After the success of The Monsters In The Wood stage show, I then went on to a book. Also called Monsters in The Wood. I was on a roll. At any rate, there is a book proposal currently in circulation and on this page I have posted some of the sample chapters it includes and a couple of things not in the proposal. If you are an editor or publisher who is interested in seeing the full proposal contact me at brad.lawrence77@gmail.com – Enjoy. Also, you can follow me on Twitter.
Chapter 1. Drugs, Guns, Spiderman, and a Noticeable Absence of Motorcycles.
On my Twenty-first Birthday I stand in front of an open casket. Inside is Randy.
Randy is wearing Harley Davidson brand biker boots, a pair of Levi’s jeans with a Harley Davidson patch on the left thigh, and a Harley Davidson belt buckle. He has Harley Davidson tattoos on both arms, and one of them perfectly matches the T-shirt he will be wearing into eternity. It’s a picture of a Harley Davidson motorcycle bursting out of a flaming Harley Davidson emblem, the flames rising to form a great orange phoenix in a night sky full of lightening and, one would assume, thunder. He is being buried wearing a Harley Davidson cap. And also, with two spare Harley Davidson caps of slightly different design. These are arranged at the hinge of the casket, displayed as though Randy were a sort of pharaoh of the trailer park, to be entombed with all his regalia.
I look down at Randy in the casket, his pale, mat finished face framed by stringy long hair and the mustache that is easily ten years out of date, surrounded by his biker shwag and, honestly, I kind of admire it all. I mean… Ok, to take the pharaoh thing one step further, apparently, when Randy arrives before Anubis, the jackal headed God of the dead, gate keeper to the underworld and paradise beyond, weigher of souls, judge of the damned, the message he wants to send is:
Fuck you, Dog-face, I’m Captain Fuckin’ America! King of the Fuckin’ Road!
That has a certain kind of balls. Class? No. Balls, a little. As a matter of fact, I think I would take this even further, I’m thinking they should have buried him with his arms crossed, like Tut, but with a tire iron in one hand and a pistol in the other. Rock n’ Roll, heavy metal thunder, Born to Be Wild, the whole nine yards. That would look great on a fucking Harley shirt.
This is Southern Missouri and this is trash, but I can guarantee you that Randy had next to nothing. How do I know this? Because I am from here and I know that all there is to be had here is next to nothing. But there is something to be said for embracing what you do have and reveling in it. Others have school and opportunity and somewhere to go and what Randy had was Harley Davidson. Founded in 1903 by Will Harley and the Davidson brothers, Walt and Arthur, in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and conquering the great expanse of America ever since. What more has ever said US of A with greater style? Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and the tragic wobble right after the shotgun blast and right before the last crash and the end credits. The hordes of Hell’s Angels barreling up the pacific highway in the sixties and camping out across the bay in Oakland like Visigoths across the Rubicon. America is nothing but highway once you get out of the fleshy condensation of the East Coast. After that it is just long ribbons of beautiful grey interstate stretching through forests, mountains, and finally desert all the way to the ocean and every mile the inspiration for endless pop songs from the Brill Building to the Beach Boys and all of that before Les Paul lead the guitar toting legions of young leather clad sex Gods to their eventual supremacy. Every time they went platinum, the first thing one of those virtuoso high school drop outs did with that first ridiculously large check from the record company was go out and buy themselves a Harley Fucking Davidson. So, Randy might have had almost nothing but he did have that, all of it and, by God, he’s gonna be buried with it.
Then Chuck, my brother-in-law, whispers in my ear, “Your Mom told me he never owned a bike.”
I turn and look at Chuck, whose eyes are afloat in tears. Not for Randy, but because he is having to work so hard to keep a straight face. So, more AT Randy, than for Randy. He is a large man, around three hundred pounds of hearty middle American meals eaten behind the wheel of his candy apple red Daytona. He likes to wear a full beard, which emphasizes the roundness of his face. With that face reddened with suppressed glee he looks inflated, like someone is blowing up a balloon with shoulders to the point of popping. Through the gritted teeth of a tight smile he says, “It was… just a dream that never came true.”
I look back down into the casket and think, “Randy, you jackass.”
Now I have to keep a straight face. I have to because, not far away, are Steve and Valerie. Steve is my step-brother and Randy was his best friend. Otherwise, the room is empty so we would be noticed if we should start laughing at the corpse. And here’s where it gets even a little sadder for Randy. You see, Randy is not the main event. At his own funeral, Randy is more in the way of the opening act or an addendum.
The reason we are really here is my Step-Sister Vicki. Vicki was shot dead three days earlier, in what has been speculated to be a drug deal gone bad. What I know so far is this, Vicki was at work in the pharmacy her in-laws own and which serves as a front for the activities of herself and her husband, Mike. Mike is one of the biggest drug dealers in Southern Missouri and Southern Missouri is one of the largest methamphetamine production areas in North America.
Methamphetamine was invented, or first synthesized as the scientists like to say, in Japan in 1893 by the chemist Nagayoshi Nagai. The crystallized form came twenty six years later thanks to Akira Ogata. Ogata was also Japanese. Apparently, Imperial Japan partied like a fraternity with backstage passes to a Girls Gone Wild taping. From there it would crop up in the medical world the way crackpot ideas always have. It was used by both sides in World War II to keep the troops on their toes, The Nazis administering it in candy bars called Panzerschokolade, or tank chocolate. Who said those guys didn’t have hearts? After the war, everyone came down a little. Then in the fifties it had a comeback when the U.S. medical establishment began prescribing it for everything from Parkinson’s, to narcolepsy (which actually makes a kind of sense) and, ironically, alcoholism. Then in 1986, the federal government outlawed the drug in the United States citing something about it being highly addictive and extraordinarily dangerous. Maybe because even after your teeth fall out of your head you think to yourself, “Well I haven’t had that aneurism yet, lets get more.” Still, its base component, ephedrine, could be found anywhere decongestants were sold and the laboratory equipment needed to refine ephedrine into methamphetamine was found to be easy to come by, assemble, and operate. By March of 1994 when Vicki is shot, there are labs all over the backwoods of the South and the Midwest, and in Southern Missouri, Mike had a hand in a good number of those labs.
Now lets be clear, I have cousins that fed an infant orange juice and only orange juice for so long that it was surfeited with citric acid and actually turned orange. These same people, who were genuinely stunned to find out that a baby required something other than Tropicana, can effectively oversee the synthesis of a complex chiral compound involving the use of several highly unstable and flammable solvents. This is the kind of thing that makes you question the value and wisdom of a near universal literacy rate. Given the choice between Shakespeare… Hell, given the choice between Penthouse Forum and The Means and Methods Of Methamphetamine Production my family went for the instruction manual every time. Actually, they probably made time for Penthouse Forum. Even entrepreneurs need downtime. Also, I may have been a little over eager in my use of the word “effectively.” Most illegal labs are not discovered by quick witted police work or carefully constructed sting operations. Most illegal labs are discovered when one of the crank freaks fucks up and there is a massive explosion out in the middle of the woods. If there were only a Methamphetamine Production For Dummies all of this could be avoided.
A known associate of her Mike’s came into the pharmacy, said Mike was supposed to meet him and demanded to know where Mike was. Vicki told the guy Mike wasn’t there. The guy went out front and hovered around, pacing and agitated. Then an old lady came in to get her entirely legitimate, I assume, prescriptions filled. At this point things get a little chaotic. The guy came back in and again demanded to know where Mike was, only this time he was waving a pistol around. Vicki still had no idea where her husband was. This prompted the man with the gun to start firing said gun. The old lady hit the floor and Vicki made for the front door. On her way out she was shot twice in the back and fell to the ground. But she had enough adrenaline going through her that she got up, ran out the front door, into the diner next to the pharmacy, and made it all the way to the kitchen before she died. Her murderer was gone, along with some valium, by the time the cops arrive.
