A roughed-up James Dean — that’s how I described him to friends. It’s a characterization that would’ve both pleased and infuriated him, as almost everything seemed to. He was an artist after all — a fine art photographer who stooped to commercial work regularly to eat and pay the rent, true, but an artist nonetheless. And what is an artist if not conflicted and mercurial? Indeed, conflicted and mercurial was what he was deliberately going for, I guessed.
He lived alone in a gigantic turn-of-the-century warehouse downtown, a dark, windowless brick box the size of a high school gymnasium. Somehow the sheer physical expansiveness of the space impressed me. The main floor was empty save for a crescent-shaped hanging chair that dangled, spider-like, by a thick rope of chain secured to something in the darkness above I couldn’t see. The coarse, soot-stained wood floors had the solidity of an earlier age’s craftsmanship, and in the farthest rear corner of the space he’d roughed in a meager kitchen and bath, with a loft above sized to fit a Queen mattress. Beneath all of this there was another, subterranean level of the warehouse strewn with salvaged photography equipment and mottled gray ringlets of exposed Tri-X film, everything anchored by two massive wood tables layered with prints of beautiful girls posed to look like they were drowning.
He threw a grand Halloween party there every Fall, and we’d only been dating a few weeks when that year’s came due. Willowy and long-legged, I devised a costume for the occasion that was all calculated heat and camp — Sexy 60s Star Trek Alien, I dubbed it — borrowing a silvery mini-dress and go-go boots from a friend whose wardrobe confessed to a failed other life on Hollywood’s darkest dark side. It got the response I’d wanted. All night boys circled while James Dean nuzzled my neck protectively, his eyes flashing with animal gratification at my appearance. But as the long night wore on, the alien get-up and the attention it garnered seemed more and more implicating — pitiable evidence of the growing gulf between who I believed I was and the things I was doing. My dress suddenly felt unbearably short. I’d tried too hard and ended up humiliating myself, I thought.
Alone late in the party’s throes, a dark, reedy man broke from the teeming crowd and approached the loft ladder perch I’d hung on all night. He appeared to be dressed as the flamboyant singer of the band The Cult, Ian Astbury, though it wasn’t clear that his outfit was an actual costume. "And who are you?" he purred, running his index finger over my silvery forearm lightly, as if checking for dust. "His girlfriend" I said, nodding in the direction of the host. "Oh, so you’re one of those," the man sneered. I looked down in embarrassment and felt him turn away, slipping back into the tangle of bodies he’d emerged from.
The evening dragged into early morning, the hundred-odd crowd thinned to two dozen, and we kept on drinking. We were alone at sunrise when he suddenly announced that he needed to deliver some prints to a client that were too large to transport by way of his motorcycle, and asked if I could drive him. Navigating my car through the narrow city streets a short time later, I followed his turn-by-turn instruction until a swirl of colored lights fired behind us, forcing me to pull over. We’d been going the wrong way down a one way street, the officer said. I rattled off a plausible story based on the distant address on my out-dated license. I wasn’t from around here, we were lost, street signs were missing — every possible excuse and explanation I could think of. Miraculously this sufficed, and we were grudgingly sent on our way.
Once out of view and earshot of the cruiser, I crumbled. Clutching the steering wheel with bloodless fists my eyes fixed hard on the pavement ahead, unable to turn and confront his astonishingly beautiful, terrible face. For the rest of the trip he sat detached and coolly silent while I admonished him through tears for his carelessness in a manner disproportionate to his blunder, my words fueled by a deeper sadness I couldn’t yet isolate or name, but for which I had no one but myself to blame.
