by David Adjmi
Then one day Vivian called long distance to tell me she had smoked pot—and not only that, she’d snorted cocaine and shot heroin! She’d done all this with her new boyfriend, Carlos, a DJ at the Sound Factory; they’d been dating since the fall. I found all this patently shocking. Vivian had been terrified of drugs and non-Jewish people, she was much more prudish and provincial than even I. But she sounded exhilarated—happier than I’d ever heard her. Though the shooting of heroin sounded extreme, I took it as a step in her evolution: I marveled at her bravery and daring. I also felt a tiny spike of competition with her.
I was over at the hub one night when Chris was being especially pushy. “C’mon, Dread,” he beseeched, his voice inflected with that delinquent New Jersey drawl. His smile was half-cocked, gray eyes drooping and wide. And this time, I felt something in me yield. “Just one hit,” I said. Sebastian clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Dread’s getting baked!” Chris took the first hit, then Sebastian—who, when he was done, oversaw my inhale. I sucked in the smoke as per his instructions. Seconds later, I felt something flip, like an air pressure change in my brain. I must’ve made a funny expression because Sebastian and Chris were laughing at me. The laughter was infectious, and eventually I was laughing so hard I fell off my chair. The room spun all around me. I was under the table, laughing and laughing. But even as I felt relaxed and happy there was a part of me that felt too relaxed, too at ease. My unmodulated display of enjoyment suddenly made me anxious. I felt scared they’d seen something in me I hadn’t wanted them to see. My insides felt suddenly exposed, like a steel beam or scaffolding. I worried any unconsidered joy I felt would be used against me. The idea of having blind spots—that I would be viewed by another person in a way I hadn’t predetermined, that some feminine need or longing could reveal itself—was unbearable to me. I lifted myself to an unsteady squat and grabbed onto the edge of the table to pull myself upright.
“Don’t leave now, Dread,” John said, “You’re too baked.”
“I’m okay,” I said, wobbling out of the dorm room, but I could barely walk. I was falling all over myself, high as a kite. When I finally managed to get to my apartment, James was at his desk, so I locked myself in the bathroom. I sank to the tiled floor, steadying myself against the toilet. My senses were all harrowingly alive, the surfaces cold and hard against my skin. The air was permeated with the peppermint stench of Bolt’s mouthwash commingled with a vague halitosis. The seat of the toilet was up, the porcelain rim lightly stained with a urine glaze oxidized to a burnt orange. I imagined my entire existence swallowed up by that septic ugliness—and I’d been so careful: so careful. Up to that night I approached my life as if I were growing a culture in a petri dish or tightly sealed mason jar: it was a controlled experiment with isolated variables. Now I’d destroyed that work.
When Drew Casper screened Rear Window, it was for a class on modernism. Drew told us the bordered windows inside Jimmy’s binoculars, which in themselves were frames, was Hitchcock calling attention to another frame: the frame of the movie screen. He said that in calling attention repeatedly to the frame, Hitchcock made himself the subject of the film. I thought that was clever. I remembered Drew traversing the aisles with his clip-on microphone and bomber jacket. “Frames within frames,” he intoned again and again in his dreamy voice—like he was summoning some dead ghost, like he was trying to hypnotize us into appreciating cinema. “Frames within frames.” Hitchcock’s watermark was everywhere in Rear Window but he was also invisible, like God. I wanted that godlike power. I wanted to be unassailable, untouchable.
I’d kept my different worlds as separate as I could, but that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t continue to be a socially active gadfly and remain safe. It was too dangerous. I would be found out.
I made the choice to drop my cliques and abandon my social world. I stopped returning people’s calls and going to parties. In the spring I got my driver’s license, and with the credit card Dad gave me I rented a cheap car for a few weeks. I spent my days exploring Los Angeles alone. I drove across town to Westwood and saw films at the old haunted movie palaces near UCLA where premieres were held: the Fox, the Bruin. I went window-shopping at Maxfield and the tacky thrift stores that lined Melrose Avenue.
