Gap Year - 56. Chapter 56

March 1, 2004

The Hotel Bel Air

Bel Air, CA

Will

I’d had a nice lunch with Stef and talked about all the issues that I’d been dealing with since I got down here, then I’d come back to my room. I’d stripped off my business garb and put on jeans and a t-shirt, then slipped on a hoodie. My choice of clothing had been a response to the weather, which pretty much matched my mood: it was overcast and rainy.

My conversation with Stef should have helped me out, but all it really did was confuse me more. That’s not entirely right. It didn’t confuse me, it settled me down, and that meant that the anger I’d had was fading and was no longer driving me forward. My outrage had made me strong, and now that it had receded, it had left only depression and vulnerability in its wake. I looked at my phone and saw that it was almost two, and that meant that Travis wouldn’t get here for another two hours. That was probably a good thing, since I sure as fuck didn’t want him to have to deal with me like this. I sat on the couch sideways, hugging my knees, trying to grapple with the pain that surged through my body. It wasn’t the physical pain that bothered me, although that was there: it was the emotional pain.

Zach had been a core part of my life for over two years. He’d been the person who could prop me up the best and could help me feel good when I was down. He was the one who knew me well enough to counsel me through my problems, and to give me a gentle prod when I needed one. I buried my head in my jeans to soak up the tears, then got even more sad when I realized that right now when I was flailing around, trying to find my footing, he was the one I normally would have called. The guy who would normally help me out was now the guy causing me problems.

Just as the anger had ebbed before, now it surged forward, like the waves against the shore. Zach had been that guy for me in the past, but until I got down here and we’d re-connected, he hadn’t really been that guy for quite a while. He’d been so absorbed in his own life and his own relationship with Taylor that he’d largely left me alone to drift around aimlessly. My mind went back to last year, to how he’d totally blown me off on 9-11 and had only called me on my birthday to tell me about himself. After the attack on Goodwell, he hadn’t even taken the time to track me down to see if I was alive. The only thing that had motivated him to show any interest in me at all was when he found out I was hanging out with Dillon Kilpatrick, Klip’s little brother, and even then, all I’d gotten was a jealous rant. Then, just like the waves, the anger ebbed and I remembered how he’d flown up to Escorial to see me and to apologize to me for being such a heartless asshole.

As if it were a lightning strike, clairvoyance hit me and I realized that this was the kind of shit my father and Wade were talking about when they bitched about the roller coaster ride that Robbie and Matt had taken them on. Just like me, they’d anchored themselves to someone totally unpredictable, and just like me, they’d felt their whole worlds torn apart when that anchor had become unchained. To my knowledge, Robbie had never hit my father so they’d never had to grapple with this situation, but Wade had come close to it when Matt had tried to fuck him at Christmas in 2001, which to Wade was the same as being assaulted. It would be interesting to get Wade’s perspective on things, but he was all wrapped up in school and being a dad. Besides, he and Matt were doing great, so the last thing he needed was me rolling in and reminding him of Matt’s douchiest hour.

I was vacillating back and forth between anger and sadness, so I distracted myself by focusing on my plans for the week. I had an appointment with my psychiatrist on Wednesday, so I needed to stick around for that. I could fly back to Palo Alto with Stef after that, then come back down and fly out with Darius. That would get me out of the pressure cooker that was this situation. The alternative was that I could go stay in Malibu until Friday. Cody and Jeff were there and they would be good company because neither one of them would make demands on me. I hadn’t seen Kevin yet, so I could reconnect with him. If I were in Malibu I’d be far enough away that I wouldn’t be part of Zach’s local world and I could divorce myself from the UCLA scene, both the good and the bad. That was one of the beauties of Malibu: it was close enough to LA to make that world accessible, but it was remote enough that it also seemed like its own little world away from the metropolis. There was also the added bonus that if the waves were good, I could surf.

Both of those options were equally attractive, and it was hard to choose between them until I factored in Travis. I was enjoying him, and more importantly, I felt like he needed me. Up until this point, it seemed like he was the one drawing strength from me, but that was probably about to reverse itself. This thing that had happened between me and Zach could end up bringing me and Travis closer, driving us apart, or some variation in between. It was worth sticking around to see how that played out. Impulsively, I called the front desk and confirmed that I’d be checking out on Wednesday.

