The Before Now and After Then

by Pen Name Publishing

  Mom and Uncle Alex were sitting on the back patio by the fire pit, drinking wine. When they heard me, they both turned around and Mom motioned to join them. She had changed her clothes into something more comfortable and was now in a white V-neck and white boxers. Everything was always black or white.

  Uncle Alex stood up to give me a hug. “Hey Danny. How’re you doing?”

  “I’m OK,” I lied.

  If Uncle Alex wasn’t my uncle, I’d probably think he was really good looking. He had curly, dark hair and horned rimmed glasses that made him look like a college professor. He was in pretty good shape because he ran every day. But what I always remembered most was how he smelled. Years before I had asked him what kind of cologne he wore, because I wanted to wear the same kind and smell just like him. He had laughed and told me he just wore Old Spice classic deodorant and no cologne. From that moment on, I only wore Old Spice deodorant and no cologne.

  Both he and Mom had wet hair, so I assumed they had been swimming. The light of the pool lit the back yard and the rain filled day had turned into a cloudless, late summer night.

  “Isn’t it beautiful out?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Go put your suit on and join us for a swim. We were just getting ready to order some Chinese and then maybe pick a movie to watch,” Mom said.

  “Umm,” I hesitated. “So I made this friend in school. Her name’s Cher. She wants me to hang out tonight. Is that cool?”

  “Cher?” Uncle Alex asked. “Not the Cher?”

  Both he and mom chuckled.

  “I didn’t know who she was,” I said.

  Uncle Alex turned around quickly. “While I’m here I’m definitely going to need to do Gay Education 101.”

  “So, is it ok?” I asked again.

  Mom looked at Alex. “Yeah, I guess it is,” she said. “You’ve never really had a curfew before, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just let him go, Alice. We never had curfews,” Alex nudged. I could tell they were both a little bit tipsy.

  “Ok then,” Mom said reluctantly, as she had been pretty overprotective since the accident. I had heard of parents who detach completely, but that wasn’t the case with Mom.

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Seriously. But I think tomorrow we should talk about what happened earlier.”

  I nodded my head and walked inside to get ready.

  I wasn’t sure what to wear, but decided on a pair of grey shorts and a white V-neck, just like Mom’s.

  Like promised, Cher arrived right at 7:30. I heard what sounded like an old motorcycle coming down our street, but when I looked out of my bedroom window, I saw Cher getting out of a decrepit black Honda hatchback. Even though I was far away, I could see bumper stickers wall-papering the entire car. She slammed the door and walked up to our house.

  I ran downstairs to get her before Mom and Alex could, opening the door just as she raised her fist to knock.

  “Hey,” I greeted.

  “Hey. I can’t believe this is your fucking house,” she commented while spreading her arms out in front of her. “The guard didn’t even want to let me in. I think he thought I was going to rob you all blind…” Her words trailed off as her eyes fell on something behind me.

  I turned around and saw my Mom and Alex standing in the entryway.

  “Holy shit!” Cher screamed, covering her mouth.

  “I hope that’s not for me?” Mom said.

  Cher kept her mouth covered and shook her head.

  “Me?” Alex said, sheepishly. “Aw shucks.”

  Cher took her hands down and ran past me, embracing Alex in a tight hug. “Oh my God! I’m so in love with you. You have no idea.” She stood back and looked at me and then back at Alex and then back at me. “I thought you were lying,” she whispered, punching my shoulder.

  The four of us walked through the entryway and into the kitchen while Cher talked non-stop to Alex about his books. Instead of stopping her as she rambled on and on about her extreme fandom of his work, he just let her hug his side. Someone who didn’t know them would have thought they had known each other for years.

  “Do you guys want to stay here for Chinese?” Mom asked.

  Cher shook her head. “I’d love to, but I promised my Mom I’d bring Danny back to meet her. She’s been dying to meet him since we met.”

  It had only been two days, I thought to myself.

  “Ok. Well, maybe another time?”

  Cher could hardly contain her excitement at the seemingly open invitation she had been given. “Absolutely! I mean, this house and you,” she exclaimed, pointing to Alex before turning to hug her new best friend, Mom. “And you, and oh my God! Do you actually have a swimming pool?” she said as she walked to the open patio doors, peering out like a child at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning. “I feel like I’m on Oprah’s favorite things show.”

  We all started laughing and Cher stopped to look at us. “What?” she said, and then she started laughing too.

  Mom and Alex walked us out and I got into Cher’s car, which she told us was named Linda, after Linda Blair, the actress in The Exorcist. I’m not sure this made Mom feel any safer, but when she saw a bumper sticker that said The Sex Pistols, Mom went into a whole story about her first car, until Uncle Alex literally had to drag her inside.

  “This is the best night of my life,” Cher exclaimed as she backed out of my driveway, scissoring back and forth, almost taking out several bushes.

  I watched Mom and Alex as they faded away on the front porch. Cher pulled out a pack of clove cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head and she tucked the pack back into her bag. The clove scent filled the car as Cher turned up the radio. Immediately I recognized the song as American Pie. Sam and I had sung it on road trips for years, memorizing every word. Cher and I rolled down our windows, letting the August wind dance in our hair, as we sang every word, just like Sam and I did back when we were kids. For just a brief second, I started to feel my coloring book pages fill with color. And for just a moment, everything was OK.

