by John Rowell
“OK, let’s nail this sonofabitch before we lose the light, everybody,” Mr. Wayne says.
And the shot, which lasts all of thirty seconds, gets a take. Mr. Wayne doesn’t fuss around, and usually gets a scene in one or two takes.
“Cut!” More talking among Mr. Ford, camera people, and ADs. All of us, even Mr. Wayne, stay in place.
“Anybody got a cigarette?” he asks, to nobody in particular, and several starstruck extras reach like lightning into their prairie purses, saddlebags, and costume pockets hoping to find one. Anything to do something nice for the star, hoping he’ll remember them for it later. While we wait, I feel Luke kind of shuck his horse over closer to mine, but real subtle-like, so that no one, including Arthur, will yell at him for disturbing the shot composition. He smiles at me, that old country-boy way that I know so well from guys back home. Then suddenly I sense something that makes me sit up a little straighter. I’m not sure, but it feels like Luke’s leg is rubbing up against mine, blue jean calf to blue jean calf, cowboy boot to cowboy boot. I look over at him; he doesn’t look back at me this time, but he doesn’t move his leg either. I look at Mr. Wayne and hope he won’t notice. The same goes for Mr. Ford. That wouldn’t be good; I’m counting on my folks being able to see me in this one, but not with a boy’s leg rubbing up against mine. Damn. But I figure they probably won’t notice that. Especially if pros like Mr. Ford and Mr. Wayne don’t. I keep my calf and boot right where they are, and so does Luke.
The shot gets tried again. “Action!”
“Cut!”
And again. Finally, another time. We hold for clearance.
Arthur on the PA: “BACKGROUND STAY IN PLACE, PLEASE. WAITING.”
Then: “SHOT IS GOOD. THANK YOU.”
Luke’s leg stays on mine the whole time we’re waiting for clearance. Finally we break, and I breathe again.
On our way back to the trailer, I wave bye at Arthur, but he gives me only a small flick of his hand, then looks around to see if anybody noticed. It’s funny about Arthur; he’s acting so different on this picture from the way he usually does, which is usually friendly, laughing with everybody, real relaxed. And away from movie sets, he gets even more relaxed than that, and sometimes even acts nellie at parties, especially those that we’ve been to in West Hollywood, and at George Cukor’s house. But being around “men’s men” seems to make him jumpy and scared. I’m sure he’s probably none too happy to see how much time I’m spending with Luke, either, although he may not have even noticed. I’m starting to think I have more in common with Luke anyhow, both of us being actors and all.
“Hey, come over here with me, Will,” Luke says. “I’ve got a picture in my suit pants of my girlfriend back home that I wanna show you. I think she looks like Natalie Wood, if you wanna know the truth.”
Luke and I follow the other friendly posse actors, three other guys, into the trailer they’ve put us all in. I take my time changing out of my costume, giving Luke plenty of opportunity to look at my chest and arms and legs and stuff, if he wants to. My heart is kind of racing, since I’m hoping he’ll look me over, but he doesn’t, not really. I try not to feel too disappointed.
The other posse guys are nice, but standoffish, and kinda tough-looking. Since Luke and I are always off together somewhere, I guess they feel like we’re not real friendly. In the trailer, they change quickly and, with a lot of gruff good-byes and see ya tomorrow’s, leave in a hurry. Luke and I are by ourselves now. I look at the door to make sure the last guy shut it all the way.
Luke is hanging out in his boxer shorts, with his shirt off. He’s better developed than Arthur, and smooth-chested, like me. Luke isn’t looking my way, exactly, but he isn’t rushing to put on his shirt or pants, either. All I can think is we’re alone together in this warm, sticky trailer getting out of our clothes, one piece at a time and … Luke finally glances over at me, then quickly looks away. My head starts to swim …
“I know that picture is here someplace,” he says, fishing around in the pockets of his street pants. “I carry it with me all the time.”
“What’s her name?” I ask, though I really couldn’t care less. I make it sound as if I care, though.
