Satyricon

The only thing my mom ever told me about my dad was that he was in a Fellini movie, which if I’m being honest is probably the only reason I would ever watch that kind of movie in the first place. It’s called Satyricon, I don’t even know how to describe it, like arthouse Greek mythology, or maybe Roman mythology, I guess. Some of the reviews I read after my mom died called it oneiric, which I learned was just a fancy word for dreamlike. But it’s true, it’s a fancy movie. I think she was impressed by that, even though she always tried to act like she wasn’t, like he was just some idiot. ‘He was hot and he knew all the best parties and he had all the best drugs,’ that was usually all I heard about him, like if she told me the bad girl stuff she wouldn’t have to tell me anything real. 

Of course they were in LA. It was the ‘80s so I picture my mom with big Stevie Nicks hair and he’s in some tight polo shirt with his chest hair popping out of the collar. I know what he looks like but I picture him differently, like he’s a different guy, like he doesn’t have a real face. The two of them coked out of their minds in some gaudy nightclub or drinking on the balcony with palm trees in the background. That’s all just from movies and TV though, it’s not real. But I think that fake glitzy stuff is what she liked about him. He made her feel hot. ‘I knew how to use my looks to get what I wanted,’ that was one of her old chestnuts, or she’d tell me again that my pretty face was the most valuable thing she’d passed down to me. She would get going about her Hollywood Days, that’s what she always called them—I’d come into the kitchen and find her chain-smoking at the table with her little frog mug and her vodka tonics, messing with the blinds because she thought the light in the kitchen didn’t look right. She always told the same stories, but we did have fun. 

I know their relationship didn’t last long. By the time I was born she had already moved to San Diego. When I was little, I thought her boyfriend Kurt was my dad. She told me he was, I called him Dad until I was six or seven. We left when she found out he was sleeping with a 16-year-old—it’s just like, God, she really knew how to pick ‘em, right? But it was only after we got out of that whole thing and moved up to Sacramento that she told me my real dad was Joseph Wheeler, this washed-up actor from a Fellini movie. 

I didn’t watch Satyricon for a long time. I mean, I actively avoided it. Even outside of the weird family stuff, it’s really not my kind of movie. More like something one of my boyfriends in college would have been into. I was always winding up with guys like that, little fancy guys who alphabetized their bookshelves and knew too much about music, guys who drank too much because all their favorite artists did. But I never let any of them show me anything I didn’t want to watch, French New Wave or whatever else they were getting into that week. I would pretend I was dumb and they would let me pretend even though they knew I wasn’t. 

I always said my favorite movie was Dirty Dancing. I don’t know if I really meant it but sometimes I guess I did. After college I was still bartending at the Voyeur, I’d get off at 3:30 or 4:00 every night and I was too braindead to talk about philosophy or watch a movie with subtitles—I wanted to get laid and watch Dirty Dancing and fall sleep. Whenever a guy tried to get onto me for watching trash, I would just say ‘Politics is more important than art’ and then we would get into a fight and we wouldn’t have to watch anything at all. I knew if I ever told any of them my dad was in a Fellini movie I’d never hear the end of it. I think I was worried one of them might have seen it already, like they might know all these facts about it or tell me what my opinion about it was supposed to be. But after my mom died, I don’t know, it’s obvious. I finally watched it. 

In the movie he’s a landowner with a bunch of slaves, like a patrician, I think that’s what you would call him. He’s only in one scene. It starts out and he’s standing in front of all his slaves and he’s talking in Latin, it’s some kind of ceremony and there’s smoke coming out of these little urns on the pedestal in front of him. He takes a rod and he walks around the room touching the slaves on the head one by one, telling them they’re free now—‘You’re free, you’re free, all you slaves are free.’ His wife is standing off to the side smiling, like what he’s doing is very noble.

He frees the slaves and they all go outside and he and his wife watch them load up their cart, they’ve got all their stuff in a covered wagon with an ox and they ride off into their new freed life, off to somewhere, I don’t know where they go. But these little kids are still standing there, they’re dressed better than the slaves so they’re his kids, I think. The smallest girl, the youngest daughter, she comes up to him and whispers something in his ear, I can’t remember exactly what she says but it’s something like, she’s asking him if the place they’re going to is even more beautiful than the place they are now. She says she’ll only go if he tells her the place they’re going to is more beautiful than the place they are now. All the kids look at him, you see them from his perspective and they’re just standing there staring at him like little children of the corn, waiting for him to say something, but I don’t think he does. And then the kids all get into another wagon and he sends them away, and it’s just him and his wife standing there together. 

