The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, not feeling entirely cleansed. Carrie was on her bed reading Knut Hamsun, and like our roving sight gag, my hard-on in the shower went unmentioned, but there was no denying a change had taken place. She looked different to me, or maybe I was just reminded of my impressions of when we first met. I felt a familiar rumble start to rise again beneath my towel, which I sensed was not going unnoticed. I sat beside her on the bed, took the book from her hands, and kissed her. It all made sense in the moment, and we both understood that everything we were doing to each other under those covers would not alter our friendship one iota. It was ridiculously fun, and at times even funny, which was a revelation to someone who’d previously taken a more solemn approach to sex.

Not only did my friendship with Carrie remain unfazed, but so did my relationship with Donald after they finally made love. He remained just as needy and insecure about her feelings toward him, and I never turned down his late-night invitations to watch him cry into his beer. He might not have been the first to pluck Carrie’s rose, but he was the first of many of her boyfriends (and girlfriends of mine), to wrongly assume that the rules of a platonic relationship were so black-and-white.

Debbie came to regard me, if not as her son, then as her daughter’s older brother. She was very protective of Carrie and thought nothing of calling to find out whether I thought a particular guy who was sending her flowers to the theater was bad news or not. I would sound concerned or reassuring depending on how I felt, but usually I didn’t even know whom she was asking about.

One day, Carrie said offhandedly that she had landed a job in some science fiction movie shooting in England. “Is there a part in it for me?” I asked, oblivious to what a normal person would say, like “Congrats” or “That’s great!”

“Don’t be like that. The other lead is some older guy named Harrison Ford. You wouldn’t have heard of him.” In fact, I knew him. He was the carpenter whom my aunt and uncle had hired to build the deck of their beach house up the coast from Malibu when I was seventeen. Like an eager puppy, I’d happily handed him nails to hammer or dug for hardware from the bottom of his worn canvas toolkit. In return, he would slip me one of his Marlboros, the filters of which I clipped off because that’s what he did. Harrison cut me off from his endless relay of joints because his stuff was so strong that after one toke I couldn’t tell the difference between a saw and a tape measure. I simply idolized the dude and hated my envy that Carrie would get to spend so much time with him. “He was the guy I told you about, who built the deck at John and Joan’s house.” “You mean the carpenter you worshipped like he was Jesus?” “Yeah, he’s the coolest guy I ever met and is almost as funny as you are. You’re going to love him,” I whined in despair.

The very first screening of Star Wars was at the Ziegfeld Theatre, the largest movie house in Manhattan. It was a sneak preview that attracted a mob of rabid sci-fi fans who lined the block along West Fifty-Fourth as if summoned by signals from a distant galaxy. They clearly knew something about this movie that Carrie did not. If John and George came back from the dead to play the Garden with Paul and Ringo for one show only, I don’t think they could have worked up the crowd the way Star Wars did that night at the Ziegfeld. By the last line of the opening crawl, something about “certain doom for the champions of freedom,” I knew Carrie’s life would never be the same.

Not to put a “certain doom” on it, but neither would our friendship. It was just different for a long while, but never really the same.

In the years ahead, I was there for her family weddings and she for many of mine. She loved to pretend she couldn’t remember which of my exes was which. But of course she knew, and dug for every little nugget about when and where it all went wrong with the same curiosity she’d had about my proclivities when she was a virgin. I wish I could remember our last conversation before she left for London on the trip from which she never came home in 2016. It was probably about Christmas plans or our daughters’ shenanigans, but I know, despite not remembering what exactly was said, that we laughed very, very hard.

It was in cabin 5 that he began a novel he’d been miraculously hired to write by Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster. Korda threw him a lifeline and a modest advance when it became clear that Joyce Haber, a gossip columnist who’d written a bestseller about Hollywood called The Users, had become a hopeless alcoholic incapable of delivering a sequel. Dad had produced a TV movie based on the book, and Korda, knowing there would be slim pickings among experienced authors eager to write something called The Winners: Part II of Joyce Haber’s “The Users” and that my father knew a thing or two about avarice in Hollywood, thought him perfect for the job.

