by John Goode
When he saw I wasn’t going to react, his voice cracked. When a parent has ushered three boys though the perils of childhood into the world of manhood, the signs when one of them is about to fall apart are clear. I cleared the short distance between me and him as he began to cry.
“I fucked things up, Dad” was all he got out before he lost it.
There are few things males will admit out loud because we’re all so caught up in trying to be men that we’re unable to just get over it and tell the truth. At times like this, when the very world itself looks like it has turned against you, there is nothing a boy wants more than his father to just hold him and whisper in his ear that everything is going to be all right.
From personal experience, as a man gets older, if his father has already passed on, his wife makes a more than an acceptable substitute, but don’t tell Beth that. It’ll just go to her head.
Kyle
I HAVE a weird life.
I don’t say that in a poor-me kind of way so I come off like some orphan from a Dickens novel. Pity is one of those things like a pet rock or one of those stupid birds that drink water out of a glass. People think other people want it but if you were to take a poll, no one would ever ask for it. I am more making an observation that my life, when held up against other lives, is fracking weird.
For example.
When I left this morning, my mother was passed out in her room, and the living room looked like one of those crime scenes you see on a CSI show, the one where there’s a chalk outline where the body isn’t. You know what I mean, right? With the bottles all over the place, discarded cigarette butts near the bottles, and a small mirror that had to have been cleaned with baby powder because there is no other earthly reason for it to have white powder on it, right?
I kid. I know what the white powder was.
Anyway, the only thing missing was a dead whore in the middle of the room and that weird track lighting I assume comes with all hotel rooms in Vegas. There are mornings I walk out of my bedroom and expect to hear The Who start to play as I walk into the bathroom, just to warn me what the rest of the place looks like. Normally the whole messed-up living room and mother passed out in her bedroom thing wouldn’t have pissed me off as much as it did. Except she had promised me she was going to change.
The “she” in that sentence being my mom, and change meaning not what had happened last night.
She had really come through for Brad when they tried to kick him off the baseball team last month; and since then it really looked like she was going to change. Of course, like the idiot monkey that always touches the electrified button, I believed her and thought things were looking up.
Long story short, I was wrong and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
So I decided to use a lifeline and phoned a friend. Well, in this case, I phoned a boyfriend and got a hot jock delivered to my door. I am, of course, bragging because I knew this was how other people saw him but not me. I knew who he really was now, so every time I looked at him I saw the small things that made me crazy instead of the glaring, obvious ones that made everyone else lust after him.
Take, for example, the way his hair always looks on the verge of being messy. It’s adorable, I mean just drop-dead cute as hell, and, to the outside observer, must look like when he rolls out of bed. I see it and I smile about the thirty-plus minutes I know he spent in the bathroom with a handful of product trying to get it to look just messy enough to look random but good enough to make him that much more attractive. The way his white T-shirt hugs him so casually, showing off his broad chest without being as obvious as wearing a fitted shirt might—to everyone else, he looks as if he threw one on and ran out the door. The truth was that he bought the shirts a size too small and spent a week washing and stretching them to look that haphazard on purpose.
People see an insanely hot guy who looks like that without any effort at all. I see the self-conscious guy behind the curtain making sure as many people like him as possible. And if they aren’t going to like him, at least they will admit he is handsome. I’m sure it sounds vain to you, but I assure you it is as fear-based as anything else we do to make ourselves presentable to the public. The only difference is that those of us who are normal-looking don’t have a bar to reach when we walk out the door. So my hair is shaggy, my jeans frayed. Who cares? I mean, before I came out, no one knew who the hell I was anyway. I could have showed up with a Pokemon shirt and bell-bottoms and no one would have noticed. People do notice him, and Brad knows it, and for some reason he is terrified of coming up short.
And for some reason, I find that fear in someone who so doesn’t need to work so hard at being hot is irresistible.
So when he pulled up wearing a ball cap and his letterman jacket, I knew he literally ran out the door to get me out of there. And if that wasn’t worth melting over a little, I don’t know what is.
I left the house in a state of disarray but without dead bodies evident. When I came back after lunch to see if my mother had crawled out of her cave, the living room looked cleaned up, but there was a dead body on the couch.
See what I mean? Weird.
At first, I had no idea who the corpse in question was. Because it lay facedown in the cushions, all I could see was that he was a full-grown man and he had a nice ass. I know that makes me sound like a perv crushing on some old dead guy, but I assure you, some asses transcend age, and this was one of them. I wasn’t aware my mom knew anyone with that nice a body; if I had, I would have been nicer to him. I inched closer to make sure I was just being sarcastic and the guy was really breathing when he snorted in his sleep and turned over to face me.
Holy shit, it was Mr. Parker!
You’d think he was some hideous monster the way I jumped back, but he was anything but. From what I had gathered from my mom, he’d been some kind of high school football star who ended up busting his knee out his first season at college and had to come back to Foster for some reason or another. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that. I mean, bad enough he’d worked his ass off—again with his ass! Man, I need to focus—and actually got out of Matrix Four: The Mayberry Years, but to end up being sent back here had to be on par with finding out the golden ticket you found in your chocolate bar was really just a cheap-ass coupon, and, by the way, you and your freeloading grandfather can get back on the bus and enjoy a lifetime of cabbage soup.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t like that for him, but I damn well know if it was me, I’d be wishing some pain on the next fat-faced blueberry chick I saw.
