I was standing outside the theater with Redford after the show, mingling with what was left of the crowd. It was a cold, late-fall evening in the Pacific Northwest and I was surrounded by people half my age. I’d rather have been in bed, reading a book or bingeing a cooking show, but instead I beamed my thousand-megawatt smile (okay, I probably wasn’t capable of generating one that bright anymore) for a selfie with some random stranger.
No, wait, I’m sorry, that’s not right. A lovely young fan.
“Oh, my god, thank you so much,” the woman said. What was she, twenty, twenty-three? She had that kind of flawless, porcelain skin people I used to know paid a premium to either maintain or to acquire. But I could tell it was the sort of thing she took for granted, like the way she assumed that being young and attractive and able to withstand a cold evening in little more than a child-sized t-shirt and torn jeans was something her body would be able to maintain in perpetuity. Still, there was something about her…energy? Her eagerness to spread a little kindness to an out-of-work actor she just happened to recognize, that reminded me what a gift it is to meet a fan. A real fan. In fact, just being near her had lifted my spirits, made my situation a little less… what’s the word for it? Undesirable. I felt seen. I felt that surge of dopamine that had made so much of my life as an actor worthwhile. “My mom used to be, like, such a huge fan of yours when she was younger. She just turned the big four-five and is super depressed her life is, like, over.”
I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t expect such a brutal flurry of emotional bodyblows from this one. I guess it’s true: words can hurt. When a person half your age indirectly points out that she thinks of you as someone who’ll soon be dead, on top of her estimation of you being a has-been—at least in terms of her mother’s fandom—it stings.
So, to keep myself from saying what I really wanted to say—that her no-longer-young mother and I were the same age, that people don’t whither up and die the second they turn forty—I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough that my eyes began to water. She thought I was getting emotional and, to her credit, attempted to staunch the bleeding from the wound she inadvertently opened. But she just ended up doing more damage.
“She’s gonna be so excited I met you and your super-cute boyfriend,” she said. “I think older guys make better boyfriends, don’t you?”
She cocked her head to the side and waited for me to say something. To agree with her, maybe? I was well aware my D-list celebrity status meant I couldn’t actually berate a “fan,” much less yank her phone from her hand and delete the photo. Or just smash the fucking thing. You know, give her the full Sean Penn Combo Deal, the Deluxe Alec Baldwin with Cheese. Besides, for all I knew she had already uploaded the selfie to Instagram or Snapchat or God knows what other platform I’m not on and have never even heard of.
I looked over at Redford, my supposed boyfriend. He wasn’t smiling, but then again, he wasn’t not smiling, either. He had a case of perma-smirk. I think it was what you’d call a resting shitface. “Him? He’s not my boyfriend,” I told her.
“Are you, like, waiting for him, then? I hope you’re not waiting too long, it’s so cold out here.” She hugged herself to emphasize that last bit.
“Nope, I’m not waiting for anyone. Because I don’t have a boyfriend. Because I’m not actually gay.”
“Really? But I thought...”
“It’s okay, really. You’re not the first to think that.”
“Well, whatever. You two are awfully cute together. Maybe, I don’t know, like, think about it?”
“Oh, I will definitely do that,” I said and smiled again. I waved my hand as the daughter of a once-young, former fan of mine turned and walked down the street, probably to an older boyfriend who’s never even heard of me either. “Okay then, bye-bye.”
“You should really charge for that kind of thing, Jones,” Redford said. “Fifty bucks a pop for a photo, a hundred for a video. You could say, ‘Happy Birthday, Dennis!’ or ‘Great job at that little league game, Jimmy!’ Some shit like that. I bet you’d do pretty well. Not great, but okay. Like the guy who played that prick robot on Star Trek. I bet he does pretty well.”
In the light of sodium lamps lining the streets of Hilltop, Redford looked like a fifty-something lycanthropic truck-stop attendant. His presence—that craggy face layered beneath massive mutton-chop sideburns, and those cold, blue, unblinking eyes—was enough to discourage many a Seattle ex-pat from moving to Tacoma, to be another tech-money-infused gentrifier looking to score big on some Hilltop real estate while it was still cheap. Well, cheap enough for someone pulling down six or seven figures a year.
