After Andy died me and a couple of the guys took his car to the junkyard to see what we could get for scrap. That was the excuse, anyway. Mostly we didn’t want to look at it anymore. It was a beat-up baby blue 1952 Pontiac with bald tires and a trunk that couldn’t close all the way; its lead-shedding paint job hadn’t been touched since Korea, and Andy had taken to patching over the exposed metal with any and all bumper stickers he could find. The thing was covered in ‘em, places he’d never been to, car brands he’d never owned, stupid sayings like KEEP OFF THE GRASS—I PLAN TO SMOKE IT… that one cracked him up every time. It was a real piece of shit, but he loved that stupid car like a girl. In the end we got sixty bucks for it.
Every Friday night he’d pick me up from my job at the video store, honking the horn three times in a row and waiting for me to come stumbling out with my uniform still on and my manager yelling at me over the racket he made. I’d climb into the backseat and try to do my hair as best I could in the mirror while he went and picked up Diane. After he picked up Diane he’d go around to pick up whatever other guys would be coming with us—ensemble members, tagalongs to our core four. Sometimes I knew them and sometimes I didn’t. Then he would pick up Alan from the porch of his parent’s house; Alan was always last.
Alan was six-foot-eight in platforms and he knew it. He had a penchant for glasses with huge frames that made his gun-metal eyes look three times their size and polyester suits he stole piece by piece from his job at Woolworth’s. He could never get the grease out of his limp bleached hair, so he improvised by slicking it back wet against his skull with a pound of product a night. He spent most of his meager salary on it, that and entry fees to Elstree, the seedy Castro disco we spent our weekends at. Alan was the king of Elstree—he could clear the dance floor in minutes, which he frequently did. When Alan wanted to dance, it was a bad idea to get in his way; we all knew that from personal experience. Dancing too close to him was like sidling up to a live wire. Both his older brothers were priests, and he seemed determined to make up for that with anything that moved.
Diane was in love with him— most of the time Diane was a chubby fast-talking Jewish girl with big hair and bigger hoop earrings. Other times she was a guy, or a girl who had been a guy, or something. Usually it just seemed like she was whatever Alan wasn’t in the mood for that night. She was the only one of us who was still in school, taking classes at the community college; she wanted to be a nurse. In the meantime things weren’t so hot. She bounced around from part-time job to part-time job, never sticking to anything, never doing anything she really believed in. Money was noose-tight. Once or twice I’d seen her on a street corner in bad parts of town, dressed up like she was going dancing, but I knew I wouldn’t be seeing her at Elstree. She didn’t have a problem with sex, though. I found out early on that she’d slept with most of the guys in the group at some point or another, even Andy once as a favor (they’d been best friends in high school and he dreaded the thought of graduating a virgin). It was love that gave her trouble. She’d sit at a table and watch Alan dance all night, never getting closer, just watching him and sighing with her head in one hand like a silent movie heroine. Usually with Andy sitting right next to her.
Andy was—well, I started hanging out with him because he was Diane’s friend and he had a car, but he turned out to be cool in the end. Cooler than all the rest of those guys, that was for sure. His real name was something Chinese, but he’d been Andy ever since we found a baby picture of him where he had the same haircut as the kid on the lettuce. We called him Crybaby because he couldn’t even watch TV without bursting into tears. He was stick-thin and only five-foot-six on a good day, and he walked with careful steps like he might get knocked over by a passing truck or gust of wind. Everybody seemed to know he was a homosexual except him. His nose was crooked because at thirteen he’d gotten it broken by a bunch of guys who knew, and I guess he’d had to live with that the rest of his life. Still, he dated more girls than anyone I knew; he had a taste for stuck-up Catholics who’d hang around for a month on average before he managed to piss them off. “Numb cunt,” Alan would mutter whenever Andy broke the news that Mary or Lucy or Bernadette had dumped him, and then he would spit on the ground. Every time. Sometimes I wondered if Andy didn’t date all those girls just to hear him say that, to imagine the face Alan was spitting in was his own.
Yeah, Andy was in love with him, too. He and Diane both. Alan didn’t love anything, except maybe TV and dancing at Elstree. I tried to love both of them enough to make up for it, in my own way, but I know in my heart it didn’t work. That was all I had in 1979, the fact that I loved everyone and everything around me. I was nineteen years old and I still thought that people were good, even if they had a bitch of a time showing it sometimes. I had a cheap camera and I took pictures of anything I could see, pictures of all my friends. I spent rolls and rolls of film on the stupidest shit imaginable and I hung every picture up in my bedroom until the walls were slathered in them. Pictures of Andy and Diane, pictures of Elstree, pictures outside my window of cars going by, people walking down the sidewalk talking and laughing with each other. I had one picture of Alan, on the dancefloor, where he was washed out to a white lightshape mid-move. Nobody knew it was a picture of him except me.
You see, I liked looking at people without being one. I was always a kind of bystander in the group—I was poor, we all were, but I wasn’t as poor as Alan and Andy, and definitely wasn’t as poor as Diane. I had the best relationship with my folks out of anyone, too. If anything ever happened, if shit went south at Elstree or I got in a fight or something happened to Diane, I could have called my dad on a pay-phone and he would have come and picked me up in his work truck in a second. No questions asked. None of my other friends could have said that. They were in it ‘til it was over. They never said it to my face, but there was always the unspoken understanding that I was a poser, a fake, and always would be… and I liked it that way.
Whenever we drove somewhere me and Diane sat in the back, her on the right and me on the left. You could seat three people back there, but if you doubled up you could get three more on each lap; if you were really desperate, the trunk fit two people as long as they had a good sense of humor. Andy drove, obviously, and Alan got shotgun, always. It was just a rule of Andy’s car that Alan got to sit up there with his legs up on the dashboard and talk to him, laughing softly at jokes the rest of us couldn’t hear.
