Clay's Way

by Mastbaum, Blair

  Manny wiped away the past. If he only knew.

  I turn the radio on and drive east toward Kaneohe and Clay’s house. I pull into the driveway, nervous and sweating. I’m scared the house won’t feel familiar to me. I scan from one end to the other, trying to pick up on small changes, so the rejection won’t hit me all at once.

  Clay’s skate shoes and Susan’s gardening slippers sit by the front door. There’s a trail of sand leading to the carport where he leaves his surfboard, but no water from recent surfing.

  Susan’s gardening tools are out, sitting by a half-tilled flowerbed. Her car is gone.

  I walk up to the door. It’s open. I walk inside quietly.

  Clay’s shoes that he wore on the camping trip are sitting in the entry, coated with orange dirt, and his shirt’s flung on the ground beside them.

  I pick his shirt up and press it to my face. It smells strong, like he was nervous or pissed off, or possibly worried, or turned on. I need more evidence.

  The phone rings. I stand by the answering machine and watch the red light blink. It activates. “Hey, if you wanna talk to me or Susan, leave a message but don’t make it too long cause you suck. Aloha.” It beeps and the tape rewinds.

  “Hey, Clay. Howzit? It’s Manny-boy. You back yet? I got some pretty interesting news about your little brah, Sam. Call me, braddah. I’ll be at Leilani’s later today. Laters.”

  The Play button starts to flash.

  I tiptoe down the hall to see if anyone’s home. Clay might be sleeping--he loves to sleep in the middle of the day and does it a lot. His room’s illuminated with soft afternoon light filtered through the trees. I don’t see him, but I hear a surfing contest on TV.

  He must be asleep.

  I run back out to the answering machine and press Delete. It rewinds Manny’s voice and the light goes out.

  “Hey.”

  I jump and turn around.

  Clay stands perfectly still, watching me.

  “Fuck, you scared me.”

  “Not half as much as you scare me.”

  He knows and he doesn’t understand. This is my worst nightmare. He doesn’t appreciate what I was trying to do for him. He doesn’t understand how scared and sad I was, how much I’d love for everyone to just know about us and get over it already.

  “Why don’t you just erase my whole fucking life. You’re doing a pretty good job so far.” He struts down the hall into his mom’s room.

  I follow him, stopping in the doorway. “Why are you being like this?”

  He plops down on his mom’s bed. “You know why.”

  “You should have called me. I was waiting to pick you up. I have the truck.”

  He takes a deep sigh and stares at the television, at a stocky, muscular Balinese surfer doing his run. Then he freaks out. “Take the truck! Go live in my room! Have all my shit! Take my mom! Just get the fuck away from me!” He stands up and walks toward me.

  I don’t know if he’s going to kiss me, hug me, kill me, or punch me.

  He pushes me hard and slams the door shut in my face.

  “I know what you’re thinking… you’re just...” I don’t know what to say.

  He pulls the door open violently and stands in the opening like a dog poised to attack. “If you know what I’m thinking, you’d know that I have no fucking interest in seeing you.”

  How’d he hear about last night? Manny didn’t tell him what I did. Maybe Tammy and her friends--a secret network set on ruining my life.

  “I don’t think that many people even heard me.”

  “Are you fucking crazy? The whole island heard. You fucked up my life forever!” His face goes from pure anger to almost crying. He sits on the bed and retreats into the surfing contest. A tan, muscular boy gets thrown off his board like a doll. He’s taken underwater, into the power and depth of the wave.

  Tears fill Clay’s eyes. He looks covers his face to hide them from me. “I don’t know what the fuck to do. Never leave my house?” His anger builds again. “I can’t go surfing or to Kailua or anywhere! I’m fucking trapped here… with you!”

  “I thought I was doing it for us.”

  “So I’m the laughing stock of Oahu? So I’m left with you and everyone else hates me?”

  I don’t know what to do. I stare at my name in his tattoo. “I’m sorry. I love you. You said you loved me.”

