Light Before Day (6 page)

"Absolutely not," he said. "I have no hard feelings at all about the relationship."

"You had something to tell me, Billy."

He exhaled a long drag through his nostrils. "We're friends, right, Adam?" I gave him a noncommittal nod. He laughed at it. "Do you remember the night we met?"

"Has someone written a song about it?"

"Not that I know of," he answered with a smile. "You came to one of my parties right after you moved here. You were with that jabber-jaw manager's assistant you call your best friend, probably because he does all the talking so you can do all the sulking. You were the only guy I met that night who didn't compliment me on my taste in luminaries or the way I had the grass cut. You were unimpressed, to say the least. My first thought was 'Well, here's this little southern yokel, just off the bus from wherever, and he's already looking down his nose at everybody 'cause he's too high to realize he's got a little coke on it.'"

"I didn't take the bus here."

"Don't get offended, Adam. I'm not finished."

"I drove."

"Congratulations," he said firmly. "But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought about you. I started to wonder if you had seen something in my life that merited a closer look.

Something rotten, if you will."

He gave me a level stare. He hadn't noticed that his cigarette was a smoldering butt between two of his fingers. I pointed to it and he tossed it to the pavement and stepped on it with one chunky black shoe.

"Which gets back to my original question, Adam. Are we friends? Because your ex-boyfriend certainly thinks we are," Billy said.

"Corey?" I asked. Billy nodded gravely and crossed his arms over his chest. "What are you saying?" I asked.

"Corey came to one of my parties two weeks ago," he said. "I was surprised to see him, to say the least. I had heard he was pretty straitlaced. I also heard your relationship didn't exactly take off for that very reason. At first, when I saw him walk in, I thought he was looking for you."

"Was he?" I heard myself ask.

"No," Billy said. "He wanted to talk to me about you." He let this sit. "He wanted to warn me about you is more like it. He said your drinking was out of control and I shouldn't have you over to my house anymore. I could tell he was very angry about how the relationship ended. Even though he didn't tell me just how it ended."

Billy waited for me to brief him on the brutal details of my split with Corey. I didn't. I was too sidelined by the story he was giving me. The idea of Corey Howard setting foot inside Billy Hatfill's mansion seemed, on the face of it, absurd. When I had suggested to him that we attend one of Billy's parties, Corey told me that he had heard of Billy and thought the guy was a waste of space and cash. In the three weeks we spent together, Corey had practically kept me housebound and away from all forms of alcohol and drugs. Now he had gone to one of my regular hangouts and tried to poison the waters. He was still trying to save me from myself.

"Look, I know it's none of my business, Adam. But you might want to have a talk with him.

He's incredibly angry, and the things he said—"

"Like what?"

Billy inhaled sharply, his nostrils flaring, and stared down at the pavement. "He said your mother died. He said if that didn't teach you a lesson, nothing would. I'm sorry, Adam. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything. But I thought you should know. It was . . . scary, to say the least."

"Scary?"

"Yes," he said flatly. "Adam, anyone who has ever met you can tell that you only go for guys who look like they can and will beat you up. Corey sounded pretty determined to teach you a lesson. Talk to him. Apologize to him, even if you don't mean it. Maybe that will be enough to cool him off."

"Have a nice night, Billy," I said.

Billy nodded and straightened up, brushing invisible lint from the front of his pants. "Are you sure I can't drive you home?" I gave him a distracted wave and he paused at the drivers-side door. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"For some reason I just don't believe that."

His cheeks colored and his arm went rigid as he rested his fingers on the door handle. "You believe a lot of things about me. Whenever I try to tell you otherwise, you don't return my calls."

I waited for him to get in the car. He didn't. "Do you still think about Paul?" he asked.

Paul Martinez, one of the first friends I had made after moving to LA, had died of a drug overdose two months ago. Given all that had happened since then, I hadn't thought about him much. Paul had been a fixture at just about every party in West Hollywood, probably because he encouraged the illusion that drug addicts were all bright spirits with a genuine love for each and every party guest. He had been proof that an overweight guy with a mouth like a Pez dispenser could run in a world of absurd physical beauty, as long as he always met the challenge of delivering the perfect one-liner.