Dad understood this was hardly a classy assignment but was grateful for the money and that someone like Korda believed he could be a writer. Gratitude was a word he’d come to appreciate since recently becoming sober, and a practice he lived by one day at a time.

The man I grew up with based his self-esteem on what table the maître d’ at Chasen’s chose to place him at. The support he found from battered police dispatchers in a world not his own made me giddy with pride. I laughed out loud when he described the night he watched the Academy Awards with Joyce and Nick Osika, who owned the only television on the premises. All they knew about Dad was that he was a writer counting his pennies, who lived in Los Angeles. When Elizabeth Taylor was presenting Best Actor, Joyce told Nick all the husbands Liz had been married to but got the order wrong. She thought Richard Burton went before Eddie Fisher, and Dad didn’t correct her, or mention that he once produced a movie she starred in. “Who gives a shit,” he wrote. “I can’t believe I thought all that crap was important.”

On my way to her apartment, I would often share the elevator with John, Yoko, and their toddler, Sean. John always nodded a hello and called me “young man” in a cheeky formal way, as if we were in on his joke together. I was too shy to tell him that I treasured a photograph of me shaking his hand at a charity event where rich kids had lined up all the way down Benedict Canyon to meet the Beatles. It was during their first American tour, and they sat on stools for hours shaking hands with children as a photographer snapped shots every fifteen seconds so everyone would get a picture.

I was fortunate to still own an image of my favorite Beatle smiling at me through his Ray-Bans, holding out his hand as if astonished to see me, with an expression that said, “Holy hell, mate, what the fuck are you doing here?”

I never did tell John about that photograph and what it meant to me, but I wish I had. Two years later, I would be in an off-Broadway comedy playing a demented youth who kills a celebrity to become famous. One night after a performance, I biked to a deli on the way home and heard on the radio that John Lennon had just been shot in front of the Dakota. Not believing it could be true, I got back on my bike and madly pedaled, as if under a spell, all the way uptown, until I reached the building. I arrived no more than an hour after the shooting, and a crowd holding candles, drawn by the same calling as me, had gathered outside. It was then that I heard he’d been murdered by a fan who, like the character I’d played earlier that evening, wanted to be famous. The next day I begged the producers to let me out of the play, but they refused. The show went on, but I couldn’t reprise the humor I’d once found in the funny little murderer I’d played, and never got a laugh onstage again.

I hadn’t known anyone who’d died a sudden and violent death before, and though of course I didn’t actually know John, I’d grown up with him, and imagined that he was once happy to see me, and, with countless others, I wept in front of...

Across the courtyard lived my other paycheck, an aging Southern actress named Ruth Ford, who on December 8, 1980, placed the first call reporting shots fired outside the Dakota. She was once a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and had been a close friend of William Faulkner’s since her college days. When I worked for Mrs. Ford, she lived in a ten-room apartment with her lover, the writer Dotson Rader, who was thirty-one years her junior, and they hosted dinner parties for a Mount Rushmore of playwrights and artists. Dotson was boyishly handsome and, while a student at Columbia, had made ends meet by cruising Port Authority Bus Terminal as a male hustler, adventures he would later recount in a wonderful book called Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things.

“You know, Tennessee,” she drawled, “this ‘boy,’ as you call him, happens to be the nephew of Joan Didion, whom I always thought you were rather fond of.” Tennessee’s hand snapped away from my crotch as if he’d been bitten by an asp. Embarrassment drained his complexion, and he pushed away a glass of vodka on ice in self-revulsion. After composing himself, he looked me directly in the eye. “Young man,” he began, “though I don’t know your aunt well, I adore her words and deeply apologize for my disgraceful behavior. Won’t you please sit with us.” He grabbed an empty high-back chair and told Truman to “scoot over.” His apology impressed me, and I joined the group with no ill will. I had been groped by men since my earliest teens, and though I realize a younger generation has felt lifelong trauma from similar abuse, I had no such reaction, and accepted my abashment as the price for being young and attractive. I pass no judgment on that generation or my own.

