He felt too restless to sit around the apartment after he talked to Mimi’s voice mail, so he pulled on his purple high-tops and turned right at the foot of the stairs, toward Hazlitt & Company. He’d thought it would be nice to see Quatro for a minute, but things turned out to be busy at the salon. Quatro looked harried, and all the clients looked bitchy, and there wasn’t a woman in the place. But just as Quinn was about to move on, Quatro caught sight of him, said something to his client, and came up to the front of the salon.
“Hey, you,” he said. “I’ve only got a second, but I was thinking I might go to the beach after work. Want to come with me?” Like he’d had Quinn on his mind all along. Quinn knew better, but still, it was nice to pretend. There weren’t that many people who wanted to hang out with him, except for scene partners during showcases and acting classes. He was trying to figure out whether this was a pity invitation when Quatro misread his hesitation and said, smiling, “I won’t drug you and carry you off or anything.”
“What? No. I mean, sure, I’d like to,” Quinn said. “Go to the beach, I mean.”
“Okay. So get back here at four fifteen, and I should be done by then. We can figure out the rest on the way.”
Quinn felt a little thrill in his gut and shoved his hands deep in his pockets so he wouldn’t give away how amazing it was that someone wanted to make plans with him. Four o’clock was only an hour and a half from now. Maybe he’d go back to Los Burritos and see if the Hispanic girl was working today. Maybe he’d try to order something in Spanish.
Back out on the street, he stood for a minute and breathed. He was suddenly glad he lived in West Hollywood. When Jasper and Baby-Sue kicked him out, which he bet would be within the next month or so, he hoped he’d be able to find a room to rent someplace over here. He could probably find something. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of living with someone he didn’t even know, or with a gay person, but he figured there wouldn’t be much of an alternative.
Like Hazlitt & Company, Los Burritos was busy, even though it was two thirty in the afternoon. The Hispanic girl, along with two women, was behind the counter when Quinn got there. He got into her line, even though it was the longest one, and when he got to the front, he smiled at her. She smiled back, but he couldn’t tell if she recognized him or not. She was wearing a pair of earrings shaped like chili peppers. He liked that: you couldn’t wear something like that unless you had a sense of humor. He bet she had a really nice laugh. Maybe he could say something funny and find out. He wasn’t really a funny person, though, at least not in a way that made other people laugh. He was good at shocking them, but no one usually got his jokes.
“Hola,” he said. “Cómo estás?”
Her eyes lit up. “Muy bien—y tú? Hablas español?”
“No, that’s the only thing I know how to say. But I’m thinking about learning.”
She smiled. “No es difícil,” she said. “What would you like?”
For a fraction of a second, Quinn thought she meant the question in a general way, and he was going to say, “Everything,” but then he realized she was just trying to take his order. She punched it up on her register and then it was time for him to move on. He’d have liked to stay and see if he could make her laugh, but he didn’t want her to get in trouble, plus he’d run out of things to say, so he just said thank you and paid her and found a table where he could watch her as he ate. She was very, very small, not much bigger than Cassie Foley, and she had a tiny gold cross around her neck, so she must be religious. Was there a saint who watched over small Latinas with crappy food-service jobs who still knew how to smile and mean it? Jasper had told him once that there was a patron saint of waiters—Saint Notburga. Weird name. Quinn liked the idea that there was someone—something—out there watching over her. Maybe he’d ask her about it the next time he stood in her line. Maybe he’d look for a necklace that had a chili pepper charm or something. One that would match her earrings. He could look for one while he waited for Quatro. At least it would give him something to do.
Energized, he finished his food, threw out his trash, and left. He’d like to have seen the little Latina girl smile one last time, but she was busy when he looked over. That was okay. He’d bring her his present and then she’d smile at him.
He could wait.
“SO IS IT TOO TOURISTY IF WE GO TO VENICE BEACH?” Quatro asked him across the roof of the car when Quinn came back to the salon at four fifteen. “Sometimes you’re just in the mood to see weird, and block for block, Venice Beach has more weird than anyplace I know.” Quatro unlocked his car—a metallic blue BMW convertible, a pretty thing—and climbed behind the wheel. Mimi’s car was a moving trash heap, full of girlie shit and fast-food wrappers, but the BMW was pristine. There was a small trash bag in the back, but it didn’t look like there’d ever been any trash in it. The leather smelled new and supple.
