Seeing Stars (30 page)

When he told Quatro that story, the stylist just shook his head. “You know,” he said, “if everyone got great parents, there’d probably be no wars. I’m serious. We spend a lifetime getting over the damage they do when we’re kids. Some of us get more than our share.”

“I’ve never told anyone that story,” Quinn said, looking out the window.

“Let me guess. You feel like you made it happen somehow.”

Quinn nodded.

“It’s not true, though.”

Quinn just shrugged and kept looking out the window. Some people liked to talk about themselves constantly, but he wasn’t one of them. You talked too much and you simply gave out ammunition for people to dislike you more. He loaded up a tortilla chip and very, very carefully brought it to his mouth, holding his hand under it the whole time to catch any drips. The car made him nervous, it was so perfect.

Quatro made him nervous, he was so perfect.

Quinn wanted to tell him about the little Latina at Los Burritos, about how she smiled at him; wanted to ask him if he thought they might be able to find a chili pepper necklace in Venice Beach, since his search while he was killing time had been a bust. But he wasn’t sure if Quatro would want to hear about a girl since he was gay, so instead Quinn just watched the world of Southern California go by out the window. In the cars around them, everybody was talking on their cell phones except for one man who was reading a script.

“There’s this woman,” he said to Quatro.

“Uh-oh.”

“What? No, nothing like that—she’s old.” Quinn blushed furiously. “She’s this casting director named Evelyn Flynn.” Then he told Quatro about
After
, and how Evelyn was his new manager on top of coaching him for Buddy, and about how the movie was being directed by Gus Van Sant, who Quatro had heard of, of course, because everybody had.

“Man,” he said when Quinn was finished. “That’s some big fucking deal, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“When’s the audition?”

“I don’t know yet. Pretty soon, though.”

“Well, once you know, let
me
know, so you can come in and we’ll tidy you up.”

Quinn said thank you because he didn’t want to make Quatro feel bad, but in his mind he saw Buddy as being shaggy and messy, kind of like Quinn himself; especially since no one really cared about him now that his mom had died—at least no one besides Carlyle and their grandmother and Uncle Wayne

“So how come you have a new manager? What happened to the old one?”

Quinn shrugged. “She kicked me out,” he said, though strictly speaking that wasn’t the reason. Strictly speaking, though, it was
part
of the reason. He might not have dumped Mimi, not even for Evelyn Flynn, if she hadn’t kicked him out of her house first. Probably he would still have fired her, though. Evelyn Flynn was like Hollywood royalty. Mimi was more like one of the peasants plucking chickens in the market square.

“What, she dropped you as a client, you mean?” Quinn was saying.

“No. I mean she kicked me out of the house. I used to live with her and a couple of other kids, but she made me find someplace else. She thinks I’m a pervert.”

“Why?” Quatro raised an eyebrow.

And before he even realized what he was doing, Quinn was telling Quatro the whole story. About how Dee had been teaching his class in Mimi’s living room, which was what he always used to do until the thing with Quinn. Dee had had them doing an improv exercise where they were each given a slip of paper that described a character, paired up with someone by drawing names from a box, and then went off to some part of the house to work out a scene. Quinn drew a kid named Lonny. He was only twelve years old so he didn’t even belong in the class, but whatever. He’d been Mimi’s client for only a few months by then, and he lived at the Oakwood with his mom. He was pale and whiny and he looked like Macaulay Culkin.

Quinn’s room at Mimi’s—or, more accurately, his
area
—had been the landing at the top of the stairs, between two attic dormers. He had a mattress and a box spring and a blanket chest for a bureau and a lamp. And it was all right with him. No one came up there because it was hotter than hell most of the time, but not so bad when you were lying down in front of a fan. He could read up there or jerk off or pick his nose, whatever—no one ever came up to disturb him. He’d been living up there since he was thirteen. So when they were told to find a spot to work in, it was only natural to go up to Quinn’s landing.

The slip of paper Quinn had drawn said,
You don’t like animals or small children, you want to join the army when you grow up, you like the taste of beer, and you tend to be a bully.
Quinn never read what Lonny’s paper said, but by his behavior his character was a loser, a whiner, and a brain. One of you was supposed to create a situation by defining a setting and a problem. Quinn came up with a bowling alley and a missing wallet.

