The Before Now and After Then
Peter Monn
Pen Name Publishing
www.pennamepublishing.com
Pen Name Publishing
http://www.pennamepublishing.com
Copyright ©2014 by Peter Monn
First edition, 2014
Cover Design by Dionne Abouelela
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in any information storage system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission of the publisher. For more information regarding permission write to Pen Name Publishing Attn: Permissions Department, P.O. Box 173, Bargersville, IN 46106
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities in story or characters are merely coincidence.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request.
ePub ISBN
978-1-941541-03-6
Printed in the U.S.A.
July, 2014
Table of Contents
Title
ePubCopyright B&N
Dedication
Alex Quote
February 24th
The Before Now
ChapterOne
ChapterTwo
ChapterThree
ChapterFour
ChapterFive
ChapterSix
ChapterSeven
ChapterEight
ChapterNine
ChapterTen
ChapterEleven
ChapterTwelve
ChapterThirteen
ChapterFourteen
ChapterFifteen
ChapterSixteen
ChapterSeventeen
ChapterEighteen
ChapterNineteen
ChapterTwenty
ChapterTwentyOne
ChapterTwentyTwo
ChapterTwentyThree
ChapterTwentyFour
ChapterTwentyFive
ChapterTwentySix
ChapterTwentySeven
ChapterTwentyEight
ChapterTwentyNine
ChapterThirty
ChapterThirtyOne
ChapterThirtyTwo
ChapterThirtyThree
ChapterThirtyFour
ChapterThirtyFive
ChapterThirtySix
ChapterThirtySeven
ChapterThirtyEight
After Then
Final Chapter
The End
Acknowledgements
About Peter
Connect With Us
To all of the kids who didn’t think they were good enough and the ones who are still hanging on. Be brave! Life truly is a sweet experience.
And to the real Rusty, wherever you are…
“In the end, we’re all just one big group of freaks I guess, trying to find ourselves in this crazy world. And I’ll always be that gay boy, trying desperately to find my own something to live for, never realizing that those things most important are always right in front of your face.”
Alex Night from Suburban Wasteland
February 24th
The scheme was delicious and we had been planning it for over a month. Sam didn’t really think Mom and Dad would care that much that I was gay, but he thought if I was going to come out to them we needed to cover any bases for a potential emotional breakdown. We decided it would be best to break the news right before our birthday dinner, leaving out any possible chance for weeping from our mother. I can’t even remember if I ever came out to Sam. He just always knew. I guess it’s that way with most twins, knowing something about our counterpart without them ever telling us.
The way he was always so protective of me would make you think that he was the older one, but that wasn’t the case. I had left him behind in the womb for greater ventures of a new world exactly 18 minutes before he chose to follow me, kicking and screaming, as I lay quietly in my father’s arms. This grand entrance would set the direction for the rest of our lives; Sam fighting while I sat idly by, living through his adventures, and allowing the world to happen to me instead of actually living.
At first, we thought it would be hilarious for Sam to be the one to come out to our parents, as me of course, since our status as uniquely identical could confuse even our own parents. But, in the end, we decided it was my life and for once I had to do something on my own.
The plan was that Sam would take our Jack Russell Terrier, Griffin, to the bark park for an hour, while I would work up enough nerve to talk to my parents. Just as I was finishing, Sam would come home and ring the doorbell as if he had forgotten his keys, this way distracting any warfare or love fest that might be occurring inside. After that, he would tell our parents he had known forever and that it was no big deal, blah, blah, blah, and could we finally head over to The Melting Pot for our annual birthday dinner. We’d all laugh, get changed, and head to the restaurant.
I’d like to tell you that’s what happened. I’d like to tell you that Sam and I blew out 17 perfect birthday candles on a half chocolate, half vanilla birthday cake, just like every other year, but that isn’t the case.
Sam and Griffin headed out the door into a surprisingly warm February day, got into the black Jeep Wrangler we shared and drove off toward the bark park as I stood on our broad front porch, staring after them. I sat down on the steps for at least a half an hour, rehearsing my lines over and over in my head. I don’t know what I was so afraid of since both of my parents had gay friends and were open about their liberal beliefs, but sometimes parents freak when it comes to their own kids and I thought maybe it would be too much for them.
I stood up, deciding that the anxiety of waiting was greater than actually saying the words, and walked inside. I paused at the bottom of the staircase and could hear muffled words from behind my parent’s bedroom door. I slowly walked up the stairs, holding the banister tightly, trying to be quiet so I could decipher the words as they grew louder with each step. I couldn’t really make out what they were saying, but kept on hearing my mom repeating Jenny, the name of my father’s personal trainer. I was confused as to why they would be talking about her, but as I got to the top of the steps I began to understand.
