The Gold Diggers (19 page)

He pulled the MG over. Eddie mumbled a sort of goodbye as he hiked himself over the door, but it was clear that he no longer remembered Sam's name, if he'd caught it to begin with. He looked very beautiful standing in the streetlight. Sam saw again what he'd taken in on the curb by the luncheonette—what he'd lost the whole time they sat in the dark car—that they had the same build and the same shape face.

“It's nice that you save it up for her some nights,” Sam said pleasantly.

“It doesn't matter. She works nights, too, so we do it in the daytime.” Which left unclear what line she was in, though Sam could have sworn from the way Eddie said it that she was a hooker.

“Good-bye, Eddie,” he said, speaking into the rearview mirror as he checked the traffic. “Some night we'll go to Valentino's old place and get it on like sheiks.” And he sped away and waved without looking back. He laughed at the thought of what a pack of whores they were. Eddie and his girl were pooling, it seemed, so as to get the mortgage quicker and plump themselves down for good in a place like San Bernardino, happily ever after. Pretty soon, Sam thought, there would be so many more hustlers than customers that they would have to start going at it with one another, just to keep in shape. When Sam got started, it was a scandal to find a fifteen-year-old working a neighborhood like a combat veteran. Especially pained were the middle-aged middlemen from The Industry—the second unit craftsmen, the people in publicity, anyone who went out for an occasional pickup. They wanted children innocent.

Well, well, he said to himself as he drove along and sobered up, he might as well be on top of the business while he could. The boom wouldn't last forever. Sam had seen towns where the gold rush or the cattle rush had once swept through, where the grass now grew in the streets. He had a mounting conviction that he was the last of the breed, the boy Nero would have been feeding chocolates to while Rome burned.

He was this year's prize, and he knew it. The prize wasn't a trophy, of course, or fixed like a name on a plaque. It was more of a feeling, and he may well have been the only one to feel it. But he didn't require more proof than the intensities he inspired in those who stood by, at the end of an hour, while he slipped through their fingers. He was the best thing on the menu. He could see that he needed a holiday to put it in perspective, because he had to know he was damn good in order to push forward with the work he'd waited ten years for. He took the most exalted view of the nexus of forces. He was free. He had the ticket to Crook House in his hand. Lust fired inside him like a dollop of uranium. And he had no questions left about the world. The scene was set like a bomb.

In an hour he'd be doing gymnastics in a stranger's bed. But one last thing. He'd thought of it in the middle of the kisses. A hundred and seventy-five minus fifty. He rocketed along now, rooting to the center of the city, where the palms gave out and the air hung low, the color of sherry and the taste of lead. I'm a cowboy, he thought. And then: No I'm not, I'm a private detective, and I get to the bottom of things if it's the last thing I do. A hundred and twenty-five. Somebody must have a gun they'd sell for that. Maybe a little thirty-eight. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel by way of patting himself on the back. He knew just the sort of man to look for on the street. They had eyes blank as dimes, and they hadn't had a good fuck in ten years. You couldn't miss them. They were all over the place.

Sam had no past anymore before LA, but he used to. Until the day after Christmas when he was fifteen, he lived on East Sixty-fifth Street, in the pastoral quarter of Manhattan. He apparently thought it prudent to gather the aunts' checks in his Christmas stocking before he took off, and he pawned the watch his father had tied up in ribbon and set by his plate of goose and chestnuts. So he was less a New Yorker by reason of time than Peter or Rita, but Peter and Rita, knowing what they did now about the townhouse life, boxes at the opera, and boxes from Bulgari and Godiva, would have envied him the style he once was accustomed to, quite as if they themselves had grown up hillbillies. Sam, of course, thought lunches at the Plaza as dull and fussy as lunches at the Pierre. He was bored in New York, always, though he knew now it was being fifteen and under and not the city lights that made it so. By the time he was ten, he was in therapy twice a week, and at twelve he was sent to school in Connecticut. To a school, in fact, that played soccer and hockey with Peter's school. He flunked math and earth sciences, ran a respectable mile, and befriended the local toughs who ran the school kitchen. It took him a year to make connections, and he entered the tenth grade running about two hundred dollars every other week in drugs, mostly acid.

