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FOREIGN FRUIT

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

January 2011

For Libby for all the magic

“Do not hold resentments. Do not get mad when things are

“a little” wrong.

There is a level from which all may work together for good

Smile always and live the smile.”

Edgar Cayce “Think On These Things.”

“Always smile when you enter a room, it puts people at ease

and raises the features of the face…and say something…

it doesn’t matter what you say…

…say “I never mind about the little things.”

Anne Bancroft in “Point Of No Return”

Elizabeth Taylor called me on Christmas Morning.

I missed the call, but Adam was with her when she made the call, so…I guess it really did happen. Adam has lapses of reality from time to time, and this wouldn’t be the first time I had been gullible at the top of my voice, rather like the inverse of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Adam’s exasperation that I hadn’t answered my phone, which I always do if I can, rang true.

“She called twice,” he tells me, “by HERSELF.” which means it wasn’t Tim, her assistant…it was HER.

Since I had last seen Adam (twenty years to be exact) he had become an unlikely but essential member of an inner circle that included Michael Jackson, Elton John (who had him thrown out of one of his concerts once – some jealousy issue, I think), Farah Fawcett (who he, like everybody else, ADORED)…and most astonishingly of all… Elizabeth Taylor.

I knew that it was possible…even if Adam was only that stoned again. My actually speaking to Elizabeth Taylor is something Adam might just dream into existence for me.

Sante Kimes (the famous axe-murderess) and my mother had one thing in common with most raven-haired lavender-eyed women born in the twentieth century whose highest form of flattery was that they bore a resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.

For most of my life Elizabeth Taylor was at the very top of a celebrity Mount Olympus that…with the actual occurrence of the “Warhol fifteen minutes of fame prediction”…has become a rather overcrowded, and something of a low rent district.

Her place in it, though, remains on the top of the hill, lavish and pristine and out of the range of the rabble…forever undiminished by the flashes in the pan that otherwise dominate the neighborhood.

When I saw Suddenly Last Summer I thought that such perfection of looks, talent, and sheer presence surely meant that a movie star represented an ideal of something.

Whatever the character being played was...a star (as opposed to an actor) brought something divine, something only they had…something to admire…to the part.

I think of Tennessee Williams when I think of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, or Suddenly Last Summer…his genius at distilling gothic southern decay is unmistakable and indelible…

…but I also think of Elizabeth Taylor.

Nobody plays a Tennessee Williams heroine like Elizabeth Taylor…o one had until she did; and no one has since. Williams was the first one to admit that and did so many times.

Kathryn Hepburn was no slouch, but Violet Venable was no heroine either; neither was Amanda Wingfield. Great actresses have played these women (Laurette Taylor, among them), but Williams’ ingénues are tricky roles and extremely demanding.

The speech in Sebastian’s garden near the end of Suddenly Last Summer at the very climax of the story is a masterwork of narrative soliloquy. There were almost no breaks and pages and pages of dialogue.

She built a momentum in that speech with impeccable timing and phrasing and emotion that makes it ring still in my mind. Cabasa del Lobo…throwing the money in the air…the white suit, the desperate run up to the ruin…the music…the damned clatter of the tribal music…the bloody had in the air.

The scream at the end...as she watched her cousin being eaten by children playing tin instruments…in her white dress whipped by the wind…the trailing end of the white scarf tied in her black, black hair…looking like an ignored flag of truce…remains for me one of the most thrilling sequences ever on film.

Adam is no slouch either. He was once the highest paid call boy in San Diego; not bad for an illiterate homeless redneck kid who arrived from Ohio with twenty-seven dollars in his pocket and nothing but spectacular good looks to sell.

A few days on the streets landed him a job as a bar-back at a gay club where the clients threw dollar bills into his underwear if he would just display them…which he did in his very real and hence convincing wonder that such a silly thing made money in the big city.

One such client threw a handful of coins into his crotch to weight-down and pull off the underwear and Adam had reacted with an innocent kind of embarrassment that turned to rage. “You fucking asshole,” he hissed as he tried to cover himself and retreated to the back of the bar.

It turns out the client was the owner of the bar.

When he came in the next day to pick up his final check there was a note, “I will pay you for pictures of you,” and there was a one hundred dollar bill and a number to call.

He found out what kind of pictures his patron wanted the next day, and a career in porn was born. Adam Scott became Adam Grant and the fantasy-boy of a whole generation of still shame-shrouded gay men who needed a detached fantasy in private to make sex work for them.

This doesn’t sound like the ordinary route to becoming a well-loved friend to so many stars, but Adam is no ordinary guy. The leap to the upper class in the gay world was no stretch for a man whose picture now adorned the cover and centerfold of Playgirl Magazine and could be found in floor to ceiling framed photos in the corridor of the best bar in town.

