It all made great sense, and if he’d had to journey three thousand miles to “get it,” well, he’d just “gotten it.”
This thought had just been fully assessed, concluded, and somewhat ratified, when a single headlight did turn onto the empty road and head toward him. A second later a motorcycle roared up and stopped not two feet from where Victor stood.
Perched on the large, handsomely decked-out black Harley Davidson with yellow trim was a tall, well-built blond with a crew-cut not quite at the fly away stage, a brushy blond moustache, and no shirt to cover his hairless, evidently oiled torso and heavily muscled arms and shoulders. He wore black leather bike gloves, tight black leather trousers, black engineer boots, a jauntily worn black leather peaked cap, and—the final touch—one black leather eye-patch.
The eye that was exhibited was hazel, lavishly lashed and twinkling. A half smoked cigarello dangled from the thick, bottom lip.
I don’t believe this even for one second, Vic thought. Is there someone here with a camera? Because if this isn’t a “Kodak moment” I don’t know what is!
“Party over?” Eyepatch asked, a steady baritone.
“Never got started,” Vic replied and looked at his watch.
“That bad?”
“It’s 11:45, two customers inside, and I’m outta here,” Vic assured him.
“Waiting for someone?”
“A taxi.”
“Want a ride home?”
“What’s in it for me?”
Eyepatch played with his crotch.
Vic thought, If I say no to him, the universe will instantly shatter into a skillion shards. Instead he said, “I’m not really into the pain thing.”
“Vanilla’s okay,” Eyepatch allowed.
“Okay. Sure. Why not?”
Victor hopped onto the back of the motorcycle, got his hands into the leather belt and yelled into Eyepatch’s ear, “Take Sunset all the way to Beverly Hills.”
Instead, Eyepatch took side streets Vic didn’t know until around West Hollywood when he leapt onto Sunset. This allowed him to roar around corners, speed mightily, show off, and even pop a few wheelies. By then his perspiration and light, slightly lemon- and coconut-flavored body odor had totally permeated Vic’s face, and Vic was, as a result, rock hard.
Only at the entrance to the Beverly Hills Hotel did Eyepatch falter and turn to look back at Vic. After all his stunt-work, this gave Vic an edge up. He yelled, “What are you waiting for?
“Are you sure about this?”
“You can park over there!” Vic pointed to the space where Meade’s Caddy usually sat. “That’s my spot.”
The doorman over-dramatically fell back two feet to let them through the wide entry. Vic hooked two fingers through the belt loops of Eyepatch’s black leather pants as he walked him into the lobby, past whoever was there and up the very long and public staircase to the second floor corridor.
Outside the room door as he fumbled with the key, Eyepatch started nibbling his nape and laughed low and dirty.
Let’s see: he’s shirtless and wearing an eyepatch, so of course walking through the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby as an obvious sex trick would excite him.
“I have to admit,” Eyepatch allowed, “this is a first for me.”
“Well, if it’s going into your diary,” Vic responded, flinging open the door and dragging him into the suite by his now open zipper, “let’s make sure you need more than one page.”
They ravaged each other’s bodies like starving lunatics who hadn’t had sex in a month for an hour and forty-four minutes.
They slept for another hour out of sheer exhaustion before Eyepatch got up got dressed and took off. Vic didn’t even hear the motorcycle roaring off.
The next day, showering, Vic discovered hickeys where they couldn’t possibly exist, as well as one thick gray sock that he was certain wasn’t his, and as he was getting dressed, he came upon a pencil-scrawled note stuffed in his underpants that read, “Fuck you!—next time! Burt.”
When he descended to the main lobby at noon, Vic could swear that every member of the hotel staff he passed, from pool towel-boy to shoeshine man, looked at him then very rapidly looked away. They all treated him very carefully and called him “Sir.” He guessed that unspoken fear and respect would rule the staff’s every action toward him until he checked out. Even the usually surly cavernous-cheeked desk clerk cringed when Vic bitched about receiving the wrong hometown paper and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Three rags from New York appeared at his door fifteen minutes later.
