You Can Say You Knew Me When (35 page)

Jed said, “I didn’t know if I could sign.”

“Right.” I took the pen, scratched out a signature, said with finality, “Thanks.”

FedEx sent me a wink on his way out, as if I’d been in on whatever they’d been up to. I suppose I could have been, that that was the plan.

I thrust a coffee at Jed. I saw that the brownies had been cut into; a chunk the size of an airmail stamp was missing.

“I’m supposed to go into work later,” he said, “so I took a seriously small piece.”

He strutted to the bedroom, his hands weaving through some kind of hip-hop improv. He looked nothing like the physically concentrated guy I’d spent the night with.

Colleen’s visitation throbbed like an untended puncture wound. I could imagine the scene she’d hinted at: she and Woody bent over bar drinks, their serious faces dotted with disco light, their voices raised above a thumping bass line. I could hear him describing that last evening in my apartment, complete with my most embarrassing lines (the crack I made about codependency surely made the cut), his tone a mix of compassion and condescension as he concluded, “I’m worried about him.” I could see Colleen nodding in agreement, relating her own recent run-in with my boorish behavior. I could imagine Woody excusing himself to go flirt with a set of pecs that had caught his eye, trying out the dance floor, a free man. I’d rather he called me an asshole, said I was difficult, claimed he’d never speak to me again. I wanted fighting words, not his distant, useless worry.

What does it mean to be the one that everyone else is
worried about?
I thought of Steven Millsack, a college acquaintance who’d arrived in San Francisco a few years after I did, an eager, friendly newcomer charming everyone I hung out with. He had a brief fling with Ian; he became roommates with a friend of Stu, the guy I was dating. He volunteered for an AIDS-services group during the day and at night got work deejaying at different bars. A crowd of us used to hang around while he spun, commenting how adorable he looked bopping behind his turntables, living out his urban-nightlife dream. But over time, you’d never see him unless you went to the places where he deejayed, and when you did he was increasingly less charming, either hyped up and catty in a way he’d never been or distracted to the point of lethargic, his conversation full of alarming repetitions. He was bingeing on crystal and popping antidepressants to recover; in months, he’d aged a decade. “I’m worried about Steven,” was our communal mantra, though none of us did anything to combat this. Our worry was a kind of gossip, the currency separating us from his declining state. A year after arriving, he checked into rehab. Last I heard, he was living with his parents in New Hampshire.

Everyone in San Francisco has a Steven in their orbit. But drugs weren’t my
issue.
Sure, I needed to get a grip on my finances, which probably meant smoking a little less pot, and I’d been a bit erratic lately, sometimes when drunk, but I was sure this was some kind of phase, a valley in my biorhythms, a funk I’d been stuck in since—well, since I got back from New Jersey. My family had that effect on me. I just needed time to put the necessary distance between me and the funeral, and I would. Every valley led to a peak, eventually.

I hadn’t been thinking concretely about Woody in the world, post-me; my thoughts of him had been longings without form. Now I typed his name into a search engine, which brought up three pages, most of them job-related. I found the text of a paper he’d delivered at a conference entitled “Setting Up a Continuing Education Program in the Digital Workplace,” about motivating tech workers to take advantage of employer-paid learning. I remembered when he wrote this; he had read passages to me, trying to calm the jitters brought on by the prospect of addressing experienced people in his field. I remembered that he’d done well, that people in the audience came up afterwards to compliment his sincerity and humor; one man had argued a few points, but ultimately came around to Woody’s ideas. Another conference had signed him up to sit on one of its panels, too. I’d gone out to celebrate with him, but as was often the case, surrounded by his co-workers and their shoptalk, I was the nineteenth-wheel on the Digitent big rig.

I visited Woody’s home page, which he’d shown to me a year earlier. On it were his résumé, some photos and a half-sincere, half-cheeky chart called
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
. Under
THINGS I LIKE
he’d entered,
JAMIE COOKING DINNER FOR ME
. Under
STATUS
it read,
IN A RELATIONSHIP
. For all the world to see, I was still part of the official record of his life. Maybe he was leaving the door open.

