By the way, there's also a mention in this story of a movie called Velvet Goldmine. The mention is very brief, certainly nothing to go encourage you all to go out and rent it oranything like that. But just as a warning and a disclaimer: rent with caution. The movie is good in very surreal sort of way, but it's also quite sexual (or at least it's the most sexual thing I've ever seen). Ewan McGregor is one of the stars in it. He plays a character called Curt Wild who, even though he's modeled more after Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, is said to look quite a bit like Kurt Cobain who Taylor Hanson is also said to look a little like. That was the main reason I mention it. In case you're curious, but you don't feel brave enough to rent the movie, I happen to have a picture of Curt Wild right here in case it helps with the story. Like I said, the mention is brief, but I still feel the need to warn a little (although what you ended up getting was more like an entire review! :D).
Enjoy!
This story was nominated at the Hanfic Awards 2001 for Best Short Story and Best Short Story Writer! Woo-hoo! Thank you for the nomination! Go vote for you favorite stories!
A Few Words: I'm starting to think maybe I'm obsessed with making up long lost family members for Taylor Hanson who look happen to look like him as well. I thought briefly of making this into a longer story (which should tell you just how much resolve I have when I say I'm definitely not going to write anymore long Hanson stories), but like most of those ideas end up (Friends in High Places, for example), it was condensed into about three pages instead. I think the short version encompasses the story pretty well, but I'll let you guys be the judge of that. Also, this was another of my stories written quickly and at night with absolutely no revision, so if the quality's not great, that's one of the reasons why. Just felt the need to warn you.
The door I stood in front of wasn’t particularly compelling, but I found myself mesmerized by it just the same. I had never done this before, stood in front of a door and contemplated the fact that it was the only thing shielding me from something I didn’t have to see if I didn’t want to. I realized that doors were something I had taken for granted all my life. Opening them, going through and closing them behind me was just a reflex. Sure, I knocked every now and then. But how many times had I actually waited for permission to enter? Doors had never intimidated me before. Not like this door.
What I found so fascinating about this door was the fact that it was so plain. In all my visions of it, it had been some grand advertisement of the wealth of the person who lived behind it. Enormous and gold, sparkling in the heavenly light that shone down upon it (why the light was heavenly, I don’t know). The finest anywhere around. A gate to a palace.
But as it turned out, the door was really just kind of a light blue color. Normal-sized or at least in proportion with the house, which was larger than normal but certainly no palace. There was even a welcome mat laying innocently in front of it, dirty and faded after so many people wiping their feet on it. It looked like an ordinary door, but under the circumstances it was far from an ordinary door.
It was my father’s door.
And my father was no ordinary person. My father was Taylor Hanson.
Or at least that was something my mother had told me all my life. Whether or not this is the truth has always been kind of an internal question with me. Something I never dared challenge her about. She had never really lied to me, but I knew virtually nothing about their relationship. I had seen pictures of them holding hands and cuddling and laughing, so I knew for a fact that there had been one and that it hadn’t been just some random one night stand after a concert or something like that. There was other physical evidence, too, like the fact that I looked like him. I didn’t have his eyes or his hair (my eyes were a nondescript green instead of the entrancing blue and my hair was slowly turning to a more auburn color not unlike my mother’s), but my build and my facial features were pretty much the same. But even with all that, there was still a lot of doubt in my mind. I think even when it’s true, the idea that you’re Taylor Hanson’s son is still hard to swallow. Especially when you’re not sure of what reasons he had for stepping out of the picture once you step in.
I have to admit though, when I was younger it was kind of fun to imagine. My mother owned a couple of his CDs and I used to sneak them upstairs and play them all the while imagining what the other kids would think if they saw me playing catch with my father, Taylor Hanson. Or what their faces would look like if they saw my father, Taylor Hanson, taking me around the neighborhood trick or treating. Or what they would say if my father, Taylor Hanson, took us all out to the movies one day and then to the arcade afterwards. When I was older, I imagined myself attending one of his local concerts (he came every now and then with his various bands and once on some reunion tour with his brothers) and sneaking backstage, if only to catch a glimpse of him up close. Once I thought if I ever found his address somewhere, I would go up to his house and pretend I was selling magazines for school. Just to see.
But nothing ever came of those fantasies and once I turned fifteen, I was kind of glad. Going to the school I went to and having the friends I had, it would have been so unbelievably uncool to be associated with Taylor Hanson’s gene pool that I became embarrassed by the fact that I looked like him. I lived in constant fear that at some point one of my friends would put two and two together and laugh their asses off at me until I couldn’t bear to go to school anymore. That is to say, everyone knew that the man my mother married when I was five wasn’t my biological father but since a lot of kids in those days were in fatherless situations (or motherless in some cases), that fact didn’t really matter. Their dads were gone and so was mine. It was a connection to make with each other, a way to relate. But as soon as they found out just where my father had gone to, I knew I was be permanently alienated. What kind of kid came from Taylor Hanson’s loins? A wussy, that’s who. With a capital “p.”
