by Paul Monette
5
Sam didn’t get the story straight for three or four days, but it was his own fault. He didn’t pay attention the first couple of times Nick called. He made noncommittal noises here and there and kissed it all good-bye, because he didn’t really believe what Nick was telling him. Sam heard stories all the time. He was used to scaring off married men and men with futures. As soon as it hit them they had gone too far, gotten too involved, they back-pedaled, threw the bolts, and went to unlisted numbers. Sam never got too involved, and his manner with any man went unchanged from the first encounter to the last, assuming he permitted more than one. They didn’t have to worry about him sticking around. He always took the first hint when things were over, as he did now. All he knew was that Nick promised him Thursday afternoon in Bel-Air that they could make it in Nick’s own bed the next day and then take steam and then a swim. And Friday morning at seven, Nick called and woke him up to cancel.
“My friend Peter was missing last night,” he said. “He had an accident.”
Sam knew who Peter was. He was the man they’d found painting at the gate to the ranch. And Sam figured the two of them must have had it out right there, after he took off in the MG. An hour or two later, when Rita left and he and Nick were alone again, they went on a tour of Crook House that was curiously formal, as if Nick were showing it to a buyer from out of town. If he only knew, Sam thought, he’d let me do all the talking. Sam could have walked these rooms in his sleep. Did, some nights. And yet he didn’t mind Nick going on about Varda, the land he sold off in half-acre lots, and the will he never made because he was all alone. Though that was a lie, Sam thought, because what about Frances Dean? Why didn’t he leave it all to her? Sam didn’t say a thing out loud. He merely asked a tourist’s innocent questions. Nick’s version was just what he hoped for—it proved he was the only one who knew the truth.
“He’s all right now,” Nick said, “but I can’t see you today. I’ll call you Monday.”
“Who knows where I’ll be on Monday?”
“Will you call me?”
They left it open. Nick rang up again on Sunday afternoon, when Sam was just back from a heavy session with a trucker who’d driven straight through from Salt Lake City. One of his out-of-towners, who showed up every couple of months and paid top dollar. Sam held the phone in one hand and leafed through a bikers’ magazine with the other. Feeling so satisfied with the animal scene where men said nothing, he was in no mood to give an ear to Bel-Air reasons. Nick seemed to want to tell him even more of the story, and he didn’t know why. If you want to get out of this, Sam wanted to say, then just let go. He didn’t care about Peter’s accident. He didn’t care about Nick, for that matter, and he had a certain specific contempt for Nick because Nick didn’t know it. This was not the same as no affection. He liked Nick well enough. He liked everybody, really. Yet, as Rita had intuited, he had no interest in people, and the stories they lived out were all the same to him. And since he paid no attention to his own story, either, you had to admit he was consistent.
“It was the snake, Sam. The same snake.”
“How do you know that?” he asked, suddenly aware that he might tip over if this went on too long. “Did it introduce itself?”
“It happened in the bunkhouse. Peter was fooling around in the fireplace, and it got him in the arm.”
Sam felt his stomach tie up in a knot. Did it hurt? he wanted to ask. How much? But that was all. He didn’t want to know the story because a hairsbreadth shift in the compass or the clock would have made it his story. But he let Nick talk on for a bit, waiting for some word about the pain.
From the moment the snake flashed, apparently, Peter moved as if he were being filmed for a documentary on the right thing to do. He made a quick tourniquet above the punctures. He picked up a Coors from the bed, pulled the tab, and used it to cut the sign of the cross in his arm, right in the middle of the wound. Then he sucked at it till the poison milked out into his mouth, sweet-sour, the sweet being the blood. Then he staggered to his pickup and drove out of the ranch and down through the canyon to the Pacific Coast Highway, where he floored it to a clinic he’d passed for years in Malibu. He walked in, held out his arm as if for a shot, said “Rattlesnake bite,” and fell over in a dead faint. There wasn’t a clue in his clothes as to who he was, and the slow-witted clinic crew didn’t think to match him up with a car in the parking lot. He came out of the faint in a fever, and it was just before midnight that he dropped the long, delirious Russian tale of his crowns and estates and remembered who he was.