All of this happened across the street from the courthouse. Law enforcement in Fredericktown, Missouri (my home town, where we are gathered on this day) is kind of a cross between Mayberry P.D. and astrology, quaint and none too bright with unverifiable effects. This may also explain why portions of my family run large scale drug operations entirely unimpeded. Picture squinty men with their Stetsons pushed back standing around in front of police tape hung upside down saying things like, “Well, sure looks like someone shot the drug store girl.” Yes, Jeb, it surely does. My uncle Fermin actually ran for Sheriff at one point. He is a gambling addict who lost an entire house to an illegal poker game, his voice box to a bout of throat cancer, and his trigger finger to a drunken carpentry excursion. He spends his free time with criminals, he can’t yell freeze and he can’t shoot a gun, which in no way kept him from shooting his own son in the ass with a rifle through a wall nor from coming within single digits of winning the election. I assume the other guy had a trigger finger and that was his edge but I could be wrong.
I digress.
When news of Vicki’s murder hit Fredericktown people were sent out to collect money for the funeral. Planning for emergencies is not really the strong suit of your average criminal in spite of the number of emergencies the life style engenders. Randy was dispatched… in a car… to Poplar Bluff, about two hours east, to pick up some cash from friends of the family there. He never made it. About halfway there he managed to run off the road and flip his car. I have no idea what kind of car Randy was driving but, for some reason, I picture an El Camino. It is an image I just can’t shake. Now, Vicki is laid up in the main viewing room and Randy is in the side parlor. Steve, having lost his sister and his best friend in the same day, is sitting in the corner. His common law wife, Valerie, is sitting behind him.
Steve, at a hundred and twenty pounds counting the glasses and long dishwater hair, has always looked like John Lennon would after radical lyposuction.
Right now, he’s looking like life couldn’t get any worse.
Valerie, however, is looking in two directions at once. About five years before Valerie met Steve, she had been in a car accident. While on Heroin. The accident left her with mild brain damage and an eye that veered off from the other one. Subsequently, she ballooned up to nearly three hundred pounds. No one was really aware that Steve had taken to screwing Valerie until she came up pregnant with his child. At this point, Steve, Valerie, and their five year old son William are all living in Steve’s trailer, which was too small when it was just Steve.
I know very little about Steve. Which is odd considering we have been family for eighteen years. On some level, when you are the youngest of eight, you are just going to lose track of some people. I remember being a kid and getting strange reports that he was in Louisiana wrestling gators, which was probably a joke, and gigging frogs, which probably wasn’t. I do remember that when I was nine he came to stay with us for a little bit. I was clueless as to the circumstances of this visit and was never inclined to ask. One day his rusted out yellow pinto was parked outside and he was sitting on the couch. He didn’t say anything. You could walk into the room and change the channel on the television and he would just watch whatever you had put on without protest. It didn’t matter how distant the two programs might be. You could start at pro wrestling and end up on Meet The Press (this is hypothetical, Meet The Press was never actually watched in my household) and he wouldn’t blink. He would just sit there through a TV medley, from afternoon cartoons to the Prime Time line-up and never express a preference. Or give any other indication of non-coma status. This seemed strange to me, but at the time I was too young to know what it meant to be really, really stoned all the time.
It was around this time that I discovered comic books and heard some rumor of entire stores dedicated to this pinnacle of American literature of which I had just become aware. There were two in the St. Louis area. This was before the ascendance of geek culture. I told my Mom about this and begged for a ride. She took one look at the address and said forget it. At this point, when Steve wasn’t on the couch or wandering the house all silent and hazy, he was spending his time working on the yellow Pinto. I have always thought of it as “the yellow Pinto.” Those cars, in that color, rusted in a way that you will never see on any other kind of metal. It was like they had started rusting before they were assembled, like it was part of the design along with the whole exploding thing. It was the yellow Pinto that made me take notice of Steve for the first and only time until the day of Vicki’s funeral. In the ruthless, pre-pubescent, hierarchy of my nine year old brain the ownership of a vehicle, regardless of how life endangering a ride in that vehicle might be, elevated him from lamp to usable resource. I hit him up for the ride and he said sure. I have absolutely no idea why. He drove me two hours into a shitty neighborhood, which even I was able to recognize as such, and never said anything.
His silence didn’t matter to me as I was always in my own world anyway. That is why comics made such an impression. Comics, some of them, at any rate, looked like my internal world. Steve did not. He looked like a strange reality that had descended at some distant point of my pre cognitive life. I was not as interested in that. Spiderman made more sense to me than any of my family and it was an easy slide over into that universe from the one I had constructed in my imagination. Checking in on the actual world of my home life was like dropping into the middle of an emergency room at about two in the morning on a Tuesday. It was full of weird tension and urgency, yet nothing seemed to be happening aside from occasional flare-ups of temper and panic, crises of indeterminate origin. At least that was the way it seemed if you were an interloper from another world. I’d raise my head from my drawings or my comics or cartoons and find my Step-Father screaming curses at one of my siblings. They would look sheepish and dumb, stranded without defense or explanation in the spew of his rage. Eventually he would either run out of steam or actually belt somebody. Whichever happened, the immediacy of the fresh injustice that had set him off would dissipate and he would settle into his normal expression of impotent wrath. At rest, so to speak, he had this look that the universe was so wrong that he could not begin to understand how it got this way. All of this was normal and, frankly, of little interest to me at the time. I would catch bits of controversy, words and phrases. “Pregnant.” “Arrested.” “You left the car where?” But, whatever. My Step father was the destroyer of peace, quiet, and siblings (of which, at that time, I had more than enough). Galactus was the devourer of worlds. Who could compete with that?
There were really only two comic houses of any importance at the time, DC and Marvel, each representing an entire universe of characters and storylines. For those who have never had a geek phase: DC equals Superman and The Justice League, Marvel equals Spiderman and The X-Men. I liked Marvel. It may sound a little crazy but Marvel was more realistic. And by realistic, I mean, chaotic, brutal, bloody, and dark. I just related more. Superman lived in a clean world of easy lessons. Spiderman didn’t. And neither did I. But Spidey usually attended to the chaos by kicking someone’s ass. I coped by reading about Spidey kicking someone’s ass. Superman spent every issue coming up with convoluted ways to reverse time and moralizing his enemies to death. The fact that I couldn’t get into that may offer a clue about what eventually happened between Jesus and I, but that is years off at this point.
When Steve and I got to the comic shop I went nuts. I found myself in the throws of two crucial life revelations, first that there were people and stores, an entire culture and history, specifically dedicated to my questionable tastes, and second, being in one of those environments when you are a kid with no money is excruciating. The phrase is “like a pig in shit.” But I wasn’t so much that as a pig who could see the shit, smell the shit, get really close with one hoof, but was otherwise stuck on a very pristine white bath mat. I guess the farmer in this analogy would be the store clerk who glared at me with narrowed eyes every time I pealed open one of the plastic covers that all of the comics were encased in. Then he would look at Steve who stood by the door with his hands in his pockets not saying anything. Steve smiled weakly. And that was it. I bought two comics, an X-Men and a Daredevil, and thus broke the bank, Then we drove home. A few days later Steve left and I never bothered to ask where he had gone and for better or for worse, Steve was cemented in my mind as a quiet, affable loser in a corner.
And now at the funeral, here he is, once again quietly in a corner and seemingly at a loss.
