The Burning Plain (5 page)

Late at night, when I couldn’t read another line of transcript or compose another sentence of argument, I got into my car and started driving. By two or three in the morning, Los Angeles had settled into a restless sleep beneath a red, starless sky. The labyrinth of freeways that arced above the city was as deserted as it ever got and I sped east to west, north to south, with the windows down and wind rushing through the car. Grief drove me, but this grief was a shape-shifter that often felt like other things. Like anger or fear or, surprisingly, like lust. I was as guiltily horny as a teenager, looking at other men with the same abashed eyes as when I was fifteen, tormented by the same fantasies. I felt like an animal slamming itself against its cage, as if my body was reacting in terror to Josh’s death, with a frantic desire to generate or, failing that, for living flesh.

One night I found myself parked on a back road of Griffith Park, watching other men slip out of their cars and disappear into the brush. This was a dangerous spot for a lawyer—it teemed with undercover cops—and public sex had never appealed to me. I knew I was acting self-destructively but, for once, knowing was not enough to stop me, and all those years of disciplined sobriety counted for nothing against the emptiness in my gut. On a hill in the distance was the graceful hulk of the Griffith Observatory and somewhere in the hills behind me the Hollywood sign. A car pulled up beside me, a top-of-the-line Land Rover with tinted windows and a sun roof. The window on the passenger’s side slid low enough to reveal a shiny pate and a set of intense, arrogant eyes. They took me in and rejected me, the dark window closing. A moment later, a different man, this one small and compact, got out of the driver’s side and headed down the trail. By then I had concluded my own internal debate and went down the path behind him.

The trail dipped into a valley between a shaggy wood of shrubs and low growing trees. The shadowy figures of men moved among them. I plunged into the wood and waited beneath a eucalyptus tree. The little man whom I’d followed had been swallowed by the darkness. I heard a rustle and then a young Asian smoking a cigarette appeared at my side. He flung the cigarette down and ground it into the dust. Behind me, I heard a deep, cajoling voice whisper to someone else, “Come on, my car’s parked on the road. We can party inside.” The young Asian took my hand, guiding it to his crotch. I touched him, then pulled my hand away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I made a mistake.”

He looked at me. “Married guy, right?”

“No, I thought I was into this. I’m not.”

He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. You better get home to the wife and kids.”

He zipped up and moved away.

I retraced my steps to my car. The little man had returned to the Land Rover with another man. I wondered if they were the two I’d overheard. They got into the backseat. A moment later, the second man jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind him. He was a boy, nineteen or twenty, a dusty-haired blond in a tank top and jeans. Hard blue eyes. He saw me, grinned spitefully.

“Troll,” he said, jerking his thumb at the Land Rover.

“What?”

“The bald guy in the car. Scary.” He’d come close enough to get a good look at me. His eyes glazed over. “See you around.”

“Whatever,” I said, getting into my car.

The little man emerged from the backseat and looked in my direction. I could not make out his features clearly, but a dark handsomeness registered that made me think of Alex Amerian. He smiled, shrugged and lunged back down the trail. I started up my car and pulled into the road. I noticed the plates on the Land Rover:
PROUDJD
. Another distinguished member of the profession.

My late-night meandering sometimes found me in Alex Amerian’s neighborhood, slowly driving past his house. If the lights were on, I’d park across the street and think about getting out, but what would I say to him? I’m obsessed with you because the first time I saw you I thought you were my dead lover? Not much of a pickup line. But I was obsessed, to my embarrassment, and conspicuous enough that one of Alex’s neighbors, who pegged me as a cruiser, came out to my car one night and warned me off with, “Don’t you guys ever give it a rest? Get out of here before I call the cops.” I felt demeaned and out of control, but I couldn’t keep him out of my thoughts or my fantasies. I would awaken from an erotic dream not sure whether the image fading into my unconsciousness was Josh or Alex.

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 …”