“Pete’s an interesting fella,” Nick said. “He’s really more Barney’s friend than mine.”
“Yeah, I liked him. Didn’t get much chance to talk to him, but he seems really cool.” A bit of a stretch. Whatever.
“They hadn’t seen each other since Halloween.” Like Nick really had to apologize to me. We were standing by my car. A kiss was, of course, a terrible idea that I still considered for a few furious arousing seconds, since neither of us seemed eager to go our separate ways. “Will you be going back to San Antone?” he asked.
“Yeah, right after the callback. My mom’s planning a big New Year’s feast.”
“That’s what moms do.”
“Nick, want to have dinner with me before school starts up?” I had to add it: “Just the two of us?”
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he smiled. Chills. Had I just made my first indecent proposal? And had he accepted without missing a beat? It was all so bewildering. However, as I drove home on deserted streets, three things were crystal-clear: 1) I was crazy about Nick. 2) He deserved better than what I’d spent hours witnessing. And 3) The consumer’s ability to choose the best-quality goods and/or services for his particular needs is the cornerstone of our free-enterprise system. Ask any MBA student.
✽✽✽
Alex: Please sign this original poster for TEENAGE BRIDES OF CHRIST, the film in which I first became aware of your copious charisma & star-power. Please return it in the enclosed rigid mailing tube. Magickally yours, Ray Lanville, Eagle Rock, CA.
In high school, Sara worked part-time at The Gap with a girl named Karla who was always bopping around to KITY radio, singing along with the pop hits of the day like Stacey Q’s “Two of Hearts” – the refrain of which she continually mis-chirped as “I’m easy, I’m easy!” Sara was performing a dead-on impersonation of that particular blast from the past when I hung up her phone.
“I just couldn’t tell him no.”
She nodded sagely, eyes condescendingly slitted. “What? So I’m supposed to never see him again?” I scoffed, suddenly well-adjusted.
She stood in front of an antique mirror and corralled her full-bodied raven hair into a couple of test-ponytails, before selecting one to implement with a little twisty thing she pulled from somewhere. “You used to think so,” she said quietly.
“I know.” I flashed back to the hideously lonely months after my first post-graduation Christmas. I’d been enjoying infrequent but regular phone calls from Nick since I’d relocated in June. It’s true he never said he planned to follow me to Babylon-On-The-Pacific, but the combo of his curiosity about L.A., boredom with his job (and Barney, it could be reasonably inferred) and my own surging optimism — my busy year had climaxed with a five episode stint on General Hospital and two weeks in December on a major-studio suspense thriller — led me to create a scrapbook for him. Not the kind Oprah’s followers dutifully assembled with cultish zeal, but a real forbidden fruit-fest of enticing L.A. material stuffed with the coolest ads for things he’d want to buy or see or taste or touch… plus a few issues of key publications like The Weekly and Planet Homo — which I had A Different Light bookstore wrap up with a mix-tape and my fave Hollyweird novels, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge/Myron… along with Bruce Weber’s new Bear Pond (because I could afford A-list beat-off material for myself and/or intimate friends) — so I could ship it all to my friend Vanessa to drop off at Nick’s office for Xmas.
And that was it. I spent the holidays with my parents and some alcoholic young cousins on Maui, covertly and constantly beeping in to my machine for the message Nick had to leave after thoroughly perusing his big box of gay goodies. But he didn’t call… or write. Or take out an ad for me to find in the Personals section of The Village Voice (to which we both subscribed) as seen in the essential New Wave screwball comedy classic Desperately Seeking Susan.
It was over. I spent dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars on long-distance calls to Sara nursing my broken heart. I wondered how close I’d come to Nick actually moving west… and what had been the fatal spark that torched the bridge I’d painstakingly built between us. My fling with Trevor started on Martin Luther King Day and was dead by Valentine’s. Afterward, I didn’t look at another guy for months… and God knows they were everywhere, each more succulent than the last.
“When was the last time you talked to him? Specifically?” she asked.
“After my big blockbuster opened, remember? In June. For all of six minutes.” The whole damn world had called then. The movie, which concerned a rapey serial killer policeman (Matt Dillon) into chicks with disabilities who targets a physically challenged romance novelist (Winona Ryder), did $38 million its first week. I played a Book Soup clerk and had one good scene with Matt and another with Winona and the phenomenal Laurie Metcalf. “I know you think he’s the reason I haven’t been back to Texas ‘til now.”
