Ziggy, Stardust and Me

by James Brandon

  He caresses my cheek, pecks my eyelashes, and when he reaches my forehead, he stops. “It’s okay,” shudders out of me. He kisses my scar. I twitch until he soothes the sting. Please, let’s never go back, I think. It is my only thought. He smiles, licks a tear that has sprung from my eye, kisses it closed.

  “Will you . . . take off your shirt . . .” I whisper in his ear.

  He throws the sheet off the bed, squirms out of his tank top. Tears scald my cheeks. I guide my hand along his chest, watch his eyes close, his mouth open. Hear his soft moan.

  I stop breathing.

  “Can I take yours off?” he whispers.

  “Yes.”

  He carefully lifts my shirt over my head, treating my body like his most prized and perfect vinyl record. He sinks into me . . .

  His fingers trace a star-map pattern on my chest, stopping at my waist.

  I nod.

  He slips his hand underneath my boxers. A volt shoots through me. I scream in his hand.

  “Shhh. Are you okay?” he whispers.

  I nod again.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. Don’t stop. Please.” Because I want to push through this once and for all.

  He kisses my waist. I shiver. Tears spill from my eyes, but at least I can feel them. Not like in my treatments. He slides his shorts down, pressing every high-voltage muscle and nerve into mine, until we stitch ourselves together. I do not flinch. I do not blink. His face starts skipping like on the Slide Projector of Shame, but I keep pushing forward, fighting the fallen power lines snapping and thrashing my nerves, until

  I can feel me again.

  And I fix what’s been broken in me all along . . .

  I don’t want to imagine hiding on the moon or being on some space adventure in the stars anymore. This is the world I want to live in. Right here. With him.

  Because for the first time in my life, being in Web’s arms,

  I feel free.

  46.

  Wednesday, July 4, 1973

  I RUB MY EYES, blink back and forth between sleep and wake. My heart is a steady, quiet, pulsing peace. So that’s what it feels like . . .

  The morning sun pricks through the boards on the window. Dust swims through the lights. We are safe. For now.

  Except there is no we. I flop my arm over to a Web-less pillow. Where is he?

  I close my eyes, strain my ears to listen for . . . anything.

  Muffled chatter buzzes from behind the house. Can’t tell who it is. Could be Web and Family, could be Hal and the Hillbillies, could be Officer Andrews and the National Guard come to cart me away.

  I slide into my shorts and his too-loose-for-me tank top—my shirt’s nowhere to be found—and peer through the window’s boards. No movement below us or across the lake. Dad’s Caddy is back, though the curtains are drawn in the trailers. Everything is still. Even the water.

  Has Dad found out yet? Does he even realize I’m gone?

  I walk to the doorframe. Wooden planks creak under my feet. Oh man, definite horror film giveaway. I peek my head through the tie-dyed sheet. “Hello?”

  No one’s here.

  It’s strange being alone in someone else’s house. Like being a for-real space invader. I creak toward the screen door. A framed Polaroid on the mantel glistens in the light. Never noticed that before. Web. Standing between two older men, all three in white tank tops and blue jeans. A white wooden church sits on a hillside in the distance. Underneath is written: HOME. He looks charged, angry even. Like when we first met. A ghost of his own history, as Starla would say.

  Muffled laughter breaks my trance. I glance through the screen.

  Web sits motionless, staring into a small fire, wearing my shirt! Which looks ridiculous on him because the sleeves end just below the shoulder and the shirt ends just above his waist. Silly boy. Still. Another couple has joined his family, sitting in a circle around the fire. All sip from steaming mugs.

  When I open the door, everyone looks at me. Oh man. I wave and walk down the steps like I just won the Mr. Alien of the Universe Pageant. Here I am: barging into their home last night, flooding their house with a lifetime supply of tears, then disappearing in their boy’s room, SLEEPING NAKED WITH THEIR BOY. Do they know? Did they hear us? Web said they sleep through tornadoes, but I don’t know. Sweet Ziggy. I have nowhere to run, or run I would.

  Web pats the log next to him. The crackling fire: the only other sound in the circle.

  “Mornin’,” he whispers in my ear.

  We look in each other’s eyes, take a quick caravel ride together in mind-kisses, and I turn back to the fire. The slight morning breeze means one thing: Today will be a blistering hot, too-hard-to-breathe kind of day.

  In related news, no one has breathed or moved since I sat down.

  “Coffee?” his grandfather asks. He’s wearing a thick leather glove and pours me a cup from a percolator that’s been bubbling over the fire.

  “Thanks,” I say, and take a sip.

  “Jonathan, are you okay?”

  “Yes. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry about last night . . . Web’s the only one I can talk to sometimes . . .”

  “We just want you to be safe,” he says.

  “I am.” I turn to Web, who lifts a smile, the flip side of the picture on the mantel. I hope to Ziggy on the Cross he stays like this forever.

  “Well, we’ll leave you boys to it, then,” his grandfather says, standing and gathering his things. The others follow him.

