I turned off the TV, grabbed my keys and headed for Santa Monica Boulevard.
Fubar, I discovered, was a dim hole in the wall on the not-so-glamorous side of West Hollywood. I didn’t care. I was glad to be out. I ordered a cosmopolitan, meandered toward the stage and sipped my drink.
“Let’s all bow our heads and say a little prayer,” Venus the Fly Trap intoned. Tonight she’d donned curly blonde locks and a yellow Bo-Peep dress. “Dear Sweet Jesus, may the people of California have the good sense to do the right thing and say yes to marriage equality. Amen.”
“Do you always pray in bars, Venus?” asked the dwarf on stage with her.
“Yes, Brownie, I do, and I never go to church without a good bottle of gin.”
I laughed so hard she looked in my direction. Her face lit up like a jeweled star atop a Christmas tree.
“Friends of Dorothy, we have a guest here tonight from Wichita, Kansas. Hi, honey!” She waved, and when I raised my glass to her, a spotlight shined on me. “Thanks for coming.” She beamed.
“Come again and again and again,” Brownie said, making jerk-off motions with his hand.
The spotlight disappeared, and I sucked down my drink. As I returned to the bar to order another, someone grabbed my arm. “It is you.”
I turned and looked right into the face of Nate the plumber. He’d grown a dark and sexy five-o’clock shadow.
“Hey,” I said stupidly.
“I’m still waiting for your call, bud.”
Oh god, how was I going to maneuver out of this? I decided to tell the truth. “I didn’t call because I was involved with someone else. But that ended tonight. How about if I give you my number? That way you can call me.”
“How about I get even with you and throw it away?”
“Fair enough, but I’m still gonna give it to you.”
He let go of my arm and smiled. “Maybe I’ll forgive you, instead.”
“I’d really like that.”
He took out his phone and entered my digits as I rattled them off.
“So how was the screening?”
“Really good, actually. I’m glad you talked me into going. I’m a sucker for romance on the big screen.”
“Me, too—I guess because there’s so little in real life.”
“Murphy!” someone yelled from across the bar. “Let’s go!”
“I have to be on set early tomorrow. How about if I call you, and we do something Saturday?”
“Sure.”
He gave me a look. “You’re not going to blow me off again, are you?”
“No, never again.”
“Cross your heart?”
When I crossed my heart, his smile was gorgeous.
“All right, see you this weekend.”
He left me at the bar, and I decided against ordering another drink. I suddenly didn’t feel like I had all that much sorrow to drown.
As I walked to the door, Venus lip-synched “Bleeding Love.” When I waved good-bye, she grabbed the fabric of her Bo-Peep skirt, tipped her head at me and curtseyed.
Our trek had started on Beachwood Drive, with the HOLLYWOOD sign sitting on the mountain ahead, grinning at us. We’d wound through a land of storybook cottages and castles and hiked up steep green slopes. Now we were atop the mountain, grinning at the sign’s backside.
“L.A. looks like a giant chessboard from here,” I said. “That tall skyscraper downtown is a queen.”
“I’ve always thought that.” Nate pointed out the city’s other skyscrapers. “She’s surrounded by shining knights and rooks. She and her army want to march rightward, capture all those pawns in the middle and take down those two dark bishops by Fox Studios.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him. I was liking the way he saw the world. Unlike Trevor, he had an imagination. Must have come from working in the business. He’d confessed midway up the mountain that he wasn’t a plumber but a property master. I’d marveled at his ingenuity when he told me about a sci-fi fantasy production he’d worked on that had almost no budget. He’d created talking books, magic wands, cosmic ray guns, and feathered druid staffs from sale items he’d found at Kmart and Home Depot.
“What are you doing tomorrow evening?” he asked.
“No plans.”
“There’s a demonstration against Prop 8 in Silver Lake. You wanna go with me?”
I wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of attending a protest. It seemed so radical. However, I detested Proposition 8. “Okay, sure. I still can’t believe Californians gave rights to chickens and took them away from human beings.”