Sam tuned out. The pain stopped. It was just another story, after all. There was so little that he bothered with beyond sex. The Concept of pain still had the power to somersault Sam’s certainty that he was self-sufficient, but even then it took the snake gliding close to his own body to bring it home to him. What’s more, it would have required a bite in the small of the back, something that couldn’t be reached, the pain going deeper and deeper, no truck, no clinic, to keep Sam riveted to Peter’s danger.
“So I can’t see you for a while,” Nick said, as if he were betraying something.
“Why?” Sam asked.
“I just told you. Peter’s got to take it easy. His nerves are shot. It isn’t the snakebite, because it wasn’t really bad. They think the snake must have just finished eating a mouse or something, and, besides, he was old. Anyway, I’ve got to stick close to Peter for a while.”
“For a while,” Sam repeated without inflection. “Well, I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”
“I want to send you some money.”
“Why? You want to put me on retainer like a lawyer? Or a private detective?”
“No reason. I just want to. What’s your address?”
“I don’t give it out.”
“Really?” Nick laughed uneasily. “I guess you don’t get much mail.”
“None. That’s the way I like it.”
“Okay,” Nick said, sorry now that he’d brought it up. “It can wait until I see you.”
“No. I’ll tell you what you do,” Sam said, practical at last, and as if everything else he’d said so tonelessly were meant to be funny, though no one had laughed. “Leave it with the bartender at the Beau-Numero. They know who I am.”
It was seven hundred in cash, and he couldn’t figure out how Nick had arrived at the actual amount. It was certainly more than Sam expected or was accustomed to. Too much, in a way. It ended up irritating him, because he couldn’t seem to communicate to Nick how to observe the proper boundaries. He didn’t see that Sam became extra hard and detached, just to compensate. Of course, he liked hundred dollar bills for their own sake, and he knew, the moment he opened the envelope, that he wouldn’t have to work for a week. But what he liked best about the business of hustling was the cash flow, how it demanded not the slightest shred of his attention. He took it in and paid it out and worked when he wanted and never went hungry. He didn’t need more, and since he didn’t pay taxes, they never went up. He knew about inflation and, like a psychiatrist, added five dollars a trick every couple of years. The only thing that would have changed his rhythm was a lot of money, a vault of it in ingots, with neither strings nor a middle-aged man attached. That was why he’d bided his time for ten years to get back into Rusty Varda’s house.
He didn’t have a list of things in his head he’d been waiting to buy. If it had been seven thousand, maybe he would have gone after a secondhand Porsche, but his mind didn’t run in that direction. All the same, he decided to take the day off and go shopping, struck with the notion of getting rid of seven hundred fast. It certainly didn’t cross his mind to save it. He had no accounts, neither checking nor savings. He kept his money, what he didn’t keep in his pocket, in a coffee can under his bed in the one-room apartment no one else knew the way to. Twisted-up tens and twenties and fifties. So much for security. When he was robbed, he chalked it up to the redistribution of wealth. He didn’t even own a wallet.
Then a Stetson, off-white with a snakeskin band. He wore it when he drove up and over into The Valley. To Studio City, where he wound his way among a thousand houses where no one had ever worn anything that went for three hundred. He tooled into a driveway, leapt out of the MG, and went up and rang at a dead-end bungalow. Rust-streaked stucco and strangling geraniums. The old woman who opened the door couldn’t have cared less who it was, so she wasn’t his grandmother or his prep school Latin teacher.
“I thought you must be in jail,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Two grams.”
“Two, eh?” She seemed impressed. “You must have hooked up with a big tipper.”
She padded into the house, and he followed her as far as the airless dining room, where three more women sat around the table, cards in hand, and waited. They looked like they’d forgotten what the game was, gone beyond it like yogis. If they’d once been the type to cluck at everybody young as reminders of their own children, they’d gotten over it. And no one took a second look at his torso.
