It was a few minutes past midnight, technically Sunday and the anniversary of Jacques’s death.
I felt more lost than I ever had without him.
With the Billy Lusk story to work on, I’d begun to feel like maybe I was useful for something again. I’d even had the self-deluding notion that I might somehow save Gonzalo Albundo from himself and whatever demons were driving him to self-destruction, the way Jacques had once saved me.
And now, in simple journalistic jargon, I was off the story.
I walked aimlessly along the boulevard, weaving through the Saturday night crowd.
An old Russian immigrant couple trudged along in front of me, worn out from their long day’s labor, keeping their eyes straight ahead. Bus drivers in brown uniforms walked home from the nearby depot carrying empty thermoses, or waited to catch buses to other neighborhoods. Restaurant workers, mostly young and Latin, waited with them, their pockets filled with tips and their heads with thoughts of sleep.
For hundreds of others on the street, though, the night was just beginning.
I stopped for a moment in front of the club where Jacques and I had met for the first time ten years earlier. Maurice liked to say that the search for love had been Jacques’s religion, the disco his temple, the dancing his sacrament. The first time I laid eyes on him, it had certainly seemed that way. I’d come in out of the rain for a drink, to see him gyrating on the strobe-lit dance floor like a dark spirit, lost in the music, so graceful and gloriously sensual I knew I had to have him.
The name on the club was different now. So were the faces in the line outside. And the dual notions of HIV and the need for protection added an undercurrent of caution that hadn’t been there a decade ago. Yet the crackle of sexual energy and the rush of romantic expectation were the same.
I thought seriously about going in, straight to the bar for a double Cuervo Gold and to hell with what happened after that. And I almost did.
Then I saw a man not much older than me standing alone at the bar, surrounded by men close to half his age, hoping one might want him. He’d taken a position near the door, where he could watch the faces and bodies coming in, picking out the ones that met his specifications. He had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a thin, false smile that looked propped up by alcohol and desperation.
I knew I was looking at myself a few years from now, or tomorrow, if I walked through that door tonight.
I turned away and made myself keep moving.
I cut up Larrabee Street, past the trendy video bar on the corner, past the upstairs clinic that counseled gay and lesbian couples, past the video store with special sections near the front for Judy Garland, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford and another near the back for gay porn.
Jacques and I had hiked up this street too many times to count, heading toward Sunset Boulevard, on our way to Book Soup to browse, or to Tower Records, or farther on to Queens Road to wind our way for miles up into the dark hills, where we could watch the city spread out below us like an ocean of lights.
“Look,” Jacques had said the first time he’d seen the Queens Road sign, “they named a street for us!”
I passed two men kissing at the next corner, as openly as straight couples elsewhere in the city. Then more couples, mostly male, out walking their dogs.
In the next and steepest block, I stopped to stare into a second-floor apartment, feeling like an intruder but unable to pull myself away.
The curtains were open and the lights were on. A man with a metal walker struggled to cross his living room, trying to reach his kitchen, unconcerned about who might see.
I guessed his age at roughly forty. He was chalk white and deathly thin, a walking cadaver in diapers that clung, just barely, to his emaciated body. Each step was followed by half a minute’s rest, during which he sagged against the rails, gasping for air.
Ten minutes passed before he reached the border of his kitchen, and a few more before he managed the several feet to his refrigerator door. He opened it and forced something into his mouth with a spoon, getting down a few swallows. Then he turned the walker around for the long journey back.
So many men, so little time.
“It’s better that you went as quickly as you did,” I said to Jacques. “It’s better that you didn’t end up this way.”
I headed back down the hill, using the alleyways and side streets to work my way home, free of the crowds.
It seemed like a good time to get out of West Hollywood. A good time to move on, before Harry changed his mind and came around again, trying to draw me back into his life with a lightweight assignment and new rules. Before Paca Albundo called to pressure me for more help getting her little brother out of jail. Before Templeton tried to put her hooks deeper into me, for reasons even she might not understand. Before I figured a way to run into Paul Masterman, Jr., one more time, playing out my silly adolescent fantasies.
I had at least three hundred dollars remaining from the advance Harry had given me. The Mustang was running pretty well. I could throw some clothes together and grab Jacques’s photograph, and Elizabeth Jane’s, and be driving up the coast or across the desert or down to Mexico before the bars were closed.
The house was dark when I got there. Before going to bed, dependable Fred had swept up the glass and boarded up the broken windows.
I found Maurice sitting in a wicker rocker on the patio out back. He’d bundled his dead cat in a blanket and clutched it like a parent who’d lost a child to starvation or war, but wasn’t ready yet to give up the body. The other two cats curled at his feet, as if they sensed what had happened and knew it was their duty to keep him company.
Maurice and Fred had given Jacques more comfort and security than he’d imagined was possible. They’d tried to do the same for me. I felt I should say something to Maurice, some kind of good-bye.
I pulled up a chair and we sat for awhile without speaking, listening to a possum rummage in the trash cans beside the garage. One of the cats jumped into my lap to be scratched. As she curled there peacefully, I wondered why it was that certain animals could coexist with such ease, when human beings found it so difficult to accept each other’s differences.
We heard the rattle of a trash can lid and saw the possum waddle down the driveway, dragging its ratty tail.
The cat opened an eye, then closed it again. It nuzzled my hand for more attention and I scratched it under the chin, where it liked it most.
“I miss Jacques,” Maurice said. “I miss him so very, very much.”
His face bore his sadness plainly, but it was also beatific with age and wisdom. Jacques had always said that if he could be like anyone when he got older, it would be Maurice.
“I’d give everything,” I said, “for just one more minute with him.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I could say so much in just one minute.”
Maurice patted my leg with his bony hand.
“He hears you, Benjamin.”
I put the cat down and wandered out into the yard, shoving my hands deep in my pockets and listening to the quiet.
I knew I wasn’t ready to leave West Hollywood, not yet.
I wasn’t ready to leave the streets where Jacques and I had first walked and talked. The streets where he’d reached down and taken my hand as we strolled, unconcerned about who might see. The streets where we’d marched side by side in political rallies, or laughed together over silly things only the two of us could understand, or ducked beneath awnings to get out of the rain and impulsively kissed. The streets where we had made our plans, in the rare and wonderful moments when things had felt right between us.
I sensed that he was still here, in the one place he’d always felt safe, and when I left I wouldn’t know him anymore. I wasn’t yet prepared to say good-bye.
Through the open upstairs door, I heard my phone ring.
I didn’t move, preferring to keep the other world out of this one.
It rang again.
“Better get it,” Maurice said. “You never know.”
I took the stairs two at a time and caught the phone on the fourth ring. It was Jin Jai-Sik.
He was drunk, but when he told me he had something for me, he sounded clear and determined.
He gave me an address where I could find him in Koreatown.