His mother and father, decked out like the sugar figures on a wedding cake, had always gone about their glittering business, and he didn't mind at all. Though he raged for something he couldn't name, he knew it had nothing to do with them. When his mother sickened and died like lightning in the summer before he ran away, he was terribly sorry for her but not for himself. He watched her stand stricken in front of her closets, wall to wall with clothes like a whole floor of Saks, here and there fingering a pleat and pulling out a sleeve. It was as if her things could reassure her that she'd done more than most did, that all the parties were just as lovely as they seemed. Something in Sam beat with its fists at the same door she did all that summer, shouting at how unfair it was. But all the same it happened outside him. Part of that, of course, was the acid he dropped, which made him see things as if underwater, but even then he had the wit to wonder when the detachment would stop. His father was worse. He treated her as if she'd brought down shame on his good name, as if she'd taken to drink or gone suddenly mad. The ruinous grief turned the house on Sixty-fifth Street into a kind of tenement. It might have gone on for months and months, but she lay one morning on her dressing room floor, an empty bottle of Seconal in the pocket of her robe, the vanity covered a half inch thick with designer scarves. It was at the funeral that he met his father's other woman. He was the only one dry-eyed enough to notice that, even underwater, she wore black crepe like a stripper. It proved to him what he hardly needed further proof of, that the only life he could keep in line was his own. And though he'd gotten to like the school's austerity and would have been glad to deal dope until he graduated—expecting by then to be able to get a piece of Reno or Miami—he knew it was time to go.

He went to San Francisco first, like a banker to Basel. He didn't feel much like a runaway—he took a plane, for one thing, and, like a pioneer in a Conestoga, he made good provision for a brand-new life. He had six hundred tabs of purple haze in his suitcase and four hundred dollars tucked in the crotch flap of his Jockey shorts. But he found he was two years too late with the acid, and anyone who might have still wanted a cosmic high couldn't afford the prices people paid in Connecticut prep schools. His market had fallen out from under him. He stayed three days and stayed stoned, but the hollow-eyed sorts he met in Golden Gate Park had fallen into gibberish, making him sound positively Shakespearean. It scared him. He went south, but again with no thought of LA. He had a vision of himself holed up in a stone house on the Baja Peninsula, getting his head together, by which he meant a toothless old Indian woman feeding him peyote buttons and giving him baths. He had been doing the little reading that is said to be a dangerous thing. He didn't consider drying out. He only wanted a change of medication.

But it ended up being decided for him. He hitched a ride in a beat-up truck in Monterey that was going down Route 1, delivering beer. For all his diverse chemical intake, Sam had hardly ever had a beer, and by the time they were taking the big turns on Big Sur, a drunken burr had insinuated itself in the midst of his hallucinations. The whole Pacific was, not to belabor the point, a purple haze. Then the trucker wanted to suck him off, and Sam said no. He didn't have room between the acid and the beer to feel panicky or flattered. He must have sounded almost bored, as if he were back in New York, refusing yet again to be waited on or entertained. And he thought that was the end of it. After a moment he showed there were no hard feelings by telling about his stash of LSD, promising to share. Then he needed to take a piss something awful. So he stood just off the road in a foggy meadow a half mile above the ocean, his cock in one hand and a beer in the other, while the truck drove off with his last key to the astral plane. It tooted its horn twice as it rounded the next bend. So long, sucker.

Odd, considering the drive that had moved him along at fever pitch ever since, how little thought he'd given to his cock. He'd noticed it was big, of course, about third in his tenth grade class of sixty boys, which was a relief. But he knew it wasn't going to be much use to him until later, so he let it be and played with his head instead, blowing it full of holes. The combined energy released through masturbation in his dormitory probably could have powered a turbine, and yet he genuinely preferred as an act of self-love to look at himself in the mirror without moving a muscle. He knew even then he was going to be a knockout. And he began to develop that eerie double life that only the great beauties live. At the mirror, self-conscious and self-absorbed, every feature put under a microscope. Anywhere else—in company, in crowds, especially in love—open and wild with grace and missing nothing, making free with the universe. Sam began to go back and forth, and it made him so happy he thought he would have it forever. Perhaps he would have, except that the balance is finally thrown off by the strain of making a living off it.

