American Dream Machine (55 page)

It’s the dreaming itself that’s dangerous, in the end.

Will’s home office was narrow, as cluttered as a ship’s kitchen. It wasn’t opulent at all. The adjacent living area was teak-dark, sparsely furnished, its bare cots and tables like an ashram’s. A Motherwell painting, one of the
Spanish Elegies
, hung on one wall.

He looked up. Outside, the street was empty, and the houses had gone gold around the edges. The phone was quiet, a minor miracle. Usually Saturdays were as bad as any other. He tossed his script aside. The glassy, twilit quiet, the gloom that crept over the yard made him think of Beau. He still did. His ex-partner would come in and disturb him, sometimes, barking and snuffling along the margins of his dreams. He missed the fat man’s laugh.

The full moon had already risen. It hung over the pitched roofs opposite, a lurid circle strung in a periwinkle sky. Williams went into the living room. This house was inky, sinister: its floors and
fixtures were chocolate brown, its walls a brightness-swallowing gold. As you receded within its interior—like a lot of those narrow, crushed-together Craftsmen just a few blocks from the beach, this one faced north—all you found was an ocean of shadow. At night, the effect was overpowering. The place held the phosphorized glow of an old crime-scene photograph. Again, this was the way Williams Farquarsen liked it. All day, he worked in the sky-bound openness of Century City, in one of those drab and candid towers where you looked out and found yourself floating over the horizon like a stupid pilot. Here, he felt sheltered. And he found himself alone.

He played an old country record. Set the needle down in the groove and listened to the sublime crackling.
Take the edge off things
. He closed his eyes to the sounds of Ernest Tubb, and then Webb Pierce, whose weird, hillbilly warbles were not exactly the things you’d expect the head of a Hollywood agency to listen to, but everyone has a private life. Some more private than others.

Williams got dressed. He stood before the bedroom mirror and hid himself, pulling on a threadbare gray T-shirt, ratty jeans, a baseball cap that read—this was long before the movie—
CRIMSON TIDE
. He looked like trailer trash, a real grease monkey. Earlier, he’d spoken to his wife and son. (“Hi, honey, where are you?” “Just outside Dolan Springs. The car overheated, we had to stop for coolant.”) It gave him pleasure to stand before that mirror and be so easily veiled: from his wife, his child, himself. He loved his family, but nothing took precedence over this peacock display, this preening concealment of the self. With his hair tucked under his cap, he sucked his cheeks to look skinny, haunted, hollow-eyed, and feral. Perhaps this was drag queen stuff after all.

He took the keys to Marnie’s Opel, and then he drove downtown. There were many places he could go, but like any decent actor, Williams improvised against the script. Breezing through the clammy night, he deliberated.
Left turn on Lincoln
. There were places in San Pedro, in Long Beach. He felt well hidden, in plain sight. He felt safe. He had clients who relied upon very little disguise, whose belief was that acting was largely interior. David Bowie played John Merrick onstage without makeup. Just as there were actors at the
other end of the spectrum, who gained eighty pounds to be boxers, who wore silk underdrawers to become Al Capone. Williams hid his hair, changed his clothes, and the rest was intuition. Privacy was still possible in 1984. Paparazzi never staked out his house; nothing he did was ever going to show up on
Defamer
. He took the 10, heading east. Even as he passed the 405 interchange, he twitched, and there was a reptilian impulse to switch lanes and go south. But he didn’t. He just kept rolling toward the light, chasing that patchy and disreputable skyline.

The car vibrated, the air hissed and fluttered. It was one of those nights when the halogen spills from the city and the wild ivy by the freeway is torn by wind and the buildings seem ready to come unmoored. To Williams’s mind, everything seemed edged with meaning and yet not quite ready to fit together, like a puzzle that hasn’t been cut right. Drugs give that feeling, but so does desire. The rectangular green signs, with their reflective white borders and lettering:
LA CIENEGA, LA BREA, WESTERN, NORMANDIE
. Each one seemed to promise whole zones of erotic distinction, through which he drove ever deeper. He needed to be farther away. The car smelled of monoxide, gas, that stale air of afternoons at the beach: of damp towels, trapped sunlight, and coconut lotion. Chewing gum wrappers sparkled in the ashtray, a crushed pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint. His son’s.