I hit play on the CD player to listen to American Idiot for the fourth time, then sat on the couch and prepared to dive back into my pity party when I stopped myself. “You are pathetic,” I actually said to myself out loud. “Totally fucking pathetic.” Ironically enough it was Zach who’d reminded me that I often had more control over problems than I thought, but in this situation, he was the person I needed to take that control from. There was no reason for me to spend any more time fixating on my encounter with Zach. I knew that I would have to ultimately deal with him, but for right now, I didn’t want him anywhere near me. There was nothing to be gained from dissecting what happened; It would only make me feel shittier, and while I was doing that, I was focusing on the wrong guy. I should be focused on Travis, the blast from my past who had turned into such a cool dude.

For most people, that probably meant skipping on down the road with happy thoughts, but I liked to torment myself more than that, so I started to worry about latching onto Travis as a rebound from Zach. What if I put too much of myself into him? What if I recovered from my wounds from Zach only to have Travis fuck me over? Then I reminded myself that I was only as vulnerable as I let myself be. The last time I’d had to rely on someone to save my ass, I had been a lot weaker than I was now. That had been after 9-11, and my hero had been Zach. I remembered what Zach had told me on the rooftop deck of the condo in Tribeca: once I made it through the nightmare of 9-11, nothing would ever be able to hurt me so badly that I couldn’t handle it. Compared to that, this was like stubbing my toe. If I just went with the flow, things would probably be fine. I decided to skip on down the road with happy thoughts.

Besides, for Travis to really rip me up and shred me, he’d had to have turned into a raging psycho compared to how he used to be, and I didn’t think he’d changed all that much. My mind wandered off on a tangent, thinking about people in general, trying to decide if the basic personality you had at 13 was going to be the same one you had at 18, or as an adult. I looked at my phone and got inspired, then called Grand.

“Good afternoon,” he said formally.

“Good afternoon,” I said, mimicking him.

“Did you call for a reason?” he asked with a mix of severity and playfulness.

“I have a philosophical question for you,” I said.

“Then pose it,” he said.

“Do you think people retain the personality they have when they’re in their early teenage years, so that their basic values and shit are the same when they’re an adult?” I asked.

“You are referring to specific traits, such as trustworthiness or the propensity to dissimulate?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, then threw his words back at him in a truncated way to annoy him. “Are they still honest or are they still liars?” There was a pause as he thought about it, which made me smile, because it was cool to come up with something that required him to really use his brain power.

“I do not know what the research on that question shows, I can only share my experiences and observations,” he said.

“I would like to hear them,” I quipped. He ignored my playfulness.

“I think that one’s basic value structures are formed by the early teenage years and they will remain largely intact unless something traumatic impacts them, in which case they could change,” he said.

Now it was my turn to think. “So the way that Matt acted after 9-11, the way he drove everyone away, that trauma could have caused him to change his basic personality?”

“Perhaps,” Grand noted. “I think in Matt’s case, it was just a temporary loss of direction.”

“He came out of it differently than when he went in,” I noted.

“That is true, but it is also possible that was due to his maturing rather than the impact of the trauma,” Grand speculated.

“Then how do you distinguish between maturation and some other impact?” I asked.

“That is an excellent question, and it makes me realize that I have already waded deeply into a field I know little about,” he said.

“You could have just told me you wanted some time to think about it,” I teased. He ignored me, of course.

“What sparked this question?” Grand asked.

“I’m hanging out with Travis Buck,” I told him. “He and I were really good friends when we were 13, then we drifted apart when we went to different schools. I feel like I still know him, but I’m worried that he’s changed and I’m not seeing it.”

“Rumor has it that this young man is very handsome, so I can see why you would want to make sure you evaluated this carefully and logically,” he said, giving me shit. Of course Stef would have told him about that.

“Indeed,” I agreed.

“You are a good judge of character and have good instincts,” he said, which was amazing praise coming from him. “You will do fine.”

“Thanks,” I said, interrupting him because his comment was so meaningful to me.

“You are welcome,” he said. “I would start out with your memory of what Travis was like when you were very close. As you get to know him again, you can try to evaluate what, if anything, has changed.”

