Howtown (31 page)

She took her seat on the bench. “OK.
People versus Deeds.
The defendant is not in court. I will issue an arrest warrant to be held until tomorrow morning. Good luck, Mr. Rios.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

I called Josh from a phone in the corridor and found him at home. I explained that I was going in search of Deeds and might not be in until late.

“I won’t be here anyway. There’s an Act Up demo at Antonovich’s house,” he said, referring to a particularly reactionary county supervisor.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I can’t tell you everything.”

That solved the mystery of where he had been when I’d called earlier.

“Is this a lawful demonstration, or am I going to be bailing you out of jail?”

Coolly, he replied, “The worst that ever happens is that they hold us overnight.”

“I’d rather you didn’t get arrested.”

“Worried about your image?”

“I’m worried about your health.”

He sniped, “That’s not your problem.”

I took a deep breath. “In that case, Josh, do whatever you want.”

“I will,” he said, and clanged the receiver down.

I hung up and immediately called back, but the line was busy, and stayed busy until I finally gave up.

Eight hours later, I found myself in the company of my investigator, Freeman Vidor, pulling into the parking lot of the Santa Monica Motel in West Hollywood. It was a perfunctory, two-floor stucco building wedged on a small lot just off” the boulevard within walking distance of the gay bars; the kind of place where the vacancy sign was perennially lit.

“Is this it?” Freeman asked.

“Yeah, his last known address.”

We got out of the car and went into the dimly lit office. An Asian woman stood behind the desk watching us apprehensively.

“Yes,” she said.

Freeman produced a mug shot of Deeds and his private investigator’s license. “We’re looking for this kid.”

“Police?” she inquired, holding up his license to the light.

“I’m a private cop,” he said. “This is Mr. Rios, the kid’s lawyer.”

She took stock of me in my sincere blue suit, trying to puzzle it out.

“We’re not here to make any trouble,” I told her. “The boy calls himself Deeds. He has to be in court tomorrow morning.”

We all stood there for a moment while she weighed her options. An air conditioner hummed loudly. Although glossy brochures advertised Gray Line tours and fun at Disneyland from a metal rack on a table in the corner, I doubted whether this place attracted that kind of trade.

“Twenty-three,” she said, wearily. “Don’t kick in the door.”

Deeds’s room was upstairs. I knocked a couple of times, then called him. I tried the door. Locked.

“We’ll have to ask her to let us in,” I said.

“Go admire the view,” Freeman said.

I walked over to the railing and watched the traffic stream up and down the boulevard. A blond in a Jeep cruised by slowly, his cassette player blaring a disco tune from the seventies. Ah, the hunt, I thought, remembering the nights I had stood in San Francisco bars listening to that same song while I ingested a little liquid courage. Or, rather, a lot of liquid courage. Most nights I would stagger out alone and take the train back to school. Once in a while someone would pick me up, or I would pick him up, and I would toil in a stranger’s bed for a few hours, trying to get out of my skin by going through his. I imagined that I was having fun, and sometimes I was, but not nearly often enough.

By the time I had graduated from law school, I was doing my drinking at home. That went on for a decade or so, drinking and working. By the time I sobered up, I was casting a pretty thin shadow, there being not much more to me than a vague alcoholic melancholy and the ability to work sixteen-hour days. I didn’t work that hard anymore, and when I was unhappy, there was usually a reason. I was unhappy now, watching the blond cruise by, wondering with whom Josh was having an affair. The thought had been in the back of my mind for months but only now, as I stood in the sexy airs of Boystown, did it all fall into place: the element of evasion in his behavior which had never been there before, the vagueness about where he was going, and when he would be coming back. I hadn’t lost track of him; he was hiding from me.

“Henry.”

I glanced back at Freeman. He was holding the door open.

We stepped inside to a darkened room. “Deeds,” I called. A sliver of light seeped out from beneath a door at the other end of the room. I went over and knocked. “Jimmy, are you in there?”

When there was no answer, I turned the knob and shoved the door open.

“Oh, shit,” Freeman muttered.

