Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “Does that say AIDS IS MAGIC?” William asked, staring at one of the many politically motivated magnets on the mini-refrigerator.

  Quinn looked over and grabbed the towel. He always had wet hands and was always drying them as if he had a nervous habit of twisting fabric.

  “Oh, yes. We made that when Magic Johnson went public. We thought it would de-sensationalize the disease. You know, AIDS is magic. It’s okay to have the high-five.”

  “High-five?”

  “HIV.”

  “But it’s not okay, is it?”

  “Hush. One night, this is when the Mudd Club was really going and none of us worked, the point was not to work in those days, twenty of us dressed up like bankers, all suits and ties we got from a clerk we knew at Bergdorf’s, hair slicked back prep school style by my friend Diane. Diane later jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge because MoMA didn’t buy one of her paintings. She wrote her suicide note on a canvas, and after they pulled her body from the river, MoMA bought the note painting. Anyway, we went down to this Wall Street bar called Bubbles. We mingled with the usual broker clientele and then at midnight we started making out with each other, half the room French kissing and grabbing crotches. You should have seen the look on their faces. God it was beautiful. It was the end of the world for them.”

  “Quinn,” William said, burying his eyes in his arm. “I’m sick of hearing about how great New York used to be.”

  “But it was,” Quinn moaned happily. “It really was something. The secret got out and too many of the wrong kind showed up. I thought we were being liberators. Now I realize when everything’s too free people just get lazy and safe. And all the best liberators died. They took it up the ass, because they were the most adventurous, and we lost them. That’s why the gay movement is basically a joke of what it used to be. They don’t know what it’s like to spill your guts out and scream for your life.”

  “I want to live in my own time, if that’s all right with you. Right now. When your parents were wilder than you are, you feel like you should quit.”

  Quinn froze, looking injured. He tossed the towel on William’s head, tapped his legs on the couch to indicate their eviction from the pillow, and sat down next to him.

  “You’ve got your youth. That trumps every old story from perverts like me who spend all their time on the Internet.”

  “I’ve barely got that.”

  “You can take my car if you ever need a day in the country. Lord knows I never drive it. The keys are in the desk.”

  Quinn kept his beat-up blue Cressida parked on West Twelfth Street, his main exercise consisting of waking up at five every other morning to repark it a block north to avoid the street cleaner.

  “Be careful,” William warned. “I might drive it to Los Angeles and never come back.”

  “You can’t do that,” Quinn said, petting his ankles. “It’s the only thing I’ve got to sell when they kick me out of here and I’m living in a retirement village in Queens. Serves me right. I’ll probably have to act straight when I’m trapped up in there at eighty. Back in the closet just so I can play bridge with a few vets who don’t remember what to do with an erection but know that they still hate fags.”

  William wondered if Quinn really thought he would live to see eighty.

  “I’ll visit you. You can tell them I’m your son.”

  “I don’t get your generation,” Quinn huffed. “If I had your body and face, I’d be out having fun. Think of all the sex you could be having. I wish old age were wasted on the old, but I’m warning you now that isn’t quite the case.”

  “What is it with you and sex?” William groaned. “It’s really not that great. Half the time, it’s the loneliest thing I can think of. But it’s like a religion with you. Sex and horror movies. Why do gay men love horror movies so much? The only fan letter I ever received was from a gay guy who watched that stupid slasher film I made about eight hundred times.”

  Quinn laughed, collecting William’s teacup to run brown water over it from the kitchen sink.

  “We like to see the clean lives get what they deserve. Punishment for all of our years pretending to be normal. Normal’s a bad thing, Will. It means you really are soulless.”

  “You’re full of shit. I’ve seen the young men you go after, the ones you look at on the Internet. They’re the normal ones, not the skinny art kids running around with high voices. You say you hate normal, but that’s precisely what those high-school jocks and gas-station attendants are.

  “We aren’t superior beings,” Quinn said, placing his hands on the kitchen counter and dropping his chin in frustration, as if William had missed the point. “I’m sorry if you got that impression. We’re just like everyone else. We want what we can’t have.”

  William slid his legs off the couch while Quinn turned to study him with a disappointed, bitten lip. Quinn always looked defeated when William cut his visits short. William knew that he provided a slowly closing window into youth for his friend. “I’m off to face my agent and demand an explanation.”

  “You’ll hold things again, I know it,” Quinn replied, referencing a joke they shared. Quinn had a terrific homily on the world’s low evaluation of actors. The way he figured it, most of life was consumed standing around holding things. If actors managed to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to perform that service, they were the clever ones. William kissed Quinn on the cheek and opened the front door.

  “I’ll see you in a week.”

