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  Back in Ron and Augusta’s driveway, she heard the car door slam. He’d never even sat in the driver’s seat. Her seat. No one had. No one had but her. The wind ripped through her. She started to open the door but stopped when she spotted her reflection in the misted glass. Her white-blonde hair stood up at the sides in thin straws, and the foundation she’d applied so carefully had hardened her face into a mask. She knew he wasn’t hers, but if she didn’t relent now, hand over to him her one precious thing, the vast meaning of it, the inseparable piece of her it was, he’d be gone.

  She opened the passenger door and hit her head on the dulled edge, not used to the car from this angle. The lap belt tugged uncomfortably around her waist, making the dress seem tighter, if that were even possible. She could see the mark the belt would leave on her like the split of a chainsaw, Caesarean—thick and jagged; a woman cut in half yet somehow still alive. She took off the belt.

  Scott said nothing as they made their way home. His head moved in and out of a zone that Sheila, at first, mistook for silent concentration but quickly identified as a kind of barely focused drunkenness. An AM station played jazz. She wanted to say it was Sarah Vaughn, but it sounded older, a scratchy relic, something that might’ve been played on a creaky Victrola. The lights from the other side of the Beltway bore down on them like a search party. She placed her hand on Scott’s thigh.

  An eighteen-wheeler began to spastically jerk in front of them. Scott tapped the brakes quickly. His head swayed, and one of his eyes blinked rapidly in his struggle to check in. Sheila wanted to say, “Pass it. Go around the thing. Pull over. Take this exit. Let’s go back to that car wash. You know the one.”

  He was too close to the truck, riding its tail as retaliation for the driver having pulled out in front of him so quickly. The truck’s brake lights flickered at them, warning, flashing. Sheila heard a desperate, preening moan enter the slow tune on the radio, a woman whose soft wailing was her sadness. Scott muttered a curse, and the car veered sharply to the left to avoid the rear of the truck. They were aimed to hit a solitary stone divider disconnected from the others, metal rods curling out of its center.

  Scott slammed on the brakes and swerved the car out of the path of the divider with one hand. His other arm pressed against her tightly. They ground to a halt on the side of the road. He turned to her, breathing heavily and sweating, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his arm still barred across her. She looked into his eyes; they seemed thankful that she was alive. His arm went slack, and then his hand fell into her lap. She placed her own hand inside it, curled up like a mouse.

  Sheila imagined flying with the thrust of the impact through the windshield, an object in motion. The moment would seem to last forever. She’d feel her hand leaving Scott’s thigh, and she’d know she wouldn’t feel anything ever again. And in some ways, that was a good thing. She’d never again feel shame. She’d never curse that little voice inside, the one that alerted her to other people’s hushed whispers. That panic would be squashed, the terror of people gone.

  But she’d also never feel Scott’s body pressed against hers in that way that told her she was desired even if it was just for that moment. She’d never feel that sense of joy at dinner when she’d look across the table at him and he’d smile at her and she’d know that, as long as the light in the painting burned in the small window, he could always find his way back to her.

  Brad’s Head Revisited, ’94

  I. CRISPIN

  I FUCK FOR money, and I like it. The studio tells me how good I am, how much money I bring in, how I look even hotter on film, like a god. Just like a fucking Adonis. I lap it up, obviously. Who wouldn’t?

  On average I shoot eight movies a year—thirteen two years ago (kind of a peak year for me). I’m the star of the studio, and doesn’t everyone know it. The best dressing room on the lot with my name on the door in gold, lowercase letters, fat and round like Bloomingdale’s. It’s not my given name, of course. No one even knows what that is. Sometimes I forget it myself.

  I go by Crispin Mandrake. My second director picked it out after taking one look at me. I like to think I emanated that name, that it shot out of my eyes. My come-fuck-me eyes. I’m happy the word man is in there somewhere, because that’s what I am, that’s what I fuck, and that’s what I like. And men are what make it all worth it, right? Hey, if things don’t work out on this end, with a name like Crispin Mandrake I should be able to make the easy transition to soap operas. What’s the difference between soaps and porn anyway? Same amount of sex, a couple more lines here and there, the same ridiculous storylines. It’s all just people getting screwed, isn’t it? I like Bo Brady on Days of Our Lives. He’s got that daddy beard, drives a motorcycle. He’s a cop. What a fucking stud he is. Every time I see him on TV, I imagine him as one of the bears power-driving me from behind in Goldicocks and the Three Bears, ’91, a video I did for Chi Chi LaRue as part of her Naughty Fairy Tales series—the one where we used lube that looked like porridge.

