Five or six months after Steve died, I got involved with a guy named Luke—nothing serious, a casual affair. I met him at the Whole Foods in Pacific Heights, where he worked as a clerk. Luke was two decades younger than me and different from Steve in every conceivable way except one: He looked like him. Tall, built, with a boxer’s nose, a prominent jaw, and hands as large and heavy as catcher’s mitts. I did not see the resemblance until a few months and many tequila shots later. Actually, a friend—concerned by my infatuation with Luke, a hard-drinking, motorcycle-driving, tattooed Texan with a temper fueled by enormous amounts of steroids—pointed it out to me. By then, I had long since learned that Luke not only had a boyfriend but also another job and went by another name. He was a porn star, a phrase I do not use lightly. He really was a star, his made-up name appearing above the title, in dozens of hard-core films. I would not have known because watching porn had never been my thing, but I did not care any more than I cared about the boyfriend. Truth is, I found it fascinating. The very idea of reinventing oneself—giving oneself a new name, new body, a radically different life—held great appeal. I had begun unconsciously doing so myself.
One night around that time, I cruised a good-looking guy at the gym, as did he cruise me. I saw him in the shower, and then he followed me out of the gym and into the parking lot. “My name’s Shane,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand.
“I’m Bill,” I said, then added, “Billy. You can call me Billy.”
It just came out; I didn’t even think about it. The name fit in a way that Bill, what I had been called almost my whole life, no longer did. The name is considered a diminutive; I’m aware of that. I was called Billy as a boy. But in middle age, it did not sound that way to me. On the contrary: Billy sounded bigger than me, tougher, invulnerable.
Along with the name came a shaved head, a beard, more muscles, and a tattoo. I had always loved tattoos and, were it not for Steve, who found them repellent for some reason, I would have had at least a sleeveful by then. But something unexpected—unexpected to me, at least—had come with Steve’s death. What he thought or would have thought, which used to seem more important than how I viewed myself, had changed entirely. I still felt Steve looking on constantly, but with death he had left behind all judgments. He no longer approved or disapproved. He didn’t cast a vote. He wanted for me, I felt, one thing, only one thing: To be happy.
I designed a tattoo that symbolized the end of one life and the beginning of another—Roman numerals for 10/10, the month and day Steve died—and had it inked on a pulse point. It hurt like hell but I loved it. I went over to Luke’s afterward to celebrate, tequila and weed serving as my anesthesia. Upon getting home very late that night, I pulled the blinds in every room of my apartment. I had recently taken everything off the walls, all our old pictures and posters, and gotten rid of a bunch of furniture, including the bed Steve and I had slept in all those years, the bed he’d died in, leaving only a foam-rubber mattress on the floor. It looked like a place where someone was only half-moved in or half-moved out, either scenario being plausible to explain my current state. The hardwood floors gleamed in the moonlight. Cool, foggy air blew through the open windows. I got stoned and put on my iPod. This was a period when I would listen to the same few songs over and over again—Bj?rk’s “Hyperballad,” “Unravel,” and “Undo,” Radiohead’s “There, There,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow,” an undanceable song to which I would dance for so long I would sweat. Music, I found, was the most effective balm to my grief.
When I woke the next morning, my sheets were stained with bits of blood and black ink from the tattoo. I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee and had to laugh at what I found left from the night before: At the height of my high, I had written lyrics from “Black Crow” on one of the blank white kitchen walls:
My whole life has been illumination, corruption, and diving
Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing
_____________________
Soon after, I decided to get away from San Francisco and spend a month in London. I subleased a flat in Camden from a friend for virtually nothing. Before leaving, I gave Luke keys to my apartment—not just duplicate keys, mind you, but Steve’s set—which seems bizarre in retrospect. I did so on the pretense that, since Luke and his boyfriend were going through a rough patch, he might need a place to stay now and then. But the truth was, I liked the idea of this über-Steve stand-in sleeping in my bed, inhabiting my space.
London wasn’t an arbitrary choice. Steve and I had been there twice to do research for my last book and had fallen in love with the city. I thought that going back might cheer me. Boy, was that na?ve. No sooner had the plane taken off than tears were streaming down my face. I might have turned around and left London in days had it not been for a single item I’d brought with me: a camera.