“Look at me,” I said, “free photo with former-famous guy is about all I have to offer. I start charging people for pictures, no one’s gonna want one anymore.”
“So it’s a win-win. Either you make a few bucks, buy me dinner—keep a little something for yourself—or sorority girls don’t bother you in some desperate attempt to impress their mothers who didn’t love ‘em enough in the first place... or whatever.”
As he often did, Redford seemed to make a good point out of a lot of nonsense. Lately, I’d begun to wonder what it was that kept me from acting more like Redford: comfortable with myself, not obsessed with the obsolescence awaiting me. Already half-consuming me. Redford’s outsized sense of satisfaction with his achievements (which were minor, but perhaps no less significant than my own) was overshadowed by the pleasure he derived in recounting them for strangers again and again. Even his (petty) grievances, like the claim that he was the true, sole author of “Detachable Penis”—which King Missile rode to a cultish kind of fame while I was still in high school, nearly three decades ago—somehow underlined this notion of his having lived a well-lived life. The man had stories to tell. As an incredibly popular local musician, he had a face and a name people knew and wanted to remember. All I had was the persona of a quirky television character who had long since been remanded to the mold-ridden basement of popular culture called syndication. This idealized version of myself was on a rather precipitous decline, one that pushed me further and further from the public’s collective consciousness and solidified my self-imposed exile from the business we call show.
I first met Redford on the road to Puyallup. (This was seven years ago, back in 2014 when I’d just moved back to Tacoma from L.A. with my tail tucked between my legs, having failed to land even a supporting role in, well, anything for about three years.) He was thumbing for a ride and had this greasy tan duffle bag slung over his left shoulder. Under his right arm was what looked like a piece of wood with the word HEART on it. Turns out, Redford had been busy that morning; he’d cut the heart out of an anti-abortion billboard so that it read: ABORTION STOPS A BEATING. I still can’t say what compelled me to stop, to pick up this complete stranger—one who recognized me right away (I’ll say it again. It is always nice to meet a fan)—but I’ll say that the decision changed my life. In a lot of ways, I feel like he found me.
Since neither one of us had anything to do that day (a fairly common occurrence), we spent the afternoon in a coffee shop on the North side of town shooting the shit before we made our way downtown, on a kind of impromptu dive-bar crawl. He seemed genuinely interested in me, in my having been a regular staple on an honest to god hit television series. He peppered me with questions about how the industry worked, what my process was as an actor, how I found my character, and what it was like working with a new director almost every week. Most people I meet want to know gossip about other, more prominent celebrities who may or may not have been in my orbit at the time. It meant a lot to me that this strange, wolf-like man wanted to get to know me, the real me, and not to get some vicarious thrill off my tenuous proximity to famous people roughly a thousand miles away.
It wasn’t until we hit the third dive bar, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place (ironically?) called The Crown that I found out Redford’s locally sourced fame surpassed my own. I was embarrassed to say the least, talking about myself all afternoon while presuming him to be nothing more than a fan. But he didn’t play it like that. If anything, he propped me up, announced to everyone who I was—who I used to be. I appreciated it. It felt good. The adoration. Even if it was filtered through Redford. Even if it was plainly obvious he was using my fame to augment his own. All in all, we hit it off pretty well. And while I’m loathe to say it for reasons that will soon become clear, it felt like the greatest blind date in the history of blind dates.
After that, the two of us settled into a kind of friendly rivalry. We were a couple of old attention whores, living off residuals and spending our days seeking that dopamine hit of recognition and adulation, which was becoming increasingly hard to come by. We’ve had our fair share of adventures, sure. “The French Fry Ghost,” “The Misshapen Croissant,” and “The Waiter Who Served Us Toilet Water” all come to mind (and you can read about them in my forthcoming (i.e., never to be finished) memoir, which is tentatively titled, I Find Your Existence Intolerable.)
