Adam
ADAM
“ I ’ve been thinking about what you said,” Roland tells me.
“Oh?”
“About the reason I didn’t come out sooner.”
My ears perk up. In the twelve days since we started on the book, he’s given me enough information to write a basic celebrity memoir, something the moms of America can read on a plane while they’re three Bloody Marys deep. He no longer blanches at the mere hint of a personal question, but his answers always feel like they’re glancing off the side of what I’m after. He explains Zoya away as a PR-arranged relationship, nothing more. Crash was a business decision, and sure he did them longer than he wanted, but “the industry was changing,” he keeps saying, and doing a big action franchise was one of the only ways to keep making major theatrical releases. The most he’s willing to allow is that staying in the closet that long was “difficult.” Anytime I try to dig past the explanations he offers—the explanations he maybe even believes himself —he either makes a joke or changes the subject. For someone who commissioned me to make him sound deep, he’s not really letting me extract his story. You’d think as a ghost it’d be easier to open up; it’s not like he’ll have to deal with any blowback for it.
He’s most animated—and most forthcoming—when I’m eating. I get the feeling he’s living through me at mealtimes, which makes sense. I couldn’t imagine being sentient but not being able to satisfy my appetite, as much as Richie probably wished that were the case. I get why Roland likes to watch me eat Nobu, or any number of the things he’s sent me to pick up with his credit card this past week. The man has no outlet. Except for electrical outlets. Besides, if I were back home, I would be mainlining peanut butter sandwiches. Here, I get to feast like a Roman emperor in a Malibu beach house.
“And?” I prompt Roland to share more, easing into the interview like I’m approaching a stray animal.
It would be so much easier if I could phone this in like I was originally planning to do. But with the end of ski season growing closer, I only feel more urgency to get to the core of this man. No matter how much I’m getting paid, we can’t spend the next two weeks producing something one of the Real Housewives could have published. Nor do I want to repeat Sodomite , telling a true but boilerplate story about the power of coming out and “living your truth.” There’s an opportunity here to write something meaningful.
I’ve considered the depressingly simple possibility that there might be nothing deeper beneath his surface-level answers. His big tacky house and his ego hallway would suggest as much. But I hear these hitches in his voice. Moments when the smooth gravel cracks and crunches under the weight of something.
“I was thinking about being a kid,” Roland begins, and it’s as promising a start as any. Did something happen in his childhood? Was I wrong not to open with that in our first interview?
“What about it?”
I’ve gotten used to nudging him like this, squeezing the sentences out of him like water from stone. I press my pen into my notebook, watching the ink bleed onto the paper, and wait for Roland to give me something I can use.
“Well, when I was little, a million was the biggest number I could imagine,” he tells me. “Even then, I didn’t realize how big a million really was; I just knew it had a lot of zeroes, you know? Then, when I made my first million, I was expecting the number to feel more real somehow, but it still seemed fake. I remember looking at my bank account balance one day and thinking it was a glitch.”
I look up from my notebook at the record player speakers, puzzled. Is he trying to tell me he’s richer than he can comprehend? So far, this just sounds like throat-clearing, but I’m willing to see where he’s going.
“It wasn’t just the money, though, it was the legion of fucking fans that I couldn’t wrap my head around,” Roland says. “There weren’t just millions of them; after Crash Street , there were billions of people who knew who I was. Kids in Jakarta had posters of me.”
Again, it seems like he’s humblebragging. He’s rich and he’s famous? None of that is news to me. Though for a second, I think about how inconceivable it would be if someone accosted me in Indonesia to ask if I was Adam Gallagher, the author of Salt Lake City Sodomite . Proposition 8 advocacy aside, my only taste of fame was being a big deal on an internet forum for gay ex-Mormons for about two years after the book came out. I was like a cut-rate Dustin Lance Black, and nowhere near as pretty to look at.
“I know a little something about fame,” I say, drenching my voice in sarcasm. “I can’t walk out my door without being hounded by paparazzi.”