Dominique and I could barely look at each other when we’d finished reading the script. The picture of us doing these unspeakable things took days to scrape from our minds, and we called Tony to pass on the first movie either of us had ever been “considered” for. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said when we told him. “It was just a thought.” One afternoon in 1984, I sat in the back row of a near-empty Rialto Theatre in Times Square to see The Hotel New Hampshire. Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster played the incestuous siblings, and they had lots of scenes where they kissed with tongues and fiddled around naked under the sheets. I laughed out loud, alone in the dark, imagining that Dominique was sitting next to me, both of us rolling in the aisles at the sheer ridiculousness of us playing these parts. When I stopped laughing, I got out of my seat and left the theater before I started to bawl.

I was playing a character who’d been killed by a werewolf and haunts his best friend David in three stages of decomposition. The six hours I spent in the makeup chair was for the first stage, which showed the aftermath of the werewolf’s attack. When Rick had painted the final touches of fresh blood to the gaping wounds slashed across my face, I studied my appearance in the mirror and felt something darker than the simple keys of sadness, more an overwhelming grief for someone I didn’t know. The violence of Rick’s handiwork was so real, it was as if I were watching my corpse laid out on a coroner’s table—details so exact that my severed jugular vein wiggled when I held my breath to keep from crying. It was my first starring role, and I should have been excited, but all I could think of was how horrified my mother would be to see me like this. I worried how the trauma of watching one of her children die such a horrible death would affect her health, and that I would be responsible for her imagining such unthinkable loss filled me with despair. Rick asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t have the words to possibly make him understand what I was feeling.

Dominique dismissed his softball response and set her sights on me. She looked both hungry for my approval and angry with herself for wanting it. I stammered over my first words, amazed that I could still be as frightened of my sister’s temper as I had been as a teenager, before finally cobbling together my cowardly opinion: “I agree with Dad. If he makes you happy, go for it.” “They are both lying,” Alex said to Dominique. “They dislike him as much as I do, they just don’t have the balls to say so.” Neither Dad nor I made any attempt to disagree. Dominique decided the matter was settled, whether she believed it or not, and changed the subject, for which we were all grateful.

“No doubt, you bet, so much better,” chimed three grown men who loved her so much they would have said anything to please her.

I wondered if before that morning I’d ever thought murder was hilarious, and though I probably had, I knew now I would never don a costume for Halloween again. The children covered in blood could laugh at violence and death because it had never touched their lives, and I silently hoped nothing would ever happen to make them lose the same macabre humor I so loved in my sister.

Also in the waiting room sat a fraught-looking young man who stared at us so intently that we asked the detective who he was. Johnston said his name was David Packer, and he was with Dominique during the attack. Checking his notes, he continued to say they were both in a television series called V, and were running lines for a scene to film the next morning when John Sweeney showed up demanding to be let in. Not wanting to cause a scene in front of a colleague, Dominique excused herself to go outside, and once alone, the actor locked the door behind her. As Dominique was being strangled, Johnston said the actor hid in the bedroom and left a message on his roommate’s answering machine that said, “If I get murdered tonight, John Sweeney did it.” Before we could absorb his act of cowardice, the nurse interrupted to say, “You should prepare yourselves,” and unlocked the door to the ICU for us to follow her to Dominique’s room.

Shortly after Sweeney’s arrest, we were shocked to learn from the local news that Ma Maison had hired an attorney to defend their sous-chef. John and Joan were friends of the owner, Patrick Terrail, who knew Dominique as well, and Dad had already been stewing over the fact that Terrail never bothered to reach out to her parents with a word of sympathy. On a morning when John and Joan were absent, Dad signed for a large orchid that had been delivered to them. To not peek at the card to find out who sent the orchid was simply too much to ask of my father. Dad opened the sealed envelope gently to leave no trace of his trespass. The card read, “My heart breaks for you, Patrick Terrail.”

“I can’t control who sends us flowers, Griffin.” “I know, but I gotta ask. Dad also thinks you still go to Ma Maison. Is that true?” “Are you crazy?” “Well, yes, I think we all are.” “We would never set foot in that place and never will.” I chose to believe him, but the unfounded accusation, the orchid, and the note from Terrail sent my brother and Dominique’s best friend, Melinda, around the bend. They vowed not to let this treason go unanswered.

An unexpected assault of tears ambushed me in the driveway. No one until then had ever said that Dominique would die, and I felt like a fool that it was so obvious to everyone but me.