I suppose I’d been looking for a fresh start in Tacoma, a chance to be the star of my own story. I’d devoted nearly a decade of my life to amassing a small fan base and even smaller fortune co-starring as Rutherford Beulah, the sassy and possibly gay (but that was never confirmed in the series proper) medical examiner on The Aesthetician’s Daughter, a procedural crime drama that ran for eight seasons on CBS. I was still cashing fairly sizable residual checks some ten years after the show aired its final episode in 2011. Not enough for me to continue living in Los Angeles (or even Seattle), but all things considered, I was doing pretty well for a guy whose professional ambition had evaporated along with his career.
Redford, on the other hand, was a lot of things I was not. He was the toughest guy I’d ever met. He could drink a gallon of milk in under ten minutes, and, long before I met him, he had already been a preteen arsonist, a drug store model, and, because he refused to let anyone forget, the alleged writer of “Detachable Penis.” To back this up, Redford frequently pointed to his status as the former frontman of Pig Hooves on Porcelain and Tacos at the Yard Sale, bands with which he’d achieved success similar to that of King Missile around the same time, albeit mostly regionally.
I can’t say I totally believed him, but I also can’t say he was lying. He was my friend and I did him the courtesy of trying to take what he said at face value. If something didn’t add up, I would just let the mystery endure. Like when we were walking back to my place on the Fourth of July, enjoying the gloom of dejected revelers and drunken, explosion-loving hicks booing the city’s failed fireworks display, and he told me he’d pulled an inside job, a heist on the blasting caps that would have facilitated the city-wide spectacle, I had asked Redford why he was the way he was, and he said, “I grew up in a family without a swimming pool.” That was the last time I ever asked him a question like that.
Despite my having just been accosted by a twenty-something convinced I had one foot in the grave, Redford and I still mingled among a small group of hangers-on who had gathered outside Press ESC, the now-defunct escape room that had been converted into a live-music venue. We’d just seen I Don’t Know, Margo!, who were okay, I guess. They had good energy onstage and a couple of their songs, “Beleaguered Robot” and “Dryager (the Dry-Aging Fridge),” had playlist potential. They reminded me a little of bands I listened to in high school—Superchunk and The Refreshments, and maybe a little bit of The Faith Healers and My Bloody Valentine.
It had been hard for me to completely enjoy the concert, though. For one thing, it was really loud and people kept shouting at me to move, saying I was too tall, that I was blocking them from recording the show on their phones. That was annoying, sure, but it’s not what really bothered me. What really bugged me was seeing Wilson, the band’s lead singer, come so close to achieving actual success. He and I recently had a falling out when I accompanied Redford to Wilson’s house a few months ago. (Wilson had inherited a six-bedroom Spanish Revival in North Tacoma when his mother died. He used the rest of the money she’d left him to record and promote I Don’t Know, Margo!’s debut album, The Donut Man of Wilfordshire.) Redford and Wilson were sitting together at a glossy white grand piano, singing “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” (Frasier was a major touchstone for them both, and, they assumed, because I used to work in television, that it was a big deal for me too). I was on the floor sipping a warm Diet Dr. Pepper Wilson had pulled from a gym bag. There wasn’t any furniture in the house other than the grand piano. Not a couch, not a loveseat, not even a folding chair.
The lack of furniture had been perplexing, but who was I to say what was normal for a guy like Wilson? I kept my mouth shut. It was a feat I managed until Wilson started talking about how he knew a guy who was looking to sell a rhinoceros, and that he was thinking about buying the beast. Wilson was either lying or he actually knew a guy who trafficked in endangered animals—I didn’t really care. What bothered me was the way Wilson pronounced “rhinoceros,” like it was a hyphenate. He pronounced everything after rhino as “ess-aeros,” so it came out “rhino-ess-aeros.” At that point, I just had to say something.
We don’t need to get into the particulars. Words were exchanged, obviously. We both said some things I’m sure we neither regret. I was accused of mansplaining. I told Wilson it’s not mansplaining if we’re both men. He said that shouldn’t matter. I accused him of appropriating another gender’s grievances. He told me to not take another goddamned sip of his Diet Dr. Pepper. I did anyway. Things between me and Wilson were pretty tense ever since
***
The small group outside Press ESC was already well acquainted with Redford, and some knew of me—or they had enough passing knowledge of The Aesthetician’s Daughter to smile and nod in polite recognition—so it was no surprise that Redford and I were invited for post-show drinks at the Camp Bar, a summer-camp-themed pseudo dive bar a few blocks away. Redford graciously accepted the invitation on behalf of us both. And while the idea of drinking myself into oblivion with a bunch of twenty-somethings, whose stars were on a more convincingly upward trajectory than mine maybe ever had been, sounded about as appealing as sitting next to my father, glassy-eyed and speechless, watching a video of his most recent colonoscopy (true story), I smiled and said it sounded like fun.