I walk over and ask Steve how he’s holding up, which is an admittedly stupid question. He nods grimly, but doesn’t really say anything. He is slumped in his chair, head hung forward on his chest. He seems boneless like an old house cat. His eyes are focused on some point beyond me. If I had to guess I would say that the place he is looking at is four days ago. Then, I ask Valerie how she’s doing.
Valerie’s eyes light up and she grins at me…
And whatever is just beyond my left shoulder…
And she says, “I’m pretty good, Brad, how’re you? Been a long time. You look good.”
Apparently, if ignorance is bliss, mild brain damage is a perpetual paradise. I have no idea what to say. For Valerie, this seems to be a grand parade of faces she doesn’t usually get to see. Her husband, father of her child, whatever, seems to be close to slipping into a coma of grief. Meanwhile, Valerie is attending a strangely somber picnic.
Chuck is staring at Valerie in open wonder and amazement, like a child seeing a giraffe for the first time. If he has to hold back any longer he will rupture an internal organ. This is what he has in mind when he tugs on my arm and says, “I think Amy is looking for us.”
We make whatever talk has to be made to get out of the room. As we’re going, William comes scuttling past without acknowledging either Chuck or I and it is doubtful that he even knows who we are. This is the last time I will ever see William. Within nine years, William will die in an accident with a four wheeler, on which, his mother will be riding piggy back. Valerie will survive, but three months later, Steve will take an overdose of oxycontin and sleeping pills and be dead for almost a full day before anyone finds him. I will never see Steve again, either.
Chapter 11. Jesus Would Strongly Prefer That You Remain a Virgin Until He Destroys the World. Thank You For Your Cooperation.
Kingsley Walker is sweating. I’m sweating too. I’m sweating because I’m fat. Kingsley is sweating because of the stage lights. He is the youth minister of the St. Charles Assembly of God Church. He is tall and thin with a weak chin and a receding hairline. He looks like Ichabod Crane, and to me, that is not an insult. Having been fat since the second grade, I have always much admired the Ichabod Crane type. Every Halloween, on CBS, they play this version of Sleepy Hollow that has Jeff Goldblum in the lead role, and part of the reason I watch it is a purely physical fascination with the character. His rigid straightness, the tightly fitted Victorian clothing with all of its layers and buttons and cinches keeping everything in close order, the delicacy of his long sinewy fingers, and the clean efficiency of his movements. These things seem so foreign to the heaped shambling that makes up my life.
Mine is a life of fleshy limbs held close to my unwieldy torso. No room I am in ever seems quite big enough, and nothing is more embarrassing to a fat kid than knocking something over. Everyone looks at you with their suspicions confirmed. I am currently in the phase of wearing over-large clothes—the mistake obese people make of buying the extra extra large when extra will do. You think you are hiding. You are not. That is also why I have an unruly mop of dishwater hair with a corona of split ends. Another ill-conceived camouflage technique that instead just screams out, “Hey, look at this weird haircut. And while you are having a gander, don’t miss the Coke bottle glasses and the braces. You want to get the full show, after all.” I am a long way from the precise lines of Ichabod Crane, and that is why he seems such the paragon of slick stylishness in my eyes.
Kingsley is not stylish, but he is tall and thin. I am more akin to Kingsley’s wife, Glenda, who is a little beach ball of a woman. If Kingsley is a line, she is a circle. I am a globe.
Glenda is sitting at the back of the stage, which is free-standing and alone in the lights. The rest of the church gymnasium is darkened, and things like the basketball nets, the rolled up mats, the grilled windows, are shadow versions of their daytime selves; detached and hovering in a brown-fading-to-black void. It makes the stage seem like a bubble in space, like the fetus in 2001. And, like the fetus in 2001, the seeming separation of event from environment makes it all seem like a metaphor too vague and abstract for me to understand at fourteen.
Kingsley comes up to the front of the stage and smiles in this way that is meant to reassure us. It is a smile that says, “I have the good news of Jesus Christ.” And then he raises the microphone to deliver said good news and it is this: “Sex,” he says, “is not the glamorous wonderful thing they show you in movies. In reality it is sweaty and difficult and hard work. It is unclean and often quite painful.” Smile. Glenda, sitting behind her husband, smiles the same smile and nods in agreement.
Andy, sitting next to me, says “Amen.”
This is Kingsley’s biannual lecture on the temptations of sex. This is one of the biggest events on the youth group’s calendar and it always gets record crowds of around forty kids, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen. At fourteen, I split the difference.
I have never had any kind of sex. I know that some of the kids around me have gotten as close as they figure the fires of hell will let them; including Andy, Glenda’s little brother, who is my age and currently sitting next to me with his Bible in his lap. He is my age, but he is nothing like me. Andy is the golden boy here. Well- proportioned with even skin wrapped around well- placed cheek bones and a ready smile of perfect teeth. He makes no secret of his plans to become a minister. He tries to make a secret of the explorations towards second base that he has made with Dana Schmidt; and to any adults who might have an opinion about it, he has probably done a good job. I have made a pastime of knowing what goes on in the sex lives of my peers, mainly through a close watch of subtle cues, who are exchanging glances, who are coming out of darkened rooms together, who is taking liberties that I can’t even conceive of taking with the way they touch someone or how close they stand. The adults seem to miss these things. They escort Andy and Dana to the movie theater for their dates, drive them to and from, they continually scrutinize their every impulse and movement, as they do with all of us, looking for some clear sign that we are possessed by the demon lust. Still, somehow, Andy, like every other boy in the youth group who isn’t me, seems to have a preternatural sense of when the parents and ministers that surround us are looking at his hands and when they aren’t.
I am certain Dana’s virginity is still technically intact. The only girls who aren’t virgins here are the ones who fell away from God and either scared the shit out of themselves with their own behavior or had a bad experience that shook them deeply and they came running back to the arms of Jesus. These girls wear a scarlet letter that God can see and are grateful for the kind compassion showered upon them by the others in the church, despite their fallen virtue and inherently sullied nature. We are all such good and forgiving Christians. These girls, like all the girls in the group, think of me as a friend; only they mean it and value it. They have been through some shit and know a friend’s value. This is one of the ways I know that Dana has a complete hymen—she is nice to me, but doesn’t need me to be nice to her. She hasn’t felt the need to confide in me and cry on my shoulder late one night in the church parking lot about her ruin and how she will so disappoint her future husband. It’s fine. I understand. I understand that I am the subject of ridicule and scorn in my high school and neighborhood, but in the youth group, well, Jesus has succeeded where no other adult ever has. Jesus can actually make other kids be nice to you. Even if you are a lard ass or a dirty slut. Actually, especially if you are those things. So long as you are repentant, you are an opportunity for others to be good Christians. And it is immensely comforting. It is a sanctuary. For me, a break in the loneliness, and for the fallen girls, a place where no one is trying to get them to do this thing that they are so ambivalent about having done in the first place. The boys in the youth group are frightened by their experience and the fact that it isn’t a secret. I have no reason to be threatened by them. And once we get past the part of my being an object lesson in christian charity, the other kids in the youth group really do seem to like me. And that is such a new sensation that I almost don’t even feel the shame of being pitied.
So, in spite of his forays into Dana’s bra, when Andy hears this pronouncement from the stage, he feels entirely comfortable in his own purity. So comfortable that he raises his Bible with one hand, gives it a curt shake, and says, “Hallelujah.” All of us are still childish enough to hold on to the letter of the law as opposed to its spirit. At the same time, all of us are playing at the adult version of what we want to be. Well, except me. I have no idea how I would ever be Ichabod Crane.
