Malibu Med and the Sweet Smell of Money

By C. Rex Sartorius

Gene therapy has inundated Malibu, California, bringing opposition, competition, and the sweet smell of money to everyone at the local medical\ school. Dr. Ahmed Adams, known as Medi to his coworkers, is a junior faculty member at Malibu Med, home to lucrative trials of designer drugs to combat cancer and aging. As Medi works his way through racks of cages and meticulously counts the dead, he realizes the day of reckoning has arrived.

Medi thinks he is on his way. With all his hopes of realizing success, fame, and fortune pinned on a study sponsored by Ahlus Inc., a local biotech company, Medi willingly serves as a corporate puppet, even though every woman he meets is more interested in the results of his study than in him. Everything is on the line for Medi and the company that has gambled its future on the outcome of the trials and FDA approval. But when animal rights activists sabotage the testing at Malibu Med, the trial and Ahlus are propelled into a crisis.

In this medical thriller, time will tell if Medi is the culprit or the victim of a far-reaching assault by competitors. As his career and the survival of the company hang in the balance, one certainty remains the truth is the last thing anyone wants to see revealed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475943757

C. Rex Sartorius

C. REX SARTORIUS is the nom de plume of a physician-scientist who is author of several medical texts as well as numerous papers in the scientific literature. He has experience in the fields of education, medicine, and biotechnology, as well as with the FDA. He currently lives in California.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by C. Rex Sartorius

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4373-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4375-7 (e)

ISBN; 978-1-4759-4374-0 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012914440

iUniverse rev. date: 9/4/2012

Dedicated to May Rindge, the Queen of Malibu, who did so much one hundred years past to preserve this little corner of the world that we call Malibu.

My gratitude goes to my wife, my family, and my friends who, misguided though they may have been, encouraged me to put pen to paper, reckless of the fruit thereof.

Contents

Author’s Note

Chapter 1 A Different Day

Chapter 2 Animal Love In

Chapter 3 The Graduate Student

Chapter 4 The Little Company that Could

Chapter 5 Another Dawn, Another Day

Chapter 6 The KLA

Chapter 7 Hawks Cay

Chapter 8 The Village Green

Chapter 9 All in a Day’s Work

Chapter 10 The Board

Chapter 11 Not the Plan

Chapter 12 Pearls before Swine

Chapter 13 Planned Encounters

Chapter 14 A Summons to NIST

Chapter 15 Revelations

Chapter 16 No Taxi

Chapter 17 NIST Redux

Chapter 18 Bing Cherrie

Chapter 19 The Professor and the Postdoc

Chapter 20 Breaking Fast

Chapter 21 Two Jack Schiffers

Chapter 22 Liberty

Chapter 23 The Clinical Trial

Chapter 24 A Rude Awakening

Chapter 25 Chance Encounters

Chapter 26 Just Tell Them the Truth

Chapter 27 Numero Uno

Chapter 28 The Malibu Times

Chapter 29 Adjoining Rooms

Chapter 30 Close Encounter

Chapter 31 Flower Power

Chapter 32 Queen Mary

Chapter 33 Me and My Girlfriend

Chapter 34 Taverna Tony’s

Chapter 35 Behind the Green Door

Chapter 36 Meet the Press

Chapter 37 Carnival

Chapter 38 Doppelganger

Chapter 39 The Price of Freedom

Chapter 40 End Game

Author’s Note

Malibu Med and the Sweet Smell of Money is a novel, a work of fiction that plays over the backdrop of a reality in which these imagined events are set. The characters populating these pages are wholly fictitious, although the primary location is Malibu, in which mythology and reality are at times not easily distinguishable.

The author confesses a somewhat cavalier approach to the geography of Malibu, California. Diligent though the reader’s search may be, the reader will not find the campus of Rindge University or Malibu Med, its College of Medical Sciences, in the real world. In these pages, this noteworthy but fictitious institution occupies the combined sites of Pepperdine University and the Hughes Institute, both of which have been erased without prejudice for the convenience of this novel.

