Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  “Oh, you won’t anymore,” Thad told me, shaking his head. “He was fired. So he was quite appreciative when I hired him to bartend here tonight.”

  “Why was he fired?”

  Thad winked. “He tossed one drink too many into a customer’s face. You see, the boy has a bit of a temper.”

  “And what did the customer do to get a drink in his face?”

  “Who knows? But whatever it was, Kelly took offense.”

  I looked back at the bartender. He was handing the martini over to a man who was leaning in to say something. I couldn’t hear what was said, of course, but I knew the gist. It was a pickup line, a come-on. The man’s face looked as if he considered himself very clever, and no doubt he thought what he’d said was funny and provocative. He probably thought it was something that Kelly hadn’t heard before, that he’d found the magic word that would entice the boy into his bed. I laughed to myself. No wonder drinks had been tossed in customers’ faces. Kelly was no doubt hit on all the time, always being treated like an object for the amusement of old men’s libidos. I remembered that feeling, standing on my box in my yellow thong. I had liked it at first, gotten off on the rush. But it had got old quickly, and by the end I had come to despise the men waving their cash, who thought a Benjamin could buy their way into my life. To this latest idiot, Kelly didn’t respond, didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow or crack a smile. He just moved on to the next person in line, leaving the humiliated man to slink away back into the crowd.

  “I’ll bet,” I said, turning to Thad, “that the recipients of the drinks in the faces deserved every drop they got.”

  “Perhaps,” Thad said, coming in close, “but I’d suggest, my dear Danny, that you use extreme caution when dealing with this particular boy. Oh, sure, he’s pretty to look at and endearingly sweet on first encounter, but beyond that beguiling surface, there is something not quite right.”

  I said nothing, just gave him a slight nod. I’d let him think I was taking his advice, at least for the time being. I wanted the conversation to end, and that was the best way to achieve my goal. Thad winked at me, then moved back among his guests.

  I leaned against the wall and trained my eyes on the bartender. Kelly. That was his name. Not a name I would have expected for him. In my mind, he was a Rick or a Tony or a Brad. But now I couldn’t imagine any other name for him. Kelly. As I watched him, I repeated his name in my mind. Kelly. Kelly. Kelly.

  I recalled Thad’s warning to Randall about that insipid little Jake Jones. I suspected that Thad Urquhart, no matter how much I had started to like him, was a fussy old man made nervous by the unpredictability of youth. Instead of exhilarating, he found it disquieting. Instead of wondrous, worrisome. But what he feared, I longed for. Suddenly I realized how much I craved the very volatility that Thad dreaded. Suddenly I was on fire for someone to take my staid, stale routine and turn it around, stand it on its head, shake it up the way Kelly shook his martinis.

  I wanted him.

  I stood there against the wall and watched him for some time, desiring him more and more with each passing minute, oblivious to everyone in the room but him. Finally—maybe after an hour, or even more—Frank found me and asked me if I was ready to go home. I wasn’t, not by a long shot. But I said I was.

  That night in bed, I touched a hot hand to Frank’s cold leg, made that way by bad circulation. He did not stir. Of course, he’d fallen soundly asleep as soon as the light was switched off, just as he always did. But I lay there wide awake for a very long time, staring up at the ceiling, just as I had on so many nights when I was a boy.

  WEST HOLLYWOOD

  It was one of those gray June days when the sun never appeared, when the whole city was wrapped in the dismal mist of delusion and disappointment, and the air had the bitter taste of stale coffee. And, to make everything worse, Randall was angry with me—furious, really—because I didn’t know who Mary Pickford was.

  “How can you claim to want to be an actor,” he admonished, “to want to be part of the whole great pantheon of Hollywood stars, and not even recognize the name of the woman who started it all?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just never heard of her.”

