THE NIGHT WE MET
Rob Byrnes
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
Acknowledgments
They say that writing is a solitary activity. True enough. But getting it right is a group effort.
So I thank my editor, John Scognamiglio, for his wise counsel. Thanks, too, to Douglas Mendini and John Masiello at Kensington Publishing, as well as to my agent, Katherine Fausset at the Watkins/ Loomis Agency.
Not to mention Alan Boyce, Nurmi Husa, Illyse Kaplan, Mick LaMarca, Jeff Marks, Alanna Martin, Denise Murphy McGraw, Joyce Moye, and Shaun Terry. They—along with many members of CompuServe’s Literary and Writers forums—were valuable resources and, best of all, honest critics.
John L. Myers and Margaret Campbell…where would I be without them? Still stuck on Chapter 3, I suppose. Their early friendship and encouragement not only sustained me but helped me treat writing as a craft, not a hobby.
Three real pros also gave me their valuable time and insight: authors Diana Gabaldon and Rabih Alameddine, and my Publishing Jungle tour guide, Robert Riger. I hope I’ve let them know what they mean to me, because it can’t be put into words.
Penultimately, I want to thank three talented people who spent an incredible amount of time working with me to make sure my ellipses had three dots, my extra thans were stricken, there were no breaks in continuity, and I cut down on my dialogue tags: K. D. Santineau, Elise Skidmore, and the great Bonnee Pierson. They were sharp-eyed, creative, and I love them to death. If I were straight and a Mormon, I’d marry them.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the one person whose faith in me has never wavered, even when mine has. Thank you, Lynette Kelly. You may have saved my life; you certainly saved my soul.
Contents
1 Life Before Frank…And Why I Particularly Hate Nicholas Hafner
2 The Hottest Passes in New York…Dude!!
3 My Life as a Man Again, and What I Did With It
4 The Place Where John Lennon Got Whacked, and Why I Should Care
5 Lawyers and Mobsters and Cops…and Me
6 Adventures on the Other Side of the Point of No Return
7 Words Better Left Unsaid…Especially When Other People Are Listening
8 Bestsellers
9 When Bad Things Happen to Stupid People
10 Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
11 The Long Good-Bye
12 Things that Happened after 3:17 A.M.
1
Life Before Frank…
And Why I Particularly Hate Nicholas Hafner
The first thing you should know is that I’m a romantic. I’ve tried to become another jaded, cynical New Yorker, but I’ve failed. Yes, I live in the real world and have all the problems that come with it, but that’s never seemed to dampen the visions of romance that live in my head, where Bogie and Bergman always have Paris, Fred and Ginger sweep across my cerebellum, and, if I’m not dating Mr. Right, he’s waiting around the corner, just as the cliché promises.
And I like the trappings of romance: cards and flowers; champagne and strawberries; long walks with a lover on warm beaches under blue, cloudless skies as our Golden Lab romps in the surf…Reality has tried but failed to beat the saccharine out of me. Those illusions of romance live deep inside me.
The second thing you should know is that Webster’s offers several definitions of the word romantic, including “having no basis in fact,” which is sort of the yin to the yang of passionate love. But that’s an easy definition to overlook when Fred and Ginger are distracting you.
And I’ve had my share of distractions. Take Ted Langhorne, for example.
I had already lived in Manhattan for fifteen years before I met Ted, after moving from Allentown, Pennsylvania, to realize my dreams of going to New York University, finding a pack of cool homosexual friends to run with, and becoming one of the preeminent literary voices of my generation.
Of course, those were dreams. In reality, I did manage to graduate from NYU, and I did manage to befriend a number of homosexuals, although no one who was known far and wide as “cool.” But the closest I came to becoming the literary voice of my generation was when my bosses at Palmer/Midkiff/Carlyle Publishing, Inc., let me dip into the slush pile—that’s what we in the business call the heaps of unsolicited and largely unreadable manuscripts that arrive in our offices, day in and day out—to see if I could find the literary needle in the haystack that would launch me as the Maxwell Perkins of the 1990s. That needle didn’t exist, of course, because if it did, someone else with more ambition and a sharper eye for talent would have found it long before I did. But still, I could dream…
And then came Ted.
Ted was an accountant, and he acted like I expected an accountant to act, which doesn’t mean that he was boring, but…Well, let’s just say that he was more adult than any of my other friends. More mature. More…well, yes, boring; but boring in a good way. And after fifteen years in New York City—years that spanned the end of my teens, all of my twenties, my early thirties, Reagan and Clinton, AIDS and Mad Cow Disease, disco and house music, cocaine and Ecstasy, and about eighty-nine managers of the New York Yankees—I was ready for boring in a good way.
And, of course, we met cute.
“Hey,” he said, approaching me as I stood alone, back to the wall of a Greenwich Village bar late one Friday night. “Aren’t you a friend of John’s?”
“I know a lot of Johns,” I replied dryly.
“I thought so,” he said and flashed a dazzling, inviting smile. “Can I buy you a beer?”
Okay, I know…not exactly Love Story. But, since it did work out at the time, it still sort of counts as a romantic, love-at-first-sight kind of meeting. In my mind, at least.
He was tall and handsome, thick chestnut brown hair framing a wholesome face that belied his true age, which I later learned was forty. I didn’t have to touch him to know his body was taut and muscular, although I discreetly did, anyway. And those eyes—piercing green, flecked with brown. I instinctively knew their color, even though I defy anyone to ascertain the color of someone’s eyes in a dimly lit bar.
“I love your eyes,” I told him a few beers later.
“Contacts,” he replied.
In retrospect, I know that was the moment I should have run away. That was the moment when Ted Langhorne had first shown me his basic lack of understanding of the illusions of romance. That was the moment when Ted Langhorne had revealed that deep inside the soul of this accountant was…another accountant.
But the moment passed. For those of us who still believe in the illusions of romance, they always do.
That night we went back to his apartment in Chelsea. He showed me his view—the apartment building across the street—and, after some idle conversation, he showed me that taut and muscular body. I put it to good use.
“So, what do you do?” he asked later as we lay entwined on his bed.
“Editorial assistant at Palmer/Midkiff/Carlyle. Ever hear of them?”
He hadn’t. Given PMC’s relatively small size in the era of increasingly