Laura and I got into a taxi.
Laura finally broke the silence by saying, “We do have a lot to pack.”
I looked at her briefly, thinking, that’s not why you didn’t want me to have a shot. I stared out the window. It was misting, and the streetlights reflected off the wet sidewalk.
We got out of the car and walked through the bright lobby of the hotel, instantly picking up where we had left off, but in our own voices now.
“I hate it when you drink. You start to say shit you shouldn’t. You start to act stupid. You get belligerent and ugly. Just follow my cue. It is my thing, you know. Sometimes you forget that.”
“Oh, fuck you. You’re on some power trip right now.”
“No, I’m just telling you how you get, and you don’t want to hear it.” She pressed the elevator button twice. She pointed her finger at me. “When you went down to the basement, I said, he’s going to want another shot, because I could tell you were getting to that point. And you come up and lo and behold, you ask for another shot. And then the fucked-up thing is that I said to everyone, and they all agreed, that you had had enough. Then they turned around and acted as if we had never had that conversation. ‘JT is a grown man.’ I mean, really. There you are, dancing around like a fool. Juergen is twice your size, and he can drink. So when you drink with him, trying to keep up, it’s like, there you go, off a cliff. And Alice, of all people. Alice just sat there, couldn’t look me in the eye.”
We entered our room, which had the feeling of a country bed and breakfast, with white walls and blue flowers painted at the corners of the ceiling.
We began to shuffle our piles of clothes around. I threw the clothes Asia had given to me into a heap, along with a polyester tennis skirt, one of the only things I had bought on the trip, at a thrift store in Sweden.
I had made those people choose sides against Laura.
I slammed myself into the bathroom and turned on the tub. I felt righteous, but also a little sorry. I was reminded of a story my mother told me about growing up, about her sister and brother and some of the other kids meeting in the back meadow to strategize about the bully in the neighborhood. She said, we’ve got to band together against this guy, otherwise he won’t leave us alone, and they all agreed. While they were talking he came up behind her and then beat the shit out of her. Her sister and brother stood there with their mouths open and eventually ran away. No one had stood up for her.
This had all gotten too confusing. At the end of every night, I would either hate Laura, or myself. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Right then I vowed that I would never be JT again. It was a complication in my life that I didn’t need. I would get on the plane, go home, and that would be that.
Laura was finishing up a conversation on the phone. She hung up and gushed how great it had been. Then I heard her slide off the bed and put her face up close to the door. She said, “I am sorry, Savanni. I think we’re fighting because our trip together is over.” It was true, it was hard to think of the tour ending. But I didn’t think this was the reason we were fighting. Laura continued, “I remember when I was young, and my best friend and I would separate, it was easier to end it fighting, it was an easier way to make the break. Listen, I’m sorry.”
I sat there and splashed around a bit, trying to stay in my anger. I didn’t say I was sorry too, but I rose and unlocked the bathroom door.
TENNESSEE
MASH, THE INTERN, GUIDED ME with impatient steps across the blacktop, clutching his walkie-talkie with his left hand as he spun the volume down. We hugged the sidewalk in front of the diner, bright as a fishbowl, and edged towards the set. I could see our breath misting through the neon lights. I adjusted my black felted fedora tucked under a slim black sweatshirt, and tugged down on the raggedy sleeves of the laquered satin jacket that Asia had given me. It was out of place here. I was cold, and I felt self-conscious in the shiny thin articles of clothing as I edged into the crowd. Everyone wore jean jackets and potato lump sweat-shirts and heavy logger’s boots. Mash tapped my shoulder, putting his hand up to signal goodbye. He skidded away into the open lot before I had a chance to ask him where Geoff and Laura were. He was such a yankee-in-training, he had no hint of an accent. I actually hadn’t heard one yet since I had arrived in Tennessee. I was the only one with a drawl, sort of.
