Boys in Gilded Cages

by Jarod Powell

  Out of touch as she seemed to be, Brandon’s mother had a lot to do with his success as an actor, and some have suggested, his subsequent problems. As a baby, she started him out on the Tennessee pageant circuit. A former pageant girl, she behaved as expected of a woman in middle age who just nicked the corner of show business in her prime.

  When there was a casting call for a local business’s commercial, Sandy was there with Brandon. When a country artist needed a weeping child for their music video, Sandy was there with Brandon. When Lou called Sandy one day and told her that he would be interested in representing Brandon, she saw her own name in lights.

  After years as a commercial actor, Brandon Bennett landed his career-starter as the subversive sidekick to kids’ network star Toby Westwood on the sitcom “[title]”, a title that Brandon could never explain in interviews. On the show, he was normally dressed in dark clothing and presented as a teen badass, and stole many scenes from Toby, as well as priceless exposure on teenybopper magazines. Toby Westwood, a round-faced queen, a more established star and bigger diva, did not like this. He tried to get Brandon fired several times for pulling humiliating practical jokes on him, and for speaking to Perez Hilton (as “A source”) on numerous occasions regarding Toby’s sexuality. Lou saved him several times, but could not keep him out of trouble forever, and Brandon was written off the series one season before it was cancelled.

  At the end of their final episode together, Brandon and Toby had to hug. On the last take, Brandon grabbed Toby’s ass and yelled to the cast and crew, “Toby’s got a big boner!” Toby locked himself in his dressing room and refused to come out.

  Cut to Summer 2010, and Brandon is giving the closeted director/producer of a comic book franchise adaptation an awkward lap dance for the role of a floating head in a comic book adaptation, with no speaking parts. Toby Westwood was the youngest person nominated for an Oscar this season.

  Sandy’s words approached Brandon softly.

  “What…I just have to ask. Being your mother makes this question seem cruel.”

  Brandon’s eyes glazed over.

  “Why are you here?”

  He wasn’t sure who she was speaking to – Brandon Bennett the Man, or the Actor. What did she mean, exactly?

  Did she mean: Why are you here, after two years of silence? Or did she mean: Why are you here, and not in the hospital, where Lou assured me you were after I saw an E! News segment talking about your figurative swan dive off a Malibu Bluff?

  Or did she mean: Why are you here, a cardboard cutout of a person, replacing my Son, claiming to be him?

  Brandon’s response was a shrug.

  “Well, Chris will be here soon. He’s bringing dinner home. He’s also bringing his girlfriend for the first time, so I guess your timing is perfect!” Sandy was demented with forced glee.

  Chris was not ecstatic to see Brandon. They greeted and hugged, but there were no smiles, no chuckles, no playful shoves to the shoulder. Chris looks like Brandon, only slightly healthier.

  Mother didn’t have much to offer the boys in their reunion. She was preoccupied. “Where’s your girlfriend? I thought she was coming…Oh, that must be her…Oh, you’re pretty! It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

  Wendy walked in with a Cheshire cat grin. Sandra immediately started clanging pots and pans, leaving the boys, and Wendy, to stare at each other.

  The dinner table was wrecked with gravy and brown flaky cuts of meat and greens soaked in leftover grease, and silence. Topics of discussion ranged from weather to this year’s crop, to cruise discounts to Brandon Bennett the Actor, to Chris’s wonderful miraculous relationship. But no more than twenty words were spoken in thirty minutes. Wendy brought up a party at her coworker’s house to interrupt the clanging of forks, and Chris immediately invited Brandon.

  “Oh, I don’t…”

  “Cut the crap, Brandon.”

  “I’m kinda tired, and…”

  “Everyone will love it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Sigh. “Okay.”

  The drive to the party wasn’t really that awkward. Back at the house, Brandon poured his cough syrup into a “World’s Best Dad” travel coffee mug and mixed it with Diet Coke. On the road, he sipped it through a stir stick and looked out the window at the big blur of corn stalks. The windows were down, and he meditated on the humidity and imagined it was bathwater. Chills don’t exist. Drugs don’t exist. California’s dead. History doesn’t matter. Wendy, sitting “Bitch”, would occasionally break the silence by mimicking along to her Depeche Mode mix tape and looking at the boys to see their reaction (they did not react). Chris, a country music fan to the core, ejected the cassette after “Goodnight Lovers” finished playing, without giving Wendy so much as a warning glance. She grimaced and positioned her torso to face Brandon.

  The house loomed larger than it was. The windows glowed, two yellowish-white devil eyes, hungrily beaming Brandon in. The situation they had there was a short fuse; nothing good was going to happen in that house. A sweaty, bearded man stumbled out onto the porch wearing a beer bong helmet. “Hey, Wendy!” He called out across the yard. “Who are those two handsome stallions in yer’ company tonight?”

  “Shut up, Keller,” Chris said, putting a lip of tobacco in. Trailing behind the couple, Brandon saw Chris animatedly whispering to Wendy.

