The Burning Plain (2 page)

“Excuse me,” the M.E. said impatiently. “Is this him?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s him.”

Two days later, his ashes were delivered to me in a bronze urn via UPS. Josh’s will specified that his family participate in the scattering of the ashes. As unlikely as it was the Mandels would agree, I felt duty-bound to remind them of his request before disposing of the ashes, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it just yet. I put the urn on the mantel above the fireplace, off to the side, and went back to work in the room I’d fitted out as my office.

I’d been a lawyer for twenty-one years, having graduated third in my class from Stanford in the mid-seventies. Back then, the words “idealist” and “lawyer” could still be spoken in the same sentence without a sneer, and no one questioned why I would take my prestigious degree and join the local public defender’s office rather than hang my shingle with a big-city firm. Criminal defense was the only kind of law I had ever wanted to practice. I was inspired in equal parts by a childhood veneration of Abraham Lincoln, the TV series
Perry Mason
, my father’s brutality and my awareness, from the time I was sixteen, that I was gay. The last two were related. My Mexican immigrant father was a hard man who had survived a hard life, and he despised the softness he detected in his only son and was determined to beat it out of me. All his beatings had accomplished was to incite in me a hatred of authority and injustice. Not until I fell in love with my best friend in high school did I begin to understand that what had driven my father’s violence was every father’s ultimate nightmare: a homosexual son. A
maricón.
Had I been able to change, I would have done it without hesitation, but in the deepest part of me I knew change was not possible, only deception, and that would have inevitably implicated other people in my lie. I was too much an altar boy for that. I compromised: if I could not not be gay, I would compensate for it with good works. My compromise led me, at twenty-four, into a courtroom to defend my first client, a man not unlike my father, accused of murdering another man in a brawl in a
cantina
in the San Jose barrio.

I hung the jury, eight to four for acquittal, with a mistaken identity defense, and the charges were dropped. It was the fast track after that, big cases, big wins, a reputation for thoroughness and eloquence I still lived off of; all those years of committing Lincoln’s speeches to heart had paid off. I was too busy for a private life, too busy to be gay, so busy that I didn’t notice the water closing over my head until I was drowning in loneliness and booze. I lost my job. I sobered up. I got drunk again. I sobered up again. I met Josh. We moved to Los Angeles. I established a successful practice. Josh left me for Steven. I closed my practice to find myself and discovered I was a lawyer. Steven died and Josh got sick. I went back to work handling criminal appeals out of my house so I could take care of Josh. Josh died. And that’s how I’d spent the last decade.

Back in my office, tropical fish danced across the screen of my desktop. Piles of transcripts were stacked on the floor, spilling out of file cabinets, representing the fifty-odd cases on appeal I was handling. On makeshift bookshelves lining the walls were my law books, reporters, treatises, digests. Somewhere in the room was my degree from Stanford and a yellowing copy of my student law review note: “Recent Developments in Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence.” On my desk was a picture of Josh I’d taken on a weekend trip to San Francisco shortly after we’d met. He was twenty-two, a little, beautifully made man with olive skin, a wild frizz of black hair, and eyes like wounds. He had only recently told me he was HIV positive. He was still afraid I would abandon him. In time, he’d learned to trust me and the wounded eyes healed. And then they’d closed for good. I took the picture from its frame, turned it over and scribbled on the back his name and dates and a line from Emily Dickinson that had been running through my head for months: “Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.”

I don’t know how long I sat there looking at his picture before I was roused to the front door by the doorbell. I peered through the peephole at my friend Richie Florentino, his fist poised to bang on the door. I opened it.

Tall and thin, his long face was framed by a luxuriance of thick, wavy dark hair and he had the square-jawed glamour of a forties movie star, a look he carefully cultivated. Always draped in the latest fashions, he was wearing a burnt-orange sports coat over a linen shirt of paler orange, a silk tie the color of new grass and cream-colored linen trousers. On his large feet were lime-green suede loafers with brass buckles forming by the letters GV, Gianni Versace, his favorite designer. Richie lived in an apartment in West Hollywood that had once belonged to Jean Harlow and edited a magazine called
L.A. Mode
that catalogued the antics of the rich and famous. His lover of twenty years, Joel Miller, was a studio executive. Richie claimed descent from the de Medicis and a family fortune going back five hundred years. His friends knew never to question his veracity, but simply assumed that, out of any ten statements, Richie had made up nine of them.

