“In Daddy’s footsteps, eh?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. If he wants to. I don’t push it.”
“Right.”
“I don’t. My old man did that to me.”
I asked what his father had done for a living.
“Does,” he corrected me. “He’s a pharmacist. In Indianapolis.”
I nodded.
“Puts you right to sleep, doesn’t it? We lived above the pharmacy. It was all he ever talked about. There was no way to get away from it.”
I pictured this wide-eyed, twerpy-voiced little kid sitting glumly among the towering shelves of pills, while a gray-templed patriarch a la James Earl Jones drones on endlessly about the glories of filling prescriptions. “What did he think of you and the piano?” I asked.
“Not much. He got better about it later.” He shrugged. “He came to Tahoe, anyway. Heard me play.”
“Well, that was something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Something.”
“At least you know what your father looks like,” I said.
He hesitated for a moment, apparently confused, then said: “You don’t remember anything?”
“Well, I remember he existed, but the rest is a blur.”
“You never even saw a picture of him?”
“Nope. Mom just erased him after he left.”
“I see.”
“And believe me, I looked. I used to dig through Mom’s stuff when she was out of the house. She had this special drawer in her dresser—way up high where I couldn’t reach—with all her letters and snapshots and shit. When she went out shopping, I’d drag the step stool out of the kitchen and play detective.”
“But no pictures, huh?”
I shook my head. “The most I ever found was a gift card that said ‘To my darling Teddy.’”
“That was his name?”
I smiled. “Her name. Short for Theodora.”
“Oh.”
“I used to imagine it was from him. I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Oh, sure. Chapman. Sergeant Howard Chapman. At the time, anyway. He left the service just before he left us.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. But I used to think Mom did and just wasn’t telling me. One summer when I was about ten, we drove to New York and visited cousins. It was my first trip out of Baker, so Mom made a big fuss about it. Somehow, along the way, I convinced myself that she’d finally found my father and was bringing me to New York for a reunion. There was no evidence for that whatsoever, but that didn’t stop me. When we got to my cousins’ house in Queens, I even checked the phone books and found an H. Chapman in Manhattan. I was sure it was him.”
Neil smiled. “Did you call?”
“Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t have dared. I just thought of it as evidence. In case I worked up the nerve to ask Mom about it.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, but not for a long time. I kept thinking she might spring it on me one night, as a special surprise, when we went out for ice cream or something. We’d get off a bus somewhere and ride an elevator, and there would be the Sergeant. He’d be tall and redheaded and smell like pipe tobacco and be much nicer than we thought he’d be.”
“What made you think he’d be in New York?”
“Go figure. It just seemed like the place fathers would hide. Mom was great about it when I finally asked her. She took me to a deli and bought us big gooey desserts and let me drink coffee for the first time. She said she’d brought me there—to New York, I mean—because she wanted me to see where her family came from. She said she had no idea where my father was and that she wouldn’t take him back even if he did turn up. She said he was a bastard and a coward and she was deeply, truly sorry she hadn’t made that perfectly clear to me earlier.”
“How’d you take it?”
“OK, actually. It was kind of a relief.”
“It must have been.”
“It was the way she did it, I guess—from one grownup to another. She made a rite of passage out of it.” I smiled at him while an old reel played in my head. “You know what else I remember about that night?”
“What?”
“Well, Mom went out to flag a cab and left me cash to pay the waitress—one more thing I’d never done before. There was still coffee in my cup, which was Styrofoam, so I took it with me and finished it on the sidewalk while I waited for Mom. I was standing there holding the empty cup and feeling like the coolest person in the world, when this guy in a suit walks by and sees me and stops and stuffs a five-dollar bill into the cup.”
“Oh, no.”
“I had no idea what had happened. Not the slightest. I tried to give it back to him, but he just waved me off. I told Mom about it when she got back, and she was furious. I think she would’ve hit the guy if he’d still been around.”
Neil shook his head slowly. “Did that really happen?”