  “I just said that to fuck with you. I don’t love you. Leave. Get the fuck out of here.”

  I stand in the doorway, afraid to leave and afraid to stay. “Your truck’s clean.”

  “Fuck off!”

  I want him to slam the door shut in my face, so I know what to do.

  He just sits there on the bed. His stillness is killing me.

  I kick the wall as hard as I can. “You’re a fucking liar!”

  A tan handsome guy on TV rides a perfect wave, smoothly and stealthily, without a worry on his mind.

  I throw myself on the floor. I want to feel pain, so this situation has some substance, some reality outside my mind. I get up and fling myself to the floor again. I land too well to hurt myself. I learned how to fall without injury from Clay’s dumb Karate lessons, when I thought everything he could teach me was the coolest. “Clay!” I scream, like a military drill sergeant.

  He pokes his head out of the sheet, his face wet from crying.

  “Look me in the eyes.”

  “What?” He sits up forcefully.

  “I hope you die.” I run out of the room. I’ll find someone better than him. I’ll fulfill who he thinks I am. I’ll lie and make up shit and ruin lives getting what I want. Tears run down my face. I can’t stop them. “Fuck!” I run down the hall to the front door. I spot my backpack by the door, so I strap it on while I’m running.

  “Sam!” His mom runs after me.

  I want to run to her, hug her, and bury my head in her breasts and feel solace and comfort and like everything’s going to be OK, but I don’t think it is, so why should I? I run outside and around to the side of the house. The adrenaline in my veins feels like it’s going to knock me out.

  Susan chases me out. “Sam, he’s got the flu. He’s in a bad mood. You don’t have to leave.”

  I take off on my bike that’s been stashed in Clay’s carport for weeks. It’s creaky and dusty. It’s from an abandoned part of my life that I completely stopped living when Clay took over. I wave goodbye to Susan as she walks out on the driveway. I take off down the street and not looking back. I ride down the hill on my bike away from his house.

  He’s done everything he could to make me go away. He told me to fuck off. He left me on the beach. He’s contagious. He’s got the flu. A virus.

  A scientist could show me the reason Clay’s bad for me on a microscope slide. He could explain to me how the virus invades vulnerable, good cells and transforms them into factories for making more viruses, leaving nothing but wreckage, like a forest that’s been clear-cut. No place for the deer to sleep or for campers to pitch a tent, and deadly silt in the streams that kill salmon, leaving bears and otters nothing to eat till nothing is left but devastation and sadness.

  I ride my bike down the long hill to my neighborhood and turn in by the Haiku Village sign. I ride up to my front yard. My front wheel catches on the curb and I fly forward and crash on my head in the grass. My bike lands hard on my stomach and the pedal scrapes my calf, making it bleed and sting.

  I can’t get up. There’s no reason to go inside, no reason for shelter. Nothing could make me feel better or worse. This is the bottom. “I fucking hate you, you liar fucker shithead dumb ass!” I throw my bike off my legs and stand up. I get dizzy and a wave of sadness almost knocks me over. Tears drip on my shoes. I’m scared to go into my room. I don’t know what I’ll find. There might be cobwebs and ghosts by now. I sacrificed myself so quickly. I didn’t even try to imagine what would happen to me if it didn’t work out. I forgot how to be me and I don’t know how to find it again. I think I’m going to throw up. I jump in on
my bed and fall back, out of breath. The room’s humid and stuffy and the door’s closed. There aren’t any phone messages on my dresser like there used to be, no signs of life.

  The rest of the world forgot that I exist while I was out trying to tame the wild boy, something I never wanted to do anyway.

  I could have died and even my parents would have taken a week or two to notice. I hate myself. I roll off of my bed and hit the floor. It’s too hard being me. I can’t stop crying. I want Clay to come over, but I know he’s not going to.

  Chapter 23

  Monster swelling waves

  Rock my small kayak and throw

  Me in the current.

