Read Online Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin - Free Book Online Page A

time.
    “Need a hand?” Neil asked this, turning to me. His face was outlined against Renee’s, granite against fog. Did I need a hand? I needed two of them, thank you, big as rump roasts, one under each arm. And maybe some warm breath against my cheek, a nice gust of Juicy Fruit.
    “I can do it,” chirped Renee.
    I shot the woman a few dozen daggers, but she missed all of them, as usual, as she galloped to my assistance, goofy with goodwill. As soon as she opened the door to the van, I slid off the seat and began the descent on my own.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Positive.” I mugged at Neil over the edge of the seat before dropping out of sight onto the pavement.
    When I straightened up, Renee was offering Neil a cup of coffee for the road.
    “Thanks,” he said, declining. “I’ve got…you know, miles to go before I sleep.”
    Renee took the Frost reference literally. “I thought you lived nearby.”
    Neil smiled pleasantly. “Not that far, I guess. There’s just some stuff I have to do.”
    Renee nodded.
    “It’s been fun,” he said, addressing me.
    “Sure has.”
    We locked eyes for a moment or two, and then he pulled away from the curb. A few seconds later he hollered back at me: “I’ll call you tomorrow about the next job. I’ve got some ideas for new songs.”
    “Great,” I yelled.
    When the van had turned out of sight, Renee walked to the door with me. “He’s nice, isn’t he?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Cute, too.”
    “He’s OK,” I said.
     
    It’s almost midnight now, and I’ve finally had my bath. I worked on this entry for three hours, much longer than I had expected. Renee popped in several times with refills on the cocoa. I could tell she was dying to ask me about my new boss, but she resisted the urge, apparently out of respect for this strange burst of journalkeeping. It’s just as well, since I can’t put a name to my feelings. I would have called them carnal and left it at that, if you’d asked me earlier in the day, before the rest began. Before he sang with me and drove me home and said that sweet thing about the magic.

4
    F IVE DAYS LATER . B ACK ON MY AIR MATTRESS .
    I should tell you a little about Jeff Kassabian, my friend of almost a decade, since we had brunch together on Sunday and he spun me the most preposterous yarn ever. This is part of what makes Jeff lovable, I suppose, but there was also something a little sad about it, given his current state of mind. It’s only natural for him to be lonely sometimes, but I wish he wouldn’t cope with it by weaving 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