"Have a nice night, Billy," I said.
Billy nodded and straightened up, brushing invisible lint from the front of his pants. "Are you sure I can't drive you home?" I gave him a distracted wave and he paused at the drivers-side door. "I didn't mean to upset you."
"For some reason I just don't believe that."
His cheeks colored and his arm went rigid as he rested his fingers on the door handle. "You believe a lot of things about me. Whenever I try to tell you otherwise, you don't return my calls."
I waited for him to get in the car. He didn't. "Do you still think about Paul?" he asked.
Paul Martinez, one of the first friends I had made after moving to LA, had died of a drug overdose two months ago. Given all that had happened since then, I hadn't thought about him much. Paul had been a fixture at just about every party in West Hollywood, probably because he encouraged the illusion that drug addicts were all bright spirits with a genuine love for each and every party guest. He had been proof that an overweight guy with a mouth like a Pez dispenser could run in a world of absurd physical beauty, as long as he always met the challenge of delivering the perfect one-liner.
"I was at the funeral, too," Billy said. "I saw you walk out."
"He died of a drug overdose in a bathhouse," I said. "Suddenly all of his friends are standing in front of his family talking about how the party won't be the same without Paul—"
"With a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other," Billy finished for me. "I know. I stayed for the whole thing." He met my stare. "The way you walked out—that took guts, Adam.
Actually, I'm not sure if it was guts or just nerve. There's a difference between the two, don't you think?"
I shrugged.
"You made a lot of people angry," he said. It sounded like he was one of those people. I wasn't about to apologize to him.
"So I'll see you at the next party?" he said.
"No you won't," I said. "I'm laying off for a while."
He made a small sound in his throat. "Sounds like Corey got his wish after all." He got in his car and drove off. As soon as his taillights disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to an afternoon in late April.
The April day when Rod called to tell me that Paul Martinez's body had been discovered that morning by a cleaning crew up at a gay bathhouse in Hollywood, I was planning to take my Jeep into the car wash. Three days later, after I walked out of his funeral in a righteous rage, I decided to pick up where I had left off.
By the time I pulled into the Twin Palms Car Wash on Sunset Boulevard, I had managed to lighten my limbs and put the world in soft focus, thanks to the nickel-plated flask my mother had given me for Christmas. I didn't notice the attendant taking orders until he stepped back from the BMW in front of me.
He was over six feet tall, with a tight helmet of jet-black hair, long dark eyes deeply set beneath the hard line of his brow, and a Roman nose that looked prominent only in profile. His broad shoulders stretched the back of his white button-up, and everything about him looked hard and unyielding until you got to his full lips and sleepy eyes.
I rolled my window down and he placed a hand on the edge that was so heavily veined it looked sculpted. "Your left brake light is out," he said in a deep voice that matched with the fantasies his body inspired. "If you get pulled over, they'll put points on your license. When you leave here, you should go to an auto body place and have them take care of it."
I tried to speak and failed.
"You could also stop at Koontz Hardware down the street. They might have the right fuse. We don't do that kind of work. That's why I'm telling you all of this."
"Sorry," I mumbled.
"Uh-huh," he answered quietly, his eyes locked on mine. "You might also want to get some breath mints and get rid of that flask that's on the floor of your passenger seat."
"I just came from a funeral," I managed. "How about giving me a break?"
The hard look in his eyes didn't change, but his top teeth hooked his lower lip in a gesture that wasn't nearly as determined and masculine as the rest of him. Suddenly he jerked back from my window and asked for my order.
I pulled forward to the vacuum station, wondering if the words new car smell would be the last I would ever say to one of the most attractive men I had ever encountered. I caught him staring at me as I walked toward the car wash's main building as if he thought I was about to hold the place up and was prepared to take action.
In the men’s room, I splashed my face with water and succumbed to the vision I had been trying to avoid for several days. I saw Paul Martinez walking down a dark and narrow corridor, his stubby limbs lacquered with detox sweat and his towel slipping from his round waist. The walls pounded with piped-in techno that did little to cover the cries of drugged lust coming from the stalls around him. He tried to pull various men into a slow and swaying embrace until each of them realized he was waltzing to the beat of Paul's fading heart and pulled away with the naked disgust you find only inside this kind of meat market.
By the time the men's room door opened, I was blinking back tears. When my vision cleared, I saw that my flask sat on the counter in front of me, and the attendant was resting his butt against the edge next to it.
"Who died?" he asked me.
"A friend of mine," I said.
He nodded gravely. I noticed that the top three buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing the scoop of a white tank top underneath and a small gold chain that disappeared under it. "I forgot to mention something out there," he said. "Your mouth may smell like a bar at three A.M., but the rest of you smells good. Real good." He was trying his best, but I could tell he had never hit on a guy in a men's room before and it put a slight dent in his rigid demeanor. "Don't drink so much," he said, lapsing back into brigadier general mode. "I've seen what it does to people's eyes. I like your eyes."
He walked out of the bathroom with a straight back and a determined gait that would have parted an army. When I went back outside, I saw that he had been replaced by another attendant, and when I asked the cashier where he had gone she told me that he got off at two P.M. She also told me his name. Corey.