Now he smiled at me. “I’ve got a wild idea.”
“Uh-oh.”
“C’mon, let’s hit Hollywood Boulevard.”
Lassie, Lucille Ball, Alfred Hitchcock, W.C. Fields—I still had a hard time walking Hollywood Boulevard without looking down to read the golden names etched into pink stars. At Fleetwood Mac’s, Nate grabbed my hand.
“Let’s go in here.” He led me toward a blue-and-gold art deco building with a neon sign blinking HOLLYWOOD TOYS & COSTUMES.
Inside was a prop master’s paradise. Nate slowed to eye cases displaying faux gangsta bling and fake Crown Jewels. I couldn’t believe he was brave enough to be holding my hand in public. Or that I had nerve enough to let him.
“C’mon, the suspense is killing me,” I said. “Are we shopping for a movie shoot?”
“Nope,” he said, resuming his mission through this world of fantasy. He tugged me through an arsenal of plastic weapons and past shelves of outlandish hats, spooky skulls and creepy rubber masks. He guided us around carousels of bright makeup and styled wigs, and we sidestepped bins filled with all sorts of plastic tchotchkes. He finally stopped and let go of my hand near a wall lined with packaged costumes.
“I have a proposal for you.”
“But it’s too soon—and too late—for us to get married,” I joked.
He smiled. “Bud, I like the way your mind works. I think I’m really gonna like getting to know you.”
“Same here.”
“I’ve been thinking about chickens since we were on the mountain. I bet they’re thankful for gays like us who voted to support their rights. I bet they’d support our rights if they could.”
I was thankful Trevor wasn’t here listening to him. He’d say chickens are the stupidest animals on earth and call Nate a fool. I said, “You’re probably right.”
He reached for a package stuffed with fuzzy bright yellow material. Then he grabbed another and handed it to me. I eyed the label. It was a chicken suit.
“What do you say we represent those thankful chickens at the protest in Silver Lake?”
When I tried imagining myself in that big yellow costume, weirdness grabbed hold of me. I wouldn’t blend into the crowd tomorrow. Thousands of staring eyes would be upon me as I marched through Sunset Junction. Suddenly, all the strange things in the costume shop began closing in on me. I quickly hung the package back on the wall. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t do it.”
I expected him to be disappointed with me and that I’d recoil at his dissatisfaction. I thought a chasm would open up between us, and I’d watch him and his strange world immediately float away.
Instead, he gazed at me, seeking my approval. “Do you mind if I wear one?”
Trevor had never sought my approval, and he wouldn’t be caught dead with Nate in or out of a chicken suit.
“Doesn’t matter what you wear tomorrow,” I said, taking his hand, “as long as we’re together.”
For once, Jess didn’t have to hard sell me into meeting her on La Brea Avenue and standing in the ridiculous, hour-long line at Pink’s Hot Dogs, because I was itching to tell her about my morning with Nate and how much I liked him.
“Remember when we recruited parents to bring their kids to the Sherman Oaks Galleria for that traveling circus movie?” I asked.
“What a n
ightmare that was.”
“Nate was the clown all the kids loved.”
“The one with the water balloon animals?”
“Yep, they were so difficult to handle the director yelled at him, ‘I don’t give a flying rip if you’re a prop master and don’t know squat about acting. Get your ass into a clown suit and make sure no more of those fuckers pop.’ So Nate suited up and stole the entire scene.”
“Wow, he sounds just the opposite of Trevor.”
“He is in so many ways. He asked a dozen questions about how you and I handle a movie recruit. Trevor never liked hearing about my market research work, even in Wichita when I recruited people for projects involving ranching.”
We inched another step toward the ordering window. The smell of grilled onions made my empty stomach growl.
“Tomorrow we’re going to a protest against Prop 8.”
“That’s kinda romantic.”
“Yeah, but he wants to do something a little strange.”
“What?”
“Dress up in a chicken suit.”
“Prop 2-ers against Prop 8; that’s genius! You should dress up with him.”