Should you, the thoughtful reader, entertain the possibility that any character resembles a real person known to you or resembles you yourself, be assured the former is mere coincidence and the latter happy delusion.

Los Angeles Times

Lockdown at Malibu Med

Monday, April 30, 2012

James Swift, Science Reporter

In the early hours of this morning, police and hazmat units moved to block all entrances to Rindge University Campus, including the medical school and associated research institutes. The exact nature of the emergency remains unknown.

All lines to the president’s office give a busy signal. The only official information is from the Office of the Dean of the Medical School, released at 8:42 a.m.:

An incident in the research area of the campus is undergoing investigation. Appropriate emergency response units have been mobilized to define the situation and initiate any further measures. There is no evidence of release of radioactive or other hazardous materials, and there is no health risk to university staff or students or to the City of Malibu.

Campus maps show that the research area includes the medical school, the Institute for Radio-Oncology, the Stem Cell Institute, the Neural Sciences Institute, their laboratories, and vivaria. Airborne news units from the Times, K9News, and KABC report a tight cordon with intense activity around several of the institute buildings and some hazmat crews working on adjacent hillsides before sheriff helicopters moved all news units back from the scene.

Already there is growing concern as to the possible impact upon numerous NIH-funded research programs as well as preclinical and clinical trials sponsored by pharmacologic and biotech companies. A spokesman for Genietech would do no more than confirm that they had some ongoing studies at Rindge but had no information relating to this incident.

Chapter 1

A Different Day

Dawn came for a day that, in the beginning, was no different from any other. Ahmed Adams, PhD, was going to count the dead. This was, for now, his role in life. He was the Grim Reaper. He was the keeper of the score.

Exiting the steep driveway, the ancient, dull red Fiat 124 Spider angled left into another dawn of burnished gold. The newly risen sun cast shards of liquid color over a restless gray ocean. Pacific Coast Highway was cool, shadowed, and empty, veiled in delinquent shreds of sea mist wherever the road skirted beach and waves that tumbled gently this morning. At this early hour, there were few vehicles heading east on PCH across the old Malibu Sequit Rancho into central Malibu, Santa Monica, and the Los Angeles megalopolis twenty-five miles beyond.

Ahmed Adams was thinking. He thought a lot. He was by training a scientist; he had learned the importance of collaboration, of collegial interactions. He could mingle when pressed, but the social graces did not come naturally. He was something of a loner, the lingering imprint of a childhood alone, left largely to his own devices. His family had moved frequently. Friends had come, and friends had gone, scarcely known. In lieu of companionship, he had found solace in books and the world of his imagination. Now as an adult, he retained something of the romantic, the fanciful, that blended in a strange way with an imposed scientific discipline, producing a capacity for innovation and creativity that he took for granted but that astonished his various mentors at times.

On a different day or maybe in a different life, he might have stopped the Fiat in solitude, top down, on the bluffs north of Trancas Canyon to enjoy the light of dawn treading along Zuma beach, but not on this day. At some subliminal level, as yet barely realized, he could taste the excitement. This was a day no different in reality, but much different in portent. He could feel it. He savored it, rolled it around his thoughts until the romantic in him released his mind to run free, unfettered, during the ten-minute drive along the coast to his lab at the medical school.

Ahmed, Medi to his friends when he had any, had adapted to Southern California, a chameleon as always. The African side of his heritage, genes ancient in the human genomic tree, imparted a permanent light tan, a genetic memory protecting against a tropical sun but that was equally effective on Zuma Beach during Malibu’s long summer. His narrow, angular jaw carried only the lightest and finest of beard growths. The net effect was an absurdly young appearance, more akin to a freshman student than to a member, albeit junior, of the faculty. Medi was not entirely pleased when he was mistaken for a student. To counteract it, he had reverted to his London phase and wore his fine black hair long over his ears and curling slightly on the collar of a pressed open-neck dress shirt. Distinct sideburns added a year or two to his age. He was mistaken commonly for Latino, South American, or perhaps Italian, a mistake that he rarely bothered to correct. He smiled readily, revealing fine white teeth that were not perfectly straight, lending a natural, honest countenance. He was smiling now, with his left hand on the wheel and his right resting on the gear lever, alert to the next downshift, a blip of the throttle, for the fun of it.

