Light Before Day (3 page)

Later, my mother and I were eating dinner at a Cracker Barrel in Mississippi when she came out of her daze to give me her opinion on the day's events. "I hope you never know what it's like to have a life you can only get rid of," she told me.

Now, as I sat paralyzed by nausea on the floor of my apartment, I realized that my mother's hope had been dashed. I was a twenty-six-year-old blackout drunk. I had grown accustomed to checking my Jeep for dents and bloodstains every other morning, studying the call log on my cell phone to see if I had given anyone a piece of my alcohol-soaked mind the night before.

I had a life that I could only get rid of.

I spent an hour throwing up, then another hour trying to slide into clothes that didn't put too much pressure on my abdomen. I made it to the office right on time. Tommy was at his desk looking through photo proofs of fashion models. He took one look at me and his nose wrinkled.

"I'm quitting drinking," I said.

"Fabulous," he mumbled, then went back to work.

Later that day, after the nausea had abated and the overwhelming sense of self-hatred had turned into a slight dizzy feeling, I was grateful for the fact that I hadn't told my boss just when I was going to quit drinking. I had just told him that it was in the cards.

The next night, Friday, I was sitting in a bar sipping a cosmo on the rocks. My date for the evening was supposed to be a handsome TV weatherman named Dave Bolter. He had a nice house in the Norma Triangle section of West Hollywood and an ass that could stop a war. I had called to tell him that while I had decided to quit drinking, I was tapering off slowly. This seemed to intrigue him. He sounded interested in spending a night with me that didn't feature hours of cocaine and pornography, as our previous two get-togethers had. Tonight he was already an hour and a half late.

People in West Hollywood still talk about the days when The Abbey was just a coffee shop.

It used to be the place to go if you wanted to pick up on fresh-faced young men who didn't have the fake IDs to get into the clubs along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several years and a liquor license later, it is West Hollywood's most popular gay bar. Several griffins guard the entrance, and a statue of Saint Francis stares out at the crowd like a closeted missionary who has grown too comfortable with his potential converts. At ten P.M., the Friday-night crowd was swelling. It already featured a surprising number of men who had appeared on popular reality television shows.

A hand slid under my leather jacket and tweaked my right nipple. "Cool jacket," a vaguely familiar voice whispered into my ear.

Nate Bain gave me a broad smile that revealed teeth even as piano keys. The last time I had laid eyes on the guy, I had been sitting on the couch in my apartment with my pants around my ankles, wilting from the realization that once again I had inadvertently rented a porn film with someone I knew in it. Nate had a short, broad-shouldered body, and his white tank top set off his sculpted arms. A U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap concealed a spiky crop of jet-black hair. I had encountered him at various parties over the last year, where his sheen of sweat and nonstop conversation told me that he was amped up on something stronger than cocaine.

Now Nate's cheeks looked sunken, and his wide eyes were bloodshot. A welter of red dots disfigured his right arm, which told me he had spent some time picking at the skin. June Gloom had brought chill to the night air, but he looked feverish. He saw me notice these things and his smile waned.

"Where'd you get it?" he asked.

"The jacket?" I asked.

He nodded, his eyes darting past me as if he thought he had been followed. "I ordered it from the J. Crew catalog back when I was in high school." I heard the slight slur in my voice and steadied myself with a deep breath. "Back then, ordering anything leather seemed like an act of rebellion. My first boyfriend always said it smelled like vitamins."

"What was he like?" Nate asked.

"He was a patrol cop in Jefferson Parish," I said. "He almost succeeded in keeping his wife and me from finding out about each other."

"Where's Jefferson Parish?"

"Outside New Orleans. Where I'm from. Is there something I can help you with, Nate?"

The bite in my voice made him flinch. "I need to talk to you," Nate said in a low voice. His smile had vanished and his tone was suddenly so serious I thought he was about to tell me I had three hours to live.

"Can it wait?" I asked. "I'm on a date."

"The weatherman?" he asked. "He dates everyone. You can do better, Adam."

Just then, Nate's eyes darted past my shoulder. I turned, expecting Dave Bolter to give me the kind of smile that made television viewers across the Southland fall in love with terms like
marine layer
and
offshore flow.

