Chapter 1: Go behind-the-scenes with Austin!

September 1978

“Five minutes, Austin.”

I turn from the dressing table lights to see the stagehand in the doorway. He’s got a headset on, a tight t-shirt, and roaming eyes. The way he’s been looking at me, I can’t tell if it’s because he wants to fuck me or he just feels sorry for me.

“Okay. Thanks,” I tell him. He lingers an extra couple of seconds, looking me over before he leaves. Maybe it’s the former.

I turn to look at my reflection. I was just thinking that there’s something about it that I don’t recognize. It’s strange. I put a hand up to my freckled cheek and tug it as if I might pull off a mask.

I’ve put on so many over the years that each time I peel one off there’s another one there. When someone says that you should be yourself, I don’t even know how many masks I’d have to remove to find who that is.

I roll up a twenty and snort the line of coke I just cut off the dressing table. I look at myself again to see if that changes anything.

It doesn’t. I rub at one nostril.

It’s funny how you see your reflection all your life, then one day, for some inexplicable reason, you look and there’s a stranger. I run a finger along my jawline to my chin. I think of the commercial with the owl and Tootsie Roll pop. How many masks would it take to get to the center of Austin Rivers?

There’s just enough time for me to do another line before I have to go on. I need to stay sharp. Kenny Kincaid is known for being a loose cannon. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you go on The Kenny Kincaid Show. Or if you’ve just got no shame at all.

But me, I have things to hide and I have some shame. Enough to have taken a Quaalude on the way here. I think if I do enough blow before walking on, the combo will have me right in that sweet spot of relaxed and attentive.

Bonnie and Floyd thought that if people see me on primetime, wearing my “everything’s a-okay” mask, they won’t be too concerned as to why I was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital a few weeks ago. Bonnie and Floyd tried to do some damage control and keep it out of the papers. They responded to any inquiries that I just had the flu and was dehydrated. It was a believable enough excuse considering the flu was going around.

“Austin?” The stagehand is back. He glances at the coke. “You’ve got about one minute.”

I nod and check myself in the mirror one last time. In the reflection, I can see the stagehand lingering in the doorway behind me. He leans against the threshold, brushing some of his thick brown hair away from his forehead.

I stand up and adjust my tailored blue suit, smooth the collar of the bright yellow silk shirt, and adjust the leather band around my left wrist. As I walk out, the stagehand walks alongside me. In my periphery, I see him check out my ass. He makes it obvious. I make it obvious that I notice.

“You know” he says, “I heard red heads have quite a temperament.”

I adjust the cuffs on my sleeves. “You heard right.”

“Fun in the sack.”

“That’s very true.”

He grins. “What are you doing after the show?”

I give him a flat smile right as we get up to the curtain, and then Kenny Kincaid introduces me so I don’t have to answer. I walk on, putting on another mask with a big, confident smile. There’s lights coming at me from the right, the audience clapping, and I’m surprised to hear some cheering. Kenny stands up from his desk to shake my hand.

For a second I feel unsteady from the drugs, but I quickly take a seat before I can stumble. I’ve done this before. I’ve gone onto shows like this, except even worse and no one knew because I am damn good at making people think I am okay.

I smile and wave to the audience as Kenny takes a seat, and I take the opportunity to note where the cameras are and the potential angles. I subtly tug on my sleeves and adjust the leather band as I sit casually and appear as if I’m just as comfortable as I would be in my own living room.

And appear as if I’m not almost stoned out of my mind.

“Wow,” Kenny says with a broad grin as he lights up a Newport. “Look at you. Weren’t you only this tall the last time we had you here?” Kenny holds up his hand a few feet beside him.

“Yeah it’s been a few years.” I pause and wink at the audience “I’ve grown just a little bit.”

Some people laugh.

“You have, you have.” Kenny nods, taking a drag from his cigarette. “How old are you now?”

“I’m nineteen. I’ll be twenty in November.”

“Wow. No more little Reggie Camden, huh?”

More giggling in the audience.

I pretend to laugh too. “No, Reggie goes by Reginald these days.”

More laughs.

“Oh, I see, I see.” Kenny leans back in his chair and takes another drag. He’s got those thick sideburns with a little bit of white and gray now. Last time I was here I was thirteen and Love Thy Neighbor had just won its second Emmy. They purposely put me on a chair that was higher so my feet would swing when I sat down. No one wanted me to grow up.

But I did, and I’m here, and I’d rather be thirteen again.

Kenny chats with me about Love Thy Neighbor for a little bit, asking if I’ve kept up with any of the former cast since the show was canceled. The only one I’ve kept up with is Margie Thurmond, who played Peggy Marshall, Reggie’s neighbor. Our characters were the same age and so are we. I feel like this might be a set up to ask if I’m dating Margie, so I prepare myself. But Kenny doesn’t go there.

He goes somewhere else instead.

“So, you were in Roller Rink…what was it, last year?” Kenny says, leaning on his desk, “with, um, Krissy Seaborn? Right?”

“Right.” My pits start to sweat.

Roller Rink flopped so bad that Bonnie and Floyd advised me not to do anymore promotions for it. It was embarrassing. I’ve struggled with getting adult roles since Love Thy Neighbor ended. Last year, all I could manage was that stupid movie and guest starring on Fantasy Island.