  TOUCHPOINT AGENCY’S NEW York headquarters were located in the West Thirties, a black onyx building surrounded by discount jewelers and exotic plant nurseries. Above and below sat real estate ventures, but on the seventeenth floor the elevator opened onto a long hallway of portraits in red lacquer frames—autographed black-and-white headshots gridding the wall in chronological order. The bowl cuts of television stars in their butterfly ’70s collars lost ground to ’80s cigarette cowboys and chubby-faced babysitters with their flowered, hairspray-stiff bangs. A black Knoll ottoman, where three young men nervously sat pinching glossy photos of themselves, drifted like a raft somewhere in the tattoo-and-piercing parlor of the mid-’90s. Farther down, the ’00s hung like “after” shots in a plastic surgery clinic. William wondered what horrible new specimens the 2010s would bring.

  He brushed past the young men on the ottoman. Each one couldn’t be more than twenty, and two looked like Nebraska ranchers straight off a Greyhound. It was painful for William to see youth so hungry and ready in this town, so eager to take the places of those who had come long before them and who were still hungry if less assured. William made his way to the receptionist’s desk and, like a famous man who did not need to speak his name, assertively asked the woman reading In Touch for “Janice Eccles. I’m one of her clients.”

  “Name?” she asked, turning a page limply and pressing a button on her telephone console.

  “William Asternathy. She’s not expecting me.”

  Janice didn’t appreciate surprise visits. She didn’t baby her talent, and often told her actors when they broke into tears that she already had her own kids and didn’t feel the need to adopt full-grown versions at work.

  “She’s not expecting you,” the receptionist said.

  He whispered. He would not let the twenty-year-olds on the couch hear what he was about to say. “Tell her I called her ten times last week. Tell her I just had a nightmare audition that she set up. Tell her I need to see her. It’s urgent.”

  “Two minutes. Three doors down on the left.”

  He continued along the hallway as the young men on the ottoman followed him with their eyes.

  Janice rotated in her chair. Behind her perfectly slicked hair, buildings and steeples and pigeons filled the polished window.

  “You know never to come in like this.” A hard candy pivoted between her teeth.

  “I’m sorry, but I called you how many times?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my assistant.”

  On
her blouse, she wore a silver pin glued with bones and turquoise feathers that looked like the curious remains of a cult sacrifice. William slumped into the chair across from her.

  “If you aren’t calling, something’s not working,” he said in defeat.

  “You’re not working,” she responded. “And you’re here because you think I’m not doing my job.”

  “I know the summer can be slow. But the fact is the only audition you’ve sent me on was the one this morning and that was a joke.”

  The candy shattered in her mouth, and she crunched the debris. “I make money when you work. I don’t make it lying to you and giving you auditions you wouldn’t get. I’m going to treat you like a man, Will. Did you see that hallway full of headshots out there? Did you see how many faces stared you down as you decided to take up my lunch hour with this crap? And those are the Touchpoint actors who had a millisecond of something that could vaguely be defined as success. Take a look.” She pulled a manila file from the stack on her desk, a file that he sensed remained there permanently for just such occasions. “Patricia Savage. She made twenty grand on a Friday the 13th spin-off. In 1984 she had a dozen national magazine features and even went on Good Morning, America. What do you think she’s doing now? She’s a journalist in Knoxville, Tennessee, writing on insecticides. This one.” Janice held a photograph of a handsome sand-skinned surfer whose hair curled like a coral reef. “Tal Kidd. He played Tom Hanks’s best friend in that comedy ten years ago about the woman who turns out to be an alien. MIA. I heard he went to Portland, where, last we know, he ran a children’s daycare center.” Janice returned the photograph to her file and dropped it with heavy purpose on the floor by her feet. “You’ve had a nice run. I’m not saying it’s over, Will. But what if it is? You’re thirty-six.”

  “I’m thirty-two.”

  “Forty. No difference.” She smacked her palm on her desk. “Wait for my calls. Let me do my job. But think seriously about other options. Hell, get married to someone with a career and see where that takes you.”

  “I already tried that.”

  “Try it again.” She pulled the lid off a canister of egg-shaped candies and offered him one. “Think it over. I tell you straight because I like you. I can’t help you if you sit here wasting my time waiting for lightning to strike. You want to kill me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Janice smiled at this. She rose from her seat, trudged around her desk in a swaying Aztec-patterned skirt, and patted his shoulders, the first time in their professional relationship he could remember that more than their hands had touched.

  “Life is long. For better or worse.”

  “What about that audition today?” he asked. “Why did she ask for me if all she wanted was to kick me out?”

  “She thought you were someone else. She was very particular. I wouldn’t worry. She’s not a director. Just a rich lady with a few important friends in the industry and some sort of first-time script. She called me up blind.”

  “Who did she want?”

  “Not you, William. That’s all that matters.”

