I'm Still Your Fag Read online

  ***

  “It’s a funny place to meet, isn’t it?” I said. I’d taken Tamar to the Pancake House. We’d been seeing each other regularly, outside of the group.

  “Why?” she asked. She’d ordered flapjacks with bacon.

  “Didn’t you see Ordinary People? They filmed a scene here. I remember riding my bike home from a friend’s house and seeing all the trucks and cables snaking out of here. I waited until I saw Robert Redford come out. My mother yelled at me for being late for dinner.”

  “Did you ever see him? In Hollywood?”

  “No,” I said. Despite working tangentially for the entertainment industry, I hadn’t met anyone famous. In fact, outside of work I barely left my apartment.

  “What was LA like?”

  I thought about my last day on the job at the Reporter. It was just a few days after the earthquake. I was working in the research library—snipping, copying, and cataloging articles from that day’s paper. It was tedious work. My desk was sequestered in an aisle of archived copies, and I didn’t have much contact with anybody else. I hadn’t done the most minimal filing work in days; instead I spent my time typing out letters home on my manual typewriter, letters which I’d crumple up and discard in the trash bin at the end of the day. I’d wanted nothing but to work in Hollywood, in any capacity, and now that I was there it felt like a counterfeit dream. I remember the walk to the bathroom being unbearably monotonous that final day. In the corridor, one of the journalists was there, kicking a yellow balloon against the wall. It must have been left from somebody’s lunchtime birthday celebration. She saw me, and tried to maneuver the balloon around my leg, engaging me in a little soccer match. I kicked the balloon, and it popped. She looked offended, then stalked away without a word. I went into the bathroom and cried in the stall for about an hour. I quit the next day.

  But I didn’t feel like telling Tamar any of that, not yet.

  “Are there pancake houses there?”

  “There might be, but I never saw them. There’s a Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard. I used to go there Saturday mornings to eat a waffle and watch the waitresses, who were all obviously failing actresses.”

  “That’s what you remember?”

  “That’s just one thing. There were good things too, like the Santa Anna winds that blew so hot through my screen door. They felt inhabited by some weird energy, I don’t know, by ghosts or something.”

  “Did you ever sleep with any?”

  “Ghosts?” I laughed.

  “No, waitresses.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Watching them was just something to do. I didn’t feel anything.” I looked down at my plate. I wanted to forget LA.

  “I just have one more question,” she said, taking a bite of bacon. “When are you going to bag this little Jew girl?”

  That night we made love in the back seat of the Cadillac. Even when I was in school I hadn’t done that, so I now took a little pride in that delayed rite of passage. Over the next few weeks we slept together a number of times, parking in the driveways of the unoccupied teardowns, where we wouldn’t be noticed. She showed me the scar that ran along her leg, let me run my finger over the knotty skin.

  “Claxton hates these places,” I said, unsure why I evoked his name at that moment, when all I could think about was Tamar.

  “I know. It’s my father’s business, you know. He gets the paperwork done for the destruction and zoning. There are a lot of people who don’t like it. It’s an old neighborhood, with old money, I guess. They consider it a betrayal. A vulgar whim of the nouveau riche. Claxton never lets me alone about it.”

  “He can be a bit unforgiving.”

  “He loves you, you know,” she said as we held each other in the darkness.

  “Who?”

  “Claxton. Maybe it’s not normal love. It’s not even normal gay love. But it’s there, and it’s dangerous.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, and turned from her.