He was handsome in a way that was just wrong on someone his age. Not that he was, like, forty or anything, but he was as old as my mom and by that time the slope down to ancient gets pretty slippery. More times than not, folks my mom and Mr. Parker’s age just look old. Not Mr. Parker. He looked like one of those stupid, hot jocks all grown up with adult clothes on. “Adult clothes” here meaning their pants are actually at their waist and stuff. Brad thought the guy hung the moon, which made me jealous for about five seconds. Then I realized this guy had played against Brad’s dad when they were in high school, and there isn’t a guy who would find his dad hot, even with a gun pointed at his head.
Though he didn’t say anything, I think Mr. Parker had talked to Brad about us at some point, which made the man a superhero in my book. The fact my mom and him were, like, best friends from high school just made the microscopic size of this town all the more apparent to me. The day he stood up for Brad, and I guess me too, at the school board meeting was the day I realized being gay wasn’t automatically a death sentence.
Okay, yeah, I get it, major drama queen, but seriously. At my age, the thought of having to walk around with a scarlet letter on my chest for the rest of my life signifying to everyone I was not like the rest of them… well, death would be merciful when compared to that kind of life. But Mr. Parker was gay, hot, and stuck in Foster, and he didn’t look like he was one bad day away from climbing the water tower over on Elm with a
rifle. The fact you can grow up being this way and still look as normal as he did was the first sign that the light at the end of the tunnel might not be a near-death experience.
But none of that explained why he was crashed on my couch.
I resisted the urge to find a stick and poke him with it, something I had wanted to do to a dead body since I had seen Stand By Me. Instead, I went to the kitchen and made some coffee. I may only be seventeen, but I had a doctorate in dealing with drunks. I was the freaking Doogie Howser of enabling, and I knew what a Budweiser nap looked like from this distance. I also knew how to counter it.
Two parts caffeine, which was the coffee; one part pain relief, which was the aspirin I was grabbing; apply cold water, in this case a damp washcloth; and speak very, very softly. In this case that would be, “Mr. Parker? Are you awake?” Which was what you asked even though you knew the person wasn’t. I am not sure when this whole line of counterintuitive questions became the norm, but I know if I was passed out like that, someone asking me if I was awake would just piss me the hell off.
“Mr. Parker,” I tried again, this time poking his shoulder. “Are you awa—”
His hand snapped out and grabbed my wrist so fast, I swore I could hear that martial arts movie break as one eye stared up at me. In a voice barely above a growl, he asked. “Kyle? Why are you in my house?”
I tried to pull my hand back slowly, but there was no way I was getting it back unless he let go.
“Wow,” I exclaimed, looking at complete lack of effort he was exerting holding me tight. “You are crazy strong.”
His gaze followed mine to his hand and just like that, I was free. It took some effort not to go stumbling backward like a spaz, but I managed.
“Sorry,” he rattled off, not sounding the least bit sorry. “Now why the fuck are you in my house?”
I set the coffee down on the table in front of him. “Um, is that your final answer?” I asked, making sure I was more than an arm’s length away from him before I spoke.
He began to sit up and then cried out like he’d been shot. I saw his hands move over his head and it looked like he was trying to hold his skull together, which did nothing to deter from the visual that he had just been JFKed. “Coffee in front of you, bottle of aspirin next to it,” I said, making sure my voice never got above what I had determined was a drunk person’s pain threshold when spoken to. As he blindly reached out for the cup, I swore to myself I was never going to drink alcohol. Never ever.
“Little to the right,” I coached since he missed the table entirely the first three times.
On the forth he grabbed the cup and pulled it to his lips, looking way too much like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. The way he cradled the coffee and sipped? I kid you not; if he said “My precious,” I might have just turned and run. After a few tentative swallows, he popped open the aspirin and downed a handful as if they were candy and then lay back down on the couch, putting the washcloth over his eyes.
“Thank you,” he croaked.
“All part of the service here at the Days Inn,” I mumbled as I sat back and watched him lie there. After about a minute, he looked out from under the washcloth and glanced over at me. I waved at him. “Hi, still here.”
Sighing, he covered his eyes again and asked, “Where’s Brad?”
“Not dead on my couch,” I answered quickly. Then I started laughing, because all I could hear in my head was Quentin Tarantino asking if there was a sign outside that said Dead Gay Guy Storage. Mr. Parker gave me a weird look—no, he gave me a look like I was weird, and I laughed more loudly. “Sorry, pop culture junkie. So… this about the guy you’ve been seeing?” I asked as bluntly as I could.
If he had been a cartoon, his jaw would have opened and then fallen off his face.
“How did you…,” he began to say, and then his brain caught up. “Did your mom…?” and then stopped again. “How did you…?” he started again. I think I broke Mr. Parker.