“I’ve never been there,” Quinn said, getting into the car carefully so he didn’t hit or scuff anything. “I mean, I’ve heard about it, but, you know.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Well, for God’s sake, then, let’s go there! Where else haven’t you been?”
Quinn shrugged. “I don’t know. Places that you need a car to get to.”
“You don’t have a car?”
Quinn wondered how old Quatro thought he was. He tried to think of something cool to say, and then he decided to hell with it and just told the truth. “I don’t have a driver’s license. It’s hard to find someone to take you to the DMV. My manager took me once, over in Glendale, but I flunked the test.”
“Hey, there’s no shame in flunking. I know a guy who flunked three times before he got it right. He had test anxiety. Did you study the book?”
“Sure,” Quinn lied.
“Well, just look it over again right before you go in.”
“Yeah. I could take the bus over there, too, I guess.”
“Tell me you’ve been to the Santa Monica Pier, at least.”
“Yeah. I audition over there a lot, so.”
“Whew.”
“Yeah, it’s okay.”
Quatro adjusted his seat. “Buckle up, son, because we are out of here.”
TRAFFIC SUCKED ON THE 405, OF COURSE, BECAUSE IT always sucked. But Quatro seemed to take it in stride. On the way out of town they’d stopped at a Ralphs and Quatro bought them bottled water, tortilla chips, and small tubs of salsa, guacamole, and sour cream. Then, from beneath his seat, he pulled three snowy white cloth napkins, which he laid over Quinn’s lap, his lap, and around the stick shift between them. By the time they were even with the Getty Museum, they were crunching away and Quatro was telling Quinn about his high school in Lincoln, Nebraska. “Drama Club, that was my godsend,” he was saying.
“I didn’t think you acted,” Quinn said, surprised.
“I didn’t act. I was the costumer. And hair and makeup, of course. I was good, too. I mean, I was good good. My mom had been teaching me everything she knew from the time I was five and discovered her makeup. My dad would leave in the morning and out would come the jars and wands and lotions, and I was in heaven. Heaven. My mother was surprisingly accepting, for a native Nebraskan.”
“That’s good,” Quinn said, because he couldn’t think of anything better to say. And it was good. His own experience was that his generation was not only as homophobic as any other, but more outspoken about it, too. Gay, not gay—suddenly it was on everybody’s tongue, everybody’s business. He’d been a target for gay-bashing since before he could remember. He didn’t know why, except that he’d been a small kid, and spindly, and of course he hadn’t been able to sit still for five minutes on end so he was everybody’s nuisance, teachers included. If they didn’t have another name for you—and most of the kids still didn’t know about ADHD then, even though it wasn’t that long ago—they called you gay. One day he’d gotten a note at their house that said, You’re a queer faggot and you’re ugly, too. Suck my
dick. Nelson had bawled him out, like it had been Quinn’s fault that someone had sent him hate mail. (“Well, you must have done something to provoke it, bud, because that kind of trash doesn’t just appear on its own.”)
When he told Quatro that story, the stylist just shook his head. “You know,” he said, “if everyone got great parents, there’d probably be no wars. I’m serious. We spend a lifetime getting over the damage they do when we’re kids. Some of us get more than our share.”
“I’ve never told anyone that story,” Quinn said, looking out the window.
“Let me guess. You feel like you made it happen somehow.”
Quinn nodded.
“It’s not true, though.”
Quinn just shrugged and kept looking out the window. Some people liked to talk about themselves constantly, but he wasn’t one of them. You talked too much and you simply gave out ammunition for people to dislike you more. He loaded up a tortilla chip and very, very carefully brought it to his mouth, holding his hand under it the whole time to catch any drips. The car made him nervous, it was so perfect.
Quatro made him nervous, he was so perfect.
