“Not the point,” she said sharply. “Now, if you have a fake ID, I want you to hand it over. Those things can get you into a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t have one, and that’s the honest truth. They’re pretty lax up in Federal Hill.”
She scowled at me. “Second, I don’t see any point in grounding you now that you’re eighteen years old. But you and your brother will make dinner for the family all this week to make up for scaring me and your father half to death.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “I can live with that.”
“I’ll be upstairs in a minute,” my mom told my dad with a sigh. “I need to decompress in my office for a bit.”
My dad remained at the table, thumbing his scruff as he eyed me and Kyle.
“I talked her out of calling the police,” he said. “So, you’re welcome.”
“Thanks, Dad,” we mumbled.
“For that, Mattie, you owe me a Star Trek marathon. I’m glad you’ve made some new friends, but you can’t forget about your dear old dad.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, deal. Sorry I haven’t been around a lot.”
“No apologies needed, Mattie Ross. Just . . . use your head. Okay?”
I nodded and he headed off to bed.
At that point, my parental-emergency adrenaline was waning, but Kyle wanted nachos. He carefully layered a batch, and we sat in comfortable silence as it heated up in the toaster oven.
“That’s a masterpiece,” I said when set a plate of cheesy goodness in front of me. “Also, thanks. And not just for the nachos.”
“A small price to pay for a good night. I haven’t seen Austin and Connor that happy in a while.” He paused to shove another nacho in his mouth. “Are you ever going to tell them the truth?” he whispered.
“You mean Mom and Dad? Don’t you think they’d, like, disown me?”
He laughed. “Uh, yeah. Probably. But they’d also probably dig your act. Especially mom.”
I thought of all the times my mom had told me what it was like to play in a band. I pictured her onstage in a smoky bar, a guitar resting on her hip as her roommate screamed her guts out into a shitty mic.
Clearly, that girl sporting a guitar—and her boyfriend who was addicted to Westerns and paying his way through trade school by delivering pizzas—would appreciate Salone Postale and my leap from consumption to creation. But they weren’t just that punker girl and her goofy-smart boyfriend anymore. They were also my parents.
“They’d dig it if it wasn’t me.”
He nodded and swallowed a mouthful of nacho. “How did you do it?”
“I had a lot of help.”
“Yeah, but how did you even know where to start?”
For the first time in probably ever, my brother was asking me for advice.
“You just start with something you love or, at least, really really like. Do you still like basketball?”
He shrugged.
“Does basketball make you want to spring out of bed in the morning?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not the right thing. When was the last time you were so absurdly happy you stopped thinking about everything except the thing you were doing?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know. Most of the time, all I want to do is sit in my room and play video games.”
“Hm. Maybe that’s it then.”
He squinted at me. “You think I should be a professional gamer?”
“Well, no. But someone has to make the games, Kyle.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about programming.”
“Not yet.”
I hugged my brother, took one more nacho for the road and started to head upstairs. Something pulled me back down, and I found myself loitering in the doorway of the mom-cave.
“Can I help you, kiddo?” my mom asked from her armchair, her face half-obscured by an old issue of Punk Planet.
“Can I look through your old scrap books? I was just thinking about you and your days of Doc Martens and purple hair. I could use a good laugh.”
She snorted. “Knock yourself out.”
I scanned my mom’s bookshelf and let my fingers brush the spines of her many photo albums. My finger stopped on a black leather spine labeled with Wite-Out pen—Summer Tour - 1992. I curled up on the sagging futon, hoping to find some comfort in those hilarious snippets of my parents’ youth. As an admittedly lonely tween, I’d spent many a Sunday morning on that futon, giggling my little ass off as I pored over the photos, ticket stubs, guitar picks, and occasional love notes scribbled on the back of a set list or a grease-dotted receipt for fast food. My mom and her band had toured a few Midwestern cities and small towns after they graduated from Oberlin, playing sets in sweaty dive bars and decaying basement clubs. My dad had been their roadie that summer, though my mom always said he made a better electrician than an audio tech.
I paused to examine a candid Polaroid taken outside a frozen custard stand in St. Louis. My mom’s purple hair stood out like a burst of Technicolor in the Polaroid’s otherwise muted tones as she shoved a spoonful of custard into my dad’s mouth. The band’s lead singer laughed at the two of them, her toothy smile totally incongruous with the thick black liner rimming her eyes. The drummer, no doubt keenly aware of the importance of documenting the band’s fleeting heyday, had taken the photo and left a small smudge on the upper right-hand corner of the lens, blurring the clouds in the background.
My mom and her bandmates gave themselves laughable pseudonyms like Cathy Crush and Ashley Asphalt. I’d always thought it was dumb. As a smart-mouthed twelve-year-old, I remember asking if they’d lied about their real names because none of them really knew how to play their instruments. My mom just laughed it off, probably presuming that her preteen kid who liked Herbie Hancock more than Hüsker Dü couldn’t possibly understand why she’d dyed her hair and picked up a guitar in the first place.