  “What? No. I should go, really. I will go—”

  “No. You stay here.” He’s already halfway up the stairs. “Oh, and if you’re staying the night again, you’re sleeping in the main room. You hear me?”

  Web chuckles. My face flushes the color of the fire. “Yessir,” I say. And everyone’s gone.

  I punch Web’s arms. “You said they sleep through tornadoes. Oh my God, Web!”

  “He’s teasing. They didn’t hear anything.”

  “Why did they leave?”

  He looks at me and my mind turns to mush and I instantly return to last night, under the sheet of stars—but when I look closer, something’s changed. His eyes hide nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “I have some news,” he says. He looks down, brushes his feet back and forth in the rocks. “You know that cop I busted up?”

  “Is he—”

  “No. He’s fine—I mean I guess I messed him up pretty bad . . . but, well, we just found out he was arrested last week. For domestic violence or something. Gonna be locked up for a while, I guess . . . So it’s safe again, you know, for me . . .”

  “Oh. Well, that’s . . . good news, right?”

  He shrugs, shakes his head, throws a rock in the fire.

  “Then why do you look— Oh . . . right . . .”

  “It’s a funny thing,” he says, leaning back, tilting his face toward the sun. “Ever since I got here, all I could think about was this day, when I’d finally get to go home. And now that it’s here . . . I mean, I want to go back, there’s so much I miss, but . . . well, you know . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  Web inches his bare feet in the sand and lands on top of mine. Maybe the fire will weld them together so we have no choice but to stay connected for the rest of our lives. Maybe.

  We sit in silence for a long while. The sun starts glinting through the oak trees behind us.

  “I’m glad you get to go home,” I say.

  He squeezes my hand. “You have to come. Anytime. Stay with us as long as you want. Forever, even.”

  “Forever, huh?”

  “Oh man, you’d love it. We don’t have much, but it’s somethin’. And you’ll have no choice but to sleep in the same bed as me, because we barely have any room in our house . . .” He winks.

/>   “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah . . . Hey, maybe we could open our own ice-cream truck business—”

  “And only serve Push-up Pops and Bomb Pops—”

  “And with all the money we make, we can hitch an Airstream—”

  “And travel the country in search of the best pies in every city.”

  He lifts that dimpled smile. “That would be amazing . . .”

  “Yeah . . . I’d like that . . .”

  He holds my cheeks, and we look into each other’s eyes, and his palms feel so soft against my— I don’t flinch. His touch doesn’t burn or twinge my nerves; it doesn’t shock . . . it feels . . . warm. Safe even . . . for the first time in my life . . .

  I pull him into me and smell his soap and sweat and still taste him on my tongue from last night, and I bottle this moment up in a jar, so I can live in it

  forever.

  “Stay for the day,” he whispers in my ear.

  “Web . . .”

  “And tonight we’re having some friends over. The family who owns this place always has people over on the Fourth, I guess. You can stay for that, and—”

  “Dad’s going to start looking for me eventually. And who knows who else. And it’d be way better if I find him first.”

  “Look, I’m just sayin’ your dad probably won’t even get up till later this afternoon anyway, right? And then he’ll start drinking and forget you’re not there, and then they’ll be too busy with all that Fourth of July stuff, right? So we can have one more day and night together.”

  I laugh. Because, actually, that sounds just about right. I gaze up at the sun. This makes no sense. None of it does. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the things that make the least amount of sense are the things you’re supposed to do. I don’t know. I look at him, looking back at me. But one thing I know: I’m not crazy for feeling this way. They’re crazy for trying to stop me. And if it’s the last time I ever get to feel joy again, I won’t let them have it.

  “Web Astronaut?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What should we do today?”

  He cracks the sky open with his smile. “Your turn,” he says.

  47.

  WE SPEND THE DAY alone in his room, lost together in our own little galaxy.

  No windows can be opened and no air filters through, but with PeterPaulandMary at the ready, neither one of us cares. We throw our shirts off within minutes because of the heat. His grandfather’s fine with this as long as we “keep the curtain open.” Web protested, but it was “absolutely not up for debate.” And I stood there thinking, Is this real life?

  After listening to Carole King and slow dancing, Web finds the tape recorder stashed in my satchel and wants to record something again.

  “So you’ll never forget this day,” he says.

  “I never could,” I say.

  But we do it anyway.

  “Hello. My name’s Web Astronaut and I’m here again today with Reporter Jonathan Collins on—what day is it today?”

  “The Fourth of July, silly.”

  “Oh, right. So tell me, Mr. Collins, what do you want to be when you GROW UP?”

  “Not so close, remember? It distorts the mic.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Well, I used to want to go to California and be a rock-n-roll star—”

  “Of course you did, Ziggy—”

  “But now, I don’t know. If we get an Airstream, we could—”

  “Travel together and I could teach—”

  “Wait. You want to be a teacher?”

  “Yeah. I want to teach the real history of this country. Our history.”

  “You’d be a great teacher, Mr. Astronaut.”

