IF AELFRIC MANHEIM’S MONDAY-EVENING dinner had been reported upon in Daily Variety, the colorful trade paper of the film industry, the headline might have been FRIC CLICKS WITH CHICK.
On the grill, the plump breast had been basted with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and a delicious mixture of exotic herbs known around Palazzo Rospo as the McBee McSecret. In addition to the chicken, he had been served pasta, not with tomato sauce, but with butter, basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.
Mr. Hachette, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef who was a direct descendent of Jack the Ripper, didn’t work Sundays and Mondays, so that he might stalk and slash innocent women, toss rabid cats into baby carriages, and indulge in whatever other personal interests currently appealed to him.
Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was off Mondays and Tuesdays; therefore, on Mondays the kitchen was, in show-biz lingo, dark. Mrs. McBee had prepared these delicacies herself.
By the softly pulsing light of electric fixtures tricked up to look like antique oil lamps, Fric ate in the wine cellar, alone at the refectory table for eight in the cozy tasting room, which was separated [186] from the temperature-controlled portion of the cellar by a glass wall. Beyond the glass, in aisles of shelves, were fourteen thousand bottles of what his father sometimes identified as “Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, claret, port, Burgundy—and the blood of critics, which is a bitter vintage.”
Ha, ha, ha.
When Ghost Dad was home, they usually ate in the dining room, unless the dinner guests—the old man’s buddies, business associates, or various personal advisers from his spiritual counselor to his clairvoyance instructor—felt uncomfortable having a ten-year-old kid listening to their gossip and rolling his eyes at their trash talk.
In Ghost Dad’s absence, which was most of the time, Fric could choose to have dinner not just in his private rooms, where he usually ate, but virtually anywhere on the estate.
In good weather, he might dine outdoors by the swimming pool, grateful that in his father’s absence no hopelessly dense, tiresomely giggly, embarrassingly half-naked starlets were there to pester him with questions about his favorite subject in school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.
They were always trying to cadge some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription was for asthma medication.
If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen to trigger an asthma attack.
Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco-style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.
The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban multiplex.
[187] To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn’t need the assistance of a projectionist. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.
Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father’s movies.
Being seen watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.
Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.
If anyone were to see him watching his father’s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds’ choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.
Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric’s sticklike physique and his father’s maximum buffness.
Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad’s movies on the huge screen. Drenched in Dolby surround sound.
He watched certain films for the stories, though he’d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.
And always in his father’s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.
In the better films, such moments abounded. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn’t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.
[188] When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric’s father was magical. “Magical” sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush, embarrassing, but it was the right word.
Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more real than anyone you’d ever known. Or ever would know.
This super-real quality couldn’t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance of the director—most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato—nor by the layered details achie............