“He wanted me to, but I told him no.”
“Why?”
“I’d be too embarrassed.”
“But no one’s gonna know it’s you.”
“Maybe so…but still.”
She fixed her pretty green eyes on me. “You need to rethink your answer to him, love. He’s trying to include you in his life. That’s more than Trevor was ever willing to do.”
I parallel parked on Silver Lake Boulevard, cut the engine and stared at the chicken suit. Still in the package, it sat on the passenger seat with the receipt from my return visit to the costume shop. I tore it open, pulled out the head, and unflattened the rubbery yellow beak and bright red wattles and comb. I slipped the mask over my head and struggled to make it fit right. When I finally got the eyeholes positioned so I could see, I looked straight into the face of a straight dude. He was staring at me from the sidewalk like I was some kind of freak.
I couldn’t do it. I pulled off the mask and tossed it on the floorboard.
I stepped out of my dusty blue Lumina and walked toward Marathon Street, where I was supposed to meet Nate. I spotted him on the corner. He was impossible to miss in the bright fuzzy fabric and orange rubber feet he wore. He held his mask in one hand and a large protest sign in the other. It read: U.S. CONSTITUTION: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL.” PROP 8: “BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.” To my surprise, he looked far less comfortable being a huge yellow target than I thought he would. His look of relief when I waved touched my heart in a way Trevor never had.
A pickup truck revved and barreled by. My heart sank when it slowed and a dude leaned out the passenger-side window.
“Faggot!” he yelled, lobbing something at Nate.
Tires screeched and the jerks sped away.
I ran to the corner and discovered they’d pelted him with an egg. Yolk, white and flecks of shell dripped from his fuzzy yellow belly.
“Are you okay?”
“This wasn’t a good idea,” he said, sounding rattled.
“Let’s get you cleaned up. I’ve got a beach towel in my car.” I took the mask from him, grabbed his hand and led him to my Lumina. I opened the trunk, retrieved the towel and, as best as I could, wiped egg off his suit.
“Thank you,” he said.
Right then, he looked so vulnerable I didn’t care if I ended up with what was left of the egg on my T-shirt. I pulled him close and embraced his fuzzy yellow form. He gazed at me and smiled, and when his lips touched my neck, I remembered wanting him the day I recruited him outside Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
Now my want was growing and growing.
I squeezed him tightly and then pulled away a little too fast.
He looked at me curiously as I hurried around the car and flung open the passenger door. I kicked off my shoes and stripped off my T-shirt.
“Wow, sexy,” he said, flashing me his gorgeous grin. “But what exactly are you doing, bud?”
I grabbed the package off the car seat, ripped it wide open and slipped the bright yellow suit over my head. “I’m not about to let you face the world alone, my little chickadee.”
MY ADVENTURE WITH TOM SAWYER
Jameson Currier
One of the best dates I ever had was not a date at all, or at least that was the way Evan reacted to it when I described my experience to him a few weeks after the fact. “Sounds like he was a cock tease,” Evan said.
“No,” I answered. “He was very sweet about everything.”
The truth of the matter was that I had experienced a bad buildup before the great-date-that-was-not-really-a-date happened, which may have exaggerated my rating of it into the stratosphere. I had spent the prior year watching my love life turn me, literally, into one of the Great Walking Wounded. After breaking up with Tony I fought off a case of shingles; I went through two root canals while I was trying to decide whether or not to continue seeing Bernie after three months; and when the six-week relationship with Hal failed to go any further so did I, stumbling down a flight of steps and tearing a ligament in my foot, which required me to use a set of crutches in order to be mobile.
That was when Evan suggested I get out of town and do some healing. “Use the cabin,” he said, referring to a small rural property he owned with his significant other. “We’re not going up there again till next month.”