“Jeez, Alex. Why else? You’ve been raking it in practically since you got there. And your schedule was totally flexible before this soap thing. I can’t believe you’ve been gone almost a year and a half.” She took the last cookie fragment off the plate, compressed it between her fingers and tossed it into my mouth.
“I admit it upset me. The idea of being so close to him without… “
“Gobbling his rod?”
“Among other things. But I’m back and you see I’m okay. Phone calls, faxes, meetings… I can handle it. He can put on a live sex show for us at the Chain Drive with Dave Navarro if he wants. No problem.”
She laughed, looking exquisitely beautiful, until she discovered a gooey cookie fragment on her Bundeswehr tank top. She flicked it off, but it left a semi-sweet skidmark. “Fuck me,” she groaned.
“You’re gorgeous… but I can’t,” I instantly replied. “I will send you a Hearts Crossing bib from the studio gift shop. Megan DuBois doesn’t leave home without one.”
“And some sexy low-rise adult diapers with that logo on them, too, please. Now listen. There’s something I’ve been avoiding telling you. Because I didn’t think you’d take it the right way.” She picked up the plate and glasses and I followed her back into the kitchen, asphyxiating from curiosity. Her CD player was shuffling three omnipresent aural components of our shared college experience, The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead), Shakespears Sister (Sacred Heart) and Cocteau Twins (Heaven Or Las Vegas). She pulled me into the parlor area and we sat on the Broyhill furniture she’d inherited.
“You’re toying with me. And I won’t have it, Missy,” I hissed, going max-Simon for her.
“I went out with Nick and Barney in August.” I forced myself not to lunge forward. “A complete accident. I was in Austin for Six Degrees of Separation — the road company at the Paramount — covering the opening for Paseo. I bought three house seats, and Vanessa and Chuck were my dates. It was a benefit for the Travis County food bank. Sixty bucks a ticket. Then Chuck was called to Chicago at the last minute to solve a software crisis, and Vanessa decides to make it a romantic weekend and she bailed with him. So I’m up there on my own, killing time at Waterloo Records, and who’s grinning at me through the window? Nick. He runs in and hugs me. It’s been almost a year, so we’re standing there talking, and I glance out the window again and there’s Barney, staring at the two of us… like a big dildo with eyes. And Nick waves at him to come in — they’d been at Sparks next door getting cards — but Barney, the autistic with an MBA, just stands there… and it’s getting awkward. I ask Nick something just to break the weird, evil spell, and the moment we stop looking at Barney, he comes in. And I’m as friendly as a girl from San Antonio can be, no joke, and still — he won’t make eye-contact with me. Even though I’d hung out with them both after you moved to Hollywood. Against my will. Twice. And I just felt so sorry for Nick, I invited them to come with me.”
I felt a little gross hanging so breathlessly on every mundane gossipy word, so I excused myself to grab
a seltzer. Sara had a full-color soap magazine photo of me affixed to her refrigerator’s freezer door with a rectangular magnet repro of the movie poster for The Unholy Wife, a Fifties melodrama starring Diana Dors: “Half-Angel, Half-Devil… She Made Him Half-A-Man!” The “Him” seemed to refer to me, as depicted in the cheesy but fetching publicity portrait.
“And what happened?” I asked non-obsessively, my tone bemused, expression expectant.
“Nick says they were planning to see a dollar movie, but he’s thrilled to be seeing Six Degrees. Of course, right? Betty Buckley, Alexis Arquette, Barry Bostwick…”
“Nick loves Alexis Arquette,” I blurted annoyingly.
“Ever since Last Exit To Brooklyn,” Sara nodded, “which you guys saw the moment it opened here. He told me. And later, at the reception for the play, he got to tell Alexis.”
“That’s so cool! He was nice, I hope…”
“Alexis?”
I nodded, apprehensive. “It wasn’t like Madonna with Kevin Costner in Truth Or Dare… was it?”
“Nope,” she assured me, her tone and eyes wickedly indicating the great relish with which she’d be informing me exactly how unlike. Which could only mean…
“Alexis Arquette hit on Nick?! Right there, in front of —“
“Stop. I’m getting ahead of myself.