Although Tommy Banks had given me the day off for Paul's funeral, he forbade me from having a lunch break that took me any farther than the coffee shop in our building's lobby. I visited the car wash several times over the next few weeks hoping to catch him again, but I didn't, and I was too embarrassed to press the other staff for information about him.
On the last Saturday in April, Rod dragged me to a party down in Laguna Beach, hosted by an entertainment attorney we had never met who owned a two-story white clapboard house that sat perched on stilts above a slice of craggy beach. The balcony was crowded with goggle-eyed, gum-smacking muscle boys in tank tops and cargo shorts. My stomach dropped when I saw Corey leaning against the rail.
He was gripping a water bottle in one fist, and the swells of his chest strained against his white T-shirt. He was wearing the thin gold chain I had noticed at the car wash, and I could see a tiny medallion at the end of it. As I approached him, I saw what held his attention. In a Jacuzzi gurgling several yards away, a lanky older man in a blond beehive wig and a bikini stuffed with socks lip-synched to the pounding dance track. Every few seconds he lost his footing, and all you could see was the top of the beehive sticking out of the bubbles.
"You know that guy?" Corey asked me.
"The drag queen?" I asked.
He shook his head and pointed a finger at Scott Koffler. Koffler was standing on the other side of the Jacuzzi, his arms around two ruddy-faced adolescents whose wide-eyed stares suggested that the last party they had attended had faculty monitors and a crepe-paper-strewn dance floor. "I hear those boys he's with are too young," Corey said.
"Me too," I answered, hoping he would change subjects.
"I hear the guy's basically a pimp," Corey continued, with what sounded to me like a mix of fascination and disdain. "He brings those kids to parties and sets them up with
rich guys."
"I stay away from Scott Koffler," I said. I figured he was probing me to see what kind of guys I ran with, and whether a creep like Scott Koffler was one of them.
Now I had his full attention. "Who did you come with?" I asked.
"No one," he said. "Some guy who came into the car wash the other day invited me. He said I'd be a big hit." He didn't smile or act bashful about what he had said; he was not bragging but flatly communicating a fact. "But I only came 'cause I thought you'd be here." His voice lacked guile and his expression remained impassive. "I forgot to tell you something the other day."
"What?" I asked.
"I'm sorry about your friend."
"You drove all the way down to Laguna to tell me that?"
"No," he said. He placed his hands on my cheeks and brought our faces together until our noses were touching. He took a deep breath and made a soft sound in his throat. "I came to get you before you drank too much."
He backed me up against a nearby wall. His mouth met mine and his hands traveled up under my shirt, where he took both of my nipples between his thumb and forefinger and applied just enough pressure to make my back arch. He cocked his head to one side and kissed me with enough open-mouthed passion to bring my hands to the sides of his face.
He studied my face for a few seconds. "Let's go, Adam Murphy," he said, even though I hadn't told him my name. "I don't want my good luck to run out now."
He drove a red Dodge Ram, and as we sped through Orange County on the 405 Freeway, he rested his hand on my knee and didn't make any attempt at conversation. For the first time in my life, I traveled out of my body without the aid of a chemical. I saw us from above as we traversed a glittering island at the bottom-left-hand corner of the country, separated from its neighbors by miles of black desert. The rest of the country had already given up on the night, but soon the last midnight on earth would sweep across the two of us. (Unless you counted Alaska or some pissant island in the Pacific, which I did not.)
We didn't exchange a word during the long drive home. Corey stared at the road the entire time, as if what awaited us back at my apartment was a fate not worthy of excitement or anticipation, probably because it was a fate he had designed.
I had left the desk lamp in my apartment on and it threw a dull halo across the Krewe of Dionysus poster hanging above my love seat.
I babbled about myself for a good twenty minutes. Part of me was hoping he would return the favor, and another part of me was trying to delay sex as long as possible so I could see if that was all he was interested in. I told him about my mother and my parents' divorce, my sister's C-section, and the enduring radio silence between me and my father. I couldn't tell if he was listening.
"Your mother's a drunk, isn't she?" he finally asked.
If anyone else had asked me that question, anyone who didn't have the body of a Greek god and hadn't driven two hours just to find me, I would have asked him to leave my apartment.
Instead I said, "Yes. And I think she's going to die soon."
His eyes flared with some emotion I couldn't identify, and suddenly my words felt like a betrayal of the woman who had tried to teach me that I was different from everyone else, that the answers to life would elude me if I strayed too far from her path. Years earlier, I had hung my moon on a sinking ship, and I wasn't quite sure how to avoid going down with it.
I crossed to the kitchen counter so he couldn't see my face. I was about to offer him some water when I felt his mouth open against my neck. He unbuttoned my jeans and tugged several times to get them past my hips. I slid my hands out in front of me to get my balance as the cool air hit my butt. The knowledge that I was half naked and he was not sent a small shudder through me. I rocked back against him and stifled the sound that wanted to come out of me, because it was too desperate and pained.
