Lightning People (10 page)

“I said you aren't right. You're not the right man.”

“Look,” he snapped. He backed up a step to get out of the sun and considered moving toward her, but his fingers were bunching in anger and he didn't want to come across as threatening. “Let me read the script and then make your decision.”

“Get out.” She retreated behind the chair as if she also guessed he
might be threatening, and suddenly the phone lying on the floor near her feet took on a larger presence than a non-ringing phone should.

He squeezed the air in his fists and walked toward the door.

“You're a fucking waste of time, you know that?” he screamed. “You bring me all the way here and you don't even let me read. Who the hell do you think you are?” But as William turned to catch one last look at her, he found that she had already disappeared into the bedroom, taking the phone with her. The double doors slammed shut and the chair fell over on its side.

 

“ CAN YOU BELIEVE that?” William lifted his arm from his eyes and stared up at the consoling face of Brutus Quinn.

“You should complain.”

“What do you think I'm going to do as soon as I leave here? I can't go on like this. I haven't gotten one thing thrown at me in months. Haven't got a single part in beyond a year. God, it's been two years now. Who am I kidding? And then this woman, this bitch, all she says is, ‘you're the wrong man.' You should have seen me. I almost murdered her.”

Quinn rolled his eyes and grabbed a towel from the dish rack to dry his hands. “Will, come on.”

“No, I won't come on. I'm broke. Why is it every time I say I'm broke to anyone, all they do is roll their eyes?”

“It's part of the business,” he said, wiping his hands roughly on a black, paisley rag. William rotated onto his stomach and picked up the tea that Quinn had placed in front of him. He had come for fatherly advice and now no longer wanted to hear it. “You can't hate people for not falling in love with you,” Quinn said, throwing the towel over his shoulder. “You can't blame the world for not dropping everything they're holding just because you're walking by.”

“But I do,” William struggled to laugh. “I don't care if that sounds narcissistic.”

“Well, I still love you,” Quinn said sarcastically, but his face reddened from the truth of the sentiment.

Brutus Quinn hibernated year-round in a piteously small stucco cottage tucked behind an apartment building in the West Village,
a single square of white bricks fitted with a thatched Hansel-and-Gretel roof that was so well hidden in its back garden of ailing oak trees that co-op boards and residential developers must have entirely forgotten about the thirty-year inhabitant shelling out eight hundred dollars per month to keep his stronghold in a neighborhood that was once crowded with affectatious gay men just like him. “Where have all the freaks gone?” was the title of one poem that Quinn had written on the subject of white, fertile, hetero gentrification. The answer to that question was easy: they had died. Quinn had tested positive in 1987, but his white cells somehow never bore the diminishing returns of those blood results. He persevered, heavier and more near-sighted as the years went on but still surprisingly healthy, as he watched most of his closest friends pass away within a matter of five years. William often thought of that disease as a bomb going off, leaving Quinn to carry on in the shrapnel of his former life, which decorated the cottage in the form of old photographs and dusty bric-a-brac arranged chaotically like a garage sale. Quinn had been an actor himself, and then, when his muscles lost their lean efficiency and his gray hair began to fall from the roots, continued on as a set designer for under-attended avant-garde plays. Quinn and William had met in one such production that had all the popular momentum of a six-day run. But their friendship had lasted, mostly on William's insistence by his dropping in at the cottage four or five times a month, lying on the couch covered in dirty Turkish batiks, and listening to Quinn's stories of New York in the '70s and '80s, which always involved young boys in constant need of drug money, suicides from swallowing razor blades, ACT-UP rallies at political conventions, kleptomaniacal models, and heavy doses of anonymous sex in the Meatpacking District. He couldn't walk with Quinn anymore through the West Village streets, because the old man hissed at baby strollers and whistled at deliverymen. But William loved the quiet sanctuary of the cottage, a fallen museum devoted to Quinn in the prime of his days.

“Does that say AIDS IS MAGIC?” William asked, staring at one of the many politically motivated magnets on the mini-refrigerator.