It didn’t really matter; I was otherwise preoccupied with the prospect of calling Quincy, my ex-girlfriend, about an article in Jezebel I assumed she—or someone on her PR team—had leaked. It was a puff piece about her and her new boyfriend that not only suggested she and I were never actually an item, but that after The Aesthetician’s Daughter ended, I had begun living in exile in the Pacific Northwest with some strange man.
It was a phone call I had been putting off for the better part of the day.
The walk to the bar was short, which made it easier for me to maintain a respectable distance from Wilson and his entourage, which had swallowed Redford whole and didn’t spit him back out again until we were inside the bar. By the time I caught sight of him again, Redford had already ordered a round of Coors Extra Gold (in cans) and shots of whiskey for everyone in the bar. Wilson handed me a can, along with a nod and a curt, “Vernon,” in lieu of an actual “Hello.” Wilson insisted on calling me by my first name, even though everyone else called me Jones. I once asked him whether Wilson was his first or last name and he told me it was just Wilson, like Madonna or Cher. I asked him what about Seal? He said that was different, that it wasn’t a real moniker; it was a showy stage name. “It lacks authenticity, Vernon,” he’d said.
The group sat down at a long table with our drinks. Wilson pulled Redford into the seat next to him, so that he was flanked by a handful of I Don’t Know, Margo! fans and the drummer, Annie. Annie had just flashed me one of those genuine smiles of recognition that faded into what I interpreted as a knowing smugness, possibly related to her and Wilson’s successful heist of my only friend, and possibly related to what I assumed was her knowledge of the dismal state of my personal and professional affairs.
With no other seats available, I sidled up next to the bassist. I figured the bassist, with his menial, minor-third position within the group dynamic, would lift my spirits. I’m sure he was used to being in close proximity to talent and stardom. In other words, I was pretty sure he would be grateful for my company.
“Good show tonight. You like King Missile or The Faith Healers?” I asked.
“I have no fucking idea who that is,” the bassist said, without looking up from his phone. An unlit, hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his lips. He was really texting up a storm. After a second, his thumb stopped moving, and he said, “Hey, man, how do you spell Sphincter? Is it S-P-H-Y-N-C-T-E-R? Or is there a G in it? My auto-correct keeps changing it to Sphinx.”
“An I instead of the Y, and no G,” I said, “Just like Leon Sphincter.”
“Leon Sphincter? Is that a thing? Is that a real person?”
“You bet it is,” I said and looked around the bar. “He’s probably here tonight. Retired in Tacoma after he lost that fight with Mike Tyson.”
The bassist looked at me for a second, not quite ready to believe or disbelieve what I’d said. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean your face, it looks really familiar.”
“I used to be on TV,” I said. “But that was a long time ago now.”
“Yeah, that’s it! You were on TV,” the bassist said.“What show, though?”
“The Aesthetician’s Daughter,” I said, though I was beginning to think it didn’t matter what I told him.
“Shit, really? I could’ve sworn it was something else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. You sure you didn’t, like, host Survivor or a gameshow or something?”
“Well,” I told the bassist, “maybe it was before your time.” This remark seemed to please him. As a reward for acknowledging his youth, and lack of knowledge about anything that occurred or was created before 1998, he offered me a second hand-rolled cigarette that had been perched behind his left ear. I didn’t smoke, but I still gladly accepted his offer.
I rolled the cigarette between my thumb and index finger and watched Redford confer with Wilson and Annie and the other followers. I was amazed at his ability to command their attention, the way his high forehead, effortless smile, and mutton chop sideburns seemed to make him belong in this bar, this town, and among these people.
I felt a stinging need to get to the bottom of the Jezebel article, and, if I’m being honest, to hear Quincy’s voice again. So I excused myself and went outside.