He pushed the back of my shirt up until it was bunched behind my neck. He used three fingers to apply pressure to the opening in my body that had never felt sexual until that moment; then he pulled my shirt up over my head, lifted me up onto the counter, and took me in his mouth, his eyes locked on mine as if my every breath would determine his next move.
He was still fully dressed and I was completely naked, which seemed absurd given how much I had already explored his body through my gaze alone.
In bed, he pressed one hand against my chest, pinning me to the mattress as he guided himself into me. His gold chain brushed against my bare chest and I glimpsed a tiny scorpion embossed in the medallion.
Everything inside of me coiled. He sensed it and waited patiently.
I did my best to draw deep breaths, then I felt my ankles go lax against his lower back, and suddenly the words coming out of my mouth were so desperate and profane that if you played a recording of them for me now, I would have to leave the room. Over the next few hours, I traveled the arc from shame to bliss, a short but irreversible journey.
Some time in the night I awoke to a strange rustling sound. The vertical blinds turned the streetlight outside into a series of orange bars that fell across Corey's naked back as he studied my bookshelves. I blinked and saw that he was taking books off the shelf and flipping through their pages without reading a single word.
He pulled out the Merriam-Webster's dictionary and opened it. The center of the pages had been hollowed out, and inside were two tabs of ecstasy, an ounce of cocaine, and five two-milligram pills of Xanax. He closed them all in his fist, put the book back on the shelf, and disappeared inside the bathroom. A few seconds later, the toilet flushed.
When he slid back under the covers, I expected him to turn his back to me and then leave before I woke in the morning. Instead he wrapped an arm around me and pulled my back against his chest so tightly I could feel each breath he took. Later I awakened to him making breakfast in the kitchen. When he saw that my eyes were open, he asked me how I wanted to spend the day.
On Sunday morning at nine A.M., as I lay in bed pondering the death of Daniel Brady, the phone rang. It was my boss, Tommy Banks. He had never called me on a Sunday morning before.
"Heard you had a little incident at The Abbey the other night," he said without saying hello.
"Is it true you almost killed someone?"
"Sort of."
"What happened to quitting drinking?"
"It's a definite now."
"Were you aware that we're doing a promotion at The Abbey with GLAAD next month?"
"No."
My feet hit the floor as I struggled to come up with a good cover story.
"There are two thousand AA meetings a week in this city," he said. "I suggest you find one of them."
"I'll think about it," I said.
Tommy groaned as if he had called me from the toilet. "I'm sorry, Adam. I just can't take this anymore."
"What are you talking about, Tommy? The only time I've missed a day of work in the past year is when I went home last month." Since he'd figured out that I had gone home to bury my mother, I thought this might shut him up.
"Enough, Adam."
I let a silence fall and waited for him to fire me explicitly. He couldn't. Finally I said,
"There's no promotion at The Abbey on the calendar. I keep the calendar, remember?"
"You know, Adam," he began in a calmer voice, "some people like being a big fish in a small pond. You like being a piranha in an aquarium. This magazine is never going to go in the direction you want it to, so there's no point in your staying—"
"Who called you?" I asked. He didn't answer. "Did Scott Koffler call you himself, or did he get one of his rich friends to do it?"
"You have a key to the office, Adam. Go in and clean out your desk this afternoon."
"I don't have a desk. You gave it to the intern you're fucking." The next thing I knew, my portable phone was lying on the other side of the room and the vertical blinds were tossing as if a sudden wind had torn through my apartment.
I spent the next few hours listening to a Dido CD. I called Rod's ce
ll phone and left him a message telling him that I had been fired. I ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and watched a few hours of professional bowling. Somewhere along the way I came to terms with the fact that the Daniel Brady story was too big for Glitz magazine anyway.
By noon I had managed to convince myself that getting fired was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I wasn't giving up on Daniel Brady's foray out of the closet and into the Pacific.
I had to take stock of what I had. If I was going to take the story somewhere else, it was time for Nate Bain to officially go on the record.
Nate Bain's apartment building was a four-story stucco palace with balconies that ran the length of each unit and a line of tall hedges flanking the entry door. I was half a block away when I saw a half-naked blur come flying down the front steps. When I shouted his name, Nate whirled and almost dropped the dishrag he was holding against his left temple.
He was shirtless and barefoot. His plaid pajama pants were stained down both legs, and he reeked of body odor and lubricant. His eyes were cue balls and his black hair was matted with something that looked thicker than sweat. "Can you take me to the hospital?" he gasped. "See, I've got this oscillating fan and it's been blowing spores all over the place. One of them went behind my eye. I can totally feel it moving around—"
"Let's go back inside, Nate."
"I tried to get it out," he went on, "but I don't think I . . ." He pulled the dishrag from his temple, revealing a welter of oozing scratches that looked like they had been incised with a fork.
A car flew by and I watched the male passenger crane his head to stare at us, his mouth an O.
Several streams of dark blood slid down the left side of Nate's face. He scratched at them as he looked at me with jerking pupils. He had obviously been awake since Friday night and he was about to come in for a crash landing. My facial expression must have pierced his paranoid frenzy. His jaw quivered, his eyes dropped to the pavement, and he started shaking his head back and forth as if I had just told him that his mother had died.
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