resist the hatred so many people feel toward us,” I replied. “It wears you down. You begin to wonder, if that many people are convinced you’re evil, maybe there’s something to it and that gives you license to behave as if you were.”
“To kill other gay men?”
“I admit that’s an extreme case,” I said, “but look at how gay men treat each other, look at the nastiness and bitchiness of so much gay life. Isn’t that a kind of acting out that most of us engage in?”
“There’s another side to it, Henry.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I replied. “That’s why I came here. What is the other side?”
“I think what frightens people about us isn’t that we’re different but that we’re free, in a way.”
“Free? Free to do what? Use each other?”
“I’m not talking about the freedom to do what you want, but to be who you are. To act on your deepest self-knowledge. Almost everyone feels trapped in their lives, but they’re afraid to change. They’re afraid to know themselves. We are forced to know ourselves.”
“We’re not a bunch of bodhisattvas, Raymond,” I said. “Take a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard and tell me those boys are free.”
“I said we’ve been forced to know ourselves, I didn’t say we liked it. For most of us, that self-knowledge stops when we come out of the closet and then we build other closets. The ghettos. Addictions. Codependent relationships. Places to hide from ourselves. But the thing is,” he continued, “once you begin to know yourself, it’s very hard to stop the process for good. Even your killer must know somewhere in some corner of his mind that no matter how many gay men he kills, he will never kill the gay man inside.”
“But how many others will have to die before he sees that?” I asked.
From Reynolds’s office in Beverly Hills, I headed east on Sunset to Hollywood to meet Richie for lunch. In the rearview mirror was another police surveillance car. I’d been followed more or less constantly since being questioned about Alex’s death. Approaching La Brea, traffic came to a dead stop, though the distant signal light was green, entombing me in my car. Sunlight smeared the windshield. Car horns began their pointless cacophony. A toothless man in rags, carrying a cardboard sign that said WILL WORK FOR BEER pressed his sunbaked face against my window. I looked away and he moved on, weaving between the cars like one of the damned. A fragment of a poem passed through my head, “I myself am hell; nobody’s here.” Where was that from?
A horn blasted behind me. The road had cleared while I was trying to remember the poet. Robert Lowell. Part of that generation of poets who went crazy or killed themselves or both. Plath, Berryman, I put the gear and moved forward, winging the intersection as the light changed from yellow to red, turning north on La Brea toward Hollywood Boulevard. Off on the curb I saw the cause of the delay. Two paramedics were lifting a gurney into an ambulance. On the gurney was a body, covered with a bloodied sheet.
I pulled into a parking lot off Hollywood and walked to Richie’s office. A heat wave had descended on the city, causing an inversion. The smog hung in the motionless air, like the respiration of a great, unseen beast, a dirty veil that curtained the city and left its inhabitants to stew in their own filth. The sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard glittered with some shiny mineral ground into the concrete to suggest the sparkle of Hollywood, but the bronze stars of the “Walk of Fame” embedded in it were like gravestones. Across the street from Richie’s office, in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, tourists photographed each other standing in the footprints of dead stars. As I entered his building, I looked over my shoulder, but for now I’d eluded my police escort.
Except for the framed magazine covers that lined the walls of the reception room, the offices of L.A. Mode , from the industrial gray
“To kill other gay men?”
“I admit that’s an extreme case,” I said, “but look at how gay men treat each other, look at the nastiness and bitchiness of so much gay life. Isn’t that a kind of acting out that most of us engage in?”
“There’s another side to it, Henry.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I replied. “That’s why I came here. What is the other side?”
“I think what frightens people about us isn’t that we’re different but that we’re free, in a way.”
“Free? Free to do what? Use each other?”
“I’m not talking about the freedom to do what you want, but to be who you are. To act on your deepest self-knowledge. Almost everyone feels trapped in their lives, but they’re afraid to change. They’re afraid to know themselves. We are forced to know ourselves.”
“We’re not a bunch of bodhisattvas, Raymond,” I said. “Take a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard and tell me those boys are free.”
“I said we’ve been forced to know ourselves, I didn’t say we liked it. For most of us, that self-knowledge stops when we come out of the closet and then we build other closets. The ghettos. Addictions. Codependent relationships. Places to hide from ourselves. But the thing is,” he continued, “once you begin to know yourself, it’s very hard to stop the process for good. Even your killer must know somewhere in some corner of his mind that no matter how many gay men he kills, he will never kill the gay man inside.”
“But how many others will have to die before he sees that?” I asked.
From Reynolds’s office in Beverly Hills, I headed east on Sunset to Hollywood to meet Richie for lunch. In the rearview mirror was another police surveillance car. I’d been followed more or less constantly since being questioned about Alex’s death. Approaching La Brea, traffic came to a dead stop, though the distant signal light was green, entombing me in my car. Sunlight smeared the windshield. Car horns began their pointless cacophony. A toothless man in rags, carrying a cardboard sign that said WILL WORK FOR BEER pressed his sunbaked face against my window. I looked away and he moved on, weaving between the cars like one of the damned. A fragment of a poem passed through my head, “I myself am hell; nobody’s here.” Where was that from?
A horn blasted behind me. The road had cleared while I was trying to remember the poet. Robert Lowell. Part of that generation of poets who went crazy or killed themselves or both. Plath, Berryman, I put the gear and moved forward, winging the intersection as the light changed from yellow to red, turning north on La Brea toward Hollywood Boulevard. Off on the curb I saw the cause of the delay. Two paramedics were lifting a gurney into an ambulance. On the gurney was a body, covered with a bloodied sheet.
I pulled into a parking lot off Hollywood and walked to Richie’s office. A heat wave had descended on the city, causing an inversion. The smog hung in the motionless air, like the respiration of a great, unseen beast, a dirty veil that curtained the city and left its inhabitants to stew in their own filth. The sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard glittered with some shiny mineral ground into the concrete to suggest the sparkle of Hollywood, but the bronze stars of the “Walk of Fame” embedded in it were like gravestones. Across the street from Richie’s office, in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, tourists photographed each other standing in the footprints of dead stars. As I entered his building, I looked over my shoulder, but for now I’d eluded my police escort.
Except for the framed magazine covers that lined the walls of the reception room, the offices of L.A. Mode , from the industrial gray
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