The Death of Friends (31 page)

I had learned with Josh that as much as you may want another human being, you don’t really get to have them, not in a possessory way. You don’t own, you absorb them. You adopt a gesture or a figure of speech or a preference for a certain color or kind of food. Then the transfer becomes subtler, a way of seeing things, a way of thinking, feeling. Eventually you can’t tell where they leave off and you begin. One day, the part of Josh I’d absorbed into myself would fade into memory, but for now this shadow Josh inside of me continued to project itself onto the world of the living. It had projected itself onto Alex and because it kept Josh alive, I couldn’t let go. But I wouldn’t humiliate myself, either, by giving in to the obsession and calling Alex. So I buried myself in work, suffered my aging, lustful body and waited for it all to go away.

I was sitting at home one hot night at the beginning of June, leafing through the sex ads of a gay newspaper, when the phone rang and it was Richie on the other end asking, “Do you have clean underwear?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Because if you don’t, you can bring them with you when you pick me up and wash them at the laundromat.”

“Are you on something?”

“Just a deadline, honey. You know that page in the magazine where we cover the trend du jour? Well, the latest thing is called the PLF, the Poet’s Liberation Front. They want to bring poetry to the people.” He paused for breath. “They give readings on buses, in shoe stores, with your rigatoni. Tonight there’s one at a laundromat in Silver Lake, and you know Mother never ventures east of La Brea unescorted. You have to come. I’ll buy you dinner afterwards.”

“Why me, Richie?”

“Who else? You were a lit major and you live in the neighborhood.”

It was like Richie to remember that English was my college major. He filed away facts when you didn’t even think he was paying attention and then surprised you with them at a strategic moment.

“Why not?” I said. “I’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes.”

Richie lived in the neighborhood of West Hollywood just below the Sunset Strip, where the black hearses of the Grave Line Tours ferried tourists to the sites of celebrity suicides, murders and hauntings: the carport on Holloway, where Sal Mineo was stabbed to death; the sidewalk outside of the Viper Club on Sunset, where River Phoenix died in convulsions. Richie’s building was on the tour as the last domicile of Bette Davis, by whom it was said the building was haunted. Richie claimed it was true, that he had seen her ancient, wasted figure tottering through the halls whispering, “What a dump.” It was a five-story brick building, whitewashed with green shutters. The dark-haired, handsome doorman sat in a little office beside the gate to the garage, waiting to be discovered. A brass plaque by the front door attested to the fact that the building was on the national register of historical places. The apartment Richie shared with Joel Miller was in the back of the building on the first floor, just past the unused swimming pool where I always half-expected to find William Holden floating facedown in the water.

The walls of Richie’s apartment were pink and blue, the colors of a decadent nursery, and decorated with Fragonard-like murals of tubby gods and goddesses mistily seducing each other. Above a seventeenth-century French writing table of inlaid woods, a blunt black-and-white drawing by a prison artist depicted one tattooed gang member going down on another. A hundred-year-old Mexican reliquary held a plastic vial which, according to Richie, contained a bit of fat removed from Elizabeth Taylor’s thighs by liposuction. On the walls of the dining room was a triptych of black-and-white photographs of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich taken by George Hurrell, framed in heavy silver; “my mothers,” Richie explained to bemused guests.

I rang the doorbell expecting to be admitted by Javier, the silent, dignified houseman Richie employed, but Joel Miller let me into the apartment. He was a plump, unprepossessing man whose face had been lifted, peeled and collagened to the smoothness, if not the innocence, of an infant. The expensive, baggy sweats he wore to hide his bulk only made it more obvious.

“Hello, Joel,” I said. “Where’s Javier?”

“It’s his night off,” he said. “Richie’s getting ready.”

“How are you?” I asked, following him into the living room.

“Busy,” he said. “I have a lot of calls to make.”

He disappeared into the library, and a few minutes later I heard him screaming at someone over the phone. Joel was a studio executive at Universal Pictures, vice-president in charge of something or other, but it was not clear to me what he actually did, no matter how often Richie explained it to me.

