Justify My Sins

by Felice Picano

  “So I heard. It sounds extremely icky.”

  “Icky doesn’t begin. If one was a real guy, they’d fuck and have it over with. If they were both gay men, they’d fuck and have it over with. If they were Lesbians, they’d discuss fucking and have it over with. But unfortunately, they are sensitive, semi-intellectual heterosexuals . . .” Joel’s eyes rolled as he accepted Martini #2 and began to bite the edge of the glass and sip. “They have to make a big megilah over what seems to me to be a few overly lubricated hormones, instead acting like they’re Paolo and Francesca for Chrissakes and, yes, I do know who ‘dem old Italianos are.”

  “Comp Lit One?” Victor asked.

  “Comp Lit Two.” Joel reached over and put a nice looking and very well manicured hand over Victor’s in a nice, not grabby way.

  “I’ll be so very grateful no matter what you do to alter in any way this—mess!”

  “How grateful?”

  “I’ll take on all your books and try my best to sell them.”

  “Even Nights in Black leather?”

  “Maybe not that one. Honestly, Victor! Who in the world would option that for film?”

  Saith the queer to the queer, Victor thought, about a queer novel. He answered, “Rainer Maria Fassbinder.”

  “Who? What?! No!”

  “Kid you not, Joel. Fassbinder read the German translation which is the best selling gay book ever in that country, and he told me he was very, very interested. We had three international phone calls. He wanted to set the action-murder-opening in Hamburg’s shipping yards. Described in detail how he’d do it.”

  “Brilliantly of course. But Fassbinder, alas, is history now.”

  “So find me another Fassbinder.”

  “Easiest thing in the world. Just kidding. But look, I’ll certainly go to bat for the first and third novels.”

  “My little play just closing Off-Off Broadway? Is that too gay?” Victor tried.

  “It’s too little! And,” Joel admitted, “probably too gay, too. I did see it. Two months back. I was on a flying trip there to see two clients, including one client from hell, and I saw it listed in the papers and went. It was cute.”

  As later diners began coming in, they filtered over to the area where Victor and Joel were sitting, and of course they knew Joel and so soon there were a half dozen at the table, all in “the Business,” natch, and all treating Joel well, or at least as an equal, and all seemingly happy to make Victor’s acquaintance, whether they’d read the one liners in the dailies or not.

  The last pair of guys to show up were a few years older than Victor. One was a dissolutely handsome actor with hair falling over his pitted-skin face who had never fulfilled his earlier potential but whose baby sister was busy working all the time. The other was an actor/producer, equally good-looking, aristocratic. As Joel quickly became engaged with the other man, and as the topics Victor and Joel were interested in had been discussed and done with, Victor and the actor/producer became instant table buds.

  Joel loudly decided to join them and some other people for dinner right there, and though invited, Victor demurred. He had phone calls to make and receive from back East.

  As he was leaving, the actor/producer he’d just met said, “He’s some guy, huh? He signing you up? Or is he tucking you in nights?”

  “He’s trying to sign me up.” Then, “‘He tucking you in’?”

  “When I was between wives,” the actor/producer laughed. “I used to leave my door unlocked and he’d come by very late at night and”—the guy looked around to see if anyone was nearby watching or listening, and when he determined they weren’t, he made a closed fist hand to his mouth gesture a couple of times. “Joel would—you know!” He laughed. “No muss, no fuss! I slept like a baby!”

  Victor laughed with him.

  As Victor stood up to take off, Joel gestured something vague at him: perhaps see you later? Or was it tuck you in later? Who knew for sure.

  As Victor drove away, he thought about it. He didn’t always remember to lock the Mulholland Drive House. Odd fact but true. Back east he’d carefully lock every triple lock. Here, he seldom thought about it, missed locking up half the nights, and he didn’t kick himself the next day when he found the deck doors open or even the front door unlocked.

  Maybe Joel had become more subtle.

  And maybe Victor would find himself tucked in soon himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-three

  “I’m a little confused by the ending of the scenario”

  Frank said—pretty much out of nowhere.