“Oh, son, I’m so sorry to have brought this up. It was a terrible mistake. Please forgive me.” His remorse was genuine, and I knew in that moment that he was just looking out for us, and that, of course, my sister would die.

Everyone looked different than they had only minutes earlier. What I hadn’t seen, but which was suddenly clear, was that Alex and I were the last to know that the past four days had been one long wake. Something shifted within me, and I suddenly felt different as well. My perspective and personality took on a new formation not yet defined. But whoever I’d be in the days ahead would never be the person I was.

Dominique’s heart was sent to San Francisco, where I hope it’s still beating. She would have appreciated that, like the Tony Bennett classic, she “left her heart in San Francisco.”

The first thing we noticed was that the monsignor was drunk. Without saying it in so many words, His Holiness made it known that he wasn’t crazy about having a funeral for someone who had the poor taste to get herself murdered. He mumbled that he wasn’t entirely sure he could accommodate us given the schedule of prior events.

Martin Manulis, Dominique’s godfather and the man who brought Dad and his family to Los Angeles twenty-six years earlier to work for him on Playhouse 90, gave the eulogy and described her as “an infanta by Goya, only more beautiful.”

Goya

Alex and I read the Yeats poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” which was suggested by Joan. In halting voices, we barely managed to get through: I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

Yeats

The monsignor, presumably sober, never bothered to pronounce Dominique’s name correctly, calling her “Dominick,” as if he didn’t even know the gender of the person he was eulogizing. Every time he said Dominick, Alex’s and my ears burned with rage and we blurted out, “Neeek! Neeek! DomiNEEK!” Heads turned our way but we didn’t care, and this time Dad didn’t try to halt our outbursts. We continued for the burial at Westwood Memorial Park, and gathered around a freshly dug plot only yards from where Mom’s best friend, Natalie Wood, had been laid to rest a year earlier. As Dominique was being lowered into the ground, a tour bus let out sightseers in front of Marilyn Monroe’s crypt. The monsignor approached our family to shake hands, and when he came to me, his arm outstretched, I looked him in the eye and whispered, “You are a piece of shit.” He didn’t react in the slightest, and moved on to whoever was to my right.

The day after the disastrous funeral at Our Lady of the Cadillacs, Mom received a phone call from a woman who opened with the line “Mrs. Dunne, I’m afraid you are now a member of a club that no one wants to belong to.” On the other end was Doris Tate, mother of Sharon Tate, calling on behalf of a group called Parents of Murdered Children. Her daughter was eight months pregnant when stabbed to death by Charles Manson’s cult members, and she was calling to invite my mother to a meeting of her support group being held that night. Mom asked us if we would like to go, and Dad said he “wasn’t ready,” followed by a “no fucking way” from Alex, so I took her to the meeting at a church in Brentwood. I wheeled my mother into a space a parent had made for her in an already formed circle of other parents. Someone brought me a chair to sit next to her, but I felt I didn’t belong and was about to leave, when Mom mouthed, “Please stay.”

In the silent anticipation of the next volunteer, a father whose son had been killed by a stray bullet in Compton asked if I’d like to say anything. I wasn’t expecting, or even emotionally prepared, to speak, but it felt rude to be the only one not sharing their feelings. “I know everyone here is a parent, and from listening to all you have been through, I realize that to lose a child is very different than losing a sibling. It’s not more or less, it’s just different. Or maybe it is more, I don’t know.” That’s as far as I got before I started to blubber. I felt like an asshole to be the only person in the room who cried, but my tears kept me from expressing an anger I had suppressed throughout the meeting. They seemed to be saying that the grief of someone who raised a child had greater meaning than mine, that of someone who had only lost a sister. I’m sure that was far from their intent, and thankfully, my weeping prevented me from expressing such a self-pitying remark. On the ride back to Crescent Drive, I felt embarrassed by my display of emotion and hoped it wasn’t obvious. At a red light on Wilshire, Mom turned to me and said, “You were very brave, honey. I know how hard that must have been for you.” “No, Mom,” I said. “You are very brave.”

She’d left it looking pretty much the same, not even taking her poster of Henri Rousseau’s Exotic Landscape, the same painting as Norman Carby’s mural on the side of Mom’s house.

and Christopher Cross’s “Sailing,” which Alex and I had always teased her about, though now the song evoked vividly painful images and memories of her. The song remained on the charts for months and clutched my heart every time I heard it on the radio.

