“Beach Baby”

“Beach Baby,” performed by The First Class, supplies the book’s opening lyric and an early image of an “all-American male.” Its backward glance at an older Los Angeles becomes a lens for Bret’s memories of youth, friendship, and concealed desire: the song’s familiar ideal sits beside relationships that cannot fit comfortably within the public roles the characters inhabit.

Opening Image and Placement

The book begins with a dedication, then fragments of the song “Beach Baby,” including its questions about old Los Angeles, the Chevrolet-driving past, and “the boy next door.” The song title and the name of its performer, The First Class, follow those lines. A sentence about the difficulty of keeping a secret comes next, before the date 1984. This sequence places nostalgic popular music alongside concealment before the narrative turns to the remembered world of Buckley and the events of 1981.

The lyric’s boy next door is described through a compact catalogue of conventional American masculinity: suntanned, crew-cut, and all-American. That ideal echoes the way Bret remembers Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds as a beautiful, popular couple who seemed naturally paired. Yet the book’s recollections complicate the apparent simplicity of that image: Bret has loved both of them without admitting it, and his attachment to Thom exists alongside Thom and Susan’s relationship.

The Ideal and the Remembered People

Bret recalls Thom and Susan as central figures in the Buckley social world, dating since their sophomore year and moving through school as a nearly inseparable pair. Their looks and popularity made them seem to belong to an effortless, recognizable picture of Southern California youth. The song’s old-fashioned all-American boy image rhymes with this public appearance, but it does not capture the private attachments Bret carries beneath it.

Thom’s appeal to Bret is shaped not only by his appearance but by his apparent ease. Bret remembers him as laid-back, agreeable, and seemingly unaware of his effect on other people. That blankness offered a contrast to the feelings Bret kept to himself. “Beach Baby” therefore works less as a literal portrait of Thom than as a cultural shorthand for the attractive, uncomplicated masculinity that the book’s memories both invoke and unsettle.

Secrecy, Desire, and Deferred Futures

The opening maxim about hiding a secret from oneself gives the song’s nostalgia a darker counterpoint. Across Bret’s recollections, affection and desire often remain unspoken or are managed through discretion. Bret remembers that Ryan Vaughn seemed outwardly like a conventional, easygoing student, while privately sharing a desire that could not be openly acknowledged among their peers. Ryan imagined leaving Los Angeles and beginning again elsewhere; Bret understood that plan as his own, too.

Their relationship’s brief possibility of a future is measured against that anticipated departure. In September 1981, Ryan spent a weekend with Bret at the empty house on Mulholland. Bret later described it as the last weekend untainted by the past, and as a rare experience of desire unburdened by drama. But the secrecy Ryan had earlier called necessary, and the expectation that they would leave school to reinvent themselves, also mark the limits placed on that intimacy. The song’s nostalgic boy-next-door image thus opens onto a story in which the socially legible ideal and private life do not align.

Retrospective Meaning

Decades later, while writing about the past, Bret found that the book contained more about Ryan than he had expected. He wondered whether they might have made a life together after Buckley, naming New York, Vermont, and San Francisco as imagined possibilities. In reality, Ryan barely spoke to him through the rest of senior year. At graduation in June 1982, they unexpectedly met in the boys’ bathroom; Bret began to address him, Ryan cut him off with a brief farewell, and they shared the expressive face that had once been their private joke.

Much later, Bret heard that Ryan had moved to San Francisco, worked as an architect, and lived with a partner. The news wounded him despite the decades since their kiss. In that retrospective frame, “Beach Baby” carries more than period atmosphere: its remembered ideal of the boy next door stands against the distance between a youthful possibility and the life Bret only later learned Ryan had made. The opening song and the book’s recurring reflections on secrecy establish that contrast without resolving it.