The Gold Diggers (17 page)

“I want to send you some money.”

“Why? You want to put me on retainer like a lawyer? Or a private detective?”

“No reason. I just want to. What's your address?”

“I don't give it out.”

“Really?” Nick laughed uneasily. “I guess you don't get much mail.”

“None. That's the way I like it.”

“Okay,” Nick said, sorry now that he'd brought it up. “It can wait until I see you.”

“No. I'll tell you what you do,” Sam said, practical at last, and as if everything else he'd said so tonelessly were meant to be funny, though no one had laughed. “Leave it with the bartender at the Beau-Numero. They know who I am.”

It was seven hundred in cash, and he couldn't figure out how Nick had arrived at the actual amount. It was certainly more than Sam expected or was accustomed to. Too much, in a way. It ended up irritating him, because he couldn't seem to communicate to Nick how to observe the proper boundaries. He didn't see that Sam became extra hard and detached, just to compensate. Of course, he liked hundred dollar bills for their own sake, and he knew, the moment he opened the envelope, that he wouldn't have to work for a week. But what he liked best about the
business
of hustling was the cash flow, how it demanded not the slightest shred of his attention. He took it in and paid it out and worked when he wanted and never went hungry. He didn't need more, and since he didn't pay taxes, they never went up. He knew about inflation and, like a psychiatrist, added five dollars a trick every couple of years. The only thing that would have changed his rhythm was a
lot
of money, a vault of it in ingots, with neither strings nor a middle-aged man attached. That was why he'd bided his time for ten years to get back into Rusty Varda's house.

He didn't have a list of things in his head he'd been waiting to buy. If it had been seven thousand, maybe he would have gone after a secondhand Porsche, but his mind didn't run in that direction. All the same, he decided to take the day off and go shopping, struck with the notion of getting rid of seven hundred fast. It certainly didn't cross his mind to save it. He had no accounts, neither checking nor savings. He kept his money, what he didn't keep in his pocket, in a coffee can under his bed in the one-room apartment no one else knew the way to. Twisted-up tens and twenties and fifties. So much for security. When he was robbed, he chalked it up to the redistribution of wealth. He didn't even own a wallet.

He bought a case of Jack Daniels in fifths. Then a half-dozen tenderloin steaks. Though friendly, one-man stores made him jittery, he spent an hour in a rhinestone-western boutique in Hollywood, trying on fancy shirts. He tried on more than he needed to because the middle-aged glitter queens who ran the place were clearly so enamored of his torso. They held the discarded shirts over their arms and debated how marvelous he looked in everything. He bought a heavy khaki gabardine yoked with hand-sewn black and gold swirls, a six-gun embroidered at each nipple. In its way, it was as difficult to bring off as the overwrought three-hundred-dollar boots, but, on the other hand, Sam could wear anything. He lived so much at the surface of his body, at the nerve ends, that his clothes hovered about him like curtains billowing in front of an open window, going with the air.

Then a Stetson, off-white with a snakeskin band. He wore it when he drove up and over into The Valley. To Studio City, where he wound his way among a thousand houses where no one had ever worn
anything
that went for three hundred. He tooled into a driveway, leapt out of the MG, and went up and rang at a dead-end bungalow. Rust-streaked stucco and strangling geraniums. The old woman who opened the door couldn't have cared less who it was, so she wasn't his grandmother or his prep school Latin teacher.

“I thought you must be in jail,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Two grams.”

“Two, eh?” She seemed impressed. “You must have hooked up with a big tipper.”

She padded into the house, and he followed her as far as the airless dining room, where three more women sat around the table, cards in hand, and waited. They looked like they'd forgotten what the game was, gone beyond it like yogis. If they'd once been the type to cluck at everybody young as reminders of their own children, they'd gotten over it. And no one took a second look at his torso.

The old woman came back from the kitchen with a parcel tied so well she could have sent it overseas. It was a hundred and fifty. She pocketed it and said, “Take care you don't ruin your nose. You won't be able to smell a rat when you need to.”