Once you got to Elstree there were about three things you could do: drink, dance, or fuck. On a good night you hit all three, but usually it was the first two. Me and Andy would go warm up the floor a little, shooting glances back at Diane and trying to make her laugh—she didn’t dance, even though guys came up to her all the time. She would have danced with Alan, but he never asked. He wouldn’t start dancing himself until at least half an hour after we all showed up, sometimes twenty minutes if he was feeling antsy, but once he started everybody in the place knew. He never had to announce himself. He’d mosey his way into the middle of the floor with a feigned politeness, pushing past shoulders and walking in the middle of less-than-pleased couples until inevitably a circle would clear for him in the center of Elstree’s glass light-up dance floor.
Alan danced like a machine. In every sense of the word—good and bad. Every move was precise, well-practiced, immaculate and on-beat. He could land splits and jumps as well as the dancers I saw on TV, because TV was where he got almost all of his training. He never partner danced; he was always solo, maybe because he didn’t want anyone taking his spotlight. It was effortless in the way that can only be achieved by constant, back-breaking effort. His body became a vessel for whatever sound, hollowing out anything that was Alan and filling it in with pure essence of Donna Summer, Village People, Sylvester. It was scary. He was a good dancer, leagues better than the rest of us and better than most of the other people in Elstree, but if you looked at his face when he did it his expression was solemn, tight-lipped. More like a Russian ballet dancer than a disco star. Everyone else in the place would be smiling and laughing, at themselves and at each other, but never Alan.
Alan’s dream was to be on American Bandstand. He wanted to be one of those teenagers they’d bring in to dance to the hot records and talk about how they liked them or not. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it. I say dream, but it was more like an obsession. This guy lived in Studio B all the time in his head. It consumed all his waking thoughts, almost every conversation you had with him, and at Elstree he treated getting scouted like it was a second job, full-time, no benefits. To his credit, sometimes Bandstand guys would trek up from LA; you could always pick them out because they dressed like squares, probably a bunch of low-level TV execs who never would have stepped foot in a disco if they weren’t getting paid to do it. Alan had an eye for them like a hawk, and whenever he saw them he’d get all worked up and wouldn’t let us leave until three or four in the morning (even if the guy had been history by twelve). “When I get on Bandstand,” he told me once while we were on line together for the Elstree men’s room, “I’m just gonna park myself on the couch and watch the tube until my episode comes on. Not gonna eat, sleep, nothin’. Then once it’s over, I’m gonna go out back and blow my brains out with my dad’s .44 Magnum. You know, like the big gun from Taxi Driver.”
The problem was, Alan was a good dancer, great, even, but he wasn’t extraordinary. Wasn’t TV material. Even he fucked up sometimes—sometimes in big ways, sometimes in ways you could only even know about if you had somebody to teach you. But he’d learned how to dance the way all of us had learned: watching other people. He’d never had a professional lesson in his life because he couldn’t afford them. He couldn’t afford studio space at the local spots to practice, either. Elstree was his only shot. Once I saw him take off one of his boots in Andy’s car, propped up on the driver’s seat headrest, and his foot was all swollen up in this horrifying shade of purple. He’d been dancing all night without stopping, and it didn’t even look like part of a human body anymore. I thought about that sometimes, when I watched American Bandstand and saw all those teenagers smiling in Studio B with their nice clean hair and their brand new clothes, and I hated them.
That was life—working five days a week for our pitiful salaries, blowing them at Elstree all weekend, rinse and repeat, over and over and over again. Watching Alan try his hardest for an achievement he never got… maybe was never even considered for. Never going anywhere, never getting anything. In our own ways, we caught onto the fact that the cycle wasn’t sustainable. There was no way to keep treading water and flailing your arms and holding your breath through the moments you sunk down under… and live. The center couldn’t hold, and if things were going to change—when they were going to change—it would probably be for the worse.
That was when we started trading what we called the Big Bugout between each other. When somebody had the Big Bugout, they hardly ever danced—usually they would just sit in the booth with Diane and drink, a lot. Sometimes they wouldn’t even show up at all, even when Andy would honk the horn a hundred times for them to get their asses up and out of bed. They’d get listless, flaky, wouldn’t talk much. Whenever the Big Bugout was washing over me I would feel half-ghost, half-man, floating through my life, never touching anything. I’d start thinking that I didn’t want to do anything, anything at all: didn’t want to work, didn’t want to eat, didn’t even want to take pictures. I just wanted to sit in a booth at Elstree for hours and hours, watching Alan dance and forgetting I was even fucking alive. He somehow never seemed afflicted by the Big Bugout, like he was above it all, and sometimes in my secret heart I resented him for that. Later on I realized that it was probably because he was always bugging out, all the time.
Poor Crybaby Andy was always hit the hardest. Whenever he was bugged out, he looked absolutely miserable. He was always either crying or immediately post-crying, and his eyes were always ringed-red and puffy. He got real needy, too, staring after Alan more desperately. Always trying to talk to him, wanting to talk to him. “You’re one annoying little fag, you know that?” Alan told him once while he was driving, in the same light and joking tone that he said just about everything… but I could tell it hurt. It hit Andy down low, somewhere it hurts for all time. When we finally got to Elstree afterwards he told me he wanted me to fix his hair in the bathroom, and once we got there he just exploded into these racking, pitiful little sobs.
“Christ, what’s wrong?” I asked him as I rubbed his back, leaning unsteadily against the cracking paint of the wall.
He couldn’t talk for a long time, and once he could he just said “I dunno, man, I dunno, I dunno. I’m bugging out again. Do you think I’m a fag? I mean tell me honestly. Do you really think so?”