It’s strange to be flooded with so much attention for years; to be sought after, to have girls writing you letters of their undying devotion to you, and then have it all dry up in the blink of an eye. I guess no one wants to believe they’ll be forgotten.

I try to avoid any embarrassment by answering Kenny with some wisecracks here and there about my roller skating skills. I try to get him and the audience to laugh. It works.

Kenny asks about my future projects, and I casually tell him I don’t have much going on right now because I’m taking a little bit of a break. I make it sound like that’s been the plan all along. No big deal. I can almost believe it’s true.

But Kenny raises a bushy brow. “A break, huh? You going to school or something?”

I shrug and flash a grin. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

“I’m sure we will.” Then Kenny leans back in his seat. “So, how are you, otherwise?” He pauses. “How’s Harvey Laden?”

My entire body immediately clenches at the sound of his name. A ripple of awkward laughter runs through the audience. Kenny turns to give them one of his deadpan looks, and there’s more snickering. The bruise around my right eye is gone now, and so is my busted lip. But a makeup lady put powder over my eye anyway.

The audience is laughing at me. And they all know what happened between Harvey and me out in front of The Roxy a few months ago. Bonnie and Floyd tried to get the rags not to print the photos, but it was too late. There was one of me on top of Harvey, my fist raised to punch him. It was not my best night. Scratch that. It was a horrible night. And it was all photographed for everyone to see.

I quickly grin and pretend to laugh about it too, shaking my head, to hide the tension. When the laughter dies down, I say as innocently as I can, “What do you mean?”

The crowd erupts in more laughter, a couple of people clapping, as Kenny gives me another one of his looks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kenny says. “Something about a meeting of the minds you two had?”

The audience laughs some more.

I decide to go along with it. “Oh yeah. I remember now. When we got together to discuss world peace.”

More laughs from the audience and Kenny joins in.

“Sure. Something like that.” He taps his note cards on the desk, and leans forward. “I was just sort of wondering when you two might bury the hatchet, so to speak.”

In one of the papers, they said Harvey and I were fighting over a girl. Honestly, I don’t mind if people think that. It’s a believable enough explanation. I’m sure everyone here tonight believes it.

I clear my throat and casually stretch an arm out on the back of the seat beside me. “Now, Kenny, you know there weren’t any hatchets. It was just our fists.”

I get the audience to laugh again and Kenny smiles.

“Sure, I know,” he says. “But I was just hoping you two might be good friends again one day.”

Harvey and I were never friends. Not once. Not ever. I don’t know why Kenny or anyone else would think so. I think it has something to do with us being in the same magazines together. And sometimes at the same parties, like my sixteenth birthday party, when I guess all this sort of began. But I was also in those magazines and at those parties with Donnie Osmond, David Cassidy, and Christopher Knight, and I’m not really friends with them.

But Harvey and I have a history, I guess you could say. I have no idea why anyone would think we’d been friends at any point. For the briefest of moments, it creeps into my mind that someone blabbed about my New Year’s party. But I know who all was there. I’d know if they’d said anything that Kenny might find out about.

I shrug and smile at Kenny. I can lie so easily, “Who knows? Maybe one day.”

The end of my appearance on the show can’t come soon enough. Kenny asks me a couple more bland questions, then after the cameras cut to a commercial, he shakes my hand, offering to take me and Margie Thurmond to dinner sometime. I walk off the stage as fast as I can, my pits damp through my shirt and jacket.

That same stagehand is waiting to take me back to the dressing room.

“You were great,” he says, walking beside me.

“Thanks,” I reply, looking down the hallway at the “on air” sign lit up in red. The commercial break must be over and Kenny’s talking to his next guest. I don’t even know who it is.

The stagehand unlocks and opens the door to the dressing room for me. The coke I’d left is still there on the dressing table.

“Thought you might not want anyone in your stash,” he says.

I pick up the twenty and stick the little bag of powder in my pocket.

“You didn’t answer me before,” he says, leaning against the open door. “About where you’re going?”

Buried underneath all these masks, the real Austin Rivers knows where he’s going. He knows who he wants and what he wants. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find him. I don’t know if I’ll ever know for sure.

I look over at the stagehand. Addictions are feelings. And I got addicted to being wanted. In that way. In all ways. For no reason in particular, I remember the package I got when I was seventeen from a girl in Cincinnati. It was a little box with her underwear and a lock of her hair. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t tell Bonnie or Floyd. And even though I didn’t know this girl, and would never want her, I was addicted to her wanting me.

I shouldn’t have come here tonight. I shouldn’t have done this show. Because my addictions are going to get the best of me.

Again.

I reach behind the stagehand for the doorknob, which puts me in his personal space. He doesn’t even flinch. I close the door. He takes the headset off, and there’s squabbling through the earpieces.

I lean back against the dressing table. “Does it matter where I’m going?” I say as he unhooks my belt and unzips my pants. “As long as I’m here tonight?”

He gets down on his knees. He unzips my fly. He looks up at me. “I always wondered about you, you know.”

My dick is out and in his mouth before I can tell him I’ve always wondered about me too.