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“The tips are better here, and you know it,” I say, lining up martini glasses.
He tosses the soiled dishes into the waiting soap-sink beneath the counter and raises a sarcastic brow in my direction. “Tell you what, why don’t you deliver Enrique’s ‘special’ order next time.” The regulars have a hard-on for Blake. He’s the light to my dark with curly blond hair cropped close to his head and deceptive doe eyes.
I shrug with a grin. “Hey, it’s the price you pay for real estate, pretty boy. We have to be close for auditions. You can’t afford to quit.” We’ve already been kicked out of two apartments in the last six months, always short on rent due to skipping work for last-minute auditions. It was how we met. I’d come home blitzed one night and decided to sleep it off outside my sealed front door brandished with an eviction notice. Blake had woken me when he came in from his own party and offered me his couch to crash on. Before that night, we’d been friendly in passing, but the next morning we’d gotten to know each other better through a nasty hangover. He even helped sweet-talk the landlord into letting me get my shit out of my apartment which now consisted of a duffle bag ready to move on a moment’s notice. We had little in common aside from acting aspirations, but even in his state, he was steps ahead of me.
Blake was a child star for fifteen minutes. He’s been typecast and unable to get many acting gigs since. I had yet to get my first real break, only scoring a few commercials with no lines in the last year. We were at the age where we were just young enough to land heartthrob teen or troubled son roles, but those were often passed out to those with a better portfolio. Our looks only gave us so much of an edge. And our headshots were shit. We’d let one of our regulars rip us off for a couple hundred dollars each only to get back underdeveloped photos on sandpaper to pass out to casting directors. Neither of us could afford to do better. We were both living hand-to-mouth and most of the time counted on the hospitality of the girls we bedded to get our next meal. We were literally fucking for food at this point, but just assholes enough to not let commitment deter our singular focus. I’d practically been a virgin when I got to Los Angeles and had spent the last couple of months making up for lost time.
In an act of desperation, Blake and I applied for and got hired to bartend at a dive aptly called Queens just off the strip even though we had no experience and were just on the other side of eighteen. Not that we had to fill out anything other than our jeans to get the job. The nights were long, but the work was easy and the tips we got in exchange for a shirtless few hours of objectification were worth it. Blake was uncomfortable with the attention, as hetero as they come, while I played nicer due to higher tolerance.
Blake glares openly as a few guys saunter up to the bar with upturned lips. Anyone with gaydar could see Blake was straight as an arrow, but it seems to be the new pastime of the patrons to flirt with the unavailable bartender. Blake is tested daily when our boss’s boyfriend, Enrique, orders his cocktails up to VIP with a special request that he be the one to deliver them. Blake is fire though, in mind-set and temperament, and I know it’s only a matter of time before he costs us the job.
It’s a little sad how formulaic we are in our circumstances. I’m the ‘runaway fresh off the bus’ to join the Hollywood circus, and Blake is already considered ‘washed up’ due to his role as a little brother in a sitcom, Buzzed, that ran one season. I had read far too many autobiographies to know that nothing happens overnight. Not even the overnight successes. Blake has very few connections since his falling out with his agent mother who took every dime of his momentary childhood wealth. He didn’t even have to get emancipation to free himself. When Blake turned into nothing more than a temporary cash-cow, his mother left him to his own devices. In his words, he thinks she’s still unaware he left her a year ago to hole up with his then-girlfriend. Blake’s still pissed off about it and determined to prove her wrong. At least that’s what he tells me when he’s drunk enough to shed some story.
For me, the grass is always going to be greener when you grow up in a trailer in Shitville, West Virginia, where my parents will die fucking, fighting, and festering in the filthy life they’ve made. As far as our relationship is concerned, I have no plans to ever visit for the holidays. I don’t play the victim. Their ignorance is incurable. As much as they lacked in work ethic, I make up for. I refuse the life I was born into. It won’t be mine. So if I have to cash in on the looks I was given and serve a few guys who are vying for a peek at my cock to pay the bills, so be it. My tolerance stems from survival instinct. I’ve been taking care of myself my whole life. Blake fled from a far more opulent lifestyle. I sometimes think he regrets leaving home though he would never admit it. His hate for his mother stems deep.
