That morning was clear but cooler than it had been, which made for lovely running weather. I ran for an hour and then headed back. On my way past the front of Moira’s house I saw that her morning newspaper was waiting on the sidewalk so I picked it up, intending to toss it onto her porch for her to find when she got out of bed.
When I picked it up I glanced at the headlines to see if the world was still in one piece. And the blood in my veins turned ice cold in an instant. Front and center on that morning’s newspaper was a crystal clear, full-color picture of Derrick—in bed with Bill. Both of them were bare chested and appeared to be asleep. The headline said something to the effect of “St. James Ditches Wife for New Boy Toy.” I guess that Bill was the Boy Toy.
Instead of just tossing the newspaper on her porch, I started pounding on the door and ringing the bell over and over and over again until Moira appeared, still partly asleep.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when she saw my expression.
In answer, I simply held up the morning newspaper.
“That son of a…,” she said.
I simply turned and walked away, heading back to my place. Slatter was still sleeping, but I was too mad to care about being quiet. He awoke with a start and asked me what was wrong. In answer I simply said, “Go to the front house and ask Moira to show you. I’m going to take a shower, and then I need to make some decisions. I may need your help.”
While he was gone, I showered and dressed and started looking around the place to make some assessments. While I stood there I heard voices raised outside. When I stepped outside I saw Slatter arguing with Moira. All I was able to catch was, “If you even had a hint of this and didn’t say anything….”
Walking up to her, I said, “You knew?” My voice apparently held a certain bit of anger.
“No! I didn’t know.”
“But you suspected something.” Statement, not a question.
“When I couldn’t get answers from people, I knew there was a problem. I can always get people to talk and fill me in on what’s happening.”
“Slatter, I need some help packing so I can get out of here.”
“No! Mark, no! Don’t leave!” Moira practically begged. “I don’t want to lose you!”
“I can’t stay here and run the risk of running into your client with my former scum-sucking pig of a boyfriend—who didn’t even have the balls to face me and tell me the truth! And if they ever show up to see you, I would appreciate it if you would castrate that lying sack of shit.”
“Which one?” she asked.
“Elmer.”
“Who’s Elmer?” Slatter asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I need to pack a bag and get out of here.”
“Mark, please don’t move out. Go away for a few days. Take a break. But don’t make any rash decisions. Your classes are underway. You like them. Don’t let their stupidity take that away from you. You’ve worked too hard to get where you are.”
I nodded without saying a word before stepping into the house. Almost immediately I was back out with a question. “Do you have any contacts at the newspaper?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’d like two things. I’d like as many copies of that front section as I can get so that I can spread them around—widely. And I’d like to know how they got the photo. Who took it? How did it get to them? Simple things.”
“I’ll call them right now.”
“I will honor your wishes and not make any sudden decisions, but I do have to go away for a little while.”
“I understand. Any idea where you’ll go?” she asked.
“Not a clue.” Turning to Slatter, I asked, “Can I stay at the dorm with you for a couple of days?”
“I’ve got a roommate.”
I nodded. “Do you like to drink?” I asked Slatter.
“I have been known to do so on occasion. I’m certainly not super good at it, but I’d be glad to go out and have a drink with you somewhere this afternoon or this evening.”
“Good. First, though, I’d like to get the rat bastard’s stuff cleaned out and thrown out.” The feeling was cathartic. Finding Bill’s stuff, most of which my parents and I had bought for him, and throwing it out the door in anger, felt good. The valuable things I kept, but his clothes, anything personal—out it went. I asked Moira to have the locks changed; she agreed and called a locksmith to come out that day.
Slatter and I went out and got into the car. I agreed to come back in a couple of hours to pick up the new keys, and then I’d figure out my next move.
“Think your contact at the newspaper can have the copies for me by then, and maybe an answer on how they got the picture and who took it?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Slatter and I got in the car and drove. I didn’t have any destination in mind, simply driving the car where the traffic seemed to allow. He didn’t say anything but simply sat with me and kept me company. After two hours of aimless wandering I drove us back to Moira’s. She greeted me with a set of new keys, a stack of three hundred copies of the newspaper, and a mystery. No one seemed to know who had taken the picture. It had come to the newspaper anonymously. What she did know was that it had been picked up by just about every news service and was in the process of spreading worldwide.
I put the newspapers in the apartment, kept about a dozen with me to keep my anger stoked, and got back in the car with Slatter. I asked him if he could drive, which he readily agreed to do.
“Stick close to him,” she said to Slatter as we departed.
“Of course.”
Chapter 18
Diversion
SLATTER and I went to the campus. He packed a backpack and we drove to Palm Springs. We checked into one of the big gay hotels, parked the car, and proceeded to get totally, absolutely, completely smashed. We drank, we danced, we were slutty, we were aggressive, we were boisterous—and I tried very hard to forget that I had been betrayed by the only man I had ever loved.
At something like four o’clock the next morning, we were strongly encouraged to go home and sleep. We crawled back to our room and collapsed.
