When she was back at her apartment, I placed a glass of ice water next to her futon. I remember her lying there in a T-shirt and a thick diaper, her fighting sleep, her asking me to check the back porch.
I did. There was a copy of a book there. Stephen King’s Cujo. Mel had borrowed it from the store, but had put it out there because it was too scary. She held my hand again as I asked if I should return it, but she said she would do it. She said she’d probably go into work the next day, or she tried to say it, her hand finally relaxing and falling away from mine.
She was asleep. I had never seen her pushed all the way past her limits into exhaustion. It was strange to feel like she trusted me like this. This was what it was like having a friend who was a woman.
My eyes kept going to the steel-toed engineers’ boots at the edge of her bed. They were beaten from use and they were enormous, perhaps size thirteen. Jeremy had not come to the hospital with her, as he had to work on the AfterMASH set. But he managed to be a presence, even when absent. Here he was, not attending to Mel’s needs. So I sat, feeling altruistic love and anger, an amazingly heady cocktail.
* * *
—
Mel didn’t come back to work for a while. She’d been lying to herself about how long recovery would take. I was thinking about her reading Cujo. The last book she’d read was something ethereal by Marguerite Duras, whose new book was getting a lot of attention. But Mel read her earlier work, and that became a mark of respect for me—loving the writer everyone would only discover ten years later. But Stephen King?
Just because something was popular didn’t mean it was diminished. Now that I’d worked at Hunter’s past summer break, and it was turning into autumn, I understood what a forty-hour workweek meant. You could buy the new James Michener without knowing what it was specifically, because you already knew what it was generally. That was a comfort. I started reading Stephen King, and Robert B. Parker, and John D. MacDonald. They each had a worldview with predictable elements, but that was part of their charms, like picking up a conversation with a friend every year or two.
One day Mike came to the counter humming with excitement. He had a stack of Len Deighton’s new novel. He put it in the center of a display close to the entrance, and behind the book he placed a large backstop with red letters: PRICE WAR! He straightened the sign a few times, put his hands on his hips, and asked me what I thought. He’d gotten permission to discount the price on this book. This would stick it to Crown.
That all of Crown’s books were discounted, and that we had one discounted book struck me as an incomplete business plan, but I wasn’t sure. Mike had been selling books longer than I had. He placed a “Price War” card in the window, with a crafty pride in our resources, like Churchill enacting air defenses over London. He started hiring new people in anticipation of actually needing them.
* * *
—
We had a signing by Andy Summers, who’d done a book of photographs of his band The Police. Their album Synchronicity had come out that summer. He showed up with a tall blonde who radiated that otherworldly kind of beauty that made her seem like a different, better species than the rest of us.
I flagged down Summers’s driver and asked who she was. Apparently Summers had told him to stop at a corner, and he’d rolled the window down. She was standing at the curb. “Hi, I’m Andy Summers. Get in.”
I was impressed. That level of arrogance was incredibly attractive. There were three guys in The Police, and Summers was the oldest and probably the least handsome, and yet he didn’t let that stop him. We sold a few hundred copies of his book, and no copies of the new Len Deighton.
* * *
—
A few days later I went back to the dentist because my jaw hurt. The exam was brief. He said I needed to be fit with a mouth guard. I was grinding my teeth because of stress.
This didn’t sound right to me. He asked some questions about how I felt when I slept and when I woke up. My answers didn’t match what he wanted to hear. I kept telling him I was empty and content. “Look,” he said, “you’re grinding your teeth. Otherwise, you’re telling me you’re walking around with your jaw clenched all the time, voluntarily, and that’s not—”
“That’s it. I’ll stop doing that.”
“No, I’m telling you that if you’re not doing it at night, you’d be deliberately clenching your jaw during the day.”
“Right. I’ll stop.”
He looked confused. “Why are you clenching your jaw?”