“I’m sure you love me,” my mother said as she slammed a drawer shut. “I’m sure that’s exactly what you’re thinking while you’re fucking Jenny!”
“It’s not like that,” my father begged. “It didn’t start like that. It just happened.”
I could hear my mom crying. I just stood there at the top of the stairs, unable to move. Whatever was happening on the other side of the door, I was now part of, whether they knew it or not.
“What are we going to tell the boys?” Mom asked. “What’s going to happen to us? To me?”
“We can work through this. I love you Alice,” Dad pleaded.
I heard the undeniable sound of what could only be a slap. Flesh against flesh. And before I could turn and walk back down the stairs, the door flew open, both of my parents staring at me with surprised faces.
I could actually hear the sound of my watch, the same watch that exactly a year before they had bought Sam and I as matching birthday presents, ticking as time passed between us.
I had no idea what to say or do, so I said the only thing my mind was trained to say at the moment.
“I’m gay.”
They both continued to stare at me as if we were in stop motion animation, waiting for the next frame to spring them into action, when suddenly the doorbell rang. Sam, always perfectly on time, was back to
save the day.
“This is unbelievable,” Mom uttered, walking past me and down the stairs toward the front door.
I was praying the door would fly open and Sam would make the joke we had prepared, “Are we all having a gay afternoon?” But instead of Sam, the door opened to two police officers, shrouded in the dancing light of their cars, echoing across the early dusk falling on our lawn.
“Mrs. Goldstein?” one of them asked.
And before Mom could even answer, nod or acknowledge her identity, I knew. I just knew.
Chapter One
Mom changed the song on her iPod to The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry and began whispering the words. The irony that she had evolved from “Angst Alice”, the punk girl who ran away her junior year in high school to hear The Circle Jerks play in a club on New Year’s Eve in New York City, into a suburbanite mother who rocked a gold Rolex and drove a black Range Rover with tinted windows was not missed on me. She still stayed true to her roots, outfitted in a black Fender guitar t-shirt, cut off jean shorts, with her white blonde choppy hair tucked behind her ears, now pierced with one solid carat diamond in each lobe. Although she was kind of a sellout, mom had been the real deal back in the day, a first class groupie, who eventually fell back in love with the nerdy guy she had started a band with their freshman year, settling down and becoming the wife of a plastic surgeon. I guess she could have done worse.
Without missing a beat from the song during the instrumental break, she grabbed my hand and looked over at me while we sat at a stoplight.
“It’s going to be OK,” she said. “You’ll love this new school and your dad and I will work things out. I promise.”
I sat there silent, thinking about those words.
I Promise.
Promises were just words people said to make you feel better even though they had no intention of keeping them. Sam and I had made tons of promises to each other throughout the years, most important being that no matter what happened, he’d never leave me. He knew I couldn’t handle life on my own. It had always been that way.
Whereas to others, our outsides mirrored each other perfectly, our insides were completely opposite. We both had extremely curly, blonde hair and blue eyes, and we were both short but naturally lean. Side by side, you couldn’t tell us apart. But something had happened in that birth canal, because I was given the gene of complete trepidation and fear of the unknown, most importantly of myself, while Sam was given absolute confidence. Even as little kids, I trusted him completely, letting him be one step ahead, while I held his shirt from behind. He had been my protector and my only friend.
Sam had been popular and athletic, taking a spot on the varsity lacrosse roster when he was only a freshman. Besides having tons of friends, he also dated the hottest girl at our school and was completely faithful, even when she wasn’t around and other girls would crush all over him. He was kind, not only around adults, but even when people weren’t looking and listening. He never studied yet he got great grades, landing easily in the top ten in our class, while I was forced to study all the time just to get C’s. Sam was incredibly loyal and protective, if not overly protective of me. And even though I never quite fit in, he always kept me around. Always.
When our parents moved into a house with six bedrooms, three more than we needed, we chose to continue to share one. Lying awake late at night, he would tell me about the first time he kissed his girlfriend Jess and how he was so nervous that he almost threw up. When they first had sex, he told me about that too, but left out details that would make me uncomfortable or betray her privacy. In everyone’s eyes, Sam had been almost perfect and there had been times in those last six months that I had thought it should have been me instead of him. Many times.
After the accident, Mom told Dad she couldn’t stay in the house and she and I moved to the other side of town, to a neighborhood of houses that looked like they could be found in Cape Cod or Provincetown even though they dotted the edge of a man-made reservoir in Indiana. Dad stayed in the old house, and on weekends when I visited him, I’d sit in our old room and talk to Sam out loud like he was still there. I’d tell him about the new house and how mom had decided she wanted everything to be white because she wanted a new beginning. We had white floors, white walls and white, leather furniture. Even my room was all white, except for my Curious George clock I got as a birthday present when I was 8. It was an old fashioned, wind up clock, with bells on top and a picture of George playing on a ball. I loved watching the clock tick, soothing me back to a time when I was happy.