  I’ve got a look that never goes out of style. A shaved head with an eighth of an inch of platinum-blond hair on top, all-natural color (and no, I’m not balding; I’m only twenty-four). I go to tanning beds, since that’s the big thing now, but I practically live on the beach, so I could get sun that way if I wanted to. I’m very tall—about six foot five. I’ve got muscles that give my body definition but don’t hulk me out. And a boy-next-door face. I’m the neighbor who mows your lawn on those hot summer days, shirtless, chugging from the water pitcher, the streams running down my chiseled chest (John Deere’s Johnson, ’92). I’m the lifeguard at the country club who doesn’t belong but certainly uses the members-only showers when everyone else has left (The Caddy, ’92). I belong all right. Come on in after your nine holes or your eighteen holes or whatever, towel yourself off, step right in, and see how much I belong (and how much you belong inside me).

  These are the “characters” I play. See how good I am at selling that shit? I’m the seemingly innocent young buck who doesn’t think he wants it until it’s wagging in his face, and then he’s like a pro, taking it like he was born with it up there.

  Yeah, I bottom on camera. Everyone seems surprised by this at first. They think because I’m the star of the studio, still such a marquee name, I’ll be the one fucking the world, bending those twinky fags over the hood of a race car and shoving it in (Grand Pricks, ’90). A tall bottom is somewhat rare, like a diamond, but I maintain more control in this position. You may not think so, but the bottoms establish the tone of the sex. We clamp down and tighten. We set the rhythm the top thinks he’s made happen. It’s more erotic for me like this, and I don’t use up all my stiffness for hours and hours of shooting. I meant that pun too.

  No one follows me around gawking or tepidly approaches me for autographs. I’m just not that kind of star. The guys who do recognize me aren’t likely to admit they’ve ever been in a position to see me in action. I remember standing in line for a coffee at that cruisy Starbucks in West Hollywood, the one on Santa Monica Boulevard on the corner. A cute guy and his girlfriend are in front of me—content, it seems—from the view I have. The guy glances around a little, taking in the atmosphere of the place, bored with waiting in line, I can tell. Bored of her, I imagine as well. She looks like a bit of a nag. Then, while he’s surveying the landscape, he spots me, and I notice a look of shock and heat and maybe a little hunger in his eyes. He turns back around, and the girlfriend pushes him forward, almost knocking his straight-as-a-rod ass over. They’re up next in line, and I just know it must have been Arctic Survivor, ’93, the one where I’m holding on to a chin-up bar in an ice-fishing cabin getting pounded by an impossibly hot Eskimo—a classic, a mega hit, one all my fans have seen. The guy is so distracted that he orders a number two like it’s McDonald’s, and the girl is so dumb that she says she’ll have one too.

  Sure, there are times when a limp-wristed ogre rushes over to me on the Venice boardwalk, maybe with a coy, nervous buddy, equall
y heinous, ten paces back, biting his nails and grinning. I’ll sign his napkin or the back of a sweaty receipt and flash the wide grin I make for the close-ups, the one I give when I’m first penetrated, all sheer joy and ecstasy. Let’s be honest—I have a smile you can see from space.

  I’ve got to keep these guys happy, even the ones I wouldn’t look twice at if I were out on my own cruising. They’re my fans. “You expect me to ignore my fans? They’re life and death to me, baby!” JC said (that’s Joan Crawford, my personal Christ). They’re the pale night owls, shut up in their dark, locked basements turning me on, pausing me, rewinding me, inserting me into their impossible fantasies, bringing me straight into their lover’s bed.

  I wasn’t always so proud of the work. In fact, at first I barely could get through a night without waking up every hour, shivering, desperate for air to breathe in, then breathe out to expel the shame of what I’d done, what I was going to do tomorrow—and if everything worked out, what I’d be doing until well into my mid to late thirties. At one point, I thought I might have had AIDS—all that night sweating and worry—but I always use condoms, and I look better than ever. It couldn’t have been that; it was just a period of adjustment. When a star is born, it must erupt over some nights, burning fast and bright at first then settling into a simmering glow of longevity. It can be scary.

