by John Inman
“You look parboiled,” he said, dismissing Bucky out of hand. “You just showered in boiling hot water again, didn’t you?”
“I was dirty.”
He laughed. “Let me guess. You were writing, the time got away from you, and twelve chapters later you caught a whiff of something foul and realized it was yourself. Either that or it was poor Clutch, lying in a corner, starved to death and decomposing into a bubbling pile of dead pussycat carcass because you forgot to feed him while you were wrapped up in your new book.”
“The only thing decomposing is my new book. The fucker flat-out sucks. And I’m not sure I’d call what I’ve been doing the last three days ‘writing.’ It was more like vamping with consonants. And it wasn’t twelve chapters. It was two. Barely. And neither one of them made any sense. And the cat isn’t dead. He’s still as irksome and demanding as ever.”
Chaz laughed. “Good old Clutch. But come now, Robert, the new book can’t be that bad.”
“I’ll tell it you said so. It will be so relieved. It was dragging itself toward the paper shredder in a fit of suicidal depression as I left the condo. And it isn’t even on paper. It’s in pixels. That’s how stupid it is.”
“You’re not making a lick of sense,” Chaz said. Then, ignoring the crowds filing past, he cocked his ear skyward. “What’s that noise I hear? Is it thunder?”
“That’s my stomach growling,” I said. “It’s crying out for cilantro.” Bucky had his addictions, I had mine.
Chaz grinned down on me. “Aha. Your tummy wants dinner. Of course. Well, then, let’s go feed the damn thing.”
“Promise me you won’t tell the waiter it’s my birthday. I couldn’t face one of those happy birthday fiascos where they drag out a cupcake with a candle stabbed into it and a bunch of strangers serenade me while I piss my pants in embarrassment.”
He sprayed me with a look of sheer sincerity. “I promise on the very graves of my ancestors not to do any such thing.”
“Well, see that you don’t.”
Before either of us could move a step from where we stood, I felt a hand come to rest on my arm. I turned, thinking it might be Bucky again. But it was a woman. Not the same one I had snapped at earlier. A different one. This woman wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress with a flared skirt like Minnie Mouse. She even had a big bow sticking off the top of her head. She was a big girl too. The hand that still rested on my arm was the size of a pot roast.
“Mr. Johnny? I just wanted to tell you how much I love your books.”
I heard Chaz mutter, “Oh, good lord,” under his breath, but I ignored him. I have very few rules in my life, but one I strictly adhere to is this—never ignore a fan. They might actually buy another one of your books someday.
I molded my face into the proper lines of gratitude and surprise and patted the pot roast still resting on my wrist. “Thank you so much. I’m glad you like them.”
The woman’s eyes were almost buried in mascara. She cast those eyes at Chaz for a second, looking a bit annoyed, as if she thought he was eavesdropping on a private conversation. The look wasn’t lost on Chaz. To make himself scarce, he wandered over to the curb and gazed up and down the street as if looking for a cab. I bit back a laugh.
“I read you until I fall asleep every night,” the woman said. I noticed she had a front tooth missing. Nice. Thank God it was only my book she was dragging into her bed and not me.
I dutifully laughed at her comment, but she didn’t seem to understand what I found amusing. “I really do,” she said again, her voice dripping with sincerity, her fat fingers squeezing my wrist now as she insisted I try to understand, her round face going all somber and earnest.
I gently pried her fingers off, still smiling. “I’m honored, ma’am. That is the sweetest thing anyone has told me for ages. Thank you for letting me know.”
I cast a look around, spotting Chaz still standing by the curb shuffling his feet. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” I said, “my friend and I have an appointment to keep. Thank you again for being a fan.”
She released me then, after casting another suspicious glance at poor Chaz. Turning back to me, she smiled grandly and patted her ample bosom as if her heart were fluttering underneath and she was trying to calm its flurry.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m so glad I ran into you.”
“So am I,” I lied. “Now if you’ll excuse me….”
“And happy birthday,” she said with a broad smile that spotlighted her missing canine to its fullest advantage.