I didn’t want to say. The videos of Synchronicity were in high rotation on MTV. One of them highlighted Sting’s cheekbones. When I clenched my jaw, I thought I looked more like Sting. That turned out to be a losing battle. So I stopped.
* * *
—
One of the things I was writing that fall was a novel I’d started in high school. It was about boarding school the way The Tale of Genji was about the Heian court, minutiae important to no one unless exquisitely described. I’d been trying to exquisitely describe it ever since 1977, when I was thirteen. If punching a blow-up clown in the nose so that it keeps uprighting itself is exquisite, then I have described my attempts pretty accurately. By 1983, I had about four thousand manuscript pages, and was in no danger of knowing what the story was.
I was now on the scene where a boy needs to track down his missing mother after a punk rock riot to tell her someone has died. I didn’t know how to finish it. I kept changing the details, all of the nouns of the story, and yet it was still unresolvable. I was writing a first draft that I didn’t know the ending of, because I had to know what my character would do when he saw his mother. This was hard to figure out.
* * *
—
With Melanie gone, I felt the weight of the silence in the bookstore. At the counter one day, it was just me and Fred, the assistant manager. We were both staring straight ahead. Neither of us had spoken in over five minutes.
“Yeah,” Fred finally said. “The last time I took mushrooms, I fell into an ice cream freezer.”
He said it as if we’d just been talking about times we’d taken mushrooms, or the times we’d fallen into ice cream freezers. And this was a goad to me—I could turn into Fred eventually. I didn’t want to feel like I was drifting. It was October now, and I was living in the extra months of adulthood I said I’d wanted, and yet I wasn’t doing much with it. I looked for allies.
Mike Conway, whose threesome hadn’t worked out, was busy “scamming” on girls, as he called it. It was unclear to me what he was actually studying at school, because scamming had become his full new branch of inquiry, a practice between art and philosophy.
He and his friend Neal were so good at it they started handicapping themselves. They would only hit on girls at the worst times—on the bus at night, for instance. Or driving Mike’s ancient, smoking, rusted, monstrous Plymouth, which he called Iron-Maiden-Man-Thing.
I went to visit Mike one night, but he wasn’t there. Neal was. Though we didn’t really know each other well, Neal offered me some beers. He was compact and blond and quick-witted in a narrow, specific way of being mean-spirited. In other words, he was studying to be a corporate lawyer. Neal was fascinated with my situation with Melanie and Jeremy—he definitely believed I should be fucking Melanie every minute Jeremy wasn’t around. He also suggested I should shit in Jeremy’s boots. But better than that, why wasn’t I helping myself to the other women in Westwood? There were women out there just begging to be used.
“Let’s go do it now. Let’s see a movie then find girls.”
We drank beer, and went to see Zelig, which hit me hard. Woody Allen had a critique in there for people who shape-shifted in order to fit in with other people. Wasn’t I doing that right now, hanging out with a crafty asshole, and laughing with him, telling him he had some good ideas even though on a certain level I was sure he wa
s the Antichrist of misogyny?
We had a brown paper bag from 7-Eleven with Mickey’s Wide Mouths, beer that tasted like self-hatred. We took ourselves to the cemetery. I was leaning against a tombstone while Neal instructed me how the world worked. Fuck everyone before they fuck you. Give up nothing. If anyone gets ahead of you it’s because you let him do it. When you meet a girl, don’t be nice—be as mean as possible to her.
Uh-huh, I said. Uh-huh. I was agreeing to get him to talk more, like I was eleven years old and the kids who lived in the Egyptian consulate were telling me how the Jews had vandalized their house.
Here was someone who lived well in utter contempt for how I had lived politely. A handsome, funny, awful man vetted by women all over Westwood. He was what I should want, if I were attracted to men. But men didn’t make my dick hard. Why did I even need to double-check that? How was it possible I didn’t know anything about myself without confirming and reconfirming it?
While he talked, I wanted to yell, “Neal, I don’t even want to kiss you!” but that’s not the kind of thing you could tell another guy apropos of nothing, so I kept it to myself. I wanted to tell Rick but I didn’t know where he was.
