Jack was a singer, and I couldn’t remember how we met, but I’d been crazy about him. His mom wasn’t around and he’d needed someone to take care of him, so I had.

He loved coffee, so I taught myself to make the perfect cup of joe. I did his laundry and ran him a bath every morning as a treat. Taking care of Jack replaced everything else in my life, and he became my hobby. Night after night, I could be found sitting in the back of a dark club smelling of stale beer, singing along to his songs. He was a little like Robert Smith of the Cure (but without the makeup, thank God). Jack had a serious David Bowie complex and during songs he’d start dancing and twirling all over the stage. That worked for Bowie, but it didn’t really work for Jack.

When Jack’s mom came back from an extended European stay, she decided to sell her house, where Jack had been living with friends. Suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven, Jack was faced with having to pay something called rent. It was a new word to him.

A senior in college, I couldn’t stand the couple I was living with, a husband and wife in Culver City who grew six-foot pot plants in the backyard and screamed at each other constantly. Renting a room for $200 a month had certainly been a winning deal, but when the husband starting getting paranoid that I’d steal his stash, I knew it was time to move on. So moving in with Jack had been kind of the natural thing to do. We hadn’t been dating that long, but. . . .

Jack and I found a place together way out in Burbank in the North Valley. His best friend had previously lived in our unit, so we’d inherited his black lacquer bed frame and dresser. Very Miami Vice. For a while things were great. Jack still bought me a nice dinner once a week, thanks to an AmEx card of his dad’s that he still had in his possession. In addition to his music, Jack was also an actor and spent a lot of time in acting class. He’d regale me with stories of all the famous people who had also studied in his class, stars like Meg Ryan, Sean Penn, and Belinda Carlisle before the Go-Go’s. After class, he would head over to the Golden Apple on Melrose and peruse the new comic books. He thought of his extensive comic book collection as an investment and what he called a “nest egg for the future.” I nodded my head and agreed, not minding the boxes of musty comics stacked around our apartment. Our drinking glasses were monogrammed with the brand Coca-Cola in swirly letters; we got a free glass with every three tanks of gas from the corner gas station.