“They’re going to kill you!” I blurted out. “Please stop! Please, Mommy, stop!”
“Jesus Christ,” she said, and I saw her notice the red blinking light on the answering machine. She’d moved swiftly across the room, this little lady in her heavy black motorcycle jacket, a lady who’d just kissed a biker in our driveway and who looked nothing like my mother, Peggy Fortunato. She pressed PLAY and listened to the message. I started to cry all over again.
“That doesn’t scare me,” Mom said, even though I could tell it did. “We’ve got to tell the Rubberman.”
“No, no more!” I cried.
“No one is going to intimidate me into giving up on Becky!”
“But if you get killed, who will I have?” I could barely speak; my tears were choking my throat.
She paused, looking at me. For a moment, she softened. She actually reached over and touched my cheek.
“Oh, Danny,” she said. “I know it’s been hard on you. But if it were you who had gone missing, I’d be looking for you just as hard. You wouldn’t want me to give up on you, would you?”
I wasn’t sure if she’d be looking for me just as hard. In fact, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be. “I just don’t want you to get killed,” I told her.
“I’m not going to get killed, Danny,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about being alone. I promise.”
“If you died, I’d die.” I blubbered.
“Danny.” She placed her hand on the back of my head and brought me close to her. Not a full hug, but it was something. “No more talk of dying, okay?”
I nodded.
She went to the phone and dialed. “Lee Ann,” she said, “it’s Peggy. When Warren gets home, tell him I need to speak with him. Pronto.”
“Mom,” I begged after she’d hung up, “please don’t go with the bikers anymore.”
“Danny, drop it.”
She took off her jacket and walked down the hall. I followed her.
“Mom, please promise me you’ll stop.”
I watched as she hung the jacket carefully in her closet.
“I don’t want you to get killed,” I said again.
“Oh, Danny.” She looked at me with impatience. “I told you. I’m not going to get killed.”
That was it. I knew if I asked again, she’d get angry. She headed to the kitchen.
“Say nothing of this to your father,” she called over her shoulder. “We must be getting close if Bruno is getting worried.”
I headed up the stairs to my room. Taking Chipper’s underwear out of my drawer, I held them in my hands. They were stiff now, hardened by more than a year of breathing on them and from being fondled by my sweaty hands. But still they were my talisman, my protection. I sat holding the underwear on my bed, my eyes trained through the window to watch for the headlights of Chipper’s car to come swinging down the street. I couldn’t wait to see him. I couldn’t wait to walk on his back.
At least if they killed Mom, I consoled myself, I’d still have Chipper.
PALM SPRINGS
It was the eagerness on Ollie’s face, his undisguised happiness at seeing me again, that made me feel like a real shit.
“Hey, Danny!” he said, his smile lighting up his face as I opened the door to let him inside.
“Hey, Ollie,” I said in reply, but as usual that was where the conversation pretty much ended. I asked him if he wanted a drink, and he said no, and so I told him to have a seat and that I’d go get Frank.
“He’s here,” I said, peeking around the corner into Frank’s office.
“Okay, I’ll be in shortly,” Frank said, his glasses down on his nose as he graded papers.
“You sure?” I asked. “Or should I take him out to the casita?”
He lifted a watery eye in my direction. “No. Take him to the bedroom. I’ll be there in a moment.”
Frank was doing it for me, I knew. Too often he’d begged off from sex in the last several months, and I’d been annoyed. Now, ironically, I really didn’t care if he joined in or not. In fact, I wasn’t all that psyched about having sex with Ollie myself—no matter how much I tried to concentrate on his delectable ass. I knew very well that poor Ollie was merely a stand-in for someone else, someone I couldn’t get. Ollie had driven all the way down here from Sherman Oaks on a pretense, on a terrible lie that was eating away at my conscience. “I’ve missed you,” I’d e-mailed him this morning. Immediately he’d replied that he could be here by tonight. And now he was.
I headed back into the living room. Ollie was just sitting there. He wasn’t even reading a magazine. He was just sitting there, with his hands in his lap, waiting for me.
