We feasted on our leftover meals of grilled polenta and chicken that we had eaten earlier. We stretched out on the floor and crossed our legs. It was like laying a lunch down by our own private river, no one around but us. Every night Laura told me stories about growing up. She gave me every detail, down to what she was made to wear as a child. With each recounting, parts of her personality came flying into place. That night she told me about Sarah, whose family had invented the bottle cap. Sarah, who was the inspiration for JT’s mother. As she told me about her childhood friend, she seemed to go into a trance. And when she felt me nodding off, she painted my face like she did with Thor—my eyelids, my cheeks—in loose round strokes, telling me what colors she was using as she went.
As I stooped to undo the last of the tags, I could smell her green-tea sunblock mixing with frankincense, which she always applied, behind her ears, in her cleavage, and if we were in an opportune place, down her tights, which she always wore except to bed. I was wearing my wig and sunglasses. We moved outside of the line. “We’re in no hurry to go through customs. That line will be there when JT is ready to go through those doors.” Laura had no problem separating herself from the herd.
Before the trip, Laura had been in and out of the hospital for her calcium levels, so she had acquired official wheelchair privileges at the airport. We cut through the sprawling line with people glaring at us.
We always had too much carry-on luggage—at least two small pieces of luggage filled with our clothing, a backpack full of Laura’s vitamins, makeup, and dental care supplies (she never went anywhere without her electric toothbrush), and a big paper bag full of treats and bottles of water. With wheelchair privileges we could pile everything onto her lap. A man would get us through to our gate. Laura always generously tipped the people who pushed her the extra distance.
When we got out of the airplane in Rome, Laura didn’t bother calling for the wheelchair. As we exited, the beige doors swung open onto a crowd of families and limousine drivers holding up placards. I spotted the four employees of our Italian publisher Fazi, with a sign scrawled in a thick marker: “JT!!!”
Simone, who was about five-foot-four with a receding hairline and eyeglasses that seemed to fog up from his smile, held the sign. He shouted in a thick accent “JT!” He stood there with Loretta, a tall woman with an elegant bob, and Valeria, who was younger with long curly brown hair and ripped jeans.1
Laura asked to sit in the front seat of the car because of “me long legs.” Simone packed our three huge bags into the trunk of the roller skate-sized car but had to fit the third on Valeria’s lap. He got in the driver’s seat and flipped on Generation X, turning back to me to say, “ JT! I know you like it. Billy Idol’s debut!” I noticed his chest build and collapse as he spoke.
Both of the women looked over at me. It took me a second and I replied, “Yeah. I love it. How did you know?”
Simone took his hand off the wheel as if he was demonstrating the horizon, pointing at the tenements and green fields and cocked his head, “I just know.”
Laura said, “Yeah, we listen to this stuff all the time at home with our boy. I grew up on this stuff!”
Simone looked over to her, his forearms leaning on the wheel now, looking straight at her. “Oh yes? And where did you grow up, Speedie?” I knew his driving was irritating her. She couldn’t stand it when people took their eyes off the road. I could tell she was debating whether to tell him.
“All over. Eyes on the road, now! Me pa was a man of the government, but I ran away and lived in squats starting when I was a green bean. This was the hot album back then. JT just found out about a lot of this music. Right, JT? You grew up with some of it ’cause of your ma. Keep your eyes on the road now, look alive!” He didn’t seem to hear her.
I nodded vigorously.
“At home he doesn’t go out at all. You should consider yourselves blessed.”
“Oh, we do!” Simone exclaimed. “It is an honor, JT. An honor. We really love your work! We were not sure if you would come or not. We are very excited.” He turned down the music. “So, now we have espresso and snack. And then we drop you off for a shower, and we meet you at the press conference. Asia, she come to pick you up in a taxi at your hotel with Loretta.” I looked over and she smiled. He continued, “Then lunch with Fazi himself, and his son. He comes just to meet you. I think you will like him. And tomorrow you and Asia will read in the Siepe at night for the literature festival.” By now I was having mini heart attacks. A press conference? A reading? Holy fuck. Right off the plane? I needed to cram to prepare myself. Simone must have noticed my electric socket response because he said, “Don’t worry, JT. We going to draw you up an itinerary.”
