The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  In an hour he’d be doing gymnastics in a stranger’s bed. But one last thing. He’d thought of it in the middle of the kisses. A hundred and seventy-five minus fifty. He rocketed along now, rooting to the center of the city, where the palms gave out and the air hung low, the color of sherry and the taste of lead. I’m a cowboy, he thought. And then: No I’m not, I’m a private detective, and I get to the bottom of things if it’s the last thing I do. A hundred and twenty-five. Somebody must have a gun they’d sell for that. Maybe a little thirty-eight. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel by way of patting himself on the back. He knew just the sort of man to look for on the street. They had eyes blank as dimes, and they hadn’t had a good fuck in ten years. You couldn’t miss them. They were all over the place.

  Sam had no past anymore before LA, but he used to. Until the day after Christmas when he was fifteen, he lived on East Sixty-fifth Street, in the pastoral quarter of Manhattan. He apparently thought it prudent to gather the aunts’ checks in his Christmas stocking before he took off, and he pawned the watch his father had tied up in ribbon and set by his plate of goose and chestnuts. So he was less a New Yorker by reason of time than Peter or Rita, but Peter and Rita, knowing what they did now about the townhouse life, boxes at the opera, and boxes from Bulgari and Godiva, would have envied him the style he once was accustomed to, quite as if they themselves had grown up hillbillies. Sam, of course, thought lunches at the Plaza as dull and fussy as lunches at the Pierre. He was bored in New York, always, though he knew now it was being fifteen and under and not the city lights that made it so. By the time he was ten, he was in therapy twice a week, and at twelve he was sent to school in Connecticut. To a school, in fact, that played soccer and hockey with Peter’s school. He flunked math and earth sciences, ran a respectable mile, and befriended the local toughs who ran the school kitchen. It took him a year to make connections, and he entered the tenth grade running about two hundred dollars every other week in drugs, mostly acid.

  His mother and father, decked out like the sugar figures on a wedding cake, had always gone about their glittering business, and he didn’t mind at all. Though he raged for something he couldn’t name, he knew it had nothing to do with them. When his mother sickened and died like lightning in the summer before he ran away, he was terribly sorry for her but not for himself. He watched her stand stricken in front of her closets, wall to wall with clothes like a whole floor of Saks, here and there fingering a pleat and pulling out a sleeve. It was as if her things could reassure her that she’d done more than most did, that all the parties were just as lovely as they seemed. Something in Sam beat with its fists at the same door she did all that summer, shouting at how unfair it was. But all the same it happened outside him. Part of that, of course, was the acid he dropped, which made him see things as if underwater, but even then he had the wit to wonder when the detachment would stop. His father was worse. He treated her as if she’d brought down shame on his good name, as if she’d taken to drink or gone suddenly mad. The ruinous grief turned the house on Sixty-fifth Street into a kind of tenement. It might have gone on for months and months, but she lay one morning on her dressing room floor, an empty bottle of Seconal in the pocket of her robe, the vanity covered a half inch thick with designer scarves. It was at the funeral that he met his father’s other woman. He was the only one dry-eyed enough to notice that, even underwater, she wore black crepe like a stripper. It proved to him what he hardly needed further proof of, that the only life he could keep in line was his own. And though he’d gotten to like the school’s austerity and would have been glad to deal dope until he graduated—expecting by then to be able to get a piece of Reno or Miami—he knew it was time to go.

  He went to San Francisco first, like a banker to Basel. He didn’t feel much like a runaway—he took a plane, for one thing, and, like a pioneer in a Conestoga, he made good provision for a brand-new life. He had six hundred tabs of purple haze in his suitcase and four hundred dollars tucked in the crotch flap of his Jockey shorts. But he found he was two years too late with the acid, and anyone who might have still wanted a cosmic high couldn’t afford the prices people paid in Connecticut prep schools. His market had fallen out from under him. He stayed three days and stayed stoned, but the hollow-eyed sorts he met in Golden Gate Park had fallen into gibberish, making him sound positively Shakespearean. It scared him. He went south, but again with no thought of LA. He had a vision of himself holed up in a stone house on the Baja Peninsula, getting his head together, by which he meant a toothless old Indian woman feeding him peyote buttons and giving him baths. He had been doing the little reading that is said to be a dangerous thing. He didn’t consider drying out. He only wanted a change of medication.