I had a new look: I wore a blazer over a T-shirt and ripped jeans. I used Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment to unmat my dreadlocks, and my hair fell in taut ringlets down to my shoulders. I tied a dark paisley-print scarf around my head like a pirate. I looked macho and distant; no uncurated feminine weakness could leak out. I was holding an idea of myself in my mind and I had to protect the idea, wrap it in a mental prophylaxis. I wanted to cultivate what Yvette Sutton used to call “mystery.” I wanted to give myself an allure, and it was working. I’d walk down the street and people would nudge their friends and whisper and point semidiscreetly in my direction. I felt powerful. I felt I had tremendous currency. It was all very delusional, but there was something about being in Hollywood that lent to this kind of inventive distortion.
West Hollywood was teeming with gay sex. There were rent boys cruising Santa Monica Boulevard. Teenage boys with dicks protruding obscenely from pastel spandex who walked the streets, loitered at gas stations. There were porn shops lining Melrose—they weren’t like New York porn stores in Times Square; these were almost elegant. I used to walk by one, faking noninterest, but each time I passed I felt more intrepid, until one day I went in. I’d gotten porn before: a few weeks after Howie impulsively shoplifted the Honcho in eighth grade, I bought a copy of a magazine from a newsstand on Coney Island Avenue, a niche-type thing in which all the men and women wore leather hoods with zippers. I was turned on by the severity and brutality; it felt like life. I kept it hidden in a drawer near my bed, but my mother found it on one of her cleaning pogroms and off it went into the trash. Richie kept his Playboys and Hustlers in his drawer when he was that age, but those fell I guess into the realm of acceptable pornography, soft-core and benign, fantasies my mother could remotely comprehend a man having.
When I entered the porn shop, I told myself I would just quickly survey the contents and hurry out, but once I was inside it was like I had amnesia, and had no recollection of how I’d gotten there. I simply found myself in this place, this sensorium, with my desires and appetites spilling out into the open. As much as I was scared of those appetites, I felt the irresistible compulsion to sate them. I told myself this was a break from my actual life; sex was just one tiny compartment, a room in a series of unlinked suites.
The shop was well lit and incongruently cheery, and there were several men standing around thumbing through magazines. There were peach and teal shelves stocked with brightly colored sex toys, and pastel-hued lube. I went immediately to the straight section (in case I was being watched), picked up something like Hustler, and thumbed through it. I was much too frightened to move or look to see if anyone was evaluating my choice of magazine. After a few minutes I noticed a young guy inching toward me with a copy of Inches.
“Hi there,” he said.
I was astonished at his action. I hadn’t expected an actual human encounter, just a quick opprobrious visit to a porn shop. He directed my gaze to a few stills from his magazine. Two naked men were doing aerobics and lifting weights and performing fellatio on each other. “What do you think of that?” he asked. When I looked up, he winked. He was handsome, trim with auburn hair and blue eyes. I didn’t know how to answer his question. Finally I said, “It’s good,” with the notion that it was better to be concise than long-winded. “You wanna do this with me?” he said, now winking more inscrutably—the wink having dropped down into his voice somehow. My heart was pounding. I felt a tiny frenzy of energy in the pit of my stomach. “Okay,” I said, feigning disinterest. I didn’t want him to know he’d made any impression. I didn’t want to bungle it with my bad self-esteem and nervous prattling.
We left the shop in silence and walked to my car. He was older than me but not old, maybe twenty-five or tw
enty-six. He looked like a completely different person in the sunlight. He was still handsome. I wasn’t unattracted to him—I didn’t know what I felt, I just vibrated incoherently with impulses. I felt the force of sexual desire without knowing how to peg it to the fuzzy coordinates of my own psychic life.
As I drove to his apartment, Inches touched my leg and sort of caressed it. I looked over at him and he was smiling a mischievous smile. I felt manly behind the wheel of my Rent-a-Wreck with this auburn-haired man beside me. He started to unbutton my jeans. He bent down and his head was in my lap. The unfamiliar scent of his hair conditioner rose up from my crotch. My car was swerving. “I’ll get into an accident,” I said, and seconds later we almost hit a passing car. My foot groped for the brake in a panic but Inches was undeterred, not caring particularly if we died or if we didn’t. His bravery made me brave. My every consideration about life and death faded completely. My fears about AIDS and diseases vanished. I hated my desires overall but, in that moment, I embraced them totally.