  Thirty-two days pass and Clay’s absence is everywhere: in my muggy room, on the streets of Kailua, at crowded Lanikai beach, at the cheap burrito place, and at 808 Skate where I peer inside the window looking for him through taped-up punk show fliers.

  My parents finally got over me disappearing for three days, but disappearing is their word. To me, camping with Clay was way stranger than disappearing. It was another dimension. School’s been delayed till November because of this parents’ group that found out about some crumbling asbestos in the ceiling. The workers need that long to clean it out, so we’re off for another month and a half. I’m glad school’s starting late, since I’m unable to concentrate on what good, if any, it’s doing for me. I don’t know what the point of living is, either. It’s a new feeling and it’s hard-core scary. At least I can write about it. It gives me something to be miserable about and poets need that.

  I finally fix my board and throw the one I stole from Clay’s house into my closet. I throw the new stupid birthday boy board out the window, strap on my pack, and jump out after it, practically falling on my face. I speed over to skate at the elementary school in Keolu Hills, a basketball court with hand railings and stairs, to try to find evidence of my life before Clay. I can’t find the energy to ollie, so I stand around by the steps holding my board around and watch the other guys rail-slide like it’s simple.

  They’re shirtless and tan and they move through the air with grace. They look sexy and some of them almost perfect, but I can’t like them the way I like Clay. These dudes are children. They don’t know what they want from life.

  Maybe they’re too young and I’m too grown up now even we’re the same age. I’m sophisticated and a poet and they’ve never even read a haiku. They’re naïve about how complicated a relationship with their girlfriend could possibly be and I’ve gone through it all with another boy. I’m guess I really am punk rock. I jump on my board and glide over to this shady corner to hang out in this place where I’m supposed to belong. All tired and smelly and sweaty, I can’t be bothered to act like I really care about being any better of a skater than I was at age 12--I just don’t care about it as much, maybe because I’m gay and I’m a poet and I’m more advanced than just needing physical activity to define me. I sit down on my board and take my pack off. I get hot in the sun so I take my shirt off and lean back on the metal chain link fence, which feels cool on my sweaty back. A haiku comes to me. On my chest, Salty sweat drying, Replenishing tear supply. Someone pokes my shoulder and I twist around and see Clay standing there under a tree looking sort of bad, almost gruesome--dark circles under his eyes, black sweatshirt on a hot late summer day and scabby deep scrapes on one of his cheeks. I can’t believe it’s him. He’s like a beat up ghost remnant of Clay reminding me how stupid I am for loving him in the first place. He leans down and looks at my board. “Finally put the wheels and trucks on that I gave you, huh?”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I got into a fight with this gnarly dreadlock dude on the North Shore. I kicked his ass.” He motions punching into the air like some stupid ego touch boy.

  “Oh.” I’m truly not interested in his stupid surferboy fights, but I want to hug him and tell him everything will be fine but that’s out of the question considering the chain link between us. I think he made it this way on purpose.

  “Listen… I wanted you to meet me at the beach tomorrow. I want to talk to you. I got to get some shit off my chest.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just come, man.” He starts walking away just as another skater my age comes gliding up to sit down and drink his green tea in a can.

  “Sayonara, kyoodia,” I whisper. He taught me that Japanese and I’ll never forget it. Goodbye, brother.

  ***

  The wind is strong today but it’s sunny and I can’t help but be excited about seeing Clay in the perfect golden light on the beach and I hate the sun most of the time, so that’s saying a lot. I hope he’ll be wearing his low-hanging flowered surf shorts and no shirt. I hope he’ll take me into his sexy wolf boy arms and wrestle me to the ground and consume me so I can forget about all the bad shit between us. I decide to walk to the beach so I can appreciate every moment of going to see Clay without rushing through this important moment. As I round the curve into Lanikai, a neighborhood that overlooks the Mokaluas, two small triangle-shaped islands, a haiku comes into my mind, mostly out of feeling hopeful about Clay. Distant islands, enveloped by warm ocean, I’m not that far away. I feel sort of stupid because I’ve hardly ever written anything so fucking lame. I’ll never show it to anyone. I’m glad I don’t have my pack with my notebook in it, because then I’d feel tempted to write it down.

