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My mother plays a card game called Mao.
Mao was created in Chinese POW camps.
They shot everyone who didn't win.
Mother hands me a two-page booklet of rules. The cover is a picture of Mao and reads: the rules of mao. Inside the booklet is one blank page of paper.
The players have to figure out the rules as they play cards. The dealer is the dictator of the game, announcing his secret rules as a game progresses. If you are dealt an ace, your penalties could have thirty different outcomes. It could mean that you have to shoot your own mother. It all depends on the rules created by the dealer. It's very difficult to win. Up to now, my mother was always the dealer.
I watch my grandmother and mother play Mao.
"What's your prize?" Mother asks.
"Jordan gets to live with me," Grandma says.
"If I win, you won't die," Mother demands.
"We're not playing for cancer," Grandma tells my mother.
"It's a new rule," Mother says, her voice desperate.
"I'm the dealer."
"What about the ruby ring?" my mother asks.
"If you win two games out of three."
"Is that all?"
Grandma begins shuffling the deck. "Two cards for talking out of turn," Grandma says.
My mother starts to cry.
"Two cards for crying," Grandma adds.
Mother has practiced for this game for weeks, creating every new rule she could conceive for whenever she can get to deal. Mother believes she can save Grandma's life with a game of cards.
Grandma doesn't need to say much during the game; she keeps her chin up, fondling the pearl beads on her necklace, holding a glass of champagne in her left hand. This is Grandma's Monte Carlo version of poker face. Grandma has never needed a pokerface. It's glamour that wins the game.
"I want to take a drive to the desert," Grandma says.
"Is this your idea of a real game?" Mother asks.
Grandma doesn't respond.
"They should put you away," my mother tells Grandma as she starts picking at her own skin.
"Go to hell."
"This is what you say to your daughter. Don't play hard. Play light. Forget the rules."
"Marry rich and become a star," Grandma adds.
"What are you going to do with Jordan?" Mother asks. Queen of spades is placed on the center deck.
"We're going to take a trip," Grandma says. "He'll be mine until I die."
"Whose idea was it to have this game?" I ask, barely audible.
"Chinese who tried to play for freedom," Grandma says.
My mother places two jacks of clubs onto the center deck.
Grandma deals Mother two more cards.
"What was that for?"
"Failure to say 'Have a nice day,'" Grandma says.
My mother picks a jack of hearts on the center deck. "How long is he going to be your son?" my mother asks.
"Until I get the right picture," Grandma says, reaching for another card. Grandma places another card on my mother's growing deck.
"Why did I get a card?"
I know my mother will lose. We know how to trick in this family.
"He's my last subject," Grandma tells my mother.
Grandma wins the Mao game. It's the only time Mother ever lost a game. And this is the last time Grandma and my mother play Mao.
What if someone asks for a rematch?
As I sit in the backseat of my mother's limousine on the way to rehearsals for my film, I realize I want to go live with Grandma.
Grandma losing the game also means Grandma could die. I don't know what happens to me or this family until we play Mao.
"How do I win this game?" I ask, turning to no one in particular in the car
I remember my tenth birthday. That's when the studios started associating me with words like commodity. Stock.
At my birthday Mother asked, "Don't you have any friends?" The party was in Griffith Park. We were at the horse rides.
She had sent three dozen engraved invitations to all of my friends and offered to pick them up in limousines. I never was at school because I was working on films.
That day we sat out under canopies built around the horse stables. Everywhere was the scent of eucalyptus trees. This park was invisible to the rest of Los Angeles.
I was ten years of age and I appreciated the vanishing points of Los Angeles, like Devil's Island, a lost island off the coast of South America.
At every birthday party I had, my mother had to have a cake with my picture on it, an eight-by-ten photograph of me in sugar and chocolate.
I would be passed around the party and everybody ate me. Some would take a big piece of my eyebrow, others would consume a fourth of my chin. My mother ate my eyes, vanilla beans, and chocolate for eyebrows. The remains of my face would be put into Mother's combination-locked refrigerator, and I could pretend to be freezing.
My birthday party was catered with French food, starting with baguettes, duck mousse pƒt‚, and champagne, then endives soaked in salt and vinegar. I always imagined endives were the wings clipped from doves, laid on a bed of lettuce.
That day at my tenth birthday party, my whole fake family came from the movie I was making. The father was nicer than my real dad. I even had a girlfriend who liked me in fiction. She had gold hair in gigantic curls and her own set of flippers, a crown created for young actors who lost baby teeth. I was in a real family. They were very good people and treated me like a son. The black tuxedo I wore belonged to the studio. I didn't think this fake family would bring me anything real to my real birthday party. They were all in character. We were a family.
I had thirty friends at my birthday party, extras who played in the movie's school scenes. I didn't know their real names. Only principal numbers one, two, three, and four, or background friends. I talked to them in character, pretending we had played or went to each others' houses.
During the banquet I sat in the corner eating fruit. Citrus represented everything I loved about Los Angeles. It was something no one could take away from me. Meanwhile, I was like doll parts scattered around on people's tables and in their mouths.
The birthday cake came out and I was on fire. Ten candles surrounded my requiem cake. I looked at my edible face and the vanilla frosting smeared across my cheeks and I couldn't eat myself. I was seven layers of rum and dried cake.
"You take the first piece," Mother said, holding a piece of me in her hand with a knife.
"I can't."
"Then everyone else will eat you."
"I don't even taste like rum," I said.
My name is Jordan Highland. I was born a blue baby. I was dead when I was born. They had to tie my mother's insides up after she choked me.
That's not in the script, my mother would say.
This is who choked me.
My mother is dropping me off at Grandma's, to live.
In the car, I think of the women in the books Grandma gave me of Edward Hopper paintings. Alone and staring out at some indistinguishable plateau, the women in the paintings are tired, weak, drowsy; like my mother, they have skin tones painted opaque, white oils.
Their hair is always knotted with strands falling from clips and sometimes tied into buns. Are these people in the paintings Mother? Sometimes Hopper puts red tones into the cheeks, but the rest of the body is a weak flesh color and pink at the ridges. This was how I see my mother. Not what she looks like with makeup but how she was in the mornings, before she had to face herself and her son.
Mother is an actress. She is dedicated to contemplating the next move, screenplay, or character.
She's into drama. Mother is concerned about the words and rhythm of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, David Mamet, Edward Albee. They wrote roles she played on Broadway. She took roles in big budget Hollywood films, which made her a movie star and gave her the power to start making films based on great novels and plays. She is working on making Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment into a film.
Mother is preparing to play Queen Elizabeth I. She is a method actress. Everyday she lives in the character she plays. Mother is up at the crack of dawn to evoke the tragedy of Elizabeth's life. She aims to communicate with the dead before the sun rises.
