Born to Be Brad (12 page)

While Tony and Sal were catching up, they left me and Sal’s friend Gary Janetti—an American—idling there awkwardly. I was dressed in what Gary would later describe as “Eurotrash jeans.” Which had something to do with the excessive amounts of contrast stitching on the acid-wash denim. I was also wearing a blue T-shirt, and I still had that Caesar haircut. I am proud of none of this today, but I am trying to paint the picture. If I acted aloof at first, it was only because I was trying to be a free spirit. I’d been broken up with my boyfriend for two months. But as soon as Gary offered me a bite of his dessert, I melted. He started to tell me about his life in Los Angeles. He wrote for television, he said, but he’d grown up in New York. I told him about Canada, about how I was obsessed with the tenth-anniversary concert of
Les Misérables
starring Patti LuPone, which had been airing on Canadian public television before I left. (This is the kind of shit I used to tape on the VHS; when I was a kid, I’d record the Tony Awards and watch the ceremony over and over again. Likewise with the red carpet at the Oscars.) Gary talked about his nieces and how they’d just visited and were listening to this song “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child over and over again. We’d been making idle chitchat for hours when he asked me if I wanted to go dancing. We were out until three in the morning.

“While it may sound cliché, I felt something different with Gary. He saw something in me that I thought was lost.”

I was supposed to go back to Athens in the morning—modeling appointments awaited. Instead, I hopped a plane to Santorini with Gary and Sal. And over the course of a week, Gary and I got to know each other. I was impressed with his resolve. He grew up in Queens and not too long ago had been a frustrated writer working as a bellhop at a New York hotel. Until he up and quit, moved to Los Angeles, and landed a job writing for a major network series in less than a year. He saw huge potential in himself, saw that a transformation was possible, and acted on it. It was the first example I’d seen of someone taking such a risk, and I was drawn to him as a source of inspiration. It’s not very Canadian to change courses so radically. But Gary had done it, and wonderfully so. Could I do the same?

On the beach in Santorini, Gary and I were talking about seeing each other again, at first half-joking, and then more directly. He knew I was a huge Madonna fan. She was scheduled to perform in L.A. later that summer. “Come for a visit,” Gary said. “We’ll see Madonna. And we’ll see what this is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. It’s easy to fall in love when you are in Greece. But it is something else to take that love to the mainland. And yet, while it may sound cliché, I felt something different with Gary. He saw something in me that I thought was lost. I had a flashback to kindergarten and my teacher Mrs. Chandler telling my mom that I was going to be fine. That I had a spark she needed to nurture, not beat down. In the years since—especially during college—I’d convinced myself that the spark had burned out for good. But Gary saw it flickering, however faint. Despite my patchwork jeans that flared out, despite the bad vintage T-shirt I was wearing, which was the height of gay Canadian fashion—despite all of that he saw something in this kid from Ontario who’d never been to New York, who had been a waiter yet had somehow made his way to Greece, who carried a Prada messenger bag and was obsessed with musical theater.

Gary and me, Greece, 2001.

We kissed good-bye and he went off to the airport. He told me to call him when I was ready to come visit him in Los Angeles. Whenever that is, he said, I’ll be waiting.

He didn’t have to wait very long. By the time Gary landed in L.A. there was a message waiting for him at home. “I want to come visit,” I said. “I’m ready.” Surely there is more to life than this hotel in Greece, I thought. There must be. But what is next? Where am I going?

It is time to look.

4

New York is waiting for you. And it’s not only for the rich.

ASK GARY ABOUT MY
arrival in Los Angeles, and he will tell you that the first thing out of my mouth wasn’t “hello” or “Thank you for the plane ticket,” but rather these words: “They lost my luggage.” In my defense, I’d brought my best clothing with me to Athens and that lost suitcase was full of Miu Miu shoes, Prada, Versace, Alexander McQueen, and anything else in my wardrobe worth owning. It was a couple of years’ worth of shopping and I could never afford to buy it all back, and now it was on some sad baggage carousel in South America or somewhere going round and round.

And here we were: two relative strangers playing house.

“And here we were: two relative strangers playing house.”

I took to L.A. very quickly. I got Balinese highlights, the kind of treatment where the pigment is brushed onto your hair so it looks sun kissed. I wanted to look like Brad Pitt in
Ocean’s Eleven.
As promised, we went to the Madonna concert, with Gary calling in a favor from, of all people, Gwyneth Paltrow’s assistant. We were in the tenth row of a sold-out show. I wore my olive Gucci dress shirt and by the time the night was over, my hair was standing straight up. Someone behind me must have eaten a pretzel, because I had mustard all over my back. I was sweating through everything on my body. Gary took one look at me and said, “What happened to you?”