Ahmed Adams, PhD, should have had no problem with attracting girls … should not but did. Determined to succeed as a new member of the faculty he was once more immersed in his work, and as a result had suffered a near critical relapse in his social life, which became moribund. He told himself that he knew the root cause; it was confidence, or rather lack thereof, loss thereof. As a teenager always on the move, Medi had found relationships to be rare and often painful, with one after another abandoned before they really ever began. During those formative years, he had scarcely known any girl well enough for more than a few tentative dates that were urgent and fumbling, and then his family was on the move again.

When he had been a graduate student in London, there had been more stability, and there had been Mark Beechame. Medi had shared a flat with Mark in Knightsbridge for a year. It was possibly the most important year in Medi’s short life up to that time. Not only had Medi completed the research that had earned him his thesis and ultimately his job in California, but he had also received from Mark a crash course in the fine art of serial seduction.

Mark and Medi enjoyed a distinct physical resemblance, often being taken for brothers. Mark was a paler version with startling blue eyes as opposed to green but with the same long, black, curled hair. Mark had no shortage of contacts or of confidence. He had not, in truth, conjured up a new girlfriend every single night, but at times, it had seemed that way to Medi. A favored scion of Eton College and Cambridge, Mark was in the City, London’s thriving financial district, in the family property business, putting in time on the floor. Unlike Medi who was burning the midnight oil for his thesis, Mark was burning the midnight oil for something else entirely. And he was happy to recount his exploits, the theory, and the practice, absent, or mostly absent, only the most graphic of details.

Medi, do you want some good advice? Treat a woman like a good wine: give her all your attention to be savored, smelled, and cupped with warm hands before you sip. You think that sounds a bit too sophisticated for the likes of us, right? Not sure who said it, sounds like Churchill. Great advice anyway. Not in so many words and not in any organized form but in a tapestry of small vignettes, lessons had been there for the learning. Some lessons Medi had learned. Some he could still recall almost verbatim.

And listen, listen … this is the thing, Mark had told him. Women like to talk. Encourage them, and when they talk, you listen. Then you learn what they want. Sometimes. Then when you give it to them, they are yours. He had looked at Medi and seen his skepticism, his uncertainty. "Come on, Medi. Have some faith. Don’t be so damned constipated. Bloody, bold and resolute! ‘Faint of heart never won the fair lady’ and all that stuff. If they don’t, won’t talk, then you talk but about them, not about you. It’s never about you. Tell them what they want to hear."

The traffic lights were flashing red where PCH wound by Paradise Cove. Medi worked down through the Fiat’s gears, slowed, and stopped. There was a local sheriff, one of Malibu’s finest, making a fine show of redirecting the only two cars that were in sight. The problem was only too evident—a contractor’s crane trying to maneuver down the narrow descent to the cove had clipped a power line, which was now sparking happily, watched by a curious family of green and black parakeets. In the distance, Medi could hear the mournful wail of an approaching fire engine, a routine precaution in Malibu but scarcely needed this morning after an overnight squall of rain. The cop waved Medi through. Mounting the narrow grass verge, Medi continued on his way, and his thoughts returned to the same refrain.

No, Lord no! I don’t knock them all, not even most. Mark’s voice was in Medi’s mind, as if it had been yesterday. You know, sometimes the chase is enough. Here I am, twenty-four. I am not looking for a long relationship. ‘Too bloody immature’ my mother said, and Mummy was right. Mark had laughed frankly at the memory. An ‘overgrown school boy,’ she called me. Well, I intend to stay that way for a while.

