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Lamb ♣ 02 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction

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♣ ♣ ♣ 02 ♣ ♣ ♣

It had been a little while since I heard from Lamb, but I called and left him a message: I had moved to Austin for a minute with a boyfriend, total fiasco, and now I was coming home to SF.

I met Mando—Armando—the one time I went down to SXSW. Hot Latino, good programming job, and he owned his own house just a few blocks from the local branch of my investment firm—by this time, I had my Series 7 and CFP, and a stellar client base, so they agreed to transfer me down there. I wouldn’t even have to buy a car—living in the City, I never needed one. Mando drove a BMW, and we were together now, right?

Turns out, he was an incredibly jealous prick, like wouldn’t let me drive his car without him, not even to the store, definitely not out for fun. I don’t think I drove more than two or three times the whole year I lived down there, and I didn’t make any friends except for a couple of hags who worked in the branch with me. Mando would literally watch my eyes when we were out together to see if I was checking out other guys.

I started looking for an escape, and when I got offered a position as assistant branch manager back in SF, I jumped. But there was the question of where to live when I got back to the City, and then Lamb called me back at work (I could never receive a call from him at Mando’s.)

He said, Hey! Just a thought, I’ve been away for a bit and I had to move out of my place, but there’s this sweet apartment on Guerrero, long-term sublet, friend taking a job somewhere but didn’t want to give it up, yada yada, and the rent’s a little steep for me but it’s got two huge rooms, bedroom and living, and a really big eat-in kitchen for a common area, one and 3/4 baths, like NICE, and would you be interested in splitting it, you could have the master suite if you don’t mind paying a little extra.

He told me the price, exactly half what I’d been thinking so I was like “LAMBCHOP! I’m your boy!” and we were totally excited about living together for the first time since Wolcott days, right? I’d moved up to SF after USC, but we never actually lived together.

You should know, Lamb came from money, his dad’s mostly, but his mom and stepdad too, so he got a little allowance every month from both of them deposited directly into his account—for years—and it wasn’t much but it was enough to cover his rent and keep him fed and the lights on if he was careful, which he usually wasn’t. Lamb had his little schemes and side-gigs, and he went to bartending school for real at one point, so he was pretty well set if never swimming in cash. 

By this time I was making more money than him because I couldn’t just play at a career, my parents weren’t sending me an allowance every month going on thirty years old. But Lamb also didn’t need to be anywhere 9 to 5, and I figured this was perfect because he’d be home during the day when I was at work, and he’d be out most of the night when I needed to sleep. I told him no parties, no crazy tricks at all hours, and he was cool with that.

Lamb was not a super outgoing or loudmouth kind of guy, but he did party, even if it was just us hanging out at home, drinking, smoking weed and playing video games, unless we were dating someone or cruising for a hookup. He got roped into the Casa Loma crowd for a while, this dive bar in the Lower Haight—breeder version of his punk thing, tank girls and pseudo-skinheads—back when he was crushing on this one dude, what was his name? Rama? Not his real name, obviously. He came and went pretty quick, but introduced Lamb to a few people when he first moved from Berkeley to the City. I followed from L.A. and got an entry-level job in the Margins Dept. at a brokerage firm on Montgomery St. (“Wall Street West.”)

Anyway, for fun we were hanging out at Casa Loma, or down at Zeitgeist—rarely the Castro, maybe the Pilsner, or Detour—but Lamb was painfully shy. While we were all yucking it up, he’d be in a corner smoking and quiet, getting slowly wasted until he was almost falling down, and then someone would eventually work up the nerve to make a play at him by the time he was too wasted to care.

They’d go home and have sloppy drunk sex, probably the other guy thinking Lamb was going to fuck his brains out. Lamb being a big old bottom and usually half-blacked out, his tricks didn’t get very far—when they got to the part where someone had to get behind the wheel, nobody wanted the job. There wasn’t a lot of repeat business.

Like I said, talking on the phone with him, he seemed like he was in a good space, like maybe he’d figured some things out—we were all pretty wild and fucked up early on, maybe I would have stuck with the party longer too if I’d had an allowance from mama and papa.

