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schools in the county. But we had to live by his rules. All of them. All the time. So when my grandfather decided I needed religion, my parents had to support the cause or risk eviction. I would now accompany him to Saturday morning and High Holiday services, and, I was informed, begin my studies to become a Bar Mitzvah. I may as well have been converting to Greek Orthodoxy.
    I did have friends who were being Bar Mitzvahed, all at the very Reform Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The huge Moorish building had an interior decorated in gold inlay, black marble, and ornate biblical murals commissioned by the studio head Jack Warner. It had been built at the height of the Depression, when regular Americans were selling apples and jumping out windows.
    I would be Bar Mitzvahed in one of the tiny synagogues in the Fairfax section of West Hollywood. I spent seventh grade playing Little League, studying for my Bar Mitzvah, and going to other boys’ Bar Mitzvahs—all held at the members-only Hillcrest Country Club and the Beverly Hills Hotel and in huge private homes north of Sunset.
    My friends’ fathers all had jobs with titles—VP of Production, Director of Business Affairs, or Executive Producer. When their parents asked what my father did, I said he was in “business.” A businessman. But “business” had nothing to do with “The Business,” and when fathers with important jobs in The Business found out I was short an article, they did one of two things. Either they went off to refresh their gin martinis or they stayed to tell me the story of how they worked their way up from nothing.
    “You know all of this is bullshit, right kid?” I was listening closely to my best friend Alan Rothman’s dad, who was a senior agent at Franklin Morton. Alan knew pretty much everything about my family, which made me both more comfortable and more nervous talking to his father.
    In fact, it had been Alan who’d broken the news to me in the first place. Well, sort of. I was eleven when I heard it from Alan who’d heard it from his brother who’d heard it from a kid in his grade who had a job there after school. But I didn’t believe it. “That’s bullshit,” I told Alan.
    We were playing catch on the playground at recess and I wound up and threw the ball hard. He caught it a few inches from his face.
    “Hey, I’m just the messenger.”
    “Sorry. How the hell does this kid even know what my father looks like?”
    “Apparently, your dad’s been throwing your name around a lot. ‘My son Greyson this, my son Greyson that. You know, proud father crap. Sorry, Grey.”
    But I needed proof. So at lunchtime we snuck past the teachers on monitor duty—which didn’t exactly require a Houdini act—and biked to the Chock full o’ Nuts all the way over on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights. I peered around the side of the building into the big front window.
    Alan was right. He was sitting at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee. Pop’s jacket was on the stool next to him. At some point he’d actually slipped his shoes off and the twice-resoled brown oxfords were lying on the floor under his feet. There was a hole in his left sock.
    Alan put his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe he’s just having lunch.”
    “Yeah, I suppose it’s possible. But I bet the other businessmen aren’t having lunch twenty miles from where they work. Or say they work.” I remember that as the first day of feeling contempt for my father for the rest of my life. Of giving up trust and security and strength and replacing them with suspicion, cynicism, and resentment. And I think it was the beginning of my chronic heartburn.
    “C’mon Grey,” Alan said. “We have to get back.”
    “Alan?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Promise you won’t—”
    “Tell a living soul? On my mother’s life.”
    Eventually, in bits and pieces, I’m the one who told Mr. Rothman—or let slip enough pieces of information for him to put the puzzle together.
    “Sir?” I’d lost