That left him with a hundred and seventy-five, and he couldn't think of anything else he wanted. What would my father do, he wondered idly as he drove back over into Hollywood. Go out for dinner, maybe. Or buy a share of common stock. Or go get laid. Sam knew he had enough even now to fly to Vegas or San Francisco, the only two places he ever went. He always took his extra money one way or the other. He liked them just about the same and found them very much alike. Like stage sets. All the people posed and spoke lines that wouldn't have gone over anywhere else and dressed so that they all matched. Of course, Sam could see that Vegas and San Francisco were the opposite of one another, too. But for him they were the two sides of LA, and narcissism was narcissism, whether it flowered in a desert casino or high on a foggy hill with a three-sixty view of The Bay. Sam would have gone right now, flipped a coin and headed for the airport, but he didn't want to put himself so far from Rusty Varda's house. He knew that it had to be only one thing. He couldn't splinter the last of the money. It waited in a wad in his pocket, to be risked all at once—on black, on red, on a single number even.

What'll I buy, he thought over and over, what'll I buy?

He went back to his apartment in West Hollywood. His nothing apartment. A double bed and a table with a big color TV that he'd bought hot. An easy chair, vinyl and motel blue. A Pullman unit built into a cabinet for pans and dishes. And a chest of drawers, every one open and spilling clothes. It existed hardly at all as a place to live. He passed the time there. He used it between tricks as a dressing room, though not necessarily so as to dress—more as an actor on location would have used it, doing a scene and resting, back and forth. Which is not to say that clothes didn't furnish the man. There was a layer of things draped and thrown on everything—Levi's and corduroys, gym gear, leather jacket, flannel shirts, swimming trunks, and two-toned jerseys for baseball, football, rugby. Street clothes. He lived here without declaring himself. And, of course, if someone had wandered in, a stranger from the world of laws and moral precision, he wouldn't have been able to accuse Sam of anything. There was no evidence.

He cut the cocaine and did a couple of lines. He poured himself a Jack Daniels over ice and turned on the TV to a game show. A half-hour later, when the coke had dropped its dazzle, he unzipped and pulled out his cock, spit on his hand, and jerked himself off. To keep him from going out on the street. He alternated that way for the rest of the day. Coke. Bourbon. Every three or four hours a go at pumping himself. He was forever aroused. The only way he knew how to disconnect from his life on the make, since it was profession and fantasy-life at once, was to blur the edges and bring himself into a state of low consciousness and numbness of the groin. Unlike so many other hustlers on his beat, he didn't need a case of joints in his pocket, a six-pack in the bushes, or uppers and downers. He had to be alert to fuck, uncompromisingly fixed in the world at hand, so as to miss nothing in the region of his senses. His fantasies may have been more lush and slit-eyed with lust when he was wrecked, but he didn't shape them up and work them out in an actual bed unless he was feeling precisely where he was. When he was sober, he could get a hard-on right on cue, hour after hour if he had to. And since the places where he ended up were so unpredictable, four or five in a day sometimes, the real world was pretty much confined to other people's bedrooms, and it never failed to turn him on.

It was a struggle to take a seven-hundred-dollar vacation, even though he knew he needed it from time to time, and particularly now, with the Varda caper finally starting to happen. If he was going to lay low at his place and let the next set of moves come together in his head, then the fucking had to stop for a bit, because he threw his whole self into it and left no room. So, taking himself in hand, he skimmed off the excess juices until he was drunk enough, and then they ceased to boil and blow all by themselves.

But who knows what his reasoning was? He woke up the next morning and found he'd eaten two steaks and drunk a fifth of bourbon. The hangover had less to do with pain—a headache was kid stuff—than with a sense of being removed from his usual outlook, the mood he settled in when he walked his block on Selma. Normally aggressive, jumpy, unattached, he found himself sent back to a time before he lived by his cock alone. So he liked the morning after. Why he needed to go away as far as his youth in order to think about the present is a curious thing, but on that second day he had no need to will his solitude. He drank the bourbon with plenty of water and sat in the easy chair, head in the clouds, the look on his face like Tom Sawyer's. He waited until sundown to snort the coke. He walked around naked and tended to catch up his genitals in his cupped hand, kneading and stroking, no sense left of their function as tools. He sought asylum in himself because he'd never had anyone else to ask it of. And he got it. He disdained Nick and Peter for retreating into a couple “for a while” because it showed they weren't self-possessed.