Turns out she was right. But almost half a year into my double life as a part-time escapologist, I finally got it. All that screechy noise and those larger-than-life stage names had given my mom and her friends license to transform themselves each night into the people they really wanted to be. Without Ginger the intrepid orphan standing like a smirking shadow between me and the crowd at Salone Postale, I wouldn’t have been able to set foot on that stage for my first performance.
I glanced up from the photo at my mom. Though she didn’t call herself Ashley Asphalt anymore, artifacts from her punk rock past filled her mom-cave. When she smiled at my dad, her face still held a glimmer of the wild-eyed grin she wore when the Polaroid was taken. And she didn’t spend her nights filling a dive bar with feedback, but that kind of fuck-off brashness still popped up now and again, like when she chided my grandmother for her casual, old-person racism or rolled her eyes when people called her ma’am.
And yet, she wasn’t some one-dimensional grownup version of a purple-haired stage persona. She was my mom.
My eyes fell back to the faded Polaroid, and I thought of all the gauzy, soft-focus photos of Akiko I’d stumbled on during my many feverish escapology research sessions. She never had a stage name, but with her neon wigs and her mysterious smile and her cryptic interviews, she’d obviously spent decades building a stage persona. The mythology surrounding her ran so deep it took on a life of its own, and fans like me were still clinging to it, almost sixteen years after her death.
But the Akiko in the journal wasn’t just a plucky schoolgirl who talked her way into a magic show. She was also a scared-shitless kid who covered up her fear with snark and pulled out her own hair before every performance. And she wasn’t just a demure but determined young lady who came to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa and stayed to build an underground empire. She was also a hot-headed cynic with a soft-spot for bad boy clichés, and, let’s face it, an occasionally neglectful parent who still reall
y loved her accidentally-conceived daughter.
I pictured Miyu as a little sprite, swishing a foam samurai sword to get her mom’s attention. How could a kid that young deal with having to share her mom with the world? Especially when the world only saw the neon-wigged Akiko who winked at the camera, not the patchy-haired Akiko who tucked Miyu in at night.
Now I felt like an ass for all the psychofan questions I’d sprung on her. How was she even supposed to answer? The miary must have been her last-ditch attempt to stitch together the disparate pieces of life her mom left behind. To reverse engineer her mother’s untouchable stage persona and turn her back into a flesh and blood human being.
“You look like you’re thinking pretty hard over there,” my mom said. “You’re doing that same brow-furrowing thing your dad does when he watches Westerns.”
“Huh? Oh, I guess. I might’ve just come up with a thesis for my history project.”
“Hm.”
She turned the page of her magazine and studied me over the rims of her glasses. I don’t know how, but I felt it coming, like the way you can feel a sneeze brewing in your nose. “Mattie, is there something you want to tell me?”
There I was, standing right on the precipice. Not that arbitrary line I’d crossed when I turned eighteen, but a palpable line. On one side, I could remain a kid in my parents’ eyes. On the other, I’d become something else. Some sort of quasi grown-up who risked her life to entertain and inspire a theater full of mostly-strangers.
Yes, mom. There are lots of things. But I can’t. Not yet.
I’m sure it looks like this was all about me. But really, the poor woman had had enough for one night. The circles under her eyes looked as dark as newsprint smudges.
“You know,” I coughed, “if you leave all your records stacked up like that, they’ll warp.”
“Though it pains me to take advice on vinyl from a millennial, you’re right. Maybe tomorrow you can help me reorganize them.”
“Yeah. Cool. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mattie.”
I ran upstairs and checked LifeScape to make sure Meadow hadn’t already spilled the misinformed beans about me and Will to the whole school. All was quiet on the digital front, but there was still time for the rumor mill to churn out something cringe-worthy.
“What were your parents like?” The Hummingbird’s foster sister asked one night as the two of them were lying in their beds, both still awake and listening to the traffic outside.
“I’ve never met my dad. He was an art student.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“My mom was an escape artist.”
“She took off a lot?”
“No, I mean she was literally an escape artist. She would get on stage and escape from straitjackets, chains, locks, handcuffs, aquariums . . .
The girl with the steely blue nails snorted. “You’re full of shit, but you’re funny, I’ll give you that.”
The Hummingbird and I both had a good laugh.
— Akiko Miyake, Cranston, October 14, 2000
Will With Two Ls Faces
the Earsplitting Cacophony
After I dropped Mattie at her house so she could quell the impending ’rent-wrath, I figured I could spend the drive to Grayton contemplating how I could possibly explain what I’d done to the unsuspecting Bonnie to my Clyde.
But it was all for naught, because my phone rang before I’d even had a chance to drive ten blocks.
“Hey, babycakes,” I purred, hoping against hope that she was calling for a little idle chitchat and still blissfully unaware of all the lies I’d ensnared her in.
“Don’t you dare babycakes me, you dick,” she screamed. “Are you fucking cheating on me?”
“Uhh . . .”
