Boys in Gilded Cages

by Jarod Powell

  INHERITANCE

  Daryl McAdams is a legend.

  When you’re seventeen, the bar for legend is set pretty low. The base for everything is romance, and every living creature is coated with the weird blue glow of that romantic ambiance. Every action of your peers is interpreted, somehow, someway, as sexual. The charisma of the object of your lust is greatly exaggerated, and every gesture towards you or towards anything, really, is a direct call for you to get naked. Though, this never crosses your mind. You wouldn’t want to cheapen it with petty human wants. No, it’s much deeper, much more profound.

  In the tunnel vision of a child, these objects obscure the glow on the other side. Even when they’re alive and well, they die fantastically: A leap off the Victorian balcony. A stage dive from the foot of the orchestra. Sinking into the quicksand of an ethereally lit wheat field. An icon or a symbol, translated by you, and only by you.

  And when they die with a thud, they go on and live.

  The first time Daryl McAdams died, it was a false alarm. He collapsed in History class after his heart simply stopped, as the macabre bitch Mrs. Danforth read a back issue of Cosmopolitan. She removed herself from her trance, looked down at Daryl’s twitching body losing what little color was there in the first place, eyes half-opened but mostly closed, inviting the light in but barely tolerating its burn, and said to the class, “Why are you just sitting there? Call an ambulance for Christ’s sakes.”

  She started to return to her magazine, but realized there were about twenty plump, adolescent faces gazing at her, their teacher and caretaker for the hour, suddenly very aware of a possible dead body in the room. She put down her magazine and threw her hands incredulously up as a boy ran to the office.

  Mrs. Danforth had surely heard the rumors about Daryl, and the look on her face suggested that this was inevitable-- That, if anything, she was surprised it took this long.

  So an ambulance was called, and Daryl was revived at Delta Trinity Hospital. He was absent for the rest of the week.

  He walked the halls with a translucent almost-halo for a few days after his return, his black t-shirt and Levis emitting the stench of a dead boy but his olive skin glowing, as he had resurrected simply because he felt like it, at God’s inconvenience. I wanted to touch him every time I saw him. He would eat a burger in the cafeteria and to me, he ate like a king, chewing as slowly as he felt like and giving the monitor dirty looks that seem to pierce his snitchy little skull. He read, and he understood everything, though he pretended he didn’t in his typically adorable fashion.

  Every time I stopped to say hello, I approached him with a look of cautious wonderment, just to touch him. I’d ask Daryl if he’d finished his paper or something like that, and touch his shoulder, then draw my hand back. It burned me.

  Daryl would smile politely, though he was annoyed, for I had no business bothering him, but I couldn’t help it. Then he would move along briskly. I didn’t mind.

  The mystery he felt about himself was evident to no one but me. Like the Son of God, he was pretty sure he was alive, though the clock was ticking. He was no angel, and though he nearly died and did touch death for a little while and saw lights and heard deep omniscient voices giving him directions upward, and all of that, he still felt physical feelings such as nausea and drowsiness from the side effects of the pills he took for whatever his parents thought was wrong with him, like he was being gently asphyxiated, and good things too, like how a warm bath felt after walking home from school in the cold.

  Daryl McAdams was no angel and he guessed that’s why everyone was so curious about his presence. Maybe they wanted to know what Hell felt like, or maybe they were mad at him for returning, maybe they were wondering how someone who never even went to church and who everyone knew stole food and money from the local drive-in burger stand on a regular basis, would ever be on the list for Heaven, let alone wear the artifacts and come back to tell the tale. He didn’t deserve to be let back, and they were jealous.

  Daryl had many unsavory habits and did many unspeakable things, which were spoken about often. He was rumored to be the town’s only drug dealer, and it was uttered several times that he sold his own body. It was thrilling to overhear parents in the supermarket ominously gossip amongst themselves about Daryl like Babylon. I wanted to know him more than anything in the world, because I know he hated our little village and I hated it too. The bad habits that were supposedly killing him were his ticket out.

  It was the only way and on some level, it was his mission to get out. I knew that someday he would succeed. That thought kept me warm on some nights and I prayed I had the strength to follow him someday.

  The second time Daryl McAdams died it was his fault. He took too many pills right there in the cafeteria and then washed it down with Dr. Pepper while the school security guard watched and did nothing, but still it was Daryl’s stupid fault because he of all people should know how rotten those pills are and how they fuck up your insides instead of actually help you.

  He of all people should have known that and he did know that and that’s precisely why he did it.

  That day paramedics showed up with a social worker and took Daryl’s twitching mass away to the emergency room, and Daryl’s mom could only watch from the office lobby, crying a lot but wearing big dark sunglasses as if that blocked the tears from coming out, but it was obvious. They all stood and watched and they weren’t surprised and they weren’t really that glad, including myself. We were simply bored.

  While Daryl was suspended everyone talked casually and they were dismissive.