  Chapter Nine

  Cher’s house didn’t look anything like I had imagined. Actually, I’m not sure what I had imagined. Maybe something purple, like her hair, with crazy pink flamingos filling the yard. Instead, her house was a small, white house set way back off of a country road. Three plump ferns hung on the front porch next to a hanging swing.

  “Home sweet home,” Cher sang, getting out of the car. I hesitantly opened the door, nerves overtaking me as I felt myself being forced upwards again. Following her up the gravel driveway into the dark garage, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but as we entered into the house’s side door my senses were overcome with comfort.

  “Mom, we’re here,” Cher shouted.

  I always thought it was interesting when you went to someone’s house for the first time that the smell of their home would forever be cemented into your mind. Cher’s house smelled like clean linen and oranges.

  “In here!” I heard a woman shout back.

  I followed Cher into the kitchen and found her mom sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine and drinking a glass of lemonade. If I had conjured up any idea of what she might look like, what I found was the farthest from the truth.

  Cher’s mom was overweight. Not just a little overweight, but extremely overweight. Her hair was black and extremely long, cut just like I had seen in the pictures of the famous Cher from years before. She was dressed in scrub pants and a matching shirt, which I assumed was her uniform for work as a nurse.

  She dog-eared the magazine and turned in her chair to look at me. “So you’re the Danny I’ve heard so much about the last few days?” She pushed herself up, the chair creaking under her weight. “I’m Ruth, the mother of the most perfect daughter in the whole world!” She waddled over and gave me a huge hug, not letting go for what felt like minutes as I inhaled her cotton candy body spray.

  “It’s nice
to meet you ma’am,” I said.

  “Ma’am?” Ruth scowled. “No ma’am’s in this house! Call me Ruth.” Her scowl turned into a smile and we followed her into the living room.

  Two recliners sat in front of a large flat screen TV, which was tuned to some true crime show. On almost every surface, including walls, table tops and on the makeshift mantle above the TV, were framed pictures of the singer Cher. In the corner was a tall, cardboard cutout of the Cher I had seen from the Oscars, headdress and all.

  “I told Danny that you were dying for me to have a gay best friend,” Cher laughed, while basically sitting on her mother’s lap in one of the recliners while I sat in the other one and watched them. Ruth pushed her off, laughing as Cher settled on the floor.

  “You did?” She turned to me. “Now I’m embarrassed. I hope Cher knows I want her to pick her friends because of who they are not what they are. But I’m glad you have him,” she smiled as she turned back to her daughter. “Did Cher tell you what a great singer she is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on honey,” she coaxed the real Cher in the room. “Sing I’ve Got You Babe. You sing it so good you might even sing it better than Cher herself!”

  “Mom, not now, please?” Cher begged.

  “It’s my favorite Sonny and Cher song,” Ruth explained. “I love it because it’s all about how if you’re in love, nothing else matters.”

  Rusty’s face popped into my head as Ruth started to hum the song.

  It’s a funny thing when people describe someone to you and then you think you have an idea of what they will be like, only to find that in reality, they’re nothing like you imagined at all. Other than her obsession with the star Cher, Ruth was just a normal mom. And what I loved most about Cher, in that moment, was that she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed of her mom. In fact, she believed her to be so much more than she actually was. She cherished her and was proud of her.

  “What are you kids up to tonight?”

  “Well, we’re supposed to pick up Henry and Maude and then we’re going to go to hear some band Henry likes,” Cher said, rolling her eyes. This was news to me and more information about Henry than she had ever offered up in our limited friendship.

  “I don’t like that boy. I think he should treat you better,” Ruth huffed.

  “Not again,” Cher moaned, standing up. “Come on, Danny. Let me show you my room.”

  “I’m leaving for work in a few minutes,” Ruth chimed in. “I’ll see you in the morning. You know how to get in touch with me if you need me.”

  Cher grabbed my hand and led me down a dark hallway.

  She opened the door and flipped on the lights into one of the most magnificent sights I had ever seen. Although the room was extremely small, it was completely alive. Every single space of each wall was covered with magazine scraps that looked like she had deliberately selected and pasted each one, forming one giant collage. Red Christmas lights hung from the corners of the room, over a small bed with a mosquito net floating above it. The carpet had been ripped up and in its place was left the raw cement on which she had written words and quotes. “Tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day, man.” was scrawled across the floor in front of her bed.

  I pointed to it. “Janis Joplin.”

  “Very good,” she said, surprised.

  “My mom’s really big into music.”

  Cher fell onto her bed. She motioned for me to sit next to her. “What do you think?”

  I looked around, trying to take in every ounce of the busy décor. It literally felt like the nesting place of Cher’s soul. “This is the coolest bedroom I have ever seen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My room is totally plain,” I said, feeling a little sad as my mind drifted to my own room.

  “Why don’t you do something to it?”

