Pink

By Barry Jay Kaplan


I’d spent more time on this trip to Los Angeles than I’d intended to but the weather was impeccable every day, the light in my rented studio near the beach perfect for the portrait work I was doing. At a birthday party towards the end of the month at a dance club in Venice Beach, I saw the most beautiful boy dancing on the bar. I dispatched one of my assistants to bring him to my table.

He stood in front of me; his chest was smooth and glistened with a fine sheen of sweat. “Hi,” he said. “You gonna take my picture?” He knew who I was. He told me his name was Roy. We spent the night together in my hotel room.

Roy’s conversation was limited to had I eaten somewhere or had I danced somewhere or heard a certain band or tried a certain drug or seen a certain pornographic video, one of which starred him. He was familiar with cultural references only if there was someone gay attached. He knew names—Andy Warhol, Gianni Versace, Rock Hudson, Keith Haring—and inevitably had been to bed with someone who’d been to bed with one of them.

My friend Maurice thought I was insane to let myself be added to that list. Surely this isn’t the best you can do! he insisted but I told him that Roy made up for his obvious social and intellectual lacks with the grace he demonstrated in bed. We’re fine, I insisted when it was apparent that Roy’s initial sleepover was extending indefinitely. True, we didn’t have much to say to each other out of bed but even sitting on the terrace, sipping pina coladas, Roy could be awfully companionable. He smiled easily, agreed with most of the activities I planned for us. I liked the way his skin smelled from the sun.

It was such a shame that I had to go back to New York. When the time came, and while the dew was still on the rose, I found myself inviting him to come back with me. Roy had never been to New York and, as it turned out, had very little interest in going. But he said yes. To be with you, he said, which I found very sweet.

The first night we were in the city, all Roy wanted was to take a nap. He had no curiosity about seeing New York at all. I finally convinced him to come with me to a new club near the river. Of course everyone was staring at him; I was glad he was mine. The man who was publishing a collection of my photographs took us into the V.I.P. section and Roy happened to sit down right next to Elton John. Roy thought nothing of it; that’s what happened in New York City, you sat down next to Elton John, no big deal.

I have to admit there was something just a tiny bit charming about how unfazed he was by things. The flip side of that was how truly boring he was. No, not boring because boring suggests that he might be trying but Roy wasn’t even doing that. He was without affect except the flesh impact he made, which dissipated soon if someone wasn’t going to have sex with him and lasted only as far as the final embrace if someone did.

I think he was actually dumb, something you don’t hear said about many people. Here he was in New York and he just didn’t seem interested in anything that didn’t have to do with sex or food or drugs. Sex was really it for him, probably the only thing in which he exhibited any originality or spontaneity.

It was trying being with him after a while, being awake with him, that is, being awake with him and not touching him. I had an exhibition coming up so most of my time was spent in my studio. Roy scuffed around at the opposite end of the loft, napping, smoking, pacing, dancing with the headset on. Go out, I said. See the city, I said. He was lonely, he said. He was bored, he said. He had nothing to do while I was working, he said. He didn’t know anyone. He put his arms around my neck and nibbled at my earlobe.

One night in bed Roy said: Do you like my feet? Do you like my knees? I was too drunk to pay any attention to what he might really have been asking. I dozed and later woke up to some strange sounds. Roy was in the living room, sobbing and tromping barefoot on broken champagne glasses. I tried to pull him away but he was possessed; it was terrifying but he finally let me put my arms around him and lead him back to bed. He sat quite still, naked, slumped over, while I washed his bloody feet.

You’re crazy, I said.

You and all your friends do things, he said. You all have these careers and opinions and you have a private language that only you all laugh at and where’s it leave me? I don’t have anything. 

It was the longest sustained speech I’d ever heard from him and it ended inconclusively. Roy wanted things, was all I heard. Roy was jealous of me and of my friends and of the time I spent away from him doing the very thing that made me attractive to him in the first place.

I let him sleep in my arms but the next day I said that if he was so unhappy, he should go home.

Home?

