“Where did you grow up?”
“On the outskirts of Pittsburgh,” Doug answered. “My old man was a steel worker.”
“Were you an only child?” Bob asked.
Doug made a sound of scornful amusement. “I should be so lucky.”
“How many of you were there?”
“Four sisters and me,” Doug said. “They got the princess treatment, I got treated like some dog they’d found in a lot.”
“Really?” Bob said, wincing.
“Yes, really,” Doug said; sounding almost contemptuous. “They had the two extra bedrooms, I had the cellar.”
“The cellar?” Bob looked at him in pained amazement.
“That’s right. While you had a nice room all to yourself, I’m sure, my old man threw up some plywood and made me a—what would you call it?—a cell, an enclosure, a fucking closet? You can imagine how cold it got down there in the winter. The only time it was comfortable was in the summer.”
“Jesus.” Bob looked distressed at the image Doug had created in his mind.
“Jesus was nowhere around,” Doug said. “Just my old man and my mother—who was drunk most of the time.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bob said, wincing again.
“He wasn’t around either.” Doug’s smile was thin and bitter. “My old man used to beat the shit out of me,” he said.
“Why?” Bob asked.
“Why?” Doug repeated. “For any damn thing he wanted to. Bad grades in school. Not doing my chores fast enough to suit him. Once, one of my sisters came on to me. She was lying naked on my cot, telling me to fuck her when my old man found us. Who got blamed? Her? My ass. It was all my fault. She was thirteen, I was nine, but it was my fault and he got that old belt out toot sweet and walloped my bare ass until I couldn’t sit down for three days. Bastard. And what about Lenora? She cried tears like the professional crocodile she was and got away with the whole thing—even my mother bawled me out. I wasn’t too crazy about Lenora after that. For that matter, none of my sisters cared much for me. My oldest sister Angela wasn’t too bad; she, at least, stood up for me once in a while. But not very much.”
“Did your father drink too?” Bob asked.
“Not during the week, he had to work,” Doug said. “But on weekends… watch out. That’s when I got most of my beatings. He beat my mother up once in a while too. But never the girls. I don’t know what the hell kept him clear of them. Hell, maybe he was screwing them, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find out that he was.”
Bob didn’t know what to say. He really was sorry now that he’d brought up the subject. Then, again, maybe it was doing Doug good to let out some of his painful memories.
“When did you leave home?” he asked.
“House, you mean,” Doug said. “It was never a home.” He paused to take a drink of his coffee, then went on. “I was about fifteen. I’d become a real ‘tough guy’ by then. Hung out with ‘the wrong crowd,’ don’t y’know. Got caught trying to rob a liquor store with a couple of my buddies. We all got sent to a reformatory. I was there two years. Got raped a dozen times or so until I beat up the ‘big guy’ there. Then they left me alone. Would you believe that’s where I got into acting?”
“How so?” Bob asked, surprised.
“Some jerky social worker started a dramatics program there. Most of the guys thought it was only for fags but I tried it and I liked it. That got some of the other guys into it too—they knew I wasn’t a fag. So we put on shows and I found out I was pretty damn good at it. So after I got out, I went to Philadelphia, got a job in a lumberyard, and went to acting school.”
“That’s very interesting,” Bob said.
Doug looked at him suspiciously. “You jerking my chain?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know what that means,” Bob answered. “But if it means am I pulling your leg, no, I’m not. I think what you’ve told me is very interesting. You’ve survived a lot of hard times.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Doug said.
“So when did you come to California?” Bob asked then.
“Went to New York first. Another acting school—I couldn’t get into The Actors Studio; guy who ran it didn’t like me. But I got a few parts in off-Broadway shows. Enjoyed the hell out of it because I had my choice of all the actresses; most guys in acting companies are queer. Which is amusing because most of the so-called famous lovers of the stage are queer—which, of course, the audience doesn’t know.”
“What brought you to the coast?” Bob asked.
“Some Hollywood agent saw me and told me I should come to Los Angeles; he thought he could get me some television work.” He exhaled hard. “End of story,” he said. He looked outside. “If it doesn’t stop raining soon, we’d better try to move on anyway.”
“Oh, all right.” Bob didn’t want to leave the comfort of where they were but knew that Marian would start to fret if he was days late.
Doug poured some more hot water into his cup, added coffee powder to it, stirred it up, and added a little more brandy to the cup. “You want some more?” he asked.
Bob was going to say no, then thought: Oh, what the hell, it’s making Doug more genial, making me feel good, and, most importantly, delaying their possible departure into the cold rain.
“Sure,” he said. He made himself more coffee and Doug added a little brandy to his cup.
“So that’s the story of my fucking life,” Doug said. “Excluding a few minor details like my marriage to Nicole, my two kids, Nicole moving out on me, my total alienation from Janie, my acting career in the fucking doldrums, and my son—”
He broke off abruptly and Bob hoped the subject of Artie would be dropped. He knew the pain Doug still felt about it and knew that there was very little he could say to lessen that pain.
“You believe in life after death, don’t you?” Doug surprised him by asking.
He hesitated for a few moments, then nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“So tell me”—Doug was looking at him almost challengingly—“you think Artie’s there, okay then?”
Bob swallowed. “Yes, of course he’s there,” he said. He’d never tell Doug what he believed about suicides.
“Even though he was a druggie?” Doug asked.
“It doesn’t matter what he was,” Bob told him. “He’s still there.” Where that “there” was he hated to consider. But he could, in honesty, say that he believed in Artie’s survival.
“You’ve been reading about this stuff for a long time, haven’t you?” Doug said.
“A long time,” Bob agreed. “Hundreds of books.”
“And you’re convinced of this… survival thing,” Doug probed.
“Totally,” Bob answered. “I believe that we’re more than body and brain, that we possess a higher self that survives death.”
“Survives for what?” Doug asked.
“To come back and try again,” Bob answered.
“Oh, shit,” Doug said. “We have to go through everything again?”
“It’ll be different,” Bob said. “We’ll be different people. But we’ll still be the same basic soul working out our problems. Trying to anyway.”
Doug grunted and took a sip of his coffee. He bared his teeth, remembering. “That means I’ll have to pay the price for what I did to Artie,” he said. “Or what I didn’t do.”
“We all have problems that we need to solve,” Bob said.
“Not you,” Doug said, his hostile tone startling Bob. “Your life is a fucking utopia compared to mine. A wife who loves you. Two kids doing well. A successful career. You’re even handsome, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell were you in your last lifetime, the fucking son of God?”