Everyone on the set stood silently. It was the scene in which Jeremiah’s mother leaves to go trick, and Kenny, her trucker boyfriend, gets ready to visit other women. The door to a phosphorescent orange cab is open as the cameraman films Kenny, dressed in a bright paisley cowboy shirt with pearl snaps down the front. He wears jeans tight enough that the muscles on his thighs seem to shine and ripple as he rocks to and fro in his seat, spraying his waves of golden hair and aiming down to his package. Such a Laura move. Everyone giggled silently as he adjusted the rear view mirror, combing over the arch of his head, extending his elbow dramatically out and waving the comb through.
I looked around to see if I could catch where Laura and Geoff were standing. They had cameos today. I had flown out a day later than the rest of the family. I was meant to have a cameo tomorrow, which I had binged and starved for accordingly. Months before, when Asia was in pre-production for her film adaptation of The Heart, I had asked her if I could work on the costumes. It must have seemed random to her. Though I had given her many pieces that I had made, I couldn’t tell her that I was designing clothes. Of course, I had to present the idea via Laura, and she relayed back to me that I could make Asia’s outfits only, and I wouldn’t be paid for them. I felt a little ashamed at the gall of JT, his sense of entitlement to try for anything, even as a novice. But I was also frustrated that I couldn’t have the full opportunity, and that I was only getting this break as JT, and not much of a break at all.
“Just keep all your receipts,” Laura had told me.
Suddenly the crowd parted and Asia teetered in wearing a bright blond wig, incandescent red lips, red miniskirt, halter, and stilettos. Something had changed about her. As I looked I realized that it was her eyes—mean and dull like the blunt end of a fire poker.
Someone shouted, “Cut!”
Asia saw me, and her eyes changed. She seemed to droop slightly in her heels. She grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned with all her weight into me, growling “JT” in an even lower voice then I remembered. She seemed very cold and tired, beyond tired, like she had been tired for weeks. How was this woman directing a film? She could barely speak.
Quietly, I said, “What’s going on with you?”
“It’s terrible. It’s like war. It’s very difficult. No one is on my side. They taunt me and undermine me for being a woman, and having an accent.”
I noticed that she had a new tattoo on her wrist that said Panos. I examined it carefully like a wound. She said monotonously, “Panos . . . He is amazing with fashion too. He made this. You’ll get to meet him.” She pointed to a black lump of clothing she had draped over her shoulder like a pet rat. “You will meet him.”
I’d rather not, I thought.
“Your ticket . . . Can we change it. Will you stay longer?”
“Um. I don’t know,” I said flattered. “If I can. Where’s Speedie?”
“This is your movie.” She responded abruptly.
“Um, yeah, it’s mine and yours and um, yeah, a lot of people’s,” I ventured.
I hadn’t noticed, but Brian, Asia and JT’s manager, was standing with us, nodding his head as if agreeing with something. His insistence made everything seem meaningless.
“Speedie’s at the Kraft truck with Thor.” He said.
Asia stared at him for a second and exploded, “Brian!” She had suddenly straightened up, the color returning to her face under cake-y layers of white powder. “I am going to go to the trailer to take off these fucking clothes. Meet me in fifteen minutes. . . . Actually, no. Get Grant over here right now, that piece of shit.”
Brian went and got Grant, who came sheepishly with a clipboard. She bega
n to yell at him. “You fucking shithead piece of shit. Are you trying to undermine me? You think you know better? You fucking arrogant piece of shit! You want me to take that money we just lost on that scene out of your paycheck?”
Grant stood with his head bowed. Clearly this wasn’t the first time that she had gone ballistic during production.
She turned on her heels, saying in a different voice, “I’m sorry, JT. I’ll see you later.”
I watched her traipse down the cement. She looked back at me with a nod, flipping her sugar-spun hair. As if he had been waiting for her to leave the whole time, Brian immediately pulled out a cigarette from a pack in his breast pocket.
Grant shrugged, rolling his eyes at Brian.
Brian shrugged back at him. “So you fucked up. Don’t worry, man. Life goes on.”
Brian led me in between two semis, one with lights decked around it like a porch at Christmas.
“She looks so different.” I said to him, thinking she appeared ashen, frenzied, not there.
“I know, right?”