“I’d love to see them try to photograph me now, the buzzards.” Roland laughs, seemingly grateful for the moment of release. “I never got used to them. I don’t even like having people in my house, no offense.”
“None taken,” I say.
One of the things I’ve come to respect about Roland is that he keeps a low profile for a man of his stature. It might be what got him killed—a solo backcountry skiing trip is basically a death wish—but most people at his elite tier of fame have four or five bodies in their orbit at all times.
“The thing is, Adam, once you get that famous, people don’t want you to be yourself anymore,” Roland continues. “Even though they supposedly fell in love with you, they don’t want you to be you. They want you to be who they want you to be.”
This is more nuanced than his explanation that he “just wanted the money” or however he phrased it, but not by much. We’re still hewing pretty close to the trite stereotypes that get trotted out in the rehab chapters of celebrity memoirs: the same convenient excuses about the demands of fame that we’ve all heard a thousand times before.
“They wanted you to be Crag Dynamite is what you’re saying,” I say, trying to disguise how unimpressed I am with where this is headed.
“To them, I was Crag,” Roland stresses. “They saw me as this super-straight, super-strong tough guy who never showed any emotion. Crag didn’t even cry when Tad died in the sixth movie.”
“ The Dynamite Chronicles ?” I ask , recalling the title from Netflix, impressed at my memory.
“That’s the one. Nick Nolte acted the hell out of that scene, by the way.”
I’ve made it all the way through Crash 4 in my bedtime binge-viewing, and I can’t say I’ve been impressed by Nolte’s work in the franchise. I am, however, enjoying any scene where Roland repairs his car shirtless. And there are a lot of them. He’s a sex symbol for a reason. But it’s not just his body or his face or his voice that is making Roland increasingly attractive; there’s some other quality, too. I think it’s the gap between the image he’s projecting and the man I suspect is underneath. There’s a contradiction there that I feel an itch to resolve, the same way you might like to see whether you can press the wrong poles of two magnets together.
“So, it was the fans who kept you in the closet?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I’m glad the fans loved me because they gave me a lot . The money helped me take care of my family back home. I lost count of the cousins who went to college on my dime. And I enjoy the finer things myself, as you can tell from my place. Do you like the blown glass in the foyer, by the way? It’s a Chihuly.”
“It’s quite … vibrant,” I say, opting for diplomacy, before trying to get us back on track. “But Roland, we’ve been over the money angle. Do you think a reader’s really going to buy that? Do you buy that?”
Roland falls silent. I used to wonder why celebrities didn’t just stop once they have enough. Why not just buy a modest house in cash, work when you want, and give the rest to charity? A hilarious thought in hindsight, especially now that I’ve tasted what it’d be like to live like he does. These celebrities all seem to get caught in a cycle of endless maintenance: a more expensive lifestyle requires continuous cash flow. There’s a point, though, at which it strains credulity. Richie used to complain about how Rihanna quit making music once she became a billionaire, but it made sense to me: once she got that rich, there was no point performing for us peasants. The critics seemed as mystified as I was by Roland’s hard turn into Crash Street , judging from the Rotten Tomatoes roundups I’ve been reading on my phone after each movie. One reviewer, who praised Crash 7 as “the ultimate in smooth-brained entertainment , ” wrote: “Who can say why a man of Rogers’s talents continues to use them on this nonsense, but we’re lucky he does.”
When he starts speaking again, Roland tries a different approach. “It wasn’t just the money; it was the pressure . The fans had expectations. Their love was conditional. I needed to have a woman like Zoya on my arm. I needed to look built.”
Is this the same Roland who called Life or Death fans “idiots” and said he “absolutely” did not respect them? He’s trying to tell me he likes the “finer things,” but it also seems like he’s happiest when he’s off the grid at his chalet. He likes helping his family financially, but he has enough money now that they could live off his estate for generations. None of this is coming together for me.
