The Burning Plain (3 page)

“Post-traumatic stress syndrome?” I said skeptically.

“What’s so fucking unbelievable about that?” he asked, angrily. “What fag—gay person—hasn’t been traumatized by someone’s hatred? When we do fight back, this is what happens.”

“All right, Richie. Calm down. I’ll talk to him.”

He leaned back and drawled, “I knew I could count on you, honey.”

Something in his tone gave me pause. “Richie? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Henry,” he said, “after everything we’ve been through together—you, me and Josh—how could you even think that?”

“Sorry.”

“You help Alex, you’ll be doing a
mitzvah.
You can redeem it for a thousand years in Purgatory after you die.”

“Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?”

“Oh, honey,” he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. “I’m going to hell. That’s where the action is.”

I
CALLED ALEX
Amerian after Richie left and agreed to meet him at five-thirty at his apartment in West Hollywood. At five, I came down the canyon and battled rush-hour traffic as I headed west on Sunset toward the gay ghetto, Boystown. The air was as brown as the curling edges of a burning book, and the palms that lined the road looked combustible. The only people on foot were the homeless and dazed tourists in search of a Hollywood that existed only in their imaginations.

I often felt like a tourist in Los Angeles myself, a temporary inhabitant, but then I suppose it felt like that to most of the millions who lived there. It was a completely invented city, a flimflam town that owed its existence to sunshine, cheap land and the movies. You could still see the sun most days, and there were parts of town where the land was still cheap, though you wouldn’t want to live there. As for the movies, they thrived, and if the studio executive whose picture I had seen in the Times was to be believed, the Industry, as it was called, was poised to take over the world.

Long ago, as a literary-minded undergraduate, I had read a short story by the Argentine writer Borges called “The Babylon Lottery” that imagined a city in which each of the inhabitants partook of a secret lottery every seventy days that determined his or her fate until the next drawing. “Babylon,” the narrator wrote, “is nothing but an infinite game of chance.” That was my uniformed idea of Hollywood, an infinite game of chance that everyone could play and anyone could win; a permanent boomtown where the surging, naked energy of dreams alternated with the violence of rejection and despair.

This was also true of West Hollywood, the gay Mecca of southern California. I turned down Crescent Heights and then took a right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood’s Main Street. Even to the unobservant, it was obvious that this was a lavender neighborhood. Rainbow flags hung limply from the small businesses on either side of the street, and the businesses themselves, antique stores, bars, an adult bookstore, coffeehouses where shirtless young men sipped iced cappuccinos at small tables on the filthy sidewalk, were unmistakable. Some signs were subtler, apparent only to the cognoscenti. Posted on the side streets off the boulevard were signs that forbade cars from making turns between the hours of midnight and 6
A.M.
, a seemingly bizarre injunction imposed by the city at the request of residents driven crazy by the heavy nighttime traffic caused by men cruising each other from their cars or picking each other up in the city’s alleys. There was a stretch behind the storefronts on the boulevard between La Jolla and Harper streets that was so notorious it was dubbed Vaseline Alley, but, at night, after the bars closed, all the city’s dark places teemed with hunters.

Most of them were hunting for sex, a few for love, all for some kind of completion that would repair the damage that, as Richie had observed, most gay people carried through life. They bore the affect of the hated, a vulnerability, a deep grief for the families that had cast them out, the childhoods and adolescences spent in hiding. Believing that safety lay in numbers, they created places like West Hollywood, the Castro, the Village. Yet ironically, the existence of these ghettos made them easy targets for the haters. Every year there were more and more violent attacks on gay men in the city’s backstreets, some culminating in murder. Maybe that’s why West Hollywood made me so uneasy. It might just have been my projection, but the air around Boystown sweated ambivalence—it dripped from the fronds of the palm trees that memorialized the AIDS dead—and the boys had in their eyes, behind the flickering lights of lust, the gentle, torpid look of animals being led to slaughter.