So they’d begun sparring, with Quinn’s character goading Lonny’s character about having stolen the wallet even though Quinn’s character had actually been the thief. “What’s the matter, you little creep, you can’t even admit you took something that wasn’t yours? What are you going to do with the money, anyways, buy yourself a dress and some Tampax?”

It had been a great role, but the stupid kid had started crying, which only egged Quinn’s character on, until he reached over and pinched the kid’s nipples. Hard. Quinn’s
character
had done that, not Quinn, but the kid had screamed and everyone had come running and Mimi had sent Quinn out into the backyard until she and fucking Dee had gotten the thing figured out. Then they brought Quinn back in, except that the kid wouldn’t look at him, which pissed him off, and then Mimi had sent him out of the house again while she talked to the kid’s parents. Now it had been immortalized in studio lore, and no one, not
one fucking person
, had heard him when he said, over and over, “It was
improv
!” All Mimi had said was, “The problem with you is, you just don’t know when you’ve stepped over the line.”

“Fuckin’
A
,” Quatro said. “Man. You got kicked out for
pinching a kid’s nipples
?”

Quinn nodded miserably. Every time he thought about it, it made him feel just as bad as it had that first day.

“And that was how long ago?” Quatro asked.

“Eight months. I don’t know. Yeah—like, eight months.”

“So, what, do you live with this new manager now?”

“Nope. With a couple of actors, this Pakistani and a redhead.”

“Men?”

“One man, one woman.”

“Huh.”

“They’re getting sick of me, though, so I’ll probably have to move again pretty soon.”

When they were on the outskirts of Venice Beach, Quatro asked Quinn to pack everything back up and put it back in the shopping bags so nothing spilled. Quinn was extra careful, wiping the sides of the tubs in case one of them had dripped. Then they were in Venice Beach, scouting for a parking spot, which they found surprisingly quickly on the street in front of an old shack of a place just a couple of blocks from the beach. Even though you’d have to knock the house down and start over, the place was still probably worth a million dollars.

Quatro snugged the car into the curb, locked everything that could be locked, and led them to the boardwalk and the beach, saying, “You look like a man who needs his name carved on a grain of rice.”

The boardwalk was concrete instead of wood, which had always been the way Quinn had pictured it. People were moving in every direction and wearing every imaginable thing: sarongs, tiny Speedos, thongs, nylon workout wear, tank tops, wife-beater shirts, flowing hippie skirts and baggy cotton pajama pants, and tourist T-shirts that said things like
VENICE BEACH LIFEGUARD: MADE YOU LOOK
. Every couple of steps there were sidewalk vendors selling everything from paintings to the Lord’s Prayer etched on a seashell. Bongs, glass pipes, roach clips, psychedelic black lights, clothing, cheap leather goods from Mexico—you could find it all.

Quatro had abruptly dodged ahead and pulled out his wallet. A wizened little old person—could be a man, could be a woman—was working on something with a jeweler’s loupe and then Quatro paid and pressed something into Quinn’s hand: a glass vial with a grain of rice inside.

“Two
N
s, right?”

Quinn nodded, feeling strangely moved. He didn’t get many presents except at the predictable times and from the predictable people, which was really more like the fulfillment of an obligation than the expression of a spontaneous and heartfelt sentiment. He thanked Quatro more than he probably should have—he probably came across as needy—but he couldn’t help it. “Is there something you want here?” he asked Quatro, pretty sure that he should reciprocate.