As Medi drove with his mind far removed, effectively on autopilot, five miles fell away, and there was the campus, cresting the next shoulder where the Santa Monica Mountains met the sea. Medi’s thoughts lurched back to the present. The sense of urgency returned from somewhere deep, visceral. He breathed deeply to calm himself, but it was nothing he could control; his mood was entirely subservient to the prescience of his autonomic system.

The day of reckoning was at hand. The feeling had been growing in him ever since the first deaths had occurred a month ago. To be sure, those had been expected deaths. They were more than expected; they had been planned. They were, in fact, designer deaths, part of the protocol for this preclinical trial. The controls were dying right on schedule. Because these deaths had been anticipated, there was an innate tension until they started to occur. It was, after all, a survival study, measuring lives in terms of deaths that do or do not occur on schedule, deaths that are delayed. Deaths were the seminal events, survival the final measure.

Now on this day more than ever, Medi’s every act was shaped by the obsession that each day must be no different. Medi’s actions were governed by that ingrained mantra from graduate school: the observer by his very presence should not, could not, influence the observed outcome. The Linnaean Society, the Royal Society, L’Académie des Sciences—all have weighed the notion that the act of observation itself affects the experiment. Centuries of debate had generated much heat but little light. Medi did not have centuries at his disposal and considered the argument to be both sterile and futile, a matter of philosophy rather than science. The hypothesis could not be tested, because testing involves observation, and observation invalidates the experiment—catch-22! He had better things to do than to try to solve the unsolvable.

However, he was a lowly postdoctoral fellow, a mere apprentice in the eyes of his many masters, and he could not simply ignore the issue. Accordingly, he designed his study to minimize observational intrusion, and he established extensive controls to neutralize its effects. Everything, every step, every animal had its parallel control, and everything was matter of detailed record, providing the ability to go back in time and reanalyze anomalous or unexpected findings. The strongest memory is weaker than the weakest ink. He had faithfully recorded each death with classification and number, gross description, necropsy findings, and digital images on his iPad. He had read his records and read them again. He had backed everything up, twice on separate pocket drives, and even copied key data to old-fashioned paper. But he had told no one of his latest findings, not yet.

At exactly 7:10 a.m.—he was a creature of strict habit—he swiped his staff ID card to park in the deserted staff lot closest to the animal facilities. A personal digital code released the electronic locks in the building, giving him access to the general animal rooms in the huge climate-controlled basement vivaria. Just five minutes after parking, he slid aside the cover of the observation port in the transit hallway and peered into his own room, which was dimly lit and red, almost orange, in tone. The light might have been deemed seductive under some conditions, but not these conditions. Ahmed Adams, PhD, was not there to count conquests; he had a different score in mind.

The temperature gauge on the door registered sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit, the overnight graphic showing no variation outside of the two-degree range limit, no different from any other day; perfect. The air handling equipment hummed softly in the background, the digital record showing stable flow and humidity over the twenty-four hours. The air filter readouts were all in range, no different from any other day; perfect. But there was going to be a difference. From the moment he had thrown off the sheets, he had been aware of the adrenalin coursing through his veins, a fast, bounding pulse, sweat on his brow even though the morning still was cool—sympathetic system overload. He had a feeling, visceral not cerebral, a gut feeling, that this was going to be the day.

All that was needed was death—not just one death but three more deaths, the right deaths for the right reasons. Medi was going to count the dead. It was what he did.