  II. SAWYER

  I WASN’T ALWAYS like this. I was in the closet so deep that I was in someone else’s closet.

  Back then, in high school, I had such an unreasonable set of expectations to live up to. This “playing straight” thing. It was so demoralizing. Feeling terrified of being found out, I went out of my way to make sure my secret—the thing I knew so early on about myself that I couldn’t change—stayed as hidden as possible.

  There was a boy in my year named Jerry. “Jerry Hall” we used to call him, because he slunk down the hallway like a model on a catwalk. He was so tall, like Jerry herself, almost obscenely tall, but stick thin with knobby wrists and a gaunt look. “Affected,” one might have called him, with the pursed lips and the walk with the knees lifting up in the air like he was walking over puddles of diamonds. So unaware—it’s like he didn’t care at all what people thought about him. Kids walked behind him, kicking his backpack, knocking him behind his knees so he’d collapse into a heap in the middle of the hallway. Even the girls laughed at him. But he’d get right back up and keep walking like we were so many small, insignificant obstacles he had to glide through on his way to class, which he, of course, just made more fabulous with his very presence.

  He was pale, with whitish-blond hair and translucent skin under which you might see blue veins running through, at his temples and along his spindly arms. Kind of like an alien. Just like he was barely even there. He looked otherworldly enough from his appearance alone, but his fey walk and penchant for affixing sparkly stickers and rhinestones to his backpack (and for declaring to anyone who’d listen his great love for the recently wed Princess Diana) clearly aligned him with a faggy kind of sensibility that I was scared to shit of and couldn’t be associated with. He laughed right along with everyone else, though. No matter what I felt when I went to bed at night and closed my eyes (and I don’t think it was anything different from what Jerry saw when he closed his), at least I didn’t look like a fag.

  Brad Malone and his best friend, Chip Sanders, were two of the most popular boys in my class. I went by Sawyer back then, although my full name is William Sawyer. We’d all grown up together, all the way up from grade school, and I’d always looked at Brad and Chip with a mixture of admiration and jealousy as the two of them took the basketball court—because, of course, they were always first string starters—or hunkered down together at the table in the cafeteria closest to the jukebox. No one sat at their table without being asked for fear of having the shit beat out of them. They always played Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” They were really hot too.

  I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but somehow, against all known logic of the universe, I found myself in that chosen circle. Brad or Chip might’ve said hi to me one day, or one of the two of them might’ve asked me to sit at their table, although I can’t imagine Chip would’ve done anything without Brad’s approval, so he must have blessed it or been the one to ask himself. I can’t recall the exact moment it happened, but soon enough I was hanging around with them at school, which made it even more crucial to keep my “tendencies” hidden. It’s funny how I could tell that they weren’t just having me on, that they really had accepted me into their group. Brad’s little brother, an eighth-grade pipsqueak no bigger than a bicycle rack, started saying hi to me in the hallway. Almost like a sign of respect, it seemed. That was how I knew I was in.

  How I managed to stay in the group was entirely up to me, and don’t think I didn’t realize that. When someone gives you a break in life you don’t ask questions, and you sure as shit don’t go around biting the hand that feeds you. Like any big break, you build on it. You don’t undermine it by being Mr. Quizzical. I knew my place in the high school pecking order had changed.

  Brad always seemed to go after Jerry with a particular amount of gusto. It wasn’t a normal kind of taunting; there was something vicious about how he spoke about him. “Who does that little faggot think he is, hopping around in those white jeans and that fucking queer backpack? It’s disgusting.” Chip pushed Jerry around in the hallways, but he didn’t seem to outright hate him as much as Brad did. “God, he can’t just walk around like that,” he’d tell me. “Someone needs to teach him a lesson.”