I’m ready to press more. “But it was your life, Roland. Didn’t you want to live it?”
“Of course I did,” he says, quieter now. “But the time got away from me. Years went by, and then a decade, and suddenly I was fifty. I blinked and it was gone. That character lived my life for me. Those movies gave me everything, and they took everything, too.”
It’s the most poetic he’s ever sounded, but still, my ears are tuned to hear the elisions. The passive voice. The convenient turns of phrase.
“The time got away from you?” I ask.
“Not everyone can be as bold as you were, Adam,” he tells me, unwittingly echoing something Paul told me a few days ago.
I know there’s more to his story than that.
But I also know what it’s like to leave things out.
When I wrote Salt Lake City Sodomite , I made it seem like my sexuality was the only reason I left Mormonism. It was true enough: I experienced “same-sex attraction,” as the Church calls it, from an early age. I spent puberty trying to pray those feelings away, hoping that if I proved my faithfulness by going on a mission, the Lord would make them vanish entirely—the initial terms of the deal I tried to make with God. Shockingly, spending two years in the company of other boys did not cure me.
I was “bold,” as Roland puts it, but only eventually. After my mission, when my bishop threatened me with eternal damnation over my relationship with Sam, I told him that I had nothing to repent for. That I’d let Sam fuck me on the chapel floor if the thin-pile carpet weren’t so scratchy. Red-faced, he stammered warnings about “sullying the house of the Lord” and all the other nonsense that religious gasbags spout when they’re challenged, all of them cosplaying as men of God when they’re really just overgrown boys on an ego trip. Twenty-two years of repression exploded in one glorious moment of catharsis. I walked out of that office like a batter trots to first base after hitting a homer.
What happened next fell like dominoes: the excommunication, the protests in Salt Lake City, the news coverage, the talk shows, the book deal. But I kept the story streamlined. Simple. The truth was that my doubts began earlier than Sam, when I was in Vegas.
The only time we had to ourselves as missionaries came on “P-Day,” as it was called, short for Preparation Day. It wasn’t even a full day: the Church only gave us a few hours each week to do our laundry, read our snail mail, and relax, and then we were expected to get our nose back to the grindstone, 24/7 for two years. My first few months in Vegas, P-Days were sacred. We played volleyball. One companion took me to the aquarium, which was a minor no-no. The more sinful elders liked to stay at the apartment and masturbate in their rooms, even though we weren’t supposed to be alone, but I suppose onanism was also forbidden.
I was fresh-faced and eager to prove myself. But the mission was more exhausting than I expected it to be, and God didn’t seem to be keeping up his end of the bargain. And then Stake President Southworth came along. A newly appointed local leader in his midfifties, Southworth decided he wanted to do half an hour of scripture study with the missionaries every P-Day. He knew it was our one day off. He didn’t care. In his day job, he was a middle manager at a pool construction company, but he forced us to treat him like some respected sage, a great teacher for our times.
I would have been tempted to skip it, but our mail got delivered to him. If we wanted our letters from home, we had to show up. He must have felt insecure about relying on the stick, though, because he offered us a carrot as well: every week he brought six dozen donuts for twelve missionaries. After the group study was over, and Southworth peeled out of the parking lot in his midlife-crisis Mustang, we threw away half the boxes in the dumpster. Even the metabolism of boys who spent ten hours a day pounding the pavement was no match for all that sugar.
One P-Day when I had built up an appetite playing volleyball, I took three donuts near the start of the scripture study instead of grabbing them one at a time like I usually did. The second I sat down, Southworth stopped reading the Gospel of Luke midverse and said, “Want to save some for the other missionaries, Gallagher?”
“There are always plenty left over,” I told him.
He didn’t like that. He saw it as a challenge to his divine authority. His beady eyes bored into me until I asked him, “Did you want me to put them back?”
“Not now that you’ve touched them,” he huffed, and went right back to reading the Beatitudes.