That she knew it was my birthday was a bit surprising, but I simply rolled with the punch. It was the age of the Internet, after all. Everyone knew everything about everyone. There were no secrets anymore. Intimate knowledge floated through the air like dandelion fluff.
“Well, thank you. How kind. Now I really must be going.”
I turned my back on her then. When Chaz saw me approaching, he grabbed my arm and steered me up the street toward my favorite Mexican restaurant in the civilized world. Sombreros. I could see the sign hanging overhead a block away. In garish, moving Las Vegas neon, totally un-PC, it depicted a chubby, serape-clad Mexican boy sitting perched astride a fat smiling burro, waving his sombrero back and forth above his head. While the sign was totally without class, the restaurant was a wet dream for anyone who enjoyed traditional Mexican cuisine. I could already hear the wandering mariachi trumpets wailing “Perfidia” from somewhere inside the crowded interior, but it was the smell of carnitas and salsa, refried beans, menudo, and albondigas wafting out into the street that really pulled me forward.
Saliva began puddling beneath my tongue. My stomach growled all the louder.
Chaz tsked in pity. “You look like you’re about to pass out. Let’s get inside and claim a table before you drown in your own spit. Unless, of course, you’re not hungry at all and those are just sexual palpitations I’m seeing after the run-in with your Amazonian admirer back there.”
“Don’t be crass,” I said. “I need food.” I groaned, sucking my cheeks in to simulate starvation and emoting for all I was worth. “See?”
He rolled his eyes and tugged me harder. “Come on, then. Just to shut you up and get you away from your fawning public, dinner’s on me.”
“Works every time,” I gloated, trailing him through the door.
It was Thursday night, and the restaurant was packed. Two-for-one drink night. Yowza. Chaz and I sat at the bar for forty minutes sucking up margaritas. I barely got through the first one before my head was spinning. By the second, my tongue had gone numb, and Chaz was starting to look sexy. Note to self, never guzzle margaritas on an empty stomach. Halfway through our third round of drinks, a table opened up, thank God, so I was spared the humiliation of being dragged through the restaurant with my head in Chaz’s fly and three fingers up his ass.
Our table wasn’t the best in the house. It was situated all the way in the back next to the kitchen door, which was fine with me. The closer the kitchen, the closer the food.
After an interminable wait, a snobby waiter took our order, and about three days after that, he brought us a plate of tortilla chips to nibble on while the food was being prepared. I ordered a Diet Coke to help sober myself up.
“You never could drink,” Chaz said around a smirk, after ordering a fourth margarita for himself and dipping daintily into the platter for a single chip while I foraged through it with both hands, gathering them up by the fistful.
“Thanks,” I said. “I love you too.”
I immediately regretted speaking those words. I was pretty sure Chaz regretted me speaking them too.
He leaned back in his chair and studied me like a lab specimen. Amid a long, drawn-out sigh, better suited for community theater than real life, he said, “If only that were true, Robert.” Happily, there was a sparkle in his eye when he said it, but even that sparkle wasn’t enough to make me think he was joking completely. Chaz still wanted a relationship with me that transcended friendship. Even
a fool could see it, and I was certainly one of those.
I reached over and patted his hand. “Stop,” I said kindly.
And he did. He stared down at my hand lying atop his for a moment, then up at me. In that moment he plastered a determined smile on his face and turned his gaze from me to the crowded restaurant around us.
“Look at these people. All bloody tourists.”
“No, they aren’t,” I said, aiming my chin at an elderly couple against the far wall. “That’s Mr. and Mrs. Buschek. They live in my building. They took a condo on the side away from the ocean. Why the hell would anybody do that?” While waiting for their order to arrive, Mrs. Buschek was adjusting her pop beads, and Mr. Buschek was digging the wax out of his ear. Neither of them looked particularly happy. Apparently they had the same waiter we did.
Chaz shrugged. “Old people. Who knows why they do anything?”
