Light Before Day (7 page)

I had left the desk lamp in my apartment on and it threw a dull halo across the Krewe of Dionysus poster hanging above my love seat.

I babbled about myself for a good twenty minutes. Part of me was hoping he would return the favor, and another part of me was trying to delay sex as long as possible so I could see if that was all he was interested in. I told him about my mother and my parents' divorce, my sister's C-section, and the enduring radio silence between me and my father. I couldn't tell if he was listening.

"Your mother's a drunk, isn't she?" he finally asked.

If anyone else had asked me that question, anyone who didn't have the body of a Greek god and hadn't driven two hours just to find me, I would have asked him to leave my apartment.

Instead I said, "Yes. And I think she's going to die soon."

His eyes flared with some emotion I couldn't identify, and suddenly my words felt like a betrayal of the woman who had tried to teach me that I was different from everyone else, that the answers to life would elude me if I strayed too far from her path. Years earlier, I had hung my moon on a sinking ship, and I wasn't quite sure how to avoid going down with it.

I crossed to the kitchen counter so he couldn't see my face. I was about to offer him some water when I felt his mouth open against my neck. He unbuttoned my jeans and tugged several times to get them past my hips. I slid my hands out in front of me to get my balance as the cool air hit my butt. The knowledge that I was half naked and he was not sent a small shudder through me. I rocked back against him and stifled the sound that wanted to come out of me, because it was too desperate and pained.

He pushed the back of my shirt up until it was bunched behind my neck. He used three fingers to apply pressure to the opening in my body that had never felt sexual until that moment; then he pulled my shirt up over my head, lifted me up onto the counter, and took me in his mouth, his eyes locked on mine as if my every breath would determine his next move.

He was still fully dressed and I was completely naked, which seemed absurd given how much I had already explored his body through my gaze alone.

In bed, he pressed one hand against my chest, pinning me to the mattress as he guided himself into me. His gold chain brushed against my bare chest and I glimpsed a tiny scorpion embossed in the medallion.

Everything inside of me coiled. He sensed it and waited patiently.

I did my best to draw deep breaths, then I felt my ankles go lax against his lower back, and suddenly the words coming out of my mouth were so desperate and profane that if you played a recording of them for me now, I would have to leave the room. Over the next few hours, I traveled the arc from shame to bliss, a short but irreversible journey.

Some time in the night I awoke to a strange rustling sound. The vertical blinds turned the streetlight outside into a series of orange bars that fell across Corey's naked back as he studied my bookshelves. I blinked and saw that he was taking books off the shelf and flipping through their pages without reading a single word.

He pulled out the Merriam-Webster's dictionary and opened it. The center of the pages had been hollowed out, and inside were two tabs of ecstasy, an ounce of cocaine, and five two-milligram pills of Xanax. He closed them all in his fist, put the book back on the shelf, and disappeared inside the bathroom. A few seconds later, the toilet flushed.

When he slid back under the covers, I expected him to turn his back to me and then leave before I woke in the morning. Instead he wrapped an arm around me and pulled my back against his chest so tightly I could feel each breath he took. Later I awakened to him making breakfast in the kitchen. When he saw that my eyes were open, he asked me how I wanted to spend the day.

On Sunday morning at nine A.M., as I lay in bed pondering the death of Daniel Brady, the phone rang. It was my boss, Tommy Banks. He had never called me on a Sunday morning before.

"Heard you had a little incident at The Abbey the other night," he said without saying hello.

"Is it true you almost killed someone?"

"Sort of."

"What happened to quitting drinking?"

"It's a definite now."

"Were you aware that we're doing a promotion at The Abbey with GLAAD next month?"

"No."

My feet hit the floor as I struggled to come up with a good cover story.

"There are two thousand AA meetings a week in this city," he said. "I suggest you find one of them."

"I'll think about it," I said.

Tommy groaned as if he had called me from the toilet. "I'm sorry, Adam. I just can't take this anymore."