I pulled up to the curb beside Alex Amerian’s house, which, like its neighbors, was a single-story whitewashed building with a red-tile roof, thick walls and arched windows. There was a plaster escutcheon above the front door: crossed swords and fleur-de-lis. I rang the bell, heard the shuffle of bare feet across a wooden floor and then the door was opened by a pretty, long-haired girl with beautiful but spacey eyes, wearing Levi cutoffs and a tee shirt that advertised a gay disco. Her pale skin was flawless but waxen, a drug addict’s pallor.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Henry Rios. I’m here to see Alex.”

She glanced at my wilted seersucker suit and surmised, “You’re the lawyer?”

“Yes, is Alex here?”

“Uh-huh. I’m Alex’s roommate, Katie.” She offered me a damp, firm handshake. “Come on in.”

The small, sunny living room was furnished with a futon, a ficus tree and two director’s chairs. Rice-paper blinds on the windows diffused the light. On one wall was a framed poster advertising the Chicago Film Festival: a coy photograph of a nude elaborately muscled man and an equally sleek woman. The room was slightly musty, as if rarely used, and cobwebs clung to the corners. Katie called Alex’s name, and a moment later, from the back of the house, down a long, dim hall, came a young man in a white linen shirt and gray slacks. His skin was olive-colored, his hair was a toss of damp, black curls and his face had a delicate, Mediterranean masculinity, like the face of an archaic Apollo. His eyes were black and gleamed like dark water. He had the rumpled air of someone who had just awakened. There was a second, as he emerged from the shadows, when I felt the stunned certainty of someone witnessing a miracle, that the young man approaching me was Josh, alive again. But then Josh’s face melted into Amerian’s features and was gone.

“Uh, Mr. Rios,” he said, his extended hand unshaken. “Are you okay?”

I took his hand, shook it. “Yes. Glad to meet you, Alex.”

I released his hand, but could not look away from his face. My eyes reported that his resemblance to Josh was nothing more than a matter of height and coloring and bone structure, but there
had
been something else, a flicker of Josh that had briefly illuminated this other man like a light passing beneath his skin.

He exchanged a nervous glance with the girl, who blurted out, “You want a beer or something?”

“A glass of water would be fine,” I said, looking at her. When I looked back at him, the spell was broken. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Alex?”

“It’s cooler in the courtyard.”

I followed Alex down the hall, across a narrow dining room furnished with a picnic table and out through French doors to a shaded courtyard between his house and the adjoining house. The courtyard was paved with bricks and covered by a trellis overgrown with morning glory. The bricks were loose in the mortar, the trellis sagged beneath the weight of the vines. In the corner was a dry fountain. The wrought-iron table was dusty and in need of a new coat of paint. We sat down. I opened my briefcase and removed the police report, a pad of paper, a pen. I felt his eyes on me, and when I looked up I half-expected to see Josh again, but there was only an anxious young stranger on the other side of the table.

“It is cooler out here,” I said. “Are the two houses joined or do they just share the courtyard?”

“They just share,” he replied. “They were built by the same guy, for his family. You can see they’re falling apart. With rent control, the landlord doesn’t have much incentive to keep the place up.”

“You’ve lived here a long time?”

“Two years,” he said.

At that moment, Katie emerged from the house with a glass of ice water and two beers. “You’re sure you just want water?”

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

“Should I stay or what?” she asked.

“She already knows everything,” Alex said.

“Do you want her to be called as a witness against you?”

“I’ll be inside,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

After she left, I said, “Tell me about the night you were arrested.”

He repeated, without significant deviation, the story that Richie had told me, while I scribbled notes.

“Let me see if I understand this,” I said. “You tried to explain to the security guard that all you wanted was a phone, but you say he got aggressive with you.”

“Yeah,” he said, peeling back the label on his bottle of beer.

“What did he do exactly?”

“He was screaming he was going to call the cops and then he shoved me a couple of times.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big guy, six something, beefy. Fat neck.”

“You shoved him back and then he knocked you down?” I asked, consulting my notes.

