Leg, p.27
Leg, page 27
We were still unwinding our scarves and settling into our seats when the house lights dimmed and the familiar jump of Tchaikovsky’s strings told us Moe would soon come flying in from the wings in her peasant blouse and black skirt. She looked wan under her makeup, her Cheshire grin painted on with effort. The choreography was rapid, every half-second a new lunge, squat, or kick. My leg went stiff under me, my foot cramping in my tennis shoe.
The normies onstage, not to mention their families in the audience, would have no idea what it had taken Moe to make it to her seventeenth Nutcracker. No idea, no interest. They’d only remember her if her costume fell off, if she leapt so high she smacked her head into a light. She’d be the ghostly rapscallion in the back of a hundred cast selfies, the one untagged girl with the giant red-lipped smile. Some things Moe would never know, either, like how I danced with her from my seat every time she was up there, my bad leg tensing to every jeté. Moe, who looked up to me even when I didn’t deserve it.
You see The Nutcracker enough times and your mind starts to wander. You start imagining things turning out different. A dad leaps from his hospital bed and cartwheels into the splits. A star sister with a smile as big as her heart never gets cut from a dance or put in the back or told to play a pig. A brother with a limp keeps acting anyway, even though you can definitely see his nuts in tights. You sit there long enough and it’s like you become the dream. All seventeen Nutcrackers play at once, a show belonging not to Balanchine but entirely to Moe: Moe the Icicle, Moe the Poinsettia, the Hurricane, the Rag Doll, the Rat, the Toy Soldier, and finally the Bolshevik. I’d been so worried my little sister would never grow up, I’d failed to see that she had. Her life wasn’t a sequel to mine. It was a ballet. Here she was, dancing in New York just like her dad.
The pneumonia Nutcracker turned out to be Moe’s last. That spring, she was accepted into a master’s program in early childhood development at Columbia’s Teachers College. Mom grudgingly decamped from the Marriott in Brooklyn to a building with a doorman on the Upper West Side. For the first winter in a long time, Moe was not trapped in a snow globe of a ballet but in a preschool, student-teaching special needs kids in Harlem. We spent that Christmas as a family in New York. Moe decorated the tree with dry Swiffer pads instead of ornaments and we didn’t go to a single Nutcracker. Thank God.
COREY
Even if it hadn’t been next to the Rite Aid where I bought my lice shampoo, the Out of the Closet on Sunset Boulevard would have been hard to miss. The thrift store was attached to an AIDS Healthcare Foundation Pharmacy. Strapped to the roof of the building, a fifteen-foot inflatable muscle man flexed his biceps. FREE HIV TESTS read the sash across his chest.
The counselor who administered the test handed me the certificate verifying I was negative—my clean bill of health—and shook a basket of free condoms at me. The wrappers were red with the word Love written across them in white letters, like Valentines. “Remember, use lots of lube,” he said, as if I were limping because I hadn’t thought to.
What can you see about me that I can’t? I remember wondering.
Corey pulled up as I was coming home. We’d been messaging on gay.com for the past week and I was disappointed to see he wasn’t worse looking. A big lug of a guy with flouncy brown hair, he didn’t appear to be missing any digits, and when he took off his Ray-Bans both eyes tracked me darting into his field of vision. I had liked that his profile was un-Hollywood: no sizzle reels, shirtless selfies, or YouTube videos with adorable dogs. I’d thought I might have a chance.
I felt bad for the guys I met online. Based on how I presented myself, it’d be reasonable to expect a shaggy blond camp counselor ready to scramble up a boulder. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, just not the complete picture. While I loved to jog in the Hollywood Hills with my roommate Katie, and while I did resemble a camp counselor, the able avatar I created online would fall apart the second I stepped toward these internet beaus, no matter how flat I tried to walk, how earnestly I attempted to roll from heel to toe or swing my right arm. My limp made me the damaged goods people warned you about on the web.
The alternative, I figured, was to add “super minor case of tight tendons” to my profile and end up with an even sadder inbox. I took my chances instead.
