In the Night of the Heat (4 page)

“You still like cash? There's five thousand in the drawer. Tax-free. I'll throw that in as a gratuity, assuming you earn it.” Lynda and her friend Pauline were nothing alike. Pauline had been courtly and considerate, always calling ahead to make sure it was a “good time” to meet, never treating me like property with a price tag.

“I should leave now,” I said.

“No ring, so you're not married. Girlfriend?”

I didn't answer. I didn't want to bring April's name into the room with us. But Lynda Jewell grinned, happy to have figured out the delay.

“I can't promise you Troy, understand.” She twinkled at me. “Let me be clear about something now, so I don't get any pouting later. You're a hidden gem, lover, but you just don't have the recognition. But there are a dozen other parts waiting for your face, some of them very good. You'll have to audition if you want heavy lifting, but you're guaranteed a line or two no matter what.”

Lynda Jewell was closing the deal. Her bra came off next, tossed away like a small animal scurrying for shelter. Her fingers were a claw as she pulled my hand toward her chest. “Pauline said you're a magician, and I need some magic today. Impress me.”

I yielded to her hand's pressure, and my palm fell to her breast. Sank into her skin.

Whenever breasts make an appearance, my body assumes it's time to fuck. The discomfort in my groin was replaced by a sense of fullness, a remnant of the days when my erections punched a time clock. My heart drummed louder.

I'd done it a thousand times. The right touch here, carefully cho
sen words whispered there, and our contract was sealed. If you don't think a few good orgasms are worth a movie role, someone isn't taking care of business at home.

I felt a confusion that seemed like clarity: Maybe my past had been designed to lead me to this moment. Few men on this earth could have been better prepared to give Lynda Jewell what she wanted that day. The thought of tasting her made me feel sick to my stomach, but the call of her open legs across my lap—and the realization of how close to the Promised Land I had come—was arousing me. I was a pro, after all.

Lynda Jewell felt the mass growing beneath her. When you're as blessed as I am, there's nowhere to hide. “That's more like it,” she said, rubbing against me. Massaging.
“Ten.”

What the fuck?
the Evil Voice said.
It's the only way in you've got.

To this day, I'm not sure why it happened. Maybe I'd trained myself to fight my Evil Voice, so that last jab helped me wake up from the dream. I stood up abruptly, bucking my hips slightly, and Lynda Jewell let out a cry as she lost her balance and landed on the carpeted floor.

She sat there dumbfounded, crossing her arms across her chest as if I'd burst into her room and ripped off her blouse. Her face darkened two shades. “What the
fuck
?”

Ever the gentleman, I offered my hand to help her to her feet. She refused to take it, hoisting herself up against the sofa.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Jewell,” I said, torn between regret and rage. “That was an accident. But please don't ever waste my time, or my agent's, with this kind of bullshit again.”

In the end, rage won. Troy himself couldn't have said it any better.

I've replayed that day over and over, trying to salvage the visit in my imagination, but it always ends the same way. Something that
starts out that wrong can't be made right. And although April made the touch of other women feel foreign, I don't think I threw Lynda Jewell off of my lap because of April. I'd quit the sex-for-pay business five years before I ever met April.

I just couldn't pretend to go back to the person I'd been, even if it would have meant real work. Even if it would have remade my world.

Lynda Jewell's eyes boiled with rage and humiliation, and I recognized the poison lurking there:
All I have to do is scream and make up a story, and I can take your life away.

“I truly am sorry. I had a reflexive—”

“You are the
picture
of nerve, you son of a bitch,” she said, flinging her blouse on like a cape. “Why would I cast a nothing like you in
Lenox Avenue
?”

Lynda Jewell and my Evil Voice had apparently read the same script. Her words flayed me. Still, I was the only one in the room with my dignity intact, and I kept it by commencing my long walk toward her suite's door.

Lynda Jewell exaggerated a laugh behind me, following me step for step like a small terrier. “I wouldn't hire a talentless whore like you as an extra,” she said. “If you don't get back over here and finish what we started, I'll make it my mission to drive you out of town. Do you hear me? Trust me, the future is
not
bright. Not for you, asshole.”

At least she had seen my commercial.