He got off at Alameda and followed the street north until he was near the bar he remembered. He’d been there twice before. It was a sex club, on one of the streets that held mostly artists’ lofts, garment warehouses, sweatshops. There were plenty of these, and plenty of after-hours clubs too—places that were not exactly strange to young Hollywood, buzzing caverns filled with glassy-eyed teenagers and cheap
MDMA
—so Williams was taking a risk. But he liked risk. And there were clients of his who liked it too. He’d done it before and escaped unscathed. You could get in and out of this place without being seen. He approached an unmarked metal door and buzzed twice, then climbed a narrow set of unlit stairs. In his hand was a perfect fake California driver’s license, a gift from a director who’d recently done a movie about forgery. He flashed it as he nodded at the doorman, who recognized him without recognizing him.

Inside, the room was red, that lurid, caramelized pink of strip clubs. Farther back beyond the bar there was a private section, its crimson
bulbs thickening the air like a darkroom’s. Will could see the bodies writhing within. There was a smell of sweat, lubricant, poppers, semen, but he stopped, instead, at the bar. Most nights, he did. He hated the indiscriminate prodding of those rooms, stupid cocks as blind as moles. He sat at the bar where there was nobody else and he ordered a Manhattan. Usually, he didn’t drink, but in places like this, he had to: he had to calm his nerves. That chattering exhilaration in his upper chest and throat, a want so close to terror.

From the next room came moaning, slapping, and rustling. If you went deeper you’d find men dominating others, leather masks, ropes, punishments, sobbing sounds and groans that telegraphed much deeper forms of release. He’d done all this, once let a man put out a cigarette on his chest, but this wasn’t Will’s scene. Role-playing was just too overt. He liked subtlety, one-on-one: the event that pitted him against another guy, starting on the bottom but then arriving on top. In a sense, this was an exact corollary to his business. Except, there, he never bottomed anymore. So he needed to come here.

His Manhattan arrived. A fey drink, but the whiskey made it fitting for a Southern boy. There was a couple sitting at a table along the far wall, kissing. Like any other couple doing that in a bar, except the one’s fly was unzipped and the other was reaching over to stroke his cock beneath the table. It was huge, Williams could see clearly from where he sat. He watched with only moderate interest. Other men getting it on did nothing for him. He lacked that mirroring response; pornography’s call to echo left him unmoved. Williams
was
a voyeur, but actual voyeurism, just watching people, wasn’t enough. What he really wanted was to see himself. If it wasn’t impossible, for all kinds of reasons, he’d have wanted to be videotaped. As it stood, he liked to fuck in his automobile, where there were mirrors that afforded at least a tiny glimpse, and where there was privacy of a sort. He could recede to that space in his head where he watched himself, purely.

Someone came in. Will could hear the footsteps behind him. The exterior room was quiet, perhaps because it was still early, perhaps just because the bar was useless, itself. No one came here to drink. The stereo played the things you’d expect—Yaz, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sylvester: Hi-NRG disco classics—while behind the bar
a muscle-bound skinhead poured drinks from label-less bottles. It really was a generic operation, extending its promise of anonymity even to the things you drank. Not lost on Williams was this supreme irony: his life was entirely branded, yet he came here, of all places, to find his most intimate self. Which could never be revealed. This was the problem, when you lived the way he did. You brokered the stars but were reduced to mere glimpses of your very own fugitive strangeness.

“Beer.”
Burr
. The man who’d just come in was one of those cowboy types, those guys with no sense of irony. How Williams hated these! Their sameness brassed him off, just as it did the way some people typified themselves butches, queens, ladyboys, Marlboro men. Walking with a client through Earls Court in London, he’d seen acre upon acre of leather-jacketed clones. Imagine being so reducible, an actor with only one role.

“Ha.” From three seats away, the man spoke. “Can I have your cherry?”

Williams just looked at him.

“What’s wrong? I said—”

“I know what you said. I heard you.” He turned back to the bar.

The guy had bristle-black hair, a dark mustache below a crew cut. There was a disconnect between the super-short hair and the luxuriant mustache, as furred as a caterpillar.

“Such a stupid thing to say,” Will muttered. “Are you a high school boy? Is this cotillion?”