It sounded like a plausible idea, even with crutches—to be isolated in the upstate woods without a guy anywhere in sight whom I could conceivably want to date, with no TV to watch and a bag of books to read—so Evan came to my apartment to drop off the cabin keys and I crawled aboard a bus and slept through the ride to the country. A few hours later, I was standing in a small, rural village wondering what I could possibly have been thinking by leaving behind my brand new air conditioner and round-the-clock support structure in the city. The taxicab I had called was not really a taxi nor a cab when it stopped in front of me to take me the next seven miles to the cabin, but the passenger seat in the front of an old red pickup truck, and the driver was not a fully licensed or registered or official or professional taxi driver either, but a boy, a late-teenaged boy with floppy golden hair, ice-blue eyes, an impossibly thin waist and the most beautiful set of arms that a slender young man could possess.
“My uncle’s tied up at Mrs. Smith’s farm,” the young one said to me when he announced that he could be the only way I would get to my final destination. “You don’t mind, do you? I can get you there in this.”
Of course I was immediately suspicious—that was my urban reflex system cracking into high gear—and just as I was about to ask his age, I felt too old and vulnerable to move my mouth, standing there with my crutches and my suitcase of books, not able to take my eyes off of young Tom Sawyer’s impossibly beautiful physique, and I was aware that I was having one of those awful motion-picture moments when the spinster realizes her tour guide is someone generations younger than she is. Or worse, finding myself in a country music version of Death in Venice.
(Did I mention that young Tom’s shirt was sleeveless and unbuttoned in the front and that the jeans he wore were cutoffs because it was summer and it was hot? Should I mention that he had a baseball cap stuck in the back of the cutoffs and that even the slight bulge in the pocket that the hat created was unable to ruin the bubble shape of his ass? Would you believe me if I said the young man’s complexion was pale and creamy except where it was red at the cheeks and slightly washed with freckles across the bridge of his nose and that his teeth were remarkably even and white, or is that taking the image too far?)
So hobble and humble myself I did, right into the front seat of his truck.
His name was Scott and his truck was a year older than he was. He was twenty. Almost. That meant he was still in his teens—nineteen, a teenager—and his truck was built the year I graduated college. I was old enough to b
e his father. I found this out as Scott drove and pointed out the local landmarks worth noting (the new Laundromat where the dryers took dollar bills, the green-painted barn on the property that had once been a women’s commune, and the small stream and the new stone bridge where a wooden covered bridge had stood until a fire destroyed it three years before).
I was reluctant to confess too much about myself (sweeping the dirt under the rug, just like everyone in my family had always done), so I kept him talking about himself as much as I could. He had been laid off from his job on the assembly line at the window factory. The bad job market had meant cobbling together a series of odd jobs instead, such as helping his brother do landscaping work and filling in for his uncle with the car service. He managed to work in a few questions for me, too, asking where I lived in the city and how I had broken my foot. (Like a stupid old fool, I wanted to tell him: running after some guy who was running after someone else.)
As we drove up a mountainside, down into a valley and through a forest, he asked how long I was staying at the cabin. I answered a little less than a week, then found myself confessing my concerns about the wilderness around me like a true (and worried) cynical cosmopolitan: Were there bears and mice and snakes and mosquitoes and such out here? (“Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, and uh, yeah!”) Was I likely to encounter them at the cabin? (“I think so. Maybe not all at the same time!”) Would they play loud music like my upstairs neighbor and keep me up all night? (“Ah-huh. That sounds like my brother!”)
He mentioned that his girlfriend’s family was having a tough time with raccoons. (“Raccoons!” I said. “Don’t they have rabies?”) I tried not to let the information about there being a girl offstage leave me too discouraged. Wasn’t I here, in the country, to get away from men just like him? Those young, drop-dead gorgeous things I saw all the time in the city, walking from an audition to a photo shoot, from a gallery opening to a sex club. Wasn’t this sojourn of mine a time to repair and heal the damaged and maligned parts of me that had turned me bitter longer than this young man had been alive? I hardly imagined I would see this boyish thing again once this ride was completed. He was certain to be off to another paying customer, and I couldn’t even keep a boyfriend a decade older than me interested for more than six weeks, let alone a young one who was charging me by the inch.
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