for you,” said Randall.
“Me?”
“When I told Thad who you were, he was dying to meet you. He’s a fan of your work.” Randall smiled. “I told him a couple of your prints would look simply marvelous over his dining-room table. And this guy has the moola to pay you whatever you want.”
“I suppose he’s in with the whole Donovan and Penelope Sue crowd,” I said.
Randall nodded. “He mentioned their names a couple of times.”
“All the big fags here do. If Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt have accepted you, you’ve arrived,” I noted.
Palm Springs, for all its charms, was the proverbial little pond with lots of big fish. The elite was made up of people who spent their time raising money for charities and then giving themselves awards for doing so. The desert’s charities were flush with cash, and that was a wonderful thing—except that sometimes all the self-congratulation became a little wearying. Every season there were more than a dozen black-tie award ceremonies, where the elite rose in unison for one long standing ovation after another. Since moving to Palm Springs, I’d discovered just how much rich people liked to cheer for themselves.
And sometimes they were very rich, like Donovan and Penelope Sue Hunt. Penelope Sue was Texas oil money, and her first husband had been head of Columbia or Sony, or something like that. She’d gotten a lot of money—and I mean a lot—in the settlement. Donovan had his own money, too, mostly family money, but he’d made quite a bit producing some big blockbusters in the late 1980s, lots of whiz-bang action flicks starring Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris, before turning over a new leaf about ten years ago and funding only serious independent pictures.
Most of the money in Palm Springs came from entertainment-related fields, or else it came from real estate. There was very little old money in Palm Springs. Donovan Hunt, with his connections back East, was a rare exception. Most of the movers and shakers here had come from L.A. or San Francisco, where they’d decided at some point that the big ponds there were too crowded with too many other big fish, and so they’d leapt over to a smaller pond, where they’d have more room to swim. And to raise money. And to receive standing ovations. Except in this case the pond was actually a desert, and the desert was built on the scurrying backs of desert rats, like Frank, who had never received a standing ovation, except for the time he was named Teacher of the Year back in Inglewood about fifteen years earlier.
Frank was born here—well, not here, not in Palm Springs, but in Beaumont, a working-class town thirty miles to the west on the 10. His father had owned a small apple orchard in the 1940s, back in the day when Beaumont was called “the land of the big red apple” because of its orchard industry. But then, during the cold war, Lockheed had opened a rocket test site just to the south of the town, spilling toxic chemicals into local streams, which Frank’s father believed eventually destroyed his orchard. One year the trees simply failed to produce fruit; the next year they were all dead. Frank’s father had to declare bankruptcy. There were no charity fund-raisers to help Frank and his family.
So they moved to Los Angeles, where Frank’s dad got a job at a factory and saved enough money to send Frank to Cal State L.A., where he got his bachelor’s as an English teacher. When I met him, he was teaching at a high school in Inglewood. Ten years later, after getting his master’s, he accepted his current job at the College of the Desert, because he had vowed to himself on the day his family had packed up and left their orchard in Beaumont that someday he’d return to the area. And Frank Wilson was a man who took his vows seriously.
I looked over at him, his face lit by the sun, the mountains reflected in his sunglasses. How he loved it here. When Frank was a boy, his father used to take him out of the cool orchard valley and drive along the dusty road into Palm Springs (Interstate 10 had yet to be built). They’d cheer on the sports car races along the airport tarmac, gravel flying every which way, and then they’d head over to the Saddle and Sirloin for hamburgers, keeping an eye out for Frank Sinatra or Bob Hope or Gene Autry. As a boy, Frank had thought Palm Springs was the most glamorous spot on the planet. “I’d look up at those mountains,” he told me, “and in my mind’s eye, I’d see Indians hiding behind the rocks, popping up now and then to shoot their arrows, and posses of cowboys riding in across the valley.”
My eyes followed the uneven crest of the mountain range in front of me, the subtle transition from brown to purple to gold to blue. The ridges and the canyons, the granite outcrops suddenly jutting into the sky, the serpentine trails worn down by generations of men and coyotes and bighorn sheep. In two thousand years these mountains had never changed. They still looked the same as they had when Frank had come here as a boy, omniscient and indestructible. They still offered the same awesome views once marveled over by pioneers in covered wagons and Elizabeth Taylor in a Cadillac convertible. It was the city around them that had become different. The old dusty roads and the arid valleys studded with cacti and red ocotillo had been replaced with three-lane highways and Fatburger drive-ins, marble mansions and golf courses, man-made lakes and rainbow-hued gay bars. Yet those sturdy granite sentinels enclosing the valley seemed to temper the excess, to contain the ostentation, like stone-faced colossi charged with keeping the peace.
I hadn’t always shared Frank’s love of the desert. On my first trips out here, for casual weekends of sex and drugs, I’d thought the mountains looked dead. They weren’t like the hills of New England, where I’d grown up, lush and rolling and green. Palm Springs might be fun for lazy lounging around swimming pools, or drinking martinis at Lucite bars, or for dancing shirtless at the White Party, allowing yourself to be passed among a hundred different boys in the course of an hour. But beyond that, I’d seen little of value, just Canadian snowbirds in wide-brimmed hats and Bermuda shorts and ticky-tacky T-shirt shops along the palm tree–lined main drive.
All that changed the morning Frank first took me hiking, insisting we get up early and pack a breakfast of trail mix and chocolate chip cookies and oversize canteens of water. Up into Tahquitz Canyon we trudged, deep into the folds of the mountains, where I saw not death but teeming life. The purple lupine and the yellow brittlebush, the beavertail cactus with pink buds, the apricot mallow, the bright orange mariposa lily. And everywhere blue lizards skittering and white-headed woodpeckers clattering. In the sky sharp-shinned hawks soared in great, swooping arcs. Our goal, however, was always to spot that most elusive of all creatures, venerated by the Indians: the bighorn sheep, with its massive curved horns and fleecy white rump. Yet not once in all our time hiking in the mountains—which from that day forward became considerable—did we spot one of the bighorns. Still, I trusted that they were there, pausing to sip from the same stream we waded through as the waterfall crashed behind us.
Ten years had passed since Frank had moved to Palm Springs full time. At first, I came out only on weekends, not wanting to leave L.A., not willing to abandon my dream of making it as an actor. But a decade of walk-on parts and missed opportunities—not to mention a decade of working as a waiter, as a cabbie, and as a housepainter—was wearing thin. The biggest jobs I ever landed were a commercial for Gravy Train dog food and a non-speaking recurring role as a clerk on Matlock. And so, on a whim, I started to take photographs. Faces of friends, the Hollywood sign, palm trees in a windstorm. Then, equally on a whim, I began scanning the photos into my computer. With Photoshop, I altered them, outlined them, fragmented them, turned them into mosaics. No rhyme or reason existed to what I was doing. I was just playing around. When I printed a few of these manipulated photographs, I showed them to a friend who ran a gift shop in Beverly Hills, and she asked me if she could put them on greeting cards. I laughed, but I agreed—and the cards actually sold. I actually made some money. Not a lot, but enough to make me think maybe I could make more if I got serious. And so, four years ago, I moved out here full time, so I could take pictures and play with them on my computer. So I could, finally, become someone. An artist, they say.
What did it mean to be an artist? Did it mean the tortured screams of Jackson Pollock, splattering his paint everywhere? Did it mean Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear? Did it mean agonizing over your work, pulling out your hair as you tried desperately to express yourself? These were the questions I wondered about as I signed up for a summer photography class at CalArts. There I encountered a woman who considered herself a very