When I woke up, I seriously was afraid I was going to die. After thirty seconds of such worry, I started to wonder why I couldn’t die. I was in pain. I was nauseous. The room was spinning. I wanted to crawl into a black hole and pull it in after me. I tried lying very still, hoping that it would make the pain go away. Didn’t work that way.
I tried pulling a pillow over my face, thinking that maybe that would stop the spinning. All it accomplished was to move my head and make me more dizzy and nauseous. While I had the pillow there I thought perhaps I should just push it down and try to suffocate myself, escaping this misery I was in.
Finally, my alcohol-addled brain was able to process a few facts and had figured out that I had been drinking. With a pillow over my face I couldn’t tell where we were, but then I remembered we had driven to Palm Springs. We were probably in our hotel room bed.
Wait. We? As gently as possible, so as not to cause more vertigo, I moved my left leg and felt around the bed. Yep. We. There was someone else in bed with me. Leg felt bare. I wondered…. Too much thinking.
After a few minutes of serious efforts to focus and stabilize the world, I started to slowly remove the pillow from my head so that I could look around a little. It wasn’t Bill in my bed, it was Slatter. While I had been lying on my back, he was the inverse, lying on his stomach. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I saw his back and shoulders. The man had a nice tan. He wasn’t a pumped-up gym bunny, but he certainly wasn’t overweight or out of shape either.
Okay. Moving my eyes was working. There was still pain. Oh yes, most definitely there was pain. Lots of pain. Too much pain. But I thought—yes, I was up to thinking by that point—I thought that if I could get upright and go drink some water I might be able to chase the taste of rotting rat nest out of my mouth. And the water would probably help the pain, since I’d read somewhere th
at alcohol dehydrates the body.
Gently, ever so gently, I moved my legs toward the edge of the bed. Very slowly, I rolled onto my side and lifted the covers. Yes, I was naked. Didn’t know how I got that way. Didn’t care. Trying to simply roll out of bed to kneel on the floor seemed more reasonable. Anything seemed better than trying to stand up immediately.
It was not effortless, but I was making some progress. I was out of bed, kneeling beside the bed, but I was out of the bed. I didn’t know at that point if it would be more reasonable to try to stand and walk across the room or simply crawl like the incapacitated animal that I was.
In the end, I crawled about halfway and then slowly stood up. The room spun, but at least by then I had a wall I could grab hold of. I eased my way into the bathroom, drank some cold water—a little, slow baby steps seemed to be in order. I turned on the water in the shower. The pain! Oh, the pain! The water was so loud! It was making so much noise! Arrgghh!
When the temperature felt about right, as near as I could tell, I decided that maybe my body in the spray of the water would cut down on the noise a little so I stepped into the water and simply stood there, letting the warm water wash over my head. Never in my life had I been so grateful for water-saver shower heads as I was that morning. Had this hotel used the old-fashioned high pressure water I would have been miserable from all of the dozen of sprays of water pounding against my body.
The water felt… good, actually. It almost felt like the water was washing some of my pain and misery away. This was a good thing.
I have no idea how long I stood there in the shower. Had I been at home I would have run out of hot water by that point, but since we were in a hotel there was unlimited hot water, or at least unlimited enough for my purposes that morning.
After some amount of time—could have been a minute, could have been ten minutes, could have been ten days, I didn’t know how long—I felt my skin starting to wrinkle. Since I didn’t want to turn into a prune, I reached down and turned off the water, as gently as I could. Okay. Water off. Quiet. Feeling around, I reached for a towel and tried to wipe away the water.
I stepped out of the shower, dried off, drank a bit more water, and slowly made my way back into the bedroom part of the room. Pulling out a chair, I sat down. Sometime since I’d left the bed, Slatter had woken.
“Am I dead?” he quietly asked from the bed.
“No. We only wish we were dead.”
“I… will… never… touch… tequila… again… as… long… as… I… live.”
“Water helps—if you move slow getting up. Shower felt good.”
I reached for my backpack—slowly, of course—and found some Advil that I had stashed in one of the pockets. Even though I would rather stay still, I returned to the bathroom, got a glass of water, and downed three of the tablets.
Slatter had made it upright by that point but was standing still—naked—in the middle of the room. I must have been feeling a little better because I was checking out his body. Big dick, I mean really big dick, flat stomach, a little bit of hair just above his crotch, but his chest was smooth. As he slowly eased his way toward the bathroom I saw that he also had a glorious ass.
Even before I had a boyfriend, I admired men’s asses. When all I had were some pictures I kept stashed away, I already knew what part of the male body I admired the most. So I felt I had some expertise in judging Slatter’s ass to be a good one.
I helped him out by turning on the water. He reacted the same way I had, finding the water to be too loud. While he stood in the shower I handed him a glass of water and shoved three Advil tablets into his mouth. He swallowed and handed the water back to me. As I had done a few minutes earlier, Slatter simply stood, allowing the water to wash over his body, not making any attempt to wash himself. Neither of us showered to get clean that morning—we were just trying to wash away some of the agony.