  “And we could drive across the country—”

  “Gettin’ big and fat from all the pie we eat from every diner along the way—”

  “Watching sunsets—”

  “Until we’re smothered in stars—”

  “And live happily ever after.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  We lie on his bed, silently dreaming and holding hands for the rest of the day . . .

  * * *

  —

  Dad finally discovered I wasn’t around hours later, when the sun was setting behind Trailerville. We’re watching him through the window boards now: He tapes a note to the trailer door and walks down the path, juggling a bag of groceries and the huge box of fireworks to the barbecue.

  “Probably thinks you went for a walk,” Web says.

  “Maybe, but—” I kiss the back of his neck. He kisses my nape, tickles my ears. “We should stop. Your grandfather might—”

  “They’re all outside now,” he says, slow dancing with me again.

  “Yeah, but they’re all awake, and they could walk by at any second—”

  We fall back on the bed.

  “Web!”

  He laughs and holds my face in his palms. “You’re so beautiful, you know that?”

  Gone. I close my eyes. He kisses my cheeks . . . my nose . . . my ears . . .

  “Web?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You’ve been with other boys before?”

  He lifts his head. “A couple times, yeah.” His hair drapes down. “But it’s never felt like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, man . . .” He slowly traces my lips. I kiss his finger. “You wanna know somethin’ my dad always told me?”

  “What?” I tuck his hair behind his ears.

  “He always said, ‘There’s only one superpower worth fighting for that can destroy any enemy. It’s also your greatest weakness, so you must use it wisely.’”

  “What is it?”

  He shakes his head, smiling. “Your turn,” he says, lying on my stomach. “When did you first know that you were gay?”

  “Oh . . .”

  “It’s okay,” he whispers. “You can trust me . . .”

  I close my eyes. “I guess . . . when I was little . . . and I got my first Ken doll . . . I guess I knew then . . .”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never told anyone that before . . .”

  “I’m glad you told me . . .”

  We lie in silence, lost in the ceiling.

  “Web?”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “Can you tell me more about how it’s a gift for you . . .”

  He looks at me, lifting those dimples, then lays his head back down. His hair twirls all around us like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “It’s like Ziggy, I guess. The guy comes down from the stars, right? And he sparkles and glitters and is like this Androgynous Messiah, singing songs of truth. And no one cares how he looks or who he loves or what he wears. They just care about his special star powers, you know, his special words. I guess that’s me . . .”

  I stroke his hair.

  “It doesn’t mean I’m gay, necessarily, just means I’m different, you know, special . . . not everyone sees it that way, of course. There’s still some Natives that don’t like it at all because it got lost over the years. White people took that away from us, too—tried to take our spirit away, make us Christians and all that, so it was considered evil . . . we still can’t even practice our spirituality in public, man.”

  “Really?”

  He props his chin on my chest. “My family remembers the truth, though. ‘Give it time,’ they say, ‘One day all people will see who you are as a gift again.’ But I don’t know, man . . . I don’t know. Anyway, no time like the present, right?” And he sweeps up, kissing me again when—

  “Web! Everyone’s here now,” his grandfather yells. We stop, panting on top of each other. “This is your boys’ fifteen-minute warning to unglue yourselves and get down here!”

 
My eyes bulge out of my head.

  Web laughs. “Can’t get anything past Grandfather.”

  “Ohmanohman . . .” I bury my face in his hair.

  “Guess we should get ready,” he says.

  “Guess so,” I say.

  He starts kissing me all over again, when:

  “TWELVE MINUTES!” Teasing, but still.

  Web throws his head down on my belly in defeat. “Okay. We need to get ready. For real.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay . . .”

  He doesn’t move.

  “Soooo?”

  “One more kiss.” He swoops up and grabs one before I can answer, then leaps off the bed.

  “Hey, can I play you an album real quick?” I ask.

  “Yeah, man.”

  Been waiting for the perfect moment. Since that night in my room, I guess . . . This is definitely it. I can feel it . . . I plug in the player, scoot it over by the bed, and pick up Roberta Flack. The First Take album. I can almost hear her honey-dripping voice swim through the room as I lift the record from its sleeve.

  I click the player on: Microphone static pops through the speakers the second I place the needle on the vinyl and skip to the song. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

  The soft strums of bass and guitar . . .

  Tiny trembles of her piano . . .

  Web throws on a tank top and plops back down on the bed. I sit across from him. And she sings.

  “The first time . . .” Oh man, I swear. If Ziggy’s my Jesus, then she is most definitely my God.

  “Whoa,” Web says.

  “I know.”

  “And the moon . . .”

  I watch him listening. He looks at me, brushes the hair away from my scar.

  I do not stop him.

  He traces my scar like a tiny bird feather.

  I whisper, “My Web . . .”

  And he whispers, “My Ziggy . . .”

  We listen to the song, lost in each other’s eyes.

  48.

  THE SECOND WE STEP outside we’re swooped up in hugs and kisses and “Heyheyhey”s and “Who’s this handsome guy?” and “We’ve missed you, man, you ready to come home?” Web has a permanent smile on his face, surrounded by friends.