While looking up at the glow in the dark stars on our ceiling, I’d act as if he could really hear me. I’d tell him how his friends stopped by those first few weeks after the accident. They would visit with Mom and Dad, talking and telling stories about him, while closely watching me out of the corner of their eyes. I think I reminded them too much of Sam and eventually they stopped coming. I told him how I realized after he was gone that the only friends I had were his friends and once he wasn’t around, they weren’t really my friends anymore. Even his girlfriend Jess stopped calling after the first month. I told him about how I had to start a new high school, because Mom and Dad thought it would be best for me to have a fresh start and how I was sick of all of this fresh start business and that I just wanted to go back to before now when it was just that day and we were synchronizing our matching watches.
And then I would cry, because even though boys don’t cry, I did.
All of these things were going through my mind as Mom pulled up to Creston High School, the snobbiest public high school in Indiana and the new home of my senior year. I couldn’t be more thrilled. The only good thing about it was that the school year started on a Thursday, making the first whole week only two days. Exactly 16 hours and twenty minutes.
Mom put the car into park and turned to me, grabbing my hand again. I could see tears falling down her cheeks from underneath the side of her huge, black Chanel sunglasses. “Danny I love you very much. This has been very hard on all of us. I wish he was here too,” she said, choking on her words, as she took off her sunglasses and folded them in her lap. “I miss him every goddamn day; every second, every minute, every hour. But I had two children when I had twins and you’re just as special to me as Sam was, do you hear me?”
I nodded, not really knowing what to say. Mom had broken down so many times in the past few months that these movie script monologues were almost exactly the same every time. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her or feel bad for her, I just didn’t know what to say.
“Anyway, I don’t want you to start crying before you head into your first day of school.” She looked in the mirror and cleared the tears away from under her eyes, replacing her sunglasses. “I have a little surprise for you,” she continued with an undertone of excitement. “Your Uncle Alex is coming to stay with us for a while. He’s working on a new book and wants to come home to write it and I need, well, I just need him. Plus, I think his being here will be good for you too.”
My Uncle Alex wasn’t exactly my uncle. He was my mom’s best friend from high school. The same guy she had ran away with to New York and the same guy she had started a band with in freshman year, along with my father. After high school, Alex had written a book called Suburban Wasteland, about a group of teenagers from the Midwest, who bond during their senior year in high school. The storyline centered around the main character Woody, who brought all of the other misfit characters together, inspiring them to help each other survive the terrors of high school. At the end of the book, Woody killed himself and mom said it was the first book that had really made people stand up and take young people seriously.
The thing about the book wasn’t that it was the greatest story ever told, which it was, or that it had all these amazing, unforgettable characters, which it did; it was so much more than all of that. Uncle Alex had been so, “fuck the government, fuck the man” when he was a freshman at Indiana University that when he had submitted a shorter versio
n of the book to a creative writing class for an assignment, his professor had begged him to send it to a publisher. He refused. Instead, he formed a Suburban Wasteland zine, each edition holding a chapter and only making 100 copies of each edition. The book was passed around, through a tightly wound underground net of followers, who then passed it on to friends and siblings and eventually they made copies and the book was everywhere. It had become a crazy, social phenomenon with Uncle Alex at the helm of this huge, rebellious ship. He eventually signed on with a publisher and moved to Tahiti to work on his second book, writing my mother a postcard, which she still kept on the refrigerator. The back had only three words inscribed, “I’ve sold out”.
He had become one of the most sought after writers alive, almost a celebrity, but I think it’s because of the crazy following he started with those zines, which sell for about $1000 each on eBay and are impossible to find. We have all 50 copies, neatly placed in a plastic container in our basement, next to our Halloween and Christmas decorations.
The book was now required reading for most AP English classes, and Sam even had to read it last year for his Sociology class. I guess nobody had ever expected Suburban Wasteland to do very well, but it had turned out to be the rebellious Great American Novel. The completed book was turned into a movie, earning Alex an Oscar and inspiring him to write five more books, each garnering the same praise. I had read every single one of his books and I was his biggest fan. Mom knew how much I loved Uncle Alex, hero-worshiped him from afar, and the fact that he had been gay and out since he was my age was an added plus. I’m sure she thought he could give me advice and be the perfect “gay” mentor to my very silent and always afraid, mostly awkward self.
Mom pulled up in front of the school and put the truck into park. “Are you going to be OK?”
I always thought was a strange question. What exactly was OK? It wasn’t happy and it wasn’t sad, yet it wasn’t fine either. I wasn’t sure what it meant.
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