Naked, Jimmy Dee sat sloppily on the toilet, his head tilted back at an angle that would have been really painful had he been alive. A needle was still jammed into his arm. His mouth was open and he stared up at a water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Africa.

I closed the door and said to Freeman, “Go downstairs and call 911.”

After he left, I switched on the light and looked around the room. Deeds’s clothes were in a pile at the foot of the unmade bed. There was a twenty on the nightstand, wages for his last trick, no doubt. On the dresser was a little pile of papers. I examined them and found my card, some phone numbers and an envelope addressed to Judge Ryan with the return address of SafeHouse, the same rehab that Gus Peña had been in. I tucked the envelope into my pocket.

Josh had left the kitchen window open and the room smelled faintly of the anise that grew wild down the side of the hill from our house. He wasn’t there. I poured myself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table with the envelope I’d taken from Deeds’s room. Inside was a letter from Edith Rosen, M.F.C.C., attesting to the fact that Deeds was scheduled to enter SafeHouse the following Monday, three days hence.

“You little shit,” I said aloud, but what I felt was more grief than anger. In my work, I was used to losing, but I thought I’d staked out a tiny victory with Deeds.

But then, I’d always had a weakness for junkies, for their defeated, helpless charm. Of course I knew better. My own fight with the bottle had taught me intimately everything there was to know about addiction. Drunks and junkies all had a big hole in their gut that sucked in panic like Pandora’s box in reverse unless it was already filled by booze or a fix. Eventually, that stopped working, and the panic went out of control until the only thing left was dying. Sometimes, like Deeds, death is what you got and sometimes, like me, you were given a reprieve, but there was no logic about it. Even if you lived, the panic was still there. It only faded when you began see it for what it was, the long drop from darkness to darkness, and you stopped fighting.

At that moment I could feel the panic elbowing me, tossing up the image of Deeds in that grisly motel bathroom, reminding me of every grisly room through which I had stumbled drunk, so close to dying myself. And when that didn’t get me going, the panic asked, “Where’s Josh?” a sure-fire tactic. I got up from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom, switching on the lamp and stretching out on the bed, still unmade from that morning. A book was half-buried in the covers, the paperback edition of
Borrowed Time,
Paul Monette’s moving tale of his lover’s death of AIDS. Josh had been reading it.

It was after eleven. The demonstration was certainly over by now.

I sat up and fumbled for the TV remote control, flicking on the set at the foot of the bed. I switched channels until I found some local news, looking for a report about the Act Up demonstration. Instead, I found myself watching Agustin Peña, standing against the backdrop of the city council chamber, his arm draped around his son who gazed at his father with a look that conveyed a history of betrayal. Peña was saying, “My kids have always made me proud, now I want them to be able to say the same thing about me.” Little Peña didn’t seem to be buying it.

Watching them, I thought of my father, and about pride and about betrayal. I shut off the TV, got undressed and into bed, ready for a long night.

“How was the demonstration?” I asked the next morning, pouring myself a cup of coffee as I waited for my bagel to toast. I had been asleep when Josh had come in. Waking beside him, my face against his bare back, I had breathed another man’s smell on his body.

Shaggy-haired and heavy-lidded, he sat at the kitchen table in boxers, mixing an assortment of liquid vitamins into his organic cranberry juice.

He looked up at me. “It was great, Henry. The cops were wearing thick plastic gloves and riot helmets. You could tell they were terrified that one of us might bite them.”

“Anyone get arrested?”

He finished mixing his holistic cocktail. “No, the cops told us that Antonovich wasn’t even in town, so after an hour we split.”

The toaster oven clicked and I retrieved my bagel. Buttering it, I asked, as casually as I could manage, “What did you do then?”

“Drove Steven home,” he said, straining for equal nonchalance. “Sat and talked to him for awhile. Did you find your client?”

I sat down at the table. “Yes, as a matter of fact. In a motel room in Boystown. He was dead.”

“Murdered?” he asked, putting his drink down.

“He OD’d.”

“I’m sorry, Henry. I know how much you liked that kid.”