“Um, Brad told me he saw you with a guy, one of the Allman brothers?” I explained, a little fuzzy on the last part.
“Wallace brothers,” he corrected me, sounding like he was mortified.
“Right, them. He said you looked happy, which he made sound like it was not a normal way for you to look. So I assumed it meant you guys had met after all and were… dating? Hooking up? Something?” I thought about that for a moment. “Unless it was with another guy and just an Internet thing. In that case, it was probably about sex and you wouldn’t want to talk about that at all, which is understandable.” I looked up at him, knowing this was killing him. “Was it just a sex thing, Mr. Parker?”
Truth? I knew it wasn’t just a sex thing. In fact, I wasn’t sure guys that old still had sex, much less sex on the Internet. I know Brad’s mom had Facebook, which had to be the worst thing in the world since she practically made him add her as a friend, but besides that I didn’t know any sites old people used to hook up. So honestly, all I was doing was busting his balls, because it really looked like he was in a bad place and a little humor never hurt anyone.
“No,” he answered hoarsely. Realizing how bad he sounded, he took another sip of coffee. “It wasn’t a sex thing,” he admitted after a while. In a voice I barely heard, he added, “We never even had sex at all.”
“So then where is the Allman brother?”
“Wallace, his name is Matt Wallace,” he corrected me.
“So then where is Matt?” I asked him point-blank.
He ran a hand through his hair, which is something Brad did when he couldn’t think of what to say and was stalling for time. “We… well, he… he’s leaving,” he decided on.
What he said and what he meant were obviously two different things. What he said was “He’s leaving.” What he meant was “He’s leaving me.” I don’t like to brag, but I speak fluent Silence.
Now, here is one of the many differences between me and other guys my age. Most guys would have been all “aw shucks” about dealing with an adult as an equal and just talking to him. Most guys my age see adults as these weird aliens who say they used to be kids way back in the Stone Age but have no real memory of their time spent as “teenagers” so spout this crap they call wisdom that does absolutely nothing to help in the long run. They aren’t like the parents in the Peanuts cartoons where they speak in this weird language no one understands; they’re more like statues that just stand there in curious poses and dare us to decipher what they’re trying to say. Let me tell you, after about ten minutes playing Pictionary with a statue, you’ll walk away shaking your head wondering why you even tried in the first place.
I don’t see adults like that.
The adults I have interacted with in my long seventeen years of life have all struck me as being the same kind of person I was, only they had more experience at pretending to know what they were talking about. I mean, that’s the only difference, if you break it down. They have the same fears and the same worries that we do; they’ve just had time to build up this invisible shell around them that makes them seem like it doesn’t affect them at all. So in comparison, kids end up looking like we are one Red Bull away from an epileptic fit every time we encounter something outside our comfort zone.
But inside, they’re just as fucked up as we are.
“So he’s leaving and you’re okay with that,” I said distantly, as if I was mulling it over in my head. “I can understand that. I mean, with all the single men in Foster, why tie yourself down to just one guy? And it’s not like he’s cute as fuck and seems to like you too, so you dodged a bullet on that one.” I looked back at him and gave him the most sincere expression I could muster up. “I mean, as a burgeoning gay teenager, these are the life lessons I should take away from this, right?”
His eyes narrowed in suspicion as he carefully put down the coffee cup. “Does Brad know you’re an evil genius underneath all that hair?”
Grinning back, I said, “In his defense, he does know it and accepts that one day I might
end up taking over the world, but don’t change the subject. If you like this guy and he’s leaving, why aren’t you stopping him?”
I don’t know who was more shocked that he didn’t have an answer, him or me.
“I have to go,” he said, standing up quickly. “I need….” He started patting his pockets down. “…my keys.” He looked around the room in a panic.
We searched for ten minutes before I found them stuck in the cushions of my TV chair. I tossed them to him. “Go get him, Mr. Parker.”
He almost sprinted out my door. “Thank you, and Kyle?” he asked as he opened the door. “Try to be a benevolent ruler when you take over.”
I shrugged. “I’ll consider it.”
He laughed as he slammed the door and ran to his car.
Grown-ups! What can you do about them?
Tyler
I REMEMBER my dad used to have a bumper sticker that read “Teenagers, move out now while you know everything!” When I was a teenager, I thought it was insulting; as I got older, I thought it was fitting; and, finally, lately, I found it funny. After talking to Kyle, I’m not so sure that bumper sticker was wrong. If I had my head on as tight at seventeen as that kid seemed to at his age, I would… well, I’d probably be ruling the world myself. I could tell Kyle was a special guy when we’d talked at Nancy’s, but after that little sparring match at Linda’s, I understood a little more what Brad saw in him.
One of the only advantages of living in a town the size of Foster is that someone can get to anywhere from anywhere within five minutes if you know how to avoid the lights. When I pulled up in front of the Wallace house, I could see the rental car Matt had been driving was gone, and I felt my stomach lurch in fear. I ran up to the door and started banging on it, a little louder than I intended because I heard a scream of, “Marvin! They’re back!” which made no sense to me.