He waited hours before telling Gilbert what had occurred, and only did so because Gilbert had begun ringing every half hour, evidently avid to hear about the Detour premiere.
When Victor told him what a disaster the debut was, Gilbert could be clearly heard choking back tears. When Victor then mentioned how and with whom he’d gotten back to the hotel, Gilbert was silent for such a long time Vic wondered if he’d fallen out the window and onto Verdi Square below.
His friend suddenly uttered in hushed tones, “I think I can die now, knowing that fantasies do come true.”
“It wasn’t my fantasy.”
“I realize that fully and that is why you are so very close to beatification, Blessed Victor of the Many Hickeys, because it was the fantasy of possibly ever other sane gay man in America, and you selflessly and seminally fulfilled it.”
Later, on the phone with Marcie, Victor said, “Listen, we have to get a leather eyepatch for the Rickster for the Black Party.”
“Won’t he look . . . lacking?” she asked.
“Marce, croi moi, until you see Rick in a black leather eye patch, you can have no idea how aitch-oh-tee he can look.”
“If he ever returns from Africa,” she sniffed; cold number four had settled in for the duration.
Fresh from the coffee shoppe and the longest and possibly largest breakfast of his life (three courses: meat, fish and dessert; after all, he’d burned about twelve thousand calories the night before), Vic brushed his teeth and thought, Now that the staff is in line, I really could live at this place. I really could!
The phone rang and it was, of all people, the unmelodious Melanie, the TV Boy Wonder’s ice-bound assistant, asking Vic if he could hold for Brandon. Before he could say yes or no, she was gone.
Well, Brandon had promised he’d call, and here it was Thursday afternoon, and he was calling. He’d remembered. How nice.
“So, listen, my East Coast friend,” he began promisingly enough, “how about you come over here tomorrow afternoon.”
And Victor thought, No, please, do not say what I think you’re going to say.
But he did, saying, “And pitch me some ideas for television series.” Just as Vic was about to let out a very audible moan, Brandon made it worse, adding, “I don’t want you to think about it too much and I don’t want you to talk to Ed Trefethern or any of the other guys about it first.”
Geez, Louise, Vic thought, give me a break, will you? But Brandon would not be stopped. “I just want to hear what you have to say, right off the top off your clever and completely with-it head.”
“You’re kidding,” Vic said.
“Why would I be kidding? You’re the smartest person I met all month. In three months, possibly.”
“Thanks for the compliment, but Brandon, think about this for a minute. I live in the far west of Greenwich Village. I only got a television two years ago. Because someone left it to me in his will. And because it was delivered.”
“That’s why whatever you’ll come up with will be fresh. Unlike all the people I see and hear from all day, week after week.”
“Perhaps so, but aside from Star Trek reruns, I haven’t watched anything but Public Broadcasting specials in over a decade!”
“I watched Star Trek religiously. Look, Vic, I know you don’t like offices and all the crap here and neither do I. The people staring. The expectations. Let me sweeten the deal. I’ll buy lunch at _____’s,” namin
g what Sam and Stan at Silver Screen had mentioned earlier that week was the most talked about West Hollywood restaurant of the minute. Utterly impossible to get in.
“Well . . .” He wavered for an instant and Brandon stepped into the tiny caesura as though it were the Gulf of Mexico:
“Everyone will see you with me and want to know who you are. I know you don’t give a shit about any of this, but we’ll have some fun, and make them wonder what we’re up to, and who knows maybe come up with something really new and different.”
Brandon was unquestionably seducing him in the only way he knew how. Not as a lover, not even really as a business guy, but as a potential friend, or at least as one smart guy to another who probably didn’t want anything else from him but company. Vic guessed that was rare enough with all the wheeler-dealers around him, and that Brandon may have just been throwing in the pitch session because it would give him an excuse. Maybe he was just trying to honestly connect with someone without all the brouhaha and trinkets?