“Sure you don’t want a drink?” I asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“Not even some water?”
“Oh, okay. I’ll have some water.”
I went into the kitchen and filled him a glass. This was wrong. This was so terribly wrong. I didn’t want to have sex with Ollie. I especially didn’t want to have sex with Ollie and Frank. There was only one person I wanted to be having sex with.
But that could never happen again.
That day, after coming back down from the mountain, I let Randall and Hassan take the Jeep, and I went with Kelly in his car back to his place. The kiss we’d shared in the sky had left me reeling. I wanted more. We spoke no words as we fell down onto his mattress. I took off my shirt. This time, I insisted, there would be something more. I told Kelly to lick my chest, to play with my nipples. He bit them, far more roughly than I liked. It hurt. I told him to ease up. He didn’t. I finally pushed him away and took down his pants. His cock wasn’t hard. I felt rejected; he felt embarrassed. He suggested we do a line. I wasn’t sure. He got up and did one, anyway. I finally agreed to join in.
But instead of making me horny this time, the coke made me crazy. “Kiss me,” I ordered him. “Kiss me like you did on the mountain.”
“I can’t,” Kelly protested. He was pulling his pants back on.
“Why not?”
His face twisted in rage. “Because I’m no good at it! I’m not going to fail again!”
“You won’t fail! I won’t let you fail!”
But he turned his back and refused to say anything else.
I went home soon after that.
For an hour or so, it was similar to the first time. I wanted nothing more to do with him. I wanted to lay down my burden and savor the bliss of weightlessness. But it was impossible. I was soon texting him that I was sorry. He texted back, asking me not to give up on him. I texted, NEVER.
But the ache was so great. I couldn’t sleep. After Frank left for school, I couldn’t work. I cried like a baby. I was a big, old, melodramatic queen, listening to sad love songs on my iPod and imagining they were all written about Kelly and me. I took the image he had sketched of me and scanned it into my computer, then sat there, staring at it, for an absurdly long time. I wanted a companion image of him so I could set them together. I’d take down that stupid green daisy over the mantel and replace it with a new, beautiful portrait of Kelly and me, created by a fusion of his talents and mine, together.
Then Frank came home, and I had to dry my tears and pretend nothing was wrong.
What did it mean, this promise I’d made to Kelly never to give up on him? I had an inkling, and it wasn’t pretty. It meant a lifetime of love deferred, unfulfilled, unrequited. It was no longer possible, I believed, to win him over, to break him down. I had seen the rage in his eyes. I’m no good at it! I’m not going to fail again! I wasn’t willing to face that kind of rejection again. I had to forget him. I had to peel my emotions away from him, as hard as that might be, and layer them onto something else.
That was when I e-mailed Ollie and told him that I’d missed him.
We went into the bedroom, and I took off his shirt. I kissed the skin that tasted like salty ham. He lay back on the bed, and I undid my pants. Frank came in then and switched off the light.
“Hi, O
llie,” he whispered.
“Hi, Frank.”
For the past year, Frank had seemed to prefer doing it in the dark. I didn’t care one way or the other. There was enough moonlight cutting across the bed to allow me to see. I dropped my pants into a heap on the floor and stepped out of them, pulling my polo shirt over my head. Frank was naked now, too, and we climbed onto the bed on either side of Ollie. We began licking his ears.
“Mmm,” Ollie moaned, and I saw his cock instantly spring up. I felt a momentary pulse of pleasure knowing I could still have that effect on someone. Certainly, I hadn’t been successful in that regard with Kelly. I reached down and gripped Ollie’s cock in my left hand. “Mmm,” Ollie said again. That was the extent of his vocabulary during sex.
But Frank was a bit more vocal. “Baby,” he said, whispering to me over Ollie’s chest. I looked at him and our eyes locked. “Baby,” he repeated. “Kiss me.”
