Adam
ADAM
R oland Rogers’s house is all sharp edges, high ceilings, and hard surfaces; nothing about it feels lived-in. The entryway, with its hideous light fixture, flows into the open-air kitchen where I “talked” with Roland moments ago. It looks like every kitchen I’ve ever seen in one of those godawful “73 Questions” videos that Vogue puts out: red knobs on the oven, a sink as deep as my arm, the island surrounded by a frankly silly number of stools, benches, and smaller tables that fill up the floor space.
From the combined living-dining area beyond the kitchen, the massive single-story structure splits off in two directions, wrapping around a palm-filled courtyard with a pool and Jacuzzi in the center. The trees are the only hint of life in this otherwise aseptic compound, a dash of tropical flora livening up the wasteland.
I start walking down the guest wing hallway only to be met with a cringeworthy photo collage hanging on the wall: dozens of pictures of Roland Rogers himself, posing with various celebrities and public figures, ranging from Samuel L. Jackson to Amy Klobuchar. There’s a shot of him with Zoya, too, and even her preternatural beauty looks almost pedestrian next to Roland. The whole tableau looks like it belongs in a goddamn Buca di Beppo. But somehow this display of vanity feels welcome in a space that has otherwise been stripped of personality.
His face is, of course, a familiar one: ice-blue eyes, the hairline I had as a teenager, and a jawbone that looks like it was drawn with a ruler. His appearance has an effect on me; I’m only human. But the structural perfection of his features doesn’t capture the perfect blend of geniality and gruffness he exudes. He looks like a hawk you’d want to have a beer with, or a German shepherd who’d do karaoke. It’s that sweet spot that propelled him to cross-genre fame: a touch more aggressive and he wouldn’t be believable in a comedy, a quarter-turn softer and he couldn’t be Crag Dynamite. When you look at him, you somehow want him to fuck you and punch you and be your best friend all at once. Right now, I’d settle for him speaking to me.
I only have a month to get this done, and I’m already losing a day. I didn’t come here to pull teeth, not even bleached-white actor teeth; I came here to write.
The décor is more abstract farther down the hallway, but still jarring and weirdly mismatched. I think I spot a Klee painting, a quilt-like array of red and orange color swatches, hanging next to a busy, almost labyrinthine Keith Haring. The juxtaposition is an assault on the senses. Art really is wasted on the rich. Porthole-shaped windows in the concrete offer glimpses at the interior courtyard, but distractingly, they cast perfect circles of slanting sunlight onto the opposing wall—and in some cases, directly onto the exposed canvas of incredibly expensive paintings. I guess when you’re as rich as Roland you can treat a Basquiat like it’s a Kleenex.
Doors to the left reveal bedrooms, bathrooms, a gym, but if I have my pick of rooms—and it seems like I do—I’m going to keep walking toward the sea. I’m guessing whoever designed this place reserved the best accommodations for the other side of the U .
Walking past all these featureless modern suites, I feel a twinge of embarrassment, even though no one’s watching, at my deepening fatigue. It’s the sort of exhaustion that’s as physical as it is existential, as much about my aching body as it is the task in front of me.
A career is a vexing thing to revitalize. When I was working on the novel I sent Paul, I spent an hour reading up on the physical process of death, telling myself I was doing it for book research but knowing that the impulse came from a much grimmer place. It seemed so cosmically unfair that a perfectly good brain, after only ten minutes without oxygen, could never be brought back to life. But the same principle applied to my work: the second the Sodomite buzz dissipated, I flatlined, and nothing I did mattered anymore. Talent, if I ever had any, is meaningless without momentum.
These past few years especially, my heart hasn’t been in my writing, but I’ve tried to keep going anyway. What else am I supposed to do on the brink of forty? Learn to code? Shoot me before I ever wear a lanyard to work. Putting the right words in the right order is the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Grade-school essays became post-college blogging, which led directly to Sodomite . And when you write a bestselling memoir on your first attempt, it’s hard to give up chasing that high, even after repeated failures.
I was full of fire and fury when I wrote my debut. The words poured out of me: hundreds of pages about being caught making out with my then-boyfriend at the TCBY in the Provo Towne Centre mall, about the excommunication, about the kiss-in protest at Temple Square. It was impossible to have writer’s block when Mormon church leaders were out there spouting homophobia in that fucking grandfatherly intonation, uttering all those weasel words about “eternal families” and “the definition of marriage,” repackaging the simplicity of their hate into ornate boxes. God, even thinking about it now makes me mad. I couldn’t not tell that story. It would have burned a hole in me if I’d kept it inside.
Since then, it’s been hard to shake the feeling that my initial success was borne of the moment, nothing more. Back then, the leaders of the Church were actively combatting gay rights, more so than they do now, and their political influence over the Mountain states was as insidious as it was invisible. I was fighting a real fight with real consequences, and a liberal media craved a gay ex-Mormon voice. I tried to continue feeding that appetite with my second book, Homosexual Heretic , a compilation of speeches I had given at various conferences and protests during the Prop 8 battle. It came out the same year as The Book of Mormon on Broadway. The pump was primed. But it sold an eighth of what Sodomite did. In the public consciousness, apparently, I had already fulfilled my one job: be loud, traumatized, and angry. There was no need for more of that schtick. Dance, monkey, dance, then get off the stage. We’ve had enough of you.
It made me question how much anyone ever actually liked the writing itself, despite all the reviews that went out of their way to praise my prose. Did they appreciate my work, or did they just want to tout me for what I represented? Stopping, though, would mean admitting my deepest fears were true. I had to prove that my debut wasn’t a fluke. But nothing gained traction after that, and even Paul stopped believing in me. The novel I sent him was an attempt at a detective story, with a middle-aged bear, in the gay sense, as the private investigator. He called it a “fun premise,” but not fun enough, apparently, to stop him from suggesting I do more memoir, and then I didn’t hear from him again until the invite to Delmonico’s.
I don’t just need the money from this job; I need the feeling of forward motion.
But my comeback will have to wait until morning. My sore feet finally carry me to an airy room with an expansive glass wall offering a panoramic ocean view. The sun is disappearing below the horizon, leaving only gray mist in its wake. My bags practically set themselves down as I stumble forward and let myself fall face-first onto the king bed. Between the flight and the weirdness of Roland hiding in his room, my own brain feels on the verge of expiration, even with the benefit of the fresh sea air coming in through an open window.
Momentum. It’s a horrible thing to try to muster. The only way to revive my career is to work harder than I ever have before, getting thousands of words squared away every day, and yet the lack of reliable work has made me rusty, rigid. As stiff as my aging joints.
I should stretch more, I think, as I pull the duvet cover over myself—and yes, I can tell it’s got an astronomical thread count. I’ll sleep well here. I should wake up at six a.m. every day and stretch out on the back lawn while looking out over the cliff, I tell myself, in one of those aspirational thoughts that, on the brink of sleep, starts to slip further from your grasp the more you try to hold on to it. After all this, if I land some splashy new book deal off this ghostwriting gig, I should post about it. I should put it on social media. Somewhere people can see it. Somewhere Richie can see how successful I became.