Kingsley is now well into the swing of things. He is tearing down the secular world and its lies about casual sex, all meant to draw us away from the teachings of Christ. Lust and sex is everywhere. Advertising, television, movies. The entirety of modern media is thinly veiled pornography in the service of the Devil. The society outside these gymnasium walls is unwittingly at the service of the Devil’s conspiracy to rip mankind away from its rightful place in God’s loving grace. The picture Kingsley paints is one where anything you read or see might be a tool for getting us distracted from holier pursuits. Still smiling that knowing smile, he says, “Pornography and exploitation of the body everywhere. Poisoning our minds with ungodly pictures and unholy thoughts.”
I understand where he is going with that. I have grown up Pentecostal and am familiar with how the church views secular entertainment. But I just can’t feel the immediacy that my youth pastor is putting into the threat. Honestly, I like TV. I like comic books. I would never say so here; that would just be inviting a scornful lecture from pretty much any other member of the congregation. When you are fat, and therefore in others’ eyes inept and bumbling, people feel free to tell you what you are doing wrong. So I just keep my favorite superheroes and TV shows to myself. These things are escapism and I need an escape route. He wants me to view them as putting my very soul in Satan’s hands, but I have bigger concerns, more immediate threats. In my dysfunctional, drug- addled family, in my school, where there is no Jesus to keep the other kids from ganging up on me or make the teachers see my own abuse and unpopularity as any less my fault. When school has the feel of a prison yard gang war, and home has all the stability of a Mafia family during the fall, and the walk in-between is rife with opportunities for the drop-outs and stoners to come out of the bushes and take a shot, it makes it hard to view beer commercials as that much of an imminent danger. And I know that makes me a bad Christian.
But I always feel like a bad Christian. Which again comes back to me being fat. Kingsley has now moved on to what will happen to you if you should give in to the temptations of the secular world and engage in the back-breaking labor that is sex. Oh, to work in a coal mine. It goes without saying, that once you give in, all of your relationships forever after will be based on an unending desire to do this horribly painful thing again and again. And all your relationships will end in failure as you madly search for more and more sex and walk away when you don’t get exactly what you want. Because secular society makes it so easy to walk away, now that it has completely done away with the institution of marriage sanctified by Jesus. And, in due course, this life of meaningless sex will eventually result in a list of STDs, a countless number of abortions weighing on your conscience, and no one at your bedside as you die a premature death. Only God to watch your last moments, and even then, from a distance, as you have never accepted salvation. Kingsley makes it clear, “God knows the toll of our sinful ways. He knows how many have been lost and he knows how many will be lost. He knows the weight of our guilt down to the last ounce. How many of you believe that, tonight?” The fallen girls look at their shoes.
But, as far as I can tell, none of these dangers will ever befall me. Because no one will ever touch me. The concept of being physically close to someone is the most foreign notion I can conjure at this point. And, God help me, all I could ever want. I know that I am a grotesquerie. I know that even the women who are nice to me, even the fallen girls, many of who think of me as an actual friend and may even genuinely care for me on some level, I know they find me repulsive. I know that after touching my skin the natural impulse is to look at your fingertips, to check. Andy, beside me, with his eyes closed and Bible outstretched, he and Dana wander these minefields, tiptoeing and edging around the dangers just as all the other kids in church do. I watch them from the sidelines and feel so deeply ashamed of my desire to run out there, stomping and rolling. Even if normalcy means getting blown up, it still has a strong pull. If contact and an end to loneliness means death and wasting, if that is the sin of lust, then I am certainly enthralled by that demon. But he doesn’t want me either.
Another thing I have been taught is that, in God’s eyes, sinful thoughts are the same as sinful deeds. I am certain there is no exception for those who lack any opportunity to act on those sinful thoughts. Even if it isn’t possible for me to commit the transgression against God, it is still part of my willful nature. And I also know that I don’t care. Not the way I should. My shame for my desires doesn’t go deep enough. I keep trying to press it further into my soul. I try to compress the guilt into my heart like trying to close an overfull suitcase. I keep trying to make it a part of me. But it always feels like something I wear poorly. Like my overabundance of flesh, it is something that feels on me and not part of me. This only adds to my confusion. I am shaken to the core by my inability to feel the dishonor and remorse before God that my fellows do. And I want to. Even more than I want that human contact, I want to feel what my friends feel. I want to feel deeply and truly ashamed. Only when you can truly feel ashamed before God can you truly feel forgiven by Christ.
And much more important, only then will I fit in. But there is a defiant core in me that keeps my sin and contrition from fusing with my deepest self. And this terrifies me. Because it means that I will always be alone.
None of the rest of the crowd is having so much trouble feeling their sinful natures called out into the glaring light of our Lord. Tears are starting to well in the eyes of those around me. Kingsley has gotten them where they live. He knows what lies in their hearts. Christ has imparted this to him, the exact nature of their self-debasement. But Christ has also given Kingsley a message of hope and redemption.
He raises his hand out towards us, lets it hover there, and says, “Maybe you have done something, or maybe you’re thinking of doing something, maybe you have a desire weighing on your conscience that you don’t feel you can bring to God. Maybe you are carrying a guilt that you fear not even the love of Christ can lift from you tonight. Well, I am here to tell you that the love of Christ knows no limits.”
At some point, we all got to our feet. I don’t remember us doing this. Some of the other kids, Dana, for one, are openly weeping now. Others, like Andy, have their hands raised and their eyes closed in personal communion with their savior.
Kingsley continues, impassioned. “He knows your heart, no secrets can be kept from Him and all that He asks is that you open your heart and accept His forgiveness. You can have that right now if you want it.” Around me, I can hear the murmurs as some of my fellows make passes at speaking in tongues. They are feeling about for Pentecost. I wonder, as some of them grow more confident in their mutterings, how do you know. I hear this voice in my head, but it just seems like my voice, some other side of me. How do they tell the difference, how do they know the voice of God, and how can that not be completely distinct? I have my hands raised, my eyes closed, mostly, reaching out into the ether of space, which feels so infinite and dark and stretching unhindered into a lonely eternity now, searching for the god who has to be there. Kingsley offers up the salvation that the youth group needs. “Now I am going to pray, and if there is anyone here who feels they need prayer, that they need the laying-on of hands, that they need to lay their burden at the feet of Christ, I want to invite you to come forward.”
My fellow Christians are seized with the ecstasy of the relief and redemption so close at hand and they begin to move forward, one at a time, in staggered shuffles. I am uncertain. I don’t feel the shame, not the way I should. I don’t feel the forgiveness, not the way I need to. I don’t feel the call. Or do I? And how would I know? I don’t know. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel God. I feel alone. Like I always do. And then I pretty much am, as the rest of the youth group is huddled at the foot of the stage in prayer. I am alone in the dark. Me and a scattering of fallen girls, in the brown-to-black darkness, beyond the light of footlights or messiahs. Still a fat sinner alone and longing for contact.
So, the chapters above are two of the four sample chapters included in the proposal. The two below are chapters which were not included in the proposal. Think of these as bonus tracks.
Chapter 3. There Will Be No Play Fighting With The Angry Potato.
I was entirely prepared for the potato to attack. I had been preparing for it for four years. When I was three, my Stepfather joined the family and I had been on a war footing ever since. He carried around a coiled tension that entered any room three feet in front of him and he existed in a swirl of angry disappointment with all he saw. He would walk into a room and pause in the doorway, staring around like the eye of Sauron. But rather than looking for the ring of power, he was looking for the ring your glass had left on the coffee table. Upon seeing said ring, or your sweatshirt in the floor, or that you were relaxed and enjoying some quiet time, he would screw up his face at the injustice of it all. The fact that the world could be so wrong always seemed to just break something vital in his mind. He would turn red and it would seem like all the curses that wanted to come spewing forth would get log-jammed just below his jaw. A sort of obscenity pile up. Usually “Goddammit!” was the one that would dislodge first. Then would follow a litany of expletives sprinkled over outsized threats of violence like a rage sundae.