I hesitated, but only slightly. So slightly I was sure he didn’t notice. But then again, Frank noticed everything about me. Twenty years of sexual relations meant there was little he didn’t spot, pick up on, recognize. Still, he gave no indication and took my lips to his with the delicacy that had always been his hallmark. Frank knew how to kiss. I felt his tongue slip inside my mouth. It had been a long time since Frank and I had had sex, and suddenly I realized I couldn’t remember how long. Since the last time with Ollie? But the last time with Ollie, Frank hadn’t joined in. So the time before that? I was stunned to realize that I could not remember.
Of course, every night we slept in each other’s arms. For twenty years, our spooning had gotten us through every crisis in our lives. Financial worries. Frank’s struggles with grad school. Randall’s diagnosis. Gregory’s death. Pixie’s death. My mother’s death. My fears about changing careers. Our move to Palm Springs. The spooning seemed eternal, indestructible. Nothing would change it. Nothing except—
How many nights over the last few weeks had I been unable to sleep? Maybe it was even longer than that, now that I thought about it. Maybe it had been a couple of months. Maybe—possibly—it had been much of the past year. Things had started to change over the last twelve months. Frank and I always used to fall asleep at the same time, but now he conked out as soon as he hit the pillow, snoring like a bear. Sometimes I’d crawl into bed, and in the back of my mind I’d be hoping for something a little more than spooning, but Frank would be out cold. Literally. He suffered from bad circulation in his legs, which, I supposed, his jogging might help. Bad circulation, his doctor had told him, was common for guys in their fifties. On some nights, there was just no way I could cuddle up next to those ice-cold feet. And so, more and more this past year, I’d been getting out of bed, dragging my pillow and a blanket behind me, and sleeping by myself on the couch in the office.
Suddenly the image of my father heading down into the basement to sleep crossed my mind.
“Aw, yeah,” Ollie murmured, startling me back to the present. I was still stroking his hard cock. And Frank was still kissing me, though my mind was everywhere and anywhere except in that bed.
And then my phone chirped with a text message.
I broke contact with Frank’s lips and released my grip on Ollie’s cock. “Be right back,” I whispered.
I could feel, even if I didn’t see, Frank’s disapproving look. Grabbing my pants from the floor, I catapulted out into the hallway, where I dug out my phone and flipped open its cover. The text was from Kelly.
I MIGHT AS WELL JUST END IT ALL RIGHT NOW.
“Fuck,” I said, rushing into the kitchen and calling him. He didn’t pick up. It just went to voice mail. So I texted back: WTF? R U OK?
Thirty seconds, forty seconds passed. What did he mean? Finally, he texted back: I AM SO DEPRESSED.
My thumbs were typing as fast as they could. R U HOME?
YES.
STAY THERE.
I was pulling on my pants as I peered back into the bedroom. “Frank, can I talk to you a minute?” I whispered.
He came out into the hall. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Kelly. He’s saying he wants to kill himself.”
“What?”
“He just texted it to me.”
Frank made a face. “These kids text everything.”
“I’ve got to go over there and make sure he’s okay.”
“Did he actually say he was going to kill himself?”
“Yes.” I was rushing into the bedroom to grab a shirt and my flip-flops. “Don’t say anything to Ollie. Just carry on.”
“I don’t want to carry on without you,” Frank said, sighing. “And I suspect neither does Ollie.”
“Oh, Frank, please.” I had no time for drama. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He said nothing more. I hurried out to my Jeep and sped across town. I was wondering if I should call 911. But at this point I figured I could probably get to Kelly’s place before they could. I ran three lights on Indian Canyon. Luckily, the Palm Springs police force wasn’t the most vigilant in the world.
Outside Kelly’s complex, the HAPPY PALMS sign was swinging in the wind. I screeched the Jeep to a stop and bounded up the steps to his apartment. I threw open the door. I had no idea what to expect.
What I saw made my jaw drop.
There was a party going on.
Here I’d thought I’d find Kelly with his head in the gas oven or with a bottle of pills in his hand…and there was a party going on!
