Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  “Oh, wait, come on. Man, you’ve just got to see this!” Quatro hurried ahead to a clearing in the crowd. Quinn could see five or six people lined up shoulder to shoulder, bent over with their hands on their knees. A black guy with dreadlocks stuffed under a baggy knit cap was giving his spiel to the crowd. “Okay, I’m going to need your energy, your positive thoughts, right? So think, all of you, about how I’m going to clear these people by a mile, no problem, piece of cake. Think now! Think!” And he took a running start and leaped, actually leaped, over all those people with room to spare.

  The crowd clapped and the guy looked around for someone to add to the lineup. He caught Quinn’s eye and said, “You! I need you to help this time. Come over here, mon, that’s right.” And before Quinn could protest, the guy had positioned him at one end of the line and bent him over. Then he backed way off and started energizing the crowd again and took a running jump. Quinn could feel the air rushing across his back as the man cleared him. He wondered what it would feel like to be airborne like that, powerful enough to leap great distances. It would be sort of like flying, Quinn guessed. Or would it feel like barely avoiding a fall?

  The leaper added two more people after Quinn and cleared all of them, too. Then he bowed to the crowd, took off his knitted hat, and passed it around so people could drop money in. Quinn just passed it on, but Quatro put in a couple dollars, which made Quinn feel cheap. He fished in his pocket to add something after all, but Quatro put his hand on Quinn’s arm and said, “That was for both of us.”

  As they went down the boardwalk Quinn matched Quatro stride for stride even though Quatro was smaller. It was like there was some magic field connecting them. Quatro seemed at ease in his body in a way that Quinn had never been. Maybe that would happen once he stopped growing and filled out. He felt tall and lanky and awkward, like Abraham Lincoln probably felt around all those olden-day, smaller people. Quatro had probably been a great-looking teenager, with good skin and great hair and clothes.

  Quatro dug an elbow gently into Quinn’s side. “You hungry?”

  He was, so Quatro steered them down a side street where there were booths filled with cheap, tooled leather goods from Mexico and a pizza concession. “Pizza, beach—they just go together,” he told Quinn.

  Quatro paid for both of them, and they carried their food and drinks to the far side of the boardwalk and sat on some grass under a palm tree. Three Chihuahuas went by in a pink stroller, pushed by someone vaguely familiar-looking, a young brunette who reminded him of Allison Addison and was probably one of the zillions of character actors in LA who worked just enough to feel the breath of fame pass them by.

  “You having a good time?” Quatro asked him.

  Quinn nodded.

  “Good. I thought you might need that.”

  “A good time?”

  “Well, someone showing you a good time. Not that I mean that in a cheesy way. You seem like the kind of person who spends an awful lot of time alone.”

  Quinn shrugged. It sounded bad, the way Quatro said it, like he was defective. “I’m okay.”

  “I know you’re okay. But that’s not the same as happy.”

  “Yeah.” Quinn watched a muscle-bound young black man go by on inline skates. He moved like the skates were part of his body, so smooth and relaxed, weaving in and out of the crowd like a wave moving through water. “What about you?”

  “Am I happy? By and large.”

  Quinn nodded as though he understood, but he didn’t really know how to talk like this.

  “I have great friends and I work in an excellent salon,” Quatro was saying. “I’m not in love with anybody right now, so that could be better, but I’m in no hurry. I was in my last relationship for four years, and I’m still kind of tender. Calling it quits was his idea, not mine.” He paused, looked at Quinn beside him in the grass. “Is this okay with you?”

  “Is what okay?”

  “Me talking about this.”

  Quinn swirled the melting ice around in his drink. “Sure.”

  Quatro nodded, watching a couple of bodybuilders walk by all oiled up. “I’m glad you came with me.”

  Quinn watched his toes squirm under the canvas of his purple Chuck Taylors.

  “Hey, buddy,” Quatro said, bumping Quinn’s arm with his arm.

  Quinn poked an ant, watched it climb up the toe of his sneaker.

  “I know you’re not gay,” Quatro said. “That’s not what this is about.”

  Quinn let out a long breath he must have been holding without being aware of it. He looked up and found Quatro grinning at him. “When I asked if you wanted to come down here with me, did you think it was like a date?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And you said yes anyway. That was brave. A lot of guys your age act like gay is contagious.”

  Quinn looked at the ocean. He could see a big tanker way out toward the horizon. “No, I wanted to come.”

  Quatro watched Quinn for a minute or two. “Be honest: are you afraid I’ll put you up for adoption now that we know I know you’re straight?”

  Quinn tried to smile, but that was exactly what he was afraid of. Why would someone like Quatro, a successful person with lots of friends, choose to hang out with him if it wasn’t for the possibility of sex?

  “Gay people have straight friends, too, you know,” Quatro said. “We do it all the time.”

  “So that’s good.”

  Quatro smiled broadly. “Yep. Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  Quinn wiped some sweat off his upper lip with his sleeve. It wasn’t that hot, but he was dripping. He hoped they were done talking. When you brought things out into the light, sometimes they just faded away and you were left with nothing. He didn’t want to risk that. So instead, he said, “Do you think there’s like a jewelry store here?”