He entered the staff changing area, pulled on a sterilized coverall, and collected a cap, a mask, gloves, and overshoes, donning these in the prescribed sequence as he crossed carefully from the dirty side of the room, swinging his legs over the low barrier, to the clean side. These were not the highest-level sterile procedures of a P3 infection control facility, federally certified by rigorous inspection as safe and secure for experiments with high-grade pathogenic organisms known to be lethal to man, but they were necessary precautions. They protected Medi from what was inside and, importantly, protected what was inside from him and his teeming colonies of commensal organisms. Make no day different. He moved down the dim, gleaming corridor to the entry of his animal room, punched in the separate security code, pulled the outer door sufficiently ajar to allow ingress, and entered, softly closing the door behind him.

As the outer door closed, the safety lock on the inner door clicked open, and he went inside. It was not a large room, with a low ceiling, matte gray walls and floor, and recessed, sealed lighting so that all could be sluiced and sprayed with disinfectant or with something more severe, as necessary. Racks of cages lined the walls in tidy rows, housing soft, scurrying forms that were alert to the intrusion and to its possibilities. The technicians fed, watered, and cleaned. Medi simply observed, recorded the data, removed the dead, and in times of anxiety, prayed to Allah, and Yahweh, Gautama Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and Pope Pius for the alliterative pleasure of it. The product of a complex, cross-denominational childhood, Medi was not too proud to ask for help, but he was not quite sure whom he should ask, so he asked them all.

His charges were housed one animal per cage. More than that and the males would fight to the death, while the risk of cross infection and spurious deaths increased among females. Either eventuality would compromise the trial—money and time down the drain, and too much of both had been spent to afford any mistake. Thus, in spite of expense, one animal per cage was the rule. It was something Medi had not been able to afford during his graduate work in London, when the initial intriguing data, so beguiling, so promising, had been gathered. Now he was repeating that experiment but on a grander scale, a formal toxicity and survival study that would be statistically significant with a degree of rigor sufficient to satisfy his sponsor and, God knows, the FDA. The scale of this study was only possible through the largess of Theme Ahlus Gerotherapy Inc., who had taken a worldwide exclusive on the provisional patents and then promptly buried them, and to a degree him also, behind the corporate veil.

If he were to bring proof of principle—undeniable, irrefutable proof—then there were fortunes to be made. If his prototypic results from London were repeatable and fully translatable to humans and scalable, then there were lives to be changed, not least his own. The incentives were high, enormously high, and there were risks aplenty, both known and unknown. The romantic in Medi lamented that he had sold his soul to Ahlus and its investors. But the scientist in him was smugly satisfied. There was a price, and the price was right. For the first time, he had the resources to do the work properly, and he held the conviction that he was not so much their man as they were his company, for knowledge was power, and only some things had he shared.

Activating his iPad, Medi methodically worked his way along the cages, row by row, in exact adherence to the protocol, with no variation and no change from the observer to excite some random act of chance. In spite of himself, he felt his heart begin to race; his palms now sweaty inside the plasticized gloves caused him to hold the computer with especial care. Using a disposable, capacitive stylus, he entered the data: food consumption per cage, recorded by the technician in wax pencil; turns of the treadwheel over twenty-four hours, a digital readout; and notation of the animal status boxes as checked by the techs (active, inactive, dead). He forced himself to go cage by cage and not just to scan the room for dead status boxes. The temptation to break routine was as great a temptation as he had known; the seduction of discovery, the intellectual rush of new knowledge, an idea consummated at last! There was nothing like it.

Almost two hours passed unnoticed in total, but each increment duly noted. Then Medi was done. He copied the file into Dropbox and exited the iPad and the room, exhaling slowly in rigid self-control. He moved deliberately through the changing room in reverse so as to attract no undue attention. Then after negotiating the long, featureless basement corridors of the vivarium, he emerged into the sudden, bright sunlight of the parking lot.

He climbed into his car. The soft top was closed; it was a squeeze. He turned on the radio, loud, and let out a primal roar, punching the roof with his fists, shouting anything and nothing. He remembered not the words or the time—five minutes, ten? Today, time was his to burn. Let the tension out! He did. There had been deaths—not three, but five, and the right deaths! Expectations exceeded. If intellectual orgasms existed, then he had enjoyed not just one in that red-lighted room, but five, each bigger than the last, better than any he had known before. Eureka! cried Archimedes. To Medi, this felt much better, much more than a little spilled bathwater.