He was just as drunk that night, but he woke wide-eyed on Wednesday morning, cooked a steak for breakfast, and headed out for the beach. It wasn't warm enough to lie down in a bathing suit, but he walked the tide-line with his shirt off. He went from the Santa Monica pier to the point where Sunset Boulevard spilled out at the Pacific—four, four and a half miles—and liked the feel of his shoulders burning. He had cruised the waterfront here a thousand times, but today he affected the air of a boy pirate, fashioning nothing for those who watched him. Indeed, he assumed as a consequence that he was next to invisible. In fact, it was a field day for men on the beach who would have been afraid most days to look him in the eye—men without cash, men who kept their shirts on. Because he moved for once without seeing himself in the third person, he was beautiful in a way that was quite unearthly, clean of sin and self.

If there was a way of keeping anyone, he thought, Nick was the sort he would go after. He always knew, when he met up with men who fell for him, the moment when they stopped wanting anything else. They surrendered the quest by believing that Sam was the goal of it all.
Sam
knew he wasn't. He would gladly fuck the whole world to prove there was no goal. There was only the accumulation of events. Sam couldn't get enough of new and better men, and he'd guessed right off that Nick was the same. They both wanted
everything
else, the search for which went on all the time and everywhere. Sam thought that if he could get Nick through the present phase—the cowboy buddies who sloughed off the world and set out for the wilds, their hearts unvalentined and freed to the weather—then perhaps they could go on to other things, each on his own. And they could use each other to measure themselves against. They could even try, for variety, to outdo one another in seeing how far they would go. And, of course, there would be the added business of Nick's money thrown in, share and share alike. To Sam, it had the earmarks of a perfect relationship, except for the fact that nobody ever stuck to the ground rules, even when they were perfect. That was why he was better off alone. But if he had his way entirely, he thought as he climbed up on a lifeguard's chair and lit up a joint, Nick was the man he'd bet on.

Wednesday night, he'd already decided, would have to be the end of his holiday because he had to make sure that his territory was clear for the weekend. He didn't want to have to fight it out on his block with some punk newcomer just hitchhiked in from Dallas, his lifeless college diploma rolled in his knapsack. Anyone who knew the streets at all knew where Sam hung out. Three days wouldn't concern anyone. They would assume what the Studio City pusher assumed, that he'd landed a big tipper for a long binge. Or perhaps, they would think, he was doing penicillin for a case of clap he couldn't ignore anymore, for fear of making things sticky for his genteel customers. Sam knew he would be expected, on his return, to look like the conquering hero, as if he'd one-upped the regular work, where he normally went for thirty-five to fifty for an hour's hot job, not including the traveling time back and forth in air-cooled Jags and Mercedes. If he seemed the slightest bit shaky or even fatigued, the rumor would go out that he had started to slip. You were up or you were down in the higher-priced streets. If you got sick or you went too deep into the medicine chest, it all passed you by. There were other streets to move to, and the money was still quite good now and then, though you couldn't be so choosy about the clientele. Because he was aware of all this, Sam knew as the sun inched toward the Pacific that he had to be back in business before midnight.

He went home and ate the last tenderloin. When he went into the bathroom to get a blade to cut more coke, he stopped at the mirror to brush his hair and thus took the first step back to real life. When he was finished snorting, he pulled a red bandanna out of his pocket to wipe his nose, and the hundred and seventy-five tumbled out on the floor. He'd completely forgotten. Because he was ripped, he pulled up a stool, sat with his elbows on his knees, and grinned down at the curl of bills. How, he wondered, had he ever had a problem with what to buy? All he had to do was buy something mad. A three-piece summer-weight suit. Or a place setting of silver. Or a Christian Dior briefcase. Sam didn't know the names of anything, not by brand, not by store like Peter and Rita and Nick, but he had the most comical picture of all the junk he could afford. It was just what his apartment needed. A piss-elegant, pointless thing.