He had always been this way. At least so far as my conscious memory was concerned. So, by the time I was seven, many of the fledgling synapses in my brain had formed around the notion that sooner or later this psycho was going to snap. I was prepared to fight for my survival when the time came and I knew the time would come. What I was not prepared for was a tickle fight.
I think my Stepfather was feeling good. Which was his first mistake. I also think he had been drinking.
I think he was feeling good was because he had reason to. It was 1980, and the last two years had been as frightening for my family personally as it had been for the rest of the country. The mines where he worked had closed down in 1978. This started off a two-year saga of wandering for him and my Mother. An uncle on my father’s side owned an RV dealership. My mom and the Potato had gotten a hold of a camper van called a Honey Bee. It was a big white thing of aluminum siding decorated with a gold stripe and a little cartoon bee mascot pasted on the side. There was a compartment over the cab with bunks and a window that gave you a surreal aerial view over the highway. Whenever I rode in the Honey Bee, that crow’s nest was my seat. This allowed me to announce the obvious with the authority of a mentally underdeveloped god. “Stop sign!” But I actually didn’t ride in the Honey Bee that often. Our recreational vehicle was not so much for recreation. Its larger purpose was so that my parents could drive around the country desperately following rumors of possible employment. Sure, Arizona sounded exotic and fun to me, but when your goal is to go see a tire warehouse doing an open call for new hires instead of the Grand Canyon, I’m sure some of the shine rubs off.
I didn’t go on that trip anyway. While most of my step-siblings were old enough to get places of their own or stay at friend’s places, my sister Amy and I were left in the care of my Grandparents. We stayed at the cheap motel they owned on the outskirts of town and they would let me turn on the big neon sign at sundown and switch it from “Vacancy” to “No Vacancy” as it was warranted. The rest of the sign was always lit up. It was one of those Route 66 bits of signage that said not only was the future right around the corner, it also swooped and swirled at angles that were beyond the understanding of the rudimentary physics that you were used to, Mr. Flintstone. The fallacy of this was given away by the name of the place, the Mine Le Motte motel. It was named after the very thing that had just died and taken the town with it. The mine was quickly receding into the past, as were all of our Oscar Neimeyer dreams. No hover cars for us. Just the Honey Bee.
Although, it must be said that the Honey Bee was pretty cool.
My grandfather, Bull, would get up early in the morning and we would get out his hunting dogs to see if we could chase out a few rabbits. Many of the motel’s guests were woken up by gunfire as Bull took potshots at anything that moved in the underbrush out behind the building. They’d come rushing out of their rooms just in time to see him carry a dead carcass up to the skinning post, a tall piece of wood with a nail stuck in it. He’d hang whatever he’d shot from the nail, wave to the paying customers with the hand holding the shotgun, and get out his pocket knife. This was usually enough to ensure that everyone was checked out of the motel on time.
If nothing worth shooting came up that day, and it should be said that almost nothing ever did, we would go down to the Pig for lunch. The pig was a barbecue drive up joint down the road, with a big friendly pig in a waistcoat painted on the outside, waving to people as they passed. Your sandwich came to you wrapped in white butcher paper and your fries came in tablecloth patterned, card board boats. All of it soaked in grease and sticky sweet barbecue sauce. I was in heaven.
Finally, another uncle on my father’s side said he could get my Stepfather work at a GM plant if we moved up to a St. Louis suburb called St. Peters. So, the rolling unemployment sideshow came to a stop, the Honey Bee was sold, and we were transplanted. For my family, things were looking up. For me personally, this was a disaster. When I was moved to St. Louis, I was the most miserable six year old in the world. All I wanted was to go back to Fredericktown. I had been a popular kid in the first grade, there was a little dark haired girl in my class that had taken a liking to me, all of my friends were in walking distance of my house, and I was the son of the most legendary good old boy the place had ever known. I had a good thing going down there. In St. Peters I had no friends, we were poorer than all the other kids and my southern accent, which was thick and trashy when I was young, made me an outcast. I hated it there, there were no woods and the kids were mean and I was miserable. I sulked for what seemed like years.
I was unable to see this from my parent’s perspective. Until 1977, Fredericktown, Missouri had been the cobalt capital of the world. Then it was discovered that, actually, Zaire is the cobalt capital of the world. The two years between the closing of the mine and our landing in the Sutter’s Mill subdivision must have been the height of uncertainty. With a family whose numbers fluctuated between four and twelve depending on who was crashing unannounced and many of those members school age with all of the needs that implies, the sudden loss of half their income must have struck my parents like a flaming meteor of shit careening out of the sky.
But now things were different. My mother suddenly had a new house; bigger and more modern than the one we had lived in before the Honey Bee. She was also a nurse and had found work easily. What’s more, the house was in a nice place. It was a neighborhood where there was a public pool and rules about keeping dogs on leashes. In Fredericktown, my Mom would wake up most mornings to find that her brother Donny’s hunting dogs had wandered down the road from his house and were sleeping on one side of her porch and pissing and shitting on the other. She had finally put a stop to that one July 5th when she had snuck out the back door and around the house before breakfast. She shot the hounds with bottle rockets left over from the previous day’s festivities. That wouldn’t happen in Sutter’s Mill. In Sutter’s Mill there were rules about such things. No more dogs and no more Donny showing up drunk at noon wanting to know what in the hell she had done to those same dogs to make them hide under his house and refuse to come out.
My Stepfather was unskilled labor, a high school dropout. Every job was on the job training where he was concerned. He got work at a mine and he learned to mine. He got a work at GM and he learned to build cars. For the two years in between there were no jobs to learn and no one looking to teach him, anyhow. The world of the late seventies recession must have seemed all the more treacherous to him. A new paycheck and a thirty-year mortgage must have been like being handed the deed to an all you can eat steak house buffet after starving in a desert. Hence, his uncharacteristic good spirits. And by spirits, I mean bourbon.
But, when you are a kid, your main priority is to make some sense of the world around you. You arrive into a world that has been building on millennial layers of logic and concepts that you are not privy to. It would be great if you could pop out of the womb, tie a perfect double Windsor, hop behind the wheel of a convertible, and be off to get your investments started. Unfortunately, you are a blank slate. You’ve never heard of the first keep right laws enacted in 1792 to regulate traffic of horse drawn buggies on the turnpike linking Philadelphia to Lancaster and thus breaking us permanently from the left hand driving norms of our British forebears. No wonder you crashed that convertible. No, all you have to work with is pattern recognition. You cry and a nipple arrives and this is the beginning of coping. If you cry and a nipple only sometimes arrives it is the beginning of hording behavior coupled with a penchant for binge eating. Why? Because we look for patterns. That is the first step to some kind of understanding; knowing what you can count on, what is a constant. If the man that you have come to think of as the potato because he is large, lumpy, neckless, and fluctuates between shades of brown and red depending on the level of wrath he is currently in the grips of, suddenly gets all playful and cuddly, then some of the consistency you rely on is broken. Then you are making this shit up as you go.
Like any kid, I looked for consistency. And I usually found it. My Stepfather was usually consistently angry. I knew that. I knew when he looked at me he was looking for fault. He was studying me for a defect so profound that it would prove I was yet another horrible burden to be endured in an endless slag through a private hell. Just as he had always suspected I was. Like the time he took me fishing and I showed no aptitude for bating a hook on the first try. From his reaction that day, and the creativity of his cursing, it was clear that he was unsure if he wanted to be put out of his misery or if he wanted me put out of his misery. I knew that when he walked into a room he would curse and scream because he was awake and present. I knew if I offered any kind of defense this would be considered back talk and back talk was the quickest way to turn threats of violence into the real thing. Many kids who grow up with this kind of thing blame themselves. But those kids have parents with moods. Their parental figure is in a good mood and then something small happens and they fly into a rage and the kid thinks it is their fault. Fast forward to years of bad relationships followed by years of expensive therapy. The greatest thing my stepfather ever did for me was that he remained constant. He was always angry and miserable, regardless of what was happening around him. Therefore I never grew up thinking it was something I was responsible for. I knew from a young age that the guy was defective. I had recognized the pattern, because he was consistent. Except this one time. When he found himself feeling good.