“Shirley. Here it is.” And he sits down next to me on the bench, real close, our bare shoulders and bare legs touching. “Told you she was pretty.”
Actually, what I think, looking at the photo, is that Shirley looks kind of dishwater blond and sleepy-eyed, like a bunch of my female cousins on the Abernathy side, the side that didn’t enter too many beauty contests. I wouldn’t tell him this, but to my eyes Shirley is about as far from Natalie Wood as a girl could possibly get.
“She’s nice. Right, Will?” Luke says.
“Real nice. I bet she misses you too.”
“Damn, I sure do miss her. Sometimes I look at this picture, and I just turn into an old horndog—just from lookin’ at it.” And he slaps my thigh kinda hard, which makes me flinch, and then he laughs real big. But then when I don’t laugh back he stops and just looks at me, and just kind of hangs his head down close to mine.
“You turn into a horndog?” I say, after a second. My breath is coming real fast and shallow now.
“I sure do,” he whispers. “A big ol’ damn horndog, buddy.” We’re sitting side by side, our hips against each other, and all our sweaty limbs are brushing up, back and forth and up and down. Our faces are turned toward each other, and our eyes are blazing. It’s almost like … we’re about to play a love scene. Good thing for me nobody’s around to yell “Cut!”
Luke smiles, but it’s kind of scared-like.
“A horndog?” I whisper, and I can barely speak, my heart is racing so damn fast.
“Yeah,” he croaks, and the palm of his hand starts to rub my leg. Shirley’s picture drops to the floor, just falls out of his hand, as our mouths get closer and closer until we start to kiss, just like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard or something. Or like Clark Gable and … Rock Hudson.
But what happens then is not like in any movie I’ve ever seen. Luke’s hands start to roam all over me, and he’s getting all heated up, and he’s touching me everywhere. Everywhere.
“Are you my buddy, Will?” he groans, all hoarse and breathing heavy, mauling me like a big grizzly bear, though I don’t mind it. “Are you my buddy, man?”
“Yeah, Luke, yeah … hell yeah, I’m your buddy.” And then we’re kissing and sliding off the bench and rolling around on top of each other, and that’s when I hear voices outside the trailer.
One of them is Arthur’s.
“Will you wait here, Mr. Wayne?” I hear him say. “The kid just wanted an autographed picture for the folks back home, you know how it is. It’ll give him a thrill.”
Luke and I jump off of each other like two frogs buckshot off a lily pad. We’re scrambling to pull up our underwear, but it’s too—
Arthur opens the door. He catches us, and freezes. I can see Mr. Wayne down below the steps; the trailer sits way up high, on cinder blocks, so he’s not looking at us, just turned around smoking, not paying any attention. Thank you, Lord.
But it’s Arthur who looks like he’s been shot.
He and I just stare at each other for what seems like eternity, though it’s probably just a few seconds.
He turns around and closes the door tightly behind him.
“I think we have the wrong trailer here, Mr. Wayne,” I hear him say, all business and put back together, and we hear them walking away.
“Fuck, man. That was that AD guy!” Luke says, suddenly looking all terrified.
“Don’t worry about it, Luke,” I say, because the right words to say—whatever they are—are nowhere in my head. “I know him. He won’t tell anybody. I know him.”
And I bite my lower lip and look down at the floor. I don’t even want to see Luke naked anymore. I wish it was just me and Arthur in the trailer now. Just me and him, like the way it is at home. Our home.
Luke is hurrying to get dressed n
ow, and he keeps saying “Just my damn luck” under his breath. I just sit there. What I want is to run after Arthur and say “Hey … come on … it’s me … it’s ’Bama Boy. Who loves you, Arthur? Who loves you? I do! Come on, Arthur! Come on!”
And then, if he did turn back and listen to me, I’d say: “It wasn’t like it was real or, or anything like that. It was just … we were just … acting.”
CONNECTICUT, 1993
Ethan is up close to the TV screen, studying it. He has frozen the scene, so that it holds still and flickers on the monitor at the same time.