I stepped out into the hallway. A door to my left clicked shut, probably closed by someone embarrassed for us.

“God damn it! Get back in here and
fuck
me, you sonofabitch!”

The hallway was empty. Barren.

I don't remember taking the elevator, or walking from the hotel. It took me four tries before I finally got my key in my car's ignition.

THE TAU FUNDRAISER WAS A MISERY,
all the more miserable for its frivolity. There are few chores worse than being the only one at the party in a bad mood.

Scratch that. It's worse if you're tied to a photo booth, smiling with strangers while flashing cameras stoke a monster headache. And worse still when your girlfriend's eyes are probing with unfinished questions, trying to take you back to an afternoon you'd rather forget.

It's not that men don't want to talk—we just like to choose our time. Lynda Jewell wasn't a story I was eager to tell.

The banquet hall of Culver City's Radisson Hotel was decorated in a carnival theme, filled with helium balloons in Tau crimson and white. Instead of the usual chicken breast banquet, they had food stands serving hot dogs, wings, and fresh popcorn. There were also poker tables, roulette wheels, and six celebrity photo booths. The last booth, awaiting the still-absent T.D. Jackson, charged one hundred dollars. Already, a dozen people waited in line.

I was in the second booth, with a twenty-dollar price, right next to dead cheapest, a guy with gold teeth who'd been a Hype man for Sha
reef back in the day. Since my episodes of
Homeland
hadn't even aired yet—and would it have mattered?—most people passed me without bothering to hide a sour pucker that said
Who the hell are you?

Higher up the celebrity food chain at fifty bucks apiece were that light-skinned brother from
A Different World,
a sister from the UCLA women's basketball team, a
Playboy
Playmate wearing only a bikini, a Famous Hip-Hop Artist with three initials for a name (D.O.A., maybe? Chela would have known him), and Billy Dee Williams, who was still making young ladies swoon in his seventies.

Billy Dee was Troy back before there
was
a Troy. If I'd been in the mood for inspiration, I would have found it in Billy Dee. Instead, all I could think about was how unfair it was that Billy Dee was grinning and posing as if time had stood still for him alone, and back at home Dad needed help getting out of bed. A bad mood colors everything.

“Ooh, look at this luscious Hershey's Kiss over
here,
” one huge woman said, eyeing me as if I were on a Mississippi auction block. “Honey, you should be charging more than twenty dollars to take a picture with
you.
Aren't you that phone guy?”

She grabbed my forearm with meaty fingers, so proprietary that my flesh crawled. My memories of Lynda Jewell were too fresh to tolerate a new woman's pawing. Gently, I slipped my arm away. She tried to hold on, but a final yank got me free. Her eyebrow arch told me,
That's okay, baby, I like 'em feisty.
I think I actually shivered.

The woman lumbered beside me into the booth.

“Stand up, baby,” she said, holding up her red ticket. “Come to Mama.”

She was my first taker in fifteen minutes, so I tried to look happy for the photographer. As the woman cinched her arm tightly around my waist, enfolding me within soft rolls of polyester-and-sequin-wrapped flesh, I cursed myself again for showing up. I could have
written the Taus a check for three times what I'd raised and spent my night at home.

The camera went off, and my headache screamed.

Then, air crackled, almost as if lightning had struck in the banquet-hall doorway.

Have you ever stood on a beach with water up to your ankles and felt the tide recede? Even the grains of sand try to flee from between your toes. It's a dizzying, startling sensation; a reminder of one's utter insignificance in the face of nature's full force.

That's what happened when T.D. Jackson walked into the banquet hall.

“Oh, shit,” said the woman standing beside me, and suddenly she wasn't.

I've spent a career around the chronically charismatic, but T.D. Jackson's presence was fuller than his six-foot-three frame could contain, stretching from one end of the hall to the other. All eyes and feet gravitated toward him. He floated into the room on a wave of fierce applause, as if he were Nelson Mandela freed after twenty-seven years of hard labor.