Like I said, his first mistake.
We were in the living room. I had been drawing. That was what I did as a kid. I was easy to take anywhere. So long as you had paper and a pencil handy, I was good for hours of adult friendly silence. The people around me could be doing anything, committing any variety of loud violent crime, and I was unlikely to look up. I had taken to drawing fish firemen. This utterly confounded my mother. I couldn’t explain that this was inspired by an episode of the old Tarzan TV show, the one that starred Ron Ely who was also a game show host and around the same time MCing the Miss America pageant. It was all very confusing. Not least of which was the episode that had me drawing piranhas with firemen hats and hoses. In the episode, a villain, likely a smuggler or a poacher or someone who wanted to put Cheetah in a zoo, was trying to get away from Tarzan in a boat. To cover his escape, the bad guy dumped a barrel of gasoline into the lagoon and set it on fire. Tarzan came to the flaming lagoon and dove into the water and swims under the flames, popping out beyond the gasoline slick to climb into the boat and thus prevent Cheetah from losing his innocence at the hands of monkey molesters. None of which answers the question of why you would name one wild animal after another, completely unrelated wild animal.
I am assuming that there were never syndication rights as cheap as those for this particular show, because channel eleven showed it for two hours after Saturday morning cartoons and another two hours on Sundays after the TV preachers had retired to the nearest Howard Johnson’s with their flock. All of this is to say, that I was learning a lot about the world thanks to reruns of a sixties TV show about a white man in the African jungle who ran around mostly naked and shaved with a young boy and an ape and lived in a tree house. One of the things I had learned was that all of these lagoons were full of man-eating piranhas. This had been used as a suspense building plot point several times, in spite of the fact that the show was set in Africa and not South America. So, now one of those lagoons is on fire and someone will have to attend to that, since fires have to be put out and can’t be left to just burn down the jungle and so this responsibility would, by my thinking, fall to the primary resident of every lagoon in Tarzan’s world, the piranhas. And so, fish firemen. With hats and coats and hoses. Underwater. They had hoses underwater. Remember that thing I said about kids having to sort of figure out the logic of the world as they go?
So, this is what I am doing, drawing fish firemen, when the potato attacks. Its not that I didn’t see him coming, the man is not a stealthy creature. The floor shakes and glass tinkles and clatters when he walks into a room. I was simply trying to put him out of my mind. I assumed he was going to start in and I thought that if I looked truly intent on what I was doing he might pass over like the Angel of Death, or at least the cherub of temper tantrums. But, instead of walking on by or standing over me screaming about the state of my room, he plopped down onto the floor next to me. This was odd. This you had to face. So, I turned, and the last thing I remember seeing before the attack was my stepfather’s face and the expression there. He was wearing this kind of distant smile I had never noticed before, his eyes were glassy and watery, and there was a lot of color to his skin. The logic of the good stiff drink was one I hadn’t applied much thought to yet.
Then he was on me! He had simply said, “Hey, Brad!” and that was all the warning I got and suddenly he was grabbing me and turning me and flipping me this way and that. His hands were curled into little skittering crabs, poking and jabbing and seeking out the sensitive spots of my rib cage and behind my knees. My body was suddenly thrust into paroxysms beyond my conscious control and no matter where I turned or how I squirmed another meaty claw was there to get me. He was laughing at me. He was tickling me. This was play fighting. After four straight years of threatening world ending violence on a biblical scale because I had left a GI Joe in the bathroom, he had now decided to start rough housing. And he was having fun!
For me, the consistency I relied on had just completely broken down. I had zero context for what was happening, so I fell back on what I had prepared for all of these years: The rage-aholic had finally lost it and this was how the murder suicides began. Fight or flight kicked into over drive, and being of redneck stock, my basic animal instincts are never that far from the surface anyway. When push came to shove came to hurled off a cliff, I was suddenly a master of multi-tasking, fighting and fleeing at the same time. I twisted my body around, blindly trying to find one gap, one loose spot in the onslaught. I got over onto my belly and dug my nails into the nubby brown carpet, trying to find purchase and perhaps a weapon. I managed to drag myself towards the coffee table half a foot away. It was a two tiered design with an under carriage that spilled over with magazines. In my struggles my right hand landed in the under carriage and got a grip on something loose. It was a National Geographic. I spun and twisted the upper part of my torso around, my arm flinging in a stiff arc, my hands gripping one gold framed corner of America’s most prestigious, not to mention heavy, monthly magazine and wham! I slammed the spine of that half an inch thick periodical right across the potato’s nose with all the force of a wrecking ball.
Suddenly the tickling stopped. My stepfather’s eyes went very wide and his body went stiff and then, very quietly he said, “ oh goddamn…” Then the blood started gushing from his nostrils. Now he said it louder and started repeating it. “Oh Goddamn! Oh Goddamn!” Then he jumped up and ran for the bathroom down the hall, one hand covering his face. He ran past my mother who had come into the room from the kitchen just in time to see me bludgeon her husband with his own subscription. She looked at me and said, “Brad, what did ya do?” Then she followed my stepfather down the hall.
That was the end of play fighting. From then on, all fighting would be for real.
Chapter 13. A Bout of Teenage Anorexia as a Corrective Measure.
Everything in the film Felicity was shot as though it were late afternoon. It was as if the world on the screen only existed for two weeks in July between the hours of five and seven-thirty. The characters moved through this perpetual glow, past large open windows that split the sun into streams which turned the drifting dust motes into golden ash that might melt to the touch. Outside of the windows were lush, dewy lawns cut into neat manicured beds by white stone paths. This was somewhere in Europe and, wherever it was, you knew it was warm. Even from the TV you could feel the warmth, the enveloping comfort of the endless and perfect summer evening that all the players seemed to amble through as if it were a native land. That warmth might explain why all of the characters were constantly shedding their clothes.
I had discovered Felicity during a summer of my own. But I was fifteen and fat and mine was a Missouri summer and not as idyllic. Summer in Missouri, especially for a fat kid, was like being submerged in a boiling aquarium. And Felicity did not play between the hours of five and seven-thirty. It was late night programming. Showtime. Two a.m.
Showtime pay cable network had run a three-month summer special for subscribers to basic cable. The subscription cost was cut in half between the months of June and August. After that, you could cancel anytime, no questions asked. My step-father had every intention of canceling come September 1st. In the meantime, we had one of the much coveted movie networks, which, during prime time hours, meant as many viewings of Soul Man as you could take, along with an Indiana Jones knock off called Alan Quartermain and King Solomon’s Mine. Both films featured James Earl Jones. Amy and I didn’t know that this was the back bone of Showtime’s programming in the eighties and when the subscription kicked in we rushed downstairs and turned on the TV to see what feature films we would be watching un-cut and without commercials thanks to the generosity of the premium cable gods. We scrolled through the program guide seeing almost nothing exciting until Saturday. On Saturday they were showing the original Star Wars. Which featured the voice of James Earl Jones.