There was a loud hum from a generator. I saw Geoff first. Dressed in dark jeans, an orange-and-brown plaid button-up, and a trucker hat, he stood leaning on one hip like our father always used to stand. Then I saw Thor at his side, his hands wrapped around a Styrofoam cup. Laura was talking to somebody a few feet away, with her hand on her waist. She looked very skinny. She gestured a lot with the other hand. She had gloves on, black with raised puffy skeleton hands and the word “Misfits” scrawled repeatedly across the wrists.
Brian put his hand on Geoff’s shoulders.
“Hey, man, you ready, dude? You look awesome.”
“Oh, hey! Hey! JT! Thanks. I’m a little nervous. But I look like a bona fide trucker, huh?”
“You look like the real thing, man.”
Thor and his mom exclaimed at the same time, “JT!”
Thor hugged me at the waist. He had just had his seventh birthday and seemed to have grown a foot.
Laura and I made eye contact and started to laugh. She hugged me and said, “Babyhead!” holding my neck for a second.
“You should have seen me! I was the waitress, and I had to say, ‘More coffee, baby?’ and then wink. I got it the first time, but then I had to do it twenty times more. And it got more and more Tourets.”
She took a step back, repeating an over-accentuated wink. “More coffee, baby?” She twitched. “But the first time it was very fucking James Bond.”
“Mom!”
“I’m sorry, baby. I owe you another dollar.”
“You’re really racking it up today, Momma,” Geoff said.
“Brian is swearing, too.”
“I had to give him a twenty just now on reserve! Potter did it, too. You’re going to be rich by the end of this trip.”
“Potty mouths, all of you.” Geoff said.
“I just get f-ing excited.” Laura bubbled. “Can you believe it? Can you believe we’re here? Did you go in the diner yet? It’s the Dove’s Diner. Fucking perfect.”
“I’ve got to see it.”
“I had to lip-synch an Italian opera song. I got to stand on top of a table!” Thor said.
“You were so good, Babyhead,” Laura said.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked Geoff.
“I gotta pick up a fine lady,” he said, grinning.
The thought of Geoff picking up a prostitute tickled me.
“JT,” Thor pulled me aside a little bit, “You wearing girls’ underwear or boys’ underwear right now?”
“Boy’s,” I said.
He had first asked me this when we were in a hotel corridor getting ice and hot chocolate from the machines. “What if a fan wants your underwear? What if you’re wearing girls’ underwear?”
“JT’s lucky. He can wear either.”
Laura turned to me, “You want some hot chocolate? They have all kinds of snacks. Want some trashy candy?” She pulled a Twix and a peanut butter granola bar out of her pocket like she was performing a strip tease.
“I do!” Thor said.
“No, you’ve had enough today baby,” she said firmly.
“Let’s go get some hot chocolate for JT.”
“When do you go on?” I asked Geoff.
“Pretty soon. We should go back to the hotel cause Thor’ll crash pretty soon.”
Brian joined us and said, “I can arrange the ride. I’ll do it in a little bit. After I go see Asia. You good, JT?”
I nodded. I wanted to go see Asia, too.
Geoff took Thor to hang out with two other kids on the set before his shot, and Laura introduced me to everybody. She said in a low voice, “Can you believe it? Here we are at the truck stop set. I never set foot in a truck stop in my life! It’s funny, though, I had this weird déjà-vu sensation as we were walking up, like I had seen it all before, and my past was colliding with my present. I don’t know if it was JT talking through me, or what.” She paused. Laura often talked to ghosts. Sometimes she spoke to Breece D’J Pancake about why he had committed suicide. Other times she spoke to the singer of an old punk band she used to see as a teenager.
“I never noticed before, but Asia has the same mole on her forehead.”
“Same as who?”
“As Sarah. I mean, it’s eerie shit. Shit that I didn’t tell Asia about, that she has picked up. It’s like she’s channeling her.”
“Who?”
“Sarah, JT’s mother!”
Brian came back while Laura was standing with me and said, “Asia wants to change your ticket. She wants you to stay. You make her feel grounded.”