When we got to his apartment, Inches removed his clothes and stood naked in his bedroom. It wasn’t a nice apartment; the carpet was littered with unvacuumed debris, it seemed underfurnished. He wasn’t well muscled but essayed various beefcake poses, borrowing unself-consciously from the debauched vernacular of porn magazines like the ones at the store. I wasn’t sure if I should touch him. I had no instinct to be sensuous. I took off my clothes, but didn’t really want to be seen naked. Inches tried touching me but I flinched. I wasn’t used to being touched, the nerves in my skin felt too alive. His lips stretched an involuntary shy smile. I worried I’d insulted him. “No, no—it’s okay,” I said. He tried touching me again but I flinched again. It was no use, I couldn’t be touched. I thought he might be upset with me, but he smiled broadly, to show he was easygoing. He lay on the bed, legs bent in a diamond shape like an insect, and his pelvis rose slowly. This mimicked one of the poses from the magazine—the one with the aerobics. I could tell it was tongue-in-cheek but for some reason I took it very seriously. I could feel myself openly staring at him. I became an anthropologist, watching him gyrate and writhe, noticing the tiny hairs on his chest, the lines in his neck. I’d never seen a man gyrate for another man and I wasn’t sure how to take it. It didn’t seem masculine to me.
With his yellow knuckles he began to masturbate himself. I masturbated next to him for a while, mainly out of politeness. I lost the spontaneous feeling that overtook me in the car. He sucked me off. I touched him and played with his dick a little bit. When it was done we waved goodbye, like we’d been at sleepaway camp. He stood by the door and watched me leave, eyes twinkling, a faint smile spreading across his thin, pink lips.
In the car I felt myself shrink into my familiar snug carapace, my desires now capped. I felt a pleasant sense of order and calm. Driving toward the freeway, I passed the swath of gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard with their pink neon signage, their Dolph Lundgren–looking muscle men spilling over onto the sidewalks with scooped pectorals and lantern jaws and dark tans and rainbow tank tops. The men all had that strange California physiognomy: those odd square faces that reminded me of Bolt. Their hair was intimidatingly blond and either spiked or down to the shoulders. They seemed angry and horny and on drugs. Their bodies were hard, like armor. The men funneled in and out, place to place, their faces scrawled with sneers that passed for lust. The lust felt distempered with annoyance, like someone was late to meet them and now they had to wait around. Was that masculinity? Was it life? I had a quick impulse to park and go into one of the bars, but when I thought of myself circulating among these men I began to panic. I wouldn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t know who to be. I stared at the men for a while through the partition of a glass windshield.
Then the light turned green, and I drove away.
The Long Con
I WAS NOT LOOKING particularly forward to my brother’s visit. As part of the larger project to erase my past I’d deliberately cut him out of my life—we hadn’t seen each other or spoken in over a year—but now (for reasons that were, to my mind, incredibly stupid) his visit had become unavoidable. I’d moved into a new complex at the juncture of the 110 and the 101, not really within walking distance of anything, so my dad agreed to get me a car. I’d have been happy with some used piece of shit, but for some reason he’d become incredibly cosseting and over the top and told me he wanted ONLY THE BEST FOR HIS SON and I would have BRAND-NEW EVERYTHING and AUTOMATIC EVERYTHING. But rather than get the “brand-new everything” car in California, he got it, for reasons I couldn’t ascertain, in New Jersey—in retrospect I’m sure it was hot, the product of some informal peculation or threat or handshake, something to make it worth his while to have it shipped across coasts. Except he scrimped on the shipping—and despite his grandiloquent speeches about “the best, the best” used some two-bit towing company, and my Honda was held hostage on a tow truck in Arizona for two months. “Don’t worry about nuthin,” said my father, who quickly conscripted Richie to take a bus to Arizona, confront and haggle with the towing company people, and then drive the Honda to Los Angeles, whereupon he would crash with me and Leslie and Mike and make a little vacation of it.
Leslie and Mike were a couple I’d met in my film history class. They’d found the apartment and needed someone to rent the spare room. We clicked as roommates right away—and we weren’t just roommates, it was deeper than that; we’d become a family. We cooked for one another and went to movies and drank wine and had long talks. I was scared of showing Leslie and Mike that I had a vulgar and spiritually ill brother. Not that I’d necessarily lied to them about who I was (I’d given up trying to pass myself off as an erstwhile model for Paul Smith and Gucci) but I’d faked, certainly, in small indefinable ways, a past, one that gleamed in the luminous shadow of my vague descriptors and ambiguous phrasing.