  It was a dim, dingy farmhouse inside, converted into a dimmer, dingier bachelor pad. There were shamefully hot high school girls, their teachers, probably their parents, college students, and pretty much everyone Brandon had left behind, but a bit aged. Brandon Bennett the Actor was approached several times by horny high school students, elated to be meeting the kids’ network rebel they masturbated to as tweens, stealing cell phone pictures and pecks on the cheek. It did not matter that he was dirty, or that he was impossibly thin, or that he was wilting with cravings for narcotics, subsisting on cherry cough syrup, slowly starving to death. It didn’t matter, because with his presence, he validated those girls’ entire lives. They’d go to school and be meaner to the goth girls, they’d play the outgoing messages he was asked to record on their phones, they’d show everyone the pictures, talk about how Brandon Bennett looks like shit but he’s still hotter than any dude at this school, and a much better lay, etc.

  Brandon Bennett the Actor was not dead yet, just dying a tad slower than expected.

  In the midst of this bored and noisy scene, Brandon heard Wendy yelling, heard things crashing, and the slapping of skin. “You fuck! I fucking hate you! Go fuck her skanky ass, you drunk stupid fuck! Fuck!” She was throwing Keller’s knick knacks indirectly at Chris, slapping his shoulders and the back of his head. Chris covered his face and curled up to deflect the attack.

  Brandon approached the couple and grabbed Chris’s arm to guide him away. Wendy shoved Brandon into the kitchen counter and tried to kiss him. He resisted and shoved her away. “Oh, what? Don’t want an audience?” She removed a slip of paper from her cleavage and threw it at Chris. Verging on tears, he started to bend over to pick it up. “Go on,” Wendy said. “Read it and weep, you fuck.” Before he could read it, Brandon grabbed Chris, who by now was nearly a puddle. He put his arm around him and headed toward the door.

  “Find your own way home, Wendy,” Brandon said solemnly. Wendy dramatically fell backward and pretended to be drunker than she actually was, but Keller caught her and held her as she cried, smiling over her shoulder at one of his buddies.

  Brandon didn’t speak to Chris as he drove; he gave him a sympathetic glance throughout the drive. Chris, glazed over, sweet, stupid Chris, with his head against the window, pouting like a child. Times like these, Brandon adored this man-child, who shared his DNA and his parents and his home for several years. What they didn’t share—Brandon’s wanderlust, Chris’s boyish fragility of spirit—was appreciated.

  Even though they had not spoken in three years, Brandon thought of Chris often. He wondered if following through with his p
romise to hire Chris to come to Los Angeles and be his personal assistant would have toughened his brother up and leaned his soft midsection; he wondered if Chris’s face, a reminder of home, would have kept him out of the skank of Skid Row, off of TMZ, from the kids’ network sitcom to the steady, respectable income of an entertainment entrepreneur-slash-performer that you must become to stay in the Hills. He wondered if his roots, the most vanilla of clichés, worked anywhere near as well as methadone. If there was anyone on Earth whose spirit was capable of resisting the soullessness of L.A., it was Chris.

  When they got home they lit a fire pit, and they talked. They talked for a long time but it wasn’t about much. Chris asked a few things about what it was like on the West, and, for example, what the difference between a producer and a director was, if Brandon had ever met any of his favorite actresses (he had, in fact, slept with many of them).

  Brandon wanted to say that famous people don’t look as good as they do in photographs and in movies, that interviews are their biggest performances, that Tom Cruise is actually the least crazy person in the whole goddamn town, but he wanted to protect him from the truth.

  (When the men were boys, it had been Chris’s own brother that ruined Santa Claus for him, and Brandon freely admitted as a teenager that he didn’t believe in Jesus. The way Chris looked at his brother after both bombshells were dropped never left him. He got a dull ache in his chest when his mother told Brandon that Chris came to her in tears, afraid that he wasn’t “going to make it to Heaven”.)

  When the liquor wore off and fatigue sat in, Brandon got up, patted Chris on the shoulder and suggested they go to bed.

  “Would you like to ride with us to the Christmas Tree Farm?” Brandon’s mother asked him after the dishes and the guests were clear, except for a few. “It’s your grandmother’s thing. We started doing it a few years ago. She didn’t make dinner yesterday, so it’d be nice if you could go with us.”

  He definitely did not want to go. He had no idea what a Christmas tree farm was, but it sounded dreadful.

  “Sure,” He said.

  “Is he going, or not?” Aunt Vida balked across the room.

  “Yes, Vida, Brandon’s going.”

  “Who?”

  “Brandon, Vida.” She over-enunciated.

  “Who’s Brandon?”

  The drive to the Christmas Tree Farm was pretty short, but dangerous. Brandon did in fact have to drive, and no one felt inclined to warn him that the dirt road to get from the highway to the place—winding and uphill—had no barrier to keep the car from crashing into the descending bank of trees on each side.

  “You can drive in that L.A. mess and you can’t handle a ride to the Christmas Tree Farm?” His father laughed from the back seat. He didn’t answer, partly because he hadn’t driven in L.A. in at least a year.

  Once there, Brandon’s family got their picture taken with the bejeweled Santa robot on a bench on the front porch waving his hands.

