The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  He pretended to think it over. “No.”

  “I’ll find you an ashtray.”

  “You like the coat?” he shouted. “It’s Versace.”

  “Who would’ve guessed?” I replied, slipping, gratefully, into his mocking locutions. I handed him a saucer for his cigarette.

  Richie was the kind of friend who touched down in my life like a whirlwind, rearranged the landscape and then blew on. I wasn’t always happy to see him, but today I was glad because whatever he wanted—and it was always something—would, at the very least, drive me out of my grief.

  He picked up the saucer, scrutinized it, pretended to weigh it in his palm. “Baccarat?”

  “Cost Plus,” I said. “It’s good to see you, Richie. How are you?”

  “Not dead yet,” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth like Bogart.

  “No, really.”

  “Really? I feel great, Henry.”

  Richie had AIDS (“But darling,” he liked to say, “all the best people do.”) I’d met him at a hospital where I’d gone to visit Josh. Richie came into Josh’s room, trailing his IV behind him, an unlit cigarette clamped in his mouth and excused himself to the small balcony off the room where, with Josh’s permission, he could light up. At one point, he’d been so sick that he’d planned his memorial service, but then he’d bounced back and now he was on a regimen of protease inhibitors, the new miracle antivirals that were bringing so many people with AIDS back from the brink of death.

  “My viral load is almost undetectable,” he continued. “My T-cells have gone from fourteen to eight hundred and they’re still climbing.” He had dropped all affectation and there was awe in his voice. “If this isn’t cured, Henry, I don’t know what cured means.”

  “I’m happy for you,” I said.

  “It could all change tomorrow,” he replied. “I know people the drugs stopped working for, or never worked for, and no one knows about their long-term effectiveness, but I’ve never lived in the long term. I’m sorry Josh didn’t get to try them.”

  “I am, too,” I said. “He was like the soldier who gets killed the day before armistice.”

  “I think about the people who didn’t make it—Mario, Steven—and wonder, why me?”

  “Every lawyer knows you never ask a question of a witness to which you do not already know the answer. It works in life, too. How’s Joel?”

  “Three things in life are certain,” Richie grumbled. “Death, taxes and Joel Miller.” He grabbed one of the transcripts piled on the coffee table. “People versus Bailey. Pearl? Beetle? F. Lee?”

  “None of the above. It’s an appeal from a murder conviction.”

  “Oh,” Richie cooed, excitedly. “Was the victim famous?”

  “No, a domestic dispute. Mr. Bailey killed his wife.”

  “Breeders are so literal-minded. Hasn’t anyone explained to them you can torture your spouse without ever laying a finger on them? Every fag knows that.” He lit another cigarette. “Of course, I blame it on the schools. Instead of forcing high school kids to read Romeo and Juliet, they should assign them Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Because, really, Henry, which one of those two great works of literature do most marriages resemble? I’ll give you a hint, Liz Taylor played me in the movie.”

  I grimaced. “I know it’s considered liberated to throw around the words ‘fag’ and ‘faggot,’ but they’re still hate words to me.”

  He stiffened slightly at the correction. “People can pack as much hate into ‘gay’ as they can into ‘fag.’”

  We had covered this terrain many times. Richie’s lacerating wit was more often than not directed at other gay men with a contempt that would have infuriated him had it come from a straight person. He never saw the contradiction. I did.

  “Let’s not argue,” I said. “Not today.” I pointed to the mantel. “Today, Josh came home.”

  He went to the fireplace, picked up the urn. “You beat his parents in court.”

  “It wasn’t a battle I would have chosen.”

  “They picked it,” he said, putting the urn on the mantel.

  I smiled. “No, actually I think Josh did by not telling them he wanted to be cremated.”

  “You’re so right about that,” he said, lighting another Marlboro.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was in the hospital with him, Henry. He was always worse after his parents visited him, especially that father of his.” He made a face. “Like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, that one. He laid the guilt on so thick the room had to be fumigated.”

  “Josh never mentioned that to me.”

  Richie arranged himself on the couch. “He thought you had enough to worry about.”

  I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth or inventing what he considered a consoling story. But the story was not consoling if true, and if not, it was a terrible thing to say. At such moments I remembered that Richie was not, as he liked to say, “your old Auntie Mame.” His wealthy family had institutionalized him when he was a teenager to cure him of homosexuality. When that failed, they cast him from the hearth and paid him to stay away. The experience left him with a corrosive rage.

  “If I were you,” he was saying. “I would’ve taken Josh’s ashes and thrown them in his parents’ faces.”

  I remembered Selma Mandel’s piteous “Oh,” when the judgment was announced. “Jesus, Richie. They aren’t evil. They loved him.”

  “That’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?” Richie said, venomously. “Your family fucks you up seven ways to Sunday, but it’s all right because they love you.”

  I shrugged, changed the subject. “Is this just a social visit, Richie?”

  “I have a friend who needs a lawyer,” he replied, abruptly all business.

  “Because?” I prompted.

  “Because he was arrested last week for something with a gun.”

  “Something with a gun?”

  “I have the arrest report,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket.