But then, Richie maintained that no one in Hollywood really knew what they were doing, and that pictures got made at all was an accidental byproduct of deal-making. Joel, I gathered, was in the business of making deals. He rarely volunteered any information about himself. He could scarcely get in a full sentence without incurring Richie’s ridicule, so he retreated into an aggrieved silence. The few times I had made an effort to talk to him away from Richie I sensed a rage beneath his platitudes I usually associated with the violent criminals I defended, a bottomless fury against the world. When I mentioned to Richie that Joel seemed to be a pretty angry guy, his eyes narrowed and he whispered, “Don’t ever let him know you know.” They’d been together for almost twenty years. Richie joked that he and Joel had an old-fashioned gay marriage: “It’s based on mutual contempt.”

Richie emerged from the bedroom, dressed entirely in black except for a necklace of large, fake pearls. “What do you think?” he asked, preening. “I call this Jack Kerouac meets Barbara Bush.”

“No hat?”

He whipped a black beret out of his coat pocket. “I’m way ahead of you, Daddy-o. Where’s Joel?”

“He said he had to make some calls.”

“Did he offer you anything to drink? That asshole.”

“I’m not thirsty. Shouldn’t we be leaving?”

“Joel,” Richie banged at the library door. “You shit. I know you’re doing drugs in there. You better have 911 on redial because I won’t be here when you OD.”

Joel cracked the door open. “I’m on the phone, Richie. Working. Do you mind?”

“Just wanted to give you a kiss, honey,” Richie simpered, planting a kiss in the air in the vicinity of Joel’s cheek. “Don’t wait up, pumpkin.”

“Have fun,” Joel replied, and shut the door firmly.

“Now, I’m ready to go,” Richie announced.

I followed Richie’s directions to a bad stretch of Sunset in Silver Lake, a neighborhood that increasingly defined what Los Angeles was becoming. In the hills above the reservoir that gave Silver Lake its name, the terra-cotta, white-walled houses of the affluent sprawled like a Mediterranean village, while down in the flats stood the graffiti-covered tenements of the poor. For a while, cheap rents in the flats had drawn artists to Silver Lake where, briefly, storefront galleries and coffeehouses had flourished, but crime had driven most of them away.

Outside the laundromat, a photographer from the magazine was waiting for Richie. I went inside to find seats while they talked. A microphone at the back of the room faced a half-dozen benches occupied by twenty or thirty people, many of them dressed as severely as Richie in shades of black, minus the whimsy of his pearls. They were mostly young and conspicuously white, lank-haired, bristling with attitude, smoking furiously. In contrast were the Latino families who had come not to hear poetry but to wash clothes. They milled around, unable to sit, since the benches had been appropriated for the reading, mothers, fathers, children, too polite to stare at the interlopers who were too indifferent to take notice of them. The room smelled of detergent, sweat and clove cigarettes, the washers and dryers thumped and chugged above the murmur of English and Spanish. I made my way to the front of the room, the only dark-skinned person to cross the invisible line separating the two groups. The room was sweltering.

Richie sat down just as the first reader was announced by the “facilitator,” a pale, red-haired woman dressed in a black brassiere and a black petticoat over black tights. The poet was a young woman in black jeans and, daringly, a white shirt.

“This is a poem about LA,” she drawled in a Valley accent. “It’s called, ‘The Seventh Circle.’ It’s based on, like, the
Inferno
?” She paused, waiting, apparently for some kind of recognition. When none came, she said, rhyming the name with
panty
, “By Dante? Dante Alighieri?”

“Just read the fucking poem,” a bearded hipster called out.

“Whatever,” she sniffed, and began her declamation.

It was a long, bad poem, and well before she finished, the restless audience had drowned her out.

“Hey,” she protested. “This isn’t the movies. Shut up.”

“Sit down, sit down,” her bearded heckler yelled.

“Fuck you,” she said, and went on reading her poem. There was scattered applause when she sat down. Richie nudged me and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m with you.”

“What was that all about?” Richie laughed, when we were safely outside.

“I think she was trying to compare LA to hell,” I said.

“Please,” he said, lighting a Marlboro. “Hell is where you go when you want a vacation from LA. What the fuck’s the seventh circle?”

“Have you ever read Dante?”