I showed Corey the Band-Aid where the counselor had pricked my finger and told him he better get tested soon, in case this was going somewhere. Corey laughed and said he’d just gotten tested, too.
“And?” I asked.
He smiled an easy smile and I made out a toothpick-size gap between his two front teeth. His chin was weak, his voice deep and charmingly doltish, like a surfer’s. “Negative,” he declared. “And by the way, hi.”
A wave of relief larger than I’d like to admit whooshed through me. Growing up, I’d been taught to think of LA as a cesspool of crime and HIV. Two nights before leaving Salt Lake, I went to a Bret Easton Ellis movie that took place in LA in the glamorous 1980s. The film featured Kim Basinger injecting drugs into Billy Bob Thornton’s penis and ended with a chick in a gold bikini roasting on the beach as she died of AIDS.
It was obvious: moving to a bigger city meant bigger risks.
I was totally going to be the girl in the gold bikini.
“Don’t worry, babe,” my friend Iris had told me. “You’re not that thin.”
Corey offered to drive and I hoisted myself into his truck, casually lifting in my right leg after me, my usual arsenal of excuses at the ready. For the first few minutes of the drive I was glad he didn’t ask about it, and then I started to get annoyed. What’s your deal, buddy, I wanted to say. Didn’t you notice my limp? Are you some kind of asshole?
The truth hit me with a pleasurable pang: He’s a little nervous.
Corey had a decal from the parochial school he’d attended in his rear window and a school picture of his little brother Miles on his dashboard. “That’s some fro,” I said, pointing to the orb of curls engulfing Miles’s cherubic face.
It was all the invitation Corey needed to spend the rest of the date, at a Mexican restaurant in Silver Lake, bragging about Miles’s college prospects and SAT scores. “He’s smart in school and dumb in life,” Corey said, not without pride.
Corey didn’t use the term Asperger’s, not at first, though it was easy enough to piece together given what my family had gone through with Moe. I recognized many of Miles’s proclivities, as described by Corey: an endearing if overpowering inability to go with the flow of a conversation or speak at an appropriate volume, the trouble making friends and clumsiness with social cues, the detachment that could read as bratty or immature, the obsessions that were endearing on paper but could be relentless in person. They were both terrible drivers, both honors students, both spoiled little shits, both kids who’d been cheated of better childhoods.
“And they’d both be super pissed off if they heard us talking like this about them,” I said with a nervous laugh.
Mostly, I identified with how much Corey adored his younger sibling. That was the main thing. In our different ways, Corey and I had been thrust into dad roles in our twenties when we should have been chasing daddies ourselves. Far from perfect, we’d earned the right to diagnose our siblings on first dates, damn it, to vent and brag.
Miles and Moe were just one year apart in age. “If it doesn’t work out with us, maybe we’ll set them up,” I said. “Or even if it does.”
The waitress brought out our beers on a tray. Picking at the label on mine, I apologized for being so in Corey’s face about getting tested earlier. I’d just watched my dad slowly die of ALS. Plus, my mom had cancer. At that time, she was still back in Utah with weird, wonderful Moe.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m a total hypochondriac,” I said.
My leg tightened under the table and I had to work to keep from flinching. In addition to tight tendons, I have what my brother refers to as verbal diarrhea. I say something harmless like “I’m a total hypochondriac” and then find myself bringing up pertinent if unflattering anecdotes such as the time I caught crabs on my dad’s farewell cruise on the Mediterranean.
“The thing is,” I whispered to Corey across our two top, “I hadn’t had sex for months.”
“It sounds like you’re not a hypochondriac,” Corey said, picking up my confidential tone. “It sounds like you had crabs.”
But where’d they come from, these immaculate crabs? It couldn’t possibly have been the theater major with the cute accordion bong I’d hooked up with a few months before college graduation. No, like many before me, I blamed a pair of chinos I’d tried on at a Banana Republic outlet days before our flight to Barcelona.
Probably because of what I still insisted were the mysterious circumstances of my first outbreak, I remained paranoid about crabs for years, periodically shaving my body hair and lathering my crotch stubble with specialty shampoos.
This habit followed me to Los Angeles.