“That sounds like a really good approach, and it should be interesting too,” I said. I probably would have done that subconsciously, but this way I’d be more aware of it.

“I am glad you think so,” he said a bit sardonically. “What will be even more interesting is to see what Travis thinks has changed about you.”

“He’ll be doing the same thing,” I mused.

“I suspect he will,” Grand replied.

“Thanks for letting me interrupt your day,” I said pleasantly.

“I am glad that you did,” he said. “On another note, I got your email and I will plan to devote our Sunday dinner to discussing privacy provisions,” he said, but his tone had changed considerably. It almost sounded like he was angry.

“Thank you,” I said. “I think it needs to be addressed.”

“As do I,” he agreed. We ended our call after that, but his last comment made me curious. His anger had not been directed at me, otherwise he would have told me about it. Did he not know that we were being tracked? If he didn’t, this was going to be a more intense dinner on Sunday than I had originally thought.

My phone rang and I looked at it in a lazy kind of way, trying to decide if I wanted to even answer it, when I recognized the number as Travis’s from his shit phone. “Hey,” I said. “S’up?”

“Meet me out front,” he ordered. I immediately began walking to the door, going through a mental checklist to make sure I had all my stuff. I made sure to pop the new Green Day CD out of the player and grab it.

“Now?” I asked.

“Right out front,” he said. I was smiling as I ran through the hotel and out to the driveway. I saw the Toyota pickup and charged toward it, ignoring the soft rain that fell.

“Short notice,” I said, as I jumped in.

“I’m unpredictable,” he said in a sexy way. He leaned in to kiss me, then stopped. “What happened to you?”

I pulled him in for a nice but quick kiss. That one kiss made me want to run back to the room and rip off his clothes, but he seemed to have a plan, so I went with it. “I got into a fight, more or less,” I said.

He started driving. “With who?” I so did not want to talk about that right now.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, smiling as I tried to change the subject. He looked at me oddly, gave me kind of a dirty look, then shrugged.

“You seemed stressed, and I know just what you need,” he said.

“Then why aren’t we heading back to my room?” I asked, making him laugh.

“That’s for later,” he said, shaking his head at me. He was going down San Vincente like a speed freak.

“Slow down,” I said, and handed him the one hitter.

“Sorry,” he said, and did a hit. After he did two, he drove like a normal person. I hit the CD button and popped out the CD that was in there. “What are you doing?”

I started laughing at his horrified expression, because he was probably thinking I was going to put in a CD with new secret recordings. “It’s the soundtrack of your mom having sex.”

“Gross,” he said, which was true for both of us since we were gay and she was his mom, but in reality she was still really hot.

“Check it out,” I said, and hit play.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Green Day,” I said.

“No way,” he said. “I know every fucking one of their songs.”

“So this doesn’t sound like Billie Joe Armstrong?” I asked. He ignored me after that and kept on driving, listening to American Idiot. I kind of wondered if we were going to the Santa Monica Pier, because that had been the hang out place when we were in middle school, but he headed north on PCH toward Malibu instead of south toward Santa Monica.

“This is fucking amazing,” he said, referring to the CD. “This is Green Day. That is absolutely Billie Joe Armstrong. How come I never heard this before?”

“Dude, don’t you get out or do anything?” I asked, treating him like a country bumpkin. “What the fuck?”

“Fuck you,” he said. Holiday came on, which had an upbeat tempo but less happy lyrics. “When did this come out?”

“Within six months,” I said. “It’s not released yet. This is a copy of the pre-production CD.”

“Dude, who do I have to blow to get one of these?” he joked.

“Billie Joe Armstrong,” I said calmly, like that wasn’t a big deal.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You blew Billie Joe Armstrong?” He was laughing as he did.

“Well yeah, a couple of times,” I said. “I told you you should get out more.”

“So much for lame-ass high school parties,” he said, shaking his head. “Can you copy this for me?”

“Probably not,” I said. That annoyed him, so much that I pulled the note out of the case where Billie Joe asked me not to copy it.

“Alright,” he said reluctantly.

“Sorry, bro,” I said.

“Dude, it’s good,” he said. “I understand. Besides that’s so like you.”

“Like me?” I asked, curiously.

“You can break rules just as bad as the rest of us, but if you make a promise to a friend, you keep it,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’m not like that,” he said. “I fuck up sometimes.”

