“So I gather.” The plants in the little pots were herbs: rosemary, basil, mint, and a couple I couldn’t identify. They gave the air near the sink a pungency that clashed pleasantly with the coffee.
Jack’s stool shifted behind me. “What do you know about us?”
I turned to look at him. “Who’s ‘us’?”
He made a circling motion, index finger down, as though stirring the air in the apartment. “Us.”
“You’re a, what, a hot line.”
“Safe sex,” he said. “Through the ear, like the Holy Ghost’s words to Mary. Did you know that Mary was impregnated through the ear?”
I pressed a leaf between thumb and forefinger and inhaled the dark, sweet green-clove scent of basil. “Sounds uncomfortable.”
“We’re more than a hot line. We’re also a dating service. Not-so-safe sex, but people are people. They’ve got to take their own precautions.”
“You’re First-Class Male, too?” I asked.
He nodded. “And we’re a computer bulletin board. Something Fine Online.” He looked dissatisfied. “Got to work on that name,” he said.
“So tell me about this,” I said. I licked the basil from my fingertips and pulled the folded newspaper from my pocket. Jack peered across the kitchen at it.
“Our ads,” he said, sounding satisfied. He got up and held out a hand, and I passed the page to him. “Designed them myself on the computer. That’s the Nite Line. Comes out once a week, on Monday. It’s a bar rag. Lots of little ads.” He turned the page over and ran a thumb over the classifieds. “Like these. All these beautiful, sensitive, lonely young men, desperately seeking a soulmate. Preferably a soulmate with many credit cards.”
“Not on the level,” I said.
“About as much as the sex ads in the straight papers. Hustlers, mostly, or old fatties pretending to be twenty-four and buffed up. Sad stuff. Where’d you get this?”
“It was Max’s. It’s what brought me here.”
Jack’s eyes widened briefly. “Max? Max had this?”
“Not what you’d expect?”
“Not bloody hardly. Max found his kids on the street, where he could see they were desperation cases. Plenty of kids on the pavement these days. One side of the economy the Times rarely sees fit to cover.”
“So why would he have the paper?”
He refolded it along the sharp creases, looking at me. “God knows. He had his hands full as it was, between his lost kids, Christy, and the service.”
I was getting confused. “Which service?”
“The computer service. Something Fine Online. I thought that’s why you were here.”
“I’m just blundering around,” I said, “chasing lines in the Nite Line.”
Jack jerked his head over his shoulder. “Come on. So your day shouldn’t be a complete loss. I’ll show you a new side of Max.”
We went through the living room, where angel’s flight seemed to have struck: All the phones were silent, and the young men sat staring into the middle distance, gathering their energies for the next erotically charged encounter. One of them was doing a crossword puzzle. Jack led me down a hallway hung with a few small and unconvincing Dali lithographs, mostly watches that seemed to have collided with pizzas, and into a bedroom where a tower-model desktop computer hummed away on a huge desk made from two tables placed end to end. The setup covered an entire wall. Multiple-tiered in and out baskets screwed to the wall held stacks of modems, their red lights blinking like the eyes of animals in a Disney forest. Four screens were filled with flying text, scrolling almost too rapidly to be read.
“About thirty online at the moment,” Jack said, eyeing the modems. “What do you know about how this works?”
I’d come up against a bulletin board before, a particularly vile heterosexual meat market where children were the merchandise. “People call in on their computers and talk to each other in real time, using their keyboards, or leave messages for each other.” It didn’t sound very expert. “I guess all boards are different, though.”
“All boards are exactly the same, at least as far as the hardware and software go,” Jack said. “It’s the wetware that makes them different.”
“Wetware.”
“The people.” He gestured at the screen, at the ribbon of words. “Boards are neutral, just like a TV set or a telephone line, until you add in the human factor. This is a gay board. Most everybody on it is gay, they live in the local calling area, and they give it its distinguishing characteristics, which is to say they make it a West Hollywood gay board, lots of jokes, lots of industry talk, lots of jokey, horny e-mail. And, naturally, a psychic flavor, since this is probably the only city in America where psychics outnumber real people.”
“And that’s where Max-”
“Not entirely. Close, though.” He seated himself at the computer and did something fast and practiced. “Look here,” he said.
TALK TO THE THERAPIST glowed in the middle of the largest screen.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Max?”
“Therapist and psychic,” Jack said. “All-around emotional handyman. Some of the strangest questions you ever read. That was one of the things I loved about him: Nothing struck him as weird. If someone said to him that he needed his aura fluffed, Max would have figured out a way to fluff the man’s aura. He dealt with some pretty disgusting stuff here, too, but Max never got disgusted.”
“Nothing human disgusts me,” I said.
Jack gave me a skeptical glance. “Or Max.”
“That’s a Tennessee Williams line,” I said. “Actually, I disgust fairly easily.”
On the screen, I read:
I’m thirty-eight years old, and lately I’ve been fantasizing sex with women. My dreams are totally peculiar, but I wake up with a big woody anyway. My lover is beginning to suspect something is wrong. Do you think you can help?
Beneath it was the Therapist’s-Max’s-reply:
You lucky boy. It’s a new world. Don’t be afraid of facing it. Look at it this way: It doubles the number of possibles. Anyway, it may only be a phase. I’d suggest that you talk to your lover about it. He might actually like it if you suggested he run down to Victoria’s Secret and buy a little-
Beside me, Jack gave a kind of gasp, like someone exhaling a knot.
— peignoir or something. Of course -
“Holy Jesus,” Jack said, and I swiveled to look at the screen in front of him. Words were scrolling past, black on the white display. Jack turned wide eyes to me and put a hand over the screen as though it were emitting heat.
“It’s from Max,” he said.
8 ~ Eat at Mom’s
There’s a lot of money in Boys’ Town.
The recently incorporated city of West Hollywood nestles up against the southern base of the Hollywood Hills, where tidy little hillside chateaus begin around $750,000 and climb into the double-digit millions. Lots of people from the entertainment industry-agents, directors, actors, writers, producers, poseurs, parasites, Picassos of the pitch-drive down the hills in the morning and up them again in the evening, where they join their new Iranian neighbors in worrying about fire all summer and mudslides all winter.
The north-south streets, streets like Miller Drive and Sunset Plaza Drive, empty into the Sunset Strip. If you think of Boys’ Town as a sort of cultural toupee planted cosmetically onto the map of Los Angeles, the Strip would be the part in the hair, dividing the hills from the flatland. It’s the thoroughfare the white people from Beverly Hills use to go east in the morning in their Rolls-Royces and Mercedes, passing the brown people from Central America going west on the bus to clean houses and tend other people’s children.
The shops along this section of Sunset are small and precious, selling imported flowers, new furniture that’s been artfully slammed with chains to make it look old, designer outfits with exotic sequins, designer shoes, designer sound equipment, and designer everything else. Alternating with the shops are a great many sidewalk cafes that cater to young, slender, aggressively attractive types who toss their hair back a lot. People who spend several hundred dollars a month on their hair want it to glimmer, and it’s hard to make hair glimmer when the sunlight striking it seems to have passed through an ocean of iced tea. So they sit there in the beige sunshine and toy with their Caesar salads and toss their hair back whenever they sense a stray sunbeam. Or, at night, a headlight.