There are two kinds of people preceded by their reputation — the many who try to make themselves legendary, and the few who just are. Javier is one of the latter, although it took me a long time to admit that to myself. I hate to believe anybody can be that effortlessly remarkable, soaring above our collective heads without even trying. But that’s Javier for you. My colleagues were always rehashing his exploits in glazed hero worship. Javier growing up openly gay in Puerto Rico and carrying his uncle’s old Korean War .45 for protection. Javier getting a book review published in the Journal of Latin American Studies as a mere undergrad, albeit at Harvard. Javier appearing in a UCLA ad campaign as one of the “Faces of Brentwood”. Javier this, Javier that.

It took me a long time to actually meet him, considering that we’re in the same graduate program. Neither of us lived on campus, reducing our potential for social friction, and our academic interests at the time resulted in wildly different class schedules. He was studying slaveowner portraiture in the colonial Caribbean, I was studying sexual violence in national-era Mexico. And then there was his subtle antipathy for gringos. I experienced it as a Monday morning ritual, hearing about the kickass weekend that he and the other Latin Americans had while Phoebe and I were consigned to hump like wind-up toys and carve each other into sashimi.

We finally met at one of those stilted departmental “socials” where everybody revolves in uncomfortable orbit around the wine and cheese. One moment I was contemplating the open doorway that led to things like escape, the next it was filled with a brown angel made corporal and walking the earth. Nobody needed to tell me I was gaping at Javier. Who else could it have been? I watched him glide through the crowd, hugging and air-kissing, as faces tracked him like satellite dishes.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I muttered in jealous dismay. “He’s…beautiful!”

I was standing next to Enrique, already the elder statesman of the program. He was more streamlined back then, only two chins and one kid. “Javier gets that a lot,” Enrique laughed. “Don’t encourage him.”

Javier came to a stop in Enrique’s shadow and a complicated look passed between them, the nonverbal conversation of old friends. I waited for Enrique to introduce us, but he didn’t. Instead they surveyed the room together while the room surveyed them back, putting them on an invisible dais, Enrique the lordly king, Javier the beloved and enigmatic crown prince. Or maybe it was just my envious imagination.

“Nick Roberts,” I finally said, sticking out a hand at Javier. “I’m one of the first-years.”

He peered at me slowly, turning shoulders more than hips. Then he reached across the perfect drape of his maroon corduroy sportcoat to shake my hand. His face was a delicate oval and animated by long batting eyelashes. “Javier,” he said in a bored tone of voice, forcing a smile. A pair of perfect matching dimples appeared in his cheeks.

Then the dimples went back into storage and he squared his shoulders away from me and that, as they say, was that.

I didn’t have my first class with Javier until a year later. It was a graduate seminar in historiographical trends, a theory-laden topic taught by a visiting French historian who studied with Foucault. I’d been warned that Javier had an intellect like a cuisinart — throw anything at him and he’ll process it — but nothing could’ve prepared me for those 10 weeks. While I was trying to spell neo-gramscianism, Javier was tying it into larger debates within cultural history. The final grades were galling. He got an A without breaking a sweat. I slaved for the only C on my transcript.

Don’t get me wrong. I may secretly hate Javier, but I also respect him. Enormously. He could be a rock star in Latin American Studies if he wanted, no problem. He was dealt some great cards in the affirmative action game — brains, brown skin, homosexuality. Everything but female genitalia and a malformed limb. The dude could have his pick of tenure-track positions, even in a piss-poor job market like ours. Instead he’s walking away from it all, and I’m driving to his house for the goodbye surprise party.

Javier lives down the broad lanes of I-405 in Culver City, another western LA town that began life as a home for film studios and backlot sets. Good luck finding any trace of celluloid ambiance now. It’s been paved over with strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions. Javier and his roommates rent in an iffy neighborhood of Beaver Cleaver ramblers on the south side of Culver City. A couple blocks in my rearview is Sepulveda Boulevard and property values in the stratosphere. A couple blocks farther ahead and you can decorate your lawn with crackheads.

Their house is a planbook rambler refurbed to look like a bungalow-thing. The only landscaping appears to be a rusty chainlink fence and some pavers leading across the half-dead lawn to the front door. Thumping disco music is spilling out of the front door into the darkness, and in the living room window I can see a crowd of unfamiliar faces churning.

Inside the house is even smaller than it seemed walking up the driveway. The ad hoc dancefloor is tiny even with all the furniture pushed to the edges of the room. To the right is a murky den filled with too-cute dudes sharing joints, the tips winking like fireflies. The hallway is chokingly narrow and decorated with framed Burning Man photos, which keep getting knocked askew. Finally I’m pushed into the white-beamed galley kitchen. A donut of humanity surrounds the formica-topped island. Somebody presses a cold bottle of beer into my ass — accidentally, I hope. Two goombah girls are braying about wigs in New Jersey accents. A shorter and uglier version of RuPaul reaches across the island, handing me a bloody mary with a shock of lettuce sticking out. It takes me a moment to recognize him as one of Javier’s roommates in drag.

