Читать книгу Candy Everybody Wants - Josh Kilmer-Purcell - Страница 12

‘So Gavin hasn’t said anything at all about me?’ Tara whispered, blowing a perfect smoke ring. She, Jayson, and Willie were in Willie’s room watching afternoon reruns on channel 64.

‘What the hell would he say about you?’ Jayson replied. ‘Tell me Jayson. That underage neighbour girl. Fuckable?’

‘Shhh!’ Tara admonished, ‘he’ll hear.’

Tara had been obsessed with Gavin since his illustrious arrival. It was easy to understand why. Jayson was also intrigued by the hygienically challenged, punk/New Wave, anorexic giant. Gavin spent most of the day and night in the dank basement, which one of Jayson’s ex-stepfathers had half-finished remodeling into a bar/rec room before he’d been shown the door by Toni. Neither Tara nor Jayson knew much about what Gavin did in his half-bar lair, but whatever it was it didn’t lend itself to coherence during the few minutes a day he emerged for either a beer or a piss. Jayson didn’t think he’d ever seen Gavin standing upright without holding on to something for balance. Gavin was more like a recurring guest star than a regular cast member in the Blocher family drama.

The one time Jayson had found an excuse to go into the basement since Gavin’s arrival he noticed thousands of Polaroid pictures taped up on every available wall surface. When he later asked Franck about them, she explained that Gavin took a Polaroid of everyone he’d ever met. He had been doing it since he was a kid because he believed in the Native American philosophy that photographs stole people’s souls, and he wanted to collect them. Jayson was growing impatient waiting for Gavin to photograph him, and began keeping a comb in his back pocket to be ready at any moment for when Gavin came after his soul.

Still Jayson liked the fact that Gavin was around. His lethargy somehow balanced out his sister’s endless energy. What Franck lacked in height, she made up in stature–instituting a set of rules on the Blocher household so rigid that even Terri Wernermeier looked laidback in comparison. Of course no one paid any attention to them–especially the untamable Toni. When Franck wasn’t busy painting watercolor self-portraits of her vagina, she was huffing and barking her way around the house, trying to impose some sort of structure on the Blocher chaos. Her persistence was as endearing as it was futile.

Against her mother’s orders, Tara began spending most of her time after school at the Blochers’, waiting for the infrequent moments Gavin made brief appearances aboveground. She could hear his footfalls coming up the wooden steps from any corner of the Blocher house and would immediately race to the kitchen for something to drink in hopes of intercepting him.

‘Hey there,’ she would say, trying to open a Diet Squirt as seductively as possible while leaning against the sink.

At most he would grunt back at her, but usually he simply avoided acknowledgment of any kind. This didn’t deflate Tara’s crush in the slightest. ‘Did you see that?’, she’d say later. ‘He paused for a moment after dropping that beer bottle. I think he wanted to ask me to wipe it up!’

Jayson neither indulged nor dissuaded Tara from her crush. He had too many of his own problems. Chief among them was his latest indignity. Someone had written ‘GAYSON WHERE’S MAKEUP!’ on his locker in bright red lipstick. Bad spelling was one of Jayson’s biggest pet peeves, so this particular insult was doubly bothersome to him.

‘C’mon, Tara,’ Jayson pleaded when the Disorder in the Court rerun broke for commercial. ‘Why do you think someone wrote that?’

‘Beats me,’ Tara said for the third time.

‘You’re lying,’ Jayson said, ‘I can tell because you’re chewing on your hair.’

Hearing this, Willie, who was lying on the bed above where they were sitting on the floor, suddenly fixated on Tara’s hair, wondering if it was edible.

‘If I tell you, will you promise not to get mad?’ Tara said, dropping her Newport butt into her half-empty Squirt can.

‘I promise,’ Jayson lied. ‘It was Trey.’

Jayson nearly swallowed his Big League Chew. If his life were a sitcom, he would have done a spittake. Only Jayson’s life wasn’t a sitcom. It was painfully unfunny, and growing more so by the minute.

‘Trey wrote that on my locker?’

‘No…someone else did the actual writing. But Trey took the silly Dalcon Crest videotape we shot this summer to school and showed everyone the parts where you wore all the different dresses.’

‘It was Dallasty!. Not Dalcon Crest,’ Jayson corrected, still not able to fully comprehend the information he’d just been given. Trey had betrayed him? His oldest friend? Trey was the last person in the world he ever thought would hurt him. Ignore him, yes…that was just part of the ninth grade social shuffle. But to actively smear Jayson? That was incomprehensible. ‘Why would he show people that?’