“And killing me.”
“Pray for strength. You don’t want to die without hearing this. Anyway… as soon as I bring up the show, Barney wants to know if I have ‘passes’. And I’m thinking oh, right, he’s thrifty! Forgot.”
“He’s a penurious little sweetheart,” I deadpanned. Inserting Bad Seed dialogue, the more florid the better, into conversations was something we’d been doing since appearing onstage together fall of junior year in our high school’s off-the-rails sold-out trainwreck/production of the psycho-brat chestnut. Our drama teacher moved the small-town setting from the Deep South to the Central Texas hill-country (Texafying creaky theatrical classics was, I now realized, his sole directorial signature) so didn’t seem to mind Sara playing Monica, the overbearing, histrionic diva neighbor, as Flo on Alice, but drunker and dykey-er. (If anyone cared… I was Leroy, the mentally challenged handyman Rhoda burned alive, which became a real crowd-pleaser thanks to my choice to add a layer of not-so-subtle pedophilia that informed my character’s every white-trash move.)
“The simple thing would’ve been saying ‘yes, free tickets!’ But as soon as Nick found out it was a benefit, he’d have insisted on paying for them. And Barney would’ve made a scene at the Paramount in front of a sold-out crowd so… I came clean: ‘Sixty dollars each to fight hunger.’ And he’s like ‘Sixty bucks for a movie?!’ And Nick gives me this cringing look —half-apology/half-begging — and I tell Barney it’s not a movie, it’s the charity Texas premiere of a national Broadway tour. And now he’s all pissy for not knowing it’s a play, and I can barely hear him mumbling how they can’t afford it.
“Then lo and behold, Nick gets angry. He glares at Barney like he’d dearly love to pick up the nearest 12-gauge and…” the product of a two-NRA membership household, she easily mimed this. “And he marches to the next aisle for a full-on couple’s spat. In whispers, so I heard zero. Sorry.”
“I’m not complaining. But I am betting in two minutes Nick came back and said they’re going. Like no hideous display of cheapness had occurred right in front of you.”
She nodded. “And when it comes to hideousness on display, Barney was just getting started.”
“Are you shitting me? What happened?!”
“The universe punished me that night — for every time you told me something about Barney and I replied ‘he can’t be that bad.’ Guess what? He fuckin’ is. So Nick meets me in front of the theater looking especially fine… jeans, cowboy boots, a little black Perry Ellis blazer over a tight scoop-neck white tee and, best of all, alone. Like I’d been hoping. Turns out Barney had decided to skip the play… but he was overcome with last-minute charitable feelings when Nick mentioned the gay plot twist and penile nudity, oddly enough. And now the curtain’s about to go up and we’ve got Barney’s ticket, while he’s circling the area looking for free parking. I had to see the show for work, so I went in, all stressed and annoyed as the house lights are going down, when suddenly Nick and Plus One are shoving past half the third row in the dark to get to me. And since there’s no intermission, I don’t get a good look at Barney until the show’s over.”
“Why would you want one?”
“I needed several to confirm that he was really wearing the exact same clothes from Waterloo: saggy old shorts and equally tired Pink Floyd The Wall t-shirt, now accented with a Members Only jacket.”
I loved it when her fashion-claws came out; even more when, despite my barely basic semi-skill set in that area, I could play devil’s advocate: “Well, you’ve said yourself that Members Only jackets will have a massive comeback in the future.”
“Yeah. In 20 years. And when they do, no one’s gonna be wearing them with flip-flops from Stop-N-Go.”
“Really? Barney did that? At a premiere… with Betty Buckley?! How excruciating for Nick…”
“I’m not sure he even notices how Barney dresses at this point. But I saw how mortified he can still get when we hit the lobby. Z Tejas, Mangia, Threadgill’s and a bunch of other restaurants had all set up this lavish buffet. And there’s Barney, standing two feet from the line, with an overflowing plate, riveted to this overhead TV monitor running promo pieces about the play and the food bank while stuffing himself, oblivious to the people staring at him. Including Nick who saw him and recoiled, like a reflex, then he takes a step forward like he had to put an end to it? But instead Nick froze, and just… crumpled.