  Daryl had died once before by accident, but now everyone had room to suspect that dying in public had become his new thing. “You got money, you’re allowed to go kill yourself. You get to come back and do it again and again until you realize it’s just not fun.” Everyone would say shit like this, referring to Daryl being an heir to some sort of farm equipment fortune, farm equipment their fathers all used but couldn’t be bothered to memorize the name. They would say it a lot and I guess it got to me. I realized that it was the spectacle he died for. As the blue glow turned fluorescent, I saw that I misjudged him completely.

  We dismissed what we would call growing pains as laziness in thought, a lack of drive and a lack of eventfulness in life; it was having everything that made his mind go off the rails in the most predictable way, and caused all sorts of things like his kleptomania and his tendency to hang out in neighborhoods of houses with dirty rain gutters and taped windows, where he clearly didn’t belong and didn’t fit in, and car crash after car crash, a shiny cherry-red brand new whatever-car of the moment with dents and bruises and scratches. Yes, in a few years he’d be a sushi and wine aficionado and would take his inheritance and move to Connecticut where no one ever frowned and everyone had fake lawns. Everyone knew the day would come and we found it pathetic that it was obvious to us but not to Daryl that only the most banal of excesses wait, no matter what he did to subvert it.

  He’d ditch his outcast friends and their terrible obscure taste in music and stop being so weird and stop acting depressed, stop using it as a propeller into space as he did during History class every day, or maybe he’d just wander off into the bland membrane of that particular day and decide to stay there, forever young and stupid.

  The death of Daryl McAdams was no longer a topic at school after a while, his strange glow had disappeared and was replaced by the sweet, earthy smell of a rich man and he walked the halls with a stupid grin, actually making eye contact with pretty girls despite being invisible to them again. He no longer had the sheen of a boyish rebel but seemed a needy old man in a boy’s body and was repulsive. His gaunt frame became healthy in every conventional sense and his skin got rosy again, like any other person on Earth.

  It took a lot of work to get used to it so instead of trying, everyone just stopped paying attention, and Daryl was kind of happy about that. That was the third death of Daryl McAdams, and the last one I witnessed. He eventually did ac
tually die of course in the I-stopped-breathing sense, probably many years later of natural causes so just consider it death’s pre-show. He was a warm body that breathed and whose heart would eventually beat like everyone else’s and he seemed to accept this curse as if it were just another material gift, like a brand new cherry red whatever-car.

  I could be wrong about all of this, I’m sure. But I fear that I’m not. Not only was it the death of Daryl, it was the death of the libertine I had become gleefully obsessed with. He was not Daryl, he was just Daryl, a chump with a stupid hillbilly name who was borderline illiterate and self-destructive and all too human.

  I’ve seen it happen since, and so it goes in adolescent mythology. The spark is just gone and I know it’s happened to him too, and everyone noticed. Seemed strange to these people, people who were watching and talking and thinking, that the only person at school who wasn’t afraid of death would just coast through life on cruise control like he had seen it all and was only hanging around because he was too rotten for Heaven and too green for Hell, and was just buying time until his inheritance came and he could spend it on sins like your average rich dude, and would probably never share what he’d seen with anyone, as if it had never happened. But they all wanted to know and wanted to believe. As for me, faith eludes.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO BABY JESUS?

  By Bobby Faust

  Bobbyfaust.blogspot.com

  Since Momma and Father Redmond turned me away last Summer, it’s been real weird. I’ve gotten calls from every big news network in the United States and Canada. I even accepted some of them: Fox News paid me a pretty good amount of money, and some alternative blog named ManChild New York paid for a week’s worth of hotel rooms and meals in New York. In exchange, they set me up with a megaphone and filmed me confronting my former family when they were in town picketing a movie premiere with sympathetic gay characters. I wouldn’t be surprised if they paid Father Redmond too. I would yell into the megaphone, mildly amusing things that really don’t mean anything, like “God hates the missionary position,” and “God is omnisexual.” My favorite was “God Hates Signs.” Simple and harmless, and wouldn’t embarrass my church. Father Redmond would ignore me until I got a round of applause and laughter. Then he and his family of little girls and boys would respond with inaudible lurching. I would imagine that Manchild New York put subtitles up, I don’t know, I didn’t view the video.

  They ran the story the following day. From the public computer at the Brooklyn Holiday Inn, I read the comments, the only thing worth reading on the entire site.

  “This man is much too dumb to understand what he is doing with the megaphone, but I’m glad he agreed to be filmed.”

  “This whole thing is just sad. A poor hillbilly was sucked into a cult, and now he is being sucked into the snarky New York blogosphere. Or is he now doing the sucking? Heh.”

  This type of thing would have mortified most people, but I’m used to it. As a member of the Redmond Family Church, I was familiar with media nowadays and their bottom feeding ways. And Father Redmond and his clan may look, walk, and sound like your typical illiterate hillbilly fucks, but in reality they are all lawyers on a mission that, even knowing they are lawyers, may surprise you. Making money through litigation is their goal.