“Okay, Brandon, I’ll come to lunch so long as you understand I’ve got a new book out in the Fall, better than the last, and a fourth, even more phenomenal, already in the works, and I’m going back to Manhattan in three days to finish them.”
“You are hotter than hot,” Brandon said. “I know that.”
Ah, you have no idea how hot, Vic wanted to say. But the staff here at The Beverly Hills knows.
Aloud, he said, “That wasn’t exactly my point. What I meant was that I just don’t have time for anything else, if by some wild chance something I happened to say to you should develop into anything. I didn’t have time for Silver Screen, either. I know this sounds weird to you—and I don’t mean to demean you or your work or any of it in any way—but really I was coerced by my agent and others whom I couldn’t let down into coming out here. And I really only did it for the weather.” And, he added to himself, I stayed for the men!
“Look, I do understand. And that’s great. In fact, Vic, I wouldn’t come to you if you weren’t already busy . . .“
“Up to my neck, Brandon. Under contract. Up. To. My. Neck.”
“I wouldn’t come to you if you weren’t already ‘up to your neck.’”
“Okay,” Vic said. “Then we absolutely understand each other.”
“We absolutely understand each other,” Brandon parroted. “See? This is the best meeting proposal I’ve had in years! Someone who won’t give me the time of day. Except for tomorrow, for an hour or so at one or two or whenever. Lunchtime. And just a few ideas off the top of your head. Great. Let me turn you over to my assistant. She’ll set you up. Ciao.”
As soon as he heard the Vivaldi adagio aural wallpaper in the background, Victor wondered, How did I just let this happen?
“You understand of course that you are superseding some very important people who will be very difficult to reschedule,” Melanie of the Antarctic had the nerve to say to him. “I’ll be reshuffling his schedule for the next fourteen days.”
“Look, this was not my idea!” he defended himself. “I was the person who didn’t want lunch with Brandon at _____’s.”
“I understand,” she said in a tone of voice that clearly signified that she didn’t believe him for a second. Because, he realized, Melanie’s entire existence depended upon not believing him, and instead believing that any person plucked off any point on the planet—a subsistence barley farmer from Srinigar, say, or a Lapland reindeer herder, or even a Xiang Xiang hunter-gatherer in Namibia—would kill for exactly this lunch experience with her boss—rather than, say, passing an entire harvest without a trace of locusts, or having two does whelp at one time, or happening upon a large, undefended honeycomb.
They settled on two o’clock and Victor felt as though his day, which had begun in a screwed-out haze but had been coming around into semi-demi-normal, was now all but ruined.
Only one thing to do: call his agent and complain.
Her instant, badly snurfled response: “Do you have room in your luggage for fresh oranges? If not, buy another bag and I’ll pay you back. Bring as many as you can. You’re only checking one bag, right?”
“Sure. Fine, I’ll bring an entire case of Valencias with me. But what do I do tomorrow, meeting with this guy?”
“Is he cute?”
“He’s cute. He’s hetero. But so what? I’m already so fucked out I doubt if I’ll get it up again in the coming decade.”
“Then why did you agree to meet with him?”
“What if I’d just called you and told you I’d said no to meeting Brandon Tartikoff, the man in charge of programming for the hottest network on TV?”
“I’d murder you as soon as I got my hands on those oranges.”
“Et voila! My point exactly.”
“Well, Vic, you’ve got to tell him something. Think about it. What excites you to look at?”
“Marcie, you know very well my idea of exciting visuals is stumbling around the long-abandoned piers on the Hudson River while I’m high on MDA, watching semi-clothed queers and assorted river-rats attempt at mating.”
“I think that’s just a tad too louche for Prime Time. What about some actor or actress you like? Maybe you can make up some program about him or her? Remember . . . who was that one you were going on about last month?”