The old woman came back from the kitchen with a parcel tied so well she could have sent it overseas. It was a hundred and fifty. She pocketed it and said, “Take care you don’t ruin your nose. You won’t be able to smell a rat when you need to.”
That left him with a hundred and seventy-five, and he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted. What would my father do, he wondered idly as he drove back over into Hollywood. Go out for dinner, maybe. Or buy a share of common stock. Or go get laid. Sam knew he had enough even now to fly to Vegas or San Francisco, the only two places he ever went. He always took his extra money one way or the other. He liked them just about the same and found them very much alike. Like stage sets. All the people posed and spoke lines that wouldn’t have gone over anywhere else and dressed so that they all matched. Of course, Sam could see that Vegas and San Francisco were the opposite of one another, too. But for him they were the two sides of LA, and narcissism was narcissism, whether it flowered in a desert casino or high on a foggy hill with a three-sixty view of The Bay. Sam would have gone right now, flipped a coin and headed for the airport, but he didn’t want to put himself so far from Rusty Varda’s house. He knew that it had to be only one thing. He couldn’t splinter the last of the money. It waited in a wad in his pocket, to be risked all at once—on black, on red, on a single number even.
What’ll I buy, he thought over and over, what’ll I buy?
He went back to his apartment in West Hollywood. His nothing apartment. A double bed and a table with a big color TV that he’d bought hot. An easy chair, vinyl and motel blue. A Pullman unit built into a cabinet for pans and dishes. And a chest of drawers, every one open and spilling clothes. It existed hardly at all as a place to live. He passed the time there. He used it between tricks as a dressing room, though not necessarily so as to dress—more as an actor on location would have used it, doing a scene and resting, back and forth. Which is not to say that clothes didn’t furnish the man. There was a layer of things draped and thrown on everything—Levi’s and corduroys, gym gear, leather jacket, flannel shirts, swimming trunks, and two-toned jerseys for baseball, football, rugby. Street clothes. He lived here without declaring himself. And, of course, if someone had wandered in, a stranger from the world of laws and moral precision, he wouldn’t have been able to accuse Sam of anything. There was no evidence.
He cut the cocaine and did a couple of lines. He poured himself a Jack Daniels over ice and turned on the TV to a game show. A half-hour later, when the coke had dropped its dazzle, he unzipped and pulled out his cock, spit on his hand, and jerked himself off. To keep him from going out on the street. He alternated that way for the rest of the day. Coke. Bourbon. Every three or four hours a go at pumping himself. He was forever aroused. The only way he knew how to disconnect from his life on the make, since it was profession and fantasy-life at once, was to blur the edges and bring himself into a state of low consciousness and numbness of the groin. Unlike so many other hustlers on his beat, he didn’t need a case of joints in his pocket, a six-pack in the bushes, or uppers and downers. He had to be alert to fuck, uncompromisingly fixed in the world at hand, so as to miss nothing in the region of his senses. His fantasies may have been more lush and slit-eyed with lust when he was wrecked, but he didn’t shape them up and work them out in an actual bed unless he was feeling precisely where he was. When he was sober, he could get a hard-on right on cue, hour after hour if he had to. And since the places where he ended up were so unpredictable, four or five in a day sometimes, the real world was pretty much confined to other people’s bedrooms, and it never failed to turn him on.
It was a struggle to take a seven-hundred-dollar vacation, even though he knew he needed it from time to time, and particularly now, with the Varda caper finally starting to happen. If he was going to lay low at his place and let the next set of moves come together in his head, then the fucking had to stop for a bit, because he threw his whole self into it and left no room. So, taking himself in hand, he skimmed off the excess juices until he was drunk enough, and then they ceased to boil and blow all by themselves.
