Part 1 (1/2)
Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams.
Brent Hartinger.
For Michael Jensen.
And for all those people crazy enough to chase some stupid, impractical dream.
CHAPTER ONE.
I was floating facedown in a swimming pool, completely motionless, dead to the world.
Down below me, along the bottom of the pool, something brown and frond-like hung in the water. Old leaves, probably. They were absolutely still, just like I was. It was like they were suspended in plastic acrylic. The water in the pool around me was completely still too. We were all frozen in time.
My name is Russel Middlebrook, I was twenty-four years old, and my life was over. I'd just moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. This was the pool in the courtyard of my new apartment building, but I was dead now, so I'd never get a chance to enjoy it.
The water moved around me. Down on the bottom of the pool, the dead leaves jerked and swirled.
Someone had climbed into the water with me, someone with hairy, muscular legs that lead up to a pair of well-packed navy trunks.
My boyfriend Kevin.
I lifted my head.
”Hey there,” he said, with a grin that gave me a reason to live again.
Okay, okay, so I wasn't literally ”dead.” But I really had felt that way. Moving from Seattle to Los Angeles had been exhausting. First, we'd flown down to Los Angeles to rent the apartment, then back to Seattle again to pack our whole lives into boxes. Then we loaded those boxes into the moving truck and drove our car a thousand miles down to California to meet the truck. And then we did the whole d.a.m.n thing in reverse, unloading and unpacking, destroying my back with all the lifting and somehow cutting my fingers to shreds on the cardboard. We'd spent the last two days unpacking, and it seemed like we'd barely started, like all we'd really done is move the boxes into the right rooms.
But being with Kevin, the guy I loved, none of that mattered. Now, for the first time in our relations.h.i.+p, we finally had the chance to live together. So as bad as it had been getting here, it hadn't been that bad. And in spite of being completely exhausted, I couldn't have been happier.
Here's where I'm also supposed to say: ”It's not like our relations.h.i.+p was perfect.” And, ”We had our problems just like anyone else. It drove me crazy the way he squeezed the toothpaste, and I could already tell we were going to fight over how to load the dishwasher.” That way, those of you who are in bad or so-so relations.h.i.+ps will still be able to relate. And those of you who aren't in relations.h.i.+ps at all won't be jealous.
Problem is, our relations.h.i.+p was perfect, or pretty darn near. Basically, Kevin was my hot best friend who I also got to have s.e.x with.
In our defense, we'd had our share of problems in the past. Basically, we'd been on-again, off-again for seven years, ever since we first started dating in high school. But we'd gotten together for good the November of the previous year, and it was early September now, and things had been incredible ever since. Maybe the stress of this move to Los Angeles, or the high expectations of our finally living together after all these years, would be our undoing. Or maybe this was all just some sort of honeymoon period that would inevitably end in a flurry of broken dishes and violently squeezed toothpaste tubes.
I doubted it. Kevin was the Ennis Del Mar to my Jack Twist, but without all the self-hatred, and fewer canned beans. (These are Brokeback Mountain references. If you've never seen the movie, you should. Oh, and you're dead to me.) Even so, I did feel a certain amount of guilt. I was the reason why Kevin and I decided to move to Los Angeles in the first place. He'd been happy in Seattle (more or less). But the year before, I'd met this really great old lady named Vernie Rose who had once been sort of a famous screenwriter. She'd inspired me to become a screenwriter myself. At one point, Vernie had told me that if I was really serious about it, I needed to move to Los Angeles. Kevin and I had talked it over, and we'd decided: Why not go now when we were young, before we had commitments and obligations? Besides, we were ready for a change.
Kevin sank deeper into the pool. ”Why is this so d.a.m.n refres.h.i.+ng? Back home, swimming pools are never this refres.h.i.+ng.”
”Oh!” I said. ”I just read something about that. It's the interaction between the temperature of the air and the temperature of the water. Or, wait, maybe it has to do with the lack of humidity. The heat is drier, so the water feels different.”
Kevin smiled. ”So basically, it feels better here. Thanks, I didn't know that.”
I splashed him. Being in a perfect relations.h.i.+p didn't preclude our teasing each other. A lot. In fact, it was part of what made the relations.h.i.+p so perfect.
A woman walked into the courtyard of our new building - the Escala Apartments. The courtyard was actually pretty dumpy: leaves in the pool, cracks in the concrete, and, yes, faded plastic plants and Astroturf in place of most of the landscaping (oy!).
”Hey, there,” Kevin said to the woman.
She looked over at us, perplexed, taken aback a bit. I guess she wasn't used to people being friendly in this building, or maybe even in this city.
She was tall and bony with lots of angles - a praying mantis of a woman, except that makes her sound dangerous, and I actually liked the way she looked, that she had a bit of an edge. She had dark red hair, definitely dyed, in sort of a tight s.h.a.g haircut. Her clothes had a crunchy vibe - some embroidery, a ta.s.sel or two - but I had a feeling it was misleading, like whiskers on a mountain lion. This was a woman who was clearly ready to rumble.
”We're new,” Kevin said. ”From Seattle? I'm Kevin.” He nodded at me. ”This is my boyfriend Russel.”
She smiled a knowing little smile. ”Gina,” she said. She drifted closer to the pool. ”You guys actors?”
”Editor,” Kevin said, meaning himself. He was more an editor/journalist - non-fiction only. ”Russel's a screenwriter.”
She gave me another knowing nod, but secretly I was sort of flattered she thought I was handsome enough to be an actor. Then again, maybe she was mostly looking at Kevin who, incidentally, really is handsome enough to be an actor. Or maybe it was as simple as the fact that so many people in Los Angeles are actors, or trying to be. I'd lived in Los Angeles for less than three days, but even I knew that.
”What are you?” I asked Gina, meaning, what do you do?
”Stand-up comedian,” she said.
She didn't say anything else, and Kevin and I just stared at her.
”You're waiting for me to say something funny, aren't you?” she said drolly.
Busted. Kevin and I smiled.
”We're in 2-B,” I said.
”Yeah?” Gina said, raising an eyebrow.
”Why 'yeah?'” I said. ”Did someone kill themselves in our unit or something?”
”Actually, yeah,” Gina said. ”There's even supposed to be a ghost.”
”Shut up!” Kevin said, in a way that was sort of a cross between ”Yikes!” and ”Cool!”
I looked at Kevin. ”The manager didn't say anything about anyone killing themselves.”
”Well, it was, like, fifty years ago,” Gina said.
”So is it like that season of American Horror Story where they don't need to tell anyone about a death in the house if it happened more than three years before?” I said.
”It's more like he's a s.h.i.+tty Los Angeles landlord who doesn't give a c.r.a.p what he tells you,” Gina said, ”because he knows there'll always be someone else to come along and rent it if you don't.”
”Why'd he kill himself?” Kevin asked. ”'He'?”
She nodded. ”Think so. And why does anyone ever kill themselves in Hollywood? Failed actor or failed writer - can't remember which. Which is funny. You never hear about the ghost of someone who moves to Hollywood to become a key grip, but doesn't get the job and ends up killing himself.”
Kevin and I laughed.