I crunched into the bagel. “Not as much as I like you, Josh.”

I watched him take a slug of juice, watched the muscles in his neck contract as he weighed a response. “What do you mean, Henry?”

“Who is he, Josh? Who are you sleeping with?”

“Steven,” he said, immediately.

I thought back. Our house had become a kind of activists’ clubhouse and frequently I came home to find a meeting raging in the living room. Though Josh had introduced me to many of the men and women who attended these sessions, their faces blurred in my mind into a single youthful face flushed with excitement and anger.

Steven?

Then I saw him. A little taller than Josh, about my height, muscular, good-looking. Not one of the big talkers, but the others listened when he did speak. Josh had mentioned once that Steven was one of the oldest surviving PWAs in the group, having been diagnosed eight years earlier.

Josh was speaking, “I kept meaning to tell you, but it seems like we never see each other anymore …”

“Are you saying this happened because I’ve neglected you?”

“No,” he said. “It happened because I’m in love with him.”

“Are you sure it’s not because you’re in love with his diagnosis?”

He stared at me in disbelief, and then fury.

“I’m sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean that.”

“You meant it all right,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table. He stalked out of the house. I heard his car start up. I didn’t think he would be coming back soon.

I
LEFT JOSH A LONG,
apologetic note and set off to work. Driving in, I decided to stop at SafeHouse, to inform Edith Rosen, M.F.C.C., that Jimmy Dee would not be needing a bed there after all. I also thought I might say hello to Chuck Sweeny, the founder and director of the house, with whom I’d served on the local alcoholism council. After my term expired, he had urged me to keep in touch, but I had never followed up on my vague promises to drop in. Halfway there, it occurred to me that my true reason for going was that I felt like a creep for what I’d said to Josh and I was looking for a good deed to do by way of expiation.

SafeHouse sat at the bottom of one of the canyons in old Hollywood on a busy street lined with towering palm trees. Up in the canyon itself, the one-time movie star residences had been torn down over the years by the new rich who preferred less ostentatious aeries, but down where Cahill Court flattened out the buildings retained their old magnificence: rambling Italian villas and Normandy chateaux set back from the road by walls and fences and sweeping swaths of grass.

SafeHouse had been the mansion of a forties star who drank away his career. A few years before he died, he was led to sobriety by Chuck Sweeny, self-proclaimed recovering wino whom the actor had met when he stumbled into an AA meeting in skid row. In gratitude, the actor left Chuck his enormous residence which he stipulated in his will was to be used as an alcoholism recovery house.

The neighbors were horrified, but Sweeny persisted, fighting zoning boards and obdurate bureaucrats until SafeHouse became a reality. The neighbors still complained. Fortunately for Chuck, the drugged-out sixties arrived. In a bold move, Chuck announced that he would also take drug addicts into the house. For this, he was condemned by old-line AA-types for whom alcohol and drugs were two entirely separate universes. But Chuck’s prescience paid off handsomely. As the decade progressed, the children of his affluent neighbors increasingly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, and they found themselves in need of his services. His work with the rich and famous made SafeHouse chic long before Betty Ford took her last drink.

Strictly speaking, SafeHouse was a halfway house rather than a drying out sanatorium. Its residents signed up for a three-month program, the purpose of which was to integrate them back into society. There was no medical staff, just lay counselors, many of them former residents themselves. From what I knew about the place, talking to Chuck and to people who had been through it, sobriety was enforced by a set of rules that covered every aspect of the residents’ lives, constant group meetings, and periodic drug and alcohol testing.

All of this was consistent with its motto, “A tough place for tough people,” and reflected the personality of its founder. Chuck Sweeny was manipulative, inflexible, egotistical and extremely effective.

A high brick wall surrounded the front of the house. I parked on the street and walked up the driveway. The house was a three-story circus of a building, all gables, dormers, chimneys, conical roofed towers, bay windows, and a wraparound veranda supported by Corinthian columns; one expected to catch a glimpse of Morticia Addams at an upstairs window. A young man was mowing the lawn, his thin arms streaked with track marks. The sign on the door said, “You are home.”