There was another bar in town where beautiful boys hung out for profit. Moist with youth and the virility that a lot of older very powerful male celebrities evidently cherished… and they were willing to provide a living fantasy for a generous fee. In Adam’s case the record was five thousand dollars for a fifteen minute date.

Adam never took it seriously, and had strict rules about what he would and would not do…he was famous for that. Having been repeated raped by a family member throughout his youth he was very specific about what not to touch.

I met him just before all of this happened, before he was discovered. He stayed in my house when I was rich and had a big house that I hated living alone in. I was never a client…this was before we knew how merchandisable he was…we had a nice month together before his life took off in a different direction.

“I was so in love with you,” he told me when he found me in Los Angeles, “I didn’t have a clue,” I told him and it was true. I never thought someone so obviously exquisite could find me desirable at all…not even then when I probably was.

I certainly wasn’t when he found me. Humiliatingly I was the virtual polar opposite of the young but powerful man I had once been…a man to be admired and a role model for a lot of people I would never know.

Now I was old and snaggle-toothed; while he was still a beauty…heavier and addled by a series of debilitating diseases and pretty seriously addicted to his magna-bong…but his long lustrous hair and dazzling smile remained stunning in every way.

The lover that had fallen in love with Adam (and stayed with him through thick and thin) was a celebrity of the first magnitude by dint of sheer personality and genius. He had introduced Adam to a world that found him first a curiosity and then a diamond in the rough. He had lived well and expensively all over the world and he was one of Elizabeth Taylor’s only remaining welcome guests in her twilight years.

“I talk about you to her all the time,” he told me just before I left California for Virginia, but that was as close to contact with her as I ever planned to get. Her call now that I was so far away was impeccably timed, even though I missed it, and just what I needed to face the next chapter of the story of me.

A month before, just before Thanksgiving, I had been reprieved from homelessness one more time by an unexpected call from a friend who needed a house-sitter in Virginia. It was a call to adventure and challenge and a real test of my absolute best intentions disguised as a vacation from hell in paradise.

I had no other offers and had exhausted all over avenue of redemption…and down to my last twenty-seven dollars with nowhere to go when I got the call from Virginia.

“There is a plane ticket waiting for you at LAX,” my friend said, “you will be picked up, when you arrive in Virginia…you will have a car at your disposal, and we still stock up the kitchen for you. Can you get to the airport?”

“Yes,” I said, “really?”

It was real…and it was the best thing that ever happened to me at the oddest time of my life to have such an adventure occur.

In truth, I felt like Pollyanna, a stranger bringing a new flavor to the quaint little town and very much at risk for ending up at the end of the story on a train out of town with broken legs…and all the townspeople waving me good-bye.

I had told my friend what a mess I was…how completely out of resources I had become (literally down to my two bags of ill-chosen clothes). He was not buying it though…or rather…he was.

I thought they must know something I didn’t know and just signed up without regret in what felt like the FBI Relocation Program.

It did not occur to them, I suppose, that I was going to be just as disappointing in Virginia as I had been in Los Angeles, and much more expensively. This however is what I had turned out to be in return for their faith…expensive and disappointing.

Even so, my time in Virginia had been the best time of my life. I loved Richmond more than I had ever loved any of the places I had lived. I had friends here that were better than any I had in any of them, and I had a best friend right out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Eric had been the best surprise I could have had at this time in my life and I would have suffered anything to know him.

How to get home was a problem, but having been here was not.

But on this Christmas all I could do was smile and put things in perspective: and try to put other people…the people to whom I had once again become a problem…at ease.

An unexpected check from a publisher served that purpose…at least for the short term.

“I never mind about the little things,” I told Eric; and for him alone this was not a ridiculous excuse for not garnering control of my own life.

I have to leave again a place I love and set out with no money and no prospects and I am not spectacularly good looking or young. I want Eric to come with me.

He is under indictment for going seventy-five…in a parking lot…and has warrants outstanding for him in most of the tri-state area, fortunately California is not one of the states in which Eric is wanted and I want him to come home with me.

He won’t go though, I know. He loves Virginia too much and he has family here. But on this lonely holiday morning, he is the best friend and confederate a displaced loser could have.

On Christmas morning, while I was missing a call from Elizabeth Taylor, Eric showed up with a bounty of meticulously Tupperwared Christmas food. I was alone and feeling the aloneness acutely as he unveiled our feast.

“My dad’s a great cook,” he tells me, “but he always throws in all this foreign fruit.”

He is referring to a passion fruit that neither one of us knows what to do with.

I am here in Virginia…at the end of my time in Virginia…and that is exactly what I feel like.

“You just never know though,” I tell him and speaking for all of the displaced and alienated creatures facing (unlike me) a Christmas really and completely alone on this beautiful day, “you just never know what kind of flavor you’re going to get out of foreign fruit.”

And Elizabeth Taylor called me on Christmas morning…whether I knew it or not.