“I’ve got a stage-four clinger,” Jack announced in his recognizable southern drawl, without immediately elaborating. “It started with a toothbrush.”
Jack looked at me under a warm key light that illuminated his face theatrically, his long, straight, side-parted hair thrown back and making him appear more and more like a dissolute Brad Pitt. A new opportunity had arisen in his world; vanity had taken over his actor’s persona; he had thrown himself back into the gym with a vengeance, was swimming laps with the ardor of an Olympian, and even hired a private trainer to push him to new post-middle-age heights of physical conditioning. We’d been glancingly in and out of touch for the past five years, Jack dreadful at email, me reluctant to pick up the phone. My two years in New Zealand had put a damper on getting together in person. It had taken Jack a while to warm to Zoom—whereas I preferred Zoom to actual interactions—but once Jack, postpandemic, realized this was now the new norm, that even auditions were being conducted on Zoom, he had embraced it.
“What does that mean, Jackson?”
Jack raked his fingers through his hair and combed his scraggly locks off his forehead, now furrowed with concern. “She’s a former theater actress—well, she doesn’t think it’s former, if you know what I mean.” I shook my head, not interested in the elucidation but waiting on it to humor my friend of thirty years, the one guy who had my back, the only person I could count on for their unwavering loyalty, the sole person in my life who could keep a secret, and that’s saying something for someone who had plied his trade in Hollywood! “With theater shut down and just now getting back up and running, her libido has needed other, how shall I say, outlets?”
“I see.” An image of Jack in bed with a theater actress forced me to suppress a laugh. The faking had to have been competitive!
“And she just went all in, brother. I don’t know what I said . . .”
“Probably that you loved her and wanted to marry her,” I interrupted.
“No, no, no,” Jack said. “She’s Aussie. Even if she’s living in Byron Bay, they’re never too far from the bush or the penal colony.” He shook his head in bemusement. “Problem for me is she’s the producer of my new show.”
Purely by coincidence, six months ago Jack had received an unexpected call from his theatrical rep—this surprised me because I thought he had been dumped—that a pathetic reality TV show he had been featured on titled Washed-Up Celebrities, which had been scuttled by the impatient streamer after a year, had found an unexpected cult following down under—in Australia and New Zealand—and some Aussie producer (the stage-four clinger) wanted to reboot the show with Jack, who had found a following as the host on the ill-fated US version. Jack knew it was a pitiful coda to a career that had never effloresced into the one of his dreams, but it was SAG legit, would pad his pension—something I didn’t have—and he found himself in Melbourne in preproduction. Naturally, it didn’t take him any time to hurtle himself headlong into a relationship, fuck the consequences and the conflicts of interest, and now he had a “stage-four clinger” with a “toothbrush”—and no doubt a suitcase clutched in one hand—bearing down on his rented oceanfront condo with a mind to sap him of what little energy he had, forget the fact he probably had other women vying for his attention, especially now he was a, well, washed-up celebrity in a land where he was American, where he was fresh meat. And no doubt Jack, like me, knew the world was imploding and had at the penumbra of his brain the possibility of relocating to a region all the media was advising was the place to be when the revolution came to right the wrongs of all the wealth inequality afflicting us Stateside. And the madness. And the biblical floods and fires. We weren’t getting any younger, the sands in the bottom of the hourglass outnumbered the ones in the top, and even if I viewed this as a positive—not afraid to die; in fact, looking forward to it, I often joked—Jack was deathly afraid of his mortality. I had my one novel that would be my legacy, even after I returned to carbon, but Jack, as always, only had the moment. And this is the problem with people who only live for the moment. They’re scared to death of death.
“They have a thing for Yanks,” he explained, “and, well, I have a thing for Aussies. They’re more liberated in the . . .”
“You didn’t tell me she was the producer of the Washed-Up Celebrities reboot.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was fucking my way back to the top.” He grinned sheepishly.
“Jack. I’m not a judgmental guy. I sincerely don’t care how you get to where you’re trying to get. It’s Hollywood, man, everyone’s got a price. Even me.”
“Even you,” he mocked. “I could buy you for a case of Burgundy’s finest, a new set of golf clubs, and—”
“Okay, okay,” I halted him midsentence. “So, why are you telling me about this stage-four clinger?”
Jack pulled on a can of Aussie craft beer. His face had grown florid in the time we had been online, and that smiling rubicund countenance had washed over him, and there was that impish twinkle in his eyes so unmistakably Jack when mischief was brewing in his inveterately determined quest for new adventures in the tunnels of perdition we both were intimately acquainted with. “I know I said I wouldn’t be able to make your book tour, but I’m having second thoughts. I need to blow this pop stand here in Byron Bay until the actress-turned-producer—”
“What’s her name?” I chopped him off.