Quincy Wurtz, my former co-star (she played the eponymous daughter of the aesthetician) and sometimes-girlfriend, had been spotted canoodling in Vancouver with Derek Austerlitz, her more “age-appropriate” co-star from her new show, Don’t Watch Your Heroes Eat. Quincy starred as Farley Farheim, the proprietor of a greasy-spoon diner frequented by a cast of colorful, yet mostly ineffectual, superheroes. Derek played the show’s Superman ripoff, Supremian, a nigh-invulnerable half man, half chimp hero with a fondness for Farley’s buttermilk pancakes (that’s not a euphemism).
Quincy had broken things off with me not long after I moved to Tacoma. She said maintaining our relationship wouldn’t be fair to me, on account of the hours she put in at work. I’m now convinced she was spending what little time she had off banging Derek. I can’t say that I blame her, much like their onscreen counterparts, the two enjoyed an undeniable chemistry.
I probably should’ve seen it coming. Quincy had a habit of falling in love with anyone who fell in love with her, which explained our on again, off again relationship over the past few years. I was in love with Quincy, but sometimes I think I was more in love with the idea that being with Quincy meant I could, someday, if I chose to, reclaim my place in the world I’d left behind. Either way, you’d think the mental image of her knocking boots with a guy who earned his SAG card pretending to be an indestructible half-chimp would bother me. And I guess it did. But I couldn’t really blame her. I was once in the same room as Derek when he’d taken his shirt off, and I’m pretty sure it made me about half as gay as most people already assumed I was
***
The Camp Bar was smack dab in the middle of the Hilltop neighborhood. The building itself was bracketed by two empty lots. One was fringed with weedy overgrowth that partially obscured a concrete staircase leading from the sidewalk to, well, nowhere. On the other side was a trash-strewn parking lot that the Camp Bar shared with the brilliantly-named Grocery & Deli. The place had a turquoise awning that advertised CHICKEN & GYROS, and even FRESH SANDWICHES. I stared at my phone and lit the bassist’s hand-rolled cigarette with the brass lighter I always kept with me, a gift from my mother when I first moved to Los Angeles. On it was engraved the words: “Trust No One.” Mom was a big X-Files fan.
While I waited for Quincy to answer my call, I blew smoke into the crisp winter air, pleased to see the night sky was not at all cloudy but was instead full of stars.
My call went to voicemail—Quincy was either on set or on Derek—so I ad-libbed some nonsensical message about libel and slander and a possible defamation lawsuit over the article. When I hung up, I felt guilty about being so aggressive and fired off an impotent text: Q. Call or text when you can? I miss you.
When I put my phone in my jacket pocket I noticed a familiar, let’s say, vagabond, sitting on the sidewalk to my right, with his back against the Camp Bar’s wall. I’d been known to give this vagabond a few bucks from time to time. He was wearing camouflage cargo pants (probably why I didn’t see him at first), a pair of dusty work boots, and a lived-in waxed canvas jacket that I’m sure Redford would consider throwing his grandmother off a bridge for. His face was mostly obscured by a heavy red beard on the bottom and the rolled brim of a Pennzoil trucker cap on the top.
I liked the guy; he felt authentic. That’s what I told myself had brought me to Tacoma. It was the antithesis of Hollywood, a place where being a card-carrying member of the Perpetual Hustle Gang wasn’t a prerequisite to belong. A place where people weren’t constantly trying to make something—themselves, usually—happen. Where people were neither mired in the past nor overly fixated on the future, they were just, you know, living life, relieved to still exist. I don’t know, maybe I was projecting too much of myself onto the people of this crusty burg.
The guy lifted his head in my direction and smiled. I assumed it was because he knew I was an easy touch for a few loose bucks.
“Ladies got you down?” he asked. It was the first time he’d spoken to me and the first time he looked at me with something other than incredulity. He had a honeyed voice that belied the life I imagined he must live: panhandling or foraging for food by day before bedding down in a soiled tent under an overpass every night.
“Oh, you know, same shit, different day,” I said, pleased with how genuinely folksy I sounded.
