(or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part One)

For years, I lied to my daughter. Sure, call it unsavory. But it remains a fact. To complicate matters morally, it’s a fact of which I am quite proud. Not the lying, that was wrong. But the quality of the deception was so artfully done, it’s hard not to feel a workmanlike satisfaction. These days, you have to find the upside.

It went like this: in the morning I’d dress like a professional. Put on a nice shirt and sweater. Belt my jeans and pack my bag with computer, books, headphones, wallet, and phone. Illusion complete, I would hug her at the door. Kiss her tenderly on the cheek and tell her that daddy had work to do. Grown-up things. Difficult things to understand. Then I would stride purposefully up the garden path, to Do Things. This was always the most delicate part. I knew she was scrutinizing me skeptically from the doorway. Really? What are these things? What do you even do, exactly?

I didn’t look back. Everything depended on whether or not I had heard the door close by the time I reached the corner. If not I would have to actually walk out the gate, close it behind me, and stand there awkwardly. Occasionally, a neighbor would pass by. It was disturbing for both of us. I never explained what was happening, because how could I trust them? This was on a need-to-know basis only. I was a hustler with one mark: my seven-year-old daughter.

If I had heard the door close before I reached the gate, then I just walked straight up into the treehouse. Not just any treehouse. An insulated, painted, decorated, furnished treehouse. The very thing every small child falls asleep each night dreaming about. It’s perfect. It’s electrified. Two decks. Two stories. A view of the surrounding hills. Cedar shingles on its sides like it belongs in a fairy tale. Curb appeal. It has it all. Kids walk by and whine that they want one. Old folk stare wistfully. Supposedly, the guy who built it worked for Disney and built Toon Town. You know, the place kids hate. But it was all mine. I wasn’t going to give that up without a fight. So how to keep it all to myself? More lies. Some real doozies.

For the first six years of my youngest’s life, I maintained that while, okay, yeah, it looked like the perfect place for a young child to play, it might be the last place that a child plays. Because it was unlikely that the poor ill-fated child who wandered up its infernal stairs would ever return. At least in one piece. It was, in fact, a den of horrors. It was a fairy tale tower all right, if you like your fairy tales Teutonic and bloody. A haven for rats. A breeding ground of spiders. Big, fat, black, venomous ones. It was probably cursed by a witch. One day I saw her run skittishly past it, eyes averted, and was satisfied. My ruse had succeeded. Mission accomplished. As far as I was concerned, those tears were collateral damage.

Twelve years before the current apocalypse, I stood with my wife, two babies, and a perjuring real estate agent in that treehouse. Inside, it looked like the place the Hardy Boys grew up in. Maps of treasure on the walls. Bats and balls and the broken ingredients of trains. Wind in the trees whispering aw, shucks on a loop. Beads and Chinese script indicated that after the boys had abandoned it, ma had exercised her chakras in there. Now it was neglected and green. With actual spiders. It was perfect. Exactly what my inner child had been crying out for. More accurately, it was what my inner dictator had been taunting me about. (You should know that the child within this man is a small tyrant who looks and screams like a baby Gaddafi. Call him my Inner Gaddafi.) I turned to my wife and said, writing den. She looked at me amused and said, sweetheart, we have two children. I realized this was true. Damn it. It was reasonable to assume that in a few years' time the little nymphs would be playing yogis happily in the treehouse, imagining themselves part of a Californian cult. Making themselves cups of herbal tea and gluten-free cake. In their cherubic expressions, I saw the disappearing coast of a long-cherished dream. Over my dead body, I said. It was me, or the kids.

I remember being one myself, in South Africa, watching Carl Sagan wax lyrical about space. As the credits rolled I solemnly promised to dedicate my life to cosmic exploration. I soon realized that I had set the bar way too high. So I wrote poems, smoked Gauloises, and pretended to be other people instead. Actors do this on camera because it’s what we already do off camera. It legitimizes our neurosis. Calls it a career. It’s a fantastic way to not grow up. I succeeded in not growing up all through marriage and early fatherhood. I was still not growing up when I stood in the treehouse.

I had earned this refuge. It was going to be mine. A place to write in my journal and work on my instrument. Then, days after buying the house, I was fired from what turned out to be my last film. It was devastating. I worked out and told myself it was a blip. Then the stock market crashed and screenwriters went on strike. I kept working out. Worked on my craft. Worked on me. Worked on my instrument again. When the economy broke, I was already broke, but in fantastic shape. This is what it had come to. Just another shredded loser in Los Angeles being screamed at by his Inner Gaddafi.