I could see all the other missionaries judging me, even the fucking masturbators. And then, when it was my turn to read a verse, President Southworth skipped me “so you have time to finish eating,” he snidely explained. I never took another donut again. Instead, I went to scripture study, robotically read my verses, and threw out the leftover boxes, P-Day after P-Day. I still have trouble eating them to this day.
I only wish the story ended there. Six months later, I had my biannual meeting with our mission president, the leader above Southworth. It was supposed to be a serious talk about my commitment to the cause. I wanted him to think I was doing a good job. Hell, I was doing a good job; I had just baptized Kevin. Instead of talking about my recent conversion, though, the mission president took a mysterious file out of a manila folder on his desk.
“Apparently, Elder Gallagher,” he told me, “there’s been an issue with insubordination that we need to address. Something about a donut …”
I couldn’t hear anything after that because it felt like blood was pouring out of my ears. That was the beginning of the end for me. That was the catalyst: grown men chastising me over pastry put the first irreparable crack in my faith—a crack that Sam continued to widen. Later, I’d sell myself as some gay caped crusader. But underneath it all, I was just hungry. Those pink frosted donuts with the rainbow sprinkles on them were just too damn tempting to resist. Who knows? Maybe I’d still be some closeted, self-denying sad sack today if Southworth had just been promoted at work.
I tell Roland as much. He doesn’t seem to mind the break from being interrogated, even if it means he has to listen to my embarrassing tale of the donut and the manila folder.
“I wasn’t bold, Roland, I just made it seem like I was,” I tell him, placing my pen in the fold of my notebook.
“But it made for a better story,” Roland insists.
Did it? I’ve wondered that in the years since writing Sodomite . It certainly made for a convenient story—the kind that was easy to package for the media. But how much more powerful might it have been to share the truth? People aren’t calculators and the ideologies we live under aren’t equations; we’re ruled by formless, fleshy impulses: hunger and hurt, pride and anger, lust and guilt. My book didn’t acknowledge that messiness; Roland’s can.
It’s his turn to prompt me out of silence. “Anyway, what matters is you did it. You came out when you were in your twenties. I’ll never know how happy that would have made me.”
It’s moving, in a way that almost makes me wince, to hear him fantasize about coming out as some sort of silver bullet. He has a decade on me, but I’ve never been more aware of how much more life I’ve lived in gay years. He has the na?veté of a man half his age—a na?veté I once shared. Coming out didn’t make me happier so much as it kept me alive. And sometimes, in my darkest moments, I wonder whether it’s the worst decision I ever made. My parents stopped speaking to me. Half my family back in Utah thinks I’m some kind of anti-Mormon terrorist because of the advocacy work I did in 2008. Most of my boyfriends left because I’m still working through religious trauma, and the ones who didn’t break up with me because of that couldn’t deal with the shame I feel around my body. It’s been fifteen years and I still haven’t felt as comfortable in a gay bar as I did in a drab church with fucking sisal walls. I traded being a misfit in one community for being a misfit in another.
But Roland’s the dead one. He deserved the chance to come out and get his heart broken and learn all those painful lessons for himself. He might not have been happy, but he should have gotten to try.
My voice catches as I ask him, “Were you unhappy, Roland?”
“I think so,” he says, but after a beat he flips the question on me. “Are you?”
The last decade flashes through my mind, all the disappointments blending together.
“Yes.” My voice quavers as I say it.
I want to rally and press on with the interview. This is a rare opening to talk about his feelings, but I’m having too many of my own. Reverting to professionalism right now feels almost inappropriate, like it would violate a sacred moment. We’re not ghostwriter and subject right now, we’re two men who want different lives than the ones we got.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t mean to derail with … my stuff.”
“You don’t need to apologize, Adam,” he says, and maybe I’m hearing things, but it sounds like there’s a new tenderness in the way he utters my name. After a pause, he adds, “How about we order some pizza today?”
I nod, worried my voice might crack if I try to say yes.