  One day after class, the three of us lingered in the locker room, where Jerry was getting dressed. We all had lunch following gym, so there wasn’t as much of a need to hurry. All the other boys from gym were gone; this wasn’t going to end well for any of us. I looked at Jerry while we all changed, and I tried to urge him with my eyes to move quicker, faster—to run out of there in his sweaty gym clothes, those short white shorts, how short they were back then. Jerry’s shorts seemed even shorter, perched as they were on top of those huge ostrich legs, white and nearly hairless. He’d worn a pair of white knee socks with pink stripes near the top. “Just because I can,” I’d heard him say to his gal pal Janelle, who’d commented on them during class.

  “Chip, go watch the door,” Brad said.

  Jerry had his shirt off and looked toward the exit. He dropped a deodorant stick on the tiled floor, from nerves it seemed, although he was still trying to act like nothing was out of the ordinary—that he’d just get dressed in his white jeans and flit away down the hall to lunch. The deodorant stick rolled under the bench toward the end, right where Brad was standing. Brad picked it up and brought it to him. “You looking for this, faggot?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you,” Jerry said, looking at the floor.

  “Well, here you go.” He offered the deodorant to him. Jerry cautiously lifted his head and made a movement to accept it, but Brad dropped it to the floor. “Aw, shit. I’m sorry. You’d better pick that up.” That indefatigable light in Jerry leached out like a flashlight on its last scrap of battery. He didn’t want to pick it up; I didn’t want him to pick it up. But he had to. There was nothing else he could do.

  When Jerry bent over, Brad jumped over the bench and pushed down hard on this back, so hard that I thought Jerry’s spine might break in half. “Hold him down,” he instructed me, as he took his own shorts off.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You heard me! Hold him the fuck down.”

  I barely needed to use both arms; he was so skinny. I straddled the bench and grabbed his shoulders, those pale shoulders with a smattering of freckles. He gazed up at me with a look of absolute resignation. Not any hatred toward me. I was his comrade, his fellow fag, and he didn’t even know it. And I didn’t help him.

  Already hard, Brad hawked a loogie into his hand, rubbed it onto his dick with one hand, while pulling Jerry’s shorts off with the other. When Brad first penetrated him, Jerry bit his
lower lip and let out a grunt. He didn’t fight much, only when it seemed he was in real pain, and then it was with a violent swish of his head, like we’d seen him do before in the hall, affecting the toss of a nonexistent ponytail. This thrashing was like he was trying to shake off a yoke that had been placed on him.

  With gritted teeth, Brad rode Jerry from behind with the expertise of a seasoned top. He went from holding his hipbones to placing one hand on the small of Jerry’s back to achieve maximum leverage. The gym bench turned out to be just the right height.

  “When I’m done, Chip, come over here. You’re taking him too.”

  I looked down at Jerry’s face. That twinkle that was always in his eyes, even when he’d been knocked down on the floor near his locker, had disappeared. Something harder had replaced it. He looked wiped clean.

  Brad climaxed with loud groans and then pulled out. He collapsed on top of Jerry and then kind of hugged him for a second, a bear hug around the boy’s middle.

  “Sawyer, take the door while Chip has a go,” he told me.

  Brad pulled up his shorts and took the position I’d held of holding Jerry down. I headed to the door to keep watch. Half the scene was hidden by a row of lockers, but I saw Chip taking a rough turn with Jerry; the two of them were laughing and high-fiving each other. I pretended we were all just roughhousing.

  Jerry was as gay as me. Part of him had to have liked it, I kept thinking to myself like a mantra. Wasn’t it all a dream?

  III. CRISPIN

  I WAS IN the backroom of a seedy bar on Abbot Kinney. This was before the neighborhood got cleaned up. I’d been watching one of the TVs at the end of the bar that was showing porn from the seventies. A guy in a red Mustang convertible had picked up a sailor hitchhiking on the side of the road. He was taking him back to this mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The sailor had blond curly hair like a statue and looked like he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. He was next to the fireplace on his back in no time, wearing big white knee socks with red stripes on the top, like I used to wear at soccer camp when I was a kid. No music. Just the boy moaning painfully as the older man of the house stuck himself inside of him. I thought it was pretty hot, and as I watched, I forgot I’d done the same thing earlier that day. Only I’d been straight down, flat on my stomach, legs spread-eagle, as a couple of football players warmed up for their game by taking turns on me in the locker room, the water boy complete with a pail and white towels they used for cum rags (Touchdown Tag Team, ’93).