Laura said, “Yeah, we need that. Otherwise we’ll never remember any of this. Fazi knows how to put the boy to work, eh?”
“Well, it’s busy now because of the festival, but later we will have time for sight-seeing.”
Valeria added, “And we will see Garbage perform later in the trip. I like that song they made for you, JT. It’s very good!”
I wished they would just be quiet for a second so I could focus on my hysteria.
Laura began to sing, “‘Go on boy, go.’ Yeah, that song has reached the charts. We get amazing reactions to the books. Bono was quoted saying the book is blowing his mind, and Madonna just read it . . .”
She went on and on, and they all listened with rapt attention, exclaiming with delight as she reeled through the list of accolades from famous fans.
Laura had given me a bunch of print interviews with JT to look at on the plane, but I only read a few, then fell asleep. Laura had also given me an article about Asia. I had never heard of her. It was in I-D magazine, a spaciously laid out, lap-sized magazine with grainy black and white portraits of Asia, pregnant, smoking in the bathtub. I got the feeling she loved to shock people. JT and Asia had been emailing for a few months. Laura implied their exchanges were flirtatious.
We had packed a chicken for the airplane ride. Pointing with her drumstick, Laura said, “I have a good feeling about her.” I had already popped a sleeping pill, having eaten my share of the chicken.
“Love me some chicken!” Then Laura popped an Ambien, too.
As it set in, we looked at each other cross-eyed and began giggling.
The magazines that Laura wrote for seemed like a road map of pop culture—lacquered portraits, fashion spreads, and articles written by people who had their fingers on the pulse of everything important. I wallowed in the fashion spreads. They’ve already done that? I fretted, biting my nails. I was going to do that in duct tape! My passion for clothing was piqued by designers’ interest in JT. I was on my way to collecting a trove of unisex clothes. Calvin Klein offered to custom-make JT a suit, and he gave me a slew of beautifully tailored pants. I had never gotten my hands on beautiful clothes like these, and I was amazed at how empowered the well-tailored clothing made me feel. My means had so far been limited, but I was inspired to go beyond duct tape.
“We’re going to eat breakfast, right?” Laura directed this question to Simone. “Because JT can’t do a bunch of press without eating something.” The last thing I needed was food. I glared at her.
“We go to get a snack now.”
“But will there be eggs and stuff like that?”
“Ah, I don’t know, we will see. It will be good. You don’t have to worry, Speedie.”
“That’s my job, Simone. They don’t call me JT’s handler for nothing.”
We arrived at what looked like a bakery. The waiter brought us into a vaulted, many-mirrored room. He started filling the table with silver-tiered trays of pastries and colorful cookies. Everyone ordered espresso so I ordered espresso too, and Laura asked, “A mochachino? Or macchiato? Can they put chocolate in it?” I slammed my espresso and ordered another. They passed around blond cookies, cookies with jam, and chocolate spread, but I refused each one. I could feel the caffeine setting in. I was worried about gaining weight
with the way Laura and I had been eating, especially late at night. In reaction, I was on a special regiment during the days. Coffee and red ginseng until I couldn’t speak: that was how I knew I was ready to begin eating. I resented Laura’s obsession with food, feeling that just when I was about able to practice self-control, she threw me back into my own dysfunctions.
After coffee, I felt more hysterical and less tired. While nobody was looking I popped a beaker of ginseng for good measure. The plan was that Loretta would wait in the lobby as we changed our clothes at the hotel. Asia would come shortly after.
Our dim hotel lobby felt like the living room of a great aunt who loves cats and never leaves the house. The concierge looked at us with disdain. He dragged our bags through the narrow stairwell to our room, which was musty. It consisted of a queen-sized bed and a vanity.
“You want to take a shower? We have a little time,” Laura said in a gentle way, then mumbled, “Guess Fazi hasn’t made it big yet. Lucky they got JT on their team.”