I didn’t have a good answer for him.
After that happened, Andy started to have the Big Bugout most of the time. He’d stay in bed a lot, but you could tell from looking at him that he wasn’t sleeping very well. I started to get real worried about him, only I didn’t know what to do about it, exactly. I tried to tell Diane once, at Elstree—I think something’s really wrong with Andy—but the music was so loud she couldn’t hear me.
“What? She said, scrunching her face up in confusion, and I repeated it. I didn’t fare any better that time. “What? What?”
It got harder and harder to say every time, like my throat was closing up. Trying to start the conversation, get it out into the open… that was terrifying. It would have meant invoking the awful thing that was boiling under the surface of everything that was important in my life and threatening to knock it all over. Eventually I just quit.
The night before it happened—I don’t believe in omens, but Andy hit a white cat with his car. He was drunk, headed back from Elstree, and he was swerving all over the place. I heard it scream under the wheel… heard the thud it made. Then Diane screamed, as if she was mirroring it. That’s what scared the crap out of me—hearing it scream and then hearing her scream seconds after. I thought about that sound all night, and didn’t sleep.
Andy pulled over and we all got out of the car to look at it. We were in my neighborhood and it was maybe two thirty in the morning, so the street was totally empty save for us four and one other guy. We could see the cat a couple of feet away thanks to its bright white fur—it was almost glowing in the dark, like a specter. Diane got one look at it from a distance and started crying; she was always a big cat person. She walked a couple of feet down the block with her face in her elbow while Andy just stood there, dazed and drunk. Me, Alan and the other guy got closer; there wasn’t anyone else who was going to do it.
“Damn stray,” Alan muttered under his breath, but it was obvious just by looking at it that this cat had been somebody’s pet. It had a pink rhinestone collar with a little bow on it, and when I knelt down beside it to pick it up the fur was soft, well taken care of. Somebody loved that damn cat, that was for certain. Never before in my life had I felt like such a waste, such a piece of human garbage.
“What’s the name on the tag?” The other guy asked. I don’t remember his name, and I know he wasn’t with us the night after once the real hard times started. Maybe he believed in omens. He looked totally pale, like there wasn’t a drop of blood in his body.
“I dunno,” I said, and when I went to check—and in the moment I reached for it the fear took over my entire body, and I became certain that I was going to turn the tag over and it would say nothing but ANDY in big capital letters. Pretty cliché, right? I could visualize it perfectly, that’s how convinced I was. It clicked something in the back of my head, that image that was based on nothing, and I never really felt all together again after that. I had seen this fake-image so concretely that it took me almost a minute to actually read the thing: PRETTY KITTY and an address I half-recognized.
We stood looking at its broken body for a long moment, a loose triangle of me kneeling and the others standing. Then I picked it up and held it tenderly in both outstretched palms, grimacing as I felt the blood start to get on my skin. When I got home I would wash my hands five times over, scrubbing with soap until they were raw and red and unpleasant, and still I would think I could feel it, a little. In the meantime, nobody knew what to say, or what to do. The other guy got right back in the car and sat patiently on the hump, waiting to be taken home. Alan followed a moment later. Andy stood in the middle of the street and stared, like a deer in fucking headlights, stared and looked down at his feet, then at his car. Diane came back and led him behind the wheel and they all drove away, without saying goodbye, without saying anything. They left me there with the dead cat in my hands.
I wandered around my neighborhood for half an hour trying to find the house on the tag, but I was drunk myself and screwed up about the whole thing. As soon as they left I started crying, I guess because there wasn’t anybody to see me do it and it felt safe. Eventually I just left it under a tree in a little parklet and went home. I promised through my tears that I was going to come back and bury it, but the next morning it was gone. That was the last and first thing that happened, the end of our life as friends and the beginning of whatever came next: killing that cat and not getting the chance to bury it.
When I think about the night Andy died what stands out the most—a pattern I can cling to—are the phone calls I got. The first was from Alan, at the video store right before my shift started, and he was calling to tell me that he’d gotten on American Bandstand.
“Oh shit! Really?” I asked him, my voice jumping up in volume and earning me a look from my manager.
“Yeah, really,” he answered, only he didn’t sound half as excited as I was. His voice was measured, entirely calm… as though things had simply gone the way they were expected to. “They called me last night after we got back. I gotta get on the plane tonight for all the filming tomorrow—so I’m not gonna come with you guys ‘cuz I’ll be busy. On the plane. I’m gonna buy some new clothes, too… maybe I’ll get, like, a white Tony Manero suit. I think that’ll look good on camera, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I agreed with him; at the time I didn’t question why an American Bandstand guy would have been calling him at three o’clock in the morning, or how he would have gotten Alan’s number in the first place. I was too happy for him. “I can’t believe it. That’s incredible.”
“Yeah, it is,” he said, and then he hung up before I could say anything else. It was the shortest of the phone calls I got that day; it had the least substance. I guess that’s a polite way to say it was complete bullshit. When I found out later that he had lied, I wasn’t taken aback by it… as though I had known already. Somewhere in my body. I just needed to believe that one of us was able to do something, anything at all. I thought about it through my whole shift, imagining what he’d look like there in Studio B with all the others, in his Tony Manero suit. What I kept seeing was a big crowd, where he slipped right in and didn’t stick out at all.
I didn’t know it then, but I got a lot of calls to my house phone, too; five from Diane, one from Andy. By the time Diane reached me at the video store she was hysterical, and when I picked up the phone she screamed loud enough that a little old lady renting Streetcar gave me the most scandalized look I’ve ever seen.
“WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN???”
“At work,” I answered meekly. By that point I was already terrified for two reasons. The first was that Diane never swore, ever, even when she was angry enough to scratch somebody or kick their heel out from under them. The second was that I could hear in her voice that she had been sobbing.