“I hear ya, man,” he told me. “Don’t let ‘em get you down, okay?”
“Roger that. Over and out.” I’m not sure why I said that, but I assume it had something to do with his hat. I searched my pockets for loose change, a few bucks, anything. All I came up with was a ticket stub, a tissue, two Werther’s Originals, and an expired Subway Club card. I’m not sure what bothered me more, that the contents of my pockets suggested I had somehow turned into my grandmother or that nothing on or of my person would be of real value to someone in need. I held out my hands to show him they were empty and said, “I’m so sorry. Can I get you next time?”
I contorted my face to convey that I understood his struggle, that I sympathized with his inability to get his shit together and that I, like him, also faced each day with the knowledge that time was running out for me to find purpose in this life. That instead of looking forward, I was too often inclined to stare longingly over my shoulder into the past. But, when I communicated this to him, he removed his hat and glared at me. With his hat off, I could see that he wasn’t some grizzled drifter man. He was young, certainly younger than me—by a decade at least, maybe more. He calmly asked me why I was offering to get him next time.
“Because you’re a... person in need?”
“I need of what? Your money? Your help?”
“You’re not hungry?”
“Man, if I was hungry I’d go and buy myself something to eat,” he stood, so that we were eye-level with one another. “I teach at the university. I have tenure, fella.”
“No shit? Well, good for you.” I was stalling, trying to recall where it was that I’d seen him and what he’d been doing that made me think he was homeless. I tried to remember whether he ever actually signaled to me that he wanted money, and I don’t know if he ever did. I recall pulling my car into an empty parking space on the university’s downtown campus. I was on my way to The Swiss to hear some local band play and to get a good old-fashioned drunk going with Redford. It was probably nine o’clock at night and pretty dark out. The guy was sitting on the ground, leaning against a window and he recoiled from my headlights like they were burning out his retinas. But he didn’t move. It was like he’d been there all day, like he was protecting his turf. This was a good spot and he wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. While I was paying for parking I heard him say something in my general direction. I assumed he was asking for spare cash so I gave him a few bucks. “Why didn’t you ever say anything, then? Why’d you take my money?”
“Oh, those four dollars you held out like they were the cure for cancer? Because it’s embarrassing.”
“Okay, yeah, I can see that. Well, I tell you what, maybe don’t sit on sidewalks so much?”
“No, for you. It’s embarrassing for you.”
I thought about this for a second and said, “So, uh, what do you teach?”
***
When I re-entered the Camp Bar it was with Walt the Philosophy Professor, my new friend who was not homeless but was mercifully understanding about the way I had misread his outward persona. Redford was standing at the head of the table, regaling Wilson, Annie, and the other hangers-on with the story of the time when he and I watched David Bowie eat an entire croque monsieur at Café Presse in Seattle. When he finished the sandwich, the Thin White Duke got up from his table, winked at Redford, and, clear as day, said, “Tacos at the Yard Sale, right? Great. Just great.” That seemed to be enough for Bowie. He left the restaurant and vanished into the back seat of a black Lincoln.
Without breaking his storytelling stride—he was at the part where we sat in utter disbelief until a waiter asked us to order something or please leave—Redford’s eyes drifted from me to Walt with a look that, in my mind, intimated a kind of betrayal. At that moment, I began to give serious consideration to the idea that my tendency to pick up and befriend strange, seemingly itinerant men played some part in perpetuating certain falsehoods that had plagued me throughout my career.
Weirdly, those same falsehoods were what aided me in avoiding a significant ass-kicking from Walt moments ago, and to persuade him that I, too, was the victim of a pernicious untruth. Outside, I had showed Walt my phone. It was open to the Jezebel article sent to me by my former agent, Jefferson Mintz. The piece frequently used the word “squee” to describe the author’s approval of seeing Quincy and Derek hold hands and kiss on the streets of Vancouver. As in “Look at the joy of young (and this time we are happy to report it’s actually young) love blossoming on the set of Quincy Wurtz’s new TV show in British Columbia. Squee!” The article also mentioned the poor ratings for Don’t Watch Your Heroes Eat, and that Quincy was in the running for the lead role in a new big-budget dystopian sci-fi film called No Such Thing as Nothing. Then it mentioned that Quincy was previously rumored to have been dating Vernon Jones, her “much older co-star who enjoyed a recurring role on The Aesthetician’s Daughter, and was last seen living in Tacoma, WA with an unidentified male partner.”