“Nick!”

I rubberneck around, holding my drink above the jostling crowd.

“Nick! How are you?”

A woman with a hairstyle like a fancy buffet-cut radish is leaning in from the back patio. My mental rolodex clicks. Leslie. Bland and boring Ph.D. student, claims to be vegetarian despite Fatburger lapses, no funding needed because she’s underwritten by her husband. Javier once described her as “mulish” and I can’t improve on his adjective.

“Where the hell is everybody?” I ask her, after I shoulder my way around the donut and escape onto the patio. “You’re the first person I’ve seen from the department.”

“All the UCLA people left already! All the Latin Americanists, anyway. Maybe some of the Europeanists and Americanists are still around.” She’s in the History of Science program and technically a free agent, unaligned into any of the geographic camps.

I’m checking my watch. The backlit digits read 11:47. I wonder when fashionably late becomes unfashionably late. “You know where they went? Javier and the rest of the Latin Americanists?”

“Nah. They were talking in Spanish.” Leslie tips a plastic cup against her mouth and holds it there for a while. “You wanna hang out with us?”

“Us” is two grad students I don’t know, a lime-haired skater boy whose arms are writhing with tattoos, and a girl going through a bad Holly Golightly phase. Their conversation is an arcane tendril of shoptalk and multisyllabic words that drag on and on, and I finish my bloody mary — even the celery — by the time they decide to start deciding where to go next.

Holly Golightly wants to hit a rave in Santa Monica that another partygoer told her about. Total non-starter for Leslie and the skater boy, who’d rather find a quiet bar and keep talking. Studying the easy intimacy of their interactions, I’m not sure Leslie’s hubby would approve. But that’s his problem, not mine. Holly Golightly and I say adios and head for our cars.

The rave directions become vague after we exit I-10 into the industrial strip along Centinela Avenue, an enormous stretching complex of whitewashed warehouses, some utterly dark, some brilliantly lit by security lights. Before long we add a third car to our caravan, also meandering through shadowy parking lots and alleys in hopes of stumbling upon the rave. They have a postcard with a map on the back and together we finally find the X that marks the spot, one of those nondescript FOR LEASE buildings with a few smoked-glass windows in front, a loading dock in the back, and a lot of precast concrete in between.

We pay ten bucks cover and wander into a cavern in a state of build-out, with some building materials and port-a-potties stashed in a distant corner. Construction floodlights on tripods are the only illumination, a freaky industrial effect. A dj is spinning trance behind a big speaker set and a throng is crowding him, mostly teens in baggy clothing, day-glow hair, reflective jewelry. I feel about 50 years old watching them. Holly Golightly immediately vanishes into their midst, looking for somebody with X to sell. I head over to the bar, just a folding table in front of some kegs, and pay five more bucks for an outsize McDonald’s cup of beer, something cheap and watery like Bud. The bouncers behind the table are selling to anybody with a heartbeat and the money, so I have to wait in line with half of Central High.

I drink morosely, pushing past anybody who tries to make conversation. The dark fringe of the floodlit space is more interesting than the rave itself. I move into the blackness gingerly, one step, then another, waiting for my eyes to adjust — and thank god, because I’m about to trample a couple humping on the concrete floor. That sends me stumbling back to the rave.

Holly Golightly is doing her impression of a stripper without a pole, her pale skin flashing like landing lights. She isn’t exactly respecting personal space, mine included when I join her for a while. Guess she scored that X. I start dancing with an eyecandy girl instead, twisty dreds and cool cats-eye glasses, very relaxed and bouncy, until the floodlights catch her full and I realize she’s 16 or 17, maybe. Her retinas are black holes in the glare, not contracting at all. She could probably fail a drug test for several different substances.

Outside the night is an open refrigerator door and haunted by crickets chirping, trains rumbling over railroad tracks, the occasional back-up beeper of a truck. I’m wondering how I got here this fast, feeling too old on the inside for my body, and wishing I’d dedicated my summers, any summer, to hedonism and fun, to reclaiming my lost childhood.

The wish makes me feel trapped, my playtimes shattered by a toolbox dropped from the heavens, a boy staring up at his terrible father. Only work could earn the slightest kindness from him. Lots of work, done repeatedly, until perfect by his exacting standards. “You’ll never amount to nothing!” he used to snarl, cursing me to do better, sometimes muscling me out of the way to demonstrate, then dismantling it for me to try again. No supper until I got the chainsaw running, the haybaler cleared, the skidloader’s hydraulic cylinder fixed. Sometimes I went to bed hungry.

I don’t know why Javier is dropping out of the program, but I know why I never will. I’m going to amount to something my father never can.