“Amanda.”
“Amanda. Okay. Let’s try to pay her a little respect. After all, presumably, you are inside her most nights.”
Jack drew a hand across his haggard, handsome face. “The production has been pushed a few weeks, and the timing is, how do you say, Miles, in your brilliantly scholarly way . . . ?”
“Fortuitously prescient?”
“Fortuitously prescient! Exactement! You’ve always got the right phrase for the right moment, Miles.”
“Lately I’ve been googling words I knew were once up there but suddenly are galaxies removed from their appearance on the page.”
“You could work with half your word palette and still deliver the goods.”
“Okay, Jack, stop your blatant inveigling. What’re you saying here? You want to come on the trip now?”
Jack scratched the incipiency of a beard. “You’re going to need backup, brother.”
“For a book tour?”
“It’s winter here, Miles. More so where you are.”
“I’m fully aware.” I glanced out at the snowcapped peaks in the distance, now scintillant in the lowering sun, where, it occurred to me, Ella was now stewing. A pang of guilt scampered across my brain, insects over open wounds.
“And, well, we haven’t hung properly for, what is it now? Five years? I’m sure you’ve got some deep truths to lay on me.”
“All the deep truths I’ve laid on you in the past fell on tin ears.” Jack smirked at the riposte. “Especially the ones that ended with a plea for money.”
“Well, I haven’t exactly been flush myself, brother.”
“With you, Jackson, between truth and money lies the Grand Canyon.”
“The money’s coming, brother, the money’s coming.” He paused and studied his can of beer with thoughtful eyes. “There’s something you said in particular a while back I will always remember,” he said, punctuating his provocative opener with another chug of beer.
“What’s that?”
“You said to me: ‘There’s one thing money can’t buy.’ And then you waited on my response. And you knew what it was going to be (happiness). And I fell for it because I know you’re a sly fucker and you would never drop a cliché on me like that without a deep revealer lying in ambush. ‘There’s one thing money can’t buy.’” He paused and pointed an index finger at me. “‘Immortality.’ And I had to think about that one. And you know, you’re fucking right, Miles. I thought I had that with Babs. That money, or marrying into money, would buy me happiness. Or security. Or something to keep me from the ranks of the unsheltered. And it did buy me happiness. In a way. But you were right—it wasn’t going to buy me immortality.”
“When you marry for money, you pay for it every day.”
“Hear, hear, brother. Hear, hear.”
“We’ve both witnessed money take down some big players.”
Jack grew thoughtful. “What’s going to buy me immortality?” he inquired, slurring a little, hobbling his words and muddling them.
“You’re going to anchor this reboot of Washed-Up Celebrities, Jane Campion or Taika Waititi is going to recognize your buried talents, they’ve got just the project for you, they direct a film starring you in all your washed-up glory, it nabs Oscars and BAFTAs and you get cast in what turns out to be the most memorable version of True West ever staged on Broadway, it’s filmed, you’re immortalized as the Brando who came out of the chrysalis of middle age to find everlasting fame.”
Jack nodded up and down and narrowed his eyes at me. “And fuck you, too.”
“It’s better than dreaming of moving invoices and cashing out your 401(k)s.”
“Amen, brother. Amen.”
We shared a cathartic laugh. I needed it for reasons I didn’t want to divulge to Jack. God forbid I would tell him my secret and not Ella and Ella found out! Ella had never met Jack, and it would likely only happen if we got married—Jack, of course, in a reversal, would have to stand in as my best man, should a second marriage warrant such a traditional ceremony, otherwise I would risk alienating him.
“So, you’re saying you want to be my über-factotum on this book tour.”
“I don’t know what über-factotum means, Homes, nor do I want to, but you said it was the Stagecoach bus and boutique hotels up the east coast of all of New Zealand. I can dig that.”
I was warming to his proposition. Conditionally. “I don’t want you fucking your way through my fan base.”
“I’m sincerely disappointed to hear you say that, Miles,” Jack snorted. “As if I need you to draft off of.”
“I’m just saying.”
He put on his histrionic face of harried perturbation to seal the deal. “Look, it’s been a wild couple weeks with Amanda. I need a break from her,” he said, practically in tears. “Plus, I’ve heard Kiwi women aren’t into casual sex like the Aussies, so I don’t think they’re going to be coming on to me.”
“I wouldn’t know, Jack. I’m a one-woman guy. I believe in committed relationships.”
