by William Poe
Before his recovery, Simon had rarely sought help from anyone, but he was different now. Just as he had found solace in rehab and was able to help Blaine as a fellow addict, Simon didn’t need to face this event alone. He telephoned Dean.
“Can I come over? Something has happened, and I can’t deal with it by myself.”
Dean heard the trepidation in Simon’s voice and knew it must be serious. “Of course you can, Simon.”
Upon his arrival, Dean poured glasses of Saint-Émilion, Simon’s favorite wine, while eyeing the package resting on his lap as he settled into the wingback chair, a favorite spot whenever he visited, and one denied him when he’d entered into theological debate with Dean’s schoolmate and would-be lover, Algernon. Simon had felt he was being displaced, not just in terms of seating priority but in Dean’s affections. Simon held an admiration for Dean that bordered on attraction, aware that Dean’s amorous feelings toward him were held back by his respect for Simon’s relationship with Thad.
“If the Riverdell counselors saw one of their alumni drinking alcohol, they’d go into conniption fits,” Simon told Dean, holding the wine glass up to the light to admire the translucent garnet hue.
Dean started a conversation to set Simon at ease. He had already noticed the postmark and knew it must have something to do with Thad. “Do you sometimes visit Riverdell? That place had such a positive influence.”
“Visited just the other day, as a matter of fact.” Simon took a sip of wine. “I was going to fill you in but haven’t had a moment, with school and all. And then you called.”
“How’s Harris, the counselor who worked with you? I’d like to meet him someday and thank him for helping my good friend find himself. Counselors don’t collect many success stories. I know from experience.”
“Harris wasn’t there.”
“You mean not at work?”
“No. I mean he was gone from the rehab center.”
“To a better job, I hope. He must be terrific at what he does.”
“If not for Harris’s approach to recovery, no telling where I’d be. The administrator of Riverdell welcomed me with a big hug and praised the fact I had returned to school. He wanted to chat, but I explained Blaine’s situation and that he wanted help. There wasn’t an opening, but because it was me asking, the administrator found a bed.”
“Blaine? The dancer we talked about?”
“One and the same. Blaine sort of stood me up. You know me well enough—I don’t handle any kind of rejection very well, and like an idiot, I went looking for drugs, which didn’t work out, thankfully. I decided to attend a Cocaine Anonymous meeting on Asher and found Blaine already there. I persuaded him to follow me to the mansion; we talked all night, and in the end, he agreed to go into rehab.”
“Who would have thought…Blaine is so talented.” Dean paused. “You’re going on dates again?”
“Not really. But I was lonely, and I mistook Blaine’s interest in me, and I don’t know what I was thinking when we planned to meet for dinner. He didn’t show, and that set me off. Blaine’s interest came from his knowledge that I had used cocaine and wasn’t anymore.”
Dean was about to ask about the package, but Simon continued, “Do you know anything about Chester Manley?”
“Of course, the dance company, I’d forgotten the name when we spoke earlier. The newspaper featured him in an article not long ago, saying the dance company has been in financial difficulty since Chester entered a debilitated state of mind.”
“Turns out Blaine and Chester have been together since Blaine’s teenage years. Chester lives in a convalescent home now, and during most of his free time, Blaine attends to him.”
“There’s nothing nice about getting old,” Dean lamented, reaching for his glass of wine with one hand and rubbing his lower back with the other. “I know of what I speak.”
“Blaine and Chester developed a complex relationship over the years; it’s hard for Blaine to move on.”
“I’m glad you took him to Riverdell, but it’s too bad Harris won’t be there to counsel him.”
“At first, the administrator didn’t want to tell me what happened, afraid the news would affect me, but I told him the value of Harris’s approach was to put me in touch with myself, not to make me dependent on him personally.”
“What happened? It sounds dire.”
“During my stay, Harris didn’t speak much about his private life, but it turns out he had a glamorous girlfriend. The administrator practically glowed when he talked about the photograph of her Harris had showed him. Seems the girlfriend made demands.”
