Adam
ADAM
I didn’t know what else to do besides come back to this obscenely large marble island. It’s the last place I heard Roland’s voice, and I don’t dare go look for him in his wing. He probably sleeps in some Matrix -style pod that keeps him ageless. Or maybe he’s just had enough work done to keep him looking thirty-five when he’s actually fifty. Immortal though he may be, I’m aware of little else but the constraints of time. This man has only given me a month to mine him for material and polish it into a manuscript. We can’t waste any more hours playing games through smart speakers.
I wasn’t aware those things could be used as listening devices, but now that I know, the one on the island almost seems to be surveilling my movements. I keep side-eyeing it as I circumnavigate the kitchen, watching for the blue light to appear.
When I open the refrigerator to survey its contents, all I find is an assortment of Voss water bottles, green juices, and premixed protein shakes that appear to have separated long ago. None of it is very appetizing, and I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything since that dubious wrap at Newark Airport yesterday. Someone with Roland’s resources should have a kitchen stocked with enough Erewhon groceries to feed an entire Kristen Bell dinner party. But he doesn’t even have eggs. Or bread. Or bacon.
For a moment, I consider chancing a juice just to get something in my system. Richie, an avid consumer of kale smoothies, probably would have preferred me to have an entirely liquid diet. Before our split, he made all sorts of thinly veiled comments about me “not taking care of myself,” which I knew meant he was embarrassed to take me to the shirts-off events he liked to go to on weekends. When we met eight years ago at that gay club out in Hackensack, it was clear my brain was the draw. “You’re so funny, Adam,” he kept saying, which became a drunken hookup, followed by a hungover brunch at the diner, where we soaked up the lingering alcohol with stacks of pillowy pancakes. But I think from the beginning, he was hoping to transform me into a circuit party gay while still holding on to my intellect. He wanted the social cachet of having a boyfriend “in the arts”—a pet he could trot out to say five-dollar words at dinners with his friends—but he also wanted me to be able to subsist on poppers, ketamine, and the occasional banana.
In a lot of ways, being with him felt like playing a very long game of Whac-A-Mole. He made comments about my weight, so I started taking spin classes after work. He implied I wasn’t making enough money, so I took on that admissions-essay job, which ate into spin. And even though he claimed to be enraptured by Sodomite after reading the entire thing between our second and third dates, he later told me that I was too hung up on what had happened to me. “Let bygones be bygones,” he said, like being raised in a cult that cut you off from your family was something you could forget about. So, I started going to therapy, which drained my money, and cut even deeper into my already winnowing gym time. I let my belt out a notch, then another, and then Richie’s remarks about my weight gave way to judgmental looks instead, loud in their silence.
He could have admitted that he had never wanted me in the first place instead of sending me on wild-goose chases to repair various aspects of myself. He only ever loved me with asterisks, not realizing that you can’t have everything you want in one person. If I were a ripped idiot, I wouldn’t be a writer. Truman Capote never did a dead lift. I could have stopped trying to satisfy him sooner, but I think some part of me wanted to see if I’d be happier as Richie’s ideal version of me, optimizing the pain away.
But more pressing than my regret is my dismay at the fact that Roland doesn’t even have Eggos or something in his freezer. All I’m finding in there are frozen containers of bone broth. More liquid. Is this how he maintains his Crash Street physique?
You couldn’t pay me enough to eat like this. Not even $250,000.
What Richie didn’t understand is that food is the most meaningful relationship many people have in their lives. From birth to death, the one thing we all do is eat, the only purely enjoyable ritual in an otherwise grim world. A lot of Mormons I knew felt the same way. All that repressed libido had to go somewhere.
On my mission in Las Vegas, I converted a realtor named Kevin who embraced the Sin City reputation. He made regular trips out to the Bunny Ranch, hit the casinos after every sale, and drank like he wanted a new liver. But for some reason, he opened the door for two nineteen-year-old Mormon kids and kept nodding his way through our lessons, inviting us back week after week. His eagerness was exciting; usually, we were the ones begging for follow-up appointments.
As we told Kevin about Mormonism’s myriad behavioral restrictions, he embraced them with the fastidiousness of an A-student. The Bunny Ranch trips stopped. So did the gambling. Still, Elder Johannson and I knew that the lesson about the Word of Wisdom was probably going to be a deal breaker for someone like him. Joseph Smith forbade his followers from drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol—which just so happen to be the most popular beverages in the world. But after that lesson, he told us, “Let me finish the six-pack of Coors in my fridge first,” and then he just stopped.
At the time, I thought it was miraculous. The power of prayer in action. How else could you explain his overnight transformation? He must have been a receptive soul, we told ourselves. The Lord had led us to him.
In hindsight, he probably wanted to make sure his new friends kept paying attention to him. A lot of our converts were solitary souls, and Kevin was no exception. I was lonely, too, in my way, constantly surrounded by cute boys in sharp suits, most of whom used the F-slur with jarring casualness, deploying the term as an all-purpose insult whenever anyone blew a volleyball serve or spilled a soda in the car.
When I baptized Kevin, the mission president let us take the day off from proselytizing and go to lunch with our latest statistic. The newest member of the Mormon Church decided to take us to some unbearably trendy gastropub on Fremont Street that served sliders with buns dyed black from squid ink. But the hip surroundings, in this case, weren’t a mask for culinary mediocrity. Everything we ate was delicious if a little try-hard in that over-cheffed aughts way.