But who knows what his reasoning was? He woke up the next morning and found he’d eaten two steaks and drunk a fifth of bourbon. The hangover had less to do with pain—a headache was kid stuff—than with a sense of being removed from his usual outlook, the mood he settled in when he walked his block on Selma. Normally aggressive, jumpy, unattached, he found himself sent back to a time before he lived by his cock alone. So he liked the morning after. Why he needed to go away as far as his youth in order to think about the present is a curious thing, but on that second day he had no need to will his solitude. He drank the bourbon with plenty of water and sat in the easy chair, head in the clouds, the look on his face like Tom Sawyer’s. He waited until sundown to snort the coke. He walked around naked and tended to catch up his genitals in his cupped hand, kneading and stroking, no sense left of their function as tools. He sought asylum in himself because he’d never had anyone else to ask it of. And he got it. He disdained Nick and Peter for retreating into a couple “for a while” because it showed they weren’t self-possessed.
He was just as drunk that night, but he woke wide-eyed on Wednesday morning, cooked a steak for breakfast, and headed out for the beach. It wasn’t warm enough to lie down in a bathing suit, but he walked the tide-line with his shirt off. He went from the Santa Monica pier to the point where Sunset Boulevard spilled out at the Pacific—four, four and a half miles—and liked the feel of his shoulders burning. He had cruised the waterfront here a thousand times, but today he affected the air of a boy pirate, fashioning nothing for those who watched him. Indeed, he assumed as a consequence that he was next to invisible. In fact, it was a field day for men on the beach who would have been afraid most days to look him in the eye—men without cash, men who kept their shirts on. Because he moved for once without seeing himself in the third person, he was beautiful in a way that was quite unearthly, clean of sin and self.
If there was a way of keeping anyone, he thought, Nick was the sort he would go after. He always knew, when he met up with men who fell for him, the moment when they stopped wanting anythin
g else. They surrendered the quest by believing that Sam was the goal of it all. Sam knew he wasn’t. He would gladly fuck the whole world to prove there was no goal. There was only the accumulation of events. Sam couldn’t get enough of new and better men, and he’d guessed right off that Nick was the same. They both wanted everything else, the search for which went on all the time and everywhere. Sam thought that if he could get Nick through the present phase—the cowboy buddies who sloughed off the world and set out for the wilds, their hearts unvalentined and freed to the weather—then perhaps they could go on to other things, each on his own. And they could use each other to measure themselves against. They could even try, for variety, to outdo one another in seeing how far they would go. And, of course, there would be the added business of Nick’s money thrown in, share and share alike. To Sam, it had the earmarks of a perfect relationship, except for the fact that nobody ever stuck to the ground rules, even when they were perfect. That was why he was better off alone. But if he had his way entirely, he thought as he climbed up on a lifeguard’s chair and lit up a joint, Nick was the man he’d bet on.
Wednesday night, he’d already decided, would have to be the end of his holiday because he had to make sure that his territory was clear for the weekend. He didn’t want to have to fight it out on his block with some punk newcomer just hitchhiked in from Dallas, his lifeless college diploma rolled in his knapsack. Anyone who knew the streets at all knew where Sam hung out. Three days wouldn’t concern anyone. They would assume what the Studio City pusher assumed, that he’d landed a big tipper for a long binge. Or perhaps, they would think, he was doing penicillin for a case of clap he couldn’t ignore anymore, for fear of making things sticky for his genteel customers. Sam knew he would be expected, on his return, to look like the conquering hero, as if he’d one-upped the regular work, where he normally went for thirty-five to fifty for an hour’s hot job, not including the traveling time back and forth in air-cooled Jags and Mercedes. If he seemed the slightest bit shaky or even fatigued, the rumor would go out that he had started to slip. You were up or you were down in the higher-priced streets. If you got sick or you went too deep into the medicine chest, it all passed you by. There were other streets to move to, and the money was still quite good now and then, though you couldn’t be so choosy about the clientele. Because he was aware of all this, Sam knew as the sun inched toward the Pacific that he had to be back in business before midnight.