“And how are the crabs now?” Corey asked, scratching a spot behind his ear.
“Gone,” I said. I didn’t add that I kept a nit comb and shampoo under the bathroom sink just in case of a recurrence.
When Corey didn’t slip away to the bathroom, never to return, I thought I just might invite him over.
I was living in a turquoise house on Harold Way with Danny and Katie, my best friend from college. The three of us had moved to Los Angeles together to make it as writers: Danny kept up a raucous blog about his life and was going to screenwriting school at USC; a journalism major like me, Katie worked as a personal assistant out of a famous media mogul’s Brentwood mansion; and I stayed home and edited the two short stories I’d written in college. (I hadn’t yet moved to Texas and was still applying to MFA programs.) As a side project Katie and I were also adapting, on spec, one of Roald Dahl’s adult stories, “The Great Switcheroo.” We had a recycling bin filled with bottles of Two Buck Chuck to prove it.
Our street, like our lives, was what you might call “showbiz-adjacent.” Harold Way was sandwiched between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. A derelict motel sat at the end of the block, the sort that could plausibly be closed off for both premium cable shoots and the sleazy activities they depicted. News choppers circled low. Harold Way was where many a police chase came to an end.
Why did it feel so much like home? Our landlady, Maripat, had raised the funds to buy this crumbling block of Hollywood by playing a nun in a one-woman show. Red-faced and usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and rubber boots, Maripat lived three doors down from us with her girlfriend Glinda and a gang of Chihuahuas named after Chicago mobsters. She wrote emails in all caps and, like a nun, threatened to line us up and slap us across the face whenever we left our security door flapping open at night. It had been installed backwards, so coming or going made you feel like you were in a behavioral psychology experiment. When the plumbing backed up, Maripat shouted in our front lawn, “You tell Katie to stop flushing her tampons down the toilet.”
A pot of coffee a day plus the shared-bathroom sitch turned me into the bungalow’s outdoor water feature, forever whizzing into some ivy off the back patio. A rocking chair sat on the front porch and a lemon tree dropped its bounty onto the hood of my dad’s hulking Lexus at the back of our skinny driveway. Around the corner from a Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, Harold Way always smelled deliciously of fried chicken and hashish, except for the time someone down the block ran over a skunk.
Katie’s godmother, Maripat’s long-suffering sister, was an interior designer. She had decorated our house, stringing our single bathroom with Christmas lights, sponge painting the living room purple with gold stenciling. A candy-colored acrylic chandelier hung in the kitchen, where you’d also find a pallet of Diet Coke and an overflowing trash can filled with the brown paper towels I used as coffee filters. A glorious midlife crisis of a place, we called it the Bungalow.
Corey entered our stanky lair with low-key aplomb. I was more attuned to fibs and fabrications after Kevin, and it took me the second half of that first date to determine that much of what Corey had told me about himself wasn’t true. This is not a testament to my skepticism or detective work. Whereas Kevin’s lies had been grandiose, Corey’s lies were lazy—he was a couch potato of a liar. There wasn’t even any guile to them. The first fib was that he had gone to Berkeley. In an unlucky break for Corey, it just so happened that Danny had also gone to Berkeley. Naturally, when the two met over drinks at our kitchen table, the subject came up. Danny asked where on campus Corey had lived. “Where did I live?” Corey said. He took a quick swig, looking up at the colorful chandelier as if he might divine the answer there. “Sort of all over.”
I’d only visited my brother a few times in college. Most of one homecoming weekend I’d spent blacked out in a side room in his frat that had been filled with packing peanuts. But even I could recall a handful of street names and major landmarks. Corey had never heard of Noah’s Bagels, Zachary’s Pizza, Telegraph Avenue—places I knew just from being alive.
“Telegraph, yeah, that sounds right,” Corey said. “I lived there. Around there.”
At the end of the night, Danny and I rolled aside the gate at the front of our driveway so Corey could back out. “Your boyfriend is full of shit,” Danny said, giving him a friendly wave. “But he’s probably just trying to impress you.” It only occurred to me later that this is exactly what my dad had thought about the motivation behind Kevin’s lies.