He stared at me. “I saw the movie. The Norma Shearer original, not the Debbie Reynolds remake. Of course I never read Dante. Have you?”

“In college. The
Inferno
gave me nightmares, it was scarier than anything Stephen King has ever written. The seventh circle is where Dante puts the violent, including homosexuals …”

“Violent fags? What did they do, mix stripes with plaids?”

“Dante was Catholic, of course, so he thought of sodomy as an act against nature and homosexuals as the violent against nature. The seventh circle was a plain of burning sand. The souls of homosexuals are forced to run around the perimeter of the plain for eternity while a burning rain bakes them.”

We walked to my car in silence, past shuttered shops and a Mexican bar. From inside I heard a
rancheria
I recognized as one of my father’s favorites.

“So let me see if I get this,” Richie said. “You’ve got all these guys running on a track, so they’re in good shape, and there’s this burning rain that keeps them tan. Gee, Henry, that doesn’t sound like hell to me. It sounds like Palm Springs.”

We got into my car. “Where to, Richie?”

“Well, there’s nothing decent here,” he said, dismissing, with a sweeping gesture, the entire east side of Los Angeles. “Spago? No, it’s Tuesday. No one there but tourists. The Ivy? Even I can’t get us in without a reservation. Maple Drive’s too 90210. I know. Musso’s. I love their creamed spinach.”

Musso and Frank’s was the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, a place of dark wood, high-backed booths, starched tablecloths, elderly white-jacketed waiters, lethal martinis and a menu that listed such antiquarian items as consommé and a salad of iceberg lettuce. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Richie’s office, on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooked what Richie insisted on calling
Grauman’s
Chinese Theater, long after everyone else had accepted its change of ownership and name to Mann’s Theater. Such sites were holy places to Richie, who often said everything he knew about life he’d learned from watching old movies. And it was true that while he might not have read Dante, he could recite big chunks of Gloria Swanson’s dialogue from
Sunset Boulevard
by heart or rattle off the filmography of Maria Ouspenskaya.

I understood Richie’s childhood devotion to old movies, because I had been as devoted to books, which, just as his movies did for him, helped me escape the loneliness of being different by creating an alternative reality where I was not alone. Richie had once told me the only thing that had kept him alive in the private mental institution to which his parents had committed him when he was fourteen was creeping into the day room at midnight to watch the late show.

“The last time I was here,” Richie confided over his martini at Musso’s, “Bob Hope came tottering down the aisle. His
hair
, Henry. Bright orange. And his face looked like it was carved out of tapioca.”

“What are you going to say about the poetry reading?”

“Blah, blah, blah. I only need a couple of ’graphs. Did you get a look at that blond by the door? Yummy. Of course, he’s an actor.” Richie smirked. “I think every actor in town ought to wear a sign that says, ‘I am not a real person, I am an actor.’”

Our waiter came, a fussy ancient whose six dyed strands of hair were carefully plastered across his bald pate. He moued his disapproval over my order of an omelet and a salad, but Richie made up for it, ordering filet mignon in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, broiled mushrooms, creamed spinach, a Caesar salad and a half-bottle of Bordeaux. I knew from other meals with him that Richie would eat every bite, then demand dessert, and yet he never gained weight. “I’m blessed with a starlet’s metabolism,” he boasted when I pointed this out to him, but a likelier reason was that his father used to scream at him at the dinner table to act like a man until Richie was so terrified his throat closed up.

“Alex Amerian is an actor,” I said, after the waiter left. “He seemed real enough.”

Richie raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re sweet on him.”

“Could you be serious for a moment?”

He dropped the supercilious eyebrow. “What’s wrong, Henry?”

“I think I’m cracking up here.”

All affectation vanished. “Tell me,” he said quietly.

I told him everything, about the frantic work and the aimless driving, the incident at Griffith Park, parking in front of Alex’s house, the neighbor who’d run me off, the shame, confusion, grief. I trusted Richie to understand me despite our many differences, because when I lay in bed at night in a small town in California, reading about Achilles and Patroclus, while he sat in front of a TV set in suburban Ohio, watching Joan Crawford in
Rain
, we had been learning the same lesson about the impossibility of our desire; a lesson that, as grown men, we were still trying to overcome.