I found myself eye to eye with a barrel-chested guy in an Abercrombie & Fitch tank top. He had sprayed his bangs straight up and moisturized himself back into his thirties. The glassy sheen in his round eyes reminded me of old heavy metal album covers. He smacked his gum as if he were working his way to a piece of solid gold in the middle.

"I want my shirt," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"You don't even remember me, do you?" he asked.

"We were having a conversation," Nate chimed in, sounding like an irate third grader.

Our new companion gave Nate a dull stare. "Love your work," he said. Then to me he said,

"Seriously. I want my shirt. It's Prada."

"You better cut those bangs before you catch a bird," I said. I tried to return my attention to Nate, but the guy grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.

"Let me refresh your memory. You made me drive you to Silverlake to see my dealer, then you spilled all my fucking cocaine, then you were too busy crying about your drunk mother to do any of the things you'd promised to do on the ride back to your place." He let this sit for a few seconds. "I want my fucking shirt."

"This is bullshit," I heard myself whisper. But I wasn't talking to the man in front of me. I was talking to myself.

Nate seized my elbow and pulled me away from the bar. Some reflex led me to pick up my pint glass and take a slug from it as Nate dragged me into the crowd.

"What the fuck is your problem, dude?" the guy shouted after us. "Did your mom get loaded and mistake you for your dad?"

My feet turned to concrete blocks. Nate said my name in a low voice that he hoped sounded authoritative. I turned. The guy was standing several feet away, his fists balled at his sides.

Several heads had already swiveled to stare at us.

The next thing I knew, my pint glass was sailing through the air in front of me at a speed that didn't seem possible. I heard screams that were too loud to be mistaken for drunken laughter.

The guy hit the deck on all fours and the glass smashed into a rack of tea candles on the wall behind him.

Nate swore, grabbed my shoulder, and pulled me into the throng of men. The two of us were halfway across the patio before two muscular arms grabbed me. One bouncer pushed Nate off to the side while the other gripped the back of my neck, forcing my head into a bowed position. I saw the crowd before us parting like the Red Sea gone pink, and then I hit the sidewalk in front of the entrance on all fours.

"What was that shit?" one of the bouncers barked.

I thought if I got to my feet we might have West Hollywood's version of a Rodney King moment, which meant they would flog me with Glo-sticks. Nate started to explain in a frantic high-pitched voice, but one of the bouncers silenced him.

"Domestic dispute," I groaned.

"Let me take him home," Nate pleaded.

There was a silence from above and I could feel a thousand sets of eyes on me through the patio's front gate. Shame misted my eyes and clogged my throat. One of the bouncers told Nate that I was forever banned from The Abbey, then shouted the same thing down in my direction just to be clear.

Nate pulled me to my feet and suddenly we were walking against the tide of pedestrians toward Santa Monica Boulevard. "It's over," I said.

'What?" Nate asked.

"Nothing."

'Where do you live?"

I pointed uphill. In the low fog, the lights of the Sunset Strip were a milky mist that obscured the foothills, turning the lights of their terraced houses into dusty floating pearls. Nate took my hand and tried to pull me onto the sidewalk.

"This hasn't been my night, Nate."

"Just come with me, Adam. Please." I averted my eyes from his. They were still moist.

"Come on! I just saved your ass from a night at the sheriff's station."

"Thanks."

A silence fell.

"I hear you're a real reporter now," he said. I didn't refute this charge. "I've got a story for you."

C H A P T E R 2

As soon as Nate and I got back to my apartment, I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. Nate was waiting for me on the love seat with a cup of instant coffee. I was surprised to hear myself thank him. Humiliation was sobering, and with sobriety came better manners. I took a seat on the love seat next to him as he channel-surfed.

"You still work for that magazine?" Nate asked.

"Are you angling for an interview? We don't usually cover porn stars, but I guess it's not that much of a stretch."

"I'm not a porn
star,
Adam," he said. "There have only been, like, two gay porn stars in history and they don't exactly have houses in the Hollywood Hills, all right?"