"I was at the funeral, too," Billy said. "I saw you walk out."

"He died of a drug overdose in a bathhouse," I said. "Suddenly all of his friends are standing in front of his family talking about how the party won't be the same without Paul—"

"With a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other," Billy finished for me. "I know. I stayed for the whole thing." He met my stare. "The way you walked out—that took guts, Adam.

Actually, I'm not sure if it was guts or just
nerve.
There's a difference between the two, don't you think?"

I shrugged.

"You made a lot of people angry," he said. It sounded like he was one of those people. I wasn't about to apologize to him.

"So I'll see you at the next party?" he said.

"No you won't," I said. "I'm laying off for a while."

He made a small sound in his throat. "Sounds like Corey got his wish after all." He got in his car and drove off. As soon as his taillights disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to an afternoon in late April.

The April day when Rod called to tell me that Paul Martinez's body had been discovered that morning by a cleaning crew up at a gay bathhouse in Hollywood, I was planning to take my Jeep into the car wash. Three days later, after I walked out of his funeral in a righteous rage, I decided to pick up where I had left off.

By the time I pulled into the Twin Palms Car Wash on Sunset Boulevard, I had managed to lighten my limbs and put the world in soft focus, thanks to the nickel-plated flask my mother had given me for Christmas. I didn't notice the attendant taking orders until he stepped back from the BMW in front of me.

He was over six feet tall, with a tight helmet of jet-black hair, long dark eyes deeply set beneath the hard line of his brow, and a Roman nose that looked prominent only in profile. His broad shoulders stretched the back of his white button-up, and everything about him looked hard and unyielding until you got to his full lips and sleepy eyes.

I rolled my window down and he placed a hand on the edge that was so heavily veined it looked sculpted. "Your left brake light is out," he said in a deep voice that matched with the fantasies his body inspired. "If you get pulled over, they'll put points on your license. When you leave here, you should go to an auto body place and have them take care of it."

I tried to speak and failed.

"You could also stop at Koontz Hardware down the street. They might have the right fuse. We don't do that kind of work. That's why I'm telling you all of this."

"Sorry," I mumbled.

"Uh-huh," he answered quietly, his eyes locked on mine. "You might also want to get some breath mints and get rid of that flask that's on the floor of your passenger seat."

"I just came from a funeral," I managed. "How about giving me a break?"

The hard look in his eyes didn't change, but his top teeth hooked his lower lip in a gesture that wasn't nearly as determined and masculine as the rest of him. Suddenly he jerked back from my window and asked for my order.

I pulled forward to the vacuum station, wondering if the words
new car smell
would be the last I would ever say to one of the most attractive men I had ever encountered. I caught him staring at me as I walked toward the car wash's main building as if he thought I was about to hold the place up and was prepared to take action.

In the men’s room, I splashed my face with water and succumbed to the vision I had been trying to avoid for several days. I saw Paul Martinez walking down a dark and narrow corridor, his stubby limbs lacquered with detox sweat and his towel slipping from his round waist. The walls pounded with piped-in techno that did little to cover the cries of drugged lust coming from the stalls around him. He tried to pull various men into a slow and swaying embrace until each of them realized he was waltzing to the beat of Paul's fading heart and pulled away with the naked disgust you find only inside this kind of meat market.

By the time the men's room door opened, I was blinking back tears. When my vision cleared, I saw that my flask sat on the counter in front of me, and the attendant was resting his butt against the edge next to it.

"Who died?" he asked me.

"A friend of mine," I said.

He nodded gravely. I noticed that the top three buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing the scoop of a white tank top underneath and a small gold chain that disappeared under it. "I forgot to mention something out there," he said. "Your mouth may smell like a bar at three A.M., but the rest of you smells good. Real good." He was trying his best, but I could tell he had never hit on a guy in a men's room before and it put a slight dent in his rigid demeanor. "Don't drink so much," he said, lapsing back into brigadier general mode. "I've seen what it does to people's eyes. I like your eyes."

