Glamourpuss
Page 17
We’d been dating nine weeks and he was shaping up to be an alright boyfriend (although, considering my history, at this point anyone I could call at home would qualify). What wasn’t to like? Flawless body (except for the chest-hair shortage, but the hot and endlessly amusing foreskin made up for it), great sense of humor, exceptionally perverted mind.
One afternoon — the day following the one on which I mentioned my recurring junior high doctor’s office fantasy — I went to his apartment after work and discovered a note: “Please step into the examining room and undress. Dr Renado will be with you shortly.” An arrow pointed toward his bedroom. Intrigued, I went on in. The bed sported a starchy paper cover like they use on exam-tables to ensure you aren’t planted on the traces of someone else’s bare butt. His nightstand had been covered with a smaller square of the same paper. Neatly arranged on it were a tongue depressor, a big thermometer, a tube of lube and a small plastic specimen bottle. Hoping Trevor hadn’t just screwed a physician’s assistant to score all this, I took off my t-shirt, sneakers, socks and jeans and sat down on the crinkly paper.
The bathroom door immediately opened and Trevor came out wearing one of those headbands with a silver disk over his forehead, a halfway-buttoned white smock, stethoscope and white Calvin Klein briefs. I grinned as he strode to the bedside. “Please shuck off those shorts,” he ordered blandly, in his best accent, Philadelphian. I giggled. Trevor would sooner shop at LaBrea Bargain Circus than refer to underwear as “shorts”. He stared at me. “I’m not sure why you find this amusing. Remove those at once.” He was really in character — I was impressed and starting to get turned on. The kinky dom routine was such a deviation from regularly scheduled programming, I felt compelled to reciprocally roleplay as an unwilling, fearful patient ashamed of his arousal.
After the oddly realistic hernia check; I was expecting him to take my temperature back there (duh!)… but Trevor put a nasty twist on it, ordering me to move from face down to up on all fours, chest and head down, legs wide apart, ignoring two throbbing boners, mine (up against my stomach) and his (tenting out the Calvins) as he repeatedly adjusted the thermometer, chiding me for not holding still and trying to push it out. “You’ve wasted enough of my time, young man,” he snapped. “Normally, we allow patients privacy to collect their own semen specimen. But you can’t be trusted. And I still don’t have an accurate temperature reading. So we’ll be trying another way.” Milking me like a farm animal, to be precise, a procedure during which Dr Renado not only resisted the myriad Longhorn and Texas cattle ranch jokes, but managed to get every precious drop into the little cup (for real — I checked the crinkly paper afterwards). Well-done!
Except for the mutual nervous need we both felt to entertain the other, our relationship was virtually stress-free. He was there for me to wake up next to three or four days a week, and hoot with at Home Shopping Club’s Bargathon late at night, and for drives on Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, singing along in a frenzy to KROQ. I insisted to myself he’d changed and matured for the better since our first brief but memorable go-round almost two years ago, but I couldn’t help wondering if his egomania was now simply being balanced by my quasi-fame. If that were the case, what would happen now that he’d been cast in Dino & Muffin and could be a household name and/or Tiger Beat poster pull-out scant months from now?
We spent many enjoyable hours ridiculing the insipid pilot script after he got the part. I ran lines with him, playing every single role but his. Apparently the producers were banking on reeling in the entire Nielsen family from Grandma and the little ones to horny teens. My favorite moment was Dino (the “really sweet” Corey Haim) and his bimbette girlfriend discovering six-year-old Muffin in his bed — oops, cancel that nookie, dude! My second favorite occurred when Muffin asks the shirtless, pectorally gifted Ky (you know who), “How come you got boobies, and I don’t?!”
Trevor hated his young co-star, who he shockingly dubbed “that spoiled rotten little pickaninny”. But he valiantly endured countless photo shoots with her, and was actually observed openly cuddling the precocious moppet during the pilot taping (which I attended… to my horror). The audience was “100 percent real people” according to the show’s braying, big-schnozzed executive producer, who’d made damn sure that the studio crowd, with few exceptions (like myself), consisted entirely of clueless tourists who thought spending eight hours watching a thirty minute sitcom taped live was a privilege on par with snagging dinner reservations at the Hard Rock Cafe.
