I still couldn’t quite believe that my high school sweetheart grew up to become a Hollywood movie star.
He’d started going by the name Trip Wiley by that time, and I was well aware of the fact that he’d been making his living as an actor. I know I may have been a bit more attuned to that information than your average entertainment-seeker (given our prior association) but he was actually starting to become kind of famous. And there I was, looking at his picture right there on Page Six.
“Holy shit! It’s Trip!”
Lisa spun her head around, looking behind her before realizing I was talking to the newspaper. I slid the page across the table and showed her the picture.
She said, “Mmmm. Trip Wilmington. He was yummy.”
Don’t I know it.
“Jesus. I still can’t believe he’s like, getting famous.”
Lisa took a sip from her Sprite. “I know. How weird is that? We know a famous person. You had sex with a famous person!”
Does it still count if he and I hooked up before he was famous? It’s funny, but the last time I even saw him in person was the morning after we’d slept together, the morning I was leaving for college.
I didn’t see his face until years later, when I went to see Failing to Fly, an aptly-named piece of garbage that almost had me walking out of the theater. But all of a sudden, Trip popped up onscreen and almost gave me a heart attack. It was a throwaway scene to the rest of the world, a silent appearance of about ten seconds total. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I wasn’t even sure I’d really seen it.
I wrote him in L.A. to ask him about it, but my letter went unanswered. It turned out to be the last one I ever sent him.
In the summer of ‘98, Devin had taken me to see The Fairways for our very first “date”. About midway through, Trip showed up in a speaking role. He wasn’t onscreen very long, but I almost fainted dead away. I didn’t say anything to Devin about it and just kept the revelation to myself. He and I barely knew each other at the time, and truly, Devin knew so many famous people. His mother was a Tony Award-Winning Choreographer for crying out loud. He grew up around all that crap—actors and dancers and artists and writers—all the most creative and world-renowned personalities that New York had to offer. He probably would have laughed at me for making a big deal out of knowing “guy at bus stop”.
Soon after that, around Thanksgiving, Trip had a small but meaty role as a male escort in Bonded. I hadn’t seen that one in the theaters, but the commercials for it ran nonstop and the buzz was pretty big. Even though Ella Perez was the big headliner star in that film, Trip was the one that ended up getting all the attention. It was a small part in a pretty big movie, and was a major turning point in his career (and apparently a major turning point for my subconscious, since my dream from the other morning was practically a shot-for-shot reenactment of his sex scene in that film).
The following fall, he had another supporting role in The Bank Vault, a huge Tarantino ensemble which was nominated for all sorts of awards. I watched the Golden Globes and the Oscars that year, hoping to catch a glimpse of Trip in a tux. But he wasn’t at either event and Bank Vault walked away with only a gold statue for sound editing.
According to the Page Six in front of me, he was the lead actor in Swayed, which was scheduled for release on October 5—my birthday—and was currently wrapping up filming on something called ReVersed down near Washington Square Park in the city.
Trip’s been in New York all these weeks?
I’d known that he was filming a movie “on location”, but I didn’t know that the location was New York. And not just New York, but Washington Square Park! The square was mere steps away from my apartment down in The Village and basically served as the backyard for my alma mater, NYU. I knew the area well. I’m sure I must have registered the white trucks and production equipment throughout the park, which were a telltale sign of yet another movie being filmed in the neighborhood. But between the big budget Hollywood flicks, independent features and New School student films, that scenario wasn’t so out of the ordinary on any given day in the city. A person learned to become immune to such things pretty quickly.
Lisa’s babbling broke through my daydreaming. “Wonder if he’ll be at the reunion. You got the save-the-date, right?”
“I did. I was going to ask you about it. Are we going?”
As Lisa prattled on about our former classmates, thoughts of my Bonded dream played through my mind. I’d earlier settled on the idea that I merely hallucinated about the movie because I had just seen it on DVD. Combine that with the reunion reminder, and my mind had simply sparked a memory about Trip’s and my personal sex scene from years ago.