The whole scene is so fucking weird because he does sort of look like me, he has the same big nose and the same square jaw, which looks better on a man, and he’s obviously handsome, you can see why he was an actor, but his eyes look sad, they’re too blue like Disney princess eyes, and his hair is so gray. He looks older in that way some guys look, where you can’t tell if they’re in their late thirties or their early fifties. My mom would always go back and forth on whether he was ten or fifteen or even twenty years older than she was. I remember thinking as I watched the movie on my laptop that somewhere, somebody had probably watched this scene and thought, ‘That guy’s hot.’ So many people must have seen him in the movie before I had, like film students had probably written papers about Satyricon and analyzed the scene where the landowner frees his slaves. It made me feel embarrassed somehow. 

It’s stupid but I was almost disappointed he didn’t have a bigger role, that it was just that one little part. I don’t know what I was expecting, it’s not like he was a famous actor. I looked at his IMDB and the only thing on there was Satyricon and some other Italian movie. The page had a ‘Star-meter’ up at the top where it showed how popular the actor was, and it said he was trending that week. I thought, who else could possibly be looking up this guy? Weird little movie nerds? One of his other kids? Who else could possibly care about him? Joseph Wheeler, this nobody actor with two movies in his filmography. 

His other movie was called Gradiva. It didn’t seem as fancy, I tried to watch it but all I could find was some shitty video on the internet that looked VHS quality. I couldn’t understand what role he played and the footage was so blurry I don’t think I would have recognized him anyway. I did see his name in the opening credits, it was in Italian but I could tell it said ‘Special appearance by,’ so he probably had a small role in that one too. I imagined Italian people seeing his name and thinking, ‘Ah, Joseph Wheeler, he was great in Satyricon.’ 

There were no subtitles so I couldn’t really understand what was happening. At the beginning a bunch of dark figures were lined up holding umbrellas and then it switched to a shot of a car floating away down a river. I clicked forward and saw a woman in robes with smoke blowing all around her, but that was as far as I got. I don’t know anything about movies but it seemed stupider than the Fellini movie, like it was made by a dumb person who wanted to seem smart. 

I started reading about Gradiva on the internet but it was way too much bullshit. It was a book, it was a movie, it was a Salvador Dalí painting—there were all these adaptations, all these artists loved it. In the original book there’s a German archaeologist who’s obsessed with this statue of a woman, she comes to life or he thinks he sees her come to life. Gradiva, she’s the ‘the woman who walks.’ I don’t know if the archeologist wants to fuck the statue, but I think he must have to, to think about her so much. I went down this gross internet hole from Gradiva the movie to Gradiva the novel and then to the Freudian analysis and all the artist trivia, so much that I started seeing these connections like I was a conspiracy theorist. The director of Gradiva was an actor in Last Year at Marienbad—I couldn’t avoid that one in college, I remember thinking it was totally unwatchable—and that movie was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet or however you say his name, and he had directed his own version of Gradiva—it was just like, where does it end? I never wanted to watch any of this stuff, I didn’t even want to read about it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was still living at the same shitty punk house and a rat had died in my bedroom wall—it smelled like rotting fruit, I couldn’t sleep in my room the smell was so bad—so I was sitting on the couch out in the living room, staring at my laptop in the dark, still smelling the dead rat even with my bedroom door closed, sitting there with my T-shirt pulled up over my nose like a crazy person, looking at the internet until my eyes hurt. Eventually I was just like, what am I supposed to do with all this stuff? What’s the point? I remember thinking, ‘Nobody else in the world cares about this. No one on Earth cares about this except me.’ 

It was the kind of stuff my pseudo-intellectual boyfriends would have been into, one of those dudes would go read all these books and watch all these movies and write some dumb essay or make his own little movie out of it. But I didn’t want to make anything out of it, I got sick just clicking around on the internet. I remember thinking, if I was some rich asshole, I could fly to Italy, I could go walk around Rome or Pompeii or wherever else they filmed these movies. I know Fellini’s dead, but I could have found somebody who worked on the movies and ask them about Joseph Wheeler, I could go find the producers, the crew, the actors, somebody who was still around. Would Fellini have even remembered him? If you search for ‘Joseph Wheeler Fellini’ on the internet, there’s a picture of him standing there with Fellini and the woman who plays the wife, I didn’t recognize her name but she was supposed to be a famous Italian actor. I had all these funny thoughts, like, ‘Why would Fellini work with someone like him, this deadbeat actor with illegitimate kids all over the place? Did he know what kind of man Joseph Wheeler really was?’ Which is obviously so dumb, the movie came out 20 years before I was born. 