Well, Amy saw nothing exciting. She had the remote and once she got past the prime time hours she would speed on to the next day, the hour slots between eleven and four the following afternoon flashing past in suddenly quick succession. But once when she was doing this, my eye caught on something in the two a.m. bracket. One word. A name. Felicity. I don’t know how I knew, but the recognition was instantaneous. There was no program description offered but I didn’t need one. The synopsis to that film was written in some hidden part of my DNA which suddenly fired to life in the quick flash of yellow words on a blue background that came and went as quickly as a synapse fires. Felicity would be about a girl who took off all of her clothes at every possible opportunity in the full and unflinching view of the camera. I knew her name the way I knew my own.
That night I snuck out of my room, hit the power button and then the mute button immediately after. That night a brand new world enveloped me in an electric flickering arc of hope and possibility.
Felicity herself was a small person. A collection of rounded angles ornamented with ripe little mounds of flesh in strategic places. Her breasts were small and attentive. Her sharp little nipples pointed at whoever else was in a given scene with a silent certainty, as if to say, “Yes, I mean you.” She had this way of bouncing on her heels once she had disrobed, her chin set forward and her gaze direct. Her nudity was clearly the answer to any questions you might have.
As a lumbering giant of cellulite, always looking for a shadow to sink away into and never finding one big enough, Felicity’s petite assertiveness, her confident nakedness was fascinating. She was like an emissary from a mythical land. I had a growing awareness, at this point still quite dim, that the name of that mythical land was Sex.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen porn before. I had seen Jim’s. But Jim’s porn had been raw and blunt. The summation of each photo in the magazines he had kept seemed to be the word “VAGINA!” All caps, exclamation point. For a shy fat kid who was completely uncertain what sex was or if any variety of it would ever be attainable for him, Jim’s porn just felt like another vague shouted demand in a life of vague shouted demands.
Late night pay cable soft porn presented a totally different atmosphere. Felicity seemed to be taking me by the meaty paw and saying, “Don’t worry. This will be fun. We’ll go slow.”
This was also a contradiction of the messages I received in Church, that sex was a painful sweaty, two person barrel role down the slippery slope to an eternity in Hell. No fun at all. But I had started to drift from Church. I still attended, but since Jim’s suicide, which I felt responsible for, the black and white morality and all the clean suburban notions of forgiveness and damnation had seemed muffled. The preacherwould deliver a sermon and it just seemed like the wrong tune for the dance my life was doing. I felt like I had worn water skis to a roller rink. Jim’s death had robbed me of the ability to force my situation to make their kind of sense. Still, I went. I didn’t say anything to anyone, I just stared while the words from the pulpit tumbled past me in half-muted tones.
So I was a seeker wandering a thorny path when I found the church of late night Showtime and I became a believer.
Felicity had friends. All women of vague European derivation with two hours of film named after them. Emmanuelle, Vanessa, Fanny Hill.
The full title of Emmanuelle’s feature was Emmanuelle in Asia. In later years I would find out this was only one chapter in an epic travelogue. The brunette star logged infinite frequent flyer miles, apparently, and if her tour of Asia was any indication, the first thing she did upon landing was take off all of her clothes. I would imagine she breezed through airport security. Once naked and let loose upon whatever foreign land was hosting her (that summer it was Thailand) our heroine went about her adventures with total fearlessness. I had never been out of the country and I didn’t leave my room without being fully dressed, much less the house or state.
Vanessa was a quiet one. Pale with a more vulnerable and quivering demeanor, her eponymous film was darker in tone. I was not as comfortable with Vanessa, but there was something deep inside that was pleasantly unsettled by the idea that this wasn’t all just fun and games. I wasn’t ready for it yet, but something told me I might be later.
Fanny Hill was a nice little bookend to Felicity and just as captivating. Fanny was rounder, more full bodied, but with equal energy and enthusiasm. The movie itself had a slapstick comedy feel to it, at least the scenes where girls weren’t busy soaping one another up. It was a period piece and, if the screenwriter knew his history, Victorian England was full of communal bathing for girls between the ages of eighteen and thirty. There was also a preponderance of stuffy old men who were prone to becoming blustery or faint, or by turns blustery and then faint, when confronted with the giddily naked and perpetually scrubbed main character.
The larger thing in these movies, the sex, was almost too much to deal with directly. Its like the old saw about the Indians in the new world not seeing the conquistador’s clipper ships because such a thing was too far outside their experience for them to even perceive. Sex wove through almost every scene and background When it came front and center, my brain would skip like a record where the stylus hovered stiff in the darkness instead of just landing back into a groove. I was suspended before this thing.
Then I would snap to, because the movie was ending and I was not fool enough to masturbate in the living room. The whole affair was already fraught with the possibility of being caught by my mother should she decide to wander out of her bedroom in the middle of the night, I would assume for the sole purpose of seriously stunting my sexual development. I imagined being caught watching any kind of porn by my mother, especially after having ratted out Jim’s collection and pushing him to blow his brains out, well that would be bad enough. As for being caught in the middle of the living room with my pants around my ankles and my dick in my hand… I didn’t have to have it happen to know I didn’t want it to.
I would sneak out of my room in the dark. Stand outside my doorway and listen for any movement that wasn’t my own, then move silently, carefully placing each foot, making my way to the steps that lead to the basement. I knew that if you stepped on each individual stair close to the wall, and not in the middle, they wouldn’t creak. Downstairs had a concrete floor with a carpet thrown down on top of it, so I could walk more freely to the TV. I would turn it on and hit the mute, but there was still a kind of ozone swell and crackle as the tube woke up. Before changing any channels, I would sit silently and listen to see if anyone had heard the TV come on. After the show was over I would have to repeat this entire process in reverse before I could have the satisfaction of jacking off back in my room. Felicity and company were worth every gingerly placed foot and every heart pounding jag of panic at an unknown noise.
But for however much I loved my new international friends, it was an American film that made the most definite and lasting change in me. Two Moon Junction was responsible for my bout of teenage anorexia as a corrective measure.
The inspiration for this was the male lead in Two Moon Junction. His character was a carnival rousty. The plot was a kind of Southern Gothic potboiler. Hot girl from the right wealthy family, getting ready to be married off to Daddy’s favorite running dog, takes up with the dirty sweaty vagabond who rolls into town with the traveling show. Well, her Daddy and her fiancé won’t be having that. And then cue all the other crap. Honestly, I couldn’t have been less concerned with the storyline. Hell, the thing was on mute, for God’s sake.
There were two things I did care about. First of all, the rebellious daughter was played by Sherilyn Fenn and she was stunning and almost constantly naked. The second thing was that the male lead was an ugly, ugly man who was getting to touch Sherilyn Fenn in the most fantastic places. Places I didn’t know you got to touch other people. Ever.
In fact, he was not an ugly man. The actor’s name was Richard Tyson, and looking back on it now, I can see that he was nothing if not a monument to the advent of the chiseled jaw line. But I thought of him as ugly because of a role he had played earlier in his career, that of Buddy Revell in Three O’Clock High. Buddy Revell was the bully who spent the film trying to beat up the protagonist because the kid had made the mistake of touching him. Being a kid who was bullied, and because they had thugged him up for the part, I perceived Richard Tyson as a monster and, in my mind, that was how he stayed. So, even though, in Two Moon Junction, he was working the pony tail and intense stare as well as anyone on the cover of a bodice ripper romance ever had, to me he was still a dim eyed, sloped forehead, slack jawed Neanderthal. But when he took off his shirt right before putting his hands all over his co-star, one thing was obvious to me: This gargoyle was in great shape.
From the following math, some of it admittedly faulty, I put together a conclusion. Obviously, they had cast him in this movie because they thought he was someone who, in real life, would get to have sex with a girl like Sherilyn Fenn. It didn’t matter that he was grotesque and deformed. (Again, I was probably the only person who ever thought of him that way.) So, it must not matter if you are handsome. If you are in good shape that is enough for women to want you to touch them. I had no idea what my face would look like without the extra chins and the babyish jowls, but apparently, whatever was under there was unimportant. I didn’t need to be pretty. I just needed to be not fat.