“I—” she started with that same sobbing rage, before taking a deep shaking breath that I could hear and managing to calm down. “You’re right, I’m sorry for yelling. I’m not thinking straight right now. It’s Andy.”
“What?” Another hard shiver of fear wracked its way through my body. I got the sinking feeling I knew what she was going to say before she even said it, clairvoyance for only the worst life can offer.
“He’s hurt himself really bad. His wrists, I—I mean I really think he tried to kill himself. You didn’t get his call, did you?”
“No,” I murmured, walking out from behind the counter and as far into the back room as the phone’s cord would reach. My heart was pounding in my chest at this point, and I could feel a sheen of sweat break out hard on my forehead as the terror throbbed side-by-side with total, unmanageable guilt. “No, I’ve been at the store all day—is he—”
“He’s safe for now I think. I tried to bandage him up best I could… he didn’t wanna go to the hospital. He doesn’t want his parents to find out once they get back.” At that she started crying again, big loud tears I could hear and imagine on her face. “Listen, can you just come? He said he wants to see you. I think he’s asleep now but—he said he wanted to see you—he wanted to talk to you—”
“Diane, I’m at work—”
“Well can’t you get out of it!? This is IMPORTANT!” She shouted again, and then tapered off into these awful sobs she wasn’t able to talk though. She just cried on the other end of the phone while I promised her over and over I would come. She was still at it when I hung up and went to get my stuff and walk out the door. I could hear my manager shouting at me, asking where the hell I thought I was going, what kind of nerve I had walking out in the middle of my shift—but I didn’t hear any of it. Later on I found out I got fired for that, but by that point it didn’t matter.
The sun was starting to set when Diane called me, and by the time the bus got me to Andy’s house it was full dark. I ran up to the front door and started pounding on it, but it was open—I slammed my way inside and hurtled up the stairs, thinking of nothing but Andy and the sound my shitty second-hand Keds made when they struck the hardwood floor. I was trying to remember the last time I’d seen him, the last conversation we’d had.
He was lying on top of his blankets in only his boxers, his black hair damp and his skin slick with sweat. His chest rose and fell in the deep, heavy breaths of sleep. I tried not to look at his arms, splayed out and hanging off his mattress, but it was impossible. Each one was wrapped in Ace bandage up to the elbow and splotched with sick dark blood. Diane must have done that for him; I guess she was finally a nurse that night. She was kneeling at the side of the bed and—she was wiping the sweat off of his forehead with a washcloth, holding one of his rough, calloused hands with her own. When I came in, she didn’t speak; she just looked over her shoulder at me, let go of his hand, and silently brought one cheap-manicured finger up to her lips. A plea not to wake him.
It was the first time in my life I had ever been really moved by something. She was tending to him. There was nobody else in the world who would do it. I became cognizant, then, of the triangle they formed—him and her at the base and Alan at the distant, unobtainable peak. They had to love each other, any way they could, because they were mutually unloved. How many times had I seen Andy try and stick up for her, in his own scaredy-cat way? When a guy at Elstree tried to hit on her, or somebody shouted at her from their car? And now this. It was like an ecosystem between the two of them. Something trying to grow in the dark. It was admirable; in all of my own triangle situations I had always seen myself as the lowest point, and scrabbled with the other guy like a scared and stupid dog over something the both of us could never have.
When I knelt beside her and said nothing, watching him, I understood that’s what I was there to do. Watch, that is. I was never going to be intimately involved in the sad and sordid lives of loose women and miserable queers. After seeing Andy and Diane like that, I didn’t want to be. I had the sick little nagging thought that I ought to take a picture of the two of them, register it as a Lasting Moment. Two years later a similar photo—a girl washing a would-be suicide in her bathtub, her hands in his hair and blood leaking down his wrist—won the Pulitzer prize. But I didn’t have my camera with me, and I knew that even if I had, taking that picture would have ended our friendship for good.
So I knelt next to Diane and I waited with her, and when she started to weep again I put my arm around her shoulder and held her close. We watched Andy breathe in his sleep for nearly half an hour, mouth hanging open in a vacant frown like he was just as miserable there, too. When his big brown eyes finally fluttered open, he looked first at Diane—always first at Diane—and then at me. There was a meek sort of dreamy wonder on his face that made me think of the end of The Wizard Of Oz, when she’s back in Kansas: You, and you, and you, and you were there…
“Hey, David,” he murmured, almost too quiet for me to understand, but his voice—as soon as I heard it I almost kind of wanted to kill myself too. He just sounded so goddamn beaten-down. Proof that everything in the world was terrible and it was never getting any better. He tried to sit up and Diane stopped him, reaching out and touching just above where the bandages stopped on the arm closest to her; at that, he laid back on his pillow and sighed.
“Didn’t you get my call?” He asked me, and I had to shake my head. I couldn’t bring myself to admit it out loud. He seemed to understand; he closed his eyes for long enough that I thought he had fallen asleep again before he spoke in a breathy, dreamless whisper. “That’s okay. I’m happy you came and saw me. I asked Diane to call everybody and… you were the only one who came… the only one who stayed on the line…”
He sighed again and I started crying, me and Diane both. He didn’t open his eyes to watch us, maybe to be polite, but soon he started to shake a little, sniffling. It took me a long moment to realize he was crying, but he was out of tears—he had swollen eyes and a runny nose, the tracks of previous sobs shiny and thick on his cheeks.
“Why did he hang up on me?” He asked, voice cracking as he opened his eyes to look at Diane and grasp childishly for her hand. He didn’t speak again until he got it, sniffling and wincing in pain as he bent his elbow to bring his free hand up and wipe his nose. “I wanted to tell him and he hung up on me, why would he do that? Why would he DO that, Diane?”