How had he known that this would be the day? It wasn’t intuition. Or rather, it was not just intuition. Admittedly, some of the feeling had had no rational basis, but the data was there if only he could trust it. The trends had been in the desired direction, if only he could put aside fears of false hopes, if he could just credit what his own eyes had told him. Food consumption had increasingly diverged between the two groups of animals over four months. Even more critical, the energy expended by the control population had fallen progressively behind that of the experimental, treated group, as measured by the treadwheel counts, and had diverged even earlier. Yet he had not allowed himself to admit the growing import of these data, not to himself and certainly not to the Ahlus scientists. For them, he knew, only deaths, survival curves, would count. Well, now he had his deaths, and soon they would have them too. The end was in sight. The end of the beginning?

He would finish up the protocol, upload everything to his personal laptop, clear Dropbox, and then give Cooper Simpson, CEO at Theme Ahlus Gerotherapy, a call. They were always pressing him for progress reports, as anxious as he was. In fact, they were more anxious because raising money from private placements was increasingly difficult. Ahlus could not forever continue the practice of selling stock to stay afloat, especially with the price hovering fitfully at around two dollars a share. So, thought Medi, maybe now is the time to feed Ahlus a few tidbits, enough to get them off my back and at the same time keep the money flowing into my lab and to me.

The sponsored research agreement between Ahlus and the university had another six months to run and supported about a third of his salary. The remainder was derived from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) K99 training award that he and his mentor, Professor Hal Kingsway, had secured on a second try and from a small business innovative research - SBIR- grant that he had written for the NIH and that had been funded on the first shot. That of itself was pretty remarkable, even more so because Medi had held back some key data and had veiled the true long-term goal behind a series of smaller specific aims and milestones, most of which he had already completed prior to submission. Grantsmanship. He had learned fast, but then he had had good teachers.

Upon later reflection, Medi had become convinced that holding back the ultimate goals—his goals and Ahlus’s—of his research had in fact helped him to get the grant, because even with pilot data from his London days, what he really intended to do would have appeared overly ambitious, unrealistic. Too many before him had failed, so how would grant reviewers accept that a mere postdoc applicant could succeed? Now with the new data coming in, he could begin to pull the results together enough to show that he had hit the milestones, enough to apply for the phase II, R42 grant, which meant significantly more money for his research—up to two and a half million over two or three years. Even with the funding from Ahlus, an extra $750,000 per year would accelerate his program. He was in a highly competitive field that stressed first to discovery, first to publish and no quarter given, but with that sort of funding he would at least have a chance.

That level of peer-reviewed funding would also raise his status in the department and the university, which was a big, bold, gold medal of honor, exactly what he must do to achieve future promotion and a tenured position, the holy grail for junior research faculty. Yes, a large grant would elicit the envy of less successful senior faculty and their enmity too, but at the moment Medi cared about none of that. Sitting there in the parking lot, in the car, his radio blaring and his mind churning, he could see the path ahead, he could believe. Angus Madue, Medi’s mentor for five years of PhD training had drummed in the lesson that success in academia required three things beyond hard work, which was a given: a flying start, luck, and money, lots of it. Dr. Ahmed Adams was on his way.

Chapter 2

Animal Love In

Dawn came for a day that, in the beginning, was no different from any other. The City of Tarzana had been awake for a good two hours before Gary emerged to collect the Los Angeles Times from his driveway, cast there on the fly from the paper truck by a practiced arm at precisely 7:10, purely coincidental with the time that Dr. Ahmed Adams opened his porthole at Rindge School of Medicine in Malibu, twenty miles distant. The thud of his personal, overweight copy of the LA Times hitting the sidewalk inevitably roused Gary. It was his alarm clock, but it always took another hour or so to abandon his sheets, shower, shampoo, shave, select his wardrobe for the day, and venture forth for said newspaper.