Before, I always told myself that I didn’t care, that I didn’t need to know anything about him. But I think I just assumed I could find out someday, like someday my mom would tell me if I really wanted to know. I didn’t expect her to die when she was fifty-one. She always drank too much but I didn’t think it would go like that. I regretted all kinds of stuff afterwards. I know it’s ordinary, but it didn’t feel ordinary when it was happening. Eventually I realized there was some part of me that was almost relieved, not that she had died, of course not, but relieved I would never be able to ask her anything about him. The opportunity had passed. It was like there was this box I could have opened but then the box had gotten thrown out by mistake. 

I remember when I was in high school, I sat behind a girl in Algebra class named Ellen Wall, she had long messy hair she always wore in a ponytail and the desks in the classroom were so close together I would sit there and count the hairs stuck to the back of her shirt. She was smart and she always finished her work before everyone else, and sometimes while she was sitting there waiting for the rest of us to catch up, she would pull out this photo of her dad holding her when she was a baby and just stare at it, like wistfully. You could tell it was her dad by the way she looked at it, I remember he had dark hair and glasses and he looked smart. She would stare at the photo in this sort of exaggerated way where it felt like she wanted somebody to ask her about it, like she wanted to tell somebody about it. I was never going to ask her because I always thought she was totally weird, but finally another kid asked and she said it was her dad in the photo and he had killed himself when she was still a baby. It became this thing where everybody who sat by her knew she was staring at this picture of her dead dad every day—eventually even the teacher realized, he walked by her desk one day and told her to put the photo away. I remember thinking that seemed cruel, but I was also glad he did it, because the photo made me uncomfortable. I thought about Ellen Wall after I spent all that time watching Satyricon and reading Wikipedia or whatever and just put the whole thing away and didn’t think about it for a long time. 

A few years later though, I got an email from this woman who said she was my half-sister, that Joseph Wheeler was her dad too. I can’t remember how she had found me, maybe through distant family members. It seemed legitimate though. What else could she have wanted? I didn’t have any money, my student loans were in collections. From the way she described him I could tell she didn’t totally hate him, which was surprising to me. We emailed back and forth but we didn’t really understand how to talk to each other. I mean, we were total strangers. Were we supposed to talk about our personal lives or talk about our weird dad? She said she lived with him when she was a teenager and she had even met my mom, that when she was sixteen my mom lived with them for a few months and had taught her how to drive a car, which made me feel weird because my mom had never told me she lived with his other daughter. Of course I didn’t say that in my emails. She asked me if I had a good memory, and I wrote back and told her I did, and she said that was from him, he had a great memory and we probably both got it from him. She knew he had a bunch of other kids, she said something like, ‘We have so many other brothers and sisters we’ll never meet.’ When she asked me about myself, I lied and told her I was in college, because it felt easier than telling her I was still bartending at the Voyeur, that I could never save any money even though my rent was cheap, that I had dumped every boyfriend I’d ever had and I didn’t really know why. I just told her I was in school studying history and political economy. 

She added me on social media so I could see pictures of her kids and her husband. We didn’t have very much in common, she was probably fifteen years older than me and one of those adults who are really into Disney. Her kids looked cute and her husband was the kind of guy who puts ‘School of Hard Knocks’ down for where he went to college, but they seemed like nice people and I felt bad for judging them.

She lived in California and I lived in Washington, so we were close enough to feel vaguely connected but far enough apart that I didn’t think we would ever actually meet. But one day she emailed me to say she and her family were going on a road trip up through Washington and they were stopping in Olympia because they had friends there, so we exchanged phone numbers and made plans to meet up when she got into town. 

