He smiled dimly and shrugged his enormous shoulders, as if to say his tastes were catholic and he could like who he wanted. “It wasn’t a bad sound. It’ll be back too, you watch. They’re already wearing platform shoes in the clubs.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“So when did you move here?”
“Nineteen eighty.”
“Did you run away?”
“Well, yeah…sort of. With my mom.”
“From your dad, you mean?”
“Oh, no. He split way before that. When I was three.” I smiled at him. “When he realized his little dumpling was gonna stay a dumpling.”
“Oh.”
“Mom and me were just running away from Baker. Plus I wanted to be a star.” I embarrassed myself with this admission, so I widened my eyes ironically to show him I knew how silly I’d been. I didn’t want him to think I take myself that seriously. Even though I do.
“You got work right away,” he remarked. “Mr. Woods was about…what year?”
“Eighty-one.”
“Not bad for a new girl in town.”
“I suppose.”
“Did you audition or something?”
“No. Philip just saw me with Mom one day.”
“Philip Blenheim?”
I nodded soberly, enjoying his amazement. Most people are impressed when they find out I was once on a first-name basis with a household name. “Once” being the operative word.
A smile sprawled across Neil’s face. “He discovered you?”
“He stepped on me.”
“C’mon. Where?”
“At the Farmers Market. Mom and I went there for brunch, and it was crowded, and he didn’t see me. He was nice about it, though. Bought us smoothies and just kept on apologizing. I realized later he was sizing me up for the rubber suit. He took our phone number and called Mom that night, and the next afternoon I had the script.”
Neil shook his head in wonder.
“I didn’t catch on to what a big deal it was until he closed the set.”
“I remember that. The press went into a feeding frenzy.”
I told him it was the weirdest time of my life. And the biggest high.
Neil didn’t talk for a while, just kept his eyes on the road in the deepening gloom of the canyon. Finally, he asked: “Have you been in a video store this week?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, there’s a big promotion.”
“For what?”
“Mr. Woods. Big cutouts with motors in ’em. Jeremy with the elf.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s the tenth anniversary, isn’t it?”
I told him it was. I’d known this was going to happen, of course, but I’d momentarily forgotten about it. I’d tried to forget about it.
“Maybe you’ll be invited to a reunion.”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“Philip likes to preserve the magic.” I spoke those last three words in quotes, as I always do.
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “Mr. Woods is just what you see on the screen and nothing else. The movie is it. That’s why the elf never makes public appearances, not even at the Oscars. Philip doesn’t like to talk about how it was done and doesn’t want anyone else to, either. It just reminds people that Mr. Woods isn’t real. He hates that.”
“But it’s fascinating, I think. Especially now.”
“Philip thinks it would ruin the movie, destroy the wonder, blah, blah, blah. At least he used to. I doubt if he’s changed his mind since then.”
“Were you credited, then?” Neil looked gratifyingly concerned on my behalf.
I told him there were a dozen “operators” for the elf listed on the crawl and that I had simply been one of them. For all the audience knew, I’d been a technician or a robotic engineer, not an actress turning in a performance. I was interviewed once about the role, I explained, by a reporter from Drama-Logue, and as soon as the piece appeared, Philip blew up and accused me of destroying the magic of the film. I almost lost my job over it, I told Neil, and Philip was chilly to me right up to the day we wrapped.
Neil frowned. “He’s OK about it now, though?”
“Who knows? I haven’t seen him for years.”
He shook his head for a while, taking it all in. “What a story.”
I just shrugged.
“Thanks for telling it. I’ll think of you in there next time I see the movie.” He turned and gave me the nicest smile. “It won’t spoil the magic for me.”
When we pulled up in front of the house, Renee came bounding out the door, barefoot and in jeans and wearing the embroidered yellow sweater she saves for special occasions. How long she’d been waiting there like that was anyone’s guess.
“How did it go?” she asked, leaning against the van.
I told her fine.
“Did the kids have a good time?”
I told her yes, they had a fabulous time.
“Need a hand?” Neil asked this, turning to me. His face was outlined against Renee’s, granite against fog. Did I need a hand? I needed two of them, thank you, big as rump roasts, one under each arm. And maybe some warm breath against my cheek, a nice gust of Juicy Fruit.
“I can do it,” chirped Renee.
I shot the woman a few dozen daggers, but she missed all of them, as usual, as she galloped to my assistance, goofy with goodwill. As soon as she opened the door to the van, I slid off the seat and began the descent on my own.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” I mugged at Neil over the edge of the seat before dropping out of sight onto the pavement.
When I straightened up, Renee was offering Neil a cup of coffee for the road.
“Thanks,” he said, declining. “I’ve got…you know, miles to go before I sleep.”
Renee took the Frost reference literally. “I thought you lived nearby.”
Neil smiled pleasantly. “Not that far, I guess. There’s just some stuff I have to do.”
Renee nodded.
“It’s been fun,” he said, addressing me.
“Sure has.”
We locked eyes for a moment or two, and then he pulled away from the curb. A few seconds later he hollered back at me: “I’ll call you tomorrow about the next job. I’ve got some ideas for new songs.”