Mike didn’t give a shit about status: he came from a bluntly lower-middle-class family in Camarillo, infamous, he said, for its disproportionately high concentration of mental hospitals. Leslie, on the other hand, was from tony Brentwood, and was the adopted daughter of a famous television producer. I found her slightly intimidating. She was from Los Angeles but seemed like a New Yorker. She wore a lot of black and looked like she’d be good at hailing cabs. She wasn’t tanned or blond—she was whey-faced, with red hair and freckles, and she spoke with a slight lisp. The parts in isolation were pitiable but the gestalt gave her an impression of glamour. Throughout her childhood, her schoolmates tortured her about being adopted. She didn’t belong to her family, to all that wealth and glamour—and that fact was impressed on her, just as the fact of her exceptionalism was impressed upon her. Even if Leslie repeatedly stated that she did not feel glamorous. So, like me, she hovered in between selves, a traveler caught between time zones. Maybe she sensed this root similarity between us and it was what prompted her to take a sort of pedagogical initiative with me.
Leslie seemed to know everyone and everything. Her parents were cineastes. She knew every movie. She referred to Woody Allen’s longtime producer as “Charlie”—he was an old friend of the family. She understood screenplay structure and explained to me why mine (because I’d started writing one the previous year, I’d patterned it on Lina Wertmüller movies, and it was awful and made me question whether I had any talent) wasn’t working. I was plagued with doubt, but Leslie soothed my fragile ego and said this was normal, that it was important to learn from your failures and move on. Her advice was so sensible! Why hadn’t anyone said this to me before? Why did I have the misfortune of being raised by people who believed my every ambition was doomed?
And rather than lord her knowledge and cosmopolitanism over me, Leslie wanted to share it. She pushed me to register for summer classes with her at Santa Monica College—an inexpensive way to fulfill credit requirements for USC. She took me to her parents’ house in Brentwood and showed me her father’s Emmys. She explained how the star of a television show her father produced was difficult
and was potentially bipolar. She toured me past restaurants she liked, and discussed politics that offended her. She spoke at long disquisitive length about a lot of things—it was like she held a constant salon. She wasn’t confident, but I think my own insecurities loosened her up. She took me to a famous cheese shop she used to work at and explained how cheese was made. She said, “Cheese is the corpse of milk, Dread,” and added that it was a quote from Nabokov. I was impressed with her ability to quote people like Nabokov; I was impressed with her encyclopedic knowledge of film and literature. I wanted her mastery, her capacious understanding of how life worked.
One afternoon she took me to see a double bill of Preston Sturges movies. I’d never heard of him but was instantly won over by all the prestissimo dialogue and dry wit. For weeks we quoted Barbara Stanwyck’s delicious one-liners from The Lady Eve, a movie that had particular resonance for me, because it belonged to that odd subgenre of parent-child con-artist movies I loved, like Paper Moon and The Grifters—films that stirred unresolved (probably unconscious) feelings about my own father, who himself was a low-level con artist (or at least that was how my mother used to talk about him, though she was typically oblique and light on details).*
In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck’s character is conscripted by her father into a life of crime. He teaches her that crime is an art, that the criminal is a kind of demiurge who stands outside pedestrian moral economies, that “sucker-sapiens” deserve to be conned—offering as proof of their deservedness the ease with which he cons them. The father is genial and pleasant, we’re not meant to despise him, but I did. He was more like a pimp than a father. He calls Barbara Stanwyck his “minx.” He openly exploits her beauty as a lure, bait for the traps he laid to cozen the “sucker-sapiens.”
Jean goes along with her father, just as my brothers went along with mine—but I rebelled. I told my father I wasn’t going to study business. I outed myself as an atheist. I looked down upon my father. I believed I was morally superior to him and to everyone in my family—money was crude, business was crude. I was attracted to higher things. I had great artistic ambitions. I wanted to know about Nabokov and cinema and goat cheese from the Pyrenees. I resented and judged my brothers—who, it was true, were simply following the rules laid out by my father—but he’d laid out those same rules for me and I found a way around them. I saw their obedience as contemptible weakness. They in turn saw me as snobbish and delusional.