Quinn looked over and grabbed the towel. He always had wet
hands and was always drying them as if he had a nervous habit of twisting fabric.

“Oh, yes. We made that when Magic Johnson went public. We thought it would de-sensationalize the disease. You know, AIDS is magic. It's okay to have the high-five.”

“High-five?”

“HIV.”

“But it's not okay, is it?”

“Hush. One night, this is when the Mudd Club was really going and none of us worked, the point was not to work in those days, twenty of us dressed up like bankers, all suits and ties we got from a clerk we knew at Bergdorf's, hair slicked back prep school style by my friend Diane. Diane later jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge because MoMA didn't buy one of her paintings. She wrote her suicide note on a canvas, and after they pulled her body from the river, MoMA bought the note painting. Anyway, we went down to this Wall Street bar called Bubbles. We mingled with the usual broker clientele and then at midnight we started making out with each other, half the room French kissing and grabbing crotches. You should have seen the look on their faces. God it was beautiful. It was the end of the world for them.”

“Quinn,” William said, burying his eyes in his arm. “I'm sick of hearing about how great New York used to be.”

“But it was,” Quinn moaned happily. “It really was something. The secret got out and too many of the wrong kind showed up. I thought we were being liberators. Now I realize when everything's too free people just get lazy and safe. And all the best liberators died. They took it up the ass, because they were the most adventurous, and we lost them. That's why the gay movement is basically a joke of what it used to be. They don't know what it's like to spill your guts out and scream for your life.”

“I want to live in my own time, if that's all right with you. Right now. When your parents were wilder than you are, you feel like you should quit.”

Quinn froze, looking injured. He tossed the towel on William's head, tapped his legs on the couch to indicate their eviction from the pillow, and sat down next to him.

“You've got your youth. That trumps every old story from perverts like me who spend all their time on the Internet.”

“I've barely got that.”

“You can take my car if you ever need a day in the country. Lord knows I never drive it. The keys are in the desk.”

Quinn kept his beat-up blue Cressida parked on West Twelfth Street, his main exercise consisting of waking up at five every other morning to repark it a block north to avoid the street cleaner.

“Be careful,” William warned. “I might drive it to Los Angeles and never come back.”

“You can't do that,” Quinn said, petting his ankles. “It's the only thing I've got to sell when they kick me out of here and I'm living in a retirement village in Queens. Serves me right. I'll probably have to act straight when I'm trapped up in there at eighty. Back in the closet just so I can play bridge with a few vets who don't remember what to do with an erection but know that they still hate fags.”

William wondered if Quinn really thought he would live to see eighty.

“I'll visit you. You can tell them I'm your son.”

“I don't get your generation,” Quinn huffed. “If I had your body and face, I'd be out having fun. Think of all the sex you could be having. I wish old age were wasted on the old, but I'm warning you now that isn't quite the case.”

“What is it with you and sex?” William groaned. “It's really not that great. Half the time, it's the loneliest thing I can think of. But it's like a religion with you. Sex and horror movies. Why do gay men love horror movies so much? The only fan letter I ever received was from a gay guy who watched that stupid slasher film I made about eight hundred times.”

Quinn laughed, collecting William's teacup to run brown water over it from the kitchen sink.

“We like to see the clean lives get what they deserve. Punishment for all of our years pretending to be normal. Normal's a bad thing, Will. It means you really are soulless.”

“You're full of shit. I've seen the young men you go after, the ones you look at on the Internet. They're the normal ones, not the skinny
art kids running around with high voices. You say you hate normal, but that's precisely what those high-school jocks and gas-station attendants are.

“We aren't superior beings,” Quinn said, placing his hands on the kitchen counter and dropping his chin in frustration, as if William had missed the point. “I'm sorry if you got that impression. We're just like everyone else. We want what we can't have.”

William slid his legs off the couch while Quinn turned to study him with a disappointed, bitten lip. Quinn always looked defeated when William cut his visits short. William knew that he provided a slowly closing window into youth for his friend. “I'm off to face my agent and demand an explanation.”

