Object of Desire. William J. Mann

or else I’d be jacking off to video porn on the new VCR we had both chipped in to buy.

      “Maybe,” I ventured as we walked over the footprints of John Wayne, “I’m not meant to be an actor.”

      Randall spun on me. “Oh, sure. You’re just going to give up. Just like that. Why don’t you climb up on the Hollywood sign and end it all? Jump to your death like Peg Entwhistle, the failed starlet of the thirties.”

      I sneered. “I’m just saying I’ve been trying for almost three years now. First, in New York, and now here. Maybe I should get a job. Or go back to school.”

      I was thinking of my father, and that last conversation we’d had. It wasn’t going to be easy, Dad had told me, and he’d been right about that. He’d been worried about me. Sitting opposite him in the little reception area of my grandmother’s nursing home, I could see that clearly. I could see his concern for me in the way he creased his brow and in the lines that formed around his eyes. Not in a very long time had I seen that look on him, at least not directed at me. When Becky disappeared, my parents stopped worrying about me. Sometimes I said things like “I’m going to learn to skydive” or “I’m going to visit a friend who has malaria” just to see if they had any reaction. They never did. They didn’t even hear me. But the day I told Dad I was moving to L.A., he sat down opposite me and nearly began to cry. From his wallet, he pulled out a hundred dollars, handing it over to me with trembling hands and telling me to say nothing about it to Mom. It was money that could have been used in the search for Becky, and I felt guilty taking it.

      I knew what my father feared. I knew why he’d almost cried. Dad had never understood my being gay. He thought it meant a life of seedy sex in back rooms—and since arriving in L.A., I’d done my best to prove him right, to ensure that all his fears would come true. Eventually, Edgar had worn me down. Many a night over the last several months, I’d gone home with customers he brought backstage to meet me, and the money I earned letting them blow me I split with my pimp sixty-forty. Just as Edgar had predicted, the tips I pulled out of my thong were no longer enough. I needed more money because I needed more clothes and more cigarettes and especially more blow, and Edgar, no fool, was no longer as generous in offering it. So I ended up having sex with him, too, even though I felt certain he was lying when he said he didn’t have AIDS.

      “You need to get serious about what it is you want,” Randall was telling me, for the four thousandth time, as we walked into the theater’s enclosed courtyard. “I want to come here someday and look down and see Danny Fortunato inscribed in this cement.”

      I shook my head. “I don’t have your sense of purpose, Randall.”

      He just shrugged, but he knew it was true. Randall was a serious medical student. Very serious. He’d stay up late at night diagramming molecular theories or some such thing, papers stuck all over the walls with Scotch tape, lines and arrows and words that made no sense to me scrawled everywhere with a blue felt-tip pen. Why he hung around me, vagabond that I was, I was never quite sure. Why he allowed me—a go-go boy with a mounting need to snort prodigious amounts of white powder up his nose—to remain as his roommate had never made sense. “I’ve gotten used to you,” was all he’d say. He promised never to kick me out so long as I never lied to him. But I broke that promise not an hour after I’d made it, when he asked me if I was still doing coke, and I told him no.

      “Of course, you have my sense of purpose,” Randall said, trying to convince himself as much as me. “You got on a bus and traveled three thousand miles to come here. You left behind everything you knew, your entire family and all your friends—because you wanted to follow your dream.”

      Was that the way it had happened? Sometimes I told the story that way myself, and I believed it, too.

      But that wasn’t how it had been.

      Randall hadn’t seen me waiting tables at Friendly’s in the south end of Hartford, saving my tips in a glass jar to make train fare into New York. I’d tell my boss I was heading into the city to audition and that, fingers crossed, I might not be coming back, but then, when I got there, I’d just wander around Greenwich Village, not knowing where to go or who to meet. I’d wind up tricking with some guy in a fifth-floor walk-up studio on Bleecker Street with no air-conditioning, slapping away the cockroaches that crawled up my legs in his bed.

      Oh, there were a few real auditions from time to time. Occasionally, I’d read about a Broadway casting call and I’d show up, sometimes even getting in to read a line or two. But mostly, I’d just shuffle around outside on the sidewalk, my hands stuffed down into the pockets of my corduroy pants. I’d look at the other actor wannabes and conclude I’d never make it, never get past them, that they were all superior to me.

      And that was why eventually I headed to Los Angeles, why I quit my job at Friendly’s and decided to board that cross-country bus. Because I came to realize that the ambition that burned so deep and so fierce inside me could never be released so close to home, so near the scene of my failures. It could only be unleashed here, far away from all that, in a world I could make entirely my own. It was as if by stepping off that Peter Pan bus in downtown Los Angeles, I was no longer Danny Fortunato of East Hartford, Connecticut, the son of my parents. I was no longer the boy who’d forgotten he was entitled to dream.

      But what were dreams, really? Wisps of smoke. Flickers of imagination that popped up late at night, waking me from sleep. How real they seemed at 2:00 a.m. when I was half awake. In those moments I could really believe I was on the stage, basking in applause, or that I was starring in my own TV show, running up to collect my third Emmy Award—or discovering Becky in the backyard, at her easel, painting the sunset, and calling to Mom that I’d found her, I’d found Becky, just as she’d asked me to do.

      Dreams. Even three thousand miles, I realized, weren’t enough to distance me from the enormity of my failures. Except, of course, when I snorted that wonderful, magical powder up my nose. A dream powder, really. I’d get up on my box and swing my slender hips to the music, really believing that someday I’d be somebody, that someday I’d matter, and this—this!—was the way to make it happen.

      “He’s cute.”

      I lifted my gaze from the pavement. Randall was nodding toward two men standing across the courtyard. I narrowed my eyes to make them out.

      I recognized one of them.

      “Randall,” I whispered. “That guy.”

      “I know. He’s hot. Looks wealthy in that seersucker suit.”

      “Not him.” Randall was, of course, looking at the older of the two, the one with the possibility of a hefty bank account. I was looking at his companion.

      It was Mr. Tight Tee. The teacher. The guy who had never shown up again when he said he would.

      “It’s Frank,” I said to Randall. I had never forgotten his name.

      “Oh, dear.” Randall looked at me. “Not the one you were completely obsessed with for three weeks, always looking around to see if he was in the bar?”

      “He’s so beautiful,” I said, staring at him.

      And he was. Absolutely beautiful. I watched him as he moved about the courtyard, pointing out to his friend various names and footprints in the cement. His biceps were still as round as melons, stretching the short sleeves of his lime green Izod shirt. His butt was equally as round and hard, framed perfectly in his beige, high-waisted Z. Cavaricci pants. I couldn’t help but stare. And then he must have sensed he was being watched. He looked over at me with those bright green eyes.

      “Go say hi to him,” Randall said.

      “No,” I said, frozen in place.

      “He sees you looking. Go say hi.”

      “Why should I? I mean, he never came back to see me, so he’s clearly not interested.”

      Randall shrugged. “You don’t know that. Maybe something came up.”

      I took Randall’s arm and turned both of us