Adam
ADAM
A textbook might not define it as sex. But what Roland and I have done over the last week is more pleasurable than anything I did with Richie in the years we spent together. I’m aware that, to an outside observer, our intimacy would look ridiculous—me eating a chocolate chip cookie straight out of the oven while Roland moans through a speaker, me masturbating while he makes colors flash on the guest room TV, him doing ungodly things to me with the electric bidet—but there’s no one watching us. And as mechanically strange as it might be, it feels right. Any self-consciousness about my body evaporates the second he calls me a “hungry boy” and asks me to take a “big bite.” It makes me cum harder than I ever have, and Roland doesn’t even have to use his hands.
And then there’s Roland himself, an infuriating man to be sure, as vain as he is closed-off, but during our play, it feels like we’re both making up for lost time. I’m experiencing a kind of intimacy that has never been available until this very unusual set of circumstances presented itself. For once, I’m feeling what it’s like for appetite to be an asset rather than an obstacle. Meanwhile, Roland is enjoying the sort of casual encounters he says he never got the chance to experience when he was alive, or his version of them, anyway.
At least, I think they’re casual. We haven’t had what the horny Mormon young adults at BYU liked to call a “DTR” conversation, short for “define the relationship”—and honestly, we may not have time to ever do that. The one-month deadline is in a week, and it’s looming silently over our interviews. Maybe he’ll want me to stay longer, though he hasn’t said as much yet. I don’t particularly want to leave. There’s more between us to explore. But all this gets riskier the closer to spring we get.
I’ve been making steady progress on the book, but not so much from the interviews themselves anymore. Work-obsessed as I am, even while I’m fucking a ghost, I’ve noticed that in the moments after our intimacy, when Roland can sadly only smoke a proverbial cigarette, he’s surprisingly candid, telling me stories he hasn’t shared before. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was taking full advantage of those post-coital sessions. Not that I mind getting to the post- part in the slightest.
The other day, after a particularly vigorous session involving the Theragun from Roland’s gym, he told me I reminded him of “Dr. Winslow,” the English professor he had a crush on during the semester he spent at Emory before moving to LA.
“That salt-and-pepper fox,” Roland called him, fondly remembering the older man reciting the first line of a Keats poem. “I was done for,” he told me. “I spent the rest of that afternoon in the library, looking for books on ‘homosexuality’ using the Dewey decimal system, because it was the Stone Age, and I’ve been alive a while, Adam, despite what the Botox in my face led people to believe.”
“And what did you find in the library?” I asked him, cleaning myself off with a sweat towel.
“Some dusty book that said I must have been too close to my mother as a child,” Roland told me.
“Were you?” I teased him.
“Does it make me too much of a stereotype to say yes?” he asked.
It’s cute watching him take his first fledgling steps as a gay man, though it’s devastating that he can only do so posthumously. I try not to think about it. Instead, I aspire to be the best mentor a newly out person could ask for—a position no one’s really needed me to fill since my Sodomite days.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” I told him, my breathing slowing to a steadier pace after the recent exertion. “Around straight people, we reject the stereotypes. But when we’re alone, we embrace the fuck out of them.”
“Well, then I was the biggest mama’s boy in Macon, Georgia,” he said, affecting the Southern accent he had long since drilled out of himself.
And then he spoke more earnestly than he ever has in our formal conversations. His elegant but seemingly rehearsed speech about fan expectations and the burden of fame paled in comparison to his loquaciousness after a good fuck. He told me about how his crush on Dr. Winslow led him to come out to himself, but that in the whirlwind of moving to Los Angeles and getting discovered for Life or Death , he never got to have a boyfriend before he was thrust into the public eye. He told me more about his mother, Jane, beyond the standard “she was a wonderful woman” mantra he has repeated so far: how she shielded him from his father’s temper, how he tried to buy back his father’s love as an adult only to realize after both his parents were dead that he should have spent more time appreciating the affection Jane gave him. I didn’t have my notebook on me, so I had to memorize as much as I could. But I also just wanted him to keep talking forever—to know him just to know him, not for the book.
If only the openness of our pillow talk would carry over into the interviews. Because while Roland has given me much of what I need to finish his memoir, I’m still missing what I have come to see as the keystone of the whole book: Why did he really stay closeted until he was fifty years old—and why did he go without companionship for so long, only to devote so much time to a sham relationship with Zoya? It can’t just be the lines he’s been trying to feed me about fan expectations; he’s deeper than that, I realize now. Other actors have come out in middle age, but usually the public finds out they’ve had relationships the entire time. Was Roland really just alone, shooting movies and skiing, living in this fortress of solitude, his charms going to waste?
One morning, before we’ve done anything intimate together, I determine to get to the bottom of it. I tell Roland we should go to the study, and ask if we can use the record player speakers, to at least simulate “the illusion of a professional distance,” which makes him laugh, but I’m serious.
“You know, I was in my twenties when you were first getting big movie roles,” I tell him at the top of the interview, Moleskine at the ready. “For years, you starred in pretty much everything: rom-coms, dramas, thrillers, even a few horror movies.”
“ Elevated horror movies,” he corrects me.
“Yes, sure, elevated horror movies. But after Crash 3 , you basically stopped doing all the other stuff. Why?”
I’m remembering what he said that first day—“I don’t want to talk about Crash Street !”—and hoping that we can at least get this frustrating loose end sorted out. He’s been watching the movies with me, but he’s still resistant to focusing on them in his book, always asking, “You’re not going to write about this, are you?” whenever the subject comes up naturally. If I haven’t earned enough trust for him to talk about this by now, I don’t know what else to try. Luckily, he doesn’t get as skittish this time.