“Demands?”
“She treated Harris as her sugar daddy, threatening to leave whenever Harris failed to provide—reminds me of every guy I fell for in Hollywood before meeting Thad! Harris finally put his foot down, so the woman left, but he followed her to Oregon. The rest is sketchy, but the assumption is that Harris became desperate for money, hoping to win her back. He’s in prison for attempting to rob a bank in Portland.”
“You’re joking!”
“Nope. I wish I were.”
“I’m so sorry to hear it.”
“I consider it a cautionary tale. A person mustn’t depend on others for their sobriety—much less for their happiness.”
“On that note, perhaps you should tell me about the mail you received. I see the postmark.”
Simon handed the package to Dean. “I can’t bring myself to do it. Will you open it?”
Dean took the parcel and gingerly pulled tape from one of the ends, unfolding a flap of brown paper. He suspected what it was before taking out a boxed videocassette. His countenance fell as he turned to the back and studied the film stills used as advertising. Dean slid out the cassette and inserted it into a player on top of the television. He handed the box cover to Simon. “Look at the stills on the back.”
The front advertised an X-rated gay film titled El Amigo Rico. Simon turned the box over and dropped it to the floor as if it had caught fire.
“I’m glad you came over before seeing this,” Dean said.
“My God,” Simon said, only half listening to Dean’s words. He picked up the box. “That’s Thad!”
“I’m sure of it,” Dean agreed.
Simon rushed to the hall bathroom and locked the door as he burst into tears and threw up in the toilet.
“Are you going to be okay?” Dean asked when Simon returned, the front of his shirt wet from splashing water on his face and neck.
“What did I expect? The sexiest men on the planet surrounded Thad day and night, and he’s had to imagine how they feel having sex so he can add his voice. But for Thad to do this and not tell me!”
“But look at the expression on Thad’s face.” Dean pointed out one of the images. “Something isn’t right.”
In the image, Thad and Felipe sat on either side of a heavyset man, the “rich friend,” whose face was obscured, but Simon recognized the body—it was Emilio!
Simon took the remote from Dean’s hand and pressed eject to release the tape. “I can’t do this right now, not the way I feel. I’ll call and let you know what I think is going on after I watch it.”
“If you need me, I’m here,” Dean offered.
“I thought Thad genuinely loved me. But how does anyone know what’s truly in another person’s heart?”
Simon drove around for hours, passing through parts of the countryside along the Saline River he had not visited since Lenny took the family on Sunday afternoon excursions to see the blooms of redbud and dogwood in early spring and, in autumn, the vivid colors of maple, walnut, black gum, and sassafras trees. Simon recalled the first time he saw hedge apples nestled among the sumac along the roadside and cried for Lenny to stop the car so he could collect some and carry them home, thinking it would be fun to smash the bright green, mace-shaped fruits against the planks of the gray barn.
Arriving at the mansion shortly after dusk, Simon left the dreaded videotape in the Pontiac and w
alked around the mansion to the corral, giving Ferdinand his evening grain and standing silent to watch as the goat ground the food between his broad teeth, jaw mechanically moving side to side. The beast, gazing up at Simon with yellow slit eyes, seemed to neigh a mocking taunt. Simon felt cursed by cosmic powers beyond his ability to reason away.
“You are Satan, aren’t you?” Simon inquired of the innocent goat.
Ferdinand neighed desperately for Simon to pour additional feed into his trough.
“You have your priorities sorted out, don’t you, Ferdinand?”
The radioactive cargo remaining secure in the Pontiac, Simon pulled the tarp from a painting he had been working on, an abstract design that allowed him to explore his feelings for Thad through expressive brushwork and slashing palette knife, colors battling for priority, sometimes in harmony, at times dissonant, complicated emotions seizing each moment, fear that he would never see Thad buttressed against refusal to believe it—potentialities now manifest in the toxic video. The painting vaguely depicted sky, land, and sea, with figures trapped in the dark web of a matrix that united the design, and the composition was informed by the photograph of Simon and Thad standing side by side, gazing into the Pacific.