  Look at it like this. Let’s say you live in Southern Missouri, where decent simple hardworking people are, let’s say, sensitive and maybe ignorant about sexual difference, or any kind of difference, really. Let’s say you are one of those rural churchgoing families who had a son who was a veteran. Let’s say that your son was not a closeted queer all his life, but straight. He died in combat.

  Now picture your son’s funeral. Saddest day in your unremarkable life. Until now, you’ve never experienced anything so profoundly tragic. You don’t know how to process your possible upcoming layoff from the factory, much less the death of a child—your eighteen year-old son who most likely didn’t know what he had gotten himself into when he gave in to the Army recruiter.

  Now picture yourself in the sanctuary, trying to focus on the words of the speakers, of the preacher, trying not to cry because had your son been with you, he’d think you were a baby. Focus on the colors of the stained glass. The quiet breaks between the preacher’s breaths. In between those quiet breaks, you hear an angry, squalling crowd outside: “God hates fags!” “Thank God for dead soldiers!” Their voices crazed, convicted, unrelenting. And these people are from where you’re from, they’re local. The things they are saying are what outsiders say. You’re betrayed by your own kind. They’re spitting in your face on the most vulnerable day of your life. What would you do? Myself, looking back, I think I would have shot them all, every single one of them, the kids too.

  So it’s no surprise that every now and then, a member of the Redmond Family Church is assaulted, which is followed by a lawsuit against the offending funeral guest—usually a member of the deceased’s family. The Redmond Family Church always represents themselves, and wins at least half of these cases.

  How I got ‘sucked into’ the church is a long story, and not really important. Religion effects people in different ways. Some folks can read the Bible as children and discreetly discount most of it for their entire lives, raise Christian families and drag their children to church against their will until they’re eighteen, hoping they take in that thirty percent of the Bible and have enough good sense to discard the rest as archaic tradition that doesn’t apply to them.

  Or, you can manipulate it to make a living, and recruit the faithful and stupid to help you make your living.

  My saga has been misinterpreted countless times. Some say I had a mental breakdown and had to be rehabilitated back into a normal existence. Some say I’m actually a homosexual and was trying to extort The Family by making accusations that Father Redmond and I had an affair (that was actually their favorite).

  Father Redmond liked to test us, and at times throughout the planning of this picket, I felt like my loyalty, and probably my resolve too, was being tested.

  My suspicion was strengthened by the fact that at the time, we were being filmed by a college documentarian.

  We were obligated to many one-on-one interviews with the filmmaker, who was obviously opposed to the Church and very liberal. We were assigned an “interview buddy” who would give an objective evaluation of our interview. By that I mean, our interview buddy would tell Father Redmond if we spoke too freely or gave too much credence to the interviewer’s talking points. I was to never waver. When we were asked why our signs were so brash in language and intentionally inflammatory with freely using the word “fag” and other homophobic slurs, we were to quote scripture or give our own incendiary interpretation of it. Every word was to help cultivate the world’s perception of the Church. Our goal was to get people to recognize us, then hate us, so a hostile citizen might cross the line on the street, which would lead to litigation. Strangely, the journalist never even raised the question that Father Redmond might not believe what he claimed.

  As with journalists and pastors and charitable celebrities and the biggest corporations that come to mind, profit was Father Redmond’s only goal, but it was the illusion of conviction that was the product. Casual homophobia was amped up to the extent that the mission of the church seemed to be to destroy homosexuality because it touched everyone and everything, and it was used to brainwash the children and the dumb.

  It should be obvious to everyone that the “protests” against the American military had little to do with homosexuality, and more to do with the inflammatory nature of intermingling the imagery of the military with the imagery of the gay lifestyle. We focused on male homosexuality, mostly—the eating of feces was a favorite rant. It garners an extreme reaction from your average military family, because you are soiling their fragile take on masculinity and strong, silent patriotism with the idea of the Army bunkers being nothing more than gay bath houses with a massive arsenal, accepting of faggotry and as such, denying traditional value
s.

  Picketing with signs and screams, even at a young veteran or celebrity’s funeral, does not give someone the legal right to hit or spit on you. When they do, the Redmond family, a clan of brilliant attorneys, get paid.

  And so, an outrageous public image was created--a bizarre brand that depended on wide spread reviling to survive.

  The film crew was there when I simply walked away from The Family at my uncle’s funeral, never to return, and it was the climax of their documentary. It was sold to Inside Edition and put on the internet, and it started the coastal media’s fixation on me.

  A large portion of the American people herald me as a hero or victim, when truth be known I still hold many of the same beliefs that attracted me to the Church in the first place. Not much has changed, except in how I express the ideas I hold, or actually, how I do not express them. My adequate vocabulary and relative youth makes me an appealing spokesperson for these journalists and online media companies, and I oblige them for the same reason the Redmond Family church exists.