T.D. and Billy Dee must have had similar genes, because the man who strode through that door was only a slightly less bulky version of the college sophomore I'd known back at SoCal State almost twenty years before. He had always had an actor's face—a jutting chin, powerful cheekbones and oddly colored eyes that hypnotized females when they flickered between golden brown and green—so I wasn't surprised when T.D. transitioned to Hollywood in the middle of his NFL career. Acting ability is secondary when you're a born star like T.D. Jackson; his face and Super Bowl MVP memories won him forgiveness for his limited range.

Even at a stroll, he moved like a jaguar. It was easy to imagine his famous leaps as he caught balls most players wouldn't dream of, land
ing just within bounds with Baryshnikov's pointy-toed perfection. Some people argue that T.D. Jackson was the best wide receiver ever to play the game. My money's on Jerry Rice, or maybe Randy Moss, but the argument isn't dumb.

T.D. was flanked by five men who might have been linebackers, and I knew a couple of their faces from college, too. Classmates, friends, bodyguards. All of them, including T.D., were dressed in silk crimson suits, white shirts, narrow crimson ties, and sunglasses. The crowd in the room surged toward T.D., but no one dared block his direct path. T.D. Jackson was leading a moving train with no signs of slowing.

I forgot about the murders. Everyone did.

T.D. raised his arm over his head, a signal, and the hall's speakers blared to life. Tinny, inane carnival music was replaced by a deafening recorded shout and heavy percussion. M.C. Hammer's “Turn This Mutha Out” flooded the room.

T.D. Jackson and his crew fanned into a circle, facing us with wide-legged stances. On the beat, all six men thrust their groins forward in synchronization, their knees so low to the ground that they were bending backward. For several seconds, they froze in place, testing their impossible balance, their heads nearly touching. Onlookers squealed, shrieked and shouted. An excited chant swelled from the crowd, also in rhythm: “Go '
head
! Go '
head
!”

The step show had begun.

Step shows have been popularized in film recently, but they originated at historically black colleges in the 1960s. Black Greek organizations at mainstream universities like SoCal State have kept up the tradition, and that night T.D. Jackson took us all back to school.

T.D. Jackson was playing for his true home crowd.

Like the gears of a perfect machine, the men flung their sunglasses into the ecstatic crowd. The woman who had just posed for a picture
with me nearly stampeded the poor young sister beside her as she snatched T.D.'s shades out of midflight.

Double time, leaping high while they jabbed their arms skyward with perfectly matched motion, the six men stalked to the waiting stage. To climb up, they leapfrogged in twos until all of them stood in a single line, moving like an optical illusion. They raised their knees high in synchronized clapping above and below their massive thighs. Their rhythmic stomping on the wooden stage sounded like thunder. I was sure the floorboards would snap beneath them.

T.D., the war chief, let out a shout. “When I say Tau, you say Heat. Tau!”

“Heat!”
the men roared in unison, with perfectly timed stomps emphasizing the word.

“Tau!”

“Heat!”

All of the men dropped to the floor in a line, as if about to do push-ups. Each man except the last hooked his ankles on another man's shoulders, and they melded into a single unit. One by one, they raised themselves high, then back to the floor, a slowly undulating snake waving back and forth across the stage.

Women screamed. Every entrance to the banquet hall was crammed with hotel waiters, cooks, and housekeepers watching the marvel of giants moving with such uncanny fluidity. April sidled up beside me, in wide-eyed wonderment despite herself.

Another shout from T.D., and the men were on their feet. They danced in formation around each other, alternately thrusting their fists into the air and stomping out a pattern with their feet that sounded like angry drumming straight from the Motherland. The way they moved their torsos, elbows, and fists reminded me of karate
katas.
These were the warriors of our tribe, performing a mighty war dance. If T.D. Jackson and his crew had done their step show on the field
before their bowl games, the other teams might have fled back to the locker room before the starting coin toss.

I'm in good shape—I work out, I can fight when it counts, and I can dance to anything from hip-hop to salsa—but on my best days, I couldn't will my body to move like
that.
T.D.'s crew carried their bulky frames with stupefying ease, capturing an odd combination of beauty and ferocity. Their shouts jittered up my spine. A premonition, maybe.

As the last of M.C. Hammer's music sounded, the other men heaved T.D. Jackson over their heads, holding him high as he lay in repose. They looked like pallbearers.