As if he’s reading my thoughts, he twists his lips up and nods. “We’re going to land something, man.”
“Damn right we are. We just have to get the dues part over with. This job is a joke, it isn’t reality. Just a test. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Right,” he says, nodding repeatedly. “But it gets better.” I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement, so I stay mute. The fact that he has a taste of the business but needs so much reassurance should scare me, but I’ve been in far worse situations than prancing around half naked for tips.
My only consolation for my shitty childhood circumstances was that a few trailers over, an old starlet by the name of Maddie—Madelyn Rosera Darling—used to babysit for my mother and taught me the art of cinema through the retelling of her heyday as an A-lister. Maddie is the one who set my future in motion. I didn’t know it then, but I’m appreciative now. She was the reason for my obsession. The one who planted the seed the first time she sat me down on her ancient sofa surrounded by a stack of reels and showed me her first movie.
“It gets better,” Blake repeated more for himself than to me as I loaded Enrique’s cocktail on his tray.
It only truly got better for one of us, for me.
I just didn’t realize the same path we traveled together, we got to from different directions. I was too busy burning takes while he was fighting the demons he created to keep up. I should have known. I should have seen him fading, but I was blazing too bright. I, like everyone else who mattered to Blake, left him behind in a trail of stardust.
Staring out at the turbulent ocean, I row in my machine for the second time that day. I’ve been overdoing it since Blake’s funeral. Speculation is front and center on every ne
ws station as to “why.” They’ve dug deep, highlighting his worst behavior, his patterns with the women in his life with a heavy concentration on ancient addictions. When we were younger, his favorite drug was whatever brought a good time or numbed him from defeat, but my fear is that there won’t be a trace of anything in his system once the autopsy report comes out. And with that, there will be no way to justify he wasn’t thinking clearly. Everything in my chest constricts at the conviction he was sober. And the idea that he was agonizingly present in his final minutes makes it that much harder. I could be asking the typical questions, but I know the answers.
Why didn’t he reach out to me?
Because I was unreachable.
Why didn’t I know he was depressed?
Because I didn’t ask.
The ugly truth is, we’d been on a different playing field for the last couple of years. Blake claimed he was doing no-budget independent films to help his creative flow—which is the standard excuse when no one wants to hire you—while I made blockbusters and cashed in. He was no longer invited to the parties, a self-made social pariah. More often than not, when Blake walked into the room, people fled from his conversation often wary and afraid of his temperament or what socializing with him could imply. People were cleaning their noses up, while Blake kept his full of debris. He’d been in the headlines more and more in the last few years for his behavior—possession of marijuana over the legal amount, public intoxication, and petty theft—which had to be bullshit.
The media hadn’t been very creative, it was almost as if the press was gunning for him, like someone was keeping tabs for any minor slip-up and then calling him out on every misstep to keep him in check. But I didn’t have to worry about distancing myself. I’ve been busy, so busy I left him to fend for himself.
Covered in sweat, I revel in the burn of my biceps and calves as I wade to nowhere, while memories of hidden hill houses and foggy nights behind the gates trap me with more questions. I’m not such an open book anymore because I don’t fully know my own story, not the parts that include missing chapters with Blake. I have my suspicions that he was a rag doll for the business, maybe more of a puppet than the rest of us. And I wasn’t there to protect him. He was the one who needed it, who always needed it.
My cell rings as a welcome distraction, and I tap my headphones to answer.
“Lucas,” my agent, Shannon, coos over the line. “I’ve got something. Wes wants you for this part, and I think it’s what you’ve been waiting for.”
“Wes?” Wes Nolan is one of the most respected directors in the business but is heavily into big-budget trilogies.
“I’m done with franchise for the moment. I’ve made that clear.”
“This is a departure for him, Lucas, and for you. Silver Ghost.”
I stop my movements. “Nikki Rayo’s story?”
