Maybe the Moon

something rich and mysterious out of a perfectly conventional set of circumstances. Conventional for him, at any rate.
    Jeff is a writer, about my age. He ekes out a living as an office temp, but his real energy goes into his work-in-progress, a rambling autobiographical novel about growing up gay and Armenian in the Central Valley. This is his second book. His first was about a Caucasian boy who falls in love with a Japanese boy at a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. He won some sort of gay writing award for it and sold about two thousand copies. I went to his one and only book signing—at A Different Light in Silver Lake—and ended up behind the table with him, sipping white wine from a paper bag and flirting with his customers.
    When I met Jeff at a video bar in West Hollywood, I knewnext to nothing about homosexuality, though my nineteen years of being myself in Baker had prepared me thoroughly for the company of fags and dykes. I could sit on a beer crate in a gay bar and amuse myself for hours, drinking and laughing and doing ’Ludes, and never once feel like a Martian. The most beautiful boy starlets in town would duck to the floor to talk to me and say the most extraordinary things. All I can remember about that first meeting with Jeff was how elated I was when he referred to a good friend of his as a “size queen” and how long it took me to realize he wasn’t talking about a gay midget.
    We’ve been buddies since then, off and on. Jeff’s most recent lover died of AIDS two years ago next October. Ned was an older guy in his mid-fifties, a no-nonsense sort of person and a real source of stability for Jeff, I think. Since his death, Jeff has become increasingly prone to creative remembering. I don’t mean that he lies; he just arranges the facts more artfully than anyone I’ve ever known. In life, as in his work, he’s not so much a writer as a rewriter, endlessly shuffling the facts to give them form and function. I’ve learned to take his memories, as well as his projections, with a few zillion grains of salt.
    He called me that morning from his house in Silver Lake.
    “Is it too late for brunch at Gloria’s?”
    I asked him what was up.
    “I’ve just had the strangest thing happen to me.”
    “Oh, yeah?” I tried not to sound too jaded.
    “I need your advice about it.”
    “ My advice?”
    “You’re gonna love it, too, if it’s what I think. And if it’s not, we’ll have a nice lunch anyway.”
    “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now.”
    “Of course not,” he said.
    I knew Renee was heading into Beverly Hills on a forage for shoes, so I decided to bum a ride with her. I hadn’t seen Jeff for ages, and I was aching for a change of scenery, especially one that didn’t involve pounding the malls. I asked him if he could drive me home.
    “Whenever you want.”
    “Let’s do it, then.”
    “Great. We can hang out at my house after brunch.”
    “You aren’t gonna read to me, are you?”
    He laughed at that, but a little uncomfortably, so I told him I was just kidding.
    “I thought you enjoyed that,” he said.
    “I did. I do. I said I was kidding.”
    Well, mostly kidding. The last time we hung out at his house, he read to me at length from his autobiography. It was fairly interesting stuff, especially if you knew Jeff, but it went on about an hour too long. His sixth-grade seduction in the pea-sorting shed—or wherever it was—could have been trimmed by half. Plus he puts everything in the present tense, insisting that it sounds more literary. It may be, for all I know, but it can get sort of grating at times.
    “Don’t worry,” Jeff said grumpily. “That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
    “Now don’t make it sound like that. I’m your biggest fan. Aren’t I the one who called you the gay Saroyan?”
    He grunted.
    “I’ll give you your strokes at lunch,” I said breezily. “You’re buying, aren’t you?” There was more urgency in this question than I cared to betray. These days, every meal that isn’t a Cher shake counts as a major extravagance.
    “Of course,” said Jeff, still a little pissed at me. “I invited you, didn’t I?”

    Since it was to be a laid-back Silver Lake kind of Sunday, I wore an aqua T-shirt, dolling it up with a string of pop beads and my pink rhinestone silence-equals-death pin. When I’m not in costume or evening clothes, I’m almost always in T-shirts, since they’re comfortable and inexpensive and you