“Great,” I yelled.
When the van had turned out of sight, Renee walked to the door with me. “He’s nice, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Cute, too.”
“He’s OK,” I said.
It’s almost midnight now, and I’ve finally had my bath. I worked on this entry for three hours, much longer than I had expected. Renee popped in several times with refills on the cocoa. I could tell she was dying to ask me about my new boss, but she resisted the urge, apparently out of respect for this strange burst of journalkeeping. It’s just as well, since I can’t put a name to my feelings. I would have called them carnal and left it at that, if you’d asked me earlier in the day, before the rest began. Before he sang with me and drove me home and said that sweet thing about the magic.
4
FIVE DAYS LATER. BACK ON MY AIR MATTRESS.
I should tell you a little about Jeff Kassabian, my friend of almost a decade, since we had brunch together on Sunday and he spun me the most preposterous yarn ever. This is part of what makes Jeff lovable, I suppose, but there was also something a little sad about it, given his current state of mind. It’s only natural for him to be lonely sometimes, but I wish he wouldn’t cope with it by weaving something rich and mysterious out of a perfectly conventional set of circumstances. Conventional for him, at any rate.
Jeff is a writer, about my age. He ekes out a living as an office temp, but his real energy goes into his work-in-progress, a rambling autobiographical novel about growing up gay and Armenian in the Central Valley. This is his second book. His first was about a Caucasian boy who falls in love with a Japanese boy
at a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. He won some sort of gay writing award for it and sold about two thousand copies. I went to his one and only book signing—at A Different Light in Silver Lake—and ended up behind the table with him, sipping white wine from a paper bag and flirting with his customers.
When I met Jeff at a video bar in West Hollywood, I knew next to nothing about homosexuality, though my nineteen years of being myself in Baker had prepared me thoroughly for the company of fags and dykes. I could sit on a beer crate in a gay bar and amuse myself for hours, drinking and laughing and doing ’Ludes, and never once feel like a Martian. The most beautiful boy starlets in town would duck to the floor to talk to me and say the most extraordinary things. All I can remember about that first meeting with Jeff was how elated I was when he referred to a good friend of his as a “size queen” and how long it took me to realize he wasn’t talking about a gay midget.
We’ve been buddies since then, off and on. Jeff’s most recent lover died of AIDS two years ago next October. Ned was an older guy in his mid-fifties, a no-nonsense sort of person and a real source of stability for Jeff, I think. Since his death, Jeff has become increasingly prone to creative remembering. I don’t mean that he lies; he just arranges the facts more artfully than anyone I’ve ever known. In life, as in his work, he’s not so much a writer as a rewriter, endlessly shuffling the facts to give them form and function. I’ve learned to take his memories, as well as his projections, with a few zillion grains of salt.
He called me that morning from his house in Silver Lake.
“Is it too late for brunch at Gloria’s?”
I asked him what was up.
“I’ve just had the strangest thing happen to me.”
“Oh, yeah?” I tried not to sound too jaded.
“I need your advice about it.”
“My advice?”
“You’re gonna love it, too, if it’s what I think. And if it’s not, we’ll have a nice lunch anyway.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now.”
“Of course not,” he said.
I knew Renee was heading into Beverly Hills on a forage for shoes, so I decided to bum a ride with her. I hadn’t seen Jeff for ages, and I was aching for a change of scenery, especially one that didn’t involve pounding the malls. I asked him if he could drive me home.
“Whenever you want.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
“Great. We can hang out at my house after brunch.”
“You aren’t gonna read to me, are you?”
He laughed at that, but a little uncomfortably, so I told him I was just kidding.
“I thought you enjoyed that,” he said.
“I did. I do. I said I was kidding.”
Well, mostly kidding. The last time we hung out at his house, he read to me at length from his autobiography. It was fairly interesting stuff, especially if you knew Jeff, but it went on about an hour too long. His sixth-grade seduction in the pea-sorting shed—or wherever it was—could have been trimmed by half. Plus he puts everything in the present tense, insisting that it sounds more literary. It may be, for all I know, but it can get sort of grating at times.
“Don’t worry,” Jeff said grumpily. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“Now don’t make it sound like that. I’m your biggest fan. Aren’t I the one who called you the gay Saroyan?”
He grunted.
“I’ll give you your strokes at lunch,” I said breezily. “You’re buying, aren’t you?” There was more urgency in this question than I cared to betray. These days, every meal that isn’t a Cher shake counts as a major extravagance.
“Of course,” said Jeff, still a little pissed at me. “I invited you, didn’t I?”
Since it was to be a laid-back Silver Lake kind of Sunday, I wore an aqua T-shirt, dolling it up with a string of pop beads and my pink rhinestone silence-equals-death pin. When I’m not in costume or evening clothes, I’m almost always in T-shirts, since they’re comfortable and inexpensive and you can accessorize the hell out of them. For a while I used to belt them with various bright and spangled things, but I gave up the effort several years ago. When you’re built like I am, there’s not much point in pretending to have a waistline.
