Eau de Lamb

Lamb ♣ 03 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction

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Eau de Lamb

♣ ♣ ♣ 03 ♣ ♣ ♣

Was I mad that Lamb skipped out on our apartment? That’s what everyone wanted to know after the dust settled and it was clear he wasn’t coming back.

I really wasn’t—Lindsey stayed in Toronto and ended up getting married, so I sublet that sweet place from her for about seven years. I always figured Lamb would probably move out after a year or two anyway, he never stayed in any given apartment too long. 

But honestly, I just missed him, you know? We’d been friends since high school—neither of us stayed in touch with anyone else from Wolcott. Even if we didn’t see each other for a while, every so often I’d get a letter and it would be like he was right there with me, no change, more brother than my real one.

“A celebrated correspondence” he would call it, so goofy—he thought if his writing ever took off, people might want to read all that, and he would always add “P.S. Save this for posterity!” so I did, and later I found my letters to him in his stuff, too.

A couple people asked if we had a falling out—or if we were actually getting together as a couple, if that was the reason he just cut contact and disappeared, because he couldn’t handle it. That was definitely not it. We fooled around a couple times, back at Wolcott, but having to hide that we were gay from everyone just sort of sealed this bond between us; in some ways, it was more intimate than sex. I didn’t need a fuck buddy, I had a hand for that. Two!

So no, I wasn’t mad, I was worried—something was really wrong, something had shaken loose in him. When I got to SF to meet him and see the place, I was surprised things were so bad he had to go to rehab. I told him I totally supported him, but there was 100% no way it was going to work if he started using again once we moved in together. I had a career, and it wasn’t like I was prioritizing that over him, but I had to support myself.

He knew I had been a scholarship case at Wolcott; he knew I still had student loans from USC. In the early days, it was Lamb who usually had the money, and I borrowed from him when I needed someone to spot me a couple drinks or get into a club if we couldn’t jerk someone off to get on a guest list. That all reversed once I got some traction at the firm and a couple of promotions.

I guess I always figured he was ashamed it had gone so far, the drugs, and that the pressure of knowing he couldn’t let me down when we moved in together was too much. Plenty of people relapse, sometimes the minute they walk out of rehab. As the weeks wore on and it was clear not only that he wasn’t moving in, but that he wasn’t even coming back for his stuff, I packed it up in a closet and got on with life. 

He had that funny smell about him, not a bad smell, it was kind of nice actually, like fresh mown grass—you probably wouldn’t even notice if you were just out and about with him, but if you visited his apartment or his room, you noticed it. His dorm room at boarding school had it, I was always like, Ah yes, that whiff of “Eau de Lamb.” Even though he never lived on Guerrero with me, it hung around the whole time in the closet where I stored his clothes and boxes. I’d open the door and get a face full of Lamb, and it was like he was hiding in there or something, sometimes I opened it on purpose just to remember. Very strange.

I didn’t touch his stuff for a long time. After a year or two, I started filling in the corners of the apartment, and I thought I would consolidate some of his boxes and make a little more room in that closet. I didn’t read his journals—I still assumed at some point he might be back to pick it all up, ashamed but alive at least. I borrowed some of his clothes, some t-shirts and a jacket I liked, and I went through some of my old letters to him, I figured those were fair game.

Here’s one I wrote to Lamb when we were in college, early days, the beginning of our correspondence back in the 80s:

Dear Lamb, 

Thanks for your letter + poem + drawing. Your dream house is on my wall directly below a photo I found of the house I used to live in in L.A. Also enclosed is this May Sarton book* in hopes that you will find it good. I read it by accident (I was drawn to the title) over vacation—your letter reminded me of it.

 [*That book was Journal of a Solitude.]

I’m still sort of confused about this one part of your plan: are you seeing yourself alone by choice or by circumstance? Because I feel that being alone can be both a positive and healthy thing and it can also be vastly destructive to your sanity and well-being—you know?—whether it’s because you haven’t chosen it or whatnot…

[Skipping over nonsense about me, USC, and L.A.]

…So what I was saying before about solitude—is it something you want or something you see as the inescapable future? Please understand that I totally don’t mean to pry. I just feel the most compelling candor in your letters and in writing to you, something we didn’t really have so much out in the open back in school days. And if you want to share your life with somebody there’s no reason why you can’t…

I think May Sarton has a little insight into it—or a lot. I don’t know if I liked this book because it was as it was or because she mentions so many things that I’ve thought about on my own, and that you think about too it turns out.

Well—take care Lambchop. Write when you can.

—D.

That’s the part I’ve been mulling over all these years since, because Lamb used to talk about wanting to leave everything behind and go buy a couple acres of land far away, maybe something up in Washington or Oregon, and just live, grow his own food, read, write, be free of the trouble he always seemed to have dealing with people.

In some of his letters he talked about living in a camper—he went to a used RV dealer somewhere in the East Bay to see how much they cost. He thought he could live in something like that while he built a little house for himself, and he wouldn’t mind that too much.

I still have that drawing he sent me, it was just one little corner of a cottage, with a stone wall coming off it and flowers, lots of flowers, wild colors, he even labeled them: hollyhocks, foxglove, nasturtiums, delphiniums, dahlias, sunflowers—his mom was a gardener, and he had more than a few flower tattoos. “Lamb’s Huis” he wrote at the top, and in the window, peeping out behind the curtain, a cute little lamb. He wasn’t a bad artist, actually, I kept it on my wall all through college.

I half-hoped that’s what he was doing at first, when he didn’t show up: maybe he finally went and bought himself that camper, found a little plot of land up north somewhere, and was just growing corn and potatoes and flowers, keeping to himself. I thought for a long time that maybe after he got settled, I would get a letter like the old days, explaining everything and maybe inviting me to come up and visit. But none of that ever happened.

What did happen was that Fugie was shooting his mouth off at dinner about Buck a few weeks ago, and after all this time, I went out to the garage and found Lamb’s old boxes. Not that I was going to confront Fugie with the truth—I knew he was full of shit—but also I’ve been curious about what Lamb maybe wasn’t telling me.

Anyway, I went through his journals and notebooks. I guess there were a few gaps in those last years he didn’t share. When I first opened the boxes again—it’s been, what, almost twenty years?—they still had that same waft of fresh cut grass, Eau de Lamb, faint but unmistakable.

Now that the boxes are open and it’s all been airing out for a while, the smell is gone.

♣ ♣ ♣

Episode 04: Hope Gardens

Esteemed Readers:

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