“You don’t fuck up when it’s important,” I said.

“I don’t fuck up when the friend is important,” he corrected. It was funny, because now that he mentioned it, I could see where he could do that. He could bullshit anyone unless that person was a good friend. I smiled when I realized he’d always been straight with me back in the day.

“How did you handle school today?” I asked.

“Pretended like nothing happened,” he said. “Told Craddock I wanted to surf with him yesterday but that you were being a douche because you hated him, and since I promised to hang with you, I felt stuck.”

I just stared at him, amazed. “So you let him get away with fucking you over?”

“Look Will,” he said in a pissed off way. “We deal with shit differently. For you it’s always a battle. You put on your fucking suit of armor, grab your lance, and run off to kill the dragon.”

“Will the dragon slayer,” I joked.

“That’s you,” he agreed.

“I do that if I’m right,” I said. “And if it’s important.”

“It’s amazing I’m the one with ADD,” he said, shaking his head. “I have learned to stand back and watch things happen. I know what’s going on, but I keep my mouth shut until the time comes, if it does.”

“Alright, so how does letting Craddock keep kissing your ass fall into that world view?” I asked, letting him see that I thought he was being a complete pussy.

“Because, asshole, if I blow this up then my father will probably find someone else to keep tabs on me,” he said. He was really mad at me because he’d read my mind and guessed I was thinking about his lack of stones. “Now that I know Craddock’s deal, I can use it. I can feed him shit and he’ll feed it back to my asshole dad: Craddock gets a check and my father thinks he’s keeping track of me.”

“Pretty clever,” I said, as I digested his strategy.

“You think I’m an asshole for doing that,” he accused.

“I am not judging you,” I said a bit too loudly. “I said it was clever. It’s probably the smart thing to do. I just don’t know if I could do that.”

“You probably couldn’t,” he said. “But you don’t live in my world where you’re in a fucking cage and every move you make is monitored. Maybe if you did, you’d do what I do.”

The old adage ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ popped into my head. “This is like me walking onto a battlefield where you’ve been fighting for years and all of a sudden I’m telling you which fort to storm. I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s whatever,” he said, but he was still mad at me. He parked at El Matador beach and paused, as if trying to decide if we should stay or not. I forced his hand by getting out.

“I haven’t been here in a long time,” I said. “I think the last time was with you.”

He had a spare backpack with him, different than the one he had for school. He tossed it over his shoulder, and we headed off down the gravel trail. “This place always reminds me of you,” he said.

“That’s very romantic of you,” I said playfully.

He gave me a wry look as he tried not to be angry with me. “Yeah, it would have been, except we ended up having an argument.”

“Dude, if you knew me as well as you think you do, you’d know that was no argument,” I said. He looked at me, shook his head, and started laughing.

“True that,” he said. We walked down the path until we got to the beach, then we just strolled on the shore. This place was remote, the weather was dreary, and that meant there was no one else out here. “Sometimes I don’t like the person I am, and you just kind of made me look at that.”

“I don’t know all the shit you’re dealing with,” I said. “You’re doing the best you can. I should not have come off as being so judgmental. That was complete bullshit.”

“So who’d you get into a fight with?” he asked.

“Zach,” I said. We walked on for a bit, saying nothing, but he put his arm around my shoulder, and that simple gesture made me feel so safe and secure.

“What happened?”

“He was waiting in my room when I got back,” I said. “He was mad at me for hanging out with you. He accused me of coming down here and making out with his girlfriend then stealing his fuck buddy away from him.”

“He could tell that I was really into you,” he said. In the past, I’d have thought it was the other way around, that Zach was mad that I was into Travis, but based on our blowup last night, I probably had that wrong.

“He was pissed at me, and tried to leave, but I stood in front of him and told him we needed to work things out,” I said, almost in a stream of consciousness. “The look in his eyes scared the shit out of me. He was completely full of rage. There was nothing else there.”

“So he pushed you out of the way?” Travis asked.

“No, he shoved me so hard he sent me flying into a shelf, a dresser, and a wall,” I spat back bitterly. “I had a Pepsi in my hand and threw it at him, and that’s why his eye is all fucked up.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think that’s a little bit like I must have felt when he tackled me in my room, you know, when you were watching.”