Simon loaded brushes with paint and began to work, avoiding the inevitable viewing of what he expected to put the mystery to rest, the effort unable to dispel the replaying in his mind of conversations with Thad about whether or not he should work for Howard, each memory a path to self-condemnation for not protesting more strongly; then, a disturbing thought: What if, in the recesses of desire, Simon had wanted to be free of his relationship with Thad because he felt undeserving of love such as his? Or worse, what if lurking demons had wanted him to regain his freedom to smoke cocaine? Simon tried but failed to reconstruct the reasons why he had not gone to California with Thad—or why, if Thad deplored living in Sibley, they could not have moved to New York as intended when Simon drove away from Hollywood. Then, moving to New York was a fantasy fueled by cocaine, but now he could manage it. After all, Simon knew the city well from his days as a leader in Sun Myung Moon’s apocalyptic army.
Simon retrieved the videotape from the Pontiac, let an anxious Cicero out the back door, and went into the parlor where Vivian and Thad, often joined by Connie, had watched their tapes of daytime dramas. It seemed wrong to insert El Amigo Rico into the same machine, remembering how Vivian would chastise a soap opera’s character for adulterous behavior. Simon had noted Thad’s bemused smile as he nodded in agreement. Simon slid the cassette into the machine and felt it snap into place. A rolling image at the start indicated the poor quality of the technique used in the transfer from a master tape. The US distributor had not bothered to translate the credits into English or to dub the opening voice-over; even so, Simon easily discerned the setup.
In the opening scene, a wealthy man, as evidenced by his Brunello Cucinelli suit, rode in a limousine with two young friends. They were setting out for sexual adventure, the point of view from the front passenger seat allowing the viewer to participate as a voyeur. Emilio—el amigo rico—sat between Thad, who was dressed in jeans and the powder-blue pullover that Vivian had given him, and Felipe, wearing yellow slacks with a blousy white shirt and ascot. Thad’s hair was disheveled as if he had just gotten out of bed, while Felipe’s hair looked professionally styled. Felipe kept the professional demeanor of a seasoned performer, squeezing against Emilio to fit himself into the camera’s narrow field of vision; Thad’s awkwardness set him apart.
Someone who didn’t know Thad would have seen in his expression the anticipation of debauchery—the effect intended by the editor, whose uneven skills gave the scene a quality little better than a home movie. Awkward close-ups of Thad’s downcast eyes shifted jerkily to reaction shots of Felipe, then panned to Emilio, staring directly into the camera as if to convey, with unsavory glee, “This could be you.”
Occasionally, the editor inserted establishment shots. Simon recognized the Capitol Records building as seen from the Hollywood Freeway, followed by the exit sign for Cahuenga Boulevard. The car veered south and turned right onto Selma, the establishment footage giving way to a handheld camera positioned outside the passenger window in order to focus on a vertical sign: Spotlight Bar.
This was shot the night Twiggy and Don had seen Thad with Felipe and the limo driver.
The handheld camera followed the trio along the sidewalk until the cameraman rushed ahead to catch Felipe entering through the heavy curtain that separated the mundane world from the Spotlight’s inner sanctum. Thad followed, holding the curtain for the limo driver. The cameraman never entered the bar, and neither did Emilio. During the time Thad, Felipe, and the driver were in the Spotlight—when Twiggy and Don saw them—the editor chose to show a montage of hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard waving at cars or approaching men on the sidewalk, interspersed with shots of hustlers standing on the streets of Gaixample, the cruising section of Barcelona that Emilio had pointed out during a sightseeing tour with David and Irene.
Simon remembered Twiggy saying that Thad wanted to get his attention. If Don had not gone to dinner, he surely would have figured out that something was wrong. Thad would never have consented to a scene being shot in the Spotlight, even if he had agreed to perform in a video, which Simon now doubted.