“That really happened,” I said.
I hadn’t told that story for years.
We polished off a few beers, and then a few more. We got pretty jolly, in fact, escaping in tandem from the debacle of our day. When it started to get dark, Neil offered to make supper, and I accepted without protest. It was scrambled eggs and toast and peanut butter and apple sauce with cinnamon—all we could scrounge from the kitchen. Neil spread a tablecloth on the floor, so we could dine at the same level. Afterwards we just sat there, propped up by one end of the sofa, while cicadas played for us in the bushes below.
“I should call Renee,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just to tell her where I am. Sometimes she holds dinners for me.”
He smiled. “I could use a roommate like that.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
He laughed. “How long has she been with you?”
This made Renee sound like an attendant or something, but I let it pass. “Three years,” I told him.
“Seems to work well.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not much alike, though.”
I smirked at him. “Can’t get anything past you.”
He chuckled.
I told him that Renee and I had learned to “respect each other’s differences.” My way of letting him know that I knew she wasn’t the brightest gal around but that we still managed to communicate. It was an awful thing to say, but there you go. I do weird things around Neil sometimes.
“You want me to get it for you?” he asked.
I had no idea what he meant.
“The phone. So you can call her.”
“Oh…sure.”
Neil retrieved a cordless unit from the bedroom, or what I guessed to be the bedroom, and laid it in my lap. Renee answered right away, as if she’d been waiting by the phone. All I said was that things had taken longer than we’d expected, so not to worry about dinner. I knew she would’ve giggled or something if I’d said I was at Neil’s house. She asked if anybody interesting had shown up at the shoot. I told her nobody much, just Princess Di and Marky Mark. She believed me for about a nanosecond, then said: “Oh, you!”
I hung up, then excused myself to pee. To my relief, the toilet was modern and low-slung, easily navigable, a graceful dove-gray oval that bore me in imperial splendor as I studied Danny’s artwork on the bathroom door. The walls held postcards from Hawaii and more snaps of the kid, plus an assortment of PortaParty shots, one of which featured yours truly onstage during the eclipse bat mitzvah. There was a sweet shot of Neil and Tread at the beach, and another one with a dignified older woman whom I guessed to be his mother.
I felt so cozy there in that small, personal space, so thoroughly embraced by my surroundings, by his surroundings, that I fell into a kind of reverie. My eyes slid from picture to picture, absorbing the march of his life, wanting to know it all. Outside, above the whir of cicadas, I could hear the comforting clatter of dishes as Neil cleaned up. I was a little drunk, I’ll admit, but something rather di
fferent was happening too. I felt such a part of him suddenly, such a perfectly natural adjunct to his life. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of that, I promised myself; it was enough just to know it was there.
When he drove me home, we talked about the scary new coup in Russia, about Pee-wee, about the white man’s black man Bush wants on the Supreme Court. Then, as if by some prearranged signal, we both fell silent. In the absence of our voices, the languorous night seemed to expand and spill into the van, a heady blend of diesel fumes and over-the-hill jasmine. From where I sat, there wasn’t much to see, of course, but I could hear sirens and boom boxes and Valley kids howling at the moon as if they owned the night. I knew just what they meant.
THE LEATHERETTE JOURNAL
10
A NEW JOURNAL, PLEASE NOTE—SMALLER THIS TIME BUT MUCH fancier, with maroon leatherette and pretty marbled endpapers. Neil bought it for me in a mall in Westwood after we finished a particularly obnoxious gig there. I’d fully intended to pay for it myself, but Neil was insistent, saying I could buy him a beer one night. The journal cost a lot more than that, of course, so it was a nice thing for him to do. I almost never write in Neil’s presence, but he’s heard me talk about the diary from time to time, and I think he senses how much it’s become central to my life.
