The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  The build-up of tension became increasingly apparent in subsequent letters, that winter. “If she were anyone else,” Matt said, “she’d tell her damn family to stuff it, and get out of there.”

  “But she won’t,” I said, maybe to vindicate my own comfortable paralysis.

  Matt rushed to telephone me whenever he heard from her, once calling from the set between takes. “Listen to this,” he said, and put on a Scottish accent to indicate that he was reading from her letter. “That song keeps running through my head, Matt,’ she says here. ‘The one you made such fun of at the party. “Am I Brown?” you sang. Or maybe “M. I. Brown?” And I still don’t have an answer to that question. Am I—who? Am I what? Certainly not the M. I. Brown I used to be. I’m not even sure she was ever me anyway. Seems as if I have always let other people decide who I was. My mother. My boss. My sister. Even you, dear Matt. But at least learning from you—being who you wanted me to be—has given me the impetus now to dare a little on my own.’”

  “What does she mean by that?” I interrupted.

  “She’s moved out of the family home, and rented a flat in downtown Edinburgh,” he told me. “Makes it easier to walk to work, she says.”

  “What work? She’s retired.”

  “Not any more. She’s taken a job with some importing company.” His voice rose excitedly. “Don’t you see what’s happening? Now that she’s left her family, and the retirement idea has collapsed, there’s really nothing to keep her from coming back to the U.S. and us.”

  The letter I got a month later told me her employer had asked her if she would be prepared to travel to the Far East twice a year. “Maybe this is my chance to improve on plain old brown, and try for a little sky blue,” she wrote, dubiously. “Or even a splash of crimson. But it would mean going to London first, and taking a crash course in Japanese. And the work is much more of a responsibility than I feel capable of taking on. And Japan is so terribly terribly far from home—”

  Line by line, I could see her talking herself out of it, giving herself reasons for staying put, exactly the same as I always did. Matt was even more reassuring when I shared the letter with him. Clearly pushing for her return to Los Angeles, he told me not to take this new option too seriously. “She may fool around with the idea of going to Japan,” he said, “but when push comes to shove, she’ll settle for the tried and true. She always does. After all, this is the gal who still signs even her personal letters, ‘Faithfully, M. I. Brown.’”

  That’s exactly how she signed a birthday card to me, a few months later. But this time it was different. The envelope was postmarked Tokyo.

  Her breakthrough stirred me; but not to action. I thought about her example almost every day, but I did not strike out on my own. The bough didn’t break, nor the cradle fall. That would take an earthquake, Matt had said.

  Within the year, however, my world would be shaken to its very depths.

  9

  WALK TALL

  For the rest of the night, I dozed and nodded, sometimes sitting up in shock, experiencing my arrest all over again. As morning finally came, I took a deep breath and reached for the phone. The only person in Los Angeles who might lend me the money I needed in this crisis was a screenwriter, Ellis St. Joseph; but sleep was dear-bought in his profession, and Nembutal often made it impenetrable. The telephone bell kept ringing—five times, eight times, ten. Even if he heard it, he would make no sudden decision to pick up the receiver. Preparations were needed before he could face the world again: a cigarette would have to be lit, his nearly invisible hair smoothed, and the spirit of Voltaire allowed to descend on him. I gave up hope eleven times, but on the twelfth ring was reprieved by his Mayfair-flavored drawl. “Hellew?”

  Mannered, mandarin, Ellis had been brilliantly successful in Hollywood, and was kindly enough; but his ways were labyrinthine. Even in my desperation, I knew better than to ask him outright for a loan. For him to respond, a request had to come by way of Pisa, Samarkand, and Never-Never Land. Consequently, the story of my arrest, as I told it, was oblique. Soon, he began adding touches of his own—irony and paradox, Grand Guignol horror, and especially, Black Comedy. “You must write about it,” he urged. “You can call it, ‘The Cock-and-Bull Story’.”

  I understood that his intention was to neutralize my anxiety with a smile, but I was wet with sweat by the time I hung up. However, by then I had his promise of a loan for a thousand dollars. This accomplished, I braced myself to make the really difficult call. This would be to Jim Holland. His family and mine had been friends ever since we had moved onto June Street back when I was eight. At that time, Jim had been studying law at USC, a jockey-sized young man, forthright, intelligent, and chaste, the kind of role-model that mothers use so ruthlessly on their young. “I’ll bet Jim doesn’t shirk his homework that way,” mine would say. Yet he was more than figuratively a pace-setter. He thought I could be a good hundred-yard sprinter, and for a whole year, had dedicated himself to coaching me for inter-school track meets. I never came in better than third place. “But the next time!” Jim would jubilantly insist. “Next time!” He almost made me believe it. I didn’t even enjoy running, yet I kept at it to justify his faith in me.

  I saw him less often now that I had grown up, too. He was married with children, and a constantly clarifying political future. He came to the phone that morning, with that older-brother manner he had always shown me. “Hey, Bud, what’s on your mind?”

  I told him straight out. The silence that followed could not have lasted more than a few seconds, but I thought it would never end. “I see,” he said. I had heard that tone of voice from him once before, when I had somehow failed him in training. After a moment, he said, “Does your dad know?”