  Janice opened the door for him, and he accepted the hallway. And with a hard slam, the real Janice Eccles transformed into her chrome nameplate.

  Jealousy must be a survival instinct, because it spilled so naturally from his mind and caught every thought on fire, wiping out whole neighborhoods of sense and memory. Another actor, someone his own age, maybe even Joseph for all he knew. William walked four blocks pounding his fists through the midtown air. That motherfucker. He dodged bicycles and taxis, peeling around tourists frozen under street signs doing complicated logarithms with street numbers in their heads. He broke into a light run, blowing into shoulders through Times Square. Sweating, lungs wheezing like a furnace, William finally stopped ten blocks from the agency and hailed a cab. “That’s it then,” he sputtered to himself in the backseat. “That’s the sign I was waiting for. It’s over. Fine.”

  Inside his apartment filled with Jennifer’s belongings, he tried to wrestle himself out of anger and got down to the business of getting drunk. Five bottles of vodka—“fresh soldiers,” his father had called them—lined the kitchen counter. He stood at the window drinking. By nine o’clock, he had killed the remainder of one soldier and started on the second.

  He thought of Jennifer stepping out of the shower with her mustard robe branded with cursive initials, her wet hair wedged in a towel. She smelled of bee pollen, her skinny thighs shuffling between the scrolling terrycloth. He tried to remember what Quinn said, about a world of sex out in the city waiting for him, about New York being wild and sarcastic and young. He culled up the short list of women he had slept with since Jennifer had left, their sweaty bodies hanging off his own, their legs open and their fingers tense, without being able to recite any of their names.

  But Jennifer kept stepping out of the shower, her moist arms and neck holding her scent, her face so smooth it looked like she had never known a second of desperation.

  He packed his pockets with keys, driver’s license, and a silver money clip loaded with six twenty-dollar bills.

  By eleven, William barreled out of a taxi and into a club called Kaos, met two friends in the second of the establishment’s two crystal bars—Jesse and Ed, actors and drinking buddies. Their faces glowed with feverish consumption. Or maybe it was from the lights that rained down from above, skimming over the hundreds packed on the dance floor. Flashes of metallic wrists shaking in the air, calves muscling up and down as if taking long flights of stairs, the music so solid that it hung like a metal vest over his ribs. So much electricity to keep the club dark and loud, so much energy exerted by bartenders to fill drinks.

  William felt young in his blood. It was midnight. He was alive and in loud company.

  “Why do you look so happy? You get a job or what?” Ed asked, throwing his arm around William’s neck. “Haven’t seen you out since that night we were trapped in three feet of snow at Michael’s. Nothing to do but drink. Michael’s gone, you know.”

  “He died?” William looked at Ed with horror.

  “Practically. He works at a Home Depot in Hoboken. Poor man. Says he wanted to do some soul searching. I’m not so sure Home Depot carries that.”

  “So where are we going next?” William asked, grinning with neon teeth. The deejay slurred the record into a new track.

  “He’s asking where’s next,” Ed screamed. “Jesse, tell him this place is enough for the next hour. Isn’t it?”

  Jesse offered a joint, thinly rolled, burned down to a quarter inch. William suctioned it with a deep inhale before passing it on to blue fingernails.

  The woman’s name was Myra, and she came with friends from the damp forest of the dance floor. Nothing hurt, not even the shine of a flashlight directly in his eyes from a bouncer who was looking for a man that did not match William’s description. He rolled up his sleeves.

  William felt young and four-dimensional. He was high, and his heart was supplying drumbeats. Myra waved her blue fingernails for him to join her on the dance floor. When she screamed, her words came out broken between pulses of light, and she told him she was Chilean and had been above the equator for five days. She told him it was winter in Chile, which did not account for her tan.

  Two hours and twenty minutes later he left Kaos with Jesse and Myra and two of her girlfriends who spoke even less English (although they insisted on trying) but no Ed. They took a cab six blocks to another club called Bad Engine, where a drag queen chugged a bottle of Jameson on stage and the audience whistled. The drag queen stared down the crowd like she was waiting for an apocalyptic horse to gallop through the room as an excuse to pull out a machine gun and blow everyone away. Jesse waved them into the VIP room, and William drank two vodkas served by a former gay porn star who asked him about breaking into more legitimate films. He sniffed something chalky out of a folded piece of tin foil from Myra’s purse and danced with her blond friend to a Stone Roses remix.

 
; They took a cab to a bar in Chinatown, and Jesse rolled down the window, dry heaving along Seventh Avenue to the shrieks of a Pakistani driver with a cell phone clipped to his ear.

  “Just get there,” Jesse said. “We have to get somewhere else, you know, before the air starts turning blue. Somewhere without windows. And please, everyone, place your watches in your pockets. Under no circumstances are you to tell me what time it is.”