  We were standing in the forecourt of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, although Randall refused to call it by its name and insisted it was—and always would be—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, after the man who had built the place in the 1920s. In this, I deferred to Randall’s greater wisdom; after all, he was a native Angeleno and surely could impart some wisdom to this wanderer from New England. Pacing across the theater’s forecourt, gesturing up grandly at the exotic architecture, he regaled me with descriptions of the golden pagodas which spiked into the murky sky, the temple bells and the Heaven Dogs which had been imported from mainland China in the heyday of silent-movie opulence. But for me, it was the floor of the forecourt that held more interest, those names and footprints imprinted in the cement, dotted with old wads of chewing gum and scuffed by decades of shoes and sneakers. And yet even still, I had to admit that the signature over which I was currently standing, scrawled under especially petite footprints in the cement, meant absolutely nothing to me.

  “Mary Pickford was the first true superstar,” Randall said. “She was huge. The whole world knew her. And then she went on to found United Artists. None of this—none of Hollywood—would be here today if not for her.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No.” Randall stooped down and brushed away an M&M’s wrapper from Pickford’s slab. “She died a few years ago. They gave her a special Oscar toward the end. It was the least they could do.”

  He sighed as he stood up.

  “This town does not appreciate its history,” he said, still acting grand, the way he often did when he tried to pretend he was many years my senior instead of just eleven months. “Look around you. This was once the thriving downtown of the American movie industry. Gala premieres were held here, at this theater. Searchlights swept across the sky, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn all stepping out of limousines.”

  Not far from where we stood, a homeless man was urinating against the side of the building. The acrid smell quickly permeated the thick, muggy air, and we had to move away. Closer to the road, an Asian prostitute with dyed blond hair was adjusting her fishnet stockings, balancing precariously on stiletto heels, her flat ass barely covered by a faded pair of hip-hugging denim shorts. A couple of times she glanced our way, but she must have pegged us as gay, because she just smirked and went on walking.

  Randall shook his head. “Pickford once said, ‘What a tawdry monument we left behind.’” He gestured down the street at the tattoo parlors and porn shops and shuddered.

  I thought he was being melodramatic. Hollywood Boulevard was seedy, no doubt about that, but it was nothing compared to Times Square. You could get stabbed standing in Times Square. For a while, I’d taken the train in from Connecticut to audition for shows in New York, and I’d always been on my guard walking through Times Square. That was not even considering the seedy neighborhoods Mom had dragged me to in her relentless search for Becky. As tawdry as Miss Pickford might have found all this, I didn’t feel I was going to get stabbed in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

  Glancing down at the cement, I smiled. “Hey, here are some names I recognize,” I said to Randall. “Darth Vader and R-two-D-two.”

  He rolled his eyes. “That was a travesty. Imagine putting mechanical footprints alongside Betty Grable.”

  “Who’s she?”

  Randall clenched a fist in front of my face. “You will be lucky to make it home in one piece, you ignoramus.”

  I laughed. What would I do without Randall?

  I’d woken up that morning in a funk, in a gray mood that matched the day. It was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Hollywood, and I had yet to land one job, one lousy commercial, in all that time. Randall had set about giving me a pep talk, telling me I needed acting lessons and vocal tr
aining, that I couldn’t just hop off the bus and expect to be “discovered.” That might have happened to Lana Turner, who was supposedly spotted sitting on a stool at Schwab’s drugstore. But it sure didn’t happen that way anymore.

  “Who’s Lana Turner?” I’d asked.

  So that was why he’d dragged me here, to Hollywood Boulevard. It was a crash course in film history. We’d already been to the Paramount gate and were still planning to drive out to Culver City to see what was left of MGM. Randall blathered on and on that if I wanted to be an actor, I needed to see the great films—Intolerance and Greed and The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane and All About Eve—not waste my time watching crap like Star Wars and Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. I smiled and let him rant, for what else was there to do? Otherwise, I’d just be shut up in my room by myself, the remote in my hand, flicking through the channels, or else I’d be jacking off to video porn on the new VCR we had both chipped in to buy.

  “Maybe,” I ventured as we walked over the footprints of John Wayne, “I’m not meant to be an actor.”