  I round the corner and see the beach right-of-way to the beach looming in front of me. Clay’s truck is parked right outside it, looking confrontational and sexy as always. It almost scares me as I walk by analyzing its aggressive lines, its carefree crooked parking spot with its tail hanging out into the road.

  A car honks behind me, a high-pitched Japanese car horn. I turn around.

  It’s Kendra in her old Honda hatchback. She pulls up beside me and I wonder if she could hear me thinking my lame, hopeful haiku. “Hey, Sammy. Going to the beach?”

  “Yeah. I’m supposed to meet Clay there. We’re sort of not talking or whatever, but he wants me to meet him for some reason.”

  “Wait for me.” She parks on the grass in front of Clay’s truck and walks over to me holding a weird wicker beach bag thing. She looks a little concerned, like she knows something I don’t. “Listen to this, Sam.” She pulls out her notebook from the bag. Oh God, I’m forever condemned now to hearing her sentimental love poems. She clears her throat while walking down the right-of-way. “Love is scary, gnarly wood that makes many strong men flee. Careful of the wolves that howl when love is hoisted high on a tree.”

  “That’s good. I like it more than that other one.” I hate that poem and I never want to think about it again.

  “I wrote that this morning. I heard about what you did, Sammy. Jared told me.” She closes her book and shoves it back in her bag.

  Fuck, I feel stupid. I can’t believe that me liking Clay out in the open with Jared of all people. He’s my cover, my safety. “Yeah, I was fucked up. I don’t know. That’s why Clay’s pissed.”

  “You’re brave to show up. I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You don’t know him like I know him.”

  “You’re right, but I’ve seen him kick a big Samoan guy’s ass.” She stops in a shady spot.

  So do I. “Then why are you here?”

  “All my friends are here. Clay’s here.”

  “I know, but Clay invited me to talk, not to hang out with your lame old friends. And tell Jared to mind his own business. Fuck, there’s like surveillance here.” I just sounded exactly like Clay, which really freaks me out, but I can’t let Kendra know that. She’s here to spy on me.

  I’ll show her.

  We’ll end up in some “From Here to Eternity” embrace on the beach. “OK, well, stop bye and say hey later. I’m gonna go find him. I hold my breath and walk down the right-of-way into the sunlight. When I step out onto the beach, it’s like walking into a party. A big group of kids who are partying, drinking beer out of one of those Styrofoam coolers than gives me the chill
s to touch. The sound of the lid coming off and rubbing onto the rim makes me want to curl up into a ball on the ground. I look both ways for Clay and start walking to the right where he usually hangs out if he comes here to swim in the late afternoon and where, before me, he used to party with Tammy and all of her stupid girlfriends and his macho crew of illiterate Kailua Boys who can talk for hours about nothing, which annoys me so much I can’t stand it. I walk a couple houses down the beach and Clay comes walking up to me, sort of strutting, like he’s aware of everyone watching him walk by them lying on their towels, facing out to the Mokaluas.

  Kendra walks by with her big bag. “Hey Clay, how’s the waves today?”

  “Not bad.”

  She looks at me, then at Clay, and walks down the beach to her group of friends. I don’t know how she hangs out with them. She’s so much cooler than they are.

  I look at Clay, who’s watching Kendra walk away. “Hey.”

  He barely looks at me.

  I feel like I’m an embarrassment. I’m an embarrassment on the Travel Channel’s World’s Best Beach five years in a row. Now, that’s an accomplishment.

  “You showed.” He’s holding a beer and I can tell he’s fucked up.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You don’t know?” He takes a big gulp of beer.

  “What’d you mean, Clay? I’ve been missing you badly.” That took so much fucking guts to say I feel like I’m going to hurl.