Just before I turned eighteen, I filmed my first movie in Los Angeles. I hadn’t made a film in America before, and it was the first time I’d been to LA. I stayed at the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, tucked into a hill right off Barham Boulevard. Famous for all the child stars who have passed through, Neil Patrick Harris, Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Love Hewitt. The property was always teeming with stage parents.
Hard Candy begins with a successful photographer named Jeff, played by the illustrious Patrick Wilson, chatting with a fourteen-year-old girl online. The plot hard to believe considering what had just transpired with my stalker. The banter is flirty, youthful. They meet up, he takes her home in his Mini, we are concerned for Hayley. They are drinking. Jeff wants to take photos, his tone shifts to frustration, aggression peeking through. However, the tables turn. A spiked screwdriver brings him to the floor and he wakes up tied to a chair.
Hayley believes he is involved in the kidnapping and murder of a girl her age, and makes it clear to him that if he doesn’t confess, she will castrate him, a shockingly simple surgery that she has taught herself to do as an honors student. She freezes his dick with a giant bag of ice. Jeff is in agony, hands turning blue, pleading desperately, swearing he had no involvement. He screams, but it’s useless. Hayley performs the procedure and dumps his testicles down the kitchen sink. Jeff can hear the garbage disposal masticating his balls.
Ultimately, she doesn’t really perform the surgery, but Jeff does admit to being involved. “I just took pictures,” he says. Just a pedophile.
We shot the film, almost all of it, in a small studio close by the Oakwood Apartments. Burbank, often considered the media capital of the world, is home to Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Nickelodeon Animation Studio, and a massive porn industry. The majority of Hard Candy was filmed on a set. The interior of Jeff’s house was sleek, minimal, that mid-century cool. The ever-hip professional, Mini-driving, sensitive guy. The friend who could never.
There was a man working on the film who always carried a small book of crosswords, the most formidable ones, I was told. He has since gone on to make films of his own. He was funny and strange, and he was kind to me. We spoke about books, discussed films and obscure, depressing graphic novels. A glint in his eyes made me feel seen, supported. He had a sweetness even.
We made the film in eighteen and a half days, an all-consuming, emotional sprint. I was giddy with exhaustion by the end. The Hard Candy wrap party was held in downtown Los Angeles, an elevator ride up a tall building. There was a rare camaraderie among all of us, what you hope for when creating something. We drank and danced and had tearful goodbyes.
My crossword puzzle friend gave me a ride back to the Oakwood Apartments. We drove through the cluster of downtown skyscrapers that towered over us ominously. It was very late, and I laid my head against the window as we got on the 101. I loved the glow of the freeways at night.
Pulling up to the Oakwood, I watched him type in the security code and the gate opened slowly. He walked me to the apartment, followed me in. He stood noticeably close, his body brushing my behind. His voice sweet, his hands on my shoulders, he guided me to the bedroom. I went stiff with a smile. Unsure what to do as he stood tall and removed his glasses. He laid me down on the bed. Starting to remove my pants, he said, “I want to eat you out.” I froze. After it was over, he tried to stay in the bed with me. I had thawed marginally and told him he couldn’t, to get out. He slept on the couch.
Turning eighteen further frayed my boundaries, an unspoken permission slip I didn’t consent to. At the start of a project, a crew member offered to take me apartment hunting on the weekend. It was a nice gesture, but something felt odd. It was far beyond a typical action for someone in her job position. I’d been staying in a hotel up until that point and needed out, a proper fridge at least, so I said yes. She picked me up in her black Audi.
We arrived at the first building, a new development. We met someone in the lobby who took us in the elevator to the top floor. She asked for the person to let us go in on our own to look around the barely furnished apartment. They waited in the hall as we went in. It was a two-bedroom, which was unnecessary, accentuating my loneliness. The apartment was eerily sparse and echoey as we walked through. There wasn’t a whole lot to look at, making it feel even more pointless.
I was standing in the empty living room, in front of the couch, when I felt her grab me. She pressed her face into mine, some version of kissing. That freezing coming over me again. The next thing I knew I was on the rug, the floor firm on my back. I didn’t say no, I did not resist, I just stiffened. Lying on the carpet, I didn’t make a sound. She began to dry hump me, at first slow, then faster and faster, her body on top of me, the weight grinding my spine into the floor. Her eyes were closed, head turned away from me, face perspiring. She huffed and puffed and began to moan. I didn’t move, just stared up at the ceiling, then closed my eyes, then looked up again as she came. It was only the second time I had kissed a woman and the first time I had ever seen one come in person.
This dynamic continued. She’d pick me up at my apartment, take me to hers, where a version of the same situation would play out. Me in bed, motionless, frozen, she on top of me, touching me, going inside of me. My rigidness would upset her, my numbness taking over, unable to touch her. We’d get back in the Audi and she’d drop me off at the sterile, one-bedroom apartment I ended up renting. She’d fuck me at work in my trailer. I’d sit on her lap and not know why.
I was back in the same city two years later to make another film. Memories of her still lingered, the heavy breathing and the sweating above me. The arching of her back when she came. More than halfway into the shoot I arrived at work at the crack of dawn. As I was walking to my trailer I noticed a black Audi and my heart stopped. It can’t be, I thought. But I knew it was.
“Darren is out for the day so someone else is filling in,” another person on set mentioned.
I ducked into my trailer and tried to calm my breathing. There was a knock on my door. I opened it and there she was. Standing there, looking up and smiling.
“Hi! Can I come in?” she asked.
I let her in.
“It’s nice to see you! We had fun, right?”
What? I thought, nothing actually coming out.
“We had fun, right? We just like, listened to music and had fun, right?”
Her eyes were wide. Her smile almost concealed it, but I could see the fright seeping through.
“Yeah,” I responded.
8
FAMOUS ASSHOLE AT PARTY
I stayed at a friend’s place in the Hills for a few weeks when I was twenty-seven. Someone had been visiting my house in the night, laying roses along the gate. They were leaving notes with quotes from some of my favorite writers and musicians but offered no indication of their own identity. Cryptic messages with unknown intent, something I was familiar with. I decided to leave my house briefly while I had security cameras installed. The home was situated at the very top of the hill, overlooking the city. At night, a sea of lights sprawled below me. I could sit there for hours, transfixed. The glinting and dancing, the red lights a blood current in the veins of LA.
I had not left the house much. My friend was away working, and I was still mending from a heartbreak. I had to force myself to do something. I drove a short distance west to celebrate a good pal’s birthday. I arrived at the house party, taking in the unique layout. The extremely high ceilings felt church-like, with a loft where the kitchen and dining area looked down at the vast living room. It was old, perhaps built in the 1940s, a dollhouse occupied by a very hip person. Off the living room, there was a large wooden terrace with built-in benches that overlooked a family of trees and a neighbor’s home. This particular friend is a social butterfly, adored by many, so the party was popping, surging with energy. People milked it for every last drop before the inevitable arrival of the cops demanding quiet.
It was 2014, and I had come out as gay only two months before at a Human Rights Campaign conference in Vegas called Time to Thrive, the inaugural event focusing on LGBTQ+ youth. I flew the morning of Valentine’s Day to Vegas with my manager. Boarding the flight at Burbank Airport, my anxiety was at a different level. I barely spoke, staring ahead at nothing. On the flight, I obsessively read the speech, as if I could exhaust the emotion, mutating it into that old take-out menu in your kitchen drawer you glance at arbitrarily for no reason. When we arrived at the hotel, all I could do was cradle myself in the hotel bed. No television, no looking at my phone, I just wrapped my arms around my body, time like sludge, barely budging.