Two things should be noted at this point. One, even though Betsy had reinvented herself after junior high, for some reason I still expected her to react to the news from Meadow like a stereotypical tweenage drama queen. I had prepared myself for tearful hysterics, sniffly woe-is-mes, and long, cathartic love-hate notes penned in Betsy’s loopy handwriting.
Instead, she let forth a string of curse words blue enough to make a sailor blush. I was so shocked I had to pull over my car or risk crashing into one of the little stone walls that run along the highway.
Two, for a moment, I actually considered telling Betsy I’d cheated on her with Mattie. I figured she’d hate me but she’d buy it, and I could go on keeping my secret from the populace.
But I owed Betsy (and Mattie) so much more than that.
“Can I come over?” I asked. The last thing I wanted to do was lay everything bare over the dry, icy landscape of a cell phone convo. Truly, that’s not my style.
“You’re joking, right? First off, it’s two a.m. and my dad would have a shit fit. And if I see you in person right now I swear to god I will coldcock you.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “Where are you? Are you sitting down?”
“I’m in the basement so my dad can’t hear me screaming my head off at you. And don’t tell me to sit down. If I want to stand, then I’m gonna stand. Now stop stalling because I want all the shameful details. How did it start? Do you guys have a class together?”
“What? Who?”
“Mattie, you assface!”
“Oh. Jeezus, Bets, hold up a sec. Though I am indeed a two-faced, lying asshole, I’m not cheating on you with Mattie.”
“Is it that twiggy smart-bitch, then? Stella?”
I had to bite my lip to keep from giggling at that one. Focus, man. This is serious.
“No. Good lord, Betsy, no.” I exhaled a deep breath. “Okay, I need to tell you something. I know you’re pissed, and you’re probably going to be even pissier after I tell you, but I need you to just give me a minute so I can actually tell you.”
“Great,” she deadpanned. “Get on with it then.”
“I love you Betsy, I really do. You’re just . . . you’re the cat’s meow, and you’ve transformed yourself into such an amazing person.”
“Stop buttering me up and get to the freaking point, Will.”
“Sorry. I love you, but not the way you want me to. Because . . . I’m gay.”
Silence. And not a small silence, but a deep, practically uncrossable chasm of silence.
“Hello?” I asked after almost thirty nerve-wracking seconds had passed.
There was more screaming and more cursing. And, because buried religious impulses tend to surface when folks are scared and angry, she told me I was going to hell. Then the distinct timbre of shattering glass echoed through the phone.
“Hello?” I asked again before realizing she’d hung up on me.
Honestly, I don’t even remember driving home. But I must’ve because I opened the Lincoln’s door to find Stella standing in my driveway.
“What happened to you guys?” she asked, though she sounded more concerned than angry. “Where’s Mattie?”
“Long story. Where’s Frankie?”
She hooked her thumb toward her little jalopy. “Asleep in the back seat. Way past his bedtime. And my bedtime. I’m running on fumes. Everything okay?”
I realized the storm surge I’d felt the night I’d come out to Mattie had been a mere tempest in a teapot compared to the seismic tremor rumbling through me now. The tectonic plates of my life were buckling, slipping from their molten beds, free floating toward to-be-determined destinations. Nothing is ever going to be the same.
Stella has arms like a stick figure, but somehow she gives amazing hugs. Practically life-changing hugs. Before I could reply to her question, she saw the face of a boy confronted with a pile of crumbling lies and threw her arms around me.
There may have been some melodramatic sobbing and sniffling into Stella’s cardigan sweater.
At some point, she coaxed me into the house, mad
e me a cup of tea, and curled up on my parents’ Italian leather sofa. By the grace of god, none of this woke my parents. If I’d had to face my mom at that point, I probably would have gone catatonic.
My phone rang as I took my first sip of Sleepytime Extra. I left Stella asleep on the couch and snuck out to the back deck before accepting the call.
“Hey,” I answered with a shiver.
“I threw my phone through the basement window. Can you believe that? It woke my dad up so I had to come up with some dumb story about how some kids on bikes were throwing rocks at houses. Like some kind of preteen, gasoline-free biker gang.”
I probably should have laughed at that, but given the circumstances it would have sounded so forced. “Betsy, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can say.”
She sighed. “What you did is beyond fucked up. You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know you were gay back when we first started dating?”
“Yes.”
More silence. “Wow. Just, wow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me back in middle school? I probably would’ve been more than happy to be your beard back then. Secrets, lies, and drama. That was my bread and butter.”
This time I did laugh. “I should’ve.”
She sighed again. “I’m going to tell you two things, but they in no way excuse what you’ve done.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if I could have gotten through my parents’ divorce without you.”
This brought on another bout of tears, though I managed to keep the sobbing inaudible.
“Also, and this is going to sound dumb, you probably saved me from four years of dating jerkweeds like Ryder.”
This brought on more laughter and more tears and a little bonding over our mutual disdain for jovial, socially-oblivious cads who think they can do no wrong.
“Was it just awful for you when we fooled around?”
“No.”
“Did you hook up with any guys while we were together? Wait, don’t answer that.”
The Art of Escaping Page 21