  They had been working on the script itself, the opening ten minutes, that initial set-up of Theo’s life at his office, his solitary life at home in his studio apartment, the phone calls just as he got home nearly every day with no one on the other end or someone suddenly hanging up. And then that fateful phone call when the person on the other end didn’t hang up but instead turned out to be a young woman with a seductive British voice asking if he was the same Theo that a friend of hers had dated briefly. Theo’s guarded response, “No.” But then their initial conversation, which went on for some time and would lead to everything else that happened, that would eventually change both their lives.

  Victor had assumed the basics of this Perry scenario had been all worked out two weeks ago, no? That’s why they were working on the script itself now.

  “O-kay,” Victor said slowly, hoping his annoyance at the sudden shift in his creative thinking remained in at least audible check. “What’s the problem? And where? Where, exactly?”

  Fortunately for both of them, Frank knew exactly where the problem lay. He wasn’t vague the way virtually all the people Victor had ever worked for in film or TV tended to be, with their “feelings” and their “impressions” and their oh-so-vaunted sense of something being “not quite right,” which was about as useful to a writer as a quart of lemonade was to an ocean. Didn’t they realize how much contempt professional writers had for “feelings” and “intuitions” that weren’t their own and thus immediately accessible?

  Frank’s problem had to do with exactly where in Anna-Marie’s suddenly darkened apartment she and Theo would each be at that climatic moment near the end of the script when Theo would use the key stolen from her building’s super to get inside.

  Perfect! This Victor could deal with.

  As he began explaining, Frank stood up from the desk and went behind the other large leather-covered club chair in the room, where he crouched down. “I’m Anna-Marie hiding. Now where does Theo enter?”

  So they acted it out, the exact motions, the counted number of steps each would make in the darkness (in the “film-set darkness”—after all, the audience had to be able to see them) vis-a-vis each other, and where each of them were as the two characters gestured and said certain key words of their final dialogue.

  Victor purposely stumbled about a bit, being Theo carrying a flashlight with a faulty battery connection. Frank only crawled around the big office, being the crazed and terrified young woman avoiding Victor’s determined, night-blinded young man.

  Thus, a kind of dance ensued, until both of them somehow ended up at the corner at the front door of Anna-Marie’s apartment, where she was trying to escape and where he was trying to cut her off.

  Still crawling, the captured Frank stopped and looked up at Victor standing above him only inches away. “Gosh. That works pretty well, doesn’t it?”

  Even so, Frank had them go back four positions and repeat their movements.

  Once again their movements dovetailed so they collided at the front door.

  “It worked again!” Frank was amazed.

  Victor pointed up the obvious. “It’ll always work.”

  Frank stood up. “I was sure it wouldn’t.”

  “I visualized it for the book, Frank.. And if it worked for the book, why wouldn’t it work in the film?”

  “You mapped out both apartments?” Frank was baffle
d.

  “In detail. I had to. Theo already has the floor plan in his head from her downstairs neighbor, remember?” Victor said. “The witchy older refugee? The one you want a far-too-young Ellen Burstyn to play? So we know Theo knows what he’s doing once he causes all the lights in the building to short out and goes upstairs.”

  “I guess we must,” Frank said in a totally uncertain tone of voice. Then added, “Never mind, then. Let’s go back to the opening lines of conversation in the script again.”

  They did precisely that for the next hour or more. But Victor now had more ammunition to add to his next conversation with Sam Allen Haddad about how Frank Perry was really beginning to “lose it.”

  That saddened Victor. Even as it convinced him further that he and Sam were definitely doing the right thing, lining up people like the Monster Girl Actress and the Agent-formerly-from-the-maitre’d’s-station on their side to help salvage Black Hawk Films—and Frank, too, if it came to that—from the Movie From Hell Perry was intent upon making. What he still wasn’t sure he believed was why Perry was making the movie: that Frank was in love with this unknown woman. Mrs. Perry, a chic, sophisticated, and it turned out pretty famous biographer had shown up at the office twice, and Victor was sufficiently taken with her to wonder if Sam was making it all up.

  “You know, she helped me and Eleanor. Financially,” Frank said.

  He meant Ellen Burstyn.