‘Because, douchebag,’ Tara answered, ‘everyone was giving him shit for giving you a boner, so he thought he’d show them what a weirdo you were.’

‘But why would he show people a tape with us kissing on it?’

‘He didn’t show that part, idiot. He just showed the parts with you in the dresses and wigs,’ Tara answered. ‘Now shut up, show’s back on.’

Jayson shut up. He wondered if he would ever be able to speak again. Trey. Trey did this to him. He was devastated.

The boner incident had been horrible, but this episode was unsurvivable. Jayson didn’t know how he would return to school knowing that everyone had seen him in a dress. He suddenly realized how silly he must have looked–like the cross-dresser on that All in the Family episode. Jayson was furious that he’d allowed himself to look so stupid. So abnormal. So freakish.

Jayson had always thought that he was the normal one in the circus that surrounded him. He’d always, in the back of his mind, felt that Toni, and Willie, and Garth, and Franck, and Gavin, and everyone else who’d ever found themselves part of the Blocher menagerie were the mutants, and that it was he who put the thin veneer of normalcy out in front of the world. But it was so clear to him now. He belonged in his queer family. He was one of them. One of the freak show.

Jayson hated that he had come to believe, he had really believed, in the religion that claimed that after twenty-three minutes and two commercial breaks everything would turn out okay. He believed in and worshiped that glowing blue altar which taught him when to laugh, when to cry, when to applaud, and when to love.

He had faith that even an incident as earth-shattering as a locker room boner would eventually be absolved right after these commercial messages. With a little ‘pluck,’ a little ‘moxie,’ a little ‘gumption,’ every trauma was supposed to be overcome.

But it wasn’t true. It was over. He was different from everyone else–and not in a good way as he had always presumed–in a funny way. A queer way. Things didn’t work out for Jayson at the end of the episode–they worked out for Trey. No one cared how Jayson’s storyline resolved.

Jayson came to a soul-shattering conclusion.

Oh God, he thought. I’m not the star…I’m the wacky neighbor!

‘I think I hear Gavin coming upstairs…let’s go!’ Tara said breathlessly, interrupting Jayson’s stream of self-loathing consciousness.

‘Nah,’ Jayson replied. ‘I don’t feel so well. I think I’ll hide out up here.’ He listened to Tara skip away down the hall.

Jayson’s funk continued to deepen in the weeks after Trey’s betrayal.

‘Why are you being such an ass around here?’ Toni finally asked Jayson after the fourteenth consecutive dinner in which Jayson didn’t utter a word.

Jayson didn’t answer.

‘Answer your mother,’ Franck commanded.

Jayson looked down at the Beef-A-Roni mixed with La Choy Chop Suey that Toni had ‘invented’ for dinner. She’d called it ‘Orientaly.’

Jayson remained silent.

‘Is it the whole boner thing?’ Toni asked. ‘’Cause Tara told me all about it.’

Jayson looked up from his plate and glared at Tara. Tara shrugged him off.

‘These things happen,’ Toni continued. ‘It’s completely natural.’

‘She’s right,’ Franck affirmed. ‘What you should really do, Jay-Jay, is focus your embarrassment into some sort of creative outlet.’

‘Sure,’ Jayson muttered. ‘I’ll start doing pastels of my scrotum. We can have a joint show.’

‘What he’s really pissed off about is that Trey showed everyone at school that video of him playing around in dresses,’ Tara interjected.

‘For the last fucking time, Tara, I wasn’t playing around. I was acting,’ Jayson said through gritted teeth.

‘So what’s wrong with that?’ Toni asked. ‘Didn’t people like it? I thought it was a good show.’ However frustrating Toni could be, the one thing that Jayson could count on from his mother was her ability to never look at a situation the way a sane person would.

‘Now they’re all calling me “Gayson,”’ Jayson explained.

‘And “homo,”’ Tara said.

‘Not “faggot”?’ Toni asked.

‘We used to say “queer,”’ Franck added.

‘Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay,’ Willie started. One of the symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome was repetitive verbalization. Willie always chose the most inconvenient times to manifest that.

‘That doesn’t seem like something Trey would do,’ Toni said.

‘After Jayson got a boner in the shower next to him, Trey started getting teased too,’ Tara explained to the table. ‘So he threw Jayson under the bus.’