"What are you talking about, Tommy? The only time I've missed a day of work in the past year is when I went home last month." Since he'd figured out that I had gone home to bury my mother, I thought this might shut him up.

"Enough, Adam."

I let a silence fall and waited for him to fire me explicitly. He couldn't. Finally I said,

"There's no promotion at The Abbey on the calendar. I keep the calendar, remember?"

"You know, Adam," he began in a calmer voice, "some people like being a big fish in a small pond. You like being a piranha in an aquarium. This magazine is never going to go in the direction you want it to, so there's no point in your staying—"

"Who called you?" I asked. He didn't answer. "Did Scott Koffler call you himself, or did he get one of his rich friends to do it?"

"You have a key to the office, Adam. Go in and clean out your desk this afternoon."

"I don't have a desk. You gave it to the intern you're fucking." The next thing I knew, my portable phone was lying on the other side of the room and the vertical blinds were tossing as if a sudden wind had torn through my apartment.

I spent the next few hours listening to a Dido CD. I called Rod's cell phone and left him a message telling him that I had been fired. I ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and watched a few hours of professional bowling. Somewhere along the way I came to terms with the fact that the Daniel Brady story was too big for
Glitz
magazine anyway.

By noon I had managed to convince myself that getting fired was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I wasn't giving up on Daniel Brady's foray out of the closet and into the Pacific.

I had to take stock of what I had. If I was going to take the story somewhere else, it was time for Nate Bain to officially go on the record.

Nate Bain's apartment building was a four-story stucco palace with balconies that ran the length of each unit and a line of tall hedges flanking the entry door. I was half a block away when I saw a half-naked blur come flying down the front steps. When I shouted his name, Nate whirled and almost dropped the dishrag he was holding against his left temple.

He was shirtless and barefoot. His plaid pajama pants were stained down both legs, and he reeked of body odor and lubricant. His eyes were cue balls and his black hair was matted with something that looked thicker than sweat. "Can you take me to the hospital?" he gasped. "See, I've got this oscillating fan and it's been blowing spores all over the place. One of them went behind my eye. I can totally feel it moving around—"

"Let's go back inside, Nate."

"I tried to get it out," he went on, "but I don't think I . . ." He pulled the dishrag from his temple, revealing a welter of oozing scratches that looked like they had been incised with a fork.

A car flew by and I watched the male passenger crane his head to stare at us, his mouth an O.

Several streams of dark blood slid down the left side of Nate's face. He scratched at them as he looked at me with jerking pupils. He had obviously been awake since Friday night and he was about to come in for a crash landing. My facial expression must have pierced his paranoid frenzy. His jaw quivered, his eyes dropped to the pavement, and he started shaking his head back and forth as if I had just told him that his mother had died.

I suppressed my gag reflex and put an arm around his back. I led him inside the building and through a maze of brightly lit stale-smelling hallways. When I asked him where his apartment was, he pointed toward a door that was pounding with bass beats.

I asked him who was inside and he put his forehead against his closed fists. I wondered if the pose was a method for keeping the drugs in his brain.

When I opened the unlocked door, I was hit by a stronger version of the stench that came from Nate. Towels and blankets had been nailed over the apartment's windows. The only light in the room came from a porn film playing on a tiny television set in the corner. The sole piece of furniture was an overstuffed sofa, and there were four naked guys on it. Two older men with stripes of bristle down their lean torsos lowered a rail-thin blond kid onto the condomless erection of the man who sat below him. The kid's flaccid penis spilled from his cock ring like an elephant's tail. It took me a second to realize that the red spots on it were the result of extreme chafing.

"Party's over, guys!" I announced. "I hate to tell you guys this, but I've been watching everything on the camera inside that smoke detector, and I had to call the FBI. They'll be here in five minutes."

The men scrambled to get out. Three of them made for the front door. "Get dressed first!" I barked. Each one of them had shed his clothes in a different part of the apartment, but they were dressed and out the front door in the blink of an eye, which shouldn't have surprised me considering they were speed freaks. Once they were gone, I looked up and saw that Nate was one step ahead of me: the smoke detector had been covered with newspaper.