But that was much, much later. The day he walked along the coast road, gradually getting sober in spite of himself, he was as virgin as the flowers on the heath. Though the term here is purely literal, because at the same time he was badly shaken out of yet another sleep of innocence. He was down to four hundred dollars and the clothes on his back. He felt he was due for a stroke of luck. There was no lag in the flood of events in
his
world, even then. No pauses while time chiseled his fate in stone. He'd had his first roughing up, and he accepted it, used it, learned where he'd gone all wrong. He was ready to process something new in a couple of hours. The hills were ghostly gray. The fog wet him right to the skin. If nothing had happened, as it did to almost anyone else, and he'd walked the whole range till it ran down into civilization again, if he'd worn out his soles and learned how to tie his shirt like a kerchief on his head against the midday sun, he might have been a poet by the time he got to Santa Barbara. But he got his wish, and his good luck carried him away.

He took a road at random, winding down, and around dusk it brought him out onto the beach. For a moment, he thought he would die of the cold, and he ran around in a circle on the sand to keep warm. Until he spied a rose of firelight at the base of a cliff. He jogged on over, and in a moment he was staring across the fire, where a tenderloin was spitting on the grill, at a man with a halfback's build and a sandy beard, about twenty-two. Sam said hello to the next year and a half. “You look hungry,” said Ben, and that was that. He cut the steak in two, poured him a Jack Daniels and water in a tin cup, and, when it was time, made room in his sleeping bag. They must have both lain awake for hours, curled like spoons, because they both noticed when the fog began to lift and the stars went on. They began to talk about the night as if there had been no lapse of time since they sat around the fire, where they talked about the four elements like characters in a medieval play. They stayed clear of talking about themselves, Sam decided in the dark in his underwear, because the tides and the plot of the North Star were more important. As to sex, nobody made a move.

For a while, it was assumed that Sam would be going off on his own again in a few days, and then suddenly it wasn't. They finished the week's hike and tramped inland, retrieved Ben's MG, and drove all the way to LA. Ben's house, a furnished bungalow on Norma Place, felt from the first like the opposite of Sixty-fifth Street, and Sam sat contented in the garden in the sun and looked at maps. Mexico and Central America. Then on across the Darien Gap into the jungles that went unbroken to the Amazon. Ben was away off and on day and night, but Sam felt no desire to know what it was he did. They slept in the same bed and, now that the sleeping bag didn't confine them to lying in each other's arms, kept a certain distance and talked less and less. What they both wanted wasn't something either of them seemed to think about. For different reasons, neither of them needed anyone else, and it was even better than being alone to have someone around who felt the same way. They were not out to be friends, let alone lovers. The nothing Sam would go a long way to feel years later came naturally to him and Ben.

It was the Southern California of the morality plays, perhaps—without humors, without reasons, without the characteristics of particular life in a particular place. It may be that they preferred to live in two dimensions, that they were more like photographs left about than people. Nothing happened on Norma Place. Somehow the food must have got bought and the laundry done, because they didn't starve, and they didn't smell. But it was all very detached, and Sam left behind what little he still had of the past because feeling detached felt good. They assumed nothing. Assumption itself was tainted with good and evil, and good was the opposite of
bad
. No morals were involved.

Once settled, then, with nothing expected of him, Sam left his head alone and took hold of his cock. As naturally as if he were shifting languages between one country and the next. His schoolboy's line of reasoning, that it wasn't going to get him anywhere until he had someone to put it in, evaporated when it dawned on him—he was the one he was waiting for all along. He became his own man, literally. He didn't need to compare with anyone else because he had an eye for his own technique like an athlete who doesn't ever lose. And he didn't worry about his lack of experience because he loved to practice. He made his own experience up as he went along. It was very existential jerking off. He didn't do anything else for weeks.