  Randall spun on me. “Oh, sure. You’re just going to give up. Just like that. Why don’t you climb up on the Hollywood sign and end it all? Jump to your death like Peg Entwhistle, the failed starlet of the thirties.”

  I sneered. “I’m just saying I’ve been trying for almost three years now. First, in New York, and now here. Maybe I should get a job. Or go back to school.”

  I was thinking of my father, and that last conversation we’d had. It wasn’t going to be easy, Dad had told me, and he’d been right about that. He’d been worried about me. Sitting opposite him in the little reception area of my grandmother’s nursing home, I could see that clearly. I could see his concern for me in the way he creased his brow and in the lines that formed around his eyes. Not in a very long time had I seen that look on him, at least not directed at me. When Becky disappeared, my parents stopped worrying about me. Sometimes I said things like “I’m going to learn to skydive” or “I’m going to visit a friend who has malaria” just to see if they had any reaction. They never did. They didn’t even hear me. But the day I told Dad I was moving to L.A., he sat down opposite me and nearly began to cry. From his wallet, he pulled out a hundred dollars, handing it over to me with trembling hands and telling me to say nothing about it to Mom. It was money that could have been used in the search for Becky, and I felt guilty taking it.

  I knew what my father feared. I knew why he’d almost cried. Dad had never understood my being gay. He thought it meant a life of seedy sex in back rooms—and since arriving in L.A., I’d done my best to prove him right, to ensure that all his fears would come true. Eventually, Edgar had worn me down. Many a night over the last several months, I’d gone home with customers he brought backstage to meet me, and the money I earned letting them blow me I split with my pimp sixty-forty. Just as Edgar had predicted, the tips I pulled out of my thong were no longer enough. I needed more money because I needed more clothes and more cigarettes and especially more blow, and Edgar, no fool, was no longer as generous in offering it. So I ended up having sex with him, too, even though I felt certain he was lying when he said he didn’t have AIDS.

  “You need to get serious about what it is you want,” Randall was telling me, for the four thousandth time, as we walked into the theater’s enclosed courtyard. “I want to come here someday and look down and see Danny Fortunato inscribed in this cement.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have your sense of purpose, Randall.”

  He just shrugged, but he knew it was true. Randall was a serious medical student. Very serious. He’d stay up late at night diagramming molecular theories or some such thing, papers stuck all over the walls with Scotch tape, lines and arrows and words that made no sense to me scrawled everywhere with a blue felt-tip pen. Why he hung around me, vagabond that I was, I was never quite sure. Why he allowed me—a go-go boy with a mounting need to snort prodigious amounts of white powder up his nose—to remain as his roommate had never made sense. “I’ve gotten used to you,” was all he’d say. He promised never to kick me out so long as I never lied to him. But I broke that promise not an hour after I’d made it, when he asked me if I was still doing coke, and I told him no.

  “Of course, you have my sense of purpose,” Randall said, trying to convince himself as much as me. “You got on a bus and traveled three thousand miles to come here. You left behind everything you knew, your entire family and all your friends—because you wanted to follow your dream.”

  Was that the way it had happened? Sometimes I told the story that way myself, and I believed it, too.

  But that wasn’t how it had been.

  Randall hadn’t seen me waiting tables at Friendly’s in the south end of Hartford, saving my tips in a glass jar to make train fare into New York. I’d tell my boss I was heading into the city to audition and that, fingers crossed, I might not be coming back, but then, when I got there, I’d just wander around Greenwich Village, not knowing where to go or who to meet. I’d wind up tricking with some guy in a fifth-floor walk-up studio on Bleecker Street with no air-conditioning, slapping away the cockroaches that crawled up my legs in his bed.

  Oh, there were a few real auditions from time to time. Occasionally, I’d read about a Broadway casting call and I’d show up, sometimes even getting in to read a line or two. But mostly, I’d just shuffle around outside on the sidewalk, my hands stuffed down into the pockets of my corduroy pants. I’d look at the other actor wannabes and conclude I’d never make it, never get past them, that they were all superior to me.