  “She got back her investment, of course. Other people helped us. In the beginning the biggest help came from Rock Hudson. I guess he and Eleanor had worked together on a picture before I met her, and he was at this party when we began talking about our first production together, her writing, me co-writing and directing. Rock said it sounded like a good project and he’d happened to have a windfall and he’d like to invest in our new company. He’s the nicest guy.”

  Victor wanted to tell Frank that he knew Rock Hudson, or rather Roy Sherer, Jr., but in a more personal and social way than from some infra dig Hollywood party. A mutual friend of theirs, another writer, had introduced them for a “semi-glamorous gay weekend” a few years back when Victor was in San Francisco just finishing a book tour.

  The three of them had met for dinner—Roy’s treat—in a Market Street restaurant where the actor, by now a middle-aged and somewhat stout man, was known by the staff. They’d moved from there to a glory-hole palace South of Market that the other writer had been visiting regularly: two floors of little slatted wooden cells with no ceiling, a door, and four-inch round holes carved in the walls for someone’s genitals or face or ass to come at you for particular attention. After about forty minutes of that, Victor and his buddy had met at the metal fretwork bridge connecting the upper level of cells, both of them sexually sated.

  Then Roy showed up in a grumpy mood that he couldn’t hide. No surprise. Victor had wondered when the writer first announced this particular stop if the patrons would snub Roy because of his middle-age spread. While Roy went to take a piss, the friend said, “My error. And a big one. This is not a good sign for the rest of our night.” Victor knew they were headed to the Top of the Mark at midnight to hear Barbara Cook, and then tomorrow at noon they would all be flying down to L.A. for parties. “Look, if worse comes to worse,” Victor stage-whispered, “Steer Roy into one of the darker rooms, and I’ll do him myself!”

  Just then Roy came their way and was half-seriously cruised by a younger guy. While their mutual friend tried to persuade the reluctant actor to follow the lad, Victor cut him off by going around another way and was able to utter what in future telling of the anecdote became the classic line: “Psst. Hey kid. Wanna blow a movie star?”

  Turned out the younger guy already knew Roy, but from TV. He’d regularly watched Roy’s successful series, McMillan and Wife. So it worked out fine. Roy was in high spirits the rest of the night.

  Some minion had left Roy’s Rolls Corniche—pale yellow with fawn rag top—at the Van Nuys airport, and when they arrived there the next morning, it was driven up and they cruised, top down, in summery weather climbing off the 101 up to Roy’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

  The actor had been going on about how that particular November Sunday happened to be his birthday, and how he was certain there would be a special gift from his agent or manager or some combo of them and friends waiting for him at the house. He was excited, a little kid.

  Sure enough, when they arrived, there were mylar balloons everywhere and twenty pretty guys between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two in various colors of Speedos frolicking in the pool and upon the terrace.

  “Who are they?” Victor had to ask.

  Roy pulled the Rolls into his garage and without missing a beat turned to him and said “The blondes are called Scott and the dark haired ones are named Randy.”

  How could Victor possibly tell Frank this story about someone they knew in common, but whom Victor knew to be witty and unique and quite different from what most people in Hollywood, or even the world, thought?

  Victor couldn’t. Of course, Frank knew Victor was gay. There was no doubt about that because Sam knew it. Virtually all the people Victor met or saw through either of these two men must therefore know he was gay. Which was just the way Victor lived his life and how he wanted to. Except, well, no one in L.A. ever spoke of it, alluded to it, referred to it, mentioned it, breathed it, or thought it—no one!

  It was as though Stonewall and the Gay Activists Alliance had never happened. As though gay plays, gay novels, gay poetry, gay Community Centers, gay newspapers, gay magazines, gay politics, and the entire network of intramural gay liberation and personal gay dirt and gay lit bickering that, let’s be frank, had been the main features of most of Victor’s lived and chatted-about life for the past decade in Manhattan and San Francisco and everywhere else but here, really simply didn’t exist! All of it made suddenly invisible.

  Thinking back, that actor/producer Noah What’s-His-Name, was the only person Victor had met so far in all the cocktails, drinks, dinners, lunches and work-sessions out here this trip to ever even refer to anything gay at all. And then probably only because he had enough sense to “get” Victor in a slightly different way alongside Joel Edison—Joel, a man whose behavior was always just one eeny-weeny twig of kindling away from bursting into a raging inferno. Even then, Noah had probably thought, “Vic’s a nice-looking straight guy. Joel’s probably blowin’ him on the sly, the way he did me.”