“That bastard,” Diane hissed, shockingly angry through her tears. “That miserable little bastard.”
I knew who she was talking about in an instant.
I tried to make it make sense and couldn’t. Sure, Alan could be an asshole, but never once had I thought he would do something that cruel. That was beyond being an asshole; it was deadly. The cause and effect was immediate and painful. And I found that I couldn’t even think about it for more than a second at a time without getting this panicky feeling high in the middle of my chest, something shockingly close to guilt. If Alan could do something like that, well… it undermined our whole group dynamic. He wasn’t our leader, exactly, but he was definitely the object of our mutual fascination. Wherever Alan wanted to go or whatever Alan wanted to do was usually what we ended up wanting, too. Without that structure, we’d scatter like a bunch of ants without a hill to come back to. My first thought wasn’t holy shit, Alan is a terrible person; it was how are we gonna come back from this? Oh man, this sucks. No one’s gonna wanna be HIS friend anymore.
More time passed. It couldn’t have been very much, but it felt agonizing. Diane didn’t move until she was certain Andy was asleep again, and when she stood up I heard the joints of her knees cracking like fireworks. I tried to follow and found my legs were dead on arrival. They shook like they wanted to topple me when I finally had to let her pull me to my feet.
We stood staring at each other, completely unmanned, over our only real friend in the world. I opened my mouth to ask Diane the only thing I could think, and I coughed for about a minute straight before it came out.
“What now?”
I had known her for three years, but I suddenly got a mental picture of her at age twelve, wide-eyed and innocent even in the grips of the first grief. “He’s probably gonna be hungry when he wakes up. Let’s make something.”
So I followed her down into the kitchen and we made pierogies, her and me. Well, when I say ‘made’ I mean they were really frozen Mrs. T’s in a box, and when I say ‘me and her’ I mean it was really Diane doing all the work sautéing and flipping them over while I hovered over her shoulder and worried about them. But we did it together, anyways. The kitchen was so small that we were hip-to-hip, always touching.
In that small span of time I realized I loved her. There wasn’t any kind of grand realization, some little thing she did that kicked the thought off in my brain—it was just being with her. Maybe that means it had always been that way. I loved her and I knew I wasn’t going to tell her, not unless by some miracle she told me first. I just stood there and watched the dopey smile that broke out on her face when she saw how nicely each pierogi browned, and I thought to myself, I guess I really love her, huh. Neat.
We scooped a couple out for ourselves and left Andy the lion’s share, precariously taking the plates up the stairs to his room. We’d timed it perfectly; he was rubbing his eyes and sitting up the best he could when we came in, and he blinked at us with this bewildered expression on his face. “Not hungry,” he muttered under his breath, but he took the plate and started to eat from it anyway with nervous, labored stabs of his fork. Me and Diane ate too, but mostly we watched him.
When he was done he slumped forward and said, “I wanna go to Elstree.”
Diane’s sympathy chipped for an instant, and I thought I even heard her scoff at him. “Are you kidding? You need to go to the hospital.”
“I can’t go to the hospital, Diane. I don’t feel good.”
“Right—”
“I feel good when I go to Elstree. That’s the only place. I don’t know how to feel good anywhere else so we’re going.”
“You’re not thinking straight.”
“I am! I am and we’re going. You don’t have a choice. Besides—Alan’ll probably be there and I can talk to him.”
“He’s at his American Bandstand taping.”
“I wonder about that,” Andy said mildly, and that was more than either of us could say we’d done. Later on, when I started to get superstitious and screwy in the head, I wondered about that, too. I wondered if Andy hadn’t gotten some psychic flash on the verge of death… or if he was just smarter than we’d all given him credit for.
In the end I put in my vote to go, and I guess I have to own it. “Come on, Diane, he’s right. It’ll make him feel better. Maybe we can even pick up a couple of the other guys too and we’ll go, no problem.”
I believed that, but I also believed in something base and selfish: that it would make me feel better too. That was the kind of place Elstree was, you know. If we were dancing we would forget that anything else was happening to us, and if we could get there soon enough and forget then maybe we wouldn’t have to think about it at all. It makes me sound like a naive idiot now, but I was nineteen and one of my closest friends had just tried to kill himself. Just remember that.
Andy got out of bed and dressed himself up best he could—long sleeves. Diane crossed her arms and opened her mouth like she was going to make a big fuss about it all, but I think eventually she got where the two of us were coming from. She shut her mouth again just as quick. Me and her were stuck in our work clothes, but other than that the image was perfect, that tonight was any other night.
But—that night, I drove Andy’s car. I’d never done it before and I never did it again, and it was the worst experience of my life, right until what happened after. I drove his car and Diane sat in the passenger’s seat and Andy laid down across the seats in the back because he’d started getting lightheaded again. I don’t think I can really communicate how wrong it felt to be behind the wheel, not without sounding like I ought to be locked up in a white room. But it was really awful, like I was going out of my way to walk under ladders. Nobody drove Andy’s car but Andy. Nobody.
But he couldn’t do it and Diane had never gotten her license; there was nobody else. Maybe in some cosmic way that makes me responsible. In any case, I’m surprised I didn’t run us off the highway. My hands were shaking bad, my knuckles pure white.
The Castro was so quiet, and so dark. Darker than I had ever remembered, so I had the high beams on, sweeping across corners every time I’d make a turn. It was like I was shining a big flashlight across a whole bunch of things that didn’t want to be seen and were trying to hide from me. So it was almost stupidly cinematic when I turned a corner about three blocks from Elstree and saw Alan standing in the middle of the street.