  And that was why eventually I headed to Los Angeles, why I quit my job at Friendly’s and decided to board that cross-country bus. Because I came to realize that the ambition that burned so deep and so fierce inside me could never be released so close to home, so near the scene of my failures. It could only be unleashed here, far away from all that, in a world I could make entirely my own. It was as if by stepping off that Peter Pan bus in downtown Los Angeles, I was no longer Danny Fortunato of East Hartford, Connecticut, the son of my parents. I was no longer the boy who’d forgotten he was entitled to dream.

  But what were dreams, really? Wisps of smoke. Flickers of imagination that popped up late at night, waking me from sleep. How real they seemed at 2:00 a.m. when I was half awake. In those moments I could really believe I was on the stage, basking in applause, or that I was starring in my own TV show, running up to collect my third Emmy Award—or discovering Becky in the backyard, at her easel, painting the sunset, and calling to Mom that I’d found her, I’d found Becky, just as she’d asked me to do.

  Dreams. Even three thousand miles, I realized, weren’t enough to distance me from the enormity of my failures. Except, of course, when I snorted that wonderful, magical powder up my nose. A dream powder, really. I’d get up on my box and swing my slender hips to the music, really believing that someday I’d be somebody, that someday I’d matter, and this—this!—was the way to make it happen.

  “He’s cute.”

  I lifted my gaze from the pavement. Randall was nodding toward two men standing across the courtyard. I narrowed my eyes to make them out.

  I recognized one of them.

  “Randall,” I whispered. “That guy.”

  “I know. He’s hot. Looks wealthy in that seersucker suit.”

  “Not him.” Randall was, of course, looking at the older of the two, the one with the possibility of a hefty bank account. I was looking at his companion.

  It was Mr. Tight Tee. The teacher. The guy who had never shown up again when he said he would.

  “It’s Frank,” I said to Randall. I had never forgotten his name.

  “Oh, dear.” Randall looked at me. “Not the one you were completely obsessed with for three weeks, always looking around to see if he was in the bar?”

  “He’s so beautiful,” I said, staring at him.

  And he was. Absolutely beautiful. I watched him as he moved about the courtyard, pointing out to
his friend various names and footprints in the cement. His biceps were still as round as melons, stretching the short sleeves of his lime green Izod shirt. His butt was equally as round and hard, framed perfectly in his beige, high-waisted Z. Cavaricci pants. I couldn’t help but stare. And then he must have sensed he was being watched. He looked over at me with those bright green eyes.

  “Go say hi to him,” Randall said.

  “No,” I said, frozen in place.

  “He sees you looking. Go say hi.”

  “Why should I? I mean, he never came back to see me, so he’s clearly not interested.”

  Randall shrugged. “You don’t know that. Maybe something came up.”

  I took Randall’s arm and turned both of us away. “Come on,” I whispered hard. “It’s been six months. If he’d wanted to see me again, he could have come back at some point during all that time.”

  “Go say hello, Danny,” Randall said firmly. “Otherwise, you’ll wish you did later.”

  He was right. I could see myself regretting my inaction, pacing around the apartment, imagining what I might have said and how Frank might have responded. But I hated approaching people. I really did. With the exception of that night running after Frank, I never came on to guys at the bar. I was too nervous. It was odd, really, that I could get up on a box and shake my ass in front of hundreds of slobbering queens. But one-on-one, face-to-face, I was chickenshit.

  I also hadn’t done a line of coke today.

  “Go, Danny,” Randall urged.

  I steeled myself. I turned around and walked across the courtyard. Frank was again pointing out a name to his friend. Halfway there, I wimped out and hurried back over to Randall.

  He glared at me. “Okay, Danny, you’ve given me no choice.”

  “What? What are you going to do?”

  Before I had the chance to stop him, Randall was marching over to Frank and his friend.

  “Hello,” he called. “So sorry to interrupt.”