We were supposed to meet at this coffee shop, but the day she got into town she tried to change it and invite me to her friends’ house because they were having a bar-b-q or a party or something. I really didn’t like the idea of going to some stranger’s house to meet her, in fact I absolutely hated it. I didn’t think they were trying to abduct me or anything, but I didn’t want to be in some unfamiliar place with a bunch of other people I didn’t know, where I would be trapped and couldn’t leave whenever I wanted. It was this whole social obligation I had never asked for. Her friends lived way out on Boston Harbor, so I tried to be polite at first and tell her it was too far and I couldn’t ride the bus out there, but she just offered to pick me up on the way. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to meet her at the coffee shop, just the two of us, where we could talk about our weird family history, and if we hit it off and liked each other then I could meet her kids and her husband, but I didn’t know how to say that to her without sounding rude. When she offered to come pick me up, I just froze and didn’t respond. I remember sitting in my apartment as she kept texting me and calling me, saying how much fun it would be, how much the kids wanted to meet me, how much they wanted to meet their new aunt, and how she could drop me back at my apartment whenever I needed to go home, but I just sat there not answering and getting more and more anxious, feeling almost angry at her for trying to switch things up on me and then making me feel guilty for not going along with it. I completely lost it, I was pitting out so bad that I got up and changed my shirt and turned my phone off and sat back down on the bed in my new clean shirt and I started crying, thinking like, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? Why is it so hard for me to just get in the car with her? Who cares if it’s awkward or she thinks I’m weird or that I smell bad, who cares if she’s into Disney or she’s a Christian or whatever else? At worst it would be uncomfortable and then be over, and at best I would have a new sister, new nieces and nephews. But I just couldn’t do it. It was so fucking stupid, I got so paranoid that I closed all the windows and blinds in my apartment like they were going to drive by and see me hiding out in there. By then I was living in this little shoebox studio with ugly green carpet, it was basically a bedroom that looked out onto the street and a tiny kitchen in the back with no windows, so I was pacing back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, crying to the point that I was almost hyperventilating. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the little chipped mirror, my eyes were all puffy and I had snot dripping down my nose onto my upper lip and I started laughing because I just looked so pathetic, I was laughing and crying and coughing all at the same time, but I didn’t get myself a tissue, I just let the tears and the snot drip down my face into my mouth, almost like I was recycling them, giving myself fuel to cry even more. I wanted to call my mom because I knew she would have told me it was okay if I didn’t want to go meet with them, she would have told me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do, or maybe she would have told me it was a good idea to go, but I couldn’t call her, and thinking about that just made me feel worse. 

I kept my phone off until the next day, when I figured they would already be gone. When I turned it back on I saw she hadn’t called me anymore, she had given up. I felt like a total asshole, like I had let them down without even meeting them. If I had just gone to the bar-b-q and made awkward small talk and never asked her anything about our dad, wouldn’t that have been okay? Would that have been better? Like obviously he was the reason we were supposed to meet each other, but we could have transcended that. We didn’t just have to talk about him. I say that like I figured it out, but I never talked to her again after that. I still could though, or at least that’s what I tell myself, knowing it probably isn’t true. I could go to California and meet my sister and her husband and her kids. But I think about my mom teaching my sister how to drive, the two of them in the car on the backroads in Laurel Canyon, where I’ve never been but I know they lived, and I picture the trees and the rows of houses up on the sides of hills passing by the windows of the car, and my mom reaching over to adjust my sister’s grip on the wheel, moving the visor back and forth between the windshield and the window because she always said the light got in her eyes, possibly drinking vodka out of a thermos if I’m being honest, and she wouldn’t have been talking about her Hollywood Days yet but she was probably telling stories about her crazy German mother, who was in the Hitler Youth but wasn’t ashamed because she could barely remember any of it, and who had been in a bad car crash that left half her face paralyzed for the rest of her life, and who had made my mom compete in the Miss Sauk City 1974 beauty pageant back in Wisconsin, which she did win, I always remember, whenever I notice her blue pageant sash sitting in the box at the back of my closet, and I wonder if she would have told my sister any of that, and I think maybe I was worried my sister would tell me something about my mom I didn’t already know, that she was better than I thought or worse than I thought or just different in some way, that I would get some little glimpse of her I didn’t want to see. I think it’s the same with my dad. Somebody told me there’s a documentary about Fellini making Satyricon, but I don’t think I would ever watch it. I don’t need to sit there and watch closely just in case it shows two seconds of him standing around getting ready for his scene. I don’t care to know anything more. I’m not just Joseph Wheeler’s daughter. If anything, I’m really just my mom’s daughter. 

He dies in the movie. He kills himself, that’s how the scene ends. After they send the kids off, he and his wife sit down outside the house and he slits his wrists. It’s not that dramatic but I guess it’s not supposed to be. You barely know the characters. There are these two peacocks standing next to them, the camera pulls out and you see the two peacocks and my dad and his movie wife, all posed in a row.

While he sits there dying he tells his wife this story that’s probably symbolic or metaphorical, about how once when he was in Africa, a lion came into his tent in the middle of the night but it didn’t attack him, it just sniffed around him like a cat. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Something about death, I guess, about how it chooses you or it doesn’t. How you choose it or you don’t. He asks his wife not to kill herself, but in the next scene she’s lying there next to him as some other actors walk up to the house. I thought the movie was confusing and pretentious but I watched the whole thing. In the ending credits it calls them ‘The Suicide Couple.’ I remember his name is spelled wrong, like ‘Weel-her’ instead of Wheeler. I laughed at that. It felt like I had something over him. 

The neurotic part of me wanted to watch that one scene over and over until I finally noticed something different or understood something new, but I didn’t. I watched it once and I took the DVD back to the library. On the way home I didn’t think about my dad or even about my mom. I thought about the little girl in the movie, standing there with her brothers and sisters, asking if the place they’re going is even more beautiful than this one.