“Oh, yes. I see. Your legs are definitely rubbing together. That’s unbelievably fucking great, you know. You must be the only actor ever who managed to inject inadvertent homosexual activity into a John Wayne film. My God. You’re some kind of unsung gay film pioneer.”
“Must you always talk in thesis statements?” Toby says, sounding peeved, but Ethan is suddenly having the opposite effect on me; he’s making me smile. Poor Ethan is so damn earnest in his own pretentiousness that it almost seems beside the point to mock him.
Ethan looks back at Toby, clearly having registered the dig. I can see him trying to decide if he should deflect or shoot back.
“Do you have a problem, Tobias?” he says, lowering his tone.
“Please, for fuck’s sake, stop calling me that!” Toby says, giving Ethan a shove that isn’t exactly playful.
It’s my house. I’m going to intercede. “Well, thank you, Ethan. I never thought of it that way, but I think a new perspective is always welcome. Unfortunately, they don’t give out Oscars for things like that, do they?”
Ethan stares at Toby, clearly stunned that his new boyfriend would actually shove him. Then, recovering, he turns to me. “Oh, the Oscars …” he begins, practically sneering. “What a hollow, bourgeois ceremony that is.”
“I’m going to bed,” Toby says, jumping up. “Good night, Uncle Will.”
He exits the room abruptly, and I hear his clunky Doc Martens stomping down the hallway into the guest bedroom. I—or we—hear the sound of the bedroom door creaking open, then slamming shut—like sound effects in a horror film. Ethan and I both glance casually around the room, pretending not to have noticed.
“Well,” Ethan says, after a couple of moments, “I guess that … I should go too,” and suddenly, he looks a little vulnerable, and not quite so … armed. I feel the oddest unexpected urge to comfort him, but I resist it. I’m old and smart enough to know that they’ll work everything out on their own, or they won’t. And is it jealousy or protectiveness that makes me secretly hope they don’t?
“Well … good night, Will,” Ethan says, rising, and clearly making an attempt to gloss over the last few awkward minutes. “This has been a very instructive, quite fascinating evening.”
I get up to see him down the hall. But then he does a surprising thing: he throws his arms around me, and gives me an awkward, boyish hug. I’m so stunned by the sudden proximity of a male body to mine that I actually gasp.
“Did you love him?” he whispers. “That cowboy, did you … were you ever … did you ever become lovers?”
The question takes me aback, and, breaking the hug, I stare into his eyes, as if caught in the glare of headlights. Very young headlights, like my own used to be.
“Oh … no. No, I … I loved someone else. I was … with someone else at the time. I loved someone else then,” I tell him. Instantly, I feel foolish, afraid that I sound like a doddering old man. I hope Ethan doesn’t think so. I hope Toby doesn’t think so.
“Oh,” Ethan says. “I see. Well, thank you again. I really had a good time tonight,” he says, in a normal tone at last. He turns away from me to go into the bedroom, though I notice that he hesitates a second or two before opening the door and then quietly shutting it behind him.
I have a shelf where I keep these things, this comparatively small collection of my appearances in Hollywood. As I look at the Lucy box in my hands, it makes me smile, holding it, because, all silliness aside, it was a one-of-a-kind experience, a Big Star encounter, a real adventure, no matter how embarrassing it seemed at the time. Of course, to this day, Toby is the only member of my family who has ever known about it. I place it back on the shelf. Holding the Searchers box feels different in my hands, somehow; I haven’t screened the lamentable “friendly posse” scenes for friends nearly as often as I have the Lucy episode. It’s a memory I haven’t talked about as much, either.