“I took his arm and guided him to the bar across the room. I wanted to tell him people probably thought the food bank brought some homeless people along tonight and Barney was one of them, ‘cause that’s what he looked like, but luckily I was distracted by Alexis Arquette checking us out. While Nick’s getting us drinks, I go introduce myself and suck up a little — I was scheduled to interview him and some others in the cast the next day — and he’s a total riot — you could see how he loves to push people’s buttons. So he motions to Nick at the bar and asks if he’s my husband. I’m like ‘honey, please — he’s gay’ and his eyes go all wide, mouth pops open and he says ‘Oh my fucking God,’ exactly like that.
“Then I see the play’s publicist waving at me, and she’s with the director and Barry Bostwick. So I tell Alexis his name’s Nick and he’s actually a big fan. And Alexis goes ‘How big?’ Shameless. And then Nick’s back, so I say ‘Meet Alexis Arquette.’ He lights up and since Alexis already has an arm around his waist, I grab my drink and go schmooze my ass off for my article. 20, 30 minutes, max. I’m hoping Nick’s okay — I didn’t expect Alexis to entertain him the whole time. But now I can’t find either of them. Then, ka-blammo — here’s Barney marching past with that petulant, pissy expression you do so well…”
“This?” I asked, slapping it on.
“That’s the one. He sees me and looks even pissier.” I made the adjustment. “Exactly. And he ignores the dessert buffet and heads for the exit. I realize I’m standing near the men’s room, which I’m thinking he came from, and any doubt vanishes when Nick barrels out the door, super-serious, obviously searching for him. But he sees me and immediately looks miserable. I ask him what’s up and he says he can’t go to Oilcan Harry’s, which he’d suggested to me before the play, and he’s sorry but he has to go ‘deal with Barney.’ So I tell him which door he just stomped out of, Nick kisses my cheek, says thanks for everything and that he hopes he didn’t ruin my night and… he’s gone. I’m just standing there, wishing I’d said ‘No, that would be Barney’ and wondering what I missed, when out comes Alexis, giving me a little wave and this guilty smile as he walks over and asks if Nick has a boyfriend who look
s ‘kinda retarded — and homeless.’”
“He’s my idol.”
“Just wait. I say ‘unfortunately, yes… what happened?’ And he’s like ‘The truth?’ ‘Yes, please.’ And he tells me what crazy-hot chemistry he and Nick had as soon as I left them alone. Alexis wanted them to slip away and ‘do things’ until I was finished, and though Nick’s voice kept saying no, his eyes and body were totally saying yes… Alexis insisted, so when Nick said he was going to the restroom, Alexis took that as an invitation, followed him, got Nick into a stall and was trying to talk him into accepting a ‘legendary hand-job’ when this plate hit the floor and broke… desserts went everywhere… and they realized someone was lurking and spying on them. And, of course, it was Barney… who mumble-screamed something at Nick then took off. That’s when Nick went after him.”
“Jesus titty-fucking Christ.”
“I know, right?” We stared at each other, so many unanswered questions swirling.
“What did Barney grunt at Nick before beast-ing out of there?” I groaned in frustration.
“Hell if I know. But who brings a dessert plate full of pralines and tollhouse cookies into a nasty men’s room?!” Sara shot back, ever-practical.
“Barney’s obviously banned Alexis from any home appearances on cable, VHS and laserdisc. But just him… or Rosanna and Patricia, too?”
“Could it be all Arquettes?” Sara wondered. “ From their dad Lewis, all the way down to cute youngest brother David?”
Then the most pressing issue of them all, which I rushed to express: “Why would you keep this from me for two hours, never mind two months?”
“Because the bottom line’s very disturbing. And it’s not that Barney’s a colossal dweeb, or that they’re so miserable together. It’s that Nick, who’s a wonderful man in a lot of ways, chooses to stay in that. It goes so beyond feeling compassionate or sorry for someone — it’s been, what, eight years? Pardon the Oprah-ism, but Nick’s co-dependent. What bright, sexy guy would take that over this?” She indicated me with a prize-modeling hand-motion a la The Price Is Right’s Janice Pennington. “Nick’s got some issue with self-esteem, or masochism, or who the hell knows. I’m a smart-ass, not a clinical psychiatrist. But whatever the diagnosis, it’s not good enough for the likes of you.”
Glamourpuss Page 5
