Jimmy all alone in the October cold. Jimmy out late, walking too-wide streets, looking through windows, watching men and aching for them. Smoking cigarettes to smell like them. Jimmy stuck inside a skinny kid body, a half ton of hunger crammed into a hundred and twenty pounds.
Jimmy dreams of becoming Jim. Jimmy hates Jimmy. His little cousin is Jimmy; his big uncle is Jim. He dreams of the day he graduates to Jim.
James is nothing. A paper phantom, a name on a birth certificate, something only ever said in schoolroom roll call.
So he’s not expecting it, when James shows up.
A voice from the cool dark beneath the bleachers. A deep voice, and raw—stretched thin with a hunger so harsh he knows right away it’s his. Saying things that make him sick, and make him hard.
Indiana October twilight is blue and smoky in the air. Three years running he’s tried and failed to make the football team. Now he watches these boys—these men—these Steves and Toms and Jims—wondering what the secret is, and how they learned it. They’d been weak little worm-boys like him but had now become brutal mighty moth-men.
“It’s easy,” says the voice from the stinking welcoming gloom. “Just come down here.”
Jimmy glances anxiously around. No one is looking. No one cares. He is nobody. Nothing will change if he vanishes from the earth. His mother is dead and his father sent him to live with his aunt and uncle—fine upstanding meek humble people who want nothing more from life than this shitty farming town.
Jimmy wants more.
So he steps brazenly down from the bleachers. Walks confidently under. Towards where a slim dark shape waits.
“Let me in,” James rumbles in his ear, like the engine of a marvelous car, and—even though the hands around his neck are too tight—Jimmy does.
James trails the players back to the school when practice is over. Hangs around outside the locker room until everyone but the coach has gone home. James walks in and makes eye contact. Holds it. Shucks off his shirt and offers Jimmy’s pale small body.
Jimmy is popular.
Jimmy isn’t great on the football team, but he uses its prestige to make the baseball and basketball teams as well. Jimmy is a letter man. All-American. Jimmy is suddenly good at giving people what they want. Jimmy competes in public speaking through the Indiana High School Forensic Association.
But. You already know: Jimmy wants more.
You know this because you want more.
Jimmy regrets it, every time he lets James in. But this is what he has to do. James knows what’s up. Who’s who. He sends him to the Methodist minister, a kind and lonely man whose drinking problem is the source of only some of the gossip about him. Jimmy likes the guy, enjoys their afternoons together; he’s happy to let James in when the shadows start to lengthen and the minister has had enough pulls from his secret pocket flask to start letting his fingers linger on Jimmy’s shoulders, his hair, his thighs.
The minister is worldly, wise; loves theater and racing cars. He expands Jimmy’s horizons. Shows him a way out of dreary Fairmount, where the gas works and the glass factory are the best he could do. All Jimmy has to do is let James take the wheel.
Sometimes there is pain, afterwards. Bruises. Marks. Jimmy doesn’t want to know.
But sometimes James tells him all the ugly details, laughing as he squirms and begs for silence, a deep raw voice from beneath his bed he can’t block out.
The minister helps get him the gig as Malcolm in a local Macbeth. Of course it’s James who takes the stage. James who earns the rhapsodic recommendation letters that get him into Santa Monica College as a drama major.
You have heard this boring story before. The miserable logistics of a-star-is-born; each tiny slow painful step on the ladder to immortality.
There’s the frat Jimmy pledges—and is rejected from—when someone calls him a fruit and he is obliged to punch him in the nose.
There are the walk-on roles he racks up. Soldier, teeny-bopper, boxing cornerboy.
The college he quits; the parking lot where he works as an attendant while going on auditions. The rich ad man whose car he parks. Who James knows right away how to handle. Who he handles so well that soon the guy offers Jimmy a place to stay, and asks really very little in return.
He takes him to parties. The pretty boy is a hit. That face; that mouth. Doors open faster. The gigs get bigger. A Pepsi commercial. In a sailor suit. The part of the Beloved Apostle in a television special.
James unleashes something in people. Something sexual, but darkly so. People say it’s androgyny, but that’s not it at all. James is masculinity objectified, the man brutally reduced to sex object, something done so habitually to women that people think that’s what femininity is.
James takes them to New York.
Jimmy pounds the pavement. Gets TV gigs. James gets him a reputation for being difficult to work with. “Unkempt and arrogant.”