“We should know. We’re not getting any younger, dear friend.” I tipped my head toward my elderly neighbors and shot them an insincere smile, in case they were watching. “We’ll be the ones gumming burritos before we know it. So how’s work?” I asked, dragging the conversation away from age at all cost. It was my birthday, after all. I didn’t want to think about it any more than I had to. “Made your second million yet?”
He shrugged again. “Made it and lost it. The markets are fluctuating like a motherfucker.”
“One almost never hears Wall Street analyzed like that on the evening news.”
“Well, maybe one should.”
We shared a grimace. “My agent wants me to fly out to Montana for a book show.”
“You going?”
“No. I’d rather set myself on fire. In fact if I did go, the result would probably be the same. The temperature is 108 there, and rising.”
“Yuck.”
“That’s what I thought.”
With a sizable hole in the platter of chips, I stopped stuffing them in my mouth long enough to take a breath. My hunger pains had eased. My margarita buzz had faded. I felt Chaz’s foot resting against mine beneath the table but decided not to make a big deal out of it. If he wanted to play footsies with my size twelve clodhopper, let him. It was the least I could do. After all, he was buying dinner.
A moment later Chaz’s eyes opened wide, and he hissed across the table. “Holy posole, Robert! Look at what’s coming in our direction.”
I turned and saw a busboy weaving his way through the tables, headed in our direction. The busboy couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old. Obviously of Mexican or Spanish heritage, his skin was mahogany bronze, tinged with a healthy shimmer of copper, as if Mother Nature simply had to go one step further with her palette, playfully improving on what was already perfect. Lean and graceful, with thick black hair tumbling over his forehead, the young man had the sweetest face I had ever seen on a human being in my life. Wide dark eyes, heavenly full lips, flat little ears snuggled up to the sides of his head like luscious dried apricots. He was wearing the uniform of the day for all Sombreros employees—black slacks, white shirt, black vest, and a spiffy little red bow tie knotted at his throat. He looked to be a head shorter than either Chaz or me. Maybe five six, five seven tops. The perfect size for cuddling.
When he was near enough for me to see the whites of his eyes, I also saw a sheen of shyness there. I had never seen him in the restaurant before. Maybe he was new on the job and still not completely sure of himself. That hint of hesitation made him even more gorgeous. More—intriguing. I wanted to mother the little bastard.
Among other things.
As he stepped up to the table and unobtrusively plucked a couple of empty margarita glasses from our midst, I noticed the lovely pelt of dark hair on his forearms where his shirtsleeves were rolled up. The lad had lovely, expressive hands. An artist’s hands. A piano player’s hands. Just by staring at them, I could imagine how one of them would feel tucked inside one of mine. To imagine how they would feel exploring my body was enough to make my blood pressure shoot up, so I tried not to do that. The last thing I needed was a stroke. I was old, now. I had to start taking care of myself.
The busboy smiled down at me, showing an array of tiny snow-white choppers. “Is everything all right, sir?”
There was no accent in his speech. He was obviously as American made as I was. I conducted a frantic little search before unearthing my voice, sort of like a paleontologist digging up an iguanodon bone from a pile of rubble. “Everything is fine, thank you.”
The busboy batted long black lashes, then aimed his exquisite smile at Chaz. After studying Chaz’s empty margarita glass, he asked, “Did you need another drink, sir? I can summon the waiter.”
Chaz smiled at him, obviously as smitten as I was. “That’s okay. I think I’ve had enough.”
The busboy nodded and turned away.
“I don’t believe it,” Chaz muttered, watching the boy walk off to attend to another table.
“What?” I asked. “What don’t you believe?”
While the busboy bent to retrieve a fallen napkin from the side of a chair two tables over, Chaz pointed to the busboy’s ass. “Look at that!”
I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, Chaz, don’t be such a lech.”
Chaz narrowed his eyes and hissed like a water moccasin. “Look at his ass, dammit!”
So I looked. Then I looked again.