“You know what bothers me the most, Walt? Can I call you Walt?” I asked when he handed me back my phone. “It’s not that Quincy was thirty-three when we were dating, all of ten years my junior, mind you. It’s the phrase ‘Recurring role.’ Recurring role? What is that bullshit? I was the co-star. That’s what you call the person who appeared in all one hundred and seventy-six goddamned episodes of a hit series. Check IMDb, Jezebel, you lazy fucking knobs. Recurring role, my puckered asshole. And who’s their source on this? Who is this mysterious someone who claims to have seen me living with ‘an unidentified male partner’? Why does everyone think I’m dating Redford? It’s like the world is angry that I’m not.”
It was then that Walt confessed he thought I looked familiar. It turns out, he used to watch four-hour afternoon marathons of The Aesthetician’s Daughter on TBS with his mother while she was bedridden with complications from lupus. “She never understood why your character was on the show, but she thought you were really funny,” he told me. “She was always laughing at you.” Backhanded compliments aside, my heart had been sufficiently warmed and, as a way of apologizing for thinking him a vagrant, I offered to buy Walt a drink.
Walt and I stood at the bar, drinking fresh cans of Extra Gold. I gave him the abridged versions of a couple of my best Redford Davis stories. I told him about the time we crashed the Thanksgiving dinner of a woman who’d been sending Redford nudes and whose husband was such a big fan of Pig Hooves on Porcelain he had the band name tattooed on his chest, right above his heart. The woman’s palpable discomfort and her husband’s obvious joy, along with his in-laws’ refusal to believe we were anything other than vagrants, made that Thanksgiving arguably the best I’d ever been a part of. And I say this while also admitting that the turkey was dry and the sides were, well…uninspired. Then I told him about the time Redford accompanied me to an Aesthetician’s Daughter fan convention in Wisconsin. We got lost looking for the hotel pool and wound up mediating a substantial drug buy between some track-suited Russian gangsters and a quiet Midwestern couple who’d been manufacturing meth on their family farm.
Walt politely internalized and contemplated these stories with greater emphasis than even I thought they deserved.
Then he hit me with this:
“Well,” Walt said, “the way I figure it is there are simply no words in the current generation’s lexicon for the relationship you and Redford seem to have. As far as I can tell, they see two men who understand each other the way you and Redford do, who’re committed to each other the way you two are, and they just assume it’s some torrid love affair. They’ve shipped you without your consent, Jones. It seems to me that you and Redford are the victims of their goddamned fan fiction.”
Just as Walt was wrapping up his theory, I overheard Redford conclude the David Bowie story. He then immediately segued into a story about the time he joined James Van Der Beek’s bookclub. I knew how this one went: he was kicked out because he kept saying “fuck” (the club was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover) when what the Beek had requested everyone say was “make love.” Only that was my story. I was the one who had been kicked out of James Van Der Beek’s bookclub for the excessive use of the word “fuck.” That was right around the time I failed to land a guest spot on CSI: Cyber and Patricia Arquette stopped returning my phone calls.
I could have stepped in and called foul. I could have claimed the story as was my right. But Wilson and Annie and the others were all laughing hysterically. Redford was in the zone. The attention and the adoration, it was like mother’s milk to him.
I thanked Walt for his understanding and for the scholarly analysis of my situation. I then looked over his shoulder at Redford, who had grown silent. As if on cue, an uneasy hush came over the table. One by one, Wilson, Annie, and the bassist all tracked Redford’s gaze across the bar to where it met my own. Redford was waiting for me to say something, to decide if he could continue telling this story—my story—or not.
For just a moment I saw this as my chance to reclaim yet another piece of me that had been lost. But then I thought, who was I to deny Redford this thing he wanted in front of a captive audience? Who was I to pass up the most meaningful collaboration to come my way in years?
“What are you looking at me for?” I said. “This is Redford’s show. And believe me when I tell you, he’s got a good one lined up.”
Comments