  But it ended up being decided for him. He hitched a ride in a beat-up truck in Monterey that was going down Route 1, delivering beer. For all his diverse chemical intake, Sam had hardly ever had a beer, and by the time they were taking the big turns on Big Sur, a drunken burr had insinuated itself in the midst of his hallucinations. The whole Pacific was, not to belabor the point, a purple haze. Then the trucker wanted to suck him off, and Sam said no. He didn’t have room between the acid and the beer to feel panicky or flattered. He must have sounded almost bored, as if he were back in New York, refusing yet again to be waited on or entertained. And he thought that was the end of it. After a moment he showed there were no hard feelings by telling about his stash of LSD, promising to share. Then he needed to take a piss something awful. So he stood just off the road in a foggy meadow a half mile above the ocean, his cock in one hand and a beer in the other, while the truck drove off with his last key to the astral plane. It tooted its horn twice as it rounded the next bend. So long, sucker.

  Odd, considering the drive that had moved him along at fever pitch ever since, how little thought he’d given to his cock. He’d noticed it was big, of course, about third in his tenth grade class of sixty boys, which was a relief. But he knew it wasn’t going to be much use to him until later, so he let it be and played with his head instead, blowing it full of holes. The combined energy released through masturbation in his dormitory probably could have powered a turbine, and yet he genuinely preferred as an act of self-love to look at himself in the mirror without moving a muscle. He knew even then he was going to be a knockout. And he began to develop that eerie double life that only the great beauties live. At the mirror, self-conscious and self-absorbed, every feature put under a microscope. Anywhere else—in company, in crowds, especially in love—open and wild with grace and missing nothing, making free with the universe. Sam began to go back and forth, and it made him so happy he thought he would have it forever. Perhaps he would have, except that the balance is finally thrown off by the strain of making a living off it.

  But that was much, much later. The day he walked along the coast road, gradually getting sober in spite of himself, he was as virgin as the flowers on the heath. Though the term here is purely literal, because at the same time he was badly shaken out of yet another sleep of innocence. He was down to four hundred dollars and the clothes on his back. He felt he was due for a stroke of luck. There was no lag in the flood of events in his world, even then. No pauses while time chiseled his fate in stone. He’d had his first roughing up, and he accepted it, used it, learned where he’d gone all wrong. He was ready to process something new in a couple of hours. The hills were ghostly gray. The fog wet him right to the skin. If nothing had happened, as it did to almost anyone else, and he’d walked the whole range till it ran down into civilization again, if he’d worn out his soles and learned how to tie his shirt like a kerchief on his head against the midday sun, he might have been a poet by the time he got to Santa Barbara. But he got his wish, and his good luck carried him away.

  He took a road at random, winding down, and around dusk it brought him out onto the beach. For a moment, he thought he would die of the cold, and he ran around in a circle on the sand to keep warm. Until he spied a rose of firelight at the ba
se of a cliff. He jogged on over, and in a moment he was staring across the fire, where a tenderloin was spitting on the grill, at a man with a halfback’s build and a sandy beard, about twenty-two. Sam said hello to the next year and a half. “You look hungry,” said Ben, and that was that. He cut the steak in two, poured him a Jack Daniels and water in a tin cup, and, when it was time, made room in his sleeping bag. They must have both lain awake for hours, curled like spoons, because they both noticed when the fog began to lift and the stars went on. They began to talk about the night as if there had been no lapse of time since they sat around the fire, where they talked about the four elements like characters in a medieval play. They stayed clear of talking about themselves, Sam decided in the dark in his underwear, because the tides and the plot of the North Star were more important. As to sex, nobody made a move.