I walked Nate into the bedroom and dropped him onto the mattress on the floor. The sheet was so badly stained it looked like it had been lifted from an auto body shop, and the piles of dirty laundry gave off a smell like rank water poured over cut grass. It took me a second to realize that the piles were sorted by color. In the tiny bathroom, I found three bottles of Viagra in the medicine cabinet. Crystal meth lights a fire under some men's sex drives, but it also turns their equipment to mush. But there was also a bottle of Xanax, just as I had expected there would be. Two-milligram pills. The good stuff.

I dumped several into my palm and asked Nate if he could swallow without water. He just stared at his laundry. In the kitchen I opened the cabinets and discovered that Nate had smashed through the back of them with a hammer, pulled coils of wiring through, and taped the individual strands to the shelves in a pattern that made sense only to him. I found a dirty glass and scrubbed it as if I'd retrieved it from a sewer pipe.

Once the pills were in him, Nate rolled onto his back, his eyes wide and his chest red and heaving, and started picking at the skin on his left arm. I asked him to stop and he told me he would as soon as he could feel his arm again.

For a while, I just stared down at him. My Daniel Brady story was dying on the vine. I had just been fired from the only media outlet I had access to, and my only source was a speed freak who believed that an organism had taken up residence behind his eye and that the Department of Homeland Security was having him tailed. I did believe that Nate had seen Daniel Brady in West Hollywood, but I didn't think there was a chance in hell I could make anyone else believe it too.

I wanted to hurt him as much as he was hurting himself. That's when I realized that pursuing Daniel Brady and Scott Koffler had been nothing more than an attempt to escape from myself, and I felt a sudden surge of guilt that kept me from shaking the gasping deranged wreck of a young man before me.

The look in Nate's eyes told me that he was seeing eight of me or none at all. I leaned against the wall until his eyes started to drift shut; then I went into the living room where I pulled the blankets and towels from the windows and stacked them next to the sofa. Screw Nate's privacy. If he got any more privacy, it would probably kill him.

I checked on him again and saw that he lay limp and twisted on the mattress, as if he had been dropped from the Emser Tile building. I put one hand to his bare chest to make sure he was still breathing.

Out in the hallway, Nate's neighbor was standing in the open door to his apartment. He was tall and lean, with a shiny bald dome and sympathetic eyes behind invisible-framed glasses.

"You guys finished yet?" he asked in a soft, high-pitched voice.

"I wasn't with that crew," I said.

"I've talked to that kid," he whispered. "Back in my day, the drugs were about the search for the soul. That drug is about getting rid of it."

"Are you sober?" I asked.

"Twenty years," he said. "You?"

"Forty-eight hours."

He disappeared inside his apartment. When he returned, he handed me a business card

printed with his first name and last initial, along with his home and mobile numbers. The guy was obviously a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Your generation," he said quietly. "You die too quickly to get anyone's attention."

After he went back inside his apartment, I turned and slid the card under Nate's door, even though I knew that I was the one the man had tried to reach out to.

Rod Peters had left three messages for me expressing his condolences and asking me to meet him for dinner. He made no mention of Jim, the former Scott's kid he had been trying to locate. I figured he had assumed I had dropped the story.

The six o'clock news had just started when I heard a harsh knock on my door. I thought it might be one of my neighbors, but when I opened the door, Scott Koffler brushed past me before I had time to collect myself.

"How'd you get in?" I asked him.

"Your neighbor's nice," he said.

I leaned against the edge of the open door as he studied the Krewe of Dionysus poster above my love seat. He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a USC Trojans football jersey. I still couldn't tell if his costume was a device for earning the trust of his young charges or if the guy genuinely lived in a state of perpetual adolescence.

"How's not drinking going?" he asked, giving me his full attention. "I hear you had a rough day."