The Trouble Boy, page 11
After having drinks, we drove to Matsuhisa for sushi. I was already loaded on vodka cranberries by the time our food came.
Elizabeth and Jamie started gobbling up the thin pieces of sashimi from the platter on our table, but I wasn’t hungry.
“Toby, don’t get discouraged,” Elizabeth said. “It takes a lot of time to make a sale.”
“They weren’t meeting with us because they liked the script; they were meeting with us because you had sent it to them. I mean, it’s fabulous that you have all these contacts, but I want people to like my work for what it is.” I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for what she had done for me, but I couldn’t deny that the trip hadn’t turned out how I had imagined it.
“Look, there are a few other places that still have the script, and I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them after the holidays,” Elizabeth said.
Right. It was about as likely she would field any more calls about Breeders as it was that Cameron Cole would call me back. He still hadn’t, nearly a month after I had left him the message. I hadn’t wanted to call again; that would seem pathetic. What was I calling Cameron for anyway? A date, a pitch meeting, a future? I was desperate for all these things.
Maybe tonight I would finally hook up with Jamie. After four cocktails and more on the way, my faculties for reasoning weren’t as strong as they should have been. And Jamie—wrinkle-free forehead and all—was on his best behavior in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. I also felt more relaxed with Chad not around; he had told Elizabeth he had to work late. It would have been far too embarrassing to have him there, and would have completely ruined Elizabeth’s credibility. Of course, Jamie would have enjoyed the eye candy.
The check came, and I put down my credit card, partly to show my appreciation to Elizabeth and partly to show that I may have been down, but I certainly wasn’t out.
Again, my card came back declined. “I’m sure it’s a mistake,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes they cut you off if you spend too much in another city, just to make sure the card isn’t stolen.”
I knew that wasn’t the case. I was dangerously close to my credit limit on both of my cards. Apparently, I had just reached it on one.
Jamie magnanimously put down his card and offered to pay for everyone. Elizabeth seemed pleased. It was probably the first time in two months that a guy had done that for her.
Even though it was late, I was determined to make the most of my trip, so Elizabeth dropped Jamie and me off at a strip of bars on Santa Monica Boulevard. Jamie got money from a cash machine and lent me two hundred dollars. Considering that I might sleep with him tonight, it made me feel like a prostitute.
We stepped inside a huge, whirling disco emporium that could have been the set for a music video.
I fetched drinks for both of us, since I felt like I owed Jamie something for his generosity. Standing at the bar was a guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty. He wasn’t my usual type; bone thin, he fashioned himself as a goth-punk with dyed red spiky hair, a leather jacket, and an ear pierced in five places. He was adorable, like a little baby punk who had recently come into punkhood.
“Hey,” I said, because I was sloshed, and it just came out.
“Hey,” he said, offering a pale hand.
Goth Boy was an art student who was, not surprisingly, into the goth music scene. He had come to the bar tonight with several friends, but they were nowhere to be found.
When I brought Goth Boy over, Jamie gave me a sideways glance that said, You’ve gone crazy, picking up trash like this. But Goth Boy wasn’t trash. He may have been pierced a few too many times, but he was a sweet kid.
As we talked, I realized what would make me feel better. I pulled Goth Boy aside and asked him if he knew where to get some coke. My buzz had started to wear off and my mood was heading downhill.
“I know someone here who can get it,” Goth Boy said. “How much do you want?”
“Just forty dollars’ worth,” I said. “I hardly ever do it.” I handed him the money and he went off to find his friend.
Jamie glared at me. “I just want you to know, for the record, that I don’t approve of this,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Your disapproval has been noted.”
Fifteen minutes later, Goth Boy came back with a tiny plastic envelope. “Your C,” he said. “I never do it either, but I might partake tonight.” With his emaciated frame, he looked like he did it all the time.
We stumbled towards the restroom, where we shoveled out the coke with my key. Goth Boy was about to unlock the door when I tugged at his sleeve. I pulled him towards me, kissing him, trading our bitter saliva. I felt the fluorescent lights of the restroom bear down on us in the stall.
Through his black jeans, his erection pressed against my leg.
“How old are you anyway?” I asked.
“Nineteen,” he said.
“What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?” I teased.
“Where else am I supposed to hang out?” he asked.
I realized we shouldn’t ignore Jamie, so we hurried back to where he was standing near the bar.
“I’m getting tired,” he said. “I think I’d better be getting back to the hotel.”
“Come on,” I said. “We just got here.”
“It’s almost closing time,” said Goth Boy. “But I know a cool after-hours on Sunset.”
The three of us hitched a ride with a friend of Goth Boy’s. He knocked on the door of the club and a guy in leather pants unlocked it for us. The black-walled dive, complete with a pool table and jukebox, stank of beer and sweat. Even though the place was illegally serving drinks, everyone still obeyed California’s smoking laws, crowding onto a small porch in the back.
As I watched Jamie, I realized he was hanging around entirely for my benefit. He was exhausted from work, he had a plane to catch in five hours, and this was probably the last place in LA where he wanted to be spending his time.