The video went surprisingly well on our second day of shooting. Janet seemed looser and less fidgety, much surer of her objectives. I’ve even begun to get excited about it. Janet knows somebody with a chain of arty-type repertory movie theaters (if three is a chain), who might be interested in showing the film as a short subject between trailers. That’s such a quirky idea that it might just attract attention, generate a little press, at least. And the audiences would certainly be more savvy and receptive than your typical MTV viewer. This could be just the right venue for me, the more I think about it.
I’m on the balcony of Callum’s suite at the Chateau Marmont, six stories above Sunset. I’m in terry cloth after a noontime swim, cool-skinned and wet-haired, my nipples still pleasantly taut. A lovely, warm breeze is blowing. Callum and Jeff are down at Greenblatt’s, buying sandwiches, since there’s never been room service here. They’ve promised to bring me back a turkey on rye. Our view is toward the south: an unbroken sweep across the palmy, saffron-hazed plains of West Hollywood, with a four-story Marlboro Man looming preposterously in the foreground. The hotel itself is a funky jumble of towers and terraces, with a sixty-something-year history that’s almost inseparable from legend.
Most people think of the Chateau as the place where Belushi bit the big one, but it’s got a lot more going for it than that. There’s all sorts of gossip in a book Callum bought at the front desk. For starters, an extremely young and horny Grace Kelly used to cruise the halls here, looking for guys who’d left their doors open. Howard Hughes and Bea Lillie and James Dean all hid out at the Chateau at one time or another, in varying states of emotional disrepair.
What’s more, when Garbo was in residence, she always floated facedown in the pool, they claim, to keep from being recognized. (“Look, there’s a corpse in the pool!” “That’s no corpse, silly, that’s You-know-who!”) The very canvas awning above my head was the one that broke Pearl Bailey’s fall—well, caught her, actually—when she toppled from the ledge of her balcony after a festive lunch. She was feeling no pain, according to the book, and was in no particular hurry to leave when a hook-and-ladder came to her rescue.
As you must’ve guessed, Jeff and Callum are an item now. Having spent the better part of last week shacked up in this suite, they finally surfaced and invited me over for a morning of sun by the pool. Jeff is trying his damnedest not to look dramatically altered, but any fool can see he’s dorky with happiness. Callum, on the other hand, appears pretty much the way he did at our first meeting: just as sunny and steady and obliging, just as unreadable. Even in the midst of laughter he seems to be holding something back, as if observing himself—and everyone else—from a safe distance.
Callum did lose Jeff’s phone number. Or says he did, anyway. I guess it’s possible he never intended to call Jeff back and was merely shamed into a second date by the fact that they had me in common, but I seriously doubt it. Not the way they’re acting now. Earlier, down by the pool, I caught them swapping a look of such pie-eyed lovey-doveyness that I find it hard to believe anyone was pressured into anything.
Not that we’ve discussed such matters—or the question of those girlfriends back home. I’m assuming that was Callum’s way of getting me off his case. We’ve mostly just talked about Mr. Woods and my video and Callum’s new movie, which is a big-budget thriller that has no connection whatsoever with Philip Blenheim. Callum plays a rookie cop whose little brother is kidnapped by a psychopath. I hinted around coyly about any “small roles” that might be available, envisioning myself as a crime lab researcher, say, or an observant street person who provides the missing clue, but Callum just smiled sweetly and said the script was already set. They’ll be shooting in two weeks at Icon. Marcia Yorke is the other lead, playing Callum’s girlfriend. He told me the name of the director, but I can’t remember it.
I must admit it’s a novel sensation to see Jeff paired off with someone younger than himself. Ned Lockwood, after all, had a couple of decades on Jeff, so I guess I’ve come to think of the younger man’s role as Jeff’s natural, perennial state. Ned was a nurseryman, for the record, a big, hulking sweetheart of a guy whose bald head stayed nut brown throughout the year. He was a lot less serious than Jeff, a real joker sometimes, and I was just crazy about him. He was somewhat of a legend in his youth, Jeff tells me: a generous soul generously endowed. Ned was Rock Hudson’s lover for a brief period during the Pillow Talk era, when Hudson, in his mid-thirties, was clearly the older man.
