Roland
ROLAND
E avesdropping is simple now, not just because I’m invisible, but because I can literally possess a cell phone. I don’t have any moral qualms about doing it, either. If my ghostwriter is going to make a habit of wandering out to the cliffs at four in the morning, I’m going to keep an eye on him.
Not that he seems like he’s at risk of throwing himself into the sea. He’s just a little down is all. I did like him telling his agent that my eyes were as blue as Gatorade; for some reason, praise from Adam feels different than a lifetime’s worth of accolades from everybody else, perhaps because he’s so stingy with it. He’s such a brat sometimes, but in our last few interviews, I’m beginning to see flashes of his brilliance—the mind I was drawn to all those years ago when I read his first book.
It was tough to hear him talk about the downhill turn his career has taken. I’ve only had a few bombs myself, but they’re not easy to bear. When that critic called my mob movie “Badfellas,” it made me wish I was actually in the Mafia so I could take out a hit on him.
I float behind Adam now as he walks back toward the house, his sneakers kicking up dew from the overgrown grass. I haven’t had the landscapers over in a while. I should probably have them come manicure the lawn just to keep up appearances.
For someone who moves with all the weariness of Sisyphus rolling the boulder, Adam is surprisingly sprightly in our interviews. During that first, borderline infuriating sit-down at the start of the week, I thought he was just a loose cannon, frenetically shifting from topic to topic.
He hasn’t given up the tactic entirely. He’ll ask me a question about my childhood dog, then pivot to my relationship with Zoya, his pen moving at lightning speed all the while. A week in, I still get frustrated with it. But I’ve been watching him write at night, and somehow, he is turning our disjointed conversations into gold on the page, with lines like: “I was the fuzz to Mama’s Georgia peach” or “ Life or Death was hardly as important as its name would imply.” I’ll still want final say-so on everything, but he’s doing it. The first inklings of a book are beginning to take shape.
I think he can tell I’m talking around certain things, though. When he’s done writing for the night, he’ll often flip to a page at the back of his notebook, where he has underlined a handful of words and phrases: there’s ZOYA and CRASH STREET and OBERGEFELL and they all seem to line up with various dead ends we’ve hit.
“You were with Zoya for six years,” he pointed out recently, then asked, “Did you have some kind of arrangement with her?”
I told him no. I said I didn’t have the courage to meet up with anyone.
He asked me about the same-sex marriage Supreme Court decision the next day. “Was there a part of you that wanted to come out in 2015?” It was his way of asking me why I waited until it was too late.
I told him what I’ve told myself all these years: that it was never the right time. That Hollywood was a unique cultural cauldron and other people wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be in my position. He inhaled sharply as if he was about to say something. I thought he was going to challenge me on it the way he dug his heels in over Life or Death . But instead, he just scribbled.
And ever since that first day of interviews, he keeps poking around my decision to do the Crash Street movies. I never should have made the mistake of telling him I didn’t want to talk about them; it only seems to have egged him on, reverse psychology having its most predictably aggravating consequence.
“If that’s not how you wanted to be remembered, why did you do nine of them?” he asked a few days ago.
“I don’t know, Adam. Everything’s clearer in hindsight, isn’t it? I think I just wanted the money.”
“For what?” he continued. “You were already rich, famous, and beautiful. What else could you want? A tenth car? A twelfth house?!”
“A lot of people rely on me for jobs, you know,” I protested, brushing past his odd mix of flattery and scorn, but the words felt hollow even as I shaped them.
“I just can’t figure it out, Roland. Six years with Zoya. A decade on Crash Street . There must have been a reason you let it all drag on for so long.”
What matters, I told him, is that I’m coming out now. Can’t he just write that?
“But what will mean the most to people is hearing why you didn’t come out all this time,” he said, getting agitated, dropping his pen to gesture with his hands. “That’s where the pathos of the story is. Surely you can see that, right?”
When he gets too excited, I fear I become even more of an abstraction to Adam. I’m already a disembodied voice in a speaker; it’s too easy for him to see me as a plot arc instead of a human being.