“You'll hold things again, I know it,” Quinn replied, referencing a joke they shared. Quinn had a terrific homily on the world's low evaluation of actors. The way he figured it, most of life was consumed standing around holding things. If actors managed to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to perform that service, they were the clever ones. William kissed Quinn on the cheek and opened the front door.

“I'll see you in a week.”

 

TOUCHPOINT AGENCY'S NEW York headquarters were located in the West Thirties, a black onyx building surrounded by discount jewelers and exotic plant nurseries. Above and below sat real estate ventures, but on the seventeenth floor the elevator opened onto a long hallway of portraits in red lacquer frames—autographed black-and-white headshots gridding the wall in chronological order. The bowl cuts of television stars in their butterfly '70s collars lost ground to '80s cigarette cowboys and chubby-faced babysitters with their flowered, hairspray-stiff bangs. A black Knoll ottoman, where three young men nervously sat pinching glossy photos of themselves, drifted like a raft somewhere in the tattoo-and-piercing parlor of the mid-'90s. Farther down, the '00s hung like “after” shots in a plastic surgery clinic. William wondered what horrible new specimens the 2010s would bring.

He brushed past the young men on the ottoman. Each one couldn't be more than twenty, and two looked like Nebraska ranchers straight
off a Greyhound. It was painful for William to see youth so hungry and ready in this town, so eager to take the places of those who had come long before them and who were still hungry if less assured. William made his way to the receptionist's desk and, like a famous man who did not need to speak his name, assertively asked the woman reading
In Touch
for “Janice Eccles. I'm one of her clients.”

“Name?” she asked, turning a page limply and pressing a button on her telephone console.

“William Asternathy. She's not expecting me.”

Janice didn't appreciate surprise visits. She didn't baby her talent, and often told her actors when they broke into tears that she already had her own kids and didn't feel the need to adopt full-grown versions at work.

“She's not expecting you,” the receptionist said.

He whispered. He would not let the twenty-year-olds on the couch hear what he was about to say. “Tell her I called her ten times last week. Tell her I just had a nightmare audition that she set up. Tell her I need to see her. It's urgent.”

“Two minutes. Three doors down on the left.”

He continued along the hallway as the young men on the ottoman followed him with their eyes.

Janice rotated in her chair. Behind her perfectly slicked hair, buildings and steeples and pigeons filled the polished window.

“You know never to come in like this.” A hard candy pivoted between her teeth.

“I'm sorry, but I called you how many times?”

“I don't know. You'll have to ask my assistant.”

On her blouse, she wore a silver pin glued with bones and turquoise feathers that looked like the curious remains of a cult sacrifice. William slumped into the chair across from her.

“If you aren't calling, something's not working,” he said in defeat.

“You're not working,” she responded. “And you're here because you think I'm not doing my job.”

“I know the summer can be slow. But the fact is the only audition you've sent me on was the one this morning and that was a joke.”

The candy shattered in her mouth, and she crunched the debris.
“I make money when you work. I don't make it lying to you and giving you auditions you wouldn't get. I'm going to treat you like a man, Will. Did you see that hallway full of headshots out there? Did you see how many faces stared you down as you decided to take up my lunch hour with this crap? And those are the Touchpoint actors who had a millisecond of something that could vaguely be defined as success. Take a look.” She pulled a manila file from the stack on her desk, a file that he sensed remained there permanently for just such occasions. “Patricia Savage. She made twenty grand on a
Friday the 13th
spin-off. In 1984 she had a dozen national magazine features and even went on
Good Morning, America
. What do you think she's doing now? She's a journalist in Knoxville, Tennessee, writing on insecticides. This one.” Janice held a photograph of a handsome sand-skinned surfer whose hair curled like a coral reef. “Tal Kidd. He played Tom Hanks's best friend in that comedy ten years ago about the woman who turns out to be an alien. MIA. I heard he went to Portland, where, last we know, he ran a children's daycare center.” Janice returned the photograph to her file and dropped it with heavy purpose on the floor by her feet. “You've had a nice run. I'm not saying it's over, Will. But what if it is? You're thirty-six.”