“I didn’t stop, really,” he says. “I just went from a ‘one for them, one for me’ mentality to ‘three for them, one for me.’ I cut back is all.”
“OK, so why did you cut back?” I press. “You told me that you decided to stay in the closet for the Crash Street fans, but what happened to your other ambitions? Didn’t you want an Oscar?”
I’ve guessed this might be a sensitive area for him, judging from the placement of his awards on the shelf: there’s a blank space next to the dusty Emmys and the Golden Globe, waiting for that more prestigious statuette to join them.
“And I would have gotten it, too,” he says, “if it weren’t for the avalanche. I wasn’t going to do Crash forever.”
“But why did you do them so long?”
“I don’t know, Adam,” Roland says, sounding distracted. “Can’t we just tell set stories for the Crash chapters? I pulled pranks, you know. I put Saran Wrap over the toilet in Jon Hamm’s trailer on Crash 8 . That can be a book exclusive, even! I was supposed to tell it on Kimmel, but I didn’t!”
He’s deflecting again, always deflecting, even after what we’ve shared. This is a man who has been not just inside me, but inside an anal vibrator that was inside me—one he sent me all the way to West Hollywood to buy. And he wants to talk about pranking Jon Hamm? I want him to have a good book, not a paperweight. I don’t want to write him a CV with the occasional funny story interspersed; I want to write him a memoir that can make people feel things, that can maybe even change their lives. Doesn’t he want that, too? Isn’t that why he brought me here?
For a fleeting moment, I want to give up and just write the book I can write at this point. Hordes of people will read it anyway, impulse-buying it by the millions at their nearest Hudson News. Even if I filled every page with Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, it’s guaranteed to be an instant New York Times bestseller. I suppose I’ll get the baseline I need out of this project. It should be easier for Paul to land things for me once publishers find out I was the brains behind the coveted Roland Rogers memoir. Maybe there was no greater logic to my ending up here. It could just be another cosmic joke, like being born into a religion founded by a treasure-hunting teenager. Did I slip back into that old Mormon mindset of looking for connections everywhere—for meaning in meaningless things? But goddamn it, even if there is no grand design that brought us together, I just want some answers at this point. I want this gay ghost to be straight with me. Can’t he just answer the fucking question?
Pulse accelerating now, I hurriedly flip back in my notebook, almost tearing the pages as I go. “You said before that Crag ‘took everything’ from you,” I quote back to him. “That he robbed you of a life you wanted to live. Didn’t you want a break from all that Crag?”
I can tell from his pause that he’s taken aback by my tone. I haven’t had to interrogate him quite so acutely in a few days, farming personal details in the bedroom instead, so he may have forgotten the kind of pressure I can apply.
“Crag gave me things, too,” Roland says, and it sounds like he’s going to continue but he stops short.
“Go on,” I tell him, patience thinning.
“I mean it felt good to be the Hollywood tough guy.”
Even when he’s answering, he’s never really answering.
“And why was that something that mattered to you?” I ask, speaking slowly, like a kindergarten teacher introducing a child to new words.
“Because it felt good.”
God, it’s like I’m the arrow in that Greek paradox that can never reach its target, forever getting stuck at midpoints.
“And why did it feel good?”
I’m not going to let him talk me in circles until the snow melts.
“You always want the why , don’t you, Adam?” He sighs.
“And you never tell me the why !” I yell.
Frustrated, I look around at all the leather-bound books on the shelves lining the walls of his study—titles Roland hasn’t read and never will. He has no sense of what makes books powerful—why they can break hearts and mend them. He doesn’t want a book, he wants a prop, something he can wave around from the grave to prove that he was more than just a cookie-cutter action hero. Well, if he wanted that, he should have just actually gone for that Oscar instead of being a fucking coward.
“I’m paying you a lot of money, Adam,” Roland says. “Can’t you just be a good boy and write what I tell you? Quit trying to unlock the secrets of the universe.”
I furiously scribble over the notes I’ve taken so far. I want to black out the whole page because that’s what Roland is giving me: Nothing. Emptiness. With a side of denigration.
“What am I to you, Roland?” I ask him, realizing too late that I am DTR-ing after all. “Am I just a stenographer?”
“You’re a cute stenographer,” Roland says, his voice quieter as he measures my anger.
He’s trying to walk me back from the ledge, but it’s not going to work.
“I thought you specifically sought me out because you liked my writing,” I remind him. “‘Felled logs in the snow,’ remember? ‘Buried secrets?’ Do you want me to actually use my skills, or was mine just the only book you’ve ever read?”
Roland is silent. Not even static comes through the speakers.
“Come on, Adam. That’s not fair.”
“No, you come on, Roland! You want me to tell the world you were some once-in-a-generation star? Well, you weren’t. You thought you could be Paul Newman or Gregory Fucking Peck but you ended up an action-movie hack.”
I’m regretting the words in real time, and yet I can’t stop saying them, just like he won’t stop withholding.
“At least I kept working,” Roland shoots back.
“At the expense of your soul,” I tell him, pierced by the insult, all the hurt and anger welling up inside me. “You were in the closet until you died , Roland. Don’t you want to do something bold for once? You didn’t while you were alive.”
“You want me to be bold?” he says, and all the Roland charm is drained from his voice, replaced with acid and venom. “Bold like you were fifteen years ago, donut boy?”
I drop my notebook on the rug, and Roland keeps talking, but I don’t have ears to hear him right now. He switches to the shower speaker around my neck but I unclip it and drop it on an empty chair as I walk out the door.