When he finished, I helped him towel off, and then we both sat down on the bed, trying to minimize our movements for fear of reigniting the vertigo and making the room swirl around again. Over the hours that followed, we slowly—very slowly—started to feel a little less like we wanted to die, and only sort of felt miserable.
“Do you want some food?” I asked after a couple of hours.
His scowl and glare in my direction gave me all the answer I needed.
We sat for another hour, and then I decided to take another shower, this one actually using some soap along with the water. When I came back out, rather than crawl into bed once again, I decided to get dressed. I was growing restless looking at the four walls of our small room.
“Want to go outside?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“Why?”
“Change of scenery.”
“I can feel miserable right where I am.” He thought about it for a minute and added, “I want to go home. If I have to feel this horrible, I would like to do it in my own bed with my own pillow. While you go out, I’ll try to shower again, and then let’s leave for home.”
“Okay,” I said very simply, liking the logic of what he was proposing. The drive I wasn’t so sure about, but the logic—sure, I could get behind that.
An hour later we were in my car and on the road. Slatter was lying back in the passenger seat, and I was behind the wheel. The drive was a grand total of 107 miles, which usually wouldn’t seem like much, but with LA traffic we were usually looking at two hours, at least. I was not looking forward to the noise, the movement, the jostling, the stress of driving for two hours, but I did it. I simply focused on my pillow at the end of the drive and put the pedal to the metal and moved us on down the road.
When traffic all around us slowed down we knew that there were likely cops doing something nasty up ahead, like writing speeding tickets, so we slowed down with the pack, and then after we passed that area we would all speed up again. By sticking with the pack we made pretty good time. Slatter hadn’t moved in two hours, but I could tell he wasn’t sleeping.
At one hour and forty-seven minutes I stopped in front of his dorm and asked him if he needed help getting inside.
“No. I’ll crawl.”
“Slatter, thank you for being there.”
“Glad I could help, but remember, next time no tequila. No alcohol of any kind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a corner to curl up in. Bye, Mark.”
I drove directly home and did my own equivalent of finding a quiet, dark place to curl up and lick my wounds. Twelve hours and more Advil later I was finally starting to feel a little better. At least I no longer felt like warmed-over day-old roadkill, which, all things considered, was a step in the right direction.
A little bit of toast in my belly and some tea helped tremendously. More Advil and a nap later and I was back and ready to take on the world once again.
Since it was technically still the weekend—even though it was late on Sunday night—I still had some errands I needed to do, most important among them grocery shopping. I always enjoyed grocery shopping and found that doing it late in the evening was actually a perfect time. The store was quieter, and I got in and out much more efficiently.
Back home I got everything put away—that task wasn’t made any easier by doing it late in the evening, but it sort of went with shopping. It finally occurred to me that, for a little while at least, I hadn’t thought about what drove me into a drunken stupor in Palm Springs. I was envisioning my life as it was now redefined, and I knew that I could do this. I was going to be pissed and hurt for a long time, but at least I had come to the conclusion that I could do this. I could get by on my own. And maybe with time I would even find someone new to love, someone who wouldn’t make such an ass out of himself by running off with an older man without telling me.
Out of curiosity, I had bought the Sunday newspaper while I was grocery shopping (even though the Monday paper was already hitting the newsstands by the time I bought it) just so that I could check to see if there was any follow-up to the scan
dalous photograph and headline that greeted me yesterday morning and sent me into such a state.
Unfortunately, there was more. I guess news of America’s number one heartthrob blasting the closet doors open and coming out with great fanfare was front page news in this town, and probably elsewhere as well. At least the Sunday newspaper didn’t have any more shots of Bill and Derrick in bed together. No, what I found in the Sunday newspaper were photos that showed the two of them outdoors somewhere—I could only assume in Australia—playing Frisbee. Another couple of photos showed them reclining on a blanket, enjoying what looked like a picnic lunch.
It was just too terrible that they had to suffer through such harsh working conditions, I thought bitchily. I had earned the right. There was one more photograph that showed the two of them smiling at each other over a candlelight dinner in some small café. They were both casually dressed, with jackets and open-collared shirts. Damn them both for looking so fucking hot!
There were apparently no additional details to report, only the photographs. There had been no press releases, no news conferences, no major announcements of any sort. When I followed the front page lead to the inside page of the newspaper, I found that there actually had been a statement as well as a press release, both from Moira in her professional capacity. Her statements simply said that she did not know why someone seemed determined to destroy her client’s hard-earned reputation with such scandalous rumors, and that she and Derrick’s wife (nicely done, Moira) were appalled and deeply concerned about such an unfounded attack on Derrick’s character. She reiterated that Derrick was a happily married man with a loving wife.
Okay. Good words, but they were buried inside. The photos of Derrick and his new “boy toy” (my old boy toy) were on the front page. I tossed the paper aside and went to bed. It was late, and I had school the next day.
Go West Young Man Page 14