  For a while, it was assumed that Sam would be going off on his own again in a few days, and then suddenly it wasn’t. They finished the week’s hike and tramped inland, retrieved Ben’s MG, and drove all the way to LA. Ben’s house, a furnished bungalow on Norma Place, felt from the first like the opposite of Sixty-fifth Street, and Sam sat contented in the garden in the sun and looked at maps. Mexico and Central America. Then on across the Darien Gap into the jungles that went unbroken to the Amazon. Ben was away off and on day and night, but Sam felt no desire to know what it was he did. They slept in the same bed and, now that the sleeping bag didn’t confine them to lying in each other’s arms, kept a certain distance and talked less and less. What they both wanted wasn’t something either of them seemed to think about. For different reasons, neither of them needed anyone else, and it was even better than being alone to have someone around who felt the same way. They were not out to be friends, let alone lovers. The nothing Sam would go a long way to feel years later came naturally to him and Ben.

  It was the Southern California of the morality plays, perhaps—without humors, without reasons, without the characteristics of particular life in a particular place. It may be that they preferred to live in two dimensions, that they were more like photographs left about than people. Nothing happened on Norma Place. Somehow the food must have got bought and the laundry done, because they didn’t starve, and they didn’t smell. But it was all very detached, and Sam left behind what little he still had of the past because feeling detached felt good. They assumed nothing. Assumption itself was tainted with good and evil, and good was the opposite of bad. No morals were involved.

  Once settled, then, with nothing expected of him, Sam left his head alone and took hold of his cock. As naturally as if he were shifting languages between one country and the next. His schoolboy’s line of reasoning, that it wasn’t going to get him anywhere until he had someone to put it in, evaporated when it dawned on him—he was the one he was waiting for all along. He became his own man, literally. He didn’t need to compare with anyone else because he had an eye for his own technique like an athlete who doesn’t ever lose. And he didn’t worry about his lack of experience because he loved to practice. He made his own experience up as he went along. It was very existential jerking off. He didn’t do anything else for weeks.

  So he woke one morning hard and got up to let it go in the bathroom. Closing the door, he looked over at Ben lying naked on the bed, taut with his own erection. Suddenly he knew—Ben was a hustler. Not that any street airs hung close about him. It was more that Ben seemed like a dream his genitals were having. Sam was years ahead of his time. He believed already that sex didn’t have to leave the circle of the self at all. Wasn’t meant to. He and Ben were the doubles of each other, he thought, and the world would have to feed on them to get tough. It came to Sam in the middle of things, something like a vocation. If it was love for Ben he was hiding, he was doing it all too well. They were born not needing love, it seemed. Their cocks, he thought as he stood there, were symbols of quite another force. Like the needles on sundials. Like radar. Yet even if Sam couldn’t see it then, the two of them in the room on Norma Place—one half hidden behind the door, the other spread-eagle in a double bed, open to attack—looked like an allegory of love forever out of phase. Even if they didn’t care what they looked like.

  Sam got right into it, all by himself. Took a bus to Hollywood and walked the starlit streets till he found one set aside for kids. Dressed working-class, as if he were going to grow up one day and be a telephone lineman. He did his training on the job. He was amazed, in fact, at how little the old men expected of him. Fifty was the age that wanted him, and since it seemed an eternity to Sam, since he found them so unpracticed and so mute, he wondered what they’d been doing all their lives. He was almost never asked to touch them back. After a time, he hardly noticed them. His cock didn’t care where it went, as long as it got a good rush. The older they were, the clumsier, the better, because it made it a snap to see nothing of himself. He did what he could to let them know what they ought to have done these thirty or forty years. Meanwhile, he got to know the cycles of the traffic in the street with a sixth sense. And, like a midshipman staring at waves, he felt kin to it all, as if the cars going by were one with the rhythm of his blood. Altogether, it was like getting paid to go to the movies.