“Your company. That’s all.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, c’mon, man, I see the living statue!” Quatro put his hand on Quinn’s back and walked him ahead quickly. Quinn’s back burned where Quatro’s hand rested. “There. Is this guy too good for words?” Through the crowd Quinn saw a man who was silver from head to foot—or, more accurately, from hat to shoes. His skin, right down to his eyelids and the palms of his hands, was also painted silver. It made Quinn feel strangely breathless, seeing someone all encased in metal that way, even if it was just paint. He’d heard you could die—suffocate—if all your skin was covered like that, because it couldn’t breathe or something. Hadn’t that actress in
Goldfinger
died? The human statue probably wasn’t silver under his clothes, but what if his clothes couldn’t breathe, either, with the silver paint all over them? He didn’t look like he was suffocating, though. He was standing perfectly still, frozen in a position that looked agonizing. One leg was up and bent and he held one hand over his eyes like a visor, as though he had his foot propped up on something and was straining to look out beyond the horizon. In reality it was hazy and you couldn’t even
see
the horizon, but the effect was still impressive. They watched for five minutes and the human statue didn’t so much as blink. Quinn wondered how much more you’d be able to see in the course of a lifetime if you never had to blink. A single blink wasn’t much, but if you strung them all together, it would probably add up to a couple of years. He decided not to ask Quatro about the suffocation business, because it would make him sound stupid. Obviously the guy wasn’t keeling over or anything, so it must be okay.

“Oh, wait, come on. Man, you’ve just
got
to see this!” Quatro hurried ahead to a clearing in the crowd. Quinn could see five or six people lined up shoulder to shoulder, bent over with their hands on their knees. A black guy with dreadlocks stuffed under a baggy knit cap was giving his spiel to the crowd. “Okay, I’m going to need your energy, your positive thoughts, right? So think, all of you, about how I’m going to clear these people by a mile, no problem, piece of cake. Think now!
Think!
” And he took a running start and leaped, actually
leaped
, over all those people with room to spare.

The crowd clapped and the guy looked around for someone to add to the lineup. He caught Quinn’s eye and said, “You! I need you to help this time. Come over here, mon, that’s right.” And before Quinn could protest, the guy had positioned him at one end of the line and bent him over. Then he backed way off and started energizing the crowd again and took a running jump. Quinn could feel the air rushing across his back as the man cleared him. He wondered what it would feel like to be airborne like that, powerful enough to leap great distances. It would be sort of like flying, Quinn guessed. Or would it feel like barely avoiding a fall?

The leaper added two more people after Quinn and cleared all of them, too. Then he bowed to the crowd, took off his knitted hat, and passed it around so people could drop money in. Quinn just passed it on, but Quatro put in a couple dollars, which made Quinn feel cheap. He fished in his pocket to add something after all, but Quatro put his hand on Quinn’s arm and said, “That was for both of us.”

As they went down the boardwalk Quinn matched Quatro stride for stride even though Quatro was smaller. It was like there was some magic field connecting them. Quatro seemed at ease in his body in a way that Quinn had never been. Maybe that would happen once he stopped growing and filled out. He felt tall and lanky and awkward, like Abraham Lincoln probably felt around all those olden-day, smaller people. Quatro had probably been a great-looking teenager, with good skin and great hair and clothes.

Quatro dug an elbow gently into Quinn’s side. “You hungry?”

He was, so Quatro steered them down a side street where there were booths filled with cheap, tooled leather goods from Mexico and a pizza concession. “Pizza, beach—they just go together,” he told Quinn.

Quatro paid for both of them, and they carried their food and drinks to the far side of the boardwalk and sat on some grass under a palm tree. Three Chihuahuas went by in a pink stroller, pushed by someone vaguely familiar-looking, a young brunette who reminded him of Allison Addison and was probably one of the zillions of character actors in LA who worked just enough to feel the breath of fame pass them by.

“You having a good time?” Quatro asked him.

Quinn nodded.

“Good. I thought you might need that.”

“A good time?”

“Well, someone
showing
you a good time. Not that I mean that in a cheesy way. You seem like the kind of person who spends an awful lot of time alone.”

Quinn shrugged. It sounded bad, the way Quatro said it, like he was defective. “I’m okay.”

“I know you’re
okay
. But that’s not the same as happy.”

“Yeah.” Quinn watched a muscle-bound young black man go by on inline skates. He moved like the skates were part of his body, so smooth and relaxed, weaving in and out of the crowd like a wave moving through water. “What about you?”

“Am I happy? By and large.”

Quinn nodded as though he understood, but he didn’t really know how to talk like this.