  No wonder Victor needed the grounding phone calls back East so badly. There were two calls daily with Mark, who was increasingly frazzled and discombobulated (but just as loving) as the Bar exam loomed. The semi-weekly ones with Gilbert were less so. He was actively hiding something, probably a positive HIV diagnosis, and doubtless more and worse. The weekly calls with his agent, Marcie, were even more distant. Truth be told, she was less interested in Victor these days. Marcie seemed to have done a one-eighty turn: she had talked him into it and now she considered script writing to be a chore, not an art, even when doing so for someone as well-known and honored as Frank Perry. It was on the same level as cleaning out your garage every decade. And as such, about as serious for one’s actual literary career as Victor having two small plays done in two gay theaters that sat sixty, tops, and with most of the cast on “Equity waivers, for Chrissakes.” Especially when the film script under question was from a book that was—hold me, I’m choking here a little—seven years old! and might expect to have had most of its sales life comfortably behind it. Where was Victor’s new hit novel? That was the unspoken undertone of all his and Marcie’s conversations these days. That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Not what happens twenty minutes into Act Two. Didn’t he have even a novel idea they could bat around, she all but begged whenever they spoke?

  Victor’s gay life in West Hollywood from his previous visit proved of no help with the Gay Silence Is Not That Golden Problem. There was Andy, the Voyeuristic Goat Boy. There were the rare dinners with Isher
wood and Don Bachardy who, though sweet and intelligent, caring and intellectual as all get-out, weren’t really very poofy themselves. And who else? The beautiful and fun Perfect Paul? Gone to pasture. Or at least, according to several people, back to Racine, Wisconsin. (And, Victor hoped, to lasting health, although he seriously doubted it and feared exactly the opposite.)

  Victor’s one foray into the vaguely Roman-esque Hollywood Spa last week had ended after less than twenty minutes when he entered the steam room and overheard, unseen, two persons dishing, one mentioning that he was there in the bathhouse. Victor had crept out, unseen (he hoped) through the mist.

  Admittedly the Detour bar had astoundingly—given that ultra-dreary opening—survived and seemed to be thriving. As did a new place a mile away, Cuff’s, smaller and more fun, which someone described as “Totally time-stuck in 1968. But, like, in a good way.”

  But coming from Benedict Canyon and Mulholland Drive, either bar was almost an hour’s drive one way. And while the drive there would go fast because of the expectation, the sad reality was, in such back room “candy-stores” Victor never quite knew when to stop. He wouldn’t come back until 4:00 a.m., half drunk, more than half drugged, and totally exhausted. Approaching home, going fifty miles per hour, he would doubtless miss one of the many curves and plow the Z into a bank of Lillies of the Nile or a ranch-style four-car garage, ending up in someone’s kidney shaped pool, just like Roy’s co-star, the divinely perky Doris Day, in—was it That Touch of Mink or Move Over, Darling?

  No wonder, then, when Victor got wind one afternoon, through the overheard conversation of two not-at-all-uncute guys in a Melrose Boulevard Fern Bar Slash Lunch Place, that a glory-hole-style “private club” had opened not that far away, he leaned over sweetly, flirted like a hundred dollar whore, then bluntly asked for the address.

  Even then, he went to purchase the twenty buck membership on a Wednesday night, wanting to keep as low a profile as possible. In Nueva Jorck, this would never happen. He’d go to the tubs any time, anywhere, from The Wall Street Sauna near the Battery, way uptown to the St. Nicholas Baths in Harlem. He’d hang out with anyone, joining George Stavrinos, whose Barney’s ad drawings were splashed over four pages of every Sunday Times, and get into a four way with two Broadway gypsy dancers from Mame. Only the featured actors were at all circumspect in the Apple, and even they would cruise you off most any Manhattan street. Victor had made it with two genuine (and handsome) stars: Larry Kert and Brad Davis, both of whom lived a few blocks from his West Village duplex.