Object of Desire. William J. Mann

and no doubt he thought what he’d said was funny and provocative. He probably thought it was something that Kelly hadn’t heard before, that he’d found the magic word that would entice the boy into his bed. I laughed to myself. No wonder drinks had been tossed in customers’ faces. Kelly was no doubt hit on all the time, always being treated like an object for the amusement of old men’s libidos. I remembered that feeling, standing on my box in my yellow thong. I had liked it at first, gotten off on the rush. But it had got old quickly, and by the end I had come to despise the men waving their cash, who thought a Benjamin could buy their way into my life. To this latest idiot, Kelly didn’t respond, didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow or crack a smile. He just moved on to the next person in line, leaving the humiliated man to slink away back into the crowd.

      “I’ll bet,” I said, turning to Thad, “that the recipients of the drinks in the faces deserved every drop they got.”

      “Perhaps,” Thad said, coming in close, “but I’d suggest, my dear Danny, that you use extreme caution when dealing with this particular boy. Oh, sure, he’s pretty to look at and endearingly sweet on first encounter, but beyond that beguiling surface, there is something not quite right.”

      I said nothing, just gave him a slight nod. I’d let him think I was taking his advice, at least for the time being. I wanted the conversation to end, and that was the best way to achieve my goal. Thad winked at me, then moved back among his guests.

      I leaned against the wall and trained my eyes on the bartender. Kelly. That was his name. Not a name I would have expected for him. In my mind, he was a Rick or a Tony or a Brad. But now I couldn’t imagine any other name for him. Kelly. As I watched him, I repeated his name in my mind. Kelly. Kelly. Kelly.

      I recalled Thad’s warning to Randall about that insipid little Jake Jones. I suspected that Thad Urquhart, no matter how much I had started to like him, was a fussy old man made nervous by the unpredictability of youth. Instead of exhilarating, he found it disquieting. Instead of wondrous, worrisome. But what he feared, I longed for. Suddenly I realized how much I craved the very volatility that Thad dreaded. Suddenly I was on fire for someone to take my staid, stale routine and turn it around, stand it on its head, shake it up the way Kelly shook his martinis.

      I wanted him.

      I stood there against the wall and watched him for some time, desiring him more and more with each passing minute, oblivious to everyone in the room but him. Finally—maybe after an hour, or even more—Frank found me and asked me if I was ready to go home. I wasn’t, not by a long shot. But I said I was.

      That night in bed, I touched a hot hand to Frank’s cold leg, made that way by bad circulation. He did not stir. Of course, he’d fallen soundly asleep as soon as the light was switched off, just as he always did. But I lay there wide awake for a very long time, staring up at the ceiling, just as I had on so many nights when I was a boy.

      WEST HOLLYWOOD

      It was one of those gray June days when the sun never appeared, when the whole city was wrapped in the dismal mist of delusion and disappointment, and the air had the bitter taste of stale coffee. And, to make everything worse, Randall was angry with me—furious, really—because I didn’t know who Mary Pickford was.

      “How can you claim to want to be an actor,” he admonished, “to want to be part of the whole great pantheon of Hollywood stars, and not even recognize the name of the woman who started it all?”

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just never heard of her.”

      We were standing in the forecourt of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, although Randall refused to call it by its name and insisted it was—and always would be—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, after the man who had built the place in the 1920s. In this, I deferred to Randall’s greater wisdom; after all, he was a native Angeleno and surely could impart some wisdom to this wanderer from New England. Pacing across the theater’s forecourt, gesturing up grandly at the exotic architecture, he regaled me with descriptions of the golden pagodas which spiked into the murky sky, the temple bells and the Heaven Dogs which had been imported from mainland China in the heyday of silent-movie opulence. But for me, it was the floor of the forecourt that held more interest, those names and footprints imprinted in the cement, dotted with old wads of chewing gum and scuffed by decades of shoes and sneakers. And yet even still, I had to admit that the signature over which I was currently standing, scrawled under especially petite footprints in the cement, meant absolutely nothing to me.

      “Mary Pickford was the first true superstar,” Randall said. “She was huge. The whole world knew her. And then she went on to found United Artists. None of this—none of Hollywood—would be here today if not for her.”

      “Is she still alive?”

      “No.” Randall stooped down and brushed away an M&M’s wrapper from Pickford’s slab. “She died a few years ago. They gave her a special Oscar toward the end. It was the least they could do.”

      He sighed as he stood up.

      “This town does not appreciate its history,” he said, still acting grand, the way he often did when he tried to pretend he was many years my senior instead of just eleven months. “Look around you. This was once the thriving downtown of the American movie industry. Gala premieres were held here, at this theater. Searchlights swept across the sky, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn all stepping out of limousines.”

      Not far from where we stood, a homeless man was urinating against the side of the building. The acrid smell quickly permeated the thick, muggy air, and we had to move away. Closer to the road, an Asian prostitute with dyed blond hair was adjusting her fishnet stockings, balancing precariously on stiletto heels, her flat ass barely covered by a faded pair of hip-hugging denim shorts. A couple of times she glanced our way, but she must have pegged us as gay, because she just smirked and went on walking.

      Randall shook his head. “Pickford once said, ‘What a tawdry monument we left behind.’” He gestured down the street at the tattoo parlors and porn shops and shuddered.

      I thought he was being melodramatic. Hollywood Boulevard was seedy, no doubt about that, but it was nothing compared to Times Square. You could get stabbed standing in Times Square. For a while, I’d taken the train in from Connecticut to audition for shows in New York, and I’d always been on my guard walking through Times Square. That was not even considering the seedy neighborhoods Mom had dragged me to in her relentless search for Becky. As tawdry as Miss Pickford might have found all this, I didn’t feel I was going to get stabbed in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

      Glancing down at the cement, I smiled. “Hey, here are some names I recognize,” I said to Randall. “Darth Vader and R-two-D-two.”

      He rolled his eyes. “That was a travesty. Imagine putting mechanical footprints alongside Betty Grable.”

      “Who’s she?”

      Randall clenched a fist in front of my face. “You will be lucky to make it home in one piece, you ignoramus.”

      I laughed. What would I do without Randall?

      I’d woken up that morning in a funk, in a gray mood that matched the day. It was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Hollywood, and I had yet to land one job, one lousy commercial, in all that time. Randall had set about giving me a pep talk, telling me I needed acting lessons and vocal training, that I couldn’t just hop off the bus and expect to be “discovered.” That might have happened to Lana Turner, who was supposedly spotted sitting on a stool at Schwab’s drugstore. But it sure didn’t happen that way anymore.

      “Who’s Lana Turner?” I’d asked.

      So that was why he’d dragged me here, to Hollywood Boulevard. It was a crash course in film history. We’d already been to the Paramount gate and were still planning to drive out to Culver City to see what was left of MGM. Randall blathered on and on that if I wanted to be an actor, I needed to see the great films—Intolerance and Greed and The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane and All About Eve—not waste my time watching