Renee was chirpy all the way through the canyon. She could hardly wait to buy oil paints, she said, because she’d been watching a guy on TV who showed you how to paint snowy peaks with Christmas trees on them, just by stubbing the brush against the canvas. He wasn’t that cute, she said—in fact, he was kind of old—but he had this deep, velvety voice that made you feel so calm, even if you weren’t painting. Already I have a creepy image of future nights at home: me on my pillow with this diary, and Renee at her easel, stubbing out snowy peaks in perpetuity under the weird spell of some bearded guy in a cardigan. She pumped me about Neil again too. She hasn’t asked me to negotiate a date with him, but I think she’s on the verge. I’d be more than happy to oblige, if Neil weren’t my employer and I didn’t know Renee as well as I do. Neil and I have a nice uncomplicated professional relationship, and I think it’s wise to keep it that way.
When we got to Gloria’s, I gave Renee directions to the nearest art supply store and sent her on her way, making my entrance on my own. The restaurant was packed, so I forged a path through a forest of legs, most of which were sheathed in the trousers du jour: those neon-print muscle pants that make gay boys look straight and vice versa. Halfway in, I made eye contact with a gap-toothed boy in peacock-green bicycle shorts. He smiled and said: “Hi, Cady,” so I smiled back, though I couldn’t place him. His groin hovered above me like a dirigible, iridescent as a butterfly’s wing in the morning light.
“Over here.” Jeff signaled me from a table. Behind him loomed a trellis of white bougainvillea, through which I could catch the angry blur of traffic on Sunset. “I brought you a pillow,” he said, lifting me into a chair.
“You didn’t.” It was a paisley pillow, wide and flat enough and suitably firm, exactly what I needed. I settled into it and rearranged my T-shirt, then surveyed the room. “Now I suppose you expect me to tell your fortune.”
Jeff chuckled.
I bounced a little on my new throne. “You brought this from home? Really?”
“Not far.”
“You’re sick.” I gave him a quick once-over, reacquainting myself with that generous, dark-eyed face, the slate-blue shadow on his jaw, even at noon. His eyelashes have always been his best feature, and somehow they seemed lusher than ever, as if in compensation for his thinning hair. He wore green corduroy slacks and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. If memory serves, that’s how he was dressed the night I met him at the Blue Parrot, so many years ago. It’s his uniform for being a writer.
“I ordered us margaritas,” he said.
I told him he could have mine, since I was on a diet.
“Have one.”
“Do I have to be drunk to hear this?”
He smiled. “No.”
“You look nice,” I told him.
“Thanks. You too.”
“So…if you’re not gonna read to me, I hope it’s about sex.”
He chuckled.
“Last night?”
He nodded.
“Was it bigger than a bread box?”
“Don’t jump ahead.”
“Tell,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest and waited.
“Well, I went running in Griffith Park yesterday afternoon. I parked in my regular lot and saw this kid leaning against a car.”
“Description, please.”
“Oh…about twenty, twenty-one. Sandy hair, dressed like he’d just come from a class at UCLA.”
“Cute?”
“Very.”
“Go on.”
“So I just headed up the path on my run, since that’s what I came there for…”
“Of course.”
“…and I ran for half an hour, nearly killed myself, and came
back to the lot, and there was the kid, still leaning against his car.”
“Uh oh.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t a cop, was he?”
“No. Just be quiet and let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“So I started to get in my car, and he sort of…you know, headed over toward me, and made this really clumsy effort at conversation. Sort of hesitant and scared, but completely charged with lust. It was the oddest thing, like stepping back in time somehow. He reminded me of me back when I was first trying to be a homo. It was touching, almost.”
I nodded. I wasn’t about to get smart with him while he was waxing rhapsodic.
“So I kind of took charge—like I wish somebody had done with me. I told him I had a place we could go to, and he knew what I meant, so he followed me back to my house in his car, and we had the most amazing sex. It wasn’t that exotic or anything, your basic vanilla, really, but he was so young and appreciative, and he kissed like an angel.”
I fanned myself with my napkin.
He laughed. “He had the prettiest dick, too.”
“Big?”
“Pretty, I said.”
“Did he stay for the night?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Did you read to him?”
“No,” he said flatly, “and fuck you.”
“Yes you did. You made that poor child listen to the next chapter.” I could see the whole thing: Jeff propped against the headboard, yellow legal pad in hand; the tangle-haired kid snuggled cozily, postcoitally, against his side. I could even hear Jeff laughing at his own jokes, sighing extravagantly at his own poignant prose.
He doled out his words slowly, ominously. “So help me…I am…never…ever…”
“Oh, lighten up. Are you gonna see him again?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “I gave him my number, but he wouldn’t give me his.”
“Where does he live, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was his name?”
“Bob, he said. But who knows?”
“Is that the whole story?”
“Not exactly. He took off this morning, early, while I was still asleep. He left a note on my dresser that said ‘Thanks, take care’ and just slipped out. I haven’t tricked like that for about a hundred years, and I felt so…I dunno…abandoned suddenly, dumb as that sounds. I thought we might go to a movie today or something. At least have breakfast.”