“I had an out-of-body experience,” I said.

Which was sort of how I felt in L.A. I wondered, What am I going to do with my life? For a minute, I thought maybe I’d try modeling again. I knew I didn’t really have what it takes, but I found out when the modeling agencies had their open calls, and I toted my portfolio all over town. No one bit. I didn’t have a green card, so I couldn’t really get a job. And so I took hip-hop classes. I got my driver’s license.

And I used the time to get to know Gary. It was a period of great exploration, a chance for us to build a real foundation. It was a time of many firsts. My first trip to London. My first trip to Thailand. I was very into this idea of American sportiness. I wore slogan T-shirts from Urban Outfitters. I wore nostalgic, faded Mickey Mouse decals. I spent too many afternoons driving up and down Melrose looking for the perfect vintage T-shirts for Gary and me. I wore cargo pants with novelty T-shirts and a Gucci monogrammed hat with Nike Shocks. It was almost the reverse of drag, and a very early-2000s moment.

I also made my first trip to New York City. Gary grew up in Queens, and shortly after the Twin Towers fell, he became desperate to take me home. “You’re never going to see the city I grew up in,” he said. But he felt strongly that we should infuse some cash into the tourist-strapped city. And so we landed at JFK and took a car into Manhattan, and when the skyline came into view for the first time my heart beat out of my chest. It was exactly as I imagined it would be. SoHo. Fifth Avenue.
The Music Man
! Within a few days, I was riding the subway by myself like it had always been this way. Manhattan and I were in love.

“When the skyline came into view for the first time my heart beat out of my chest.”

While I was happy in Los Angeles, my family had their suspicions. Moving to L.A. with a man I barely knew? It had a faint whiff of Nick, like there was some gay-jà vu happening. My sister was indignant. When I called to explain she actually said, “This is crap.” For months now she had been at home in Canada stewing, refusing to support this plan. Finally, Gary confronted the situation head-on, picking up the phone and offering to fly her to Los Angeles so they could meet face-to-face, which she did. Tracy, my high school friend whom I styled for the prom, was similarly concerned. “You don’t know this person,” she said. “You’re taking an enormous leap of faith.” She actually ended her rant with these words: “Here we go again.” While she was a struggling young professional in Toronto, she was so concerned that she put a wildly expensive plane ticket on her credit card and flew to L.A. so she could conduct her due diligence.

And she was relieved to find that Gary was as good as I described. I took Tracy around town. We went to the beach in Malibu and ran around on the sand and took pictures of each other. Unfortunately, our outfits were fashion don’ts. I was wearing a jean vest. It reminds me of how we used to be in high school—doing silly photo shoots and wearing clothes that we thought were cool at the time but that we’d regret in six months. I took her to Palm Springs and we sat at the diner and ordered burgers and fries and Oreo milkshakes. We went to a gay bar but spent more time sitting on the curb outside the 7-Eleven across the street, drinking Red Bull and gossiping. Sitting outside a convenience store is a very Canadian thing to do. You can take the boy out of Ontario but you can’t take Ontario out of the boy. Swept up in the glamour of Los Angeles, Tracy bought a Marc Jacobs jacket at Fred Segal that she couldn’t afford and a Vuitton purse on Rodeo Drive just because. That night, with our feet in the backyard swimming pool at Gary’s house, Tracy cried. It wasn’t buyer’s remorse. Nothing like that. Rather, she was crying from contentment. Because when she looked in my eyes, she once again saw her old friend from Port Perry. She could once again feel the spirit of kinship between us, between two like-minded souls who’d met on the first day of high school—me in the color-block Polo rugby, she in all-black Le Château—and dreamed of something more. We had drifted apart, but we were back together. And we’d figure the next steps out, just like we did as teenagers.

She was struggling in her own life and was contemplating a move to New York. “How do I do it?” she said.

“Pack up a U-Haul and drive across the border,” I said. “You’ll get a job. You’ll figure it out.”

I didn’t have any great wisdom—just enough sense to know that if she wanted something badly enough, she would figure it out. Because that’s what I was doing every day.

I was finding my way in Los Angeles. After a few months, I joined a well-known Alcoholics Anonymous outpost in Brentwood. This was no touchy-feely L.A. support group. Here, they didn’t coddle their members. They didn’t care if your car broke down and you couldn’t make the meeting. There were no excuses. No matter what, you made the meeting. You checked in. It was tough love. No one cared about your problems. No one cared that you broke a nail and it made you want to drink. There were people in the group whose children were killed by drunk drivers. All they cared about was that you maintained your sobriety. If you were so miserable and you wanted to wallow in that misery, go have a drink. We were there to get well. We were there to live life.