We bombed to Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. We lashed into Lana Turner’s house sixteen seconds apart. We bombed up to an upstairs bedroom. I froze in the doorway and caught a frightful freeze-frame frisson:
Lana–terrified, tear streaked. A teenage girl–shiny eyed, in shock, and scared shitless. Johnny Stompanato staring at the knife Yolanda just jammed in him.
That’s the real story: off the record, on the Q.T. and very Hush-Hush.
I latched onto Lana ‘s letters late that night. I leaked two to Ben Luboff and bought Rock back into the closet. I closed the closet door on Ben’s big toe. I told him to clear me with Clinton Anderson or I’d clip him for that sweet smack he swung on the sweaty swish,
He capitulated and kowtowed and called me back. He passed me a cautiously codified Anderson aside.
I know where you were Good Friday. YE going south. Let’s go with the public version.
A deal went down behind BHPD doors. Anderson could not afford to yank Yolanda and push her public and stamp her for the Stompanato snuff The Chief chiseled out a deal and chilled himself out of trouble and chipped Cheryl Crane into a chump child charge. Lana let it go down. Anderson addressed her with a big bag of dirt he took from Terry Tompkins at Tattle. Lana liked to lez with Lila Lee once in a soft sapphic moon. Terry had a pack of Polaroids.
Don Jordan decided to let me live. He decisioned Honeybear Akins and wore the welterweight crown for fifteen fat months. Benny “Kid” Paret mugged him and took his title in May 1960. Some malefactors mugged him for real and murdered his mulatto ass in the mid- ’90s.
Yolanda moved back to Mexico. Hollywood had its hooks in her She transcended the tragedies of her life and triumphed as a snuff-film auteur
Steve Crane crapped out in ’85. Those lavish Luau liquor libations lopped out his liver
The live-in lover left the Rock for Liberace. He maliciously maintained that I turned Rock straight–despite a massive mountain of definitive data that conclusively contradicted him. Rock and I remained friends. 1 pressed his preposterous straight credentials in Hush-Hush and herded him to a herbalist when I heard he had AIDS. Potent potions prolonged Rock ‘s life for a small parcel of time. My current prognosis is presumably much better
I want to LIVE. I want to lay out the scopophiliac scope of my life in a NON–mea culpa manner I want to slap myself in serial form all over GQ. I’ve got an artful array of dirt on Art Cooper–the editor-in-chief I’ve extorted him into publishing this piece. I’ve got dirt to illegitimize Ilena Silverman–Art’s most artful editor They’ll print what I tell them to.
I talked to my doctors today. My red-blood count is oscillating optimistically up. I might make it to the moment that they dig up and discover a cure.
The gonif three gurneys down is still staring at me. He ‘s looking more and more familiar He ‘s tripping out of the tableaux that I just tantalizingly tattled. I’ve got him on the tip of my tongue.
Right there. Right–
The Rock’s lachrymose live-in lover. The cuckolded kid who cursed me back in–
He made me make him. He made a geriatric jump in my direction. He’s got a hypodermic full of hyper-hazy, health-hazarding shit. He wants to reinfect me and get his revenge on the Rock.
I grabbed the sharp shiv shoved under my bed.
September 1998
TIJUANA, MON AMOUR
I lashed the live-in lover and left him for dead. A night nurse noted his absence and noticed his knees nudged under my bed. She hauled him out. She hydrated him. She tricked up a transfusion and blasted him with black-market blood.
She saved his life. She convinced a kangaroo court to convict me of Assault on an AIDS Ward. She trumped up a tribunal and jerry-rigged a jury. She found five fags and fed them facts on my fag-fragging Hush-Hush heyday. They banished me to a basement stuffed with stacks of old newspapers.
Doctors dip by and drizzle my IV drip. Pill pushers pump me with potions. A homophobic herbalist hops by and hails me as his heterosexual hero. I regale him with riotous riffs on scandal scores and outrageous outings. We ponder my plight as a fag-fragger plowed with the HIV plague.