Commence starvation.
My decision to begin starving myself while exercising excessively was a direct result of seeing a movie no one knew I was watching and the change in behavior went almost entirely unnoticed. Most of the time in our house, meals were eaten separately. This was partly due to the fact that my Mom worked long, odd hours and partly because we, as a family, couldn’t stand the sight of one another. So it was easy for anyone to miss the fact that I had stopped eating almost completely, the exception usually being a six inch in diameter microwave pizza around three o’clock. That microwave pizza also marked the only time I was in the house from the moment I woke up to sundown. The time in between, I was down in the woods that followed the creek, which ran through the center of the subdivision. I was running. Awkwardly at first, but as my eating disorder did its job, I became more coordinated. Then, after nightfall, I would come home, avoid everyone and dinner, go into the windowless basement room where Jim had slept and lift weights.
The plan was elegant in its simplicity, if I do say so myself. I decided to stop eating and start walking, then running. There wasn’t a whole lot to stick to. I would wake up in the morning and immediately leave the house, skipping breakfast entirely. Once I was out of the house, well, I was fifteen and had no money of my own, so every step I took from my front door was a step further away from the only food source in my life.
The Creek was central to my plan. The creek was a stretch of woods around a trickle of water that ran through the center of the town. St. Peters was essentially made up of a collection of subdivisions, a library, and a mall which, taken together represented the furthest edge of suburban sprawl to that point. The creek was a strip of wilderness, a remnant of the kind of dense woods that all of these manicured lawns had been carved out of, and it wound its way through all of the subdivisions and within spitting distance of the library and the mall. I knew the woods and the trails through it very well. I had grown up down there trying to find a place to hide.
It was summer time and the bullies who made my life hell at school were now free and on the hoof, wandering the streets undoubtedly looking for someone to beat on. My step-father was at home waiting for a victim to happen into view. The paths that led through the creek allowed me to avoid both of these problems. I made it a point to be up early, ahead of anyone, then out the door. Once I was in the woods, I could use the trails to spend the first half of the day at the library reading books on Greek Mythology and Jack London novels. Then I would head back home. Eat a microwave pizza. Back down to the woods. Make my way to the mall and hang around the bookstores. When twilight came I would head back home, lift weights, go to my room, draw, wait for everyone to go to sleep. Then, it was back down to see what scantily clad offerings Showtime had brought me from across the seas.
At first this had been an act of will power. I was focused on a goal. But as the summer wore on and the walking turned into running and the hunger turned into habit, something else took over. The entire thing became like an out of body experience. I was on autopilot. I was purpose without thought. And it was working. The body I was outside of began to change and I saw it happening from a distance.
I could cut off almost every social interaction and attendant conflict by staying out of sight. The kids in the church Youth Group were a different story. Not going to church would be more conspicuous than disappearing. Not to say there wasn’t some confusion. The Youth Group had always related to me through friendly ribbing. They weren’t bullies, but I was still the fat kid. Now I was changing and instead of playing along with their jokes at my expense, I was checked out and uninterested in movie nights or lock ins. I had an agenda to attend to. I had a mission that no one else was aware of and that even I didn’t completely understand, but one for which I had stopped eating or sleeping or engaging with the outside world.
My regimen of starvation was helped along by the fact that my family was under siege, otherwise the change in me might have been noticed. In the aftermath of Jim’s suicide, my parents began to get phone calls. These calls were from Andy Bowen. Andy Bowen was the drug dealer who had given Jim the crank and the shotgun. Andy wanted the shotgun, the one that Jim had used to blow his brains out, he wanted it back. He also wanted a couple thousand dollars which he claimed Jim had owed him at the time of his death. He expected my parents to pay up. My parents didn’t have the money he wanted and the shotgun had been kept by the police. Andy Bowen didn’t seem to hear these inconvenient facts and just kept calling. He was known to be violent and erratic and he did not feel that the old drug dealer rule about not sampling your product applied to him.
I remember skirting past the kitchen where my Mother and Stepfather were discussing the situation. They always spoke of this in hushed tones. I guess they were trying to protect Amy and I, trying to keep us from feeling afraid. I have no idea how Amy was feeling about all of this. She had disappeared into her room and it seemed like months since I had seen her in any way other than passing. I was so focused on my mission that it didn’t really register all that deeply that there was a violent criminal phone stalking us. I had become completely divorced from any sense that my fate was tied to the people around me, the people I lived in that house with. To me, family had become an obstacle to be negotiated, and really, just another in a series. I stuck to whatever provided cover, whether it was getting out the front door at hours that were almost pre dawn, sticking to the dark canopy of the woods, or making my way downstairs to try to find the girls, my girls.
Like I said, though, I sometimes caught bits of conversation. They got my attention because of how much different my stepfather seemed when he discussed the Andy problem. I guess he was scared, but I think more to the point, he was defeated. He had not been allowed to see Jim. The coroner had asked Rick and Steve to identify the body, the feeling being that no parent should see a child that way. “That way” meant with two thirds of his skull missing and the remainder twisted beyond any resemblance to a human being. I have heard that, for a parent, the death of a child is like having a part of yourself die. When you see your dead child you know some part of you is going in the ground with them. Maybe if you never get to see the body, maybe your mind can never reconcile the sudden gaping hole in your own being. Some part of you is just missing, just misplaced, and some part of your back brain is always occupied with that problem, trying to figure out where it went. The synapses your mind creates to hold the information that you are never going to be whole again never get completely formed without the visual confirmation to prompt their growth. I don’t know. It’s a theory.
My parents had called every law enforcement agency they could think of but until Andy actually tried something, they were on their own. All they could do was talk in circles when no one else was in the kitchen. Amy was in her room. I was in the woods. We each had our own foxhole, if not our own individual wars.
But at three in the morning there was Felicity or Vanessa or Fanny. There was the darkness, the flickering light of the TV in the basement of a silent house. My family slept upstairs. All the tension and rage, fear and resentful isolation that ruled our home was dormant. I sat on the carpet with my knees tucked under me, listening for it to stir, and learning what it meant to want something.
By September 1st, when Showtime was cancelled, I had gone from 245 lbs to 185. I wasn’t done. My mother said, “You’re going to need new clothes for school.” The tone in her voice was one of distant wonder and concern. Something had passed by here and maybe she should have been on top of that. But she had spent most of the year worried that a violent drug dealer was going to break in and gun us all down while we slept. Maybe she could just hope that my life would get easier after whatever I had spent the summer doing to myself. Maybe she could just count a blessing for once and skip the fine print.
The thought of school woke me up and suddenly I was back in my body. It wasn’t how I remembered it. But then, it hadn’t been my body I was trying to commit to memory.
I would stare in the mirror, trying to be sure it was me. The face that had emerged from the chin and jowls still had acne and braces. My hair was still a frizzy, mulleted train wreck, which I didn’t realize was actually an easy fix. No sort of fashion awareness had woken up yet and the concept of dressing my new form in something approaching a style was still too risky. I wasn’t going to try for cool, that was still a fight I couldn’t win. But, in terms of fights I had won, I was no longer fat. Still kind of soft and I had a deep seated terror that if I let my guard down this would be a temporary victory.
But looking at myself in the mirror, I knew that I was ready for whatever came next. Junior year of high school. Driving. Sex. I was ready to have what I thought everyone else had. I had gotten rid of the version of myself that kept me alone and ashamed. There was still my family, the church, and school. But if I could defeat myself, if I could fight me and win, then my stepfather, God, and Mr. Byrnes should be easy.