In Austin, I moved out of Mando’s—I couldn’t stay there another minute. I put my little mini-van’s worth of stuff in storage, and was couch surfing with my girlfriends for a few weeks while I was working out the details of the move back to California. We arranged to meet with Lamb’s friend over at the new apartment and sign a contract Saturday around noon, and then we were going to eat and hang out. I flew out on a Friday night, and I assumed he was working.

The place was gorgeous, a block from Dolores Park, huge bedroom, lots of closet space, white oak parquet floors, crown moldings, clawfoot tub and guest bath, all redone. His friend Lindsey had rent control so she wasn’t giving it up come hell or high water, but we had to keep a lid on things and not fuck it up. Lindsey was nice, we’d met before but never hung out, and she was instantly delighted I was on the scene as soon as I walked in the door. She told me later how I missed the craziest parts of the last year with Lamb’s drinking and, turns out, drug problems. 

See, Lamb’s “away for a bit” situation? Rehab. Eight weeks, in-patient, paid by his mom of course, but he had been able to get clean, and got his old job back at some bar south of Market. Yeah, we both drank too much in our salad days, and we both had our share of mishaps, but this caught me by surprise—I didn’t know he was doing drugs. This was Lamb, Lambie-Lambs, best buddy and wingman for years. I guess we all look at our friends through the lens of me.

Honestly, it always felt sort of naughty to have a friend that looked like Lamb, since I had to clean up and put on a shirt and tie every day. He was always shaving his head, mohawks, crazy colors, leather jackets, bombers, Docs, all that shit. He had piercings—lip, septum, tongue, stretched out ears, nipples, Prince Albert. The few occasions my friends at work met Lamb, they all seemed a little afraid. He absolutely was NOT a nazi or anything like that, he just liked the style, and he was attracted to that kind of guy.

So I was used to all of that, and at Lindsey’s, he was actually dressed down, if anything—t-shirt, jeans, his hair was grown out a bit and just his natural brown, he still had his piercings of course, but he looked almost normal. Lindsey was visibly relieved both by me and with how good Lamb looked, so it was all settled and I thought, Huh, no big deal, good old Lambchop. 

That Saturday, we paid the deposit, got the keys, and I helped him move his shit over from his old place in my rental car. The old roommates were cool, they were friendly and all, and they let him keep his stuff there while he was in rehab, but it was clear they were glad to be rid of him and actually surprised at how normal I was—seemed to everyone like Lamb was going to be OK. 

We grabbed a burger at Sparky’s. Lamb was sweeter than sweet, tender, even grateful. “I love you, D—” he told me, with that bashful way he couldn’t make eye contact, and I was really touched. I flew back to Austin, wrapped things up at work, loaded my stuff in a U-Haul and drove back to San Francisco the next weekend. 

But Lamb wasn’t there when I arrived. Nowhere to be found. He’d checked out of rehab, and just … disappeared. His stuff was all in the new apartment exactly where we left it, untouched, but he hadn’t slept there, had moved everything in except himself. No answer on his cell, and his voicemail box was full.

I had to schlep all my stuff up two flights of stairs by myself, not that I had a lot, and I started calling around, called Fugie, called Lindsey, a couple other friends, where’s Lamb, have you seen Lamb? Nothing.

That was it. I never saw him again. 

I called his parents a couple times over the next few months, they said they’d heard from him, he was in New Orleans or he was in Las Vegas depending on which one you asked, but they said they had long since stopped paying for his cell phone apparently, and eventually his allowance too because they figured he went straight from rehab to a drug dealer or an old boyfriend or who knows what, and enough was enough. 

Lindsey said if I wanted to get a new roommate that was fine too, but I just decided to stay and pay for it myself, it really was exactly how much I had budgeted, and I even got a raise at work as assistant branch manager. As a bachelor pad, it was actually the nicest place I ever lived.

But I still had all of Lamb’s clothes and video games, his journals and letters, just … no Lamb.

Poof.

♣ ♣ ♣

Episode 03 Eau de Lamb

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