I screeched to a sudden stop and Diane screamed, though of course in the immediate aftermath she couldn’t have really known why she should have been screaming. That came after, when my heart started again and I got a good look at him. My whole body went cold, so cold I thought I’d never warm up again.
There was Alan, in his white Tony Manero suit, glowing like a beacon in the headlights with his arms limp in the slightly too-short sleeves. But it was splattered with something, and though he told us himself that it was blood I think I knew the second I looked at him that it was. It… marred him. There’s no other way to put it. Like it was a stain on his whole person instead of on his suit. It was also the moment that made me realize this was going to be one of the lynch-pins of my life, whether I liked it or not. That made me sick to my stomach, but I also couldn’t curb that age old, terrible impulse: Gee, I ought to take a photo of this. His composition is great and this lighting would be fantastic.
I heard three sounds all at once: The tires screeching, Diane screaming, Andy’s head hitting the back of my seat as the force of my hard-stop flung him forward.
“GET OUT OF THE ROAD!!!” I shouted at him, though thinking about it now he probably couldn’t hear me. It was the first thing I could think to do. I was freaked out already, but hearing my own voice coming out of my mouth freaked me out more. It was the first time I thought I’d ever sounded like an adult.
“What’s happening?” Andy asked from the backseat, struggling to sit up straight and rubbing the goose-egg growing on his head. I tried to answer neutrally as I could, but Diane took that job from me in her movie-heroine shriek.
“OH MY GOD IT’S ALAN! IT’S ALAN I THINK HE’S BLEEDING—PULL OVER DAVID—PULL OVER!”
I pulled over. For what it’s worth, I never once considered that the blood could have been his.
Alan, who was always so fucking cool, walked back into the beam of the headlights in one fluid motion and let himself into the backseat of Andy’s car. “Give me room,” he grunted to Andy, and Andy gave him room. Didn’t even hesitate for a second.
“Drive,” he told me. I drove. I didn’t look at the road; I craned my head over the driver’s seat shoulder and stared into the backseat like I was chauffeuring two space aliens. Mostly I wanted to make sure Andy was okay: you know, why did he hang up on me, why did he do that, I wanted to tell him and he hung up on me. Man, you could cut the tension in that car with a knife the second Alan shut the door and boxed it in. I could feel it, Diane could feel it, Andy could feel it for sure. But Alan—well, I think it’s safe to say that Alan just didn’t give a shit.
He was holding something in his lap and when I looked down I realized it was a gun—the .44 Magnum. He had one hand over it like he was trying to hide it, but like he’d told me himself, it was a big gun. I didn’t know if Andy and Diane had seen it and I didn’t know how to ask.
“Are you alright?” Diane asked. However mad she’d been at him before, I don’t think she could have helped herself. She loved him. “That’s blood, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Alan answered. He was looking out the window. “Don’t worry, Diane. It’s not mine.”
She didn’t ask him whose it was instead. I don’t think he would have answered. His interest in talking to any of us seemed to be at an all-time low. Instead she said, “What about your flight?” By this point we’d all gotten the hint that there was no flight, but there wasn’t anything else to ask. Not without getting really, really scared.
He didn’t answer that one, either. He just fidgeted with the gun in his lap, his long fingers curling over the barrel.
Somebody slammed their horn at me and I snapped my eyes back on the road, stupid with nerves and starting to get even more nauseous than I already was. Not that I kept my eyes on the road all that much, anyway—mostly I watched Andy in the rearview mirror, checked up on him. He was looking at Alan and shivering all over, looking away, and then looking again. I realized they matched—Alan in his bloody white suit and Andy in his bloody white Ace bandages. Fucking hell.
I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t particularly care. We wandered around Ashbury-Haight, probably looking like drunken idiots, for what felt like ages. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that it was the worst drive I’ve ever been on in my life. Nobody talked to each other. Diane put the radio on and turned it off just as fast when she realized that it actually made it worse. The air was so thick with bad energy I thought we were all about to start choking.
I don’t know how long I drove and took it, but I put my foot down when I turned the corner and saw police lights flashing up ahead, heard the echo of a muted siren. Not for us, obviously, but it just felt like too much of a damn omen, and I’d had enough of those the last two days.
“Listen,” I said, and in the mirror I saw Alan lift his head—he already knew I was talking to him. “You gotta get out of the car, man. It’s been a rough day and I’m not getting everyone involved in whatever you just screwed up.”
“I didn’t screw anything up,” Alan responded, and something in his voice—how brooding he sounded—suddenly I got angrier than I’d remembered being in a long, long time. I’m talking about real honest-to-god rage, white hot behind my eyelids. I gripped the wheel so hard my palms hurt for two days afterwards.
“Oh, cut the shit, Alan,” I hissed at him. I thought steam was going to start coming out of my ears like a cartoon character. “You have been so full of SHIT today, you know that? Nobody who hasn’t screwed something up stands in the middle of the street with a GUN covered in blood that apparently isn’t theirs. So you better tell me what you did and then get out of the car if you know what’s good for you. Do ONE thing today that doesn’t fuck somebody over.”
“David, lay off,” Diane whispered through clenched teeth, but Alan responded before I could even consider the possibility.
“Christ, who pissed in your coffee?” He muttered—and then this miserable little bastard had the guts to chuckle. Like he was the hottest shit since Chevy Chase. That just set me off all over again.
“YOU DID!” I screamed at him. My foot landed harder on the gas pedal—I was wheeling around corners like a demon. It didn’t occur to me to pull over. “YOU did, Alan, holy shit! Do you have ANY idea what’s been going on? Can you pull your head out of your ass for TWO SECONDS and take a goddamn LOOK? This might come as a surprise to you given you didn’t bother asking, but Andy slit his fucking WRISTS today and it was probably because of YOU! And now THIS! Whatever you did THIS time—”
“STOP!” Diane begged me again. She was starting to cry, and that made me feel like an asshole, but I couldn’t stop. No chance.