He walked out of the bathroom with a straight back and a determined gait that would have parted an army. When I went back outside, I saw that he had been replaced by another attendant, and when I asked the cashier where he had gone she told me that he got off at two P.M. She also told me his name. Corey.

Although Tommy Banks had given me the day off for Paul's funeral, he forbade me from having a lunch break that took me any farther than the coffee shop in our building's lobby. I visited the car wash several times over the next few weeks hoping to catch him again, but I didn't, and I was too embarrassed to press the other staff for information about him.

On the last Saturday in April, Rod dragged me to a party down in Laguna Beach, hosted by an entertainment attorney we had never met who owned a two-story white clapboard house that sat perched on stilts above a
slice
of craggy beach. The balcony was crowded with goggle-eyed, gum-smacking muscle boys in tank tops and cargo shorts. My stomach dropped when I saw Corey leaning against the rail.

He was gripping a water bottle in one fist, and the swells of his chest strained against his white T-shirt. He was wearing the thin gold chain I had noticed at the car wash, and I could see a tiny medallion at the end of it. As I approached him, I saw what held his attention. In a Jacuzzi gurgling several yards away, a lanky older man in a blond beehive wig and a bikini stuffed with socks lip-synched to the pounding dance track. Every few seconds he lost his footing, and all you could see was the top of the beehive sticking out of the bubbles.

"You know that guy?" Corey asked me.

"The drag queen?" I asked.

He shook his head and pointed a finger at Scott Koffler. Koffler was standing on the other side of the Jacuzzi, his arms around two ruddy-faced adolescents whose wide-eyed stares suggested that the last party they had attended had faculty monitors and a crepe-paper-strewn dance floor. "I hear those boys he's with are too young," Corey said.

"Me too," I answered, hoping he would change subjects.

"I hear the guy's basically a pimp," Corey continued, with what sounded to me like a mix of fascination and disdain. "He brings those kids to parties and sets them up with rich guys."

"I stay away from Scott Koffler," I said. I figured he was probing me to see what kind of guys I ran with, and whether a creep like Scott Koffler was one of them.

Now I had his full attention. "Who did you come with?" I asked.

"No one," he said. "Some guy who came into the car wash the other day invited me. He said I'd be a big hit." He didn't smile or act bashful about what he had said; he was not bragging but flatly communicating a fact. "But I only came 'cause I thought you'd be here." His voice lacked guile and his expression remained impassive. "I forgot to tell you something the other day."

"What?" I asked.

"I'm sorry about your friend."

"You drove all the way down to Laguna to tell me that?"

"No," he said. He placed his hands on my cheeks and brought our faces together until our noses were touching. He took a deep breath and made a soft sound in his throat. "I came to get you before you drank too much."

He backed me up against a nearby wall. His mouth met mine and his hands traveled up under my shirt, where he took both of my nipples between his thumb and forefinger and applied just enough pressure to make my back arch. He cocked his head to one side and kissed me with enough open-mouthed passion to bring my hands to the sides of his face.

He studied my face for a few seconds. "Let's go, Adam Murphy," he said, even though I hadn't told him my name. "I don't want my good luck to run out now."

He drove a red Dodge Ram, and as we sped through Orange County on the 405 Freeway, he rested his hand on my knee and didn't make any attempt at conversation. For the first time in my life, I traveled out of my body without the aid of a chemical. I saw us from above as we traversed a glittering island at the bottom-left-hand corner of the country, separated from its neighbors by miles of black desert. The rest of the country had already given up on the night, but soon the last midnight on earth would sweep across the two of us. (Unless you counted Alaska or some pissant island in the Pacific, which I did not.)

We didn't exchange a word during the long drive home. Corey stared at the road the entire time, as if what awaited us back at my apartment was a fate not worthy of excitement or anticipation, probably because it was a fate he had designed.