Robert in L.A.

This is a story about a boy named Robert.

In the 70’s he was a suburban Boy-scout in New Jersey, and in the early 80’s he had moved to West Hollywood (well, actually his digs were in Pasadena, with the little old lady you’ve heard so much about) to reestablish himself as another person.

That’s when I met him. I was traveling with an old friend of his and we dropped by in hope of spending a couple of nights on his floor while we looked around. At least, that was my hope.

By the time we arrived, everything I had been told about him was out of date, except his amazing hair.

Robert had curly red hair in a giant corona, a foot high fro. It floated above and around him, as though he had his own personal field in a different gravity.

Until shortly before we came, Robert had been a manager (with a tie) in a brick and mortar bookstore. I don’t believe I ever knew why he had quit, and possibly I never asked. “I had arrived,” as they say in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, “on a rather special night.” I had arrived at a party that most of America wouldn’t find out about until years later. And I had arrived in the midst of the personal struggle of two childhood friends who hadn’t quite decided what to wear.

Robert had few furnishings, most of them consisting of piles of coverless paperbacks from the dumpster behind his (former) employer. In this he exactly resembled most of my other friends. We were a shiftless lot, on the whole. Our three passions were books, politics, and sex. Few of us had discovered a job path that gripped us, being mostly absorbed in the vagaries of our school responsibilities, and our politics were too diffuse and extreme to be of much immediate use, except as ways to criticize each other. My high-school graduation class was distinguished by the highest rates of drug use ever, so those of us who weren’t habitually part of that statistic were unusual in many respects.

I was pleased to see that Robert had simple tastes and clean habits. This made him a more agreeable roommate. I took over what food prep there was...with no income among the three of us our eating was pretty minimal. And we had to buy water, a new concept for me. Mostly we walked, getting to know the neighborhoods around LA, and occasionally driving my old yellow Subaru to out of town tourist spots. We blew someone’s birthday money on a trip to Disneyland, and headed down the coast to Black’s Beach in La Jolla, just because the existence of a famous nude beach implied the necessity to go. I am sorry for people from less experimental eras or memes, sometimes.

Robert moved to California to transition from the careful ‘bisexuality’ of his high-school identity to being gay. California was one of the places you could do that, and it was an entire continent away from his folks. The West Hollywood scene was a real eye-opener for me, although I had flattered myself that I was hip enough for anything. A few trips with my pack of friends to gay bars in smaller towns and a few protest rallies with leather boys had not prepared me for LA at the height of the party. It was a world of notorious parks, and cocaine and popper fueled clubs where Devo was playing.

It may be that Robert had thrown off his tie just because the rest of his life was so like riding an iridescent soap bubble.
Everyone realized, somehow, that it would suddenly disappear, but it was so pretty, and you could see for such a distance, if you were lucky. And young people generally feel lucky.

His transition was hard on his friend, though. Choosing up sides in sexual preference is one of those choosing up sides things. Someone is always last chosen.

I watched them struggle around it. We walked for miles in the warm sun, marveling at places where avocados dropped promiscuously over garden walls into the dusty alleys. Is there really such a thing as bi-sexual? Is there really such a thing as ‘totally gay’? Who has the most courage? Who makes the biggest cop-out? Who am I when my friends aren’t who I thought?

Robert was a nice young man with a shock of red hair and decent taste in science-fiction and fantasy. I wonder who and where he is, now.

But I remember fondly who he was, for a couple of weeks, a long time ago.