As I undressed, her tone changed. “I knew it. I knew they would do that. I need eggs in the morning. You know how you need coffee? I need eggs. None of this sugar breakfast. I get loopy.” I jumped in the shower, turning the cold faucet. It was humid here. I left the door open. It was a claw foot tub with an opaque shower curtain. The vines at the window blurred green. Was she blaming me for the cookie breakfast?
“I need you to be my advocate in the future. People don’t listen to what I need, so I need you to speak up for me.” That was true. People didn’t respond to her demands in the same way that they responded to JT’s. In fact, they were often hostile to them. I am not taking care of Laura’s needs, I thought guiltily. But I was also starting to resent this fucked-up dynamic. Why was she always dependent on others to get what she needed?
“I get it.” Rolling my eyes, I let the cold water run over my head. I wasn’t going to get into it with her this time. We had already had many versions of this conversation on other JT outings. I would bellow, “Why should I order something I don’t want to eat?”
“Why do you only think of yourself? Maybe someone else would want to eat it. Like your brother, or your nephew. You can always pack it up.” Frustrated, she would often say, “You’re such a goy!” She’d point out that my people had never suffered through the years, so we never felt the need to take extra for loved ones. In fact, I’d had the opposite training. My parents both had an aversion to excess. They never bought paper towels. My father left everything dirty, and my mother compulsively washed everything with old dishrags worn threadbare; then she compulsively washed those. On Saturdays, Hennessey and I got on our hands and knees and dusted underneath the beds and bathtub with these rags. My mother wore her clothes until they were full of holes, elbows worn out like someone’s jaws hanging open. She only bought enough groceries for one day at a time. And when people came over for dinner they went home and ate again because the portions were so small at our house.
My father was frugal in a different way. He never threw anything away. He refused to pay full price for his produce, so he would scout out “perfectly good” tomatoes and apples in the bruise bin of the discount food store and buy them in bulk. He kept every plastic bag to pack up bruised fruit or to use as garbage bags. On a recent camping trip, when we cooked a meal together, he pointed out, “You missed a spot!” There was a little grain sticking to the lip of the pot that I accordingly scraped into the serving bowl. I had never realized where I inherited this part of my own meagerness until that moment.
Laura is clean, much cleaner than I am, but as soon as she enters a room she messes it up. She could do it in a matter of minutes, flooding the space with magazine articles, loose pieces of paper, plastic bags, and chocolate wrappers. As soon as she went into a bathroom she would throw the fluffy white hotel towels onto the floors. She hated how the cold tile felt on her bare feet. This habit bothered me. I hated the feeling of wrinkled fabric under my feet.
Laura was always on the hunt. She would carry plastic zip lock bags to take extra food from a buffet, and shopping bags for “other things.” You never knew what you might come upon. She would pat herself on the back afterwards for her resourcefulness, committed to whatever she had foraged. She would disperse things to others even if they didn’t want her free shit. I think they would take it out of politeness. Sometimes there was someone who genuinely appreciated that stolen toilet paper or pound of year-old peanut brittle. Nothing seemed to please Laura as much as this. But to me, it was excess. It exhausted me because I was trying to find a place for it to go. I could relate to foraging, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like free things. But quantity freaked me out.
“What if I don’t know the answers?” I said, changing my tone to a whine. I had only done that one interview in New York and it hadn’t gone very well. This time Laura wouldn’t be there to back me up. My stomach felt cramped from anxiety about the upcoming press, and distended and heavy from traveling.
I got out of the shower and frisked myself dry, wrapping the towel around me. I pulled out Laura’s past interviews. There were so many questions about JT’s life. Why didn’t they ask about his writing? Reporters rarely asked about the books, more mesmerized by his survivor story. As long as people stuck to questions about the mundane details of JT’s life, I was okay. What was JT’s favorite color? Yellow. His taste in literature? Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Breece D’J Pancake. He liked Wiffle ball and dark chocolate. We definitely didn’t have the same taste in music; he had Laura’s taste. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, but I am a music snob. And it pained me to say I liked Pearl Jam and Silverchair. And it seemed to hint that JT was not who he said he was. None of my peers—JT and I were supposed to be the same age—liked the new music Laura listened to.