He awoke to see Dominique sitting at the foot of the bed. Alex described her as not ghostly but three-dimensional, and though the bedroom was dark, the moon illuminated her face, hands, and even the buttons on the cotton shirt she wore. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but didn’t for fear she would go away. “Alex,” she said to him, “I’m okay, everything is fine with me, but I’m worried about you. I need you to hold it together. I can’t move on if you start flipping out and worrying Mom. She needs you to be strong, and so do I.” Alex told me the next morning that he promised her he would, and how they continued talking well into the night. I knew he’d gone to bed sober, and never doubted for a moment that his visitation was real. It was so like Dominique to appear only to Alex, because even though he had been surprisingly strong, she worried he might not hold on much longer and that the only person he’d listen to would be his little sister. And she was right. Alex was far from saddened or disturbed by their conversation; in fact, her visit seemed to bring him peace. He took a risk in telling me what happened, because I might have thought him crazy, and when I didn’t, he decided not to push his luck by telling anyone else. What I didn’t tell him was that I felt shamefully envious that Dominique hadn’t come to me.

My twenty-eighth birthday fell two weeks before I left for LA, and Carrie had thrown me a birthday party in her penthouse apartment in the El Dorado on the Upper West Side. There was a heat wave, and the elevators were broken, so the guests arrived drenched in sweat after climbing seventeen flights. Seeing Susan Sarandon’s glistening body in a tank top was gift enough, but she threw in another present, which was just a piece of paper with rows of red dots on it.

Some days later, when the trial was on a break, Dad looked through the porthole window of the courtroom to find it still empty. A woman about Mom’s age was seated alone on a bench outside the entrance. “Do you know when they’re back in?” he asked. “Not for another ten minutes, I heard.” Alex witnessed the exchange and told Dad that the woman was Sweeney’s mother. He said that earlier in the morning he was sitting next to her, unaware of who she was, until he overheard the lawyer for Ma Maison have the regrettable duty of informing her that Sweeney did not wish to see her, despite her having traveled by bus from their hometown of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Alex said that her eyes welled with tears. We would later learn that she was a battered wife, with five other children, and Sweeney had distanced himself from all of them the moment he left for Los Angeles. We grew to admire Mrs. Sweeney’s dignity as she sat across the aisle from us every day, though we were confounded by her unflagging support for her accused son, who never once agreed to see her during the trial. We took to nodding to each other in greeting every morning as we entered the courtroom.

The presiding judge was another piece of work. Again, I can’t better my father’s perfect portrayal of Judge Burton Katz: “In his forties, Judge Katz gives the impression of a man greatly pleased with his good looks. He is expensively barbered, deeply tanned, and noticeably dressed in a manner associated more with Hollywood agents than with Superior Court judges. He has tinted aviator glasses, and on the first day he was wearing designer jeans, glossy white loafers, and no necktie beneath his judicial robes.” For reasons unknown, the judge took an immediate dislike to the Dunne family. Like the monsignor at the Good Shepherd church, he would even mispronounce Dominique’s name, calling her “Dominick.” He also loathed Steven Barshop as much as he found Mike Adelson endlessly charming. He would amiably tease Adelson about his height, to the delight of the jurors, and overrule the majority of Barshop’s objections. One of the few times Katz didn’t let Adelson have his way was when, with the jury absent, he denied his request that Mrs. Dunne be barred from the courtroom because her wheelchair was prejudicial enough to elicit the jury’s sympathy. Even Katz knew that might be pushing it, and would probably invite advocates for people with disabilities to join the victims’ rights groups that were already demonstrating outside the courthouse.

While a makeup team cleaned up Alan, a production assistant approached me to say a guy named David Packer was shooting next door and wanted to stop by to say hi. Packer was the actor rehearsing with Dominique the night she was murdered. Packer was the guy who locked her out of the house and left the message to his roommate that said, “If I get murdered tonight, John Sweeney did it.” Now he was an actor who dropped by because we happened to be shooting on the same lot, when all we really had in common was that I happened to have a sister he watched die. I yelled toward the stage door on the other side of the set, loud enough for him to hear, “Packer, get the fuck off my set! We got nothing to talk about.” The PA rushed off to make sure he had left.