Quinn wanted to tell him about the little Latina at Los Burritos, about how she smiled at him; wanted to ask him if he thought they might be able to find a chili pepper necklace in Venice Beach, since his search while he was killing time had been a bust. But he wasn’t sure if Quatro would want to hear about a girl since he was gay, so instead Quinn just watched the world of Southern California go by out the window. In the cars around them, everybody was talking on their cell phones except for one man who was reading a script.
“There’s this woman,” he said to Quatro.
“Uh-oh.”
“What? No, nothing like that—she’s old.” Quinn blushed furiously. “She’s this casting director named Evelyn Flynn.” Then he told Quatro about After, and how Evelyn was his new manager on top of coaching him for Buddy, and about how the movie was being directed by Gus Van Sant, who Quatro had heard of, of course, because everybody had.
“Man,” he said when Quinn was finished. “That’s some big fucking deal, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“When’s the audition?”
“I don’t know yet. Pretty soon, though.”
“Well, once you know, let me know, so you can come in and we’ll tidy you up.”
Quinn said thank you because he didn’t want to make Quatro feel bad, but in his mind he saw Buddy as being shaggy and messy, kind of like Quinn himself; especially since no one really cared about him now that his mom had died—at least no one besides Carlyle and their grandmother and Uncle Wayne
“So how come you have a new manager? What happened to the old one?”
Quinn shrugged. “She kicked me out,” he said, though strictly speaking that wasn’t the reason. Strictly speaking, though, it was part of the reason. He might not have dumped Mimi, not even for Evelyn Flynn, if she hadn’t kicked him out of her house first. Probably he would still have fired her, though. Evelyn Flynn was like Hollywood royalty. Mimi was more like one of the peasants plucking chickens in the market square.
“What, she dropped you as a client, you mean?” Quinn was saying.
“No. I mean she kicked me out of the house. I used to live with her and a couple of other kids, but she made me find someplace else. She thinks I’m a pervert.”
“Why?” Quatro raised an eyebrow.
And before he even realized what he was doing, Quinn was telling Quatro the whole story. About how Dee had been teaching his class in Mimi’s living room, which was what he always used to do until the thing with Quinn. Dee had had them doing an improv exercise where they were each given a slip of paper that described a character, paired up with someone by drawing names from a box, and then went off to some part of the house to work out a scene. Quinn drew a kid named Lonny. He was only twelve years old so he didn’t even belong in the class, but whatever. He’d been Mimi’s client for only a few months by then, and he lived at the Oakwood with his mom. He was pale and whiny and he looked like Macaulay Culkin.
Quinn’s room at Mimi’s—or, more accurately, his area—had been the landing at the top of the stairs, between two attic dormers. He had a mattress and a box spring and a blanket chest for a bureau and a lamp. And it was all right with him. No one came up there because it was hotter than hell most of the time, but not so bad when you were lying down in front of a fan. He could read up there or jerk off or pick his nose, whatever—no one ever came up to disturb him. He’d been living up there since he was thirteen. So when they were told to find a spot to work in, it was only natural to go up to Quinn’s landing.
The slip of paper Quinn had drawn said, You don’t like animals or small children, you want to join the army when you grow up, you like the taste of beer, and you tend to be a bully. Quinn never read what Lonny’s paper said, but by his behavior his character was a loser, a whiner, and a brain. One of you was supposed to create a situation by defining a setting and a problem. Quinn came up with a bowling alley and a missing wallet.
So they’d begun sparring, with Quinn’s character goading Lonny’s character about having stolen the wallet even though Quinn’s character had actually been the thief. “What’s the matter, you little creep, you can’t even admit you took something that wasn’t yours? What are you going to do with the money, anyways, buy yourself a dress and some Tampax?”
It had been a great role, but the stupid kid had started crying, which only egged Quinn’s character on, until he reached over and pinched the kid’s nipples. Hard. Quinn’s character had done that, not Quinn, but the kid had screamed and everyone had come running and Mimi had sent Quinn out into the backyard until she and fucking Dee had gotten the thing figured out. Then they brought Quinn back in, except that the kid wouldn’t look at him, which pissed him off, and then Mimi had sent him out of the house again while she talked to the kid’s parents. Now it had been immortalized in studio lore, and no one, not one fucking person, had heard him when he said, over and over, “It was improv!” All Mimi had said was, “The problem with you is, you just don’t know when you’ve stepped over the line.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Quatro said. “Man. You got kicked out for pinching a kid’s nipples?”
