stems from survival instinct. I’ve been taking care of myself my whole life. Blake fled from a far more opulent lifestyle. I sometimes think he regrets leaving home though he would never admit it. His hate for his mother stems deep.
As if he’s reading my thoughts, he twists his lips up and nods. “We’re going to land something, man.”
“Damn right we are. We just have to get the dues part over with. This job is a joke, it isn’t reality. Just a test. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Right,” he says, nodding repeatedly. “But it gets better.” I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement, so I stay mute. The fact that he has a taste of the business but needs so much reassurance should scare me, but I’ve been in far worse situations than prancing around half naked for tips.
My only consolation for my shitty childhood circumstances was that a few trailers over, an old starlet by the name of Maddie—Madelyn Rosera Darling—used to babysit for my mother and taught me the art of cinema through the retelling of her heyday as an A-lister. Maddie is the one who set my future in motion. I didn’t know it then, but I’m appreciative now. She was the reason for my obsession. The one who planted the seed the first time she sat me down on her ancient sofa surrounded by a stack of reels and showed me her first movie.
“It gets better,” Blake repeated more for himself than to me as I loaded Enrique’s cocktail on his tray.
It only truly got better for one of us, for me.
I just didn’t realize the same path we traveled together, we got to from different directions. I was too busy burning takes while he was fighting the demons he created to keep up. I should have known. I should have seen him fading, but I was blazing too bright. I, like everyone else who mattered to Blake, left him behind in a trail of stardust.
Staring out at the turbulent ocean, I row in my machine for the second time that day. I’ve been overdoing it since Blake’s funeral. Speculation is front and center on every news station as to “why.” They’ve dug deep, highlighting his worst behavior, his patterns with the women in his life with a heavy concentration on ancient addictions. When we were younger, his favorite drug was whatever brought a good time or numbed him from defeat, but my fear is that there won’t be a trace of anything in his system once the autopsy report comes out. And with that, there will be no way to justify he wasn’t thinking clearly. Everything in my chest constricts at the conviction he was sober. And the idea that he was agonizingly present in his final minutes makes it that much harder. I could be asking the typical questions, but I know the answers.
Why didn’t he reach out to me?
Because I was unreachable.
Why didn’t I know he was depressed?
Because I didn’t ask.
The ugly truth is, we’d been on a different playing field for the last couple of years. Blake claimed he was doing no-budget independent films to help his creative flow—which is the standard excuse when no one wants to hire you—while I made blockbusters and cashed in. He was no longer invited to the parties, a self-made social pariah. More often than not, when Blake walked into the room, people fled from his conversation often wary and afraid of his temperament or what socializing with him could imply. People were cleaning their noses up, while Blake kept his full of debris. He’d been in the headlines more and more in the last few years for his behavior—possession of marijuana over the legal amount, public intoxication, and petty theft—which had to be bullshit.
The media hadn’t been very creative, it was almost as if the press was gunning for him, like someone was keeping tabs for any minor slip-up and then calling him out on every misstep to keep him in check. But I didn’t have to worry about distancing myself. I’ve been busy, so busy I left him to fend for himself.
Covered in sweat, I revel in the burn of my biceps and calves as I wade to nowhere, while memories of hidden hill houses and foggy nights behind the gates trap me with more questions. I’m not such an open book anymore because I don’t fully know my own story, not the parts that include missing chapters with Blake. I