These folks were wild about Dino & Muffin, of course, providing thunderous applause and squeals of delight during such comic high points as Muffin turning Dino’s jockstrap into a backpack. “She won’t be carryin’ much around in that,” the stern but beneficent Irish housemother (Stephanie Beacham) comments.
“That’s okay. Neither does Dino,” Trevor cracked back to live-studio-audience bedlam. By the end of the episode, when Dino and his frat brothers convince the cold-hearted cynical social worker (Special Guest Star Linda Gray) that they can be a real family for Muffin, there wasn’t a dry nose in the house. Afterward we stayed for a pizza wrap party catered by Numero Uno. I ended up interrogated by someone’s 14-year-old sister, who happened to be a Hearts Crossing fanatic, while Trevor worked the room and the star child actress threw pizza toppings, screamed at her mother, then ran around the stage until she vomited. “If we get picked up, she’ll be earning 40 grand a show,” Trevor marveled as a janitor schlepped in a sawdust bucket.
The network loved the pilot, immediately slated it as a summer replacement, and ordered six additional episodes. Trevor was now an honest-to-God series regular. About ten days after the joyous announcement, I woke up at 6:00 a.m for an early call, took a shower, ran a brush through my wet hair and drove to the studio with my face buried in my script at every traffic light. Somehow I was in 12 scenes, mostly with Allison and Megan, but after lunch I was opposite Anna Ford, my onscreen pseudo-girlfriend, who usually copped the attitude that she was doing most of her co-stars (me included) a favor by acting with them.
I hit the hair room at seven o’clock sharp. Megan was in the chair getting her blonde perm sprayed stiff and squirting – what was undoubtedly – Tab into her mouth from one of those 44-ounce sports bottles normally available at finer convenience stores; but since this one boasted a flaking silver HC logo, it was clearly a cast and crew gift from the last few years courtesy of our notoriously stingy show-runners.
“Hi, sweetie!” she chirped. Her character Cyrinda had just awakened from a five-month coma and apparently had no memory of Simon’s deviltry. I went over and chatted for a minute. She had the reputation as a manipulation-mad pill, but I’d never had a problem with her. We’d hit it off at my series test when she said, loudly, with an ambiguous degree of seriousness, “You better hire him or I’ll quit,” to the casting director, all the producers and a network VP right after she played my audition scene with me.
After my hair was done, I entered the adjacent makeup room, expecting the usual coffee-fueled dish from Tommie, our gray-ponytailed morning makeup man. But Tommie was on the ratty vinyl loveseat with a cherry danish hanging limply from one bejeweled hand, just staring into space. “‘Morning,” I said.
He jumped. “Oh. Alex.” Something was definitely amiss. He focused on me and assumed a miserable expression that reminded me of Dana Plato on Diff’rent Strokes when she was told she wouldn’t be allowed to move to Paris to pursue modeling. Tommie closed the door (also weird) and started to slap on my base. Finally, he said, “How’s everything, baby?”
“Just great.”
“No problems?”
“My car needs a new water pump. Got one?”
In the mirror, he shook his head as if this saddened him. “Are you happy with all the, uh… press you’ve been getting?”
“Oh, yeah. Lots of fodder for the scrapbookers back home.”
He bit his lip. What the hell wa
s wrong with him? I hadn’t been in a conversation this stilted since my callback for that Steven Seagal film. He reached for a product, then stopped before applying it to my face, unable to eyeline. “Good Christ, hon. I didn’t want to be the one to have to show this to you.”
He pulled a folded tabloid out of his jacket and shook it open. The cover depicted an extremely prominent country music queen, disheveled, with a black eye and a huge bandage over her nose. The headline shrieked that she’d left her “Cheating, Beating Hubby For Good!”
“Is she a friend of yours?” I asked Tommie, more than a tad befuddled.
“Huh?” he bleated, then glanced at the cover. “No, no, no! Here!” He pointed and moaned to himself as I read one of the little blurbs on the bottom of the front page: “Gay Soap Tryst!” Before I could begin to process anything, he’d flipped to the middle of the issue. It was the “Gossip Hound” column, and under its trademark logo of a dog in sunglasses and pearls yakking on a cordless phone was a quarter-page series of three photos — of Trevor and me kissing in his car.