Midway through the meal, Kevin polished off a slider, pointed a finger at me, and said, “You know what, Gallagher? After everything I’ve given up, food has taken on a whole new meaning.”
Then he picked up the last croquette—no, it was an arancini—and said, “See this? From now on, this is sex, alcohol, and gambling, all rolled up into a little ball. I’ve got nothing left but this and Jesus.”
He popped it in his mouth, and I laughed. Later, while polishing off the rest of the truffle fries, I thought about men. How they moved. How they smelled after shaving. The easy way about them. Their beautiful, sweet, stupid simplicity. I savored all the things I never told the mission president when he asked me if there was anything I needed to confess, only repenting for these fantasies in secret. I had made a private deal with God, or so I told myself, that I could linger on this lust every once in a while if I were a diligent missionary the rest of the time. Instead, the thoughts surfaced constantly, insistent and irrepressible. As Kevin was taking care of the check—there was no way we could pay for it; the whole meal cost more than our entire monthly stipend from the Church—I told him, “I know what you mean. About the food thing.”
He said, “I bet you do, Gallagher,” and I froze, certain he could tell I was gay. Back then, I was convinced everyone had X-ray vision for my sexual orientation. But maybe Kevin was gay, too. It was the George W. Bush era. A lot of confused guys were clinging to anything they could—family, religion, the army—to try to “fix” themselves. Was it a comment about my appetite, or was it an unspoken moment of recognition over a rice ball? I never found out. I got transferred to a different area two weeks later and didn’t see Kevin again—a common occurrence in the mission field. But I never forgot how ravenous he was at that dinner. “This and Jesus,” he said. I lost Jesus. Maybe Kevin did, too. But I kept food.
I survey the empty fridge again, hoping that something new has magically appeared in the last thirty seconds, and find the same horrible options. I weigh the logistics of ordering a pizza to Roland Rogers’s house—the length of his driveway alone probably puts me outside the delivery radius of most places—when I catch a flash of blue light at the edge of my vision. The speaker. I hear static, followed by my host’s voice.
“Hello!”
I swing the fridge door shut, feeling chastised. He sounds more energetic now. More like the Roland I know from the movies. That bodes well, even if he still hasn’t shown me the basic respect of shaking my hand.
“Um, hi, Roland,” I say, adding hopefully, “I’m excited to get started today.”
The frustrating thing is I already know how mechanical this project will be. I’m not Robert Caro and Roland Rogers isn’t Lyndon B. Johnson; we just have to write down what happened in his life, and get it done in the month he’s given me to earn my paycheck. All we need to do is expand each of the subheadings on his Wikipedia page—“Family,” “Early Career,” “Personal Life”—into chapters of a few thousand words apiece, and then wrap it up with some big emotional takeaway about being yourself, despite the consequences. It’s what readers want out of these things: a tale of adversity, overcome. When I wrote Sodomite , I was so thrilled to have landed a book deal that I didn’t care about shoehorning my story into that restrictive structure. The thought of writing another one of these things is about as tantalizing as folding laundry, but I can get it done if only Roland would come talk to me.
Instead, he asks, “Have you eaten yet?”
That’s promising. Roland can come show me where he keeps the actual food. There could be another pantry somewhere for all I know. None of the cabinets in here have handles, everything is soft-closing, and it took me ages to locate a trash can.
“No, I was trying to see what I could make,” I tell him.
“I don’t have much here, and I’d avoid the juice if I were you. It tastes like mud.”
Where was this lucidity yesterday? He’s no longer pausing awkwardly between every word, and he even said something mildly amusing.
“Do you want to come eat with me?” I prompt him. “You must have something around here.”
But then the blue light disappears. I stand there waiting for a response, shifting my gaze every few seconds between the speaker and the closed refrigerator, which I now notice has a screen displaying the time and the weather. Seventy-five degrees and clear skies. I won’t be outside very much at all this month if I do as much writing as I’m hoping to. Roland and I should probably do several hours of interviews to make up for yesterday.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Roland says. “Go to the garage. Take the Benz. The key is on the front seat. Drive to the In-N-Out in Westlake. Get two double-doubles, animal style. Two fries, also animal style. A strawberry shake and a chocolate shake. Bring it all back here. Think you can remember that?”
Jesus Christ. Does Roland know I’m his ghostwriter, not his fucking Postmates driver? Doesn’t he have a gopher he could send to fetch food for us? All these Hollywood megastars are propped up by chefs, drivers, au pairs, event planners, tie knotters, and shoe lacers. Where are Roland’s people? And where the fuck is Roland ? I’ve got half a mind to march into his wing and tell him I don’t care how good he looks or how much money he has, I’m not here to run errands.
On the other hand, I am hungry. And I assume at least some of that order is supposed to be for me. I remember hearing Tom Hanks talk about his love of In-N-Out on a talk show once, so maybe I wouldn’t look terribly out of place driving a luxury sedan to a drive-thru. A cheeseburger for breakfast isn’t exactly brain food, but it will at least keep me from fainting. He’ll have to come out of hiding as soon as I get back, right? Milkshakes melt. French fries go cold.
“Well?” he prompts.
I can feel myself sinking to a new low as I recite his order back to him. “Two double-doubles, two fries. Everything animal style, whatever that means. And two shakes.”
A career in fast food seems harrowingly possible if I don’t get this man’s money.
“Strawberry and chocolate,” Roland reiterates.
“And then we can get started?”
There’s a pause.
“Uh. Sure.”
He doesn’t sound as committed as I would like him to be. Maybe I’d be better off stealing the Benz.