He actually sounded perplexed and it occurred to me that I had no idea where Roy was from. He had one of those generic accents that I think of as rural. I liked to imagine that he was a simple farm boy who came by that body baling hay after school, that the lock of hair that fell across his forehead, that touched the tip of his freckled nose, was bleached white by the midwestern sun. Roy’s home wasn’t where Roy had any intention of going, I saw. It was best to leave him where I found him. I bought him a ticket back to California, drove him to the airport and didn’t stick around to watch him take off.

I saw him the next year when I went back to California. He was still dancing on the bar in the club on Venice Beach where I met him. He waved to me while he danced and came over afterwards. We had a beer. He asked about my show and I told him. He was as beautiful as ever. I hardly heard anything he said and after a few minutes we just sat there and sipped our beers and Roy flashed that smile every once in a while. After half an hour he had to do another dance set on the bar. I didn’t suggest that we get together later. I didn’t want him to think I’d come back because he was so fatale. I knew he was there and I knew he’d be there; there was something tantalizing about keeping him at arm’s length.

I realized that he had become part of the fabric of Los Angeles for me, a steady kind of thing in my memory, something that felt solid and sunny and enticing.  I looked forward to seeing him whenever business took me there. Of course the sex, the touch of his flesh,
remained fantastically vivid in my memory. Just seeing him, even from afar, even in that bar, brought it all back. When I wasn’t in Los Angeles, I’d ask certain friends if they’d gone to that bar, if they’d seen Roy, if he was still dancing, if he was still so delicious and he was, they said, he was definitely.

A year or so later the Los Angeles County Museum was showing some of my photographs. I thought it might be a hoot to bring Roy to the opening. I went to the club. He wasn’t there. It turned out he hadn’t been there for months, the bartender said and no, he didn’t know where Roy was, left town, maybe. Odd, I thought though it wasn’t odd at all. What was odd was my assumption that Roy would be there. People move on. As I was leaving, the bartender added that he didn’t think Roy was his real name.

I went back the next year, just out of habit. He was still not there, of course, and the whole city felt different without Roy at that club, without the thought that he was there whether I went there or not, whether I saw him or not, whether I touched his skin or not. There was a different bartender this time and it was no use asking him about Roy. The entire roster of boys had changed, the atmosphere was a little seedier, or had it always been like that? The next year the place wasn’t there at all, just sand and the remains of the foundation. The year after that a new condominium had risen from the ashes.

So what happened to Roy? It would be difficult for him to get in touch with me and even if he wanted to, even if he tried, why would he think I’d want to hear from him? I’d tossed him aside, hadn’t I? He was so light, so insubstantial, that was what you did with Roy. Did others do that to him too? It seems sad to think of that happening to the boy over and over. I probably wasn’t the first or the last. No family to keep track of him, friends like himself with troubles of their own. The best thing that could happen to him was to lose his looks before he got too used to getting things for them. Learn a trade, I thought. Learn to be happy with someone. His personality was placid but I think essentially sweet. I can’t say for sure. He kept his thoughts to himself.

Most likely he’s dead by now. Most likely he died of an overdose. He did drugs when he was with me, too many, I thought, and too easily too. Or somebody he didn’t know very well expected certain things of him and when Roy didn’t deliver beat him a little too hard and left that beautiful body in a dumpster in downtown LA. I’m dramatizing but really it wouldn’t be overly surprising. It’s hard to imagine him slowly getting older, focusing on what a person had to do to get from one point in life to another. The thought of all that youth and beauty ruined by time is so sad. He’d never grow up. He’d be an old young man.

In my show this spring, there’s a photograph called ‘Roy, New York.’ He’s sleeping, his arms thrown back over his head in an attitude of complete abandon; that was Roy. The morning light tinted his skin very pink, which it was naturally, come to think of it. I’d intended to show it to him that very morning he left New York but hesitated and then decided not to. The thought of his reaction—his big smile, how he might hug me in delight and start nibbling at my ear which meant we’d be off to bed and he’d never get on that plane—stopped me. He never knew I did it, never knew I’d immortalized his beautiful flesh,
which was the best part of him, let’s face it. 



Published April 2007