“Woody is a pretty
rough
name, dude. You know what a woody is, right?” Jed had crept up from behind and was pointing at a JPEG of Woody in business drag: a button-down shirt, khakis, brown shoes.

“Here’s a better picture.” I reached to the shelf over my desk and pulled down the photo taken in the park. I could still see where I’d smeared away a streak of dust, though the streak was dusty now, too.

“I saw that picture,” he said. “I thought that might be your brother.”

“We don’t look alike,” I said, surprised.

He studied the picture for half a minute. “I take it back,” he said. “There’s something in common. But not enough to be related.”

Surf’s Up in San Diego
was a bargain-basement Frankie and Annette movie, full of unfamiliar faces put through the usual machinations. Pretty-but-bookish blonde falls for swaggering surfer. She joins a
fast crowd,
but when she almost drowns after drinking jug wine at a luau, she understands that she must get back on track. The surfer is so impressed by her resolve he decides to return to high school in time for final exams, which he passes, with her help, of course. Then they all go back to the beach for the summer. Dean Foster’s role was small, a dark head of hair amid the blonde beach bums, his arm always secure around a girl. But even if you weren’t looking, you’d notice him. His beauty was almost unreasonable: long-lashed doe eyes and ripe lips; nose, cheekbones and jaw at the ideal structural angles. His torso, lean and sturdy, stretched from a boxy swimsuit like a sapling from a planter. He played the kid brother of a more important character, and in fact that’s what everyone called him, the Kid. He only had a couple of lines. When he opened his mouth, the lingering grip of puberty was obvious, his voice catching in the top of his throat—not unlike Jed’s. On top of that was his New York street accent. When he yelled, “Hey, scram! It’s the fuzz!” the sound could have stopped traffic.

“That’s the guy I’m looking for,” I told Jed, who sat next to me on the couch, all elastic limbs and gluey eyes. I hadn’t touched the brownies and had no idea how concentrated they were. Jed was the test case.

I rewound and paused on Dean Foster in close-up:
scram
stretching his mouth wide, telegraphing enthusiasm when the script called for alarm.

“You know him?” Jed asked. His vacant gaze was less animated than Dean’s, frozen on the screen.

“My father knew him.”

“Is he famous?”

“Not famous, just hot.” He didn’t respond. “Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think about whether guys are hot?” He shook his head no. “What about the guys you have sex with?”

“Usually they think I’m hot.”

“Are you saying that you’re not attracted to the guys you have sex with?” He looked bewildered. Given how high he was, this was probably the wrong time for analysis. But his guard was down, so I tried again. “Were you attracted to the FedEx guy?”

“That guy? We were just talking.”

“What about me?” I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, though it sounded that way to my own ears, so I added, “We had sex three times last night.”

He nodded vigorously. “Yeah, totally. That was probably, like, a world record.”

I might have blushed. “I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from, Jed.”

“I’m…attracted…to…you”—each word balanced with the effort of a steep walk downhill—“because you were into…tripping in nature. Most people won’t go there. But you tripped out for real.”

It was nearly noon by now. He wasn’t going to make it to work unless I pushed him. And I didn’t want to push him. I wanted to be on the same foggy slope, moving at his tempo. I called his Starbucks and posed as the radio producer I was supposed to be: “Jed wasn’t aware of some professional commitments I’d made for him today, so if he could start his shift tomorrow, it would greatly benefit his internship.” While I was at it, I gave him a good reference. They thanked me for taking the time to call. Jed thanked me, too. So everyone was happy. The brownie I cut myself was so small Jed deemed it
pussy size
and broke me off another chunk, which he pushed to my lips with his fingers. I smelled the cooked grass in my nose before the chocolate hit my tongue. It balled up against the roof of my mouth as I chewed, and went down my throat in a gooey lump. Back in the living room, I pushed P
LAY
. Dean Foster jumped to life, said what he was supposed to, and faded back into the crowd.

Jed, studying a shot of waves crashing on the sand, put his hand on my thigh and said, “We’re totally gonna hit Baja together, right?”

I nodded and smiled. This plan seemed as likely as any other.