  “God,” Brandon murmured. Aunt Vida shot him a glassy look and said, “Wouldn’t you like to wait in the car?”

  “Vida,” Sandy snapped. Vida moseyed into the cabin.

  “You boys look so cute, all bundled up,” Sandy marveled. “ Get next to the gaudy Santa. I’ll take your picture.”

  She directed them on each side, squinting at the hung over and opiate thirsty brothers through her disposable camera’s viewfinder. Upon the click, Chris mumbled something about a bathroom and stumbled off.

  Brandon’s mother was a terrible photographer. But she got that picture perfectly, and it went on their mantle that Christmas, the centerpiece to her collection of awful knick knacks.

  What made Brandon return Lou’s million phone calls was not an effort to return to his despondent career. It was not an escape from Hawthorn, as his mother saw it so many years ago. It was defeat. There was no escape from L.A. and Brandon Benett the Autonomous Man was now relegated to the back, screaming and clawing at the lobotomized actor in front until he was out of air, once and for all.

  One phone call. Turn on the fucking lights. Deaden my eyes again. Let me hit my fucking mark.

  He took the BART to Lambert International, with Chris accompanying him. At the gate, the boys hugged. Knowing Brandon’s fate, Dead Fish Chris could not manage a grip worth shit. Brandon Bennett the Man pecked his brother on the cheek and headed toward the terminal, surrounded by a sea of oblivious drone travelers. Brandon didn’t say a word; he just left again.

  THE MACABRE BITCH MRS. DANFORTH

  Out of everyone, she was the only one not asked about him after his death. Well, that’s how it seemed, anyway. She was part of an old maid guild here in this town, untouched by the sexiness of a teen death. When she finally got married to a widower pastor at the age of forty-seven, the young Daryl McAdams was in attendance, along with my mother, addled by dementia, and Jim’s congregation. It was a quiet ceremony at Jim’s church, which most of the townspeople seemed to regard as foreign, or alien. Strange. It was a gathering of the country’s outcasts, I suppose, but a call for celebration.

  I guess everyone who was there to celebrate, was there to celebrate the union of two people. For Danforth, it was little more than a relief. A single woman reaches an age where the quiet night becomes not quietness, but a tension. Unfulfilled expectations cause tension.

  There is no more frightening a sight than an angry woman in her forties. The sight of her is akin to a runaway rust bucket of a truck – useless and stiff but fervent in speeding towards its own death. It’s an incredible sight. The rust bucket speeding proudly towards collision into a ditch or a tree; probably set on that path on purpose and if not, its demise is probably a blessing to its caretakers.

  For all of the glaring, the taunting, the mailbox shenanigans, and her furious indifference to them, a person may think she had become immune to ridicule. On the contrary, this wedding is a direct result of it. Danforth is reinventing herself.

  I still insist that Daryl and Danforth had a connection. A person reserves the right to deny herself a kindred spirit, and to pretend that the boy was anything close would be especially disingenuous. Many attach themselves to him post mortem, and I’m not sure why.

  He was not particularly disliked, or feared. He did not have an aura. There was nothing mystical about him and she found his spirit to be dull and subdued. His face was not particularly memorable, and his name carried an indistinct, typically rural ring. Starting with the first day he plopped himself into the back row of her class, and ending with the day of her wedding (my last memory of him), she saw a boy with no future and no intention of making one. It’s hard to imagine his story ending well, and of course it didn’t.

  Despite this, she takes private pride in believing that no one knew him like she did.

  She had stopped into the Cue ‘n Brew on the way home from work to meet her dear friend Esmeralda, who had just returned from California and was eager to show off her new facelift.

  She was, at that point, a frumpy divorcee. It was clear from the moment they met durin gher Junior year at Southeast Missouri State, that she only bothered attending college to meet a boy who would one day become a doctor. She was liquored up quite intensely when she pointed and whispered, “Isn’t that the McAdams boy?” Daryl was bent over the bar, yelling at Billy Joe, presumably because he wouldn’t serve him. Looking at Esmeralda, she was undoubtedly analyzing his backside. This made Danforth blush.

  “That boy is sixteen,” she muttered.

  “I know,” Danforth said flatly.

  “There is just no way…” she trailed off, in a trance, mouth agape. “No way.” She stiffened up and slid her straw into her mouth. Her eyes darted West, and back at Danforth, then West, then back at Danforth. She must have looked puzzled, because Esmeralda whispered, “He’s coming over here!” Danforth felt a brisk wind, and Daryl was sitting there, between her and Esmeralda, leaning on the back of the chair.

  “Why, Daryl McAdams, what on Earth would you be doing her
e?” Esmeralda drawled.

  “I’m trying to drink, Miss Raymond, but your boy Billy won’t serve me.”

  Danforth would later say that was the first time she heard him speak. His voice was huskier, belied his age, and his accent Southern. He stared Esmeralda down and she all but melted.

  “Would you like to try mine?” Esmeralda asked in an embarrassingly flirtatious tone.

  “I don’t know, Miss Raymond, what is it?” He smirked.

  “It’s free.”

  Daryl shrugged, flicked the straw on the table and swigged it down. “Mmm, that’s pretty good.”