  He met Ben one day in the parking lot of an apartment house in Westwood. They were both walking—Ben in, Sam out—with men who could have been their fathers. They looked through each other as if they weren’t there. And never brought it up. It may have been then, that night at dinner, that Sam began to get his bourbon neat when Ben made drinks. If so, it must have been a coincidence. This was not a fraternity they were in. Sam’s debut in the business didn’t fulfill a wizard’s prophecy. And the upshot of it all was not kisses on Norma Place. Or to put it another way, there is more than one sort of romance. In the customary one, the knight and the squire meet by chance in the palace court, each carrying a freshly severed dragon’s head under his arm. Their mail is rank with sweat. It is hard to say who is more proud of the squire’s noble deed. But the torch passes on, and at last they are free to unbuckle each other’s armor and bed down together. The monsters have all been taken care of. In the less well-known romances, the ones without the ballads, there are no knights and squires. There are no distinctions at all. Nothing is passed on. The romance comes from the going forth alone, time after time after time.

  One other thing. Ben told him the story of him and Marilyn Monroe, and Sam understood he wouldn’t have heard it before Ben knew he was hustling. To anyone else, it would hardly have seemed a story at all. Because it had no point. She stopped one day when she was driving past and asked him for directions. Ben knew who it was, and he knew she knew the quickest way to the Hollywood Freeway, too. But he told her. And they smiled at each other like movie stars.

  “You know what I mean, Sam? I mean, if Marilyn Monroe doesn’t know her way around Hollywood, then what the fuck are the rest of us doing here?”

  The next time, she wanted to know the nearest branch of California Federal. Then, a week later, was there a college around. She was thinking of taking up reading, she said. Then a long time went by. Then, it was the day The Dark Lady brought flowers, she wanted to know where Valentino was buried.

  “‘Hollywood Memorial,’ I said, ‘but you don’t want to go there.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because that’s why we live here,’ I said, ‘to banish all that.’”

  So it became a regular thing. She dropped by about every ten days, always dressed down, in a loud old Ford that must have been her maid’s. Once Ben was at the curb talking with a john in a car when she drove by, but she didn’t show that she noticed. They didn’t talk about their work, in any case. They talked about the city, overgrown and seedy, and what it was like before, in Mary Pickford’s day, in Garbo’s day. They actually talked about the stars, and it turned out she didn’t know any more than he did. He knew more, because he knew who was gay. They were strict about keeping their places—Ben out on the curb, Marilyn on the passenger’s side of the car, legs tucked under her, elbows on the wi
ndow sill. It went on for eight or nine months, until one day she said she was leaving town for a while. Ben knew she was going off to shoot a movie. He read about her, just like everybody else.

  “I was going to buy you something,” she said, “but then I didn’t know what you’d want. What would you have liked?” He didn’t know. He couldn’t think of a thing. “Well, as long as it doesn’t matter,” she said, as if she’d guessed what his attitude would be, “then anything will do.” She reached over into the back seat and brought forward a leatherette handbag, off-white, very fifties, with a rhinestone clasp. She opened it and held it out. “Close your eyes and pick something.” And, when he made no immediate move, she added, “So you’ll remember me.”

  Though he did it in broad daylight, it would have been hard for someone going by to know what he was doing. Not scoring dope or making change for the meter, because his eyes were shut. You don’t shut your eyes on the street. But for a moment he’d suspended that part. His hand fished around among gum wrappers and eye pencils. He chose small and delicate and came out with a screw-on earring. A little disk of silver from which hung a cameo on a tiny chain. Just costume jewelry. Marilyn laughed and twirled a feather of hair.

  “We’d better get you the other one, honey. You have to have a pair in this world.”

  “Pick me something else,” he said, making as if to hand it over.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You keep one. I’ll keep one.”

  She wore no makeup except a sugar red lipstick, and she pursed her lips just then in a rosebud, as if to stifle a smirk. The sentimental hadn’t got its hooks into her, she seemed to say, though she wasn’t through trying to outwit it. Ben wondered if she meant, giving him a keepsake, that she couldn’t see him again, even after she came back. That day, he could have asked her whimsically what was she planning, why was she paying him off. She didn’t come back, in fact, not to him, and then she died a year or so later. By then she was once again the picture in the papers. He hadn’t pinned her down on that last day because they were busy savoring how casual they were. They banished the future. It took itself too seriously.