“Good, you’re home,” Richie said, sweeping past me in a flood of Guerlain’s Derby. “Oh, honey, it’s so hot in here. Turn on the air-conditioning.”

“You’ve been here before,” I said. “You know my house isn’t air-conditioned.”

“But I keep hoping.” He flung himself into an armchair and lit a Marlboro Light. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

He pretended to think it over. “No.”

“I’ll find you an ashtray.”

“You like the coat?” he shouted. “It’s Versace.”

“Who would’ve guessed?” I replied, slipping, gratefully, into his mocking locutions. I handed him a saucer for his cigarette.

Richie was the kind of friend who touched down in my life like a whirlwind, rearranged the landscape and then blew on. I wasn’t always happy to see him, but today I was glad because whatever he wanted—and it was always something—would, at the very least, drive me out of my grief.

He picked up the saucer, scrutinized it, pretended to weigh it in his palm. “Baccarat?”

“Cost Plus,” I said. “It’s good to see you, Richie. How are you?”

“Not dead yet,” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth like Bogart.

“No, really.”

“Really? I feel great, Henry.”

Richie had AIDS (“But darling,” he liked to say, “all the best people do.”) I’d met him at a hospital where I’d gone to visit Josh. Richie came into Josh’s room, trailing his IV behind him, an unlit cigarette clamped in his mouth and excused himself to the small balcony off the room where, with Josh’s permission, he could light up. At one point, he’d been so sick that he’d planned his memorial service, but then he’d bounced back and now he was on a regimen of protease inhibitors, the new miracle antivirals that were bringing so many people with AIDS back from the brink of death.

“My viral load is almost undetectable,” he continued. “My T-cells have gone from fourteen to eight hundred and they’re still climbing.” He had dropped all affectation and there was awe in his voice. “If this isn’t cured, Henry, I don’t know what cured means.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said.

“It could all change tomorrow,” he replied. “I know people the drugs stopped working for, or never worked for, and no one knows about their long-term effectiveness, but I’ve never lived in the long term. I’m sorry Josh didn’t get to try them.”

“I am, too,” I said. “He was like the soldier who gets killed the day before armistice.”

“I think about the people who didn’t make it—Mario, Steven—and wonder, why me?”

“Every lawyer knows you never ask a question of a witness to which you do not already know the answer. It works in life, too. How’s Joel?”

“Three things in life are certain,” Richie grumbled. “Death, taxes and Joel Miller.” He grabbed one of the transcripts piled on the coffee table. “People versus Bailey. Pearl? Beetle? F. Lee?”

“None of the above. It’s an appeal from a murder conviction.”

“Oh,” Richie cooed, excitedly. “Was the victim famous?”

“No, a domestic dispute. Mr. Bailey killed his wife.”

“Breeders are so literal-minded. Hasn’t anyone explained to them you can torture your spouse without ever laying a finger on them? Every fag knows that.” He lit another cigarette. “Of course, I blame it on the schools. Instead of forcing high school kids to read
Romeo and Juliet
, they should assign them
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Because, really, Henry, which one of those two great works of literature do most marriages resemble? I’ll give you a hint, Liz Taylor played me in the movie.”

I grimaced. “I know it’s considered liberated to throw around the words ‘fag’ and ‘faggot,’ but they’re still hate words to me.”

He stiffened slightly at the correction. “People can pack as much hate into ‘gay’ as they can into ‘fag.’”

We had covered this terrain many times. Richie’s lacerating wit was more often than not directed at other gay men with a contempt that would have infuriated him had it come from a straight person. He never saw the contradiction. I did.

“Let’s not argue,” I said. “Not today.” I pointed to the mantel. “Today, Josh came home.”

He went to the fireplace, picked up the urn. “You beat his parents in court.”

“It wasn’t a battle I would have chosen.”