FILM
IT WAS NOVEMBER. Mel called. Did I want to go to a movie, maybe? As friends. That sounds evolved, I said.
She suggested Risky Business. I’d heard that even though it sounded like something Cinemax would eventually show, it subverted the teen sex comedy and its subtext apparently made you think. Also I wanted to know if I really looked like the lead.
There were more phone calls, and her invitation became complicated. I said, “Yes” with every iteration, as this was the first milestone of our post-lust friendship. I would have to get to the theater myself, she said. She had to leave fairly soon afterward, but not that soon, there was time for coffee. We’d be seeing it with her old friends from Arizona, Scottie and Dan, a couple whose support had kept her going in the past.
When I met them I could see how solid and decent Scottie and Dan were. We all loved Mel but other than that there seemed to be nothing to talk about. They were older, their late thirties. Every once in a while, Scottie or Dan would ask me a simple question about books or school, and I tried to be charming when I answered, but what came across was the trying rather than the charm.
The film was funny and strange and there was a sex-on-a-train scene that was erotic without showing much skin. I wondered how the director had figured that out. I wished I’d made that film. It made me ache a bit, wishing I were a better storyteller.
Back on the sidewalk, much agreement: great film. The three of them thought Tom Cruise was very hot. No matter how long the pause afterward, no one suggested I looked like him.
We got in the car. Things were confusing. Apparently they were supposed to drive to the airport now. It turned out Scottie and Dan were here because they were having dinner with Mel—and Jeremy, who was returning from a quick trip to Arizona. It’s possible the confusion arose from not knowing what to do with me.
Scottie, driving, looked in the rearview mirror, directly at me. “Oh!” he said, a lightbulb moment. “That guy in the movie.”
“Yeah.”
“Of course—I missed it. You have the same sunglasses he did.” There were murmurs of agreement, Dan saying I must have gotten them because the posters were so ubiquitous. I could have fought that, in the feeble way that never works, proving my purchase had been prescient. But all I could manage sounded like a sad attempt: my glasses fit my weird crooked nose; they were glasses I’d earned because of actual experience.
Mel, in the front seat, turned to Scottie, who was driving, to tell him something about my study of Japanese aesthetics. And that prompted Dan to say, with the interest you’d show at a piano recital, “Oh, you’ve studied Japan?” and I knew he was keeping the conversation going until he could drop me off and their actual lives could return.
Scottie and Dan loved Mel. But they loved Jeremy, too, and they loved Mel and Jeremy together, and whatever Mel and Jeremy did was all right with them. I was a sign of Mel’s life in counter-theme, I was teenage candy, sweet and ambitious, the kid who tried to look like Tom Cruise. I was a story they would tell for a while.
It was after dusk, and my time was almost up. I said they should just drop me off right here. They were sweet—they could take me anywhere. But I could feel the car already slowing down, the curb meeting us gently. Goodbye. Nice meeting you. Good luck. Joke about Japan. Joke about movie. See you again. Click.
I watched the car pull into traffic.
It was Saturday night. I was on Santa Monica Boulevard and oh, by the way, it was raining. I wasn’t that far from Mel’s house, and there was a bus directly to my place, so I didn’t mind waiting in the rain a little.
“Just missed the bus,” a voice said.
It was a guy leaning against a concrete wall by the bus stop. I wondered: hooker or another guy waiting for the bus? He had a military haircut, combat boots, olive cargo pants, and a sweatshirt. In other words, he and I were dressed exactly alike. This didn’t make me trust him.
“Yep,” he said, “Saturday night rain. Chases all the whores away and the only chicken hawks tonight are total freaks or cops. What are you?”
“Mostly sad I missed the bus.”