  It never failed to impress me how quickly Richie could shuck aside the queeny manner when it no longer served his purpose. Even his posture changed, the languid pose abandoned as he leaned emphatically forward.

  “Does the client have a name?”

  “Alex Amerian,” he said, handing me the arrest report.

  I scanned the cover sheet. The charges were PC sections 245 and 12022.I; assault with a deadly weapon and possession of a concealed firearm. According to the arresting officer’s narrative. Alex Amerian (twenty-nine years old, Caucasian) had been picked up by a security guard while wandering through the shrubbery on the grounds of a hillside mansion in Los Feliz belonging to someone called Cheryl Cordet.

  I looked up at Richie, “Cheryl Cordet? Why do I know that name?”

  Richie did a Mae West roll of his eyes. “Because last month she became the first woman ever to win an Oscar for best director?”

  “Oh,” I said and returned my attention to the report.

  Amerian had pulled a gun on the security guard who managed to wrest it from his control and call the police. Amerian was arrested. He declined to make a statement.

  “What do you think?” Richie asked when I raised my head from the report.

  “What’s his version?”

  “He told me he was coming home from a party when his car broke down in front of Cheryl Cordet’s place. He jumped the fence to see if she’d let him use her phone to call the auto club. The security guard caught him and they got into a scuffle. The guard called him a faggot. Alex lost control and waved the gun around. The guard knocked him down, got the gun away from him and called the cops.”

  “Why was he carrying a gun?”

  “For protection. Six months ago he was gay bashed and got the shit beat out of him.”

  “Did he mean to shoot the guard?”

  “No, he panicked.”

  “He didn’t try to explain this to the cops?”

  “He has a
n attitude about the police,” Richie said.

  “Why?”

  “He was attacked on the streets of West Hollywood by some teenage punks with baseball bats who left him crawling in his own blood to a pay phone to dial 911. It took forty minutes for the sheriffs to show up and when they did, they refused to take a report.”

  “How do you know this guy, Richie?”

  “The magazine ran a piece on violence against gays and lesbians a couple of months ago. Alex was one of the people we interviewed.”

  “L.A. Mode did a story about gay bashing? Who photographed it? Herb Ritts?”

  “Bitch,” he replied. “I’m a serious journalist, Henry.”

  “Between fashion spreads,” I replied. “Alex Amerian sounds like one angry guy.”

  “Wouldn’t you be if you’d gone through what he did?”

  “Not to the point of stupid.”

  “He’s not stupid, Henry. He was traumatized by the attack on him, and when he got into a scuffle with this security guard, who called him a queer, he thought it was happening again.”

  “Post-traumatic stress syndrome?” I said skeptically.

  “What’s so fucking unbelievable about that?” he asked, angrily. “What fag—gay person—hasn’t been traumatized by someone’s hatred? When we do fight back, this is what happens.”

  “All right, Richie. Calm down. I’ll talk to him.”

  He leaned back and drawled, “I knew I could count on you, honey.”

  Something in his tone gave me pause. “Richie? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Henry,” he said, “after everything we’ve been through together—you, me and Josh—how could you even think that?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You help Alex, you’ll be doing a mitzvah. You can redeem it for a thousand years in Purgatory after you die.”

  “Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?”

  “Oh, honey,” he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. “I’m going to hell. That’s where the action is.”

  Chapter 2

  I CALLED ALEX Amerian after Richie left and agreed to meet him at five-thirty at his apartment in West Hollywood. At five, I came down the canyon and battled rush-hour traffic as I headed west on Sunset toward the gay ghetto, Boystown. The air was as brown as the curling edges of a burning book, and the palms that lined the road looked combustible. The only people on foot were the homeless and dazed tourists in search of a Hollywood that existed only in their imaginations.

  I often felt like a tourist in Los Angeles myself, a temporary inhabitant, but then I suppose it felt like that to most of the millions who lived there. It was a completely invented city, a flimflam town that owed its existence to sunshine, cheap land and the movies. You could still see the sun most days, and there were parts of town where the land was still cheap, though you wouldn’t want to live there. As for the movies, they thrived, and if the studio executive whose picture I had seen in the Times was to be believed, the Industry, as it was called, was poised to take over the world.

  Long ago, as a literary-minded undergraduate, I had read a short story by the Argentine writer Borges called “The Babylon Lottery” that imagined a city in which each of the inhabitants partook of a secret lottery every seventy days that determined his or her fate until the next drawing. “Babylon,” the narrator wrote, “is nothing but an infinite game of chance.” That was my uniformed idea of Hollywood, an infinite game of chance that everyone could play and anyone could win; a permanent boomtown where the surging, naked energy of dreams alternated with the violence of rejection and despair.

  This was also true of West Hollywood, the gay Mecca of southern California. I turned down Crescent Heights and then took a right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood’s Main Street. Even to the unobservant, it was obvious that this was a lavender neighborhood. Rainbow flags hung limply from the small businesses on either side of the street, and the businesses themselves, antique stores, bars, an adult bookstore, coffeehouses where shirtless young men sipped iced cappuccinos at small tables on the filthy sidewalk, were unmistakable. Some signs were subtler, apparent only to the cognoscenti. Posted on the side streets off the boulevard were signs that forbade cars from making turns between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M., a seemingly bizarre injunction imposed by the city at the request of residents driven crazy by the heavy nighttime traffic caused by men cruising each other from their cars or picking each other up in the city’s alleys. There was a stretch behind the storefronts on the boulevard between La Jolla and Harper streets that was so notorious it was dubbed Vaseline Alley, but, at night, after the bars closed, all the city’s dark places teemed with hunters.