The next day, David Packer was called to the witness stand. I recognized that his wholly inappropriate visit to my set must have had something to do with it. As he described the events of October 30, he seemed to preen under the attention of the crowd, as if he were on callback for a part in a feature film. But as a fellow actor, I could tell that under his charm Packer was scared—not as terrified as he was of Sweeney that night, but frightened all the same. Dad and Alex were sickened by his performance on the stand, but to my surprise, I felt sorry for him. As Dominique’s murder would forever haunt us, her death would trail him as well, but his demons would be his own voice, beginning with “I should have,” “I wish I,” and “Why didn’t I?”

“Sobbing, Sweeney apologized to the court and said he had not been trying to escape. Judge Katz accepted his apology and explanation. ‘We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney,’ he said. I was appalled at the lack of severity of the judge’s admonishment. What we had witnessed had nothing to do with escape. It was an explosion of anger. It showed us how little it took to incite John Sweeney to active rage. Like most of the telling moments of the trial, however, it was not witnessed by the jury.” “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney.” For weeks Alex and I would say that sentence to each other out of the blue, for any reason, or no reason at all. Looking for a parking space: “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney.” Waiting for an elevator: “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney.” Watching Luke Skywalker fight Darth Vader in a cinema, I’d mutter to Alex, “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney.” We couldn’t get Katz’s ludicrous expression of sympathy for a murderer out of our heads.

“Enough!” snapped Barshop to the judge. “Mr. Adelson’s cruelty is despicable. And if you had allowed the jury to see this, they would be as disgusted as me.” Even Katz looked dismayed, and broke the court for lunch.

Our entire table lost it, and heads turned to see what was so funny. Mom laughed so hard tears rolled down her cheeks, and she looked to Dad, maybe remembering what he’d done to Howdy Doody so many years before. I was aware of our table getting a lot of attention, and while the Robin story was funny, I was also conscious our laughter was a form of release, an expression of defiance, a big, loud “fuck you” to Adelson and Katz and the whole awful morning. Once the hilarity died down, our appetites were restored, and we looked once again at the menus. I caught sight of the jury, regarding us from their Last Supper table in shock and disgust. I knew what they saw from their perch: privileged, heartless monsters whose daughter dumped a sensitive boy when she became famous, our grief a put-on because it didn’t conform to what they thought real pain should look like. The nine men and three women were poorly paid for their civic duty but getting the most for their money by sitting in judgment of us both in and out of the courtroom. I knew in that moment that when the time came for them to deliver a verdict, they would deem Dominique’s life to be worth not all that much.

“Listen, kid, Norma and I don’t live in a cave and know what you and your family are going through. How could I not, it’s in the papers every day, and we are both sick about it. When I see pictures of your mother, it just breaks my fucking heart. She seems like an amazing woman.”

“I will only mention this once, so listen carefully: something could happen in that private cell that could put an end to this and let you and your family go on with your lives.”

“Maybe I’ve seen too many movies,” I said, “but usually there comes a time to repay the favor, like being forced to rob a bank or something.” That got a laugh out of Leo, which was not my intent. “You will owe me nothing nor ever hear from me after tomorrow night. I think you are a fine young man who has been wronged, which pisses me off. But I’m really offering this opportunity for your mother. Something about her touches my heart, and I’d like to spare her any further pain.”

It wasn’t until then that I remembered the psychic in the Ansonia accusing me of exacting revenge on Sweeney well before it crossed my mind, and now here I was, contemplating an act of violence that Dominique had begged me not to do from the beyond. Maybe the clairvoyant was the real deal after all. “Leo,” I sighed, “I really appreciate what you are willing to do for me and my family. It’s a selfless act of kindness, and at great personal risk to you, and I’ll never forget it, but I’m afraid it’s something I’m incapable of being responsible for.” “Totally understand, kid, it’s not for everybody. You’re a good person and a caring son to that beautiful mother of yours, so I thought I’d give it a shot. But as far as you ‘never forgetting it,’ I want you to start forgetting it right now.”