“Is that the first time he’s been violent with you?” I asked.

“That, and one other time when he punched me in the stomach,” he said. “I just wrote it off to roid rage.” That made me wonder if Zach was shooting up again, but I forced my mind back to our conversation.

“I can’t write this off,” I said. He looked at me curiously. “After he hurt me, and I was on the ground holding my can of Pepsi, he looked at me and there was no remorse, nothing. It was like he was standing on top of the mountain as the alpha male, declaring victory.”

“That’s what he did to me when we were wrestling,” Travis said. I stopped and pulled up my hoodie and my t-shirt, and showed him the massive bruise I had on my side. “Fuck,” he said, and ran his hands over it gently.

“No one does that shit to me, laughs in my face, and gets away with it,” I said with such venom that I probably sounded like I was the one shooting steroids. “No one.”

“So are you going to go and stab him with your lance?” he asked in a slightly playful way.

“No,” I said. We paused our walk and went over to sit on some rocks. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to him, and if I had to, I’d still try to stick up for him, but I don’t want to be around him.”

He nodded. “What if he comes back and begs you to forgive him?” Travis asked.

“He’s already asked me to do that,” I said.

“I guess I’m more likely to give someone a second chance than you,” he said, only this time he’d pissed me off.

“I am a big believer in second chances,” I snapped. “It’s not like I haven’t gone out of my way to make things work between us, and it’s not like I haven’t moved fucking heaven and earth to help him out.”

“Dude, I did not mean to upset you,” he said, then I got that his line of discussion wasn’t really about Zach, it was about me, and us.

“You’re wondering if I’m the kind of guy where you make one fuck up and that’s it, I write you off?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t want you to yell at me about it,” he teased, cracking me up.

“I can fly off the handle sometimes, but I really do think that I can get my mind under control pretty fast,” I said. “After I made out with Taylor and he met me at the hotel, he told me he should kick my ass. I told him that I wasn’t worried about that, because that was something he could never do to me.”

“And then he did it,” Travis said.

“Well, I think he ended up worse than me, so in reality, I kicked his ass, but we’ll go with that,” I joked, acting like a badass and making us both laugh. “When I was a kid and I got pissed at you, I didn’t carry a grudge.”

He chuckled some more. “No, you just made my life hell for a day or two and then it was over.”

“You’d pout for longer,” I teased, nudging him in the shoulder.

“Maybe,” he agreed.

“I remember that time I tripped you up when we were surfing and you were so pissed off at me, but all you did was ignore me,” I said.

“That was a dick move,” he said. “I had the right of way and you dropped in on purpose, and it was the best wave of the day, of the fucking week.”

“And when I told you I was sorry, it didn’t really matter to you at all,” I said.

“I heard you when you said you were sorry, but I had to get over it,” he said.

“That was the first time you’d really been pissed at me, and I was freaking out so I just pretended to ignore you, only that didn’t work,” I told him.

“You did for me what you’d have wanted me to do for you,” he said, nailing it perfectly. “Remember when I blew you off and went out with Jason Crocker and those dudes?”

“I remember,” I grumbled. We’d had plans to hang out, then he’d canceled, saying he had to do shit with his family. Instead, he went to Santa Monica Pier with those guys.

“I tried to hang out with you after that but you ripped me a new fucking asshole,” he said. He was right. I had done that, and I still thought he’d deserved it.

“When someone I care about really makes me mad, I usually need them to leave me alone until I calm down enough to forgive them,” I said.

“That’s not how I work,” he said. “When you dicked me over on that wave, I needed you to be around me to remind me that I still wanted to be your friend.”

“And you wanted to slowly torture me by keeping me at a distance so I wouldn’t want you to push me away again,” I accused in a playful way.

“That works too,” he said, smiling at me.

“I was talking to my grandfather today and asked him if he thought people basically have the same personality when they’re older that they did when they were kids,” I said.

“What did he say?”

“He wasn’t sure, but he thought it seemed likely,” I said.

“Seems to me that neither one of us has really changed all that much,” he said. “I think that’s why it’s been easy to reconnect with you so quickly.”

I leaned in and gave him a nice kiss, then we got up and started walking along the shore, just enjoying each other’s company.