I saw Luke only a few times after that; eventually, he went home to South Carolina, no doubt to marry that poor homely girl who he thought looked so much like Natalie Wood. And Arthur … I lost Arthur, of course. I deserved to. A few days after catching me in the trailer with Luke, he asked me to find another place to live; I expected that, actually, I just hoped it wouldn’t happen. I moved in with a couple of friends who had a house in the valley. After that, I ran into Arthur a couple of times here and there, at parties, but he would never really talk to me again. Eventually, I lost track of him. I heard through the grapevine that he moved to New York to work in the theater, but when I visited the city a few years later, and called information, his name didn’t come up. I never saw him again; obviously, he never became a famous director. And, of course, God knows, I didn’t become famous either. Eventually, I followed a terminally ill friend back to his family home in Connecticut, and after he died I decided to stay. I found it peaceful in Old Lyme; I still do. I get to work around flowers and plants all day, and deal with mostly unhurried, unambitious people, sort of like the people I grew up with, though more open-minded. It suits me here.
In my more shamelessly sentimental moments, usually during some idle hour at the shop, I do still think about Arthur. I’ll often wonder what he went on to do, who he went on to love, if he’s living or dead. I fantasize that one day, by pure happenstance, Arthur will be in the area for a wedding or a party and find himself in need of some last-minute flowers, and he’ll walk into my shop. And I’ll recognize him, of course, and perhaps apologize to him in a way I was never able to when I was young, green, and stupid in the ways of love—and of Hollywood. I think maybe he’ll wink at me, and sing a few bars of “I love Willie, and he loves me,” and then he’ll give me a sweet peck on the cheek, when no one is looking, and he’ll walk back out of the shop as quickly as he came in, and wave as he drives off in his car.
Arthur, wait! We were just … acting.
As I drain the last of my vodka and soda, I hear the back bedroom door open. I’m not surprised to see Toby creeping silently back down the hall to see me. He’s in a tank top and boxer shorts.
“Hey,” I whisper. “You OK?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
“Oh, yes. God, yes. Just having a silly old boy’s reverie out here on memory lane. Really, not a good thing to do.” I move back over to the couch, and sit.
“Oh …”
“And what about you, kid? Did you straighten everything out?”
“I guess. Whatever. God, he can be such an asshole.”
Toby sits down next to me on the sofa with a boyish plop. With the moonlight streaming in through the pine trees over the sunroom’s glass roof, I can see all the Abernathy and Ford features intermingling on his fine, strong face: my father’s furrowed brow, my mother’s pug nose, my own once-dark hair and blue eyes. It’s a serious face, always has been, but handsome and striking. As they say in Hollywood, he’ll age well.
“It’s so fucking hard, isn’t it?” he says, finally.
“What, Toby?”
“Oh … you know. Just trying to figure out who loves you, if you love them back, if they love you enough, if you love them too much, if the percentages add up and equal out on both sides, all that shit.”
I burst out laughing, though I know I probably shouldn’t; he’s so earnest! “Yes, I would say you’ve got that right. It is … um … fucking hard, as you put it. But you get a lot of points for hanging in there, kid. I mean, you don’t se
e me out there dating, God knows.”
“But you know you could if—”
“Shhh, little one. I’m just fine without. Don’t worry about me.”
He laughs and rolls his eyes to say whatever. Which I appreciate.
“And by the way,” I continue. “I know what you want to ask me, so let me just go ahead and answer it for you. I—”
“Wait. Auntie Mame? Patrick?”
“Ah, ahead of me as usual.”
“I know. So?”
“So … I did not feel like Auntie Mame trying to get rid of Gloria Upson for little Patrick tonight.”
He grins. “Really? So … you like him?”
“Well, I think he has potential, if he could learn to just … loosen up a little bit. Maybe you can help him with that.”
“We’ll see,” he says. “It’s like, he can be a total asshole, but then … he can be cool, too.”
“Toby, there’s something here I wanted to show you.” I get up and go back to the video shelf, and select a box marked Family, Late ’60s-Late ’70s. “Do you remember your twelfth birthday party? I have it on tape now.”
“No way! You had all those old sixteen-millimeter home movies put on video?”
“Yep. The Fords and Abernathys in all their glory. A family saga to rival the O’Haras, Minivers, and Ambersons combined. I was thinking this was not something we wanted to screen for Ethan.”