  “I wouldn’t be bothering you with this, if I’d been able to tell him,” I replied.

  This too was met by silence. So were my answers to his other questions—perhaps he was jotting down notes. “All right,” he said, abruptly. “I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.”

  I had no appetite when I came downstairs for breakfast. Not wanting to give my parents the impression that anything was wrong, however, I stirred my coffee vigorously, and played with a piece of toast; kept up some kind of conversation, but was deaf to it, listening for the telephone in the next room. When it finally rang, I made a show of answering it casually. Jim’s voice was subdued. He had been in touch with some of his contacts at City Hall, trying to get the charge against me reduced to a mere violation. I had apparently been too honest about myself at the station house the night before, however, and as a result, the authorities were firm about me being tried as charged.

  I began to sweat again, desperately needing to ask questions, but unable to risk being overheard in the breakfast room. Somehow I crowded all my uncertainties into one cryptic word. “When?”

  “Are you asking when you will be tried?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m getting your hearing postponed for a few weeks,” he said. “Your lawyer will need time.”

  Again, I strained to keep my side of the conversation noncommittal. “Haven’t got one.”

  “Haven’t got a lawyer?”

  “Don’t even know any.”

  Understanding my need for secrecy, he said carefully, “I’ll try to arrange for a friend of mine to see you at his office between appointments this morning. Could you be there by ten?”

  Even though I had to reclaim my car, and pick up a check from Ellis, I was at that office before ten. The lawyer, whose name was Button, maybe Bouton, turned out to be a cheerful, graying man, with family photographs mixed in with the diplomas and civic citations on his wall. He spoke quickly, confidently, though I didn’t always understand the legal terminology even when he explained it. He did say that my arrest stank of entrapment, a questionable police tradition which he despised. “With any luck,” he added, “we can get the case thrown out of court.”

  “And if we can’t?” I asked.

  He sm
iled. “Let’s cross that river when we come to it.”

  But that river had been sweeping the earth from under my feet for hours, and I needed to know the worst: could I be sentenced to jail?

  “Anything can happen,” he said. “In a court trial, believe me, anything can happen.”

  I returned home to wait on developments. “Keep a low profile,” Jim cautioned. “Don’t—gallivant.” I didn’t need to be told. The usual fun and games had no allure for me now; I was already absorbed by full-time hiding. “A terrible thing has happened,” I wrote in my journal, but that lone sentence was my last entry in the book for several years. At first, I escaped into sleep whenever possible, but soon began writing compulsively. I had been at work on a predictably autobiographical first novel, but now put it away, and lost myself instead in writing about the cut-throat intrigues of a family in Lyons, France, a place I had never been, in an era long preceding my birth. It was fiction at its most fictitious, but at least it took me far away from my own experience.

  Oddly, in the midst of this self-imposed blindness, a new range of vision began to develop. The rambling California hacienda we lived in was an instance: I had merely made use of its convenience and comfort since my return from college, but now, threatened by the possibility of prison, I found myself homesick for it in advance. Unasked and without a vestige of skill, I began taking on some responsibility for the house—chinked up cracks in its adobe walls, found a solution for our perpetually wet cellar, got up early in the morning to climb the plum trees and harvest the ripe fruit.

  This rediscovery of my home included my parents. My father especially had lost my attention. A calm, instructive man, something of a prophet in his field of economics, he had chosen to be black velvet to my mother’s diamond, forever providing a backing where her warmth and enthusiasm could shine. I had seldom stayed home at night, but now spent my evenings with them, playing cards, reminiscing, or helping prepare the plums for the thick, delicious jam which was a joint family endeavor. As I began to enjoy their company again, I found that the bond was very different than it had been during my childhood. They had been responsible for me then, and now, for the first time, I began feeling responsible for them. A pressure was building in me, a promise to myself that they would not be hurt by all this.

  Almost immediately, this newfound determination was put to the test. My lawyer’s plan to fight the issue of police entrapment seemed straightforward and high-minded, showing every possibility of clearing me. It seemed something quite else to the subtle mind of my screenwriter friend. Ellis invited me to lunch at an obscure restaurant that suited his sense of intrigue. “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “that by fighting the entrapment, you’ll be challenging one of the L.A. police department’s most profitable operations. Of course they’ll fight it! Rather noisily, I should imagine.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I have sources,” he said. The lift of his almost indiscernible eyebrows suggested he had been in touch with authority too important to divulge. “With no trouble at all, the Los Angeles police could come up with testimony that would suggest you’d practically raped that poor innocent plainclothesman,” he went on. “The sort of messy testimony that gets picked up by the less finicky newspapers. Not that your family would be likely to read one, but it would only be a matter of time until word wafted around—”

  I scoffed at him, but as he kept touching on the same nerve, I began looking for alternatives less risky. From Ellis’ point of view, the solution was simple. “Have your lawyer plead you guilty,” he advised. “Pay the fine, and forget it.”

  “Great! But if I’m sentenced to jail?”

