I couldn’t win. Whatever I said made me guiltier.
“I go for ride now,” Tommy said as he got up and headed to the door. “I don’t want to talk now. I go get fresh air — maybe see girl or something. You have audition and I don’t want to spoil. We talk tomorrow.”
I got into bed with psychic spiders crawling all over me. Was this just a pretext for Tommy to throw me out of here? Had I really done something wrong by talking about Tommy with my friend? Tommy had walked me into a minefield of paranoia and left me there all alone.
When I woke up the next morning I could hear Tommy snoring in the other room. I thought, You have built a human relationship on a foundation of asbestos.
I mangled my Viking callback, which was held next to a restaurant appropriately called the Stinking Rose. All I could think about was whether I was going to be homeless at the end of the day.
When I got back to the apartment Tommy was once again on the phone. I knew he’d had his meeting with the late Stella Adler at around the time I was forfeiting my Viking role. “These Stella Adler people,” he was saying to whoever was on the other line, “they’re all behind schedule. Not as good at acting as I thought. They don’t even understand the subconscious. You know what, I’m sorry. I do my way.” He looked over at me. “Well, I have to go now. My friend is here.” He’d really doused that word in kerosene and set it on fire. For a long few seconds after hanging up he didn’t say anything. He was sitting on a chair, not making eye contact, his hands folded in his lap, smiling a hideously false smile. “And how was audition?”
I stared right back at him. “Not good. It was better the first time.”
“Oh, come on. I’m sure you did good job.”
“Yeah. Sure you are.”
He stood up. “Let’s go for a spin and talk about stuff.”
I was nervous to go anywhere with him. I knew something bad was going to happen if I did. But if I didn’t go with him now, it meant the last two years of our friendship were based on my being a stupid, trusting idiot, and I didn’t want that to be true. I followed Tommy to his car. A few minutes later he was turning left on Sunset, not saying a word but driving faster than I’d ever seen him drive : the speed limit. Then he floored it. My hands flew out to grip the dashboard. “Tommy,” I said. “Slow down.”
He veered recklessly around one car, another. “This guy from yesterday at the door—I guess he like you, huh? Best friend?”
“Tommy, what is this really about?”
“And your goofy friend. You talk to him all the time, huh? You tell him all these things.” His mouth was set at an ugly angle. He was driving slower now but somehow just as recklessly.
“Tommy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Why you talk about me?” His voice was slightly more aggressive.
“I don’t even know what—”
“Why you talk about me to this friend? Why? You talk about Jean Shelton! You talk about football! You talk about acting! My place! Why do you talk about me?” He was screaming at the windshield, hunched over his steering wheel, too disgusted to look over at me. “Why do you talk about me? I thought I trust you, and you talk about me!”
Now I was scared. Tommy had completely lost control of himself. What was he so afraid of? I knew, then, that this was how Tommy’s Planet operated. I wondered if the reason he didn’t have any friends was that they all, eventually, wound up here : untethered, lost in space.
“Tommy!” I said. “I don’t even know why you’re so upset!”
“Why do you do this? Why do you do this?” He wasn’t hearing me. He was lost in the orbit of his own rage.
All I had told my hippie friend about Tommy was simple stuff, basic stuff—fond stuff, even. I told him that Tommy was always willing to try new things, things he had no prior interest in, like playing football. I described his openness to new experiences. I told him how good Tommy could be, and how kind he often was, once you got to know him. I told him how grateful I was to Tommy that he let me live in his place, that he was the only one to tell me to keep going when everyone else in my life had urged me to give up. I know you don’t trust him, I said to my hippie friend, but Tommy really is a good guy, deep down.
Tommy turned off Sunset Boulevard and pulled over — pulled over on the very street Joe Gillis uses in Sunset Boulevard while trying to avoid those loan sharks, after which he discovers Norma Desmond’s mansion. But I didn’t know any of this at that moment. I didn’t know that I was living Joe Gillis’s life in twenty-first-century form.
“Look,” Tommy said, more calmly, and I knew instantly that he’d been preparing this speech for a while. “I decide I’m moving to Los Angeles to be actor. I just want people to leave me alone. I can’t have anyone around at this time. Now is time you find your own place. I cannot trust you. The feelings go away.” Tommy held his thumb and forefinger apart and squeezed them shut. That was our friendship now : a molecule’s width of nothing.
This felt like a bad dream. Tommy was so oily with menace that all I wanted to do was run. The person whose support had meant so much to me was gone.
I got out of the car and started walking away. Everything I’d worked for, I thought, was done. I’d wound up exactly where my mother had predicted I would. The tears in my eyes proved it.
The next thing I knew Tommy was driving beside me, urging me to get back into his car. “I’m sorry, Greg,” he said, gulping the words. “I’m sorry I yell at you. I can trust you. You know that. You can stay in apartment.”
That was all this ridiculous tirade had been about. Tommy was still capable of hurting and affecting and controlling me, and knowing that he could do all these things was, to him, the very stuff of relief. Now that Tommy had this dark assurance, all between us was, in his mind, fine. But it wasn’t fine. I now knew that everything my mom and friend had said about Tommy was right. There was something twisted and poisonous inside him — something potentially dangerous, even. It was just a matter of time.
I got back in the car and said, “Okay,” but I never again looked at Tommy in the same way. I started searching for a new apartment that night.
eleven
“I’ll Record Everything”
No one leaves a star.
That’s what makes one a star.
—Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard
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