Fade Into Me Read Free Page A

inevitable battle with his parents over where he would go to college. They, of course, wanted him to go to a local state school, where his father would have gone if he’d had the intelligence and the money back when he was Max’s age. Max was unyielding in his desire to go to film school. His parents said there was no way they were going to pay for him to go all the way to UCLA, where Max wanted to start his undergrad work and then apply to the film school for his junior year, as the admission requirements stated.
    His parents hadn’t even wanted him to apply to UCLA, but he’d sent off the application along with the fee, paid for out of his savings from his part-time job at the movie theater.
    It was during this argument that his parents confessed to taking his UCLA application out of the mailbox all those months ago. Max couldn’t believe it.
    Alone with his dad one afternoon while his mother was at the grocery store, Max confronted him. “Stop hitting mom.”
    Max’s father turned to face him. “What are you going to do about it?”
    Max stepped closer to his father, and looked down at him. By this time in his life, Max was about an inch taller than his father. He also outweighed him by at least twenty pounds—all of it muscle.
    “Touch mom again and you’ll find out what I’m going to do about it.”
    Max’s father laughed, but said nothing.
    “And there’s always the police,” Max added.
    “So,” his father said, “what are you going to do? Blackmail me?”
    Max just laughed and left the room. His father had been such an asshole to him, never giving Max the freedom he wanted or needed, always treating him like he was incapable of doing anything right, taking his belt to Max, or swatting him with the back of his hand, which stung due to Max’s father’s fake college class ring (an item he wore to impress people). Well, now that had all changed. Max had the upper hand on his father.
    Max knew what he had to do, and he hatched his plan over the next couple of weeks.
    He would leave home, taking the three hundred and sixty-one dollars he had to his name, and hitchhike halfway across to the country to Hollywood. But that probably wouldn’t be enough.
    He’d never thought of blackmailing his father before he himself raised the possibility. Now it was looking like a damn good idea. Especially since Max had something else on his father. So, two days before Max skipped town, he went to the store where his father worked and said he needed five-thousand dollars.
    His father didn’t ask any questions. He simply wrote the check. After all, what was he going to say when Max told him he knew about Annette and Roberta, the two women his father had had affairs with (Roberta was still in the picture, as far as Max had been able to determine). Max’s dad didn’t even look shocked, didn’t ask how Max knew.
    When Max was leaving the office, he turned around and looked at his father. His dad’s eyes were weary, and he appeared to have given up all hope of having a normal relationship with his son.
    Two days before his seventeenth birthday, Max told his mother to pack her favorite stuff, but only two bags. On the morning of his birthday, after his father left for work, Max and his mother boarded a Greyhound bus. It was bound for southern California. It was on this bus ride that Max’s mother said she always wanted him to do what he wanted, and only agreed with his father because of the hold he had on her. Max said he knew all along.
    Over the next three years, Max worked in movie theaters, restaurants, and gas stations, while he finished high school. His mother got a job as a teacher’s assistant at a middle school.
    He finally landed a job that interested him: as a PA announcer on a tourist bus. He had impressed the owner of the tour bus company with his vast, almost obsessive knowledge of Hollywood. This led to him making a connection with someone who worked as a junior production assistant at MGM studios. His