When he turned back to the house, he saw a slip of yellow paper wedged under the heavy brass doorknocker, proudly polished for its olde-worlde charm. From Marion and George, he thought. They must have come by while I was showering.

He unfolded the note. He was right. Scrawled in eye marker was, Back at 10:00. Is everyone else coming? M & G.

As far as Gary knew, everyone else was coming, although everyone was a pretty small number—thus far just five others, plus of course, Marion, George, and himself. They had all met at the Animal Love In, a camp/retreat at Solvang in Santa Barbara County in the fall of 2009. Though they had been complete strangers, there must have been some innate affinity, for they became like old friends over the long weekend, campfires, music, a few bottles of the local wines, brains gently washed by a series of animal love speakers.

They did have a lot in common: Labradors to start with plus a vegetarian bent, though not absolute vegan, but avoiding the cruel foods. And they shared a generally green outlook on the world. They had all voted for Gore, won a voters’ majority but lost the election, and variously were members of Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Earthwatch, Save the Bay, and the like. They were scattered throughout Southern California from Santa Barbara to Fallbrook, near San Diego, to Victorville in the high desert to the east. About every three months after Solvang, they had managed to meet, enthusiasm undiminished for doing something, for making a difference, but that something had not yet gelled. Would today be the day?

They had progressed so far as to have an agenda, which they circulated on the new group Wiki that Marion had set up. It was a modest agenda, to be sure, with two items listed so far. There was the Annual People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Proggy Awards. Then there was the decision of the group naming contest that Gary had organized after the last meeting. The goal was to define who they were, why they were, and whether they had a future as an animal group. They needed an identity, a name. Today they would have one.

After the meeting, the plan was to barbecue the Proggy prize-winning Best Faux Meat Product (from Trader Joe’s) and then watch Marley and Me, winner of Proggy Movie of the Year, paws down. Gary also had borrowed a copy of the Skinny Bitch workout video for animal lovers (dogs could do it too). Ulterior motive to the fore, his goal was to introduce the idea of a group workout, move the group forward a step at a time. Jumping straight to the idea of an orgy had been par for some of the gay rights festivals, but that might be a bit of a reach for dog lovers. Although this was the San Fernando and Simi Valley, Home of Porn in the good old US of A, so one never knows. He nurtured secret hopes.

Scanning the headlines, Gary ground the last of the pea berry coffee, loving the aroma of select, rare, prime beans but not loving the memories that came unbidden with them. The pea berry came courtesy of a standing order from the Ferrari coffee plantation in Kona on the Big Island, an order initiated by Pedro on one of their trips to Hawaii. But Pedro was no more. Not strictly true, Pedro was undoubtedly somewhere, but Pedro was no longer with Gary, not in this house, which had been their house. They had been together for more than six years from college at the University of San Francisco in the capital city of gaydom, where it was queer not to be gay. Or so it seemed at the time.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever is, not even with the tidying perspective of hindsight. Gary and Pedro had hit it off. After being assigned to the same dorm as freshmen, it seemed quite natural for them to share an apartment as sophomores, then a bed, and then a life. Together they had been gay liberationists, and they had campaigned for gay marriage together up and down the state. Finally, just as it seemed that they had won that fight, Pedro of the Golden Locks had left. He had packed his bags, all his worldly goods, anything that he might otherwise have thee endowed, everything that smacked of Pedro, smelled of Pedro, carried any memory of Pedro. Everything except for two pounds of pea berries in the wine cooler behind the Pinot Grigio that had been one of Gary’s contributions to that erstwhile good life.

More than a year had passed since Pedro had left. Gary was at work, not so much putting his life back together as putting together a new life—remaking himself, the whole deal, a new and different Gary. Throughout everything, his job had remained stable. For that, he was grateful. He worked on script editing, mostly TV soap operas out of NBC’s Burbank Studios, and there were times when script and reality danced together. Life is a stage.

