Michael Nava - Goldenboy

“That’s not my business.”

“I just mean, you’re out and everything.”

“I learned pretty early on that I’m not a good liar. That’s all there is to my being out.”

He lowered his eyes. “It’s not like I like lying,” he said, softly.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You don’t have to like me, Henry,” he said, suddenly. Our eyes met and I felt his sadness. Or maybe I felt my own. “You didn’t come to talk about me, anyway. You want to know about Jim.”

The waiter brought our drinks. I paid for them over Josh’s protests. “What about him?”

He churned his drink with a straw. “It’s something I found out after he tried to kill himself. I was hanging around the bar at the Yellowtail one night and the bartender asked me to dump the trash. He gave me the bar key to the back door. It was new.”

“New?” I echoed.

“Uh-huh. I asked him what happened to the old one and he said it had disappeared months ago. The next day I went through work orders and stuff and I found this.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and extracted a piece of paper, handing it to me.

I examined it. It was a receipt from a locksmith for the making of a key. The receipt was dated less than a week after the night Brian Fox was murdered. I handed it back to Josh.

“You think the missing key has something to do with Brian’s death?”

He folded the paper. “You’d need it to get out,” he said.

I thought about this. “You think there was someone back there before Brian came in?”

He nodded.

“Kind of a strange coincidence,” I said.

“There’s a strongbox down in the manager’s office,” Josh said. “Someone could’ve cleaned it out and let himself out through the back door.”

“A burglary?” I was interested, suddenly, in the missing key. “And Brian just happened to be there. Had the strongbox been tampered with?”

Josh shook his head. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t try.” He shivered and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. The fire cast a flickering light on his face.

“The problem is that they found Jim with the knife,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be any way around that.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said too quickly and gulped his drink.

I looked at him. He hadn’t asked me here to tell me about the key. Then why? To let me know about himself?

“Still,” I said, “I’ll have my investigator look into it.”

“That skinny black guy?”

“Yes. Freeman Vidor. He talked to you, didn’t he?”

Josh frowned. “Yeah. I’m going to get another drink. You want one?”

“No.” He got up and started for the bar. “Josh,” I said, “are you trying to get drunk?”

He sat down again and looked at me. “I could’ve told you about the key on the phone,” he said, then added awkwardly, “I just really wanted to see you again.”

I looked at him. “Why?”

“I’ve seen you before,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Two years ago you gave a speech at a rally at UCLA against the sodomy law. Remember?”

“I gave so many speeches that year,” I said apologetically. He smiled. “I remember. Afterwards I came up and shook your hand.” The smile faded and he looked at me gravely. “You gave me the courage to be who I am. But it didn’t last.”

“Few of us come out all at once,” I said, gently. “It’s not the easiest thing to do.”

He shook his head and frowned. “I never came out at all.” “We are at a gay bar,” I said.

“It’s easy to come out in a bar,” he said, “or in bed.” A shadow crossed his face.

“Are you all right?”

He stared down at his hands and said, “No.”

There was a lot of pain in the little word. He grabbed my hand, clutching it tightly.

“What is it, Josh?” I asked.

He drew a shaky breath. “My life’s a lie,” he said. “No one knows who I really am, not my friends or my folks. I can’t live this way anymore.”

Suddenly I thought of Jim Pears. “Don’t say that,” I said sharply.

He let go of my hand and looked away from me.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a voice at the edge of tears. “I admire you so much. I wanted you to like me.”

“I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just when you said you couldn’t live this way, it made me think of Jim.”

“If it wasn’t for me, he would be all right,” Josh said. “You’re taking the blame for a lot,” I replied.

“If I’d told him I was gay — “ he began.

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “His denial was too deep.”

Josh tipped his head back against the fence. The light from the doorway of the bar shone on his face and cast a sort of halo around his hair.

“Is that true?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He inclined his face toward me. “But you still don’t like me.”

“You lied to me about where you were the night Brian was killed.”

Someone dropped a glass and it shattered near the firepit. “I wasn’t anywhere near the restaurant,” he said.

“But you didn’t tell me the truth.”

He rose from the bench and stood irresolutely. “I told you,” he said, looking toward the bar. “My life’s a lie.”

He made a move to go.

“Wait,” I said.

His look was disbelieving. “You want me to stay?”

“You asked me here to come out to me,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy. I did a lot of harm to Jim by not listening to him. I don’t want to make the same mistake with you.” He sat down.

“So,” I continued, “you want to talk?”

He shook his head. “No, I want you to come home with me.”

I smiled. “You need a friend, Josh, not another trick.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything to you to mean something to me.”

“That’s not the point.”

He touched my hand. “Are we really going to sit here and talk about this?

I looked up at him, saw my face reflected in his glasses and saw past my reflection into his eyes. A waiter came up and asked us if we wanted another drink.

“No,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

Josh lived in Hollywood on a decayed street lined alternately with boxy apartment buildings and little stucco houses whose front yards doubled as driveways. The squalor was softened by the big elm trees that lined the road and the wild rose bushes still putting forth their flowers four weeks before Christmas. I lowered my window as I followed his car down the street. Mariachi music blared from one of the houses where four men squatted on the front lawn guzzling beer. Lights were on in every house, though it was now near two in the morning.

Josh flicked his signal and turned into the carport of a twostory apartment building. I pulled up along the curb and got out of my car. He met me at the sidewalk. It was cold. Behind us, in the Hollywood Hills, the lights flickered like distant stars. The big emptiness of the night was like a stage as we stood in the grainy light of a streetlamp looking at each other. In the darkness, I smelled jasmine.

“This is it,” he said, nervously.

I put my arm around his shoulders, and felt the tension in his neck seep out as he leaned into me.

“You’re cold,” I observed, touching his face with the back of my hand.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

He led me around to a tall gate, through it, and up a concrete staircase to the second floor landing. “The place is kind of a mess,” he said, unlocking the door.

He held the door open for me. The room I found myself in was, in fact, quite tidy. There was a fake Oriental rug on a fake parquet floor. A shabby couch flanked by two sling armchairs, and a glass-topped coffee table furnished the place. One wall was taken up by wooden bookshelves crammed with books. A stereo and a small tv were set on a couple of orange crates filled with records.