  Most of them were hunting for sex, a few for love, all for some kind of completion that would repair the damage that, as Richie had observed, most gay people carried through life. They bore the affect of the hated, a vulnerability, a deep grief for the families that had cast them out, the childhoods and adolescences spent in hiding. Believing that safety lay in numbers, they created places like West Hollywood, the Castro, the Village. Yet ironically, the existence of these ghettos made them easy targets for the haters. Every year there were more and more violent attacks on gay men in the city’s backstreets, some culminating in murder. Maybe that’s why West Hollywood made me so uneasy. It might just have been my projection, but the air around Boystown sweated ambivalence—it dripped from the fronds of the palm trees that memorialized the AIDS dead—and the boys had in their eyes, behind the flickering lights of lust, the gentle, torpid look of animals being led to slaughter.

  I pulled up to the curb beside Alex Amerian’s house, which, like its neighbors, was a single-story whitewashed building with a red-tile roof, thick walls and arched windows. There was a plaster escutcheon above the front door: crossed swords and fleur-de-lis. I rang the bell, heard the shuffle of bare feet across a wooden floor and then the door was opened by a pretty, long-haired girl with beautiful but spacey eyes, wearing Levi cutoffs and a tee shirt that advertised a gay disco. Her pale skin was flawless but waxen, a drug addict’s pallor.

  “Hello,” I said. “My name is Henry Rios. I’m here to see Alex.”

  She glanced at my wilted seersucker suit and surmised, “You’re the lawyer?”

  “Yes, is Alex here?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m Alex’s roommate, Katie.” She offered me a damp, firm handshake. “Come on in.”

  The small, sunny living room was furnished with a futon, a ficus tree and two director’s chairs. Rice-paper blinds on the windows diffused the light. On one wall was a framed poster advertising the Chicago Film Festival: a coy photograph of a nude elaborately muscled man and an equally sleek woman. The room was slightly musty, as if rarely used, and cobwebs clung to the corners. Katie called Alex’s name, and a moment later, from the back of the house, down a long, dim hall, came a young man in a white linen shirt and gray slacks. His skin was olive-colored, his hair was a toss of damp, black curls and his face had a delicate, Mediterranean masculinity, like the face of an archaic Apollo. His eyes were black and gleamed like dark water. He had the rumpled air of someone who had just awakened. There was a second, as he emerged from the shadows, when I felt the stunned certainty of someone witnessing a miracle, that the young man approaching me was Josh, alive again. But then Josh’s face melted into Amerian’s features and was gone.

  “Uh, Mr. Rios,” he said, his extended hand unshaken. “Are you okay?”

  I took his hand, shook it. “Yes. Glad to meet you, Alex.”

  I released his hand, but could not look away from his face. My eyes reported that his resemblance to Josh was nothing more than a matter of height and coloring and bone structure, but there had been something else, a flicker of Josh that had briefly illuminated this other man like a light passing beneath his skin.

  He exchanged a nervous glance with the girl, who blurted out, “You want a beer or something?”

  “A glass of water would
be fine,” I said, looking at her. When I looked back at him, the spell was broken. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Alex?”

  “It’s cooler in the courtyard.”

  I followed Alex down the hall, across a narrow dining room furnished with a picnic table and out through French doors to a shaded courtyard between his house and the adjoining house. The courtyard was paved with bricks and covered by a trellis overgrown with morning glory. The bricks were loose in the mortar, the trellis sagged beneath the weight of the vines. In the corner was a dry fountain. The wrought-iron table was dusty and in need of a new coat of paint. We sat down. I opened my briefcase and removed the police report, a pad of paper, a pen. I felt his eyes on me, and when I looked up I half-expected to see Josh again, but there was only an anxious young stranger on the other side of the table.

  “It is cooler out here,” I said. “Are the two houses joined or do they just share the courtyard?”

  “They just share,” he replied. “They were built by the same guy, for his family. You can see they’re falling apart. With rent control, the landlord doesn’t have much incentive to keep the place up.”

  “You’ve lived here a long time?”

  “Two years,” he said.

  At that moment, Katie emerged from the house with a glass of ice water and two beers. “You’re sure you just want water?”

  “Yes, thanks,” I said.

  “Should I stay or what?” she asked.

  “She already knows everything,” Alex said.

  “Do you want her to be called as a witness against you?”

  “I’ll be inside,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

  After she left, I said, “Tell me about the night you were arrested.”

  He repeated, without significant deviation, the story that Richie had told me, while I scribbled notes.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” I said. “You tried to explain to the security guard that all you wanted was a phone, but you say he got aggressive with you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, peeling back the label on his bottle of beer.

  “What did he do exactly?”

  “He was screaming he was going to call the cops and then he shoved me a couple of times.”