  He answered loftily. “It’s your lawyer’s job to see that doesn’t happen.” My lawyer didn’t want the job at all, if we weren’t going to face the issue of police entrapment. “Get yourself a vag-lewd expert,” he said, as he showed me to the door. “They’re used to pitching in the towel.” I had no sooner gotten home than Jim Holland phoned—I was making a great mistake, he said. If I pled guilty, as charged, the fact would always be on my record. I told him that wouldn’t make any difference, I would never be running for Congress.

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but it leaves you wide open to blackmail. And God help you if this country ever elects a Hitler. You’ll go right into the gas chamber.”

  I recognized the validity of this, but it did not change my mind, and the next day, I met with a lawyer who specialized in my kind of case. Not a distinguished jurist like Mr. Button, I was warned, but nonetheless, shrewd and sure. Case-hardened, unsmiling, he looked like a lower-echelon actor’s agent, and spoke in a curious blend of legalese and private idiom. Never once, for instance, did he mention homosexuality by name. He called it “queerdom.” And his first advice to me was far from Blackstone’s finer points of law. “Get the curl out of your hair.”

  “It doesn’t go away, I’m afraid.”

  “Then cut it off!”

  His further advice had the sound of an order: I was to get myself a job at once. I explained I already had one, that I was a writer. “I’m talking about a real job,” he interrupted. “I’ve got to make you look like you do something useful.”

  I took part-time work in the stockroom of a large department store on Wilshire Boulevard. It was poorly paid, and menial, but not uninteresting, and it left half the day free to work on my book. Meanwhile, my new lawyer got my hearing postponed again; and then, before that date could arrive, had it postponed yet another time. It was the rotation of judges he was waiting on, holding out for the most propitious. This was allimportant, he said: a judge without charity for ‘queers’—and that included most of them—could spell disaster for me.

  This continuing delay only left me more time to picture what could go wrong, wiping out any equanimity I had left. Let the damn hearing happen, I kept thinking. Get it over with! Even if they hanged me, it couldn’t be worse than, day after day, trying to square my foot to a constantly shifting floor. It did not help that my parents had begun to know something was wrong. My loss of weight was one clue, and at first, my mother read it as unhappiness in love. Impulsively, and out of context, she put her hand on mine, and urged me to send the girl some flowers.

  My father neither offered solutions nor asked questions, but there was something in his manner that suggested his intuition was not confined to the Dow-Jones. I had begun to run out of money, and could not even buy a present for my younger sister’s birthday. “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand.” But did she? I prayed not. Too many people already knew. Ellis, for all his help, had not been able to keep from leaking the story to his friends at the studio. “Ah, yes,” said an English actor, when we were introduced. “You’re the lad who—”

  And if gossip could not be contained, much less could chance. One Sunday after church, my family and I stopped for lunch at the Pig‘n’Whistle, a long time favorite along Hollywood Boulevard. Midway through the meal, I became aware of two couples finishing up their lunch several tables away from ours. One of the men was in his late twenties, well-built, with a fresh complexion, and the look of an ex-sailor. My scalp began to tighten, and I kept sneaking uneasy glances in his direction. I could not be sure it was not the decoy cop who had arrested me.

  As he and his party got up to leave, he caught me watching. Perhaps he assumed I was someone he knew. Or if he actually was the detective, he may have recognized me. In any case, he cut across the room towards me. Unable to breathe, much less to think, I stood up and faced him. As he started to speak, I interrupted: “How’ve you been?” One wrong word now could strike the set in mid-scene. “Great,” he said. We shook hands, and then, nodding to my parents and sister, he moved along. “Who was that?” my mother asked. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  But what I was not sure of was my ability to control the unforeseeable anymore. The only way to protect my family from some chance exposure was to clear out. For the first time, I faced the necessity of leaving home. The idea
l would be to move to Chicago or New York, far enough away so that my letters home could present me as the son they believed they had, without hard evidence to the contrary. Until I was free to leave town, however, it seemed wise to take a room in the Valley or at the beach, and pass it off with the excuse that I really needed “to get some writing done, undisturbed.”

  As it turned out, my time was already up. Even as I began to look for garage apartments, I got a call from my lawyer confirming the date of my hearing. I was as ready as I would ever be; and yet, when that morning came and I arrived at the courtroom, I felt that familiar self-induced stupor creep over me, dulling all my responses. I sat there trying to breathe regularly, dressed soberly, and with my hair shorn almost to my scalp. As the chamber filled, I saw Jim Holland come in and sit down, his eyes never turning toward me. I looked over my shoulder several times to see if, by some chance, my father was there. He was not, and that, at least, was comfort. Then the judge entered, and the stout little clerk chanted a medieval song that began Oyez, oyez—

  I waited in a kind of suspended cognizance until my name was called. My lawyer nodded for me to come forward. Obeying, I lifted unblinking eyes to the judge. The charge against me was probably read, and there must have been discussion between him and my lawyer, yet all I recall now is his voice asking how I pled, and the other voice, my own, answering “Guilty”. Forever after, I heard him sentence me to a year in prison, and then, in the same impersonal voice, suspend it. I was smartly fined, however, and put on probation for twelve months before the knock of the gavel closed the case.