“What do you think I did?” Alan asked, and God, he was so fucking cool about it that I wanted to strangle him. There was a second where I really wanted to kill him. “You’re gonna accuse me of something, man, spit it out, tell me what you think I did.”
“I THINK,” I started, but then Andy grabbed the gun out of Alan’s lap and opened the car door and rolled back-first into the street before taking off like a shot into Golden Gate Park.
Diane screamed again. I’d been hearing that sound a lot more than ever wanted to. I screeched the car to a stop on the side of the road and immediately took off after him, not thinking, just moving. In my anger I had pretty much completely forgotten he was back there. I heard two pairs of heels following me and dimly realized it was Alan and Diane, but they didn’t exist to me, either. What existed was Andy and wherever he’d gone.
Eventually I stopped and I had to bend over, dry-heaving. My throat was like sandpaper and my heart was pounding like it wanted to make a break for it too. Diane and Alan caught up to me, and for fifteen minutes we wandered around, shouting his name over and over again like we were calling a dog. It was maybe ten-thirty, eleven at this point; if anybody was in the park, they didn’t bother us.
He was still running when we found him in front of the Conservatory of Flowers; there weren’t any trees, so his shadow-shape was obvious in the empty space. Diane called out to him one more time, and then, finally, he slowed to a stop. We didn’t have to get all that close to him to hear he was crying, loud.
“STAY AWAY!” He screamed, hysterical, and pointed the gun at us with a skinny arm that was shaking like a leaf in a blizzard. “LEAVE ME ALONE!!!” He didn’t really know how to hold it—his finger wasn’t even on the trigger—but me and Diane stopped dead in our tracks about five feet away from him. Alan, of course, went the rest of the way and held both hands out.
“Give me the gun, Andy,” he said patiently. I don’t think Andy even heard him.
“Why’d you hang up on me?” Andy managed to pull himself together enough to say. “Why? I needed you, Alan, and you hung up on me! You don’t DO that to someone! I was trying to tell you—I NEEDED to tell you that I, I, I—”
It was like watching a car crash. He couldn’t make the words come out. He started crying again, these horrifying, overpowering sobs. He cried so hard that he retched, and his face screwed up into a singular point of misery before he bent over at an odd angle and vomited. I didn’t want to see it, but I couldn’t look away. Crazily, I thought, it was like he was trying to make sure it didn’t get on Alan’s shoes.
“I want—” Andy started again, and then the hand that wasn’t holding the gun shot up to his throat like it was controlling itself. I saw the squeeze, the nails dig in, and I saw his eyes practically bug out of his head.
“WHY CAN’T I SAY WHAT I MEAN???”
I’d never heard anything quite so loud in my life, until he threw his head back like a man possessed and wailed. The purest, most distilled expression of agony I’ve ever encountered. That’s the only way I can describe it—you had to have been there. It took something out of me. I felt it seep into the ground, whatever it was, and it made me feel cold. Now somebody will call the cops, I thought numbly, and then the cops will show up and all of this will be over.
Nobody ever came.
“Is it really so fucked up?” Andy whispered, jarringly in contrast. His voice was completely blown out, a nearly inaudible creak. “To… to, you know, need things? Things like another person? Everybody wants that, that’s normal.”
Shockingly, Alan replied. His voice was as calm and collected as ever. As cool. “Come on, I know you’re not that dumb.”
It was enough to take Andy out of himself, make him blink twice and shiver once. “Huh?”
“Figure it out, Andy. You’re a man and I’m a man—that sound very normal to you?”
And he laughed again. The same laugh he’d had in the car—a particular laugh I realized I hadn’t heard before that night.
Something in Andy got unplugged. That’s the only way I can explain it, and if you’ve ever seen it happen to someone—which I wouldn’t wish on anybody—you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The look on his face: I watched something vital go out of him, never to return. It was the face of a guy who’s died in every way except physical. Once it took him over, he laughed, too, and the sound was the same low and awful thing that came out of Alan’s mouth, doubled over.
“You’re right,” Andy said—I think. He sounded like his mouth was full of cotton balls. “You’re right, Alan. You’re right, God—”
And then he broke off into these abysmal choking sounds, deep in the bottom of his throat somewhere between the laugh and his previous wailing. He put his free hand over his eyes like he was ashamed of himself and just stood like that for a terrifying moment. All I could do—all any of us could do—was watch him. I had forgotten where Diane was, knew where Alan only by the visual stimulus of his shape in front of me. I was watching him and screaming at myself inside, move, dammit, MOVE!... but I just couldn’t. I stood and watched the most horrible thing I’d ever seen unfold right in front of me.
After the moment was over Andy seemed to snap out of it. He lowered his hand; his face was pale and devoid of flush. Then he said the last thing I ever heard him say. “My dad is going to beat the shit out of me,” he said, stunningly clear, dissonant in how casual his voice suddenly went. Like it was nothing. “I mean, he might really kill me.”
Andy smiled, and the hand holding the gun raised ever so slightly. At the same second, Alan rushed him.
I’m embarrassed about what I did next. I only saw them tussle with the gun for about ten seconds before I shut my eyes tight. I couldn’t stand to look anymore. I heard Diane scream and heard her shoes in the grass. Maybe she said something. Then I heard the shot go off.
I opened my eyes by accident, and I’ll regret doing that for the rest of my life. Andy was dead. His head—his face—you can’t get shot with a gun like that from that close and live. Diane had gotten closer, to intervene, maybe, but she had her hands over her mouth and was stepping back away from him. She went too quickly and fell on her ass, the kind of slapstick that lets you know that if there’s a God he’s a cruel, cruel God. Alan just stood there, looking down at the bloody wreck that had once been Andy—the guy who was supposed to have been his friend. He had the .44 Magnum in his hand, and it was smoking. It was hard to see in the dark, but it was smoking, alright.