I read the caption, stunned: “Sexy soap star Alexander Young, super-baddie Simon Arable on Hearts Crossing, is out at first base with an unidentified hunk at LAX International Airport.” Beside it, a picture of me getting out of the Miata (license plate blocked in all photos by the car behind us), face angled differently, to clear up any doubt that, yes, world, it was me. The issue was dated next week. I looked at Tommie, not having any idea what to say.
“It came in the mail yesterday,” he explained. “Probably be on the stands tomorrow. I subscribe to a few of them. They call me sometimes for dirt, you know, but I’d never blab.” He gestured distractedly to the wall, adorned with autographed pix of the luminaries he’d prettied up over the years.
“I don’t get it,” I stammered. My mouth was dry. I tapped the Sparkletts cooler for a cup of water. “That… happened in October. Why — now?”
“You’re a lot bigger than you were last fall, honey. Try to relax. Take a seat.” With cat out of bag, Tommie obviously felt much better. He finished my face then handed me the rag. “You better hold onto this. By the way, who is that guy, Alex? Besides a little slice of semi-heaven, from the looks of it…”
✽✽✽
I headed for Trevor’s after being released into premium five-fifteen rush hour traffic. It felt like I’d been awake for three days straight — make that three days in a row. I’d spent my time off-camera hiding in my dressing room. I wanted to call my mom and warn her, and I wanted to call my agent and see how the fuck she suggested I handle this little bombshell, but every time I looked at the phone, I froze up. I felt stiff and awkward on the set, but nobody noticed because Simon was supposed to be nervous and agitated throughout the episode. For the first time in my life, I relied on cue cards.
It was raining and took me 40 minutes to get to West Hollywood. The Miata wasn’t in Trevor’s space, so I used my key to let myself in. He’d left a note on the sofa: “Dear A STOP Be back soon STOP Commercial audition STOP Do telegrams really exist in our world today STOP Trevor” Whenever he signed his name, it was achingly neat and formal and looked like the insignia on the back of fine china. I untaped the note and absently folded it into eighths. I went into his room to lie down on the unmade bed. The pillow smelled like jasmine body lotion. I closed my eyes and was suddenly asleep.
I heard metal striking the floor, and there was Trevor stepping out of his belted Girbauds. His knee-length underwear glowed a preternatural white in the dark room.
“Hi,” I said. He dove into bed and enveloped me in smooth, hot muscle. He started grazing around my neck and slid his fingers under my sweatshirt and walked them up my spine. I held him close for a moment, until Mini-Jeff Stryker’s nasty little mini-voice was hissing in my ear: “Hope you’re diggin’ this, pussyboy… cuz it’s gonna cost you your goddamn career!” We both stiffened, Trevor in his Calvins, me all over. When he started to kiss me, I had to intervene:
“Trevor…”
“Hmmm?” He was now pestering my crotch.
“Something really shitty happened today,” I began. He encircled both of my wrists in one big hand and yanked them over my head, lowering himself on top of me at the same time.
“Did Anna Ford try to upstage you again?”
“Trevor, I’m serious.” I sat up and plinked on the lamp. The rolled-up tabloid was wedged in my bag next to the bed. I pulled it out and passed it to Trevor. He looked at me, horrified, then flipped to the cover, then back to The Page.
“Can you tell that it’s me?” were the first words out of his mouth.
“I don’t think so,” I said, watching him squint at the pictures like they were a hide-a-word puzzle. His erection still bulged through his underwear but was, I suspected, softening rapidly. “My face is in front of yours and you’ve got sunglasses on.” Concern for my public exposure could be exhibited anytime now, Trev.
“I can’t fuckin’ believe this,” he said. He hopped out of bed and stomped to the living room. “How’d you find out about it?”
“The makeup man at the show brought it in for me.”
He returned, carrying his portfolio. “Those sleazy assholes. I’ll sue. I will sue.” He began comparing each shot of himself in his book to the pictures.