We scrounged together barely enough money to take the kids to South Africa and see my parents. The dreams of my childhood had derailed. It didn’t matter that I hailed from the ass-end of Africa and was an autodidact who had traveled the world and hobnobbed with my heroes. I had acted with Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, and Samuel Jackson. I had eaten shellfish with Bertolucci in Rome. Chatted with Sting about poetry in Paris. But the child within this man expected more. Much more. He expected Global Domination. The all-female cadre of bodyguards had yet to materialize. The gold-plated shitter had been misplaced in customs. My fleet of Bentleys had been traded for a dusty Pontiac I could no longer afford. My food taster was on a hunger strike. My inner child was going to purge me. And the irony of it all was, his dreams had also been forged in a treehouse.

We moved a lot, but for a while we lived in Durban, South Africa, in a leaky house with holes in the walls, guarded by a huge Monitor Lizard. It was in a bit of jungle sandwiched between toxic smokestacks. There was a mercenary next door who smoked a pipe and had lots of girlfriends. My dad had put up a treehouse in the jungle. He’s a resourceful Scot who cleverly economized in its construction, and it had bits of doors and car parts. Rotted plywood sheets from the house. A place where logging protesters might dwell. Or squatters. To me, it was a Sky Throne. I trained ninjas in it. I wrote a science fiction short story in it about a jaded operative betrayed by the High Priests of Logic. I hid from Bob Marley playing on stoned repeat for two years straight. And I dreamed big. Imagining what my future self would look like, I saw a Sultan. He didn’t have a treehouse, he had an Ivory Tower. He had a balcony and adoring subjects. He was a big fucking deal.

I was not. Returning to Los Angeles, our Green Card application was denied. I couldn’t work, we had no money, and small children. I wrote a screenplay between bouts of self-loathing. We put a doll's house and tea set in the treehouse. My reps let me go. I couldn’t afford acting classes. My wife kept us going through her photoshoots, and I learned how to produce them. When we finally did get the Green Card, the side hustle became a production company. Aside from one trip to Paris for a baffling audition in broken French, my acting goose was cooked. The company did well enough for us to pay off our debts and take holidays. Not the view from the old Durban treehouse, but it could have been worse. Then, we met Jon Avnet.

A neighbor in Topanga, he had produced Risky Business and directed Fried Green Tomatoes. He knew everybody and his business partner was Rodrigo Garcia. At my wife’s suggestion, he read the script I had written while on suicide watch and suggested I submit something to the Youtube channel that he and Rodrigo created. I did. It became a series I wrote for two years called Lauren. It was nominated for awards and won a couple. It starred Jennifer Beals. Oh, that pleased my Inner Gaddafi. He was almost nice to me for a while. I got a lit agent. I got a lit manager. We had another daughter. I sold some scripts. But I was still reticent to call myself a writer. I hedged my bets. What if it didn’t work out? What if this is all a dream, and I’m really a hobo on LSD tripping his balls off under a bridge in Shanghai? You know what I mean? This could all go up in smoke. That’s what the little shit tells me, anyway. He never shuts up

Roald Dahl wrote in a gypsy caravan. Agatha Christie wrote in her bathtub. If I was really gonna own it, I needed my thing. By now, the older girls had become teenagers and only seemed to recognize me intermittently. The treehouse would be my place to hide. I painted it white and put a desk in it. Like a dictator in his last hideout, it was a refuge to rant in. I started writing a science fiction novel. (When this thing is over, we’ll be able to power airplanes with burning paperbacks. I’m doing my part.) It was somewhere I might at least fail in peace. On my own. Just me, myself, and Baby Gaddafi. I earned this.

Flash forward to quarantine. All three girls at home. Everyone walking around shouting non-sequiturs like it’s an avant-garde play. Going delirious out in the wild like it’s Apocalypse Nah-uh. No longer able to pretend to be professional, I just sneak off furtively before dawn. When I return and my youngest asks where I was, I say I was walking. Silence. Where? she asks, eyes narrowing. In the woods, I say. I was walking around in the woods. Aware that this sounds weird, but hoping it will discourage further questioning. And it works! My powers remain undiminished! Until the other day, when I emerged from the treehouse and saw her looking up at me. Her expression was something between Caesar recognizing Brutus and Newton recognizing gravity. Giddily she raced past me into the rat-free lair. Daddy, she said, you’ve been tricking me. I knew you didn’t do anything!

I told her I’m writing a novel. You’ll be an author? she asked. Yes, I said. You’ll write a series, she said. What are you, Max Perkins? I said. What’s it about? she asked. Well, it’s about this jaded operative, I began…

No more lying. That’s something. We may all be living in storm drains huddled around burning tires next year. Until then, this is what I do.