The Criminal Kick
was better than
Surf’s Up
. Not better in quality. Worse, in fact: a stagnant camera that occasionally raced in for an extreme, obvious close-up, as if the operator had just jerked awake from a nap and reflexively hit the zoom button; a self-consciously jumpy editing style (someone had been studying the French New Wave); sloppy lighting that sent details into shadowed obscurity. But the story showed a willingness to go anywhere. The script, layered in pulp-fiction dialogue, stayed mercilessly unaccountable to all of its characters, humiliating and bumping them off creatively, so that by the end there was literally only one man standing, covered in blood, a suitcase of money in his clutches.

Dean Foster played Robbie the Greek, a flashy hustler in open-necked polyester shirts and tight, high-waisted pants. Robbie the Greek is hired for sex by a society widow, whom he quickly chokes to death and stuffs into a trunk; then he moves into her mansion. When the film’s stars—an acid-freak Bonnie and Clyde who have kidnapped a ten-year-old girl—happen upon Robbie, he gives them refuge. He plies Bonnie and the child with pills, and when they’re zonked out he puts the moves on handsome Clyde. The scene where Dean walks his fingers down the bare chest and lanky belly of the lead actor—a gesture completed with the gleeful unfastening of the stud’s American-flag belt buckle—was for me a moment of electricity. A quick cut to Robbie’s cigarette being lit makes it clear in the most rudimentary way that he’d successfully conquered his prey.

More than a decade after his debut as a surf stud, Dean Foster wasn’t aging well. He was still handsome—there was no way to ruin those eyes—but his physique had a drawn quality to it, as if he’d shed his muscles on an amphetamine diet. The teen scratchiness of his voice had been outgrown, the New York edges planed away; he spoke every line at an intimidating volume. Maybe it was simply an actor’s choice for a smarmy character, but Dean sounded like an angry god, calling down vengeance and relishing every moment. Of course, in keeping with the norms of the day, Dean’s character is promptly and brutally knifed by the girlfriend after she wakes from her barbiturate stupor. The boyfriend, shedding any notion of sexual ambiguity, kicks Dean’s writhing corpse with his cowboy boots and decrees him to be
one far-out sicko.

At this moment of seduction-transformed-into-violence, Ian arrived. I’d put in a call to him earlier, alerting him to Jed’s presence, inviting him for a brownie. He entered without saying hello, watched the on-screen assault, and announced, “Talk about a buzz kill.” Jed shot me an amused look, which Ian took as encouragement: “Jamie’s famous for picking exactly the wrong pop-cultural reference for a drug trip,” he said.

Jed: “Last time he played Elton John.”

Ian: “Be glad you’re not on acid watching a political documentary.”

Jed: “True, true.”

“Ganging up on a mutual friend is a major violation,” I said. But as I watched Jed keep pace, and watched Ian sail through Jed’s three-part handshake, I was happy for their instant groove.

Within moments Jed was scampering back from the kitchen with the tray of brownies, holding it out to Ian. “Dive in, dude.”

Ian declined. “Someone’s got to play Party Nurse.”

Party Nurse
was a concept we’d come up with together after the death of one of our most beloved sensitive-boy actors, River Phoenix, who had spent his final night ingesting a vast pharmacopoeia washed down with booze before collapsing outside a Hollywood club. “He’d be alive today if someone had just kept a few of those substances out of his system,” Ian had intoned. We decided then that serious drug trips needed a designated monitor to keep everyone from going off the deep end. This explanation didn’t do much for Jed, who made the point that we weren’t combining our brownies with anything, and anyway, hadn’t I claimed
pot’s not a drug
?

“Eating it is different than smoking it,” I said.

“For such a big druggie you sure have a lot of judgments about what other people do,” Jed said, cutting himself a brownie about three times the size of the first and swallowing it in a couple of bites.

I grabbed another square for myself. No need for restraint if Ian was staying clean. Jed was excited to realize that Ian didn’t know about my windfall from Anton, even tried to persuade him to scavenge for it. (Another decline.) When the bag was revealed, Ian’s eyes went wide. “I’m taking half of this with me,” he declared. “For your own good.”