“Ah, I don’t think I can stay through the week.” I had to work four shifts at the Thai restaurant to make up for this weekend, plus I had an internship for an independent clothing line called Nisa and had missed it once already to come here. School was impossible with JT’s schedule. But I had to work. And I was committed to making clothes.
“She’s doing this movie for you,” Brian said. I couldn’t believe that Asia had said that again. I looked down at the ground.
“Can you come back next week?” I asked Laura. She shook her head.
“No. Thor’s got a birthday party and a soccer game. But hang on a minute, Brian. Asia’s not doing this for JT. That’s not true.”
“What? She is doing it for JT! This is your story, man! She is making your story.”
“Brian, don’t pull that shit! We all know who she’s doing this for. JT has put plenty of time into helping Asia, time that he’s not getting paid for.” Laura had spent days over the phone working on the script. She had even gone through the revisions. When Laura called Asia and told her that some scenes were just too heavy-handed, she told me that Asia had said, “Now hold on a minute. You’re getting kind of Speedie on me. I don’t like it when you talk to me like that.” Being harsh was associated with Speedie. Didn’t JT have the capacity to be harsh or direct?
Brian said, “So what should I tell Asia?”
I was having fun here, and Asia needed me. I would ground her. Me, not JT, I thought. Well, I hoped. But there was the question of missing Valentine’s Day with Jonathan. We had been together for close to a year now. He knew all about JT, but not about my feelings for Asia. Or what had happened between us. It wasn’t that either of us cared about Valentine’s Day, it was more that I felt like I was choosing JT over him, and I felt bad about that. And there was the question of work. The manager at the Thai restaurant had recently asked me, “Do you want to be working here? It doesn’t seem like it.” Should I risk getting fired? And I was missing my internship. If I came back next week I would miss the sample sale, a venue for local designers. I had already paid for it. Forty dollars—that wasn’t a big deal when you thought about it; forty dollars is nothing when you’re working. But what if I lost my job?
I felt that familiar pull: should I do that line of blow, start drinking while I’m studying, play hooky, eat something I told myself I shouldn’t? I was a fruit fly buzzing around th
e lip of the honey jar. “Should I come back next week?” I asked Laura.
“The family can’t come next week, but I can’t tell you what you should do. It’s up to you.”
“Um, do I have to decide right now?”
“Pretty soon.” Brian said. “Because I have to get you the ticket.”
“Um . . . Uh. Yeah. All right, next week. I can go for the weekend.” Stuck in the amber honey, I had just died again.
The following week, as I flew down to Tennessee, I found out that Mike Pitt would be on the set. He was playing Buddy, one of the only characters sympathetic to Jeremiah in The Heart. Out of all of the people I had met as JT, Mike was one with whom I felt the most ease. But I had never been anywhere without Laura backing me up. I was excited. I would be with Asia, Pitt, Potter, who was doing the makeup, and Mel, who was doing the costumes. I felt like JT had real friends. I was to report back to Laura everything that happened.
This time Mash took me to a neighborhood close to Knoxville proper. They were shooting the part of the story in which Jeremiah and his mother are holed up in a speed den with Chester, Sarah’s newest boyfriend. They had converted a ramshackle house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kids from the neighborhood skulked around the trailers, pointing curiously. I spotted Mike. Then I saw one of the kids, a little black boy with tight braided hair, go up to him and gesture at the house. Mike gestured in the same way the boy did. The boy ran off. As I came up he said, “Somehow they got word that the house was going to explode.” We hugged, the way I had noticed that men do, the brisk pat on each other’s shoulders. I thought of how much I had learned about being a boy since the last time I had seen him. I had learned my “mans” and “dudes,” started smoking more to lower my voice, and my mannerisms—and balls—were colder. I always went to the men’s bathroom, even in a swarming club with crowds of men. When I walked in with Ben Foster, one of JT’s friends, all the men told me that I was in the wrong bathroom. I said easily, “Don’t worry. I’m used to this.” Ben simply chaperoned me to a stall, saying, “I’ll be out here, man.” I would say, “Thank you, dude.” The emperor’s new clothes.
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