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If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. 1984 George Orwell
MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.
in a pre-digital world secrets were more easily kept; in fact, secrets were the norm in a pre-digital world.
She mimicked someone pondering a great mystery, cocking her head again, two fingers at her chin, and then casually tossed off in a mock-British accent: “Well, I thought he was rather electrifying.” She looked at me. “Be honest. Didn’t you?”
Sex and novels and music and movies were the things that made life bearable—not friends, not family, not school, not social scenes, not interactions—and that was the summer when I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark every other week but barely had dinner with my separated parents even twice.
I had no stakes in the real world—why would I? It wasn’t built for me or my needs or desires. And I was reminded of this almost constantly since I was locked in a teenage horniness skyrocketing into the stratosphere and constantly activated by things I found erotic—and yet could never have. This was my only point of reference. This was what contributed to the no longer tangible participant. —
I was so close now that he was able to physically push me back. Matt stared at me with disbelief, furious. This was the Matt I never knew existed—real and emotional, conflicted, angry and alive—and who I’d wanted to know since I met him, and who finally revealed himself to me on that Sunday afternoon in the minute it all ended.
Matt had never felt about me the way I’d felt about him, which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life though, of course, I didn’t know this yet on that September afternoon in 1981, when I was seventeen and still navigated on hope.
But looking at photos of myself from that senior year I now realize I actually was cute enough to warrant their attention, and this was the afternoon in 1981, at the bar in Trumps on a Wednesday, sipping a Greyhound cocktail, when I began to fully sense its formation, and when this consciousness about myself—that never really bloomed because of so much insecurity and self-abnegation—was beginning its struggle to accept itself and grow.
The fact that Steven thought he was a player because he was Terry Schaffer’s personal assistant was a reminder of the constant desperation flooding Hollywood and how the town made everyone completely delusional.
I was reminded, in that moment, yet again, that Trumps had a gay vibe—I knew that the chef was gay, the big investors were gay, the designer of the space was gay, all or most of the waiters were gay, even the location was gay: smack in the middle of what was known as Boystown. The entire aesthetic had an undercurrent of fuck you to the straight status quo and I suddenly felt slightly uncomfortable being there at the center of it. Terry ordered a couple of appetizers: the grape-and-Brie quesadilla that the restaurant was famous for and the salmon tartar, which was served exactly nowhere yet in
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And Matt Kellner, even though he might have been numbed with marijuana and was having a sexual relationship with me for over a year, was deemed a good kid with decent grades who kept to himself, living in some kind of underwater fantasy world: stoned in the pool was where he resided in a marijuana haze and that was all he ever needed; this was what gave Matt sustenance, the late-afternoon sun, the scent of chlorine, the shade of the palms above the hammock he rested in, the Specials singing “Ghost Town” coming from a pool house lined with surfboards and an aquarium that stretched along a wall
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Ryan didn’t come over that weekend—he had intimated earlier that week he would—and I don’t think I masturbated for six days, from the moment I heard Matt was missing to when the body was finally found I didn’t want to touch myself. —
I imagined it was breathing heavily, drooling, as it stared at me through a pair of binoculars it held in gnarled hands tipped with yellowed talons. It was someone from the Riders of the Afterlife, it was the Trawler, it was the ghost of Matt Kellner.
And then an absence announced itself when I heard “Dreaming” by Blondie: shadows were standing next to the pool and one of them was wearing the same puka-shell necklace Matt Kellner wore and I realized again that Matt had been alive and now he was dead, as if in a dream that had dematerialized, and I was homing in on the pool, the bright square of light in the backyard, and I kept staring deeper into it until I located the drain and I imagined the swirl above the drain filtering the pool, and a vortex appeared in my mind, and it was the spiral nautical shell on the cover of my calculus
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We started heading toward Wilshire Boulevard and were just listening to music—New Order, the Cure—when I asked him if he was looking forward to the trip, suddenly eager to find out Thom Wright’s state of mind, where he was floating emotionally; everything about him was interesting to me.
“Why Robert?” I asked. “I understand Thom, but why Robert?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t explain it.” I said nothing. “I fell in love with him,” she said. “I thought I had met…” She trailed off, almost ashamed of what she was going to say next. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just received a blow. And then she recovered. “You thought you met who?” I asked. There was barely a pause before she said, “A dream.”