Quinn nodded miserably. Every time he thought about it, it made him feel just as bad as it had that first day.
“And that was how long ago?” Quatro asked.
“Eight months. I don’t know. Yeah—like, eight months.”
“So, what, do you live with this new manager now?”
“Nope. With a couple of actors, this Pakistani and a redhead.”
“Men?”
“One man, one woman.”
“Huh.”
“They’re getting sick of me, though, so I’ll probably have to move again pretty soon.”
When they were on the outskirts of Venice Beach, Quatro asked Quinn to pack everything back up and put it back in the shopping bags so nothing spilled. Quinn was extra careful, wiping the sides of the tubs in case one of them had dripped. Then they were in Venice Beach, scouting for a parking spot, which they found surprisingly quickly on the street in front of an old shack of a place just a couple of blocks from the beach. Even though you’d have to knock the house down and start over, the place was still probably worth a million dollars.
Quatro snugged the car into the curb, locked everything that could be locked, and led them to the boardwalk and the beach, saying, “You look like a man who needs his name carved on a grain of rice.”
The boardwalk was concrete instead of wood, which had always been the way Quinn had pictured it. People were moving in every direction and wearing every imaginable thing: sarongs, tiny Speedos, thongs, nylon workout wear, tank tops, wife-beater shirts, flowing hippie skirts and baggy cotton pajama pants, and tourist T-shirts that said things like VENICE BEACH LIFEGUARD: MADE YOU LOOK. Every couple of steps there were sidewalk vendors selling everything from paintings to the Lord’s Prayer etched on
a seashell. Bongs, glass pipes, roach clips, psychedelic black lights, clothing, cheap leather goods from Mexico—you could find it all.
Quatro had abruptly dodged ahead and pulled out his wallet. A wizened little old person—could be a man, could be a woman—was working on something with a jeweler’s loupe and then Quatro paid and pressed something into Quinn’s hand: a glass vial with a grain of rice inside.
“Two Ns, right?”
Quinn nodded, feeling strangely moved. He didn’t get many presents except at the predictable times and from the predictable people, which was really more like the fulfillment of an obligation than the expression of a spontaneous and heartfelt sentiment. He thanked Quatro more than he probably should have—he probably came across as needy—but he couldn’t help it. “Is there something you want here?” he asked Quatro, pretty sure that he should reciprocate.
“Your company. That’s all.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, c’mon, man, I see the living statue!” Quatro put his hand on Quinn’s back and walked him ahead quickly. Quinn’s back burned where Quatro’s hand rested. “There. Is this guy too good for words?” Through the crowd Quinn saw a man who was silver from head to foot—or, more accurately, from hat to shoes. His skin, right down to his eyelids and the palms of his hands, was also painted silver. It made Quinn feel strangely breathless, seeing someone all encased in metal that way, even if it was just paint. He’d heard you could die—suffocate—if all your skin was covered like that, because it couldn’t breathe or something. Hadn’t that actress in Goldfinger died? The human statue probably wasn’t silver under his clothes, but what if his clothes couldn’t breathe, either, with the silver paint all over them? He didn’t look like he was suffocating, though. He was standing perfectly still, frozen in a position that looked agonizing. One leg was up and bent and he held one hand over his eyes like a visor, as though he had his foot propped up on something and was straining to look out beyond the horizon. In reality it was hazy and you couldn’t even see the horizon, but the effect was still impressive. They watched for five minutes and the human statue didn’t so much as blink. Quinn wondered how much more you’d be able to see in the course of a lifetime if you never had to blink. A single blink wasn’t much, but if you strung them all together, it would probably add up to a couple of years. He decided not to ask Quatro about the suffocation business, because it would make him sound stupid. Obviously the guy wasn’t keeling over or anything, so it must be okay.
Seeing Stars Page 29