“Okay, then, me, too.” He was smoking a cigarette somehow. It was Los Angeles rain, some of it coming in like cloud bursts, but mostly just an oily drizzle that smelled like weed killer. There was a bench, and sometimes one or the other of us sat on it, but it was wet, so we got up and paced. “The problem is, waiting like this makes us suspects. Everyone thinks we’re whores,” he said. “Like these guys.”
What guys? His eye was much better than mine. A dark car cut across two lanes of traffic and before the window finished rolling down, rain disappearing inside, he had sprung off the bench, and crouched down to yell into the passenger seat, “We’re waiting for the bus, so fuck off, cops.”
The window rolled back up, and as the car went back into traffic, throwing veins of rain water into the gloom, he tossed his cigarette at its trunk.
“Cops. I hate ’em even more than I hate whores,” he said.
It was really coming down. I’d been there twenty minutes and there was no bus. Traffic was thinning out. People who wanted to be inside had stayed inside.
Another car slowed down at the curb. Somehow I felt in the rain that I’d earned camaraderie with this guy, so I wandered toward it to tell the driver to fuck off. But the window rolled down, and there was a twenty dollar bill floating in the air. The other guy sprang off the bench. Without a word, he threw open the door, got in, and closed it behind him.
A second later, the car peeled away.
It took a second to process what I’d just seen, and I had to tell myself the story: once, this girl dropped me at a bus stop so she could pick up the man she really loved at an airport, and I was waiting for the bus in the rain with a guy who hated male prostitutes who turned out to be a male prostitute. Yep. That sounded like pretty much what had just happened.
Because there didn’t seem to be another bus coming, I had time to hone this story. I imagined telling Owen what had happened, how he would ask questions that would make it funnier.
I realized the story wasn’t as important as the possibility there wasn’t going to be a bus. Some riot or revolution had happened up line and so I was going to stay here forever. I thought, Be here now, then I thought, “I don’t want to be here now. It’s horrible here right now.”
A car idled at the bus stop. I hadn’t seen it show up. Wipers going. The windows were fogged up. One window was slightly open.
I stayed away. The car didn’t move. The exhaust jetted into the rain. Through the slit of the open window I could hear music. KROQ. New Wave. The Go-Go’s. “We Got the Beat.” Seriously?
It was a GTI Rabbit convertible,
I told myself, and I looked toward the license plate, in case that would be important to the people who found my body. And then I saw something that made a blend of feelings touch my heart, fear and excitement. I was looking at a Tri-Delt sticker.
Tri-Delts were the most beautiful sorority on the UCLA campus. Tri-Delt girls were wild. How wild? It was a Saturday night, and they were wild enough to pick up a male prostitute.
I walked toward the car.
I had nothing on to cover my head. I approached the car, drenched. The window rolled down. The driver and the passenger were nineteen-year-old girls with perfect makeup and long, straight, ironed hair. They looked terrified. There was no one in the backseat. The driver leaned over to get a look at me, as if this was something she would eventually need to describe to a sketch artist.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello.”
The girls exchanged looks and laughed. They talked over each other. “Would you—” “No, don’t tell him that.” But it wasn’t the joy of playing a joke on me. It was nervousness.
“Do you want to come to a party?” the passenger finally said.
My hand was on the roof of the car. I was leaning inward so closely I could smell their perfume.
“Actually I’m waiting for the bus,” I said. “Sorry.”
I tapped the roof twice as a goodbye and went back to the bench.
The car didn’t move. The window stayed open, as if the girls inside were consulting a textbook they had about how to get a male prostitute to come to a party. Then the window rolled up and, after signaling first, the GTI returned into traffic.
My bus finally arrived a few seconds later. I got in, paid my way, and shook my head. I was soaking wet. What a day. I started telling myself about the moments that most affected me, because I was feeling that I’d had the worst day of my life, so I was adding them up in order of the most offensive, meaning Mel’s rejection, the dismissal by Scottie and Dan, Jeremy’s concurrent return to her life, the girls in the car—hold on.
I Will Be Complete Page 30