“What?”

Not too keen, this one. He had a pronounced scar, a vertical groove that cut his forehead and singed an eyebrow. Otherwise, he seemed less memorable even than most. Yet Will’s voice softened, just as it sometimes did on the phone. He sounded distinctly, almost tenderly, Southern.

“I said”—
Ah sed
—“is this cotillion? Are you really that witless? I don’t like cowboys.”

The guy walked over. Williams already knew that they were going to have sex: “liking” didn’t enter into it. The guy sat down next to him. He was ugly, with pitted skin and chapped-looking lips. Small blue eyes, cataracted with darkness.

“I’m Michael.”

“Will.” It might’ve been imprudent to use his real name, but Williams could get away with it. He still had on his
CRIMSON TIDE
cap, his tattered T-shirt. There was a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. He looked like what he might’ve become if he’d never left Louisiana.

“You want another?” Michael leaned over and put his hand on Williams’s lower back. “You
OK
there, handsome?”

He grunted. The last thing Will wanted from this guy—whose own name was almost certainly not Michael, he could tell—was small talk. But they had another drink and then, when Williams had drained his and set the triangular glass on the bar, the man leaned over to kiss him.

“Uh-uh.” Will flinched from the gust of rank, tobacco-laced breath. “I don’t do that.”

He didn’t. Kissing was for fairies. This man’s uncleanness was especially appalling. Yet it was also, inexplicably, hot.

The guy smiled. The leer of a man who said
gringo
in the movies. But then he laughed and it was all right.

“
OK
.” When he laughed like this he lit up, his face became more individuated and human, almost sympathetic. “Whatever floats your boat.”

Williams stood up. They could’ve used one of the interior rooms—that’s what they were there for after all—but they didn’t.

“Let’s go someplace a little less comfortable,” Williams said, and led the man toward the door, ignoring the basket of condoms below the Department of Health’s posted warnings.

He liked to fuck outside. Once more, because it was risky, but also—this was the poet in him—because it was close to nature. Even in seedy downtown
LA
, even in those blocks—so close to the sullen threat of the Greyhound station and the rust-covered railroad yards, that Los Angeles that had ridden on the edge of dereliction ever since the days of John Fante and the bulldozing of Chavez Ravine—even there Williams felt himself “close to nature.” They passed down the narrow stairs together and walked under the street lamps. This would’ve been the riskiest moment. As they were close to places like Dirtbox and Radio where young Hollywood
did
go, sometimes, where you might run into an assistant or an actor and where it would’ve been tough for Will to explain the presence
of an erectile cowboy like this one trailing so close behind him.
All clear
. They started down Factory Place, which was where Williams had parked, but then the guy turned to him.

“Let’s go to my car.”

“Uh-uh.”

“We gonna take yours?” In the darkness he swayed. His tone was playful, just like Will’s. “You got a truck we can sit in?”

Will watched him. Marnie’s car was unsuitable, even smaller than his own.

“All right,” Will said. “Let’s go to yours.”

The street was black, narrow, edged on one side by three-story lofts and on the other by a corrugated iron fence that ran almost its entire length. This marked off a scrapyard filled with industrial metals, whose value would’ve been puny, no matter what the sum, to Williams III. The lamplight wasn’t enough to lift any of this out of obscurity. The brick, fire-escaped faces on his left; the dull, graffiti-scarred metal on his right. Between these, a heaving patch of asphalt. For a man whose life had been specificity, stars, figures, and deals, his last few breaths in open air were certainly generic.
EXT. LOS ANGELES – STREET
. A man leads another
MAN
to his
CAR
. A moment as vague in its way as the blueprint for a movie.

“Where are we going?” Will said. Wind carried a loud but indefinite sound, the seismic, faraway booming—terrace chants and rattling percussion—of club music. “What exactly are we doing here, honey?”

The moment they crossed Alameda, the man gripped him and pushed him back into a doorway. He clutched Williams’s crotch, not hard, just cupping his cock and balls and kissing him again. This time, Williams allowed it to happen.

“Are you not into this?” The man gripped tighter, feeling Will’s lack of an erection.

“Nah.” Will ground back against him. The excitement always seemed to peak before, and just after. “We’ll be all right.”