“Not the traditional kind, no.”
“Huh, so you never had teachers telling nerdy math jokes, or prom, or Friday night football games?”
“No, no, and no.”
“Do you ever feel like you missed out?”
His granite jaw appeared to tighten and I wondered if I’d hit a sore spot.
“Maybe sometimes, but I didn’t hate growing up on television, or at least I didn’t until my star burned out. Then it became the opposite of fun.”
I gently ran my finger along his arm, encouraging him to continue. By his jittery disposition, I surmised this was a truth he wasn’t used to sharing.
“There’s a black hole that opens up when a child actor gets too old to play little kids but too young to play teens. Actual teens are generally cast aside for ‘Hollywood’ teens—twenty to thirty year olds. Once I hit sixteen and started puberty, I was done for. I couldn’t get a job in a mouthwash commercial, that’s how thoroughly I’d been tossed away.”
“It must have been hard on your self-esteem.”
“It was, but even harder on my father’s. He’d made a name for himself in Hollywood and it wasn’t a good one. Let’s just say he was the stage dad from hell. You would’ve thought he was the star the way he carried on about every little thing. People only put up with him because I was popular and, in order to keep me around, they had to deal with his shit. But having Tucker by my side was like carrying around two hundred pounds of baggage. Once I’d grown out of being cute, Hollywood couldn’t dump me, and him, fast enough.”
“I can’t imagine you not being cute.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Have you ever heard of that Chinese guy who sued his wife for giving him ugly kids—and won? He claimed she’d deceived him by having plastic surgery and not disclosing her ugly duckling status from the beginning. Well, Breeze, you’ve officially been warned.”
My mouth dropped open. “I don’t believe you were ever an ugly duckling.”
“Well, okay, not by most people’s standards, but certainly by my father’s. See, I’d had the audacity to go through puberty in a less than attractive manner. A growth spurt left me tall and gangly with a spattering of pimples and unacceptably crooked teeth.
Tucker decided my lack of job opportunities was because I wasn’t good-looking enough so he went to work fixing my outside. I went through six months of the acne treatment that required monthly blood draws and minimal contact with the sun. I was put on a regimented weight gain diet while working out with a trainer two to four hours a day. I spent nearly two years in braces, after undergoing a surgery to align my back teeth because apparently, celebrities weren’t allowed to have a slight under bite. And the icing on the cake came when my father deemed my post-puberty nose too wide at the bridge and arranged for a nose job on the day I turned seventeen. Happy birthday to me.”
Bodhi’s story blew my mind. His father’s maniacal insistence on beauty was like Munchhausen by Proxy for the Hollywood crowd. What Tucker had subjected him to constituted abuse and Bodhi didn’t even realize it. I was beginning to get a better picture of a father-son relationship that was no partnership. Tucker was the king and Bodhi his loyal subject. No wonder he felt the need to deceive his father. Freedom for Bodhi did not come for free.
“But even after he’d fixed my physical issues, I was still unemployable in the business because my father was like kryptonite in the casting circles. That’s when he decided to switch gears and tackle a different avenue toward fame and fortune… music. The idea was to turn me into a pop star and, in turn, make both of us matter again.”
“Did you even want to be a musician?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it before that, but I’d been in both music and voice lessons since I was five, so it wasn’t such a farfetched plan. I’m no Freddie Mercury but I have a fairly decent singing voice. Pair that with the 2.0 Bodhi upgrade I’d gone through and Tucker had stumbled onto a legitimate business plan.
He handpicked four other teenage boys to join me in formingAnyDayNow. Several producers jumped in to provide the capital when it was determined that my father might have a winning hand. And he did. Within a year of forming the band, Tucker had morphed from an overbearing stage dad into a music industry power player.”
“And you became a teen idol by no choice of your own.” I realized I was sounding like Debbie Downer but there was nothing inspiring about a story where a full-grown man filtered his dreams through his son.
Bodhi nodded. “The funny thing is, back then, it never occurred to me to mind. I’d been groomed for stardom, so it was a natural process for me.”
For the first time, I saw Bodhi’s life for what it was— manufactured. Everything that had happened today at the ice cream parlor was just the after effect of a father living vicariously through his child.
“So how do you feel about it all now? Do you like being a teen idol?”
“Uh, I didn’t mind in the beginning. It was flattering, all that attention. But as our star status exploded, it became more difficult. Now, I just feel like I’m playing a part, you know?”
“So why don’t you leave?”
“It’s not that easy. Everything I am and everything I’ll ever be has his signature written all over it. He not only owns me, he owns the band. Every step we take, every decision that’s made, goes directly through him. ManagingAnyDayNowput him on the map, and Tucker Beckett won’t settle for anything less than world domination.”
Gripping his chin, I turned his face toward mine. “You do have a choice. It’s your future and no one has the right to dictate it for you. If I were you, I’d hire an outside lawyer and figure out exactly what your obligations are.”
“You want me to leave the band?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want or what Tucker wants. What matters is whatyouwant. Whether that’s as a member ofAnyDayNowor not, you owe it to yourself to find out what your rights are so you can go into the decision informed.”