“Why don’t we go back to the hotel room?” Jamie asked. It was almost 3 A.M. and he had to leave for the airport at six.
We piled into a cab and cruised up Sunset to the Standard. Jamie showed his key card to the doorman and we headed upstairs.
Jamie’s room was decorated like a fantasy 1960s motel room, with an orange Formica bathroom, Warhol cow-print curtains, and a bed with a blue vinyl headboard. Goth Boy and I collapsed on the silver beanbag in the corner.
Jamie flopped down on the bed and half-heartedly told us we could help ourselves to the mini-bar.
I felt awful that Jamie seemed so defeated, but the situation had already gone too far. I had brought my date back to his hotel room, the hotel room he had reserved specifically to see me, so we could hang out in LA together, away from the madness in New York. And instead I had brought all the madness with me.
“You guys can stay here if you want,” he said. “I just need a few hours of sleep.” Jamie dimmed the lights and passed out on the bed, fully dressed, his good ear to the pillow.
Goth Boy and I started making out on the beanbag, which wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement, since one of us fell off onto the deep shag carpet every thirty seconds. After this had happened several times, I crawled up onto the bed. Jamie was barely occupying half of it. Goth Boy clambered on top of me and we started kissing again, the kind of wet, messy kisses that only happen when people are drunk and hungry for contact. His mouth tasted like sour milk.
As we kissed, I looked over at Jamie, who was lying less than two feet away from us. He had his eyes half closed, but I could tell he was watching.
As soon as Jamie stepped into the shower, we took our clothes off and crawled under the covers. I felt awful about it, teasing him like this. But we had to be out of the room by eleven, and there wasn’t a moment to waste.
Jamie emerged from the bathroom fully dressed. He packed up quickly and waved goodbye to us from the foot of the bed. It was as if he had barged in on us, not the other way around.
After Jamie left, we both stripped out of our underwear. Goth Boy’s uncircumcised dick was skinny, not very long, and had red veins running down its side. I wasn’t looking forward to putting my mouth on it.
“You’re like the sweetest guy I’ve met in, God, since I don’t know when,” Goth Boy said.
“Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve the compliment.
“No, really,” he said. “I hope I can see you again.”
“I may be out here more if this screenplay thing works out.” I knew there was no guarantee of the elusive “screenplay thing” working out, and if it did, I certainly wouldn’t be spending my time with the likes of Goth Boy. I hoped he realized that, but I had the feeling he didn’t.
I went down on him for thirty seconds, segueing into jerking him off, kissing his chest and rubbing his pierced nipples. After two minutes, he came onto his stomach in short spurts. Part of his semen formed an X, like the frosting on a hot cross bun.
Of course he would come like that, I thought. I wiped his stomach down with the sheet, erasing his handiwork.
“Do you want me to ...” he asked. He started trying to jerk my dick to attention.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”
“But I want to,” he said.
“Really, it’s fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “Let’s just order breakfast.”
I called room service, since Pelham Robertson was paying for it, and ordered as much as two people could possibly eat. It was punishment for all the late nights Pelham had been making Jamie and David work over the past several months.
As Goth Boy and I wolfed down our breakfasts, I noticed he still had a raging erection.
“Must be since I’m diabetic and I have poor circulation,” he said. “Once the blood gets to my dick, it just wants to stay there for a while.”
After showering and getting dressed, I surveyed the room. The bed was stained with Goth Boy’s red hair dye on the pillows, his semen on the sheets, and the room service orange juice I had spilled on the duvet. In an effort to create some ambiance, Jamie had turned one of the wall lamps so it faced the headboard, and there was now an enormous welt where the blue plastic had melted.
We had pulled a Johnny Depp on the room, or as close to a Johnny Depp as ordinary civilians could come.
I left five dollars for housekeeping and we headed downstairs.
Goth Boy and I sat on the steps outside the Standard, feeling more like two vagabonds who had spent a night on the street than two people who had just bunked at a chic hotel. We exchanged numbers.
Elizabeth pulled up in her Range Rover and Goth Boy sauntered forward and put his hand on the rear door.
Thinking he was some kind of drifter, Elizabeth instinctively power-locked the doors as a horrified look crossed her face.
After she realized Goth Boy was the person I had just spent the night with, she unlocked the doors again and we got in.
Goth Boy, who had suddenly become shy, grunted a greeting. He told her he lived in an apartment building near Mann’s Chinese. Elizabeth drove him home.
“I’ll give you a call,” he said after getting out, seeming genuinely sad that the night was over.
“Cool,” I said, though I was sure I would never see him again.
As we pulled away, he stood on the street waving to me.
“My God, Toby, he was so young,” Elizabeth said. “Did he have braces? I saw something that looked like braces!”
“It was probably just his tongue piercing,” I said.
“Kiddo,” Elizabeth said, “you are out of control.”
Right after Elizabeth dropped me off at the airport, my cell phone rang. Sometimes, I thought as I pressed SEND, you know you shouldn’t answer.
“Toby?”
“I’m about to check in,” I said. “This isn’t really a good time.”
“I was just thinking about when I would get to see you again.”