At the readings in New York and Los Angeles, I met fans who were hungry for JT’s acknowledgment. They told me how the books had affected them, and they recounted their own life stories. I listened silently and held their hands. I rationalized to myself that JT was a conduit for many people who had suffered and survived. JT existed as a force of energy flying above our heads, a symbol of hope for those who had undergone the same kind of trauma and lived through it. Laura, JT, and I were a trinity. I didn’t know what our mission was yet, but I knew it was something bigger than our trivial problems and rivalries.
Loretta brusquely rapped on the wooden door. “Asia is downstairs.” I dropped my dirty underwear on the floor. “Shit, that was quick!”
Laura went to the door, “Right, hold on! JT’s just getting dressed. We’ll be down in two shakes!” She turned back, directing her head to the door. “If he ever finds his underwear!” she added as I riffled through a pile of dirty clothes that had exploded from my bag. I primped my wig on my hand like I had seen Mike Potter do.
I scrambled to put on the same clothes, and a new undershirt. We had gotten my pants from a designer named Gary Graham, whom we met through Mike Potter. They were made out of hand-dyed canvas, an almost metallic brown, with channels of cording around the knees. Then I put on an old white synthetic lace shirt from the ’60s that I had stolen from the costume room at boarding school, an old man’s v-neck, and a bomber that I had gotten from a stylist, with a cracked white leather arrow coming up and around the shoulder. I furrowed my brow as I zipped up my bomber.
“Don’t worry! Don’t take it so seriously! At play in the fields of the Lord!” said Laura.
When did JT split with his mother? How did he get to San Francisco? A ship bottoms-up flashed before my eyes. My veneer would slowly crumble. Laura pushed a penis bone into my hand and said, “Here, this is for her.”
I could see Asia from the top of the stairs, her body swallowed up by a velvet chair. Smoke curled up from the place where her head was. She was bouncing one knee off of the other. Her fluorescent pink fuzzy purse was like a nuclear poodle at her side. Her hand holding the armchair had many rings on it. She wore a witch’s pentagram. Loretta sat on a chaise, her legs crosse
d primly. She saw us right away and clapped her hands together, exclaiming, “Here he is!” I kept my head down low.
Asia leaned over the arm of the chair; her eyelashes drooped over her eyes, but she had an expectant pose, like a child awaiting a present. “JT!”
I barely moved my head, keeping my shoulders scrunched up. “You are that shy?” She changed her demeanor. “You are like a nut: you need to be cracked open. What is this? You act as if you don’t even know me after all of our back and forth.” She hadn’t looked at Laura standing behind me. I should respond more, I thought. I turned my fist over and opened my hand like the maw of a snake. She took it, her eyes still on me.
“He has been looking forward to seeing you.” Laura explained, and then Asia looked at her without any acknowledgment that she was JT’s friend.
Loretta added, “This is JT’s dear friend, Speedie.”
“Right.” She stared at me with her arms straight against her armchair. I kept my head down but wanted to look at her. I could feel my body shaking like a little dog. Her arms were lithe and muscular.
Loretta said, “We should go. We don’t want to be late. I am going to call a taxi.”
She walked out briskly, her high heels clicking down the stairs.
I ventured, “It’s good to finally meet you.”
Asia continued to stare at me. It felt like someone sticking their elbow into my ribs. Her look said, who the fuck are you?
“I’m sorry, I’m really nervous. I’ve been waiting for months to meet you, and now . . .” I trailed off.
Where was this bullshit spewing from? My body felt incredibly tense, as if I had been contracting my muscles for many minutes. Loretta called for us. The taxi was waiting. Laura and I labored down the stairs; we were carrying two large shopping bags full of penis bones and books and hollow chocolate trolley trains to pass out as gifts. I sat in the middle, between Laura and Asia. Laura pulled out the jars of jam and JT’s two books in English.
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