He dropped it and bolted off into the night without a word. I watched him, in his stupid fucking Tony Manero suit, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing but a little white dot at the other end of the field. That was the last time I ever saw him.
I found out later that there had been some bad talk at Elstree, and in the middle of it Alan pulled the gun from his suit pocket and put a bullet in the guy’s chest. Just got into an argument and went ahead and took his life. That was about twenty minutes before we found him, and five minutes after that Elstree had been crawling with cops. I’ll never know why it happened, and I’ll never know why he brought the gun to Elstree in the first place. I don’t want to know either of those things.
I helped Diane up off the ground and she couldn’t stand, she was shaking so bad. I had to hold her. We didn’t want to look at Andy again but we did, and when we heard a car alarm go off and saw lights come on in the apartment building across the field we did the worst thing either of us have done in our silly little sordid lives: we ran, too. We left him there. What else were we supposed to do? That’s what I said at the time, but shit, I knew it wasn’t true then as much as I do now. There had to have been something else. But we were scared stupid and we ran. And the whole time we ran I thought this time I really will come back, I swear, I won’t screw it up this time, I’ll come back and I’ll bury you, Andy, pretty kitty—
We ran and then walked to Diane’s house in Little Russia, and then we stopped, and we held each other, and we cried. There was nothing to say. We held each other and cried until there were no more tears, listening to the police sirens close in around Golden Gate Park. I wanted to kiss her but I knew that I couldn’t tell her that, much less do it. I waited patiently until she went inside, and then I watched her silhouette in the yellow-lit window from her front porch.
Then I found a payphone and called my father.
—
I wish to God I could tell you Diane spent the rest of her fat and happy days as Mrs. David Aguirre, but the truth is we made it about six months and then we split. I loved her, but we weren’t good lovers. It was just too obvious that the glue holding us together was the fact that we were the only ones who had seen that awful thing happen to poor Crybaby Andy, who had never hurt anybody in his life. That’s never going to be the basis for a lasting relationship, no matter how much I wanted it to be. Besides, it meant that there was always another man in bed with her—sometimes Andy, sometimes Alan.
But we always stayed friends. She kept up her classes and ended up moving to Georgia for nursing school, the only one of our crew who ever made it out far as I know. Last Christmas card I got, she was going pretty steady with some guy she met there, and I have to be happy for her even if I still wish it could have been me.
We only ever talked about it, really talked about it, once. Mostly just to share conspiracy theories. She thinks that Alan shot him, and I let her think that. I think it’s easier on her than what I think happened.
When I come back to it myself, I think about the thing Alan said to him right before. Figure it out, Andy. You’re a man and I’m a man—that sound very normal to you? Because it wasn’t like he was some raging homophobe. I mean, shit, he was at Fairoaks every other Friday night. Why would he say something like that? I’ll never really know, of course. But I wonder. I think that, when Alan killed the man at Elstree, something got unplugged in him, too. I think that when he pulled the trigger he saw his own headstone, and then it didn’t matter what he said to Andy, or to anyone, ever again. He just needed something that would make Andy give him the gun back, or give him the opportunity to take it. Anything at all.
I was fucked up about it for a long while afterwards. I did something else I regret: I deleted Andy’s voicemail, the one he left me just before he cut himself, without ever listening to it. I couldn’t be that brave. I got as far as hey, David and had to stop. Then I was plagued by these awful dreams where he would be hanging from the ceiling of my bedroom like something out of The Exorcist, crying, saying over and over: Why didn’t you call me, David? Why didn’t you call me? And all I could say as his head exploded into gore was, in Alan’s voice: You’re one annoying little fag, you know that?
Right, it was bad. But it got better. I got a new job. People moved on, things changed. Elstree shut down about a month after what happened, and the guys found a new place to dance every weekend, but I wasn’t huge on disco by that point. I’d gotten into new and cheaper hobbies, like writing. I even briefly had a little thing going with a girl from the restaurant I was bussing tables at.
But I also started watching American Bandstand every week.
I can’t explain why. It just became a habit the way it hadn’t been before. I wasn’t seeking it out, consciously, at least. It just always happened to be on, and I always happened to leave it on. There wasn’t any harm in it.
Long after everything was over and things had started to feel alright again in the world, I thought I saw somebody I recognized.
If it was Alan—and I really do think it was—he’d dyed his hair. Black, like Andy’s had been. But I couldn’t miss that face, those eyes. Those awful beautiful gun-metal eyes that had lost something, or that maybe never had it to start. It couldn’t have been anybody else. I never saw him close enough to tell for sure, but I felt it. It was the closest I’ve ever come to seeing a ghost.
I sat and watched the whole thing, and I thought about what he’d told me, a lifetime ago. I’m just gonna park myself on the couch and watch the tube until my episode comes on. Not gonna eat, sleep, nothin’. Then once it’s over, I’m gonna go out back and blow my brains out with my dad’s .44 Magnum.
Oh, yes, that damn thing. Just like in Taxi Driver.
I sat there, cold, as American Bandstand tapered off into the 8 o’clock news. A solemn looking woman was standing in front of Elstree and holding a microphone too close to her lips, saying words I had to work hard to process.
“Dance is the word when it comes to the night life of San Francisco’s passionate youth. But where do you go when the record is over? We’re here on the fifth anniversary of ‘the night that disco died’ for this Castro District block, when two different teenagers were found shot dead by the same gun in two different locations…”
I went upstairs to my room and wept.