In the end, all that most parents (the middle-, upper middle- and upper-class ones, anyway) really cared about was their shit. The “precious” things they had accumulated in the years prior to spawning. That was what was more important to them than their child. That’s what their actions constantly said loud and clear. At least to Ethan Burke, who had multiple pieces of video evidence that his parents would rather leave him to the dogs bawling his eyes out than risk one of their “valuable” items incurring any potential damage.

In his teenage years, Ethan had always harbored the sneaking suspicion that his parents were “this way.” In other words, that they were raging materialists. And, for a time, Ethan naively believed that one oughtn’t be a materialist if they were to be a parent. That a truly good parent wouldn’t care so much about possessions, accrual, etc. Over time, though, Ethan realized that the crux of wanting a child was rooted in the tenets of materialism, capitalism. Propagate, expand/secure the legacy, get a return on your “investment,” make your (DNA) imprint on the world—all of that. Perhaps in the past, when humankind was in its most primordial iteration, wanting to have children was not related to these things, but simply to the survival of the species. The intrinsic, primal desire to ensure humans as a “breed” endured. But that primal motive had long been stamped out. Childbearing was about something else entirely now. A means to add a another “piece” to the “collection.” A collection that said, “I am a successful, productive human and I have all the ‘entities’ in my life to prove it.” For, yes, that’s what a child was—an entity. And that’s what Ethan was to his parents, Brenda and Rich. The latter especially seemed to treat him like a piece of property he was desperately hoping would one day become satisfying rather than a constant source of disappointment. As though Ethan needed to be “shaken” or something in order to “work right.”

To be sure, Rich had done his fair share of shaking, both literally and figuratively. One of his most glaring attempts at “setting Ethan on the right course” being to send him to boarding school when he was fifteen years old. Not just any boarding school, mind you, but “the best”: Le Rosey. And so, Ethan was exiled from their home in Pacific Palisades (for this was long before said town was burned to the ground) to the “wilds” of Switzerland, as far removed from his parents as they could get him without leaving “the West” entirely. It was while there that he began to ruminate on the long-brewing feelings of rage and resentment toward his parents that he had tried to keep dormant as flashes of the past flickered before his very red (from the weed) eyes. When he went back home to attend college at Pitzer, those images became all the more crystallized when his older sister, Marin, unearthed a box of home movies. Being five years older than him, the sight of VHS tapes was slightly less “anachronistic,” and she was eager to see what was on them.

Having returned to their parents’ house in Pacific Palisades solely to help her brother move his things out, Marin told him the least he could do was watch these videos with her while they kept packing up his room. So it was that she went into the garage to dig up the long-forgotten VHS player that Brenda had been adamant about saving for “posterity.” As it turned out, it was a shrewd, filled-with-foresight move. One that had been leading up to this very moment, apparently.

With both Brenda and Rich out of the house living their respective (and generally separate) lives, it left Marin and Ethan to their own devices, able to watch the past unfold in granular form without fear of interruption. And because Ethan was the more favored child, being “newer” and “the boy” at the time when home video’ing really hit its stride, he saw far more evidence of the ways in which his parents were so much more concerned with protecting their shit rather than their own son.

One “vignette” in particular would haunt Ethan for years after seeing it. It happened on his third birthday. An affair that his parents had gone “all out” for, not just in terms of the presents and décor, but also in the evidently very “exclusive” guest list. Their most powerful and influential friends, along with Ethan’s stodgy grandmothers—because his grandfathers had already died years ago by then, likely as a result of all the hen-pecking from their wives. Marin was there, too, though scarcely ever in frame…likely off somewhere with the family’s beagle, Sully, for it was he that served as her “security blanket” and “pacifier,” as it were, all rolled into one. By the time Ethan was old enough to try making an emotional connection with Sully, he was already firmly “Marin’s dog.” So there wasn’t much love to be had on the domestic animal front either. But long before that, Ethan was to get the “no real love here” message at this third birthday party—even if it was only to be imparted “subliminally,” implanted in his subconscious and made to come out after all these years thanks to Marin foisting the home video viewing onto his retinas.

During the “scene” in question, Ethan is haphazardly opening a gift, tearing indiscriminately at the paper when he’s not kind of also chewing on it. This alone seems to make his parents bristle, but when he comes too close (or rather, their estimation of “too close”) to a cut-crystal vase on the coffee table nearby, Brenda takes matters into her own hands by violently slapping his hand away and ushering the guests into the other room for cake and coffee. Rich, meanwhile, starts grudgingly picking up the wrapping paper around him and generally “tidying the area” as Ethan keeps crying and crying his eyes out. It has no effect on anyone, and certainly not Rich. A man who made it consistently clear throughout Ethan’s life that “tough love” was the only kind. But this, to him, was the root of it all. The first piece of “hard evidence” that both of his parents were callous and concerned more with their things than their children. As the tapes played on, there were several other instances like these, all involving one or both of their parents shouting at them not to touch or break something (“touching” being synonymous with “breaking” to them), though Ethan patently bore the brunt because he was still of an age when touching objects arbitrarily was like breathing.

Nonetheless, Brenda and Rich were only too keen on cutting off his air supply, as it were, for the sake of protecting their shit. Some might try to tell Ethan that it was only natural, and that, maybe, if he’d ever worked hard for anything in his life, he would understand where his parents were coming from. But no, that was a bullshit line as far as Ethan was concerned. One that tried to mask grotesque materialism as “hard work.” Besides that, Ethan worked every damn day of his life after graduating from Pitzer. Was it something as thankless and “embarrassing” as working at the Margaritaville inside Universal CityWalk? Yes. Did he care? Not really. Because it was his parents’ over-caring about shit that didn’t really matter which had led him here. To this state of total disaffection.

Soon after he finished college, rather than bothering to apply to jobs “within his field,” Ethan drove out to the CityWalk (his new apartment being in Toluca Lake) and applied at every business in there. Margaritaville just happened to be the first to call him back and hire him. He might have had the best education money could buy, but he wasn’t about to pursue anything “serious.” That would just mean far too much to his parents, who saw him as part of the possessions they were hoping would only accrue more “value” over time. In the monetary sense, of course. They wanted Ethan to make lots and lots of money so that he might be able to take “wonderful” care of them. Not just in the present, but when they were older as well. It had nothing to do with wanting “the best” for him, and everything to do with wanting the best for them.

This is what vexed Ethan to no end about parents in the same socioeconomic “class” as his own. It was all rooted in such fakery. Such self-delusion about the motives at the core of what they were doing when it came to the “why” of having children. It was purely ornamental. Another “box to tick off” in the column of “Being Successful and Having the ‘Accoutrements’ to Prove It.” It made Ethan sicker to his goddamn stomach than a Bahama Mama drink from the restaurant (he made the mistake of trying it once after his shift—never again). And that was part of why he vowed two things to himself after encountering those videos with Marin: 1) never be successful by conventional societal standards and 2) absolutely never, under any circumstances, have children.

By the time Ethan was forty-five, he had failed on both of those vows, having become the manager at Margaritaville in his late twenties and, by his late thirties, pivoting into fine dining management. It was while working at L’Échec in Beverly Hills that Ethan encountered A-list actress Carla Decker and struck up a romance with her that soon led to a wedding and then, in no time at all, two kids. His parents were, naturally, quite proud. Though they did their best to ignore the part where their son was still technically a “food service worker.” But even the staunchest and snootiest of parents can forgive the occasional “blemish” of that nature if it’s offset with something “marvelous” enough.