He nodded. “It was a reflex when I shoved back. I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with him because I knew he could beat the crap out of me, but then he laid into me and knocked me down …”

“And called you a faggot. Do you have any idea why he called you that?”

“I guess it was the worst thing he thought he could call another guy.”

“So it was just a general insult, but because you’d been gay bashed, you didn’t hear it that way, right?”

He nodded. “He was standing over me, calling me a faggot, and it was like a flashback to those punks with their baseball bats. I thought, any second now and he’ll start kicking me, so I pulled my gun …”

“Where was the gun?”

“In my waistband,” he said.

“What happened then?”

“I got the gun out but before I could point it at him, he stepped on my wrist and I dropped it. He kicked it away. Then he rolled me over and got me into handcuffs. He pulled me to my feet and locked me to the fence until the cops came.”

“You’re sure you didn’t point the gun at him.”

“I didn’t have a chance.”

“Tell me about when you were attacked. How serious were the injuries?”

“Six broken ribs and a concussion, plus I was black and blue for weeks.”

“And the psychological damage?”

He frowned. “I’d like to find those punks and kill them.”

“Richie said the police wouldn’t take a report. Is that right?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“So there’s no record of the attack.”

He stared at me. “You don’t believe me?”

“If I’m going to be arguing to the DA or a jury that you pulled the gun on the security guard because you were in fear of your life based on the previous attack, they’ll want evidence.”

“Incredible,” he muttered. “This was a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

“Misunderstandings that end up as felonies take on a life of their own.”

He brooded into his beer. “What about the article about me in Richie’s magazine? Is that evidence?”

I thought about it. “It depends on whether the reporter corroborated your story. Do you have a copy of the article?”

“I have lots of copies,” he said. “I’ve been sending them all over the place. My congressman, the mayor, the sheriff. No one writes back.”

“Where were you treated for your injuries?”

“The emergency room at Cedar-Sinai.”

“Then there are those records, too,” I said.

“What’s going to happen to me, Mr. Rios? I don’t want to go to jail behind this. It’s not fair.”

“The problem is the gun,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s not hard to get a gun in LA.”

“I assume the cops kept it.”

“As far as I know,” he said.

“Would you agree to its destruction?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I can find a sympathetic DA, I might be able to work out a deal because, based on what you’ve told me, this isn’t the kind of case a prosecutor’s going to want to take to a jury. I can’t guarantee you no jail time, but it’s pretty unlikely unless you have a record. Do you?”

“I’ve never been in trouble before,” he said, quickly.

“Then that’s not a problem,” I replied. “You want to get me a copy of the magazine piece?”

While he was gone, I went over my notes. Alex had provided a sympathetic and plausible account of the incident, one I could easily sell to a jury if it came to that. Was he telling the truth? Most of my clients lied to me, people in trouble usually do. Over the years I’d developed an intuition about how much was being concealed. My bullshit detector had twitched a couple of times with Alex, but no major alarms had gone off. I thought he might be lying to me about whether he had a rap sheet, but that was easy enough to check. One other thing bothered me, and when he returned, I asked him about it.

“Did you carry this gun with you everywhere you went?”

“Yes,” he said, passing me the article across the table.

“But the attack was six months ago?”

His eyes were cold. “Have you ever been gay bashed, Mr. Rios?”

“No.”

“I thought I was safe in West Hollywood,” he said, “but once I was attacked I knew I wasn’t safe anywhere. I had to protect myself.”

I nodded. “And if I run a rap sheet on you, I’m not going to come up with any surprises.”

He was more wounded than angry. “No.”

“I have to make sure. I don’t like surprises.”

A dusty leaf drifted from the vine and settled in his hair. He was drenched in cologne. I recognized the fragrance—it was popular that year—but I couldn’t remember what it was called.

“You looked pretty surprised when you first saw me,” he said. “What did Richie say about me? Did he tell you I was crazy?”

“It wasn’t anything Richie said. You reminded me of someone.”

“Someone you liked?” A note of flirtation crept into his voice.