“For a couple months.”
Laughter rippled out of me. “That’s pretty good, Jackson. I’m going to use that.”
“You’ve been making a living using me as a foil in your fiction your whole life.” He pointed an amiably accusatory finger at me.
“You are one colorful dude, and I have exploited your likeness and real-life foibles, it is true, but other writers have met you and they haven’t. I’d like to believe you have some modicum of respect for what little talent I possess to bring you to life with only the words on my admittedly vast lexicological palette.” I gestured to my laptop monitor until we were dueling with finger-pointing. “With only words, my friend.”
“And I respect that,” Jack said, a tinge of desperation creeping into his voice. Hearing a noise, he threw a quick backward glance, fearing a new drama erupting at any moment, it appeared. Relieved, he turned back to me. “So, what do you think? A little road trip reunion?”
“I have to talk to the publisher and my publicist.”
“You have to talk to the publisher and the publicist,” he mocked. “Oh, bullshit. You’re the author. You’re calling the shots.”
“I don’t know if they’ll spring for your accommodations. And we’re not bunking in the same room like we did at the Windmill on that now-infamous road trip I made famous,” I said, referring to my legacy work. “Those days are history.”
“I don’t want to be awakened by your snoring either.”
“And we’ve got to go light on the grape.”
He made a face. “That’s your Achilles, not mine.”
“Achilles’ heel,” I corrected.
“Don’t be correcting me, Miles. You know I don’t have your vocab—”
“Sorry. Bad habit. It’s cost me a few girlfriends.”
“I’ll bet it has!” Tilting his can of beer skyward, he drained it in one long pull. He left the screen. Off camera I heard a pop-top on a can puncture open. The stage-four clinger must have been putting him through the wringer. He returned with his beer poured in a glass mug this time, an inch of white foam cresting it, his face tinged with a lively red. “How’s Ella, by the way?”
“She’s fine.” I nodded, debating my next words. “Or was until this evening.”
“What happened?”
I glanced over at Max. Chin on his forepaws, he was dozing in his cat hammock by the window, and I wished I could transpose myself into him. “I got some news, and I might have to return to Cal-i-for-ni-a.”
“What news?” Jack forearmed foam mustaching his upper lip.
“I can’t tell you. It’s personal. It’s private. It’s dismaying, and I’m still processing its concussive consequences.”
“And you didn’t tell your honey?”
I shook my head. “I can’t tell anyone except my little buddy Max.”
“Max being your special needs cat, right? The one you text me pictures of, you sentimental fuck.”
“Yep.”
“You can tell a cat but not your current girlfriend, let alone your best friend of three decades? Come on, Homes.”
“I can’t tell you, Jack. Sorry. Like I said, it’s deeply personal shit. I’m still wrestling with it. It’s so seismic I couldn’t even tell Ella when she confronted me after I told her I might have to go back to California, and she flipped out and maybe even just broke up with me, so I’m dealing with that shit.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve overstayed my visa here. If I fly back to California to face this thing, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to return. New Zealand’s already a difficult country to get into. Ella will probably take my half hectare of Pinot and graft on Merlot in a kind of vintner version of a revenge fuck. But of course Merlot doesn’t ripen down here in Central Otago, so that would be both a death sentence and a humiliation, a sorrow beyond words.”
Jack chortled and smiled. “This news must be pretty heavy shit,” he commiserated in a rare, but not unprecedented, show of feeling.
“It is.”
“And only Max knows?”
I nodded. “And you’d better get used to him because he’s coming on this road trip.”
“What?”
“Ella won’t take him. Not because she doesn’t want to care for him but because it’s her only hold on me, I’m psychoanalyzing.”
“Max is coming with us?”
“That’s right.”
“And how’s he doing?”
“He was doing fine until I told him.”
Jack barked a laugh and spit a mouthful of lager.
“Don’t laugh. He feels shit. He can’t articulate it, but he feels it. He curls up next to me and purrs when I’m stressed.”
Jack nodded, not wishing to alienate me with his coming on the book tour on the line and everything. Despite what some negatively assumed about Jack—the goatishness, the phony social butterfly extrovert, the profane womanizer—he was an immensely feeling guy. If something was awry in my world, he’d be the first to stomp down the doors, clear the room of the riffraff, and roughhouse me out of there to safety, even if it imperiled his own well-being. He’d done it before. He’d taken me to the depths, and he had pulled me out of the depths, the nepenthean depths. Figuratively and literally. You don’t forget this shit. It’s what bonds men together for life.
Until an Amanda materializes.