Daddy's not here too much anymore. Mom's dating. She's dating ministers. She's dating rabbis. She's dating Bob Hirschfield (great guy). She's dating Louis Begley (sweet guy). She has made me man of the house, and I have my eye out for who's going to cut the mustard and pay the bills.
When Mr. Ben Heller walks in, I know he'll do both. Charming in the beginning, stern now and then, but basically pretty terrific: a man's man. We always call him Mr. Heller.
Mr. Heller reads everything; Proust and Ford Madox Ford are two of his favorites. His athletic résumé is like Jim Thorpe's: pro football; ranked squash; a long game of golf that matches the pros; able to thwack a softball 400 feet; when he boxed for the first time, he broke (accidentally) the other guy's ribs.
My sister asks him about Hitler: "How can one man be so entirely evil?"
"I don't think a man is entirely evil," Ben tells her. "I think there are different levels." Mr. Heller is a daunting man.
We arrive at his apartment building on Central Park West. A butler opens the door. I had never seen a real-life butler before. The butler takes our coats.
The foyer is as wide as a superhighway. Wood with fine vertical-grain paneling adorns the walls. When we start living here, I'll run my nails through the panels to clean them.
We walk into the living room. I haven't been to many museums at age 10, but I know one when I see one. This is a museum.
The first painting that looks down on me is the biggest thing I've ever seen in my life. I am told it is "Blue Poles," by Jackson Pollock. I just see scary blotches and globs of paint that make no sense at all. But underneath those globs are hairy webs of paint. Very delicate. And underneath that, some other blue galaxy that must go on forever. It is as big as a small swimming pool, and I get stage fright in front of it. Two years later it is sold to Australia's National Gallery for $2 million and is hoisted out the window with a pulley system.
At dinner, an invisible bell summons the butler from the kitchen. Later, Mom will take to ringing an actual bell, but now there is a button under the carpet that Mr. Heller presses with his foot, and mysteriously the butler enters to whisk the plates away. In a James Bond movie it would be the button that opens the trapdoor to the pool of man-eating sharks.
At the wedding I guzzle every drink I can grab. I get bombed. An 11-year-old drunk. I blab to anyone and everyone who will listen, "I am in the greatest shape known to man." My brother, Nikko, gets hives. My sister, Kyra, falls off a tall stool in the bathroom, smashes her head and has to get stitches in the emergency room.
When Mr. Heller wants to see you, you are summoned. He reads in the vast living room. Alone. He sits in one of the two powerful heavy club chairs, always the one on the left, the huge, basketball-court-size living room completely dark except for one light from a reading lamp reflecting off his huge, bald head. It is a chillingly bright planet that floats by itself.
"What the hell is this I hear about . . . ?!" (You fill in the blank.) The criticism drones on. I am sweating. I feel impossibly stupid.
Years later, when I am busted for possession of drugs, it is Ben Heller who saves the day. My mean, browbeating, condescending, the-reason-I-drank-enough-booze-to-fill-a-dainty-shallow-bath stepfather stepped up and got me a lawyer.
"Everything's going to be O.K.," the lawyer said, patting my chest. Then off I went for more processing and another holding pen before bail was set.
The door flew open. The first thing I saw was my mother, enveloped by my stepfather. She took the briefest of looks at me, then, disgusted by what she saw, buried her head in his mass.
My stepfather intercepted me to give me a quick hug.
"There's nothing you've done so bad that doesn't deserve a kiss," he said.
Ben — by this time, I called him Ben — posted bond, which was 10 percent of the actual $500,000, and I was free to leave.
We got into the lawyer's car and headed uptown. I needed cigarettes. We stopped in Chinatown, and I sucked down five in a row. Mom peeled off, still hardly speaking to me. Ben, back in the car, said, "At the end of the day, I think this is going to end up being a cheap lesson."
Rob Sedgwick is an actor. His memoir, "Bob Goes to Jail," from which this essay is adapted, will be published as an e-book this month.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission. Share comments on this essay at nytimes.com/magazine.
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