Protruding from the busboy’s back pocket was a paperback copy of my first book. Lightning Summer. The paperback was well thumbed, the pages dog-eared and stuffed into the busboy’s trouser pocket as if maybe he dug it out during those times when he wasn’t busy cleaning up after sloppy diners. My own eyes peered out at me over the top of his pocket from the author’s picture on the back of the book.
“I wish my head was snuggled up against his ass like that,” Chaz dreamily sighed.
I laughed. “At least we know he’s well-read.”
“Don’t be immodest. It’s very unbecoming. Think he recognized you?” Chaz asked. “That big girl on the street sure as hell knew who you were.”
I flapped the comment away like a gnat. “Don’t be silly.”
Chaz studied me closely. He had a cockeyed grin splitting his face. I had a sneaky suspicion I had the same grin splitting my own face, but there’s never a mirror around when you need one so I couldn’t be sure.
“Tell me you aren’t flattered,” he said.
I peeked around one more time to see the book still protruding from the busboy’s back pocket. Even I was aware this was one of those times when a writer is taken aback by a moment of purest satisfaction when he realizes that people really do read his words on occasion. And to some people the words might even mean something. Maybe even mean enough to take those words to work with him to fill in the downtime.
“Okay, I’ll admit it,” I said. “I’m flattered. Now, let’s talk about something else.” I could feel the blood sluicing into my cheeks. I hate that feeling.
Chaz’s grin widened. “You’re embarrassed. How cute is that?”
I wasn’t embarrassed. Well, maybe I was, but I was also gratefully stunned. Somehow seeing my book in that kid’s back pocket made me feel a renewed burst of my own worth. It was such an overpowering feeling, it left me rather breathless. Was I being vain? Or was it just because the busboy was so flat-out gorgeous? And why the hell hadn’t I been as appreciative of the woman on the street? Did a person’s looks really make that much difference? Jeez, what the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t fresh from my first publishing contract. I had been around long enough to have tumbled off the charts already. Hell, I was practically on my way out. So why get all starstruck with my own importance now because the kid was cute?
Was it simply that I wanted the young busboy to be gaga over my writing? Well, sure. Who wouldn’t? But there had to be more to it than that. I wasn’t that shallow.
I hoped.
I was astonished to realize I had suddenly found my courage. The courage to erase. If I had my Mac handy,
I would smack that Delete button without an instant of hesitation. The work I had done the last few days on the new book was worthless. I could see that now. I needed to toss it and start over. The minute I got home, I would do exactly that.
I looked up to see Chaz still staring at me. “I’m sorry about Jason,” he said, taking me by surprise and knocking my internal struggle about fans and who I appreciated and who I didn’t right out of my head.
Not wanting to be totally self-absorbed, I refocused my attention on Chaz.
I might have believed what he’d said if there hadn’t been a spark of satisfaction burning in his eyes. A spark of—victory. As if by an effortless stroke of luck on his part, he had won this battle. Now on to the war in general. The war in which claiming me for his own was the spoils.
His name rolled off my tongue as easily as if he were a lover. “Chaz….”
“Too insincere? Am I sounding vindictive?” he asked.
“No.”
“How about connivingly gleeful?”
I gave him a chastising smile. “Maybe a little.”
His fingers snaked across the table, and I pulled my own hand away, tucking it into my lap before he could make contact. The movements were so blatant on both our parts, Chaz spit up a self-deprecating chuckle.
“Do I really disgust you that much?” he asked, his words barely loud enough to carry.
I whispered back, leaning in to prevent my voice reaching the table next door and the couple who already seemed inordinately interested in our conversation.
“You don’t disgust me at all,” I admonished. And it was true. He didn’t. Chaz was a good-looking guy. The few times we had bedded each other had been fun. But when I began to see glimmers of infatuation mixed in with the passion, I knew enough to pull away. After all, Chaz was my friend. I didn’t want to hurt him. While I didn’t want him as a lover, I didn’t want to lose his friendship either. It seemed abundantly clear that if I led him on, sooner or later I would do exactly that.
Seeing his attempt to hide the hurt in his eyes even now, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I was losing him anyway.