  I thought about it for a second. If I explained what my room used to look like, I would have to explain to her about Sam and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that yet. I had found that when people knew I had a dead brother they started treating me differently.

  “It’s a long story,” I whispered.

  “We have all night,” she said, leaning against the wall behind her bed. She fumbled in her bag before locating a cigarette and lighting it.

  “Your mom lets your smoke in here?” I asked, motioning to an ashtray on her nightstand overflowing with cigarette butts.

  “No,” she smiled. “What’s the story?”

  I don’t know why, but I told her. Maybe I trusted her or maybe I was tired of having it inside, but it didn’t seem like something I needed to hide anymore. “My brother and I used to share a room.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said, more a question than a statement.

  “A twin.”

  She sat up and smiled, “Hopefully an identical twin.”

  “Actually, yes. But…”

  “But what?”

  I paused for a moment. I had never really told the story before and now it was too late to turn back. Everyone involved in my life already knew the truth.

  “He died last spring,” I said.

  Cher put her hand to her mouth and grabbed her lip, sincerely in shock, “Holy shit.” “Yeah, so there’s that,” I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “How?” she asked. “I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s ok,” I paused for a moment, trying to figure out how to tell the hardest story of my life. “It was our birthday. We had made this stupid plan about how I was going to come out to my parents. We decided he would go to the bark park with our dog, Griffin. Then he was going to come back and interrupt the whole thing and make some stupid joke,” I smiled, thinking about Sam and how he could always make everything funny. “I sat on the porch for a long time, thinking about what I was going to say but not really wanting to go inside. Finally, I walked inside to tell my parents, but overheard them fighting about my dad having an affair with his personal trainer, Jenny. I tried to walk back downstairs, but before I could, my parent’s bedroom door opened and they knew I had heard the fight so we all just stood there in silence. I didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out ‘I’m gay’. Two seconds later, the doorbell rang and I thought it would be Sam, but instead, it was the police, telling us about the accident.”

  I suddenly noticed that even though I was telling this story for the first time, reliving it to some degree, I wasn’t crying. I didn’t even feel any emotion attached to the details, like watching a movie you’re not very interested in. I continued, empowered by my ability to finally let it out. “The worst part was that while we were getting ready to go to the hospital, my mom turned on the news and there was coverage of the accident. Sam had been hit by a drunk driver. She was some soccer mom who was late picking up her kids and she went through a red light. The news showed their bodies lying on the street, covered with white sheets. And next to them was a smaller sheet covering Griffin, his little white tail peeking out from underneath.” And that was when I started crying.

  I looked up at Cher as she just sat there, her half smoked cigarette with an ash a mile long hanging from her lips. “I thought at first you were making this up, but you aren’t are you?” she asked, softly.

  I shook my head.

  It was strange that the memory of Griffin was what made me cry. I had never really blamed the woman who was late picking up her kids. I knew it was her fault, but her kids had lost their mom. And maybe it was because I had never really grieved, but thinking about Griffin’s little tail made the memory very real in its tiniest details.

  I wiped my eyes. “So that’s why my walls are blank. When Sam and I shared a room, everything was his. I don’t really know who I am because for so long I’ve lived by his side and I’ve never had to think about that before. He always just told me who to be and what to do. It was easy.”

  Cher put her cigarette out and reached across the bed,
hugging me. “Well, we’re going to figure that out together,” she offered. I noticed that she was crying too. “I’ve never known my dad.”

  “I know. You told me,” I said.

  “I guess I was trying to not make you feel so bad. But I guess it’s not really the same thing, is it.” She stood up, stretching her arms over her head. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She took off her shirt and skirt and threw them onto the floor. She stood in front of her closet wearing nothing but her underwear; trying to figure out what outfit she wanted to wear that evening. It felt strange that she was so comfortable changing in front of me, so I turned away.

  “Let’s hit it,” she said. I turned around and she was dressed in a black t-shirt and cut off jean shorts with black Chinese flats.

  We gave her mom a quick farewell and promised to behave as we stepped outside into the cool air. She struggled for a minute with her car’s rusted door locks before we climbed in and shot off down the road.

  “Henry and Maude live about fifteen minutes from here,” she explained. “They go to Chapel.” I had known other kids that Sam was friends with who had gone to the private school Chapel Jesuit. They were known for being very smart and very snotty.

  “Do their names ever remind you of that movie, Harold and Maude?”

  “Huh?” she rummaged through her backpack, finally pulling out a tube of purple lipstick.

  “That movie. Harold and Maude,” I said.

  “Yeah, what about it?” she asked.

  “Their names are almost identical.”

  “They’re nothing like that movie.” She put the lipstick on while we sat at a red stoplight. “They can hardly stand each other.”

  “How did you guys meet?” I asked.

  She sighed, “Maude and I used to work together at this ice cream store. She introduced us. They’ve been friends forever.”

  “How long have you guys been together?”

  “Since last spring. And it’s been wonderful.”

  I noticed she didn’t smile. She just said it like it was a fact. I wondered if she really believed it or if she was trying to convince herself. I had learned that when people asked me if I was OK, I would always say yes, and over time, I started to believe it. It’s a weird thing when you start to believe your own lies.