Once the show was over, April remembered her indignation. “You'd think he'd have the decency to keep a low profile until after the civil trial,” she muttered to me over the room's raucous shouting and applause.

I chuckled. The phrase
low profile
had never been in T.D. Jackson's vocabulary.

April's eyes narrowed. “You think it's funny he got away with murder?” She said it loudly enough to elicit a gaze fit for blasphemers from a nearby older couple. I hoped April wouldn't be foolish enough to confront T.D. Jackson, but suddenly I wasn't sure. Women's mouths have earned their men a beat-down, or worse, since the dawn of so-called civilization.

“Chill, April,” I said. “You knew he would be here.”

April's eyes cut at me in a way I wasn't used to. Maybe there had been something in my voice she wasn't used to either. That was the way things were with us lately.

While the crowd swarmed T.D. Jackson at the other end of the room, I returned to my lonely booth to wait until April was ready to go. She was a member of the Taus' sister sorority, so the ladies were there to help keep the popcorn popping.

After the step show, the rest of us might as well have been invisible. The line for T.D. Jackson's photo booth was so long that organizers set up velvet ropes to keep order. The Bruin and the Bunny traded hair care advice while Billy Dee and the
Different World
dude exchanged business cards, talking politics.

“Now I have truly seen everything,” a woman's voice said beside me.

Any number of unusual sights could have fit that description, so I followed her gaze: She was staring toward the flock around T.D. Jackson and his entourage at the other end of the room.

The woman was petite and smooth-skinned, dressed in an efficient gray pantsuit that told me she had come to the event straight from a job she probably didn't like. I didn't know her, but when she looked at me, I was sure I knew her eyes.

“Marilyn…Johnson?” I said. Her name came first.

She smiled. “That's impressive. I look…” Beat. “…different.”

The long, embarrassed pause helped me remember her: She'd been the only other sister in my first college drama class. She'd had unfortunate acne and overprocessed hair, and I remember thinking that she would need to lose about sixty pounds if she wanted acting work. Apparently, she had. The weight was gone, shrunken to a healthy athletic frame that bespoke serious workouts. The acne hadn't left so much as a scar, and her hair had a raven sheen. Marilyn Johnson had gotten herself together.

I'm not the school-reunion type, but I was happy to see someone looking better instead of worse after twenty years, so I stood up to hug her. My hug surprised her, and I felt her body stiffen, so I pulled back sooner than I would have. I'd been careful to issue my Friendly hug—more upper body than lower—but Marilyn was skittish about contact.

Marilyn never met my eyes for more than a hot second, roiling
with shyness that seemed misplaced. Despite her effective dusting of makeup to bring out her cheeks and large, almond-shaped eyes, in her mind's eye she was hideous.

“Hey, darlin',” I said. “You look terrific.”

“Right back at ya,” she said. “I've marked my calendar for your first episodes on
Homeland.
Love that show! I've been keeping up with you on the internet. I'll never forget turning on my TV and seeing you on
Malibu High
back in the day.”

“
Way
back,” I said, downplaying it. My entrée into television had been a minor part as a basketball coach on a
Beverly Hills 90210
knockoff.

Marilyn swatted my hand, just like April might. “Stop. Everyone didn't get triumphs like that to celebrate, Tennyson. Embrace your achievements.”

It was the nicest thing anyone fully dressed had said to me all day.

The photographer had long since drifted away, but Marilyn waved him over. Then she opened her purse to find her twenty dollar photo fee. “You don't have to,” I said.

She smiled. “I want to. A picture with you will wash away how the Taus just ruined my night.” Her jaw could have cracked a walnut. Marilyn wasn't looking at T.D. Jackson anymore, but I realized she could see no one else.

“Not in the fan club?”

“He's guilty as hell,” she said quietly. “And he knows it.”

As the camera flashed, Marilyn posed by giving me a gentle kiss on the cheek. The kiss lingered, sweet and sad, as if she wanted to absorb some luck, or goodness, from me. I wished I had some to give. I expected the Let's-have-lunch riff, but none came. I could tell that she had abandoned her acting dreams long ago. Most people do.

“I'm disappointed with the Taus. They should know better,”
Marilyn said with the
My-people-My-people
shake of her head. “But it was good to see you, Ten.”