“They picked it,” he said, putting the urn on the mantel.

I smiled. “No, actually I think Josh did by not telling them he wanted to be cremated.”

“You’re so right about that,” he said, lighting another Marlboro.

“What do you mean?”

“I was in the hospital with him, Henry. He was always worse after his parents visited him, especially that father of his.” He made a face. “Like Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments
, that one. He laid the guilt on so thick the room had to be fumigated.”

“Josh never mentioned that to me.”

Richie arranged himself on the couch. “He thought you had enough to worry about.”

I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth or inventing what he considered a consoling story. But the story was not consoling if true, and if not, it was a terrible thing to say. At such moments I remembered that Richie was not, as he liked to say, “your old Auntie Mame.” His wealthy family had institutionalized him when he was a teenager to cure him of homosexuality. When that failed, they cast him from the hearth and paid him to stay away. The experience left him with a corrosive rage.

“If I were you,” he was saying. “I would’ve taken Josh’s ashes and thrown them in his parents’ faces.”

I remembered Selma Mandel’s piteous “Oh,” when the judgment was announced. “Jesus, Richie. They aren’t evil. They loved him.”

“That’s always the bottom line, isn’t it?” Richie said, venomously. “Your family fucks you up seven ways to Sunday, but it’s all right because they love you.”

I shrugged, changed the subject. “Is this just a social visit, Richie?”

“I have a friend who needs a lawyer,” he replied, abruptly all business.

“Because?” I prompted.

“Because he was arrested last week for something with a gun.”

“Something with a gun?”

“I have the arrest report,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket.

It never failed to impress me how quickly Richie could shuck aside the queeny manner when it no longer served his purpose. Even his posture changed, the languid pose abandoned as he leaned emphatically forward.

“Does the client have a name?”

“Alex Amerian,” he said, handing me the arrest report.

I scanned the cover sheet. The charges were PC sections
245
and
12022.I
; assault with a deadly weapon and possession of a concealed firearm. According to the arresting officer’s narrative. Alex Amerian (twenty-nine years old, Caucasian) had been picked up by a security guard while wandering through the shrubbery on the grounds of a hillside mansion in Los Feliz belonging to someone called Cheryl Cordet.

I looked up at Richie, “Cheryl Cordet? Why do I know that name?”

Richie did a Mae West roll of his eyes. “Because last month she became the first woman ever to win an Oscar for best director?”

“Oh,” I said and returned my attention to the report.

Amerian had pulled a gun on the security guard who managed to wrest it from his control and call the police. Amerian was arrested. He declined to make a statement.

“What do you think?” Richie asked when I raised my head from the report.

“What’s his version?”

“He told me he was coming home from a party when his car broke down in front of Cheryl Cordet’s place. He jumped the fence to see if she’d let him use her phone to call the auto club. The security guard caught him and they got into a scuffle. The guard called him a faggot. Alex lost control and waved the gun around. The guard knocked him down, got the gun away from him and called the cops.”

“Why was he carrying a gun?”

“For protection. Six months ago he was gay bashed and got the shit beat out of him.”

“Did he mean to shoot the guard?”

“No, he panicked.”

“He didn’t try to explain this to the cops?”

“He has an attitude about the police,” Richie said.

“Why?”

“He was attacked on the streets of West Hollywood by some teenage punks with baseball bats who left him crawling in his own blood to a pay phone to dial 911. It took forty minutes for the sheriffs to show up and when they did, they refused to take a report.”

“How do you know this guy, Richie?”

“The magazine ran a piece on violence against gays and lesbians a couple of months ago. Alex was one of the people we interviewed.”

“
L.A. Mode
did a story about gay bashing? Who photographed it? Herb Ritts?”

“Bitch,” he replied. “I’m a serious journalist, Henry.”

“Between fashion spreads,” I replied. “Alex Amerian sounds like one angry guy.”

“Wouldn’t you be if you’d gone through what he did?”

“Not to the point of stupid.”

“He’s not stupid, Henry. He was traumatized by the attack on him, and when he got into a scuffle with this security guard, who called him a queer, he thought it was happening again.”