Eight people, seven guys and a girl, were either flopped on Kelly’s mattress or sitting against the wall, with their knees pulled up to their chests. Open bags of Cheetos and Doritos littered the floor, and an empty bottle of wine lay on its side. Most everyone was puffing away on cigarettes, and a hazy gray cloud hung in the room. I glanced around at the faces, a few of which I recognized from around town. One was Jake Jones, the blond kid Randall had wanted to trick with. But where was Kelly?
Turning around, I saw him against the wall behind me, deep in conversation with a gorilla of a man, all shoulders and hairy biceps and standing at least six foot three.
“What’s going on?” I asked Kelly.
“Hey, Danny,” he said, utterly blasé. “Do you know Damian?”
The gorilla looked at me and extended his hand. “Hey, dude.”
I shook his hand but kept my eyes squarely on Kelly. “What the fuck was up with those texts?” I asked him.
He smiled. “What texts?”
I knew right away that he had done a lot of coke, and had probably drunk a lot of wine, and had ingested who knows what else.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Jake Jones was suddenly at my shoulder. “Hey, Ishmael,” he said. “When you gonna use that number I put in your phone?”
“I’d forgotten you had,” I admitted, not turning around to look at him.
“What did you just call him?” Kelly asked Jake.
The kid smirked. “It’s a private joke. He probably doesn’t think I’m literate enough to get it, but I do.” He moved off.
Kelly laughed. “So you have private jokes with Jake? And you have his number in your phone?” He made a face. “I didn’t think he was your type.”
Damian the gorilla moved in a step closer to Kelly, but his eyes were trained on me. I understood the gesture. He was staking his territory. And though I knew my odds against a gorilla were not good, I was not about to back off.
“I rushed over here because I was worried about you,” I said to Kelly.
Kelly seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why?”
I was getting angry now. “Would you come outside with me for a moment?”
“We were in the middle of a conversation,” Damian said threateningly.
“Yeah, well, we were in the middle of what I took to be a crisis,” I replied. “Kelly, please? For a minute? Outside?”
“I’ll be right back,” Kelly said to Damian.
We walked outside, onto the landing. There was a breeze, and the fro
nds of the palm trees were rustling. “Your text said you were going to end it all,” I said. “I thought you were suicidal.”
“Oh, Danny, don’t be such a drama queen.”
I was ready to throttle him. “Kelly, I was so worried about you that I left someone who had driven all the way down here from Sherman Fucking Oaks just to be with me. To have sex with me, in fact. Who likes to have sex with me. Who thinks I’m good enough to kiss and hold and make love to.”
“Well,” he asked, his eyes suddenly blazing, his voice oozing with sarcasm, “what are you doing here, then?”
“I came here because I was worried about you. Because I care about you.”
The words shattered his hardness. He broke like a plate-glass window under a well-aimed baseball. All the pieces shimmered and shook, then collapsed to the ground. He looked as if he would cry.
“Oh, Danny,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He looked away, sighed, then returned his eyes at me. “I was out at the bar tonight and ran into some of these guys, and we decided to come back here. One person invited another, and soon there was a party. And all of a sudden I looked around at them, and I just got so depressed. I looked at them and said to myself, ‘If this is my life, I might as well just end it now.’”
“And you texted that thought to me.”
He smiled a little. “You’re the only one I can admit such things to.”
I sighed. “Are these people that bad?”
“You saw them.” He paused, seeming to remember something. “And apparently you know Jake.”
“I barely know him.”
“Yeah, right. You don’t have private little love names with someone you barely know.”
“Kelly…”
His eyes flashed. “You know, it’s all your fault I was feeling so depressed!”
“My fault?”
“Yes, your fault! I was just going on with my life when I met you. Everything was fine until you started telling me I could be something more than I am. That I could take classes at freaking CalArts! That I had talent and potential!”
“But you do.”
“Oh, fuck you, Danny.”
I gripped him by the shoulders. “Kelly, the reason you’re acting this way, the reason you got depressed, was that you did too much coke. And then you drank too much on top of it. You’ve got to stop it.”
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