The Burning Plain Read Free Page B

concealed firearm. According to the arresting officer’s narrative. Alex Amerian (twenty-nine years old, Caucasian) had been picked up by a security guard while wandering through the shrubbery on the grounds of a hillside mansion in Los Feliz belonging to someone called Cheryl Cordet.
    I looked up at Richie, “Cheryl Cordet? Why do I know that name?”
    Richie did a Mae West roll of his eyes. “Because last month she became the first woman ever to win an Oscar for best director?”
    “Oh,” I said and returned my attention to the report.
    Amerian had pulled a gun on the security guard who managed to wrest it from his control and call the police. Amerian was arrested. He declined to make a statement.
    “What do you think?” Richie asked when I raised my head from the report.
    “What’s his version?”
    “He told me he was coming home from a party when his car broke down in front of Cheryl Cordet’s place. He jumped the fence to see if she’d let him use her phone to call the auto club. The security guard caught him and they got into a scuffle. The guard called him a faggot. Alex lost control and waved the gun around. The guard knocked him down, got the gun away from him and called the cops.”
    “Why was he carrying a gun?”
    “For protection. Six months ago he was gay bashed and got the shit beat out of him.”
    “Did he mean to shoot the guard?”
    “No, he panicked.”
    “He didn’t try to explain this to the cops?”
    “He has an attitude about the police,” Richie said.
    “Why?”
    “He was attacked on the streets of West Hollywood by some teenage punks with baseball bats who left him crawling in his own blood to a pay phone to dial 911. It took forty minutes for the sheriffs to show up and when they did, they refused to take a report.”
    “How do you know this guy, Richie?”
    “The magazine ran a piece on violence against gays and lesbians a couple of months ago. Alex was one of the people we interviewed.”
    “ L.A. Mode did a story about gay bashing? Who photographed it? Herb Ritts?”
    “Bitch,” he replied. “I’m a serious journalist, Henry.”
    “Between fashion spreads,” I replied. “Alex Amerian sounds like one angry guy.”
    “Wouldn’t you be if you’d gone through what he did?”
    “Not to the point of stupid.”
    “He’s not stupid, Henry. He was traumatized by the attack on him, and when he got into a scuffle with this security guard, who called him a queer, he thought it was happening again.”
    “Post-traumatic stress syndrome?” I said skeptically.
    “What’s so fucking unbelievable about that?” he asked, angrily. “What fag—gay person—hasn’t been traumatized by someone’s hatred? When we do fight back, this is what happens.”
    “All right, Richie. Calm down. I’ll talk to him.”
    He leaned back and drawled, “I knew I could count on you, honey.”
    Something in his tone gave me pause. “Richie? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
    “Henry,” he said, “after everything we’ve been through together—you, me and Josh—how could you even think that?”
    “Sorry.”
    “You help Alex, you’ll be doing a mitzvah. You can redeem it for a thousand years in Purgatory after you die.”
    “Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?”
    “Oh, honey,” he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. “I’m going to hell. That’s where the action is.”

Chapter 2
    I CALLED ALEX Amerian after Richie left and agreed to meet him at five-thirty at his apartment in West Hollywood. At five, I came down the canyon and battled rush-hour traffic as I headed west on Sunset toward the gay ghetto, Boystown. The air was as brown as the curling edges of a burning book, and the palms that lined the road looked combustible. The only people on foot were the homeless and dazed tourists in search of a Hollywood that existed only in their imaginations.
    I often felt like a tourist in Los Angeles myself, a temporary