  “Jewelry?”

  “There’s this present I want to find for someone. A necklace that’s a chili pepper.”

  “You mean like a charm?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “We can sure look.”

  They stuffed their trash in a bin and headed back along the boardwalk. A pod of teenage girls rode by on beach-cruiser bicycles, and right after they passed Quinn they all laughed. Reflexively Quinn assumed they were laughing at him, even though he knew that was unlikely. Mimi had told him once, after he’d overreacted to teasing at the studio, “You’ve got to stop assuming that everything’s about you. It isn’t. Most of the time no one’s thinking about you at all.” Later, thinking about it, Quinn hadn’t been sure which was worse.

  A good ten minutes’ walk farther down the boardwalk (food stand, tattoo parlor, bad art, bad art, leather, glass bongs, tie-dye, henna tattoos, elephant ears, falafel, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and hats), they found a table with a bunch of jewelry laid out. Quatro started at one end of the table, and Quinn at the other. At almost the exact same moment they both spotted a pretty little silver and enamel chili pepper, bright red or green, take your pick. Quinn tried to remember her earrings. Red? He was pretty sure they were red. The charm cost eighteen bucks, which was more than he had on him. He pretended it wasn’t quite what he was looking for, but Quatro just said, “Put down what you’ve got, and I’ll make up the rest. You can owe me,” and Quinn accepted the offer. The vendor, a beat-to-shit-looking woman with the hair of an eighteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old face, wrapped the charm in a piece of well-worn tissue paper and handed it to Quinn.

  “Meth,” said Quatro once they were away from the table.

  “What?”

  “Meth. She’s a meth user. She’s probably younger than I am.”

  Quinn didn’t know much about meth, except that it scared the crap out of him, and he said so.

  “Good,” said Quatro. “Keep it that way. Weed’s okay, ’shrooms are even okay, Ecstasy’s definitely okay, but that’s where you’ve got to draw the line. You already know that, though, right?”

  “Yeah.” He’d tried Ec
stasy at the apartment a couple of times with Jasper and Baby-Sue and a bunch of their friends. He’d liked it a lot. It had calmed him down. He didn’t really have the budget for drugs, though. He’d rather spend his money on acting classes or coaching. Or a chili pepper charm for the little Latina at Los Burritos.

  He liked the fact that Quatro was counseling him about what to do and not do. He didn’t get that very much. In Seattle they didn’t know enough about him to say anything, and down here no one cared. That wasn’t exactly true: Mimi used to care. Now Evelyn did. But they cared only in a way that was mutually, professionally beneficial, so their telling him what to do was as much for their own sakes as it was for Quinn’s—sometimes more. Quatro had no ulterior motive. Quinn wished he’d tell him some other stuff that would be good for him, but Quatro only paused for a minute and asked Quinn if he’d mind walking back to the car along the beach.

  “Sure. I mean, no. No, I don’t mind.”

  They walked carefully between two beach volleyball courts. One court had a coed game going on, and the other had an all-guys game. Quinn watched the girls and Quatro watched the guys. The guys were all wearing long, baggy shorts, but the girls were wearing bikinis, which Quinn thought was impractical. If he were a girl he’d be worrying all the time about his boobs popping out or something. You reach up, nail a shot, spill a boob, and the whole thing’s ruined. Then again, these were pretty athletic women and they looked like their boobs were pure muscle, so they probably couldn’t spill; plus their tops covered a pretty big area and were tight, so maybe it never happened.

  “They’re good,” Quatro said.

  “Yeah. I don’t have that kind of coordination,” said Quinn. “I could never even play soccer, and frickin’ everyone in Seattle plays soccer.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED THE WATERLINE THEY TOOK OFF their shoes and started wading back. Quinn found himself telling Quatro all about his Seattle life, before Mimi, even before acting, right up until his moving to LA—stuff he’d never told anyone.

  “So you’re saying they gave you away?” Quatro said. “To your talent manager?”

  “Kind of like that. I mean, it’s okay, because it’s not like I had a bunch of friends back there, plus I wanted to be an actor. I am an actor. And I couldn’t be, back there. I mean, the only things going on in Seattle are musical theater, nonunion, or rinky-dink. The only good thing back there is my kid brother. He’s pretty great.”