The video made clear that the limo driver was indeed a bodyguard, positioned to ensure that Thad, and perhaps Felipe as well, were unable able to make a break for it. Simon recalled how Felipe had begged to be taken to America upon his return.
In the scene following the hustler montage, Felipe, Thad, and the swarthy limo driver exited the Spotlight, accompanied by an additional young man that Simon didn’t recognize, ostensibly someone picked up at the bar. The voice-over continued in Spanish, but Simon caught the drift: a third boy from the bar had been recruited to provide entertainment for “the rich friend” who waited inside the limousine.
Emilio must have made the fateful associations listening to Felipe talk about the young man providing sound effects and then wormed more information from Thad, who didn’t realize that what he was saying would reveal his connection to Simon. Emilio knew how to charm with the tact of a devil’s minion. Thad’s friendship with the owner of the Spotlight would have been easy to ascertain from Howard. Howard and Emilio had already had plans for a video. Whatever the original story, it would have been easy to incorporate Thad and include a scene at the Spotlight, where people knew Simon, where Emilio could be sure that someone would tell Simon about it, even before completing the video and mailing a copy to the mansion, an address he surely forced from Thad. Simon could only imagine Emilio’s plan. Maybe the idea was to make back the stolen money by exploiting Thad, and a fringe benefit would be Simon’s suffering upon receipt of the video.
Simon had to find Thad. Would Scott provide some lawyerly sleuthing with his gay producer clients, perhaps weasel a new phone number for Howard Price? What about Sweet Peter, the bartender at The Pub—might he be able to track down Howard for him? What would Howard say if Simon confronted him? Emilio could have absconded with Thad, telling Howard he’d left of his own accord. What reason would Howard have for stopping his new partners from abducting Thad, even if he knew their intent?
Simon paused the video before reaching the scene depicted on the box cover. He telephoned Dean and broke into tears.
“This has to be hard for you,” Dean consoled. “Do you want me to drive out to Sibley? I don’t mind.”
“No. I’ll be okay.”
“I am here for you. Please call if you need me.”
“I’m already convinced that Thad is in trouble and that he didn’t want to make this video. One of the first segments was shot at the Spotlight!”
“Then I was right about something being off about the look on Thad’s face.”
“Howard Price might have sold Thad to the Spaniards. Such things happen.”
“I hate to even think about it.”
“Thank you
for being my friend, Dean.”
“Seriously, call me if you want me to drive out there.”
“I will—and don’t worry, I won’t go looking for drugs.”
“That possibility had crossed my mind.”
Simon returned to the video. More establishment shots put the group on Cahuenga, driving north, before a jump cut to stories of other threesomes, each including Emilio. Simon fast-forwarded and realized that Thad appeared in only one more scene, the one depicted on the box cover. Simon cued it up and braced himself, but nothing could have prepared him for recognizing the same hotel room where he, Felipe, and Sören had engaged in sex with Emilio while they were using cocaine. Thad was in Barcelona!
The camera panned from a close-up of Thad and Felipe servicing Emilio to pause on a framed photograph—the picture of Simon and Thad at Zuma Beach!
The unholy trinity of Emilio, David, and Irene were sending a message with El Amigo Rico: they owned Thad.
Simon wished they had sent a hitman instead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Had an avenging angel been released to cause misery for Simon’s abandonment of the faith that had sustained him for so many years, unleashed by a callous deity treating Thad as a pawn in its jealous game? Simon wanted a god to blame but found only himself as he directed his anger at flesh-and-blood Emilio, David, and Irene.
Simon needed information, and the best place to start would be Scott’s connections to the world of gay pornography—if only Scott could manage a coherent response.
“Shy-mon? Let me shee,” Scott slurred. “I used to know shomeone by that name. I think he died or shomething. Don’t tell me you’re his ghost. Da-yum.”