So I never tried to find him or anything. I didn’t even try to find out about him in his many biographies or in the magazines he appeared in every now and then. Although once I did flip through an autobiography he had written to see if I was mentioned in it. Or if my mother was mentioned in it at the very least. I found nothing. But then again, I didn’t look very long. I was too scared of actually finding something.
Because of my mother’s husband (my dad, as far as I was concerned), I also never really felt much of an empty space where Taylor Hanson should have been. A man I loved and respected as a father with all my heart, he was a shy, hard working man who ended up being the one playing catch with me, taking me trick-or-treating, and taking my friends and me to the movies and the arcade afterwards like I always fantasized Taylor Hanson doing. And on the nights of most of those few and far between local concerts, I could usually be found sitting on the couch, arguing with him over which channel to watch on the television or talking quietly about some problem I was having (or, once I was much older, some problem he was having). And I didn’t have to pretend I was selling magazines in order to get him to talk to me. He was usually the one interrupting my daydreaming to come to the dinner table. He was the one who got a funny look on his face when he caught me listening to one of the CDs one time in my room.
“He sounds like a little girl,” he had commented. I had laughed and he had laughed with me, but his laugh was uncomfortable.
From that uncomfortable laugh, I became very afraid that any attempt to locate my real father would absolutely crush the one I had known since I was five years old. So I didn’t look and didn’t ask even though I knew my mother probably knew something about his current whereabouts.
The funny thing is, it was my dad who brought up the idea of finding Taylor Hanson and introducing myself. At eighteen, I had moved away to college. A college that happened to be not very far away from where Taylor Hanson was “rumored” to be living (the way he had said it gave me some idea that it was probably some off-handed comment my mother had made rather than a rumor that led him to believe this). He hadn’t done anything more than plant the seed, as was his normal strategy. But once the seed was planted, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Two years later, at twenty, I found myself actually giving in. Maybe I would find him. Just to see.
The house hadn’t been that hard to find. A celebrity living in city limits was an exciting thing, so most people knew the place. My girlfriend, Eve, had actually claimed she had seen him once out on his lawn. A fellow dishwasher at the restaurant where I worked, Greg, had told me a story about one time when he had walked by and Taylor Hanson had waved at him. Neither of them knew why I was asking.
The fact that it was my dad’s coaxing which had got me here disturbed me a little bit. Out of everyone, this should have bothered him most of all. I still wasn’t quite sure of his reasons. The last time I had seen him, the last time he had dropped a hint about it, I had asked him why he was doing this. He had shrugged and answered,
“I want him to see what a good kid you turned out to be,” he said. “And my more vengeful side wants him to see that he can’t take any credit for it.”
I think that was his somewhat backhanded way of saying that he wanted Taylor Hanson to see that I had grown up in good hands. In case he worried or something.
So I stood there in front of this house with Plan A staring me straight in the face and Plan B stuffed in my back pocket. A piece of paper I had scrawled a letter on, telling him who I was and offering to meet him. If I found I couldn’t knock on his door, I planned on stuffing it in his mailbox and waiting by the phone to see if he responded at all. I doubted he would if I did that, though. Being Taylor Hanson, he probably had gotten more than a few of those letters in his time. But how many of them were actually true?
I must have been standing out there for a good hour before the door I stood in front of opened seemingly of its own accord. Blue eyes, slightly grayed since his younger days, peered out at me, startling me. He opened the door wide enough so that I could just barely see into his house.
“Can I help you?” he asked
He wasn’t quite the burned out, washed up former rock star I had pictured him to be. Having been influenced by the movie Velvet Goldmine, my image of my father hadn’t been unlike the one of Curt Wild at the end of the movie in the bar scene. I had seen pictures of him, of course, but very few of them had been recent. None of them had been this recent.
Like the house, he looked pretty much like an ordinary guy. His hair was cut short and his clothes were not unlike the ones my father wore on a day to day basis. He did, however, look a little scared.
I cleared my throat and prepared to speak.
But the words that came out weren’t words I meant to say.
“Hi, my name is Cameron,” I said. “I’m selling magazines for a school fundraiser and I was wondering if you would be interested in any new subscriptions?”
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“No thanks,” he said. “I already have too many magazines as it is.”
He smiled warmly at me. I tried to smile back.
“Is that all?” he asked when I didn't make any move to leave.
“Yeah, I think it is,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
“No problem. Good luck,” he said.
I nodded and walked away. He closed the door behind me.
I passed the mailbox and went straight to my car, unbelievably embarrassed. I turned and surveyed the house, but knew that I couldn’t go back and fix things. Instead, I went up to the mailbox quickly, knowing he was probably watching me from the window, and stuck Plan B in among the other mail.
Then I drove away, knowing that waiting by the phone would be a painful thing indeed.