  “Still,” said Quatro, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” said Quinn. Then they were back where they’d started, two blocks from the car. Quinn was reluctant to leave the water, so he stopped and just stood there, looking out at the horizon. What if your vision traveled like light, so by looking out toward Japan now, you would actually see Japan in a few minutes, transmitted back to you? It was too bad it didn’t work that way. He thought about explaining his theory to Quatro, but it was too complicated, plus that sort of thing was why people thought he was weird. So instead he looked down at the water rushing away beneath his feet, and although he knew he was standing still, it looked like he was hurtling backward at impossible speeds. He staggered a little. Quatro steadied him with a hand beneath his elbow. “I’ve got you,” he said, and then it was time to go home. And all the way back he could feel Quatro’s steadying hand under his arm, and the little red chili pepper beating in his pocket like a heart.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MIMI DELETED QUINN’S PHONE MESSAGE: HE WAS JUST ONE more client who’d cut and run, another betrayal in a never-ending succession. It was a sad truth that the good clients left her much sooner than the bad ones, who seemed to stay on forever, dragging on Mimi’s time and energy. Quinn was one of the most promising actors she’d had in years, maybe ever. He was difficult, granted, but most of the good ones were. And they were worth the hardship. Just one client could easily pull down twenty-five or thirty thousand a week as a TV series regular, which, at her 15 percent commission, would bring her forty-five hundred dollars a week, or ninety-nine thousand for a standard twenty-two-episode season. And this was entry level. An actor could easily bring home two or three times that much, and substantially more if the show stayed on the air for four or five years. And if that actor was the star of the program, Mimi would be looking at retirement; and even in retirement she’d continue to collect her commission. She’d been waiting for this kind of score for her entire professional life, and if Quinn and not Allison had been the One—and it was certainly possible—the whole thing, the vicarious fame, the money, the mention at the Emmys or the Oscars, was lost.

  She didn’t deserve that.

  She never should have let him live with her to begin with. She’d known how volatile he was, and how few social skills he possessed. Not that he was dangerous, because he wasn’t. He was just extraordinarily immature. Sixteen going on fourteen, or younger. He’d gotten carried away and acted inappropriately, and even though the episode was over as quickly as it had started, she couldn’t let him stay until he reconciled his issues. Her standards might be lax in some ways, but not when it came to sexual misconduct. If her other parents caught wind of what he’d done, there could be charges brought against her, and she couldn’t afford that and neither could Quinn, not at his age. So she’d banished him as much for his own good as for hers, and now he was dumping her for Evelyn Flynn, who, God knows, didn’t need either the money or the recognition.

  And that was a bitter, bitter pill.

  But Mimi wasn’t a woman to dwell on things she couldn’t change, so she gave herself five minutes to wallow and then picked herself up and reminded herself that she still had Laurel Buehl, who was on fire, commercially speaking. That might very well be where she stayed, though Angie had had a small hissy fit the day before, during which she demanded that Mimi get Laurel more theatrical auditions or they’d walk. Angie didn’t want to hear that some people never made the jump from commercial to theatrical; there were lots of reasons why, but the upshot was, they made commercials and then they were done. Done, but with a lot of money in their pockets. Laurel could act, Mimi wasn’t denying that—her Marbles monologue, for instance, was raw and uncontrolled, but hinted at a talent much deeper than even Mimi would have guessed. For the most part, though—at least for now—Laurel’s looks were stronger than her acting chops. There was also the problem of her Georgia accent, which was so heavy that she sounded like a cracker half the time. Angie needed to get her to a dialect coach, but Angie didn’t think her accent was strong enough to warrant one and there was only so much Mimi could take on.

  And then, of course, there was Allison, who, Mimi worried, was already heading into the Bermuda Triangle of the midteen years. She hadn’t booked anything in months now, wasn’t even getting many callbacks, and she was looking older every day. It would be another two years before the child could procure her legal-eighteen status, and anyway she was such a poor student that she’d probably flunk the proficiency exam even when she was finally eligible at sixteen. As an alternative, there was a school in Hollywood—and Mimi used the term school loosely—that would, for six hundred dollars, administer exams in all the major scholastic areas and award the student who passed them a high school diploma that same day. If the student failed any of the exams—and they always did—the school would coach her until she passed. One way or another, every student who had the money was guaranteed a same-day diploma even if it meant being coached well into the night. It was a scam, of course, but so far the California State Board of Education hadn’t challenged the validity of the diplomas. The fact that some of the children were nearly illiterate didn’t seem to trouble anyone, especially Hollywood’s producers. Mimi had recommended the school to Quinn’s parents, who’d sent him over; he’d procured the diploma and from that day on had been booking something almost every month.

  The immediate challenge for Mimi was going to be keeping Allison motivated and moving forward. Allison knew what was what; Mimi had had a long talk with her recently about what she would likely find in the
next few years, professionally speaking. As a hedge, Mimi had enrolled the girl in several intensive voice-over workshops, because Allison had excellent diction and vocal expression. These jobs could also be very lucrative, and of course it didn’t matter if you were two or a hundred and two, as long as your voice sounded like a four-year-old’s or whatever other age you were auditioning for. Allison was a poor reader but a quick memorizer, so as long as she could get the sides ahead of time and work with Mimi, she’d be eminently employable, which was as important emotionally as professionally. Mimi had noticed a growing tendency for Allison, like Quinn, to act out. Though her triggers were different, she was as hungry for attention as he was. And that, as Mimi well knew, could lead to trouble.

  “DO YOU BELIEVE IN IMMACULATE LOVE?” RUTH ASKED Vee Velman. They were sitting in a booth at Paty’s, and Clara and Bethany were sitting at one just behind them.