“You’ll sue?! I’m the focus here, in case you missed the phrase ‘sexy soap star Alexander Young.’ Nobody knows that’s you. I’m the one who’s going to have to answer for this.”
He stared at me, open-mouthed and petulant. “You expect me to take this lightly?”
“Taking it…”
He cut me off. “This could ruin everything for me. I have a series about to air. A national primetime family series.”
“And what do you think I do for a living, dinner theater?”
“It’s different, Alex. Daytime is different. You’re not in the public eye as much.”
Typical. “Bullshit. Who do you think reads these rags?” I tossed the paper off the bed. “I’d say the cross-section of soap opera fans is on the huge side.” He snatched the tabloid off the floor and continued trying to match it with one of his modeling pix. I’d pretty much had it. “I can’t believe someone who posed naked and hard for the centerfold of Beatoff Buddies is obsessing over these pictures!” I told him.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, but I'm sure everyone who bought it still has it.”
His mouth popped open to reply to that backhanded insult but said nothing. I brushed my hair and packed up my bag. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I want to be alone.” It was a lie but he really left me no choice. “Thanks for your support, though.” I left before he could say anything, but was still sorry he didn’t.
On the drive home, I thought about how Nick would’ve reacted if it had been the two of us. I could almost hear him: “They should’ve asked for my name. I’da spelled it for ‘em!” Or maybe I was just flattering myself. In any case, Nick would undoubtedly see the pictures and feel sorry for the persecution I might face as a result, while simultaneously feeling better about abandoning me, since I obviously had no trouble attracting unidentified hunks.
I dreaded what might be on the answering machine, but when I got to my apartment there were no messages. Before relief set in too comfortably, I reminded myself that the issue wasn’t yet available at the nation’s Winn-Dixie checkout stands. I ordered Italian food and pulled out some recent fan mail forwarded to me by my agency. I answered a few letters, reflecting that now at least one Rachel Finster would tell everyone in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that I was a nice faggot. It was getting late, but I decided to call Connie at home. What was I paying her ten percent for, if not stroking at a time like this? I explained the situation and she told me to relax, to not discuss my private life with anyone, and to meet her for lunch on Friday. I went to bed still thinking Trevor would call, but he didn’t.
Of course it took no time at all for every damn person at the studio to find out all about it. When I got to my dressing room at ten the next morning, I’d no sooner taken my subtle all-black costume for the day off the wooden hanger when a staccato knock on the door preceded the immediate entrance of Megan DuBois.
“Oh, sweetie,” she mewed, scurrying over and encircling me with tiny but surprisingly strong arms. “I just saw it. I’m so sorry.” She sat on the cigarette-smoke-soaked couch and carefully removed a tear from the corner of her eye with one lacquered fingernail. “Believe me, I know what it feels like. I still see red when I think of how those bastards dragged me through the mud over that fertility clinic nightmare.” She popped open a can of Tab and took a long swig.
“But that whole thing was a fabrication. Wasn’t it?”
She nodded vehemently. “But it still hurt, Alex. Some fan of mine had used my name when she checked in, and that same ‘newspaper’ couldn’t wait to report I was being impregnated with an African prince’s semen.” She drained the remaining soda and checked her lipstick in my mirror. “You learn how to be tough, sweetie. That’s what stardom’s really about. Survival. You’re going to be just fine… I know it.” Another hug and she was gone, flitting off like a Donna Karan sprite.
During rehearsal, I was sensitive to any new and unusual treatment by the cast and crew. Was the cue card guy smiling more than necessary? I was being ridiculous. “Nobody cares,” Allison Slater Lang assured me after our scene. “On this show? Two gay directors, Reggie Van Wyck” — the septuagenarian bachelor who played Cyrinda’s father, newspaper magnate Rutherford Blake — “the prop lesbos, hair and makeup, Will DeSisto…”
“No way,” I exclaimed. Will was a megahot young stud who’d recently quit the show to co-star in a Meg Ryan movie.
“Oh, yes. He used to bring his tricks here to visit. Do you still use that word ‘trick’? It’s so Boys In the Band.” I gave her a look. “Not to mention Jerry Reynolds, that poor thing. I bet Brent Bingham could even be one. He is a Scientologist, isn’t he?”