“It’s not a story, it’s my fucking life, Adam,” I said.
He didn’t miss a beat. “Your life is the story, Roland. And you brought me here because you wanted people to hear it.”
That pushed me over the edge. “People don’t need to know everything!” I shouted, the speaker fuzzing out from the volume.
Instead of pressing like he did the first day, Adam’s expression softened. For a second, it looked like he was about to cry. But then he said, “Let’s pick this up later.”
In his slow walk back to the house, Adam has reached the courtyard, but I’m lagging behind, floating at my usual sluggish speed. A few hours from now, I assume he’ll come back out to the kitchen to find me, and we’ll go to the study for another day of interviews. Later I’ll send him to Duke’s and tell him to bring back some Korean sticky ribs. So far, he hasn’t asked why I’m so particular about him always getting takeout, but I get the feeling he doesn’t want to sit at restaurants alone anyway—especially not at the popular, tourist-friendly places in Malibu that make some of my favorite takeout dishes. The vicarious excitement I get through his consumption is still stimulating, and not just in the moment. I have more energy lately. I can use appliances longer without needing float time. I still don’t understand why or how this even works, but there’s something about the way he eats, like he’s a famished soldier emerging from a long winter, that seems to only enhance the excitement.
Adam’s a singular fellow. Frustrating. More than a little condescending. Even smarter than he thinks he is. Surprisingly insightful given his social awkwardness. It’s like his sadness carries him so deep he can see the bottom of things. And he wants me to meet him there, even when he could just type what I say, collect his paycheck, and go. There’s no one in Hollywood like him—certainly no one who would talk to me as bluntly as he does. In fact, I’m not sure there’s anyone like him at all.
Before I followed him out to the cliff this morning, I was thinking about what he said: “There must have been a reason.” He’s right, of course. There are things I haven’t told him.
I haven’t told him how easy it was to die when you’ve never really lived. There was no one around for miles the day I was buried in the snow. There’s only one outcome in a situation like that. And yet, I felt almost serene while it happened. Put in the most primal position I could be in, I reached out for some idea to hold on to—some clear-as-crystal reason I should want to keep going, keep breathing—and found … nothing. It scares me to admit it, even to myself, but some piece of me was relieved. I wouldn’t have to film the next movie. I wouldn’t have to keep lying. I wouldn’t have to be Roland Rogers—or rather who Roland Rogers became. If I could have survived, I would have tried, but with no way out, I just sort of let go of life, like I was dropping a stone into a pond just to watch it splash.
I haven’t told Adam about the regret—not the full extent of it. Not how consumed I’ve been with picturing how differently I could have lived. It’s hard to feel rage when you don’t have hot blood pumping through your veins, but the disappointment is deep enough. I want to do it over. I want to do so many things over. This book won’t turn back time. I wish it could.
And I haven’t told Adam everything about the loneliness—about being a walking ATM to everyone but my mother, about the missed connections and the empty hotel rooms. There was Zoya, of course, but the comfort she provided wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. Now I’m alone again, living in some spirit realm with only me in it.
My own parents passed, one after the other, in the late 2010s, my father from a stroke, Mama in her sleep two years later. As far as I know they didn’t get to linger inside the cathode-ray tube TV that they refused to get rid of, even after I bought them a nice flat-screen; they were gone, with so many things left unsaid. The closest Dad ever came to telling me he was proud of me was saying that “the last Car Crash movie was pretty good”—and of course that would be the only part of my filmography he enjoyed. The things I never said to Mama could fill a book of their own. I stayed in my childhood home for a month after she died, sorting out her affairs, and there wasn’t so much as a peep from any of the appliances. I wish I could have talked to her. I wish I could have shared the truth I’m certain she already knew, just to say it, just to hear her tell me she loved me not in spite of it, but for it.
Adam is back in the house, but I decide I’m going to stay here on my untended grass and watch the sun rise over the cliff. I wasn’t all that bothered by my state before he got here and started trying to uncork everything I had bottled up. But God, I want to feel the warmth on my skin now.