“Last month?”
“She was in some Off-Broadway prison movie take-off play you were raving about.”
“You don’t mean Divine?”
“She the one with all the eyebrows and the plunging neckline? The fat girl who ate poop in that awful film?”
“That ‘fat girl’ is a guy named Glenn Milstead.”
“But you told me Divine was nominated for some best actress award.”
“An Obie for Women Behind Bars? He’s still Glenn. He’s an actor, remember?”
And as Vic himself said those words aloud, an idea of the utmost swillishness gurgled slowly up toward the pathetic, nearly liquid surface of his overheated, overhumid, and severely sexed-out brain.
“Thank you, Marcie. You are a very brilliant agent and the most stunningly loyal friend a writer could have and I must thank you once again.”
Marcie didn’t like the sound of that response, not one bit. Hard experience had taught her that excessive compliments from authorial clients meant one of two things, neither good: either she was about to be dumped for a larger agency, or she was about to receive a summons to civil court and be soundly sued for malfeasance.
“Vic-tor!?” she warned. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. At least not yet. But you’re right. I’ll go to that meeting. And I’ll have an idea fresher than fresh. So fresh, it’ll leap off the lunch table and scurry onto the pavement.”
“Vic-tor?” she warned, even more fearfully, but he quickly said: “Gotta get dressed for dinner with your pal at Joe Allens. Ta!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“So,” Jim Anthonys interrupted his interminable monologue long enough to recognize another likely source of consciousness in the room, “this place must seem terrifically familiar to you, coming from New York and all.”
It was in fact about as close to a duplicate of the Manhattan eatery as could be accomplished this adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, right down to the fake brick walls. Victor was certain that if the management could have trained Collie-sized IND subway rats to slither past without anyone tipping off the health authorities, they would have attempted it.
His first foray into the men’s room—anything to escape—had delivered the admittedly mixed thrill of that acridly-reeking, fizzily-dissolving soap in the two urinals instead of the mint julep-flavored ice cubes like most other WeHo eateries. In another words, a real touch of Lower East Side Pirogi Palaces. The second dash in had revealed two tiny specks of blood on the otherwise pristine sink counter—either someone mainlining or, more likely, someone trying and failing to.
Luckily, the Manhattan food was duplicated too.
“I could live on Jo
e Allen’s cheeseburgers and giant onion rings,” Victor responded, thinking, When will this dinner be over?
“Now, did I mention the upcoming slate we have in post production?” Anthonys went on, and Victor thought, Only seven times already. Please, stop me before I kill again.
It wasn’t that there was anything intrinsically wrong with Jim Anthonys, aside from his last name, so badly in need of a trim. The problem was that he possessed one topic: his work. Any attempt Victor made to alter that topic went immediately absolutely nowhere. As for his so-called “upcoming slate,” the two films Jim mentioned, they were surely calculated to induce instant and terminal ennui in even the lowest I.Q. First, a diplomatic spy story set in World War Two Paris. (I believe we all know how that turned out!) Second, a light romantic comedy among unattached teachers at a Gifted Ed school in Greenwich, Connecticut. (Hetero W.A.S.P.s in love, young Gentile geniuses being smarty pants—Oy! Quick! A hundred Tuinals!) These weren’t exactly calculated to set off fireworks in Victor’s mind or britches. Nor did the stories emanate potential for anyone even half as perverted. (What if the spy plot failed and the Germans won the war, invaded the States, and converted the residents of Lake Ronkonkoma into Hitler Youth Zombies? Victor might go for that!)
At some point, maybe around the twelfth rephrased retelling of the allegedly romantic so-called comedy, after Vic had said he thought both ideas had great market possibility (allowable under the axiom “there’s a sucker born every day”), Victor asked why it was that, given this “super slate,” Jim Anthonys believed Vic or his work held any interest whatsoever for his company?
Justify My Sins Page 10