Ned was no fading twinkie, though, when I knew him; he wore his age with an easy, shambling grace that was completely out of sync with the desperate pretenses of most people in this town. He and Jeff never lived together—Ned had a tiny cubbyhole next to his nursery in Los Feliz—but they borrowed each other’s lives with the offhanded efficiency of brothers who could wear the same clothes.
Maybe there’s a pattern here, after all, some unwritten law of gay genealogy that compelled Jeff to pass the torch to a younger man, just as his lover had done, and his lover’s lover before that. Whatever the reason, I’m glad he finally got laid. Jeff suffered for a long time after Ned died and deserves to be happy again. I’m not at all sure this is true love, but it’s a start, at least. I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible, that Jeff would bury himself so completely in the navel-gazing of his writing that he’d lose the knack for intimacy with another person.
After lunch. The guys have come and gone again. They invited me to join them on a drive, but I decided to stay here with my journal, basking in my solitude and the delicious oddness of this place. Just before they took off, Callum realized he’d left his sunglasses by the pool and raced down to retrieve them, giving me and Jeff the moment I’d been waiting for.
“I’m so fucking proud of myself,” I said.
“Yeah…well…” He gave me an embarrassed smirk.
“You look good together. I knew you would.”
He stood at the mirror and ran a comb through his remaining strands of hair. There was something so tentative and teenagery about this gesture that I couldn’t help but be moved.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With Callum. He knows I know, doesn’t he?”
“Know what?”
“That he’s a homo, Jeff.”
He looked vaguely annoyed. “Of course.”
“He doesn’t act like it.”
“Well…”
“He knows I’m cool, doesn’t he?”
“Sure.”
“Well, tell him to lighten up. Tell him I’m the biggest fag hag this side of Susan Sarandon.”
“Tell him yourself.”
“Well, I would, but…he s
eems like he’d take that as an invasion or something.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“I hadn’t really noticed it.”
“You hadn’t?”
“He’s just young,” he said, laying down the comb.
If I’m not mistaken, it was I who first suggested this to Jeff, and not that long ago, either. That he’d loosened his moral requirements for a bed partner so drastically in such a short time could only mean one thing: Jeff’s poor little overworked politics had been no match at all for a great piece of ass. I gave him a long, hard look with a Mona Lisa smile.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I just figured something out.”
“What?”
“Why you weren’t wearing your nipple ring at the pool.”
“What?” He frowned and looked away, picking up the comb again.
“He asked you to take it off, didn’t he? It was too gay for him.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“This is getting serious.”
“Cadence…”
“Is this a permanent arrangement, or did you put it back on?”
“In the first place, nipple rings aren’t just a gay thing anymore.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Axl Rose has one, and he’s a homophobic pig.”
“Oh, well, in that case…”
“In the second place…”
He didn’t get to finish the thought, because Callum came bursting through the door, looking sleek and cryptic behind his shades. Seeing Jeff turn scarlet on the spot, I showed mercy and shooed them both out the door without further ado. I knew too much about what was driving Jeff to rag him any further.
Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.
11
I HAVEN’T WRITTEN FOR WEEKS. I’VE BEEN STRICKEN WITH WHAT Mom used to call “the mauves”—something vaguer than the blues but just as debilitating. If I knew what the problem was, I could fix it, or at least bitch about it, but I can’t nail down my emotions long enough to give them names. I feel empty and adrift, I guess, devoid of purpose. The simplest rituals of existence, like shaving my legs or replacing the trash can liner, leave me racked with the futility of it all. I long for serendipity, but there is simply none to be had. And that hateful, familiar voice in the back of my head reminds me that I’ve probably already done all I was meant to do—and ten years ago, at that. I am a husk of a person, nothing more, a burned-out organism tumbling toward oblivion.