We watched Corey’s brake lights blink at the end of the block and disappear around the corner. The palm readers, payday lenders, and weed dispensaries on Gower would be open for business now, neon signs lighting up their windows.
Someone trying to impress me? I liked the sound of that.
Walking home from 24 Hour Fitness a few days after our first date, I got a call from Corey telling me he had been fired from his job as a construction site manager. He’d already tied his mattress to the flatbed of his truck, planning to leave behind his Santa Monica apartment, and his annoying roommates, to move back in with his mom and Miles about forty-five minutes down the 405 in Orange County. It was for the best, anyway. Miles was a senior in high school. He had a lot to figure out about his future and it’d be good to have Corey around.
I hit the WALK button to cross Gower. “That happened fast.”
“I was subletting,” he said. “Hey, aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry I had a rough day?” He let a bit of irritation creep into his voice.
“Of course,” I said. “That really sucks. Can I help you move?”
“Nope, all good,” he said, “but I’d like to take you out. Do I get a second date?”
“I can’t turn you down now,” I said.
Corey came over and made out with me in the driveway for a good two minutes. Things were looking up. For starters, he’d already gotten rehired at his old job at a fuel dock in Newport Beach and for another—here he pulled a red T-shirt out of his backpack and tossed it to me—he was the newest part-time deckhand on the Balboa Island Ferry. “Look on the back,” he said proudly. “See how it says CREW? They only give these shirts to actual crew members. I stole one for you.”
Sure, it was a little fishy Corey had lost his job, found two new ones, and moved within days of meeting me, but I was struck by the modesty of his invention, if that’s what it was: this “Berkeley” grad had gone from being a construction worker in Santa Monica to a gas station attendant in Newport Beach. Big whoop. We were in a recession. I never even got a response to the job applications I filled out.
Until I did. Sort of.
On a Wednesday night in March, about a month after meeting Corey, I received an email from the director of the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. All the coffee had paid off. The promise of a funded, three-year fellowship lay before me. My writing career—if that’s what I was now embarking upon—was taking me to Texas. I’d be moving by the middle of July.
Corey turned down my offer to celebrate at Disneyland with Katie. He was disappointed I’d be skipping town; he was also happy for me. It took the pressure off. We figured we should enjoy each other for whatever time we had left, not worry about our relationship status. We didn’t have sex, not for that first month of seeing each other. I had a swimsuit rash and an appointment at a free STD clinic on Melrose: I wanted to make sure the rash wasn’t herpes. Plus, I wasn’t ready to take off my jeans and explain the surgical scars on the backs of my legs and have my flaccid penis poked at. My limp didn’t bother him, but I was scared Corey would pull a Tyler Townsend and not want to see me anymore if he found out I’d never topped anyone, ever, and that I doubted I could. I wasn’t letting the topping genie out of the bottle of Cetaphil this time.
Corey proved worth the wait. One of the great lays of my life, he was so hung he was bashful about it. Gentle with my stiff legs, he displayed the kind of patience with my temperamental parts I pledged to practice with his jumbo ones. The subject of me topping never came up, though he’d boyishly offer to blow me when he got drunk. Sober, Corey was squeamish about anything that smacked of passivity. He was the top. “Masc.” A dude’s dude. Give him a beer or four, though, and he’d camp it up, rolling his eyes and lisping, a giant grin on his face. It felt good to let Corey inside the tight coil of my body, to give up control. I’d be so relaxed when he left I’d walk into walls as I made my way up the stairs to Katie’s attic bedroom to tell her all about it. There was JBFed and then there was JBCed: Just Been Coreyed.
Still—we weren’t exclusive. I went on dates with a guy whose WASP roots stretched back to the Mayflower and who enjoyed John Irving novels as much as I did. And I gleefully hooked up with the guy who hosted me during my program visit in Austin that spring. (What can I say? His condo complex had a sauna.) But I was happiest with down-to-earth Corey. He was the first guy I ever knew who called me handsome to my face. “Hey, handsome,” he’d say, and I’d stand there blushing, astonished at how good it felt.
