The gatekeeper? 

I pressed the release button, watching on the screen as the guy who must be my Dad’s Man-Friday eased gracefully through the opening gate and firmly ushered all those who’d opportunistically followed him back out onto the sidewalk, clanging the wrought iron barrier shut behind them and sealing just the two of us in.  The quiet authority with which he went about his business impressed me.  The man was accustomed to handling just this kind of situation.  He was a professional.  This was legit!  This urbane gentleman was from my Dad, he had to be!

As he jogged up the steps to the front door, I swung it open a couple of feet to admit him but keep myself out of sight of the cameras.  Door closed, we stood in the hall looking at one another.  I blushed and felt ridiculous.  He smiled warmly, showing very white, very even teeth, “Zachary.  I’m delighted you allowed me into your home,” extending a tanned hand and shaking mine briefly, firmly, confidently.

“Um…are you from my…um…Dad?”

“I am.  David Leader.  I’ve worked for your father since just after you were born.”

“Really?  That long?”  During the worst of the drug-fuelled hedonism, across the touch-and-go months incarcerated in rehab, through the long and arduous years rebuilding career and reputation…and still by his side, ‘handling absolutely everything’.

“Yes…thirty years…”

“Wow.  He must be a good boss, huh?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the groomed individual stated simply, “He’s the best boss.”

“Right…”  I didn’t know what else to say.  At my mother’s knee I’d absorbed the incontrovertible truth that my absent father was an asshole, yet every piece of recent evidence suggested he was anything but.  When the silence lengthened, David Leader glanced surreptitiously at his expensive watch and swung briskly into action, “I understand you have some questions.  Perhaps we can have a coffee and I’ll try to answer some of them for you?  After all,” here, this impressive, polished display of my father’s omnipotence fixed me with unblinking, light brown eyes, and softly suggested, “we have the particulars of a significant meeting to arrange, don’t we?”

 

Does @VidsKid ever meet his #RockGodDad?

To find out, check back soon for the next instalment of ‘SHORTS: 10-minute reads for coffee break or commute’ on:

www.annieholder.com/just-write-right/

‘Against All Odds’, the surprising story of how Vidar met Grace, is available to buy worldwide as paperback or eBook on Amazon.

www.annieholder.com/against-all-odds/

© Annie Holder 2018

Annie Holder has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Annie Holder in 2017.

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination.  Place and public names are sometimes used for the purposes of fiction.  Resemblance to any person, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author.