I asked Goth Boy if I could call him back later.
With the same naïveté I had exhibited at his age, he was now sure we would be long-distance boyfriends. I had known, though, from the moment I had met him, that this would be a one-night-and-one-night-only deal.
Still, his needy phone call spurred my conscience. Did I owe him something? What was it?
I feel like this every time, I reminded myself.
Every time I slept with someone, part of me felt guilty.
6
When my plane landed in San Francisco, I experienced a familiar sinking feeling as I anticipated seeing my parents. It was the feeling that there was a continental divide between us that had to be crossed, a gap of understanding to be bridged.
I thought of them as sophisticated people, though San Francisco is a city that tends more toward the provincial than the cosmopolitan. To a longtime San Franciscan, New York carried with it a whiff of sin, of ill intent. My mother had always lived in large cities; she grew up in Rome, the product of an Italian mother and a German father. She attended the American University of Rome, making that choice, she said, because she wanted to marry an American. After completing a major in dance, she moved to New York with her boyfriend, a young man with a trust fund, and they lived at the Plaza Hotel for three months. She failed to find work as a dancer, instead becoming fascinated by the machinations of Seventh Avenue. After the romance faded, she enrolled at F.I.T. and found herself an apartment in the Village with three other Italian girls. In the spring of her senior year, she was rushing several bolts of fabric down to her studio on Twentieth Street on a Friday afternoon when she ran into my father, who was visiting from California. A native of Palo Alto, he had just completed his M.B.A. at Stanford. She showed him the town that weekend, and six months later, they were married. Glad to be freed of New York’s sticky summers and biting winters, she set up her household in San Francisco in 1975.
Thus it was with a mix of fear and regret that my parents viewed my current situation. My mother, after all, could have stayed in Manhattan. She could have married a New York banker and ended up on Park Avenue. She could have started her own boutique in the Village and continued to live as a quasi-Bohemian. My father could have chosen to move out to New York himself. But none of those things had happened. They were now Californians, and I was on my way to becoming a New Yorker, which meant I was a different breed entirely, one not to be trusted, regardless of the fact that I was their only son.
My father greeted me at the gate at SFO with an obligatory grin. He looked the same as always: a little paunchy, soft around the edges, though still handsome.
“How’s New York been treating you?” he asked, the question he always asked.
“Great,” I said, since the truth was too hard to explain.
“Your mom wanted to pick you up, but she’s been busy with her Thanksgiving preparations. You know how she always tries to do a little too much each day.”
He asked about the Web site, and so I told him about the funding crisis, leaving out the part about the possibility of his investing. Explaining it all, combined with the previous evening’s debauchery, was making my stomach turn.
“I don’t know, Toby, it doesn’t sound very stable. How about something more traditional, like marketing or PR? You’re good at that sort of thing.”
“I want to be able to write,” I explained, though he already knew this.
“That’s fine,” he said. “But we don’t always get to do the things we want to do. Sometimes you have to pay your dues.”
When I arrived at my parents’ house on the edge of Pacific Heights, it was filled with the aroma of multiple meals being prepared: a cioppino for tonight, cornbread and pumpkin pie for tomorrow. Mercedes, my parents’ housekeeper, was busily stuffing the turkey, her small hands stuck up its ass. My mother, who still enjoyed cooking, was preparing a salad. She was dressed in a slim pantsuit under an apron; her figure was the result of dieting, yoga, and a complicated liposuction procedure done several years ago that had put her in a girdle for ten days. Her shoulder-length hair, which she still had highlighted every two weeks, was a rich honey blond whose variations she had asked her colorist to copy directly from a real leopard coat of hers.
“My darling,” she said, hugging me. “You look good. Have you lost weight?” My mother’s Italian accent, as much as I was used to it, never failed to surprise me when I hadn’t seen her in a while.
She opened a bottle of champagne. “Our hero has returned from New York!” she exclaimed, toasting me. My stomach was feeling a little better—perhaps simply due to making it home—so I took a sip. I wasn’t looking forward to explaining about CityStyle, about my check not coming through, about borrowing some money to tide me over.
Instead of worrying, I did what I always did when I returned home: I ate.
Despite my mother’s propensity for thinness, she was a master when it came to orchestrating meals. We all dug into the rich red cioppino, spooning out mussels, clams, and prawns into large bowls.
“This Web page,” my mother said after we had been eating for a few minutes. “I don’t really understand it. Every time I pull it up, I find it hard to read. The color combinations, the type: I suppose it is not for people my age.”
“They do try to push the envelope a bit on the design,” I said.
“Readability should be key,” my father said.
“Is it my imagination, or does it have a column called ‘StarFucker’?” my mother asked.
“I don’t write for that,” I said, hoping they hadn’t seen my piece about Real World Guy.
“This woman who says she slept with Mick Jagger? What’s the big deal? Everyone slept with Mick Jagger at some point or another!”
My father laughed. “You never did.”
“I just think there are more important things to write about.”
“I don’t see how the site makes any money,” my father said.
“Actually,” I said, “they’re looking for additional investors. I wanted to ask you two if you were interested.”