‘I’d appreciate it if everyone would stop bringing my penis up at the dinner table,’ Jayson pleaded.

‘Why not? It seems to come up everywhere else,’ Tara joked, chortling through a mouthful of Orientaly.

Jayson stood up to clear the table. He didn’t need to relive the worst moments of his life any longer.

‘So what are you going to do about this?’ Franck asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jayson replied, scraping the globs of congealed food onto one plate.

‘God, you really are a little fag, aren’t you? You don’t have any plan on how to get even?’ Franck said. From what little Jayson knew about her history, he had learned that the four-foot-eight, handicapped lesbian had solved most of life’s dilemmas with her right fist. ‘I guess I’m going to have to be the man around here,’ she sighed.

‘Well, you do have the mustache,’ Jayson muttered.

‘You’re not going to punch my brother, are you?’ Tara asked, suddenly a little frightened.

‘I don’t punch kids,’ Franck clarified, defensively. ‘What do you people think I am?’

‘A violent, crazy dyke,’ Jayson answered, rinsing off the last of the plates.

‘No–a violent, crazy dyke with a plan’, Franck corrected.

‘What are you talking about?’ Jayson asked.

‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Franck answered. She caught Gavin’s dilated eye and winked.

Jayson ignored her, pouting his way through the next three hours until bedtime. He slept fitfully, waking up sometime after midnight, desperately thirsty from his two helpings of sodium-laden Orientaly. He made his way downstairs, and on his way across the darkened living room to the kitchen a voice startled him. He yelped.

‘It’s just me, Butter Bean,’ Toni said, her voice coming from the darkness where the sofa would be.

‘What are you doing in the dark?’ Jayson asked. He squinted and just made out the tip of her smoldering Newport.

‘Just thinkin’,’ came her reply. ‘Come over here and sit next to me.’

Jayson felt his way across the dark room, taking small steps in order not to trip over the coffee table. When he finally felt the cold arm of the vinyl faux-leather couch, he sank down next to the warmth of his mother. She put her soft arm around him. Jayson could tell she was only wearing her bra.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Jayson asked. In the total darkness, he realized he could imagine his mother being anyone he wanted her to be. Mrs. Cunningham. Mama Walton. Alice the waitress. The possibilities were endless.

‘I was thinking that this is the first time I’ve seen you unhappy.’ Jayson heard the slow inhale as Toni took a final drag on her cigarette before snuffing it out somewhere in the darkness on the other side of him. ‘I mean really unhappy.’ She paused before exhaling. ‘And I’ve realized that I’m not happy when you’re not happy.’

Jayson sighed.

‘You haven’t been writing nothing,’ Toni continued. ‘Or acting, or filming…fuck, you aren’t even singing television theme songs around the house anymore.’ It was Toni’s turn to sigh. ‘It’s hard to believe that you’re this upset just because some kids didn’t like your movie.’

‘It was a pilot episode,’ Jayson corrected. ‘And they didn’t just “not like it,” they think I’m perverted.’

‘I got news for you, Butter Bean,’ Toni replied. ‘You are perverted. I’m perverted. Willie’s perverted. Franck, Gavin, even Tara is perverted. All “perverted” means is that you aren’t like other people.’

‘So far,’ Jayson said, ‘you’re not helping matters.’

‘Since when did you think you were like other people?’ Toni asked. She had a point. ‘You’ve always known you were different. I can’t see why the fact that other people know it now, too, should change anything.’

Jayson got goose pimples. His mother was right.

‘If you weren’t different from them, how could you become a celebrity?’ Toni continued. ‘There’s only…what…a couple hundred celebrities in this world?’

Jayson was going to correct her by pointing out that he’d just seen a special CBS presentation of Night of a Thousand Stars, but he didn’t want to stop the soothing lull of her voice.

‘And none of these other hicks around here are gonna be celebrities,’ Toni continued, ‘so of course you’re perverted to them.’

Jayson listened as his mother flicked her Bic to light a fresh menthol. In the few seconds of light from the flame he looked up and saw the soft roundess of her cheeks. He wanted to lean up to kiss her, but her speech was like a lullaby and he found his eyes drooping shut.

‘I don’t know much about showbiz, Butter Bean,’ he heard her say as he dropped off to sleep, ‘but it seems to me like all you gotta do is find the applause and go stand in front of it.’