I just stared at him. He grabbed the remote, found an eleven o'clock news broadcast, gave me a grave look, and raised the volume. The two of us sat there as an eighty-one-year-old woman described what it was like to have her arms ripped off by her nephews pit bull. When the reporter asked her what the worst part of her experience had been, the woman replied, "Losing my arms."

I squawked with laughter, but suddenly Nate grabbed my knee. He raised the volume even more, and I found myself staring at a rolling patch of black ocean pierced by the searchlights of Coast Guard cutters. A reporter's voiceover informed me that a UH-1 Huey helicopter had gone down that afternoon without warning during a training exercise, ten miles off the coast of Oceanside. Four members of a Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron had been on board, all of whom were only a few months home from Iraq. A search and rescue mission was under way, but the prospects looked grim.

They showed a photograph of the pilot in full dress. His name was Daniel Brady, and the first thing I noticed about him was that he and I had the same eyes: big, blue, and widely spaced, the kind that make someone look surprised even when he's not. We were the same age, twenty-six, with the other resemblances between us more subtle: the rounded chin, the baby-fat padded cheeks. Brady had sharper versions of each.

"Hot, right?" Nate asked.

If I agreed, I would be flattering myself. I watched as Brady's distraught wife was led away from a duplex apartment building by a tall, big-boned Hispanic woman whose furious

expression didn't dim in the lens flare of the surrounding cameras. The most I could see of Melissa Brady was her tangled honey blond hair as she sobbed against her friend's shoulder.

When the story ended, Nate killed the volume and said, "Daniel Brady was in West Hollywood this week."

I pondered this for a second. My head was starting to hurt as the aftereffects of the alcohol kicked in. "Start at the beginning," I said.

He took a deep breath and got to his feet. "It was Wednesday night. Around midnight. I went on a walk, just to get some air, you know?" I didn't believe that any gay man in his twenties who took a walk in West Hollywood at midnight was out just to get some air. But I kept my mouth shut. "I was right down on Santa Monica and San Vicente when this black BMW X5 pulled to the curb beside me. Scott Koffler was driving."

He let this name hang. In the rarified social scene of West Hollywood, Scott Koffler was notorious for bringing barely legal pretty boys to the most exclusive pool parties. In fact I was fairly sure his young charges weren't legal at all, so I stayed the hell away from him. He seemed to have no actual profession aside from high-class pimp, and even though he was in his early thirties, he always dressed the part of the college undergrad, in university sweatshirts and backward baseball caps. He and I had never exchanged anything aside from a thin smile.

"So anyway," Nate continued, "Koffler asks me to get in, so I do. I mean, he's not my favorite guy or anything, but he's kinda cool." I didn't ask him how a jailbait supplier could be considered cool. "So I climb in the backseat, and guess who's in there with me?"

"Daniel Brady."

He nodded. "Brady was nice enough at first. Kinda antsy. Freaked out. I figured he was closeted, but I didn't have any idea he was a marine."

"Or married," I said.

"He's hot, though," Nate said, as if this dismissed the fact I had just given him. "I almost thought he was you. You guys have the same build and everything."

He gave me a slight smile, and I wondered if he was buttering me up in anticipation of how this story of his was going to end. I didn't smile back.

"Suddenly Koffler's asking me if I would like to do stuff. You know, like, mess around. With Brady." Nate didn't see what he wanted to in my face. "So I started following Scott's instructions. The whole setup. I don't know. It turned me on." His voice lacked conviction, which told me there was another layer to the story he was leaving out. His hollow cheeks and the welts on his arms gave me some idea what it might be.

"For a second, I thought Brady was going to go along with it," Nate said. "Then he just flipped out. He slammed my head into the side of the door, and the next thing I knew the motherfucker had thrown me out into the street and I was lying there watching them speed off. I almost got run over."

I gave him a moment to catch his breath, and then I said, "Sorry, Nate. I'm not buying it."

"What?" he barked. He turned his back to me and peeled the back of his tank top up over a skid mark that covered the right half of his lower back. His skin had been turned to ribbons over a bruise that looked like a giant ink stain. "What about this?" he cried.