Jimmy shacks up with a girlfriend, in a shitty hotel on West Seventy-first Street. He is happy there. But also broke and hungry all the time. When his ad man comes to the city and invites him to come cohabitate, he’s clear that Jimmy will need to entertain him and his friends whenever he’s asked. Those friends, after all, can help him get work. Jimmy tells his girl what’s up, says he’s sorry, leaves the hotel and her for the ad man’s penthouse.
Everyone gets a piece of Jimmy.
James gets them the part that breaks them through. A lead in a Broadway play; but Jimmy fucking hates it. Fights it all the way. Enrages cast and crew and money men. But when James takes the stage, everyone forgives him. Whatever he is—whatever he taps into—it astonishes everyone who sees it.
“A pandering homosexual,” the Times calls his character, conceding the young actor’s “insidious charm.” Time calls it “the most outspoken treatment of homosexuality that Broadway has seen.”
Elia Kazan sees it in previews. On opening night, Jimmy tells the rest of the cast that he’s leaving the play. He’s scored the lead role in Kazan’s East of Eden.
There’s bleedthrough. Times when he’s not sure what’s what. The edges get blurry. Sometimes he has nightmares, and they are full of things he shouldn’t be able to remember. Sometimes he finds himself on his knees, or his back, or his stomach on the floor of a filthy hotel bathroom, and doesn’t think it was James who put him there.
But things are working out. Jimmy’s dreams are coming true; he’s a working actor living in Hollywood, making a major prestige picture. Maybe they can manage this partnership.
Jimmy is a friendly guy, raised right, good midwestern manners. He wants friends. A real life. He becomes buddies with fine upstanding citizens, people who have the kind of safe warm family home he knows he’s supposed to want. He’s great with kids, talks to them like equals, asks the weird questions kids ask each other—shows up with ice cream—but is it him or is it James, who, once the mixed pint of coffee and raspberry ice cream is gone and he’s helped the little boy put his toy soldiers away, kisses the missus and one-armed-hugs his friend and hops on his motorcycle and prowls the town for hours, headlights splitting the dark down the middle but the dark zips itself right back up behind him, cruising the Venice pier or the Strand at Manhattan Beach, searching for someone to sleep with—but of course sleep is not the right word—and sometimes it’s a woman but mostly it’s a man?
Jimmy can’t tell who it is. Which one he hates.
James loves journalists. The studio sees something, in the dailies coming off of Kazan’s set, assigns him six publicists, sets up interviews in the build-up to East of Eden’s release. James can jaw for hours about absolutely anything, inventing indigenous ancestry for his mother and Mayflower descent for his father, adopting dramatically different personas for every conversation—some brash and streetwise, some urbane and soft and sensitive, all of them odd and interesting and memorable.
Jimmy’s a nice guy. Jimmy doesn’t dig the “occasional crude or cruel behavior,” “insolent cockiness,” or “ostentatious bad habits” that alienate friends and make it into gossip mags. Jimmy doesn’t think they need to trash talk Paul Newman and Dean Stockwell and any other handsome up-and-comer. Jimmy would never in a million years have sat on his motorcycle outside the church the day the girl who broke his heart got married, and revved the motor incessantly throughout the service.
But that’s because Jimmy is weak. Jimmy doesn’t understand show business. Jimmy doesn’t get America. That’s why Jimmy needs James.
East of Eden is the talk of the town, and Jimmy is the main topic of conversation. He lands the lead in Rebel Without a Cause right away. He’s so hot that as soon as he’s cast, the studio head switches the film from black-and-white to color stock. Scenes have to be re-shot. Round about this time is when Jimmy realizes—he never became Jim. And he never will.
You’d think it’s James, behind the wheel, opening up the throttle, pushing his Porsche Spyder up into the hundreds. James following the roughest of rough trade into the dark below the Pier. James taking dumb risks, trying to get them both killed.
But that’s all Jimmy. By then he’s barely there, a flicker in James’s eyes, a boy crying from the bottom of a well. James lets him out almost never. And always for a very good reason.
Jimmy probably thinks he’s freeing himself, getting his final revenge on the demon who stole his body and his life, but this gruesome death a month before his biggest picture comes out—guiding the Porsche into a collision so spectacular he’s almost decapitated—is precisely what James wants.
He’s wrung this body dry. Taken what he needs. Built the framework for a story that will capture hearts for decades to come. Linger any longer, and the myth starts to tarnish.
Jimmy goes to heaven, but James goes everywhere. He’s under bleachers and inside books and behind screens.
He knows you know this.
His name won’t be James but you’ll know it when you hear it. My voice, from the cool stinking dark, saying, “Let me in.”