He told himself that he was scripting a new scene. It wasn’t as hard as he had expected to script a new life or the departure of Pedro, truth be known. Although no one in his old crowd, his Pedro and Gary as an item friends, seemed interested in the truth. There was some fleeting interest in the newly available Gary, but it was just that; he was available. There were a few one-night stands, and a few one-night nonstands, performance dropping off, anxiety taking the opposite direction. At thirty-three, was he done? Gary was wrapped in dilemma. Was it time to go back into the closet? Was such a thing even possible? Did the closet have more than one exit?

Suddenly, Gary had been worried he might be not be gay. His friends, the only friends that he had, would find out, then, ostracized, his social life would collapse. Had collapsed. Then there were his parents; God knows how they would react. In a way, one of Gary’s greatest pleasures from coming out at college had been giving the good tidings to the old man. One memorable Sunday, Gary had driven out to that small, tired house in Pomona and introduced Pedro to his father, hoping for a stroke or at least paraplegia. No such luck. On learning that his only son, Gary Owen Bey, was homosexual, Dad, a third-generation steel man at the now defunct Fontana works, did what he had always done best, opened another bottle and then belted the missus. It was her fault.

And perhaps, in a way, it was. Certainly, Gary’s mother had done all that she could to mold her only child into the exact antithesis of his hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-swearing father. Somewhat belatedly, while he was away at college where he at last could begin to think for himself, to shape himself, Gary had begun to appreciate the extent of his mother’s contribution, and he had been grateful. So on that momentous Sunday, Gary had gathered up his cojones and helped his mother pack her few possessions. He did what he should have done in high school, when his father could no longer intimidate him physically. In Pedro’s car, he took his mother to her sister’s home, where she lived relatively happily ever after. Gary enjoyed that memory. His mother was happy when Gary was happy. His father? Gary had no idea. They hadn’t spoken since.

In truth, a month or so before Pedro finally walked out, doubt had reared its ugly head, figuratively speaking, and renewed doubt for Gary as to his sexual identity. Was he or wasn’t he? Yes, no, or in between? The precipitant, nothing being as simple as it seems, was that Gary had been visiting his mother in Glendale, wandering along Brand for a coffee, when he had bumped into two old high school friends, Chadley and Eric. The three had been inseparable from first grade through high school proms, soccer, cross country, Y Indian guides, first dates, and the like, but they had fallen out of touch when Gary had gone up north to college. Now Chad was about to get married, and they were getting together for the stag night. Why don’t you come? You must come, for old times’ sake, they said. So he did. He sent a text to Pedro, Be late, and he just went. In total there were eventually eight of them. They gathered down by the railroad tracks in Glendale, like moths to a candle, drawn to the neon lights to The Lusty Lady—Girls, Girls, Girls, Live! He went not expecting much, not even a good beer and certainly nothing to turn him on. But did he get a surprise? The beers were great—a dozen or so on tap and some microbrews. And les girls? For those who frequent such establishments, not much need be said. Across the world, the entertainment comes in different tongues but much the same flavor. Some are a little more subtle, others more in the slam bang, thank you, ma’am mode favored in the United States, certainly in Glendale.

For the righteous multitudes who do not frequent these pleasure palaces, Gary hitherto among them, they are somewhat overrated as stimulants for the flagging sex drive, lap dances notwithstanding. But, it turned out, not overrated for Gary, not on that night. As Bouncing Betty did her thing, climbing the metal pole, shedding bangles and black leather upholstery, suspending herself upside down from the ceiling, out jumped two of the most exciting things that Gary had seen for years. In his recent gay world, these were anatomical curiosities, mere figments that had not adorned his imagination since the days of wrestling with high school biology and a dubious puberty. Mammary glands, mammary glands, tenth-grade biology, ran like a broken record in his