by Jarod Powell
His topcoat just wasn’t heavy enough. This was evident from the increased chatter of his jaw. His molars clanged, seeming to echo throughout his mouth and down his throat with the drainage from his sinuses, which, as his father warned before the move, is commonly increased in this climate. The door shut behind him. This, for some reason, triggered an involuntary contemplative moment, not really a flashback or a hypothetical scene complete with heightened reality, but more like an ominous rumble in the gut, regarding the upcoming events of this dreaded evening--A welcoming party in his honor.
This miserable party was his mother’s doing, of course--An opportunity to showcase her teenage son’s angelic face to a bunch of people who are surely better acquainted with the faces of road kill. “This is my son, Jaime,” she’d say to homely people in hand-knitted sweaters. “He’s in from Nashville.” She would say this with saccharine voice inflection, as the neighbors nod with honest fascination. She’d take for granted that these poor, dumb people would look upon them both as if Nashville was a beacon of world culture, which meant that his mother gave birth to exotic offspring in an exotic land. And they’d be impressed, because people from Wyoming are exactly that stupid. He suspected that’s why she decided to live here in the first place, to live around people whom she could easily impress. This brief flash of dread triggered, as it always does, an unconscious, queer facial expression that always perplexes and unsettles strangers in the mall--a reaction he recognized, but didn’t understand.
He was experienced with this reflexive expression enough to know what the muscles in his face felt like when it happened. It only layered onto the rest of the awkward shit his body did, showing no reverence to etiquette or aesthetics, and in turn made more awkward bodily and facial shit happen, which led people to believe he was crazy or diseased. It subsided here quicker than normal, as there wasn’t anyone around. He forced one foot in front, moving his legs into an odd amble.
And so he slumped up the dirt road from the guest house, toward his mother’s house. He could see the house from the cedar porch he was now a few steps from, and he silently prayed the route would get deterred, perhaps by a snowstorm or elevation-sickness.
He took comfort in, of all things, the landscape. Just like the Paramount logo marking the end of the coming attractions, he settled into the image. He admired the metropolitan atmosphere: Streets of busy, furiously indifferent drones, and daydreamed about it as he stared at the silhouette of the Rocky Mountains. While there were no skyscrapers in Nashville, and no cabs to hail except for on the curbs of the airport and Greyhound station, there was still a sense of hustle in the city that to him, was soothing, ambient noise. There is a level of comfort in being surrounded by anonymous people who also considered him to be anonymous.
Still, icy, nature felt exactly the same as a busy street. It was just as comfortable. His agoraphobia had nothing to do with people, as was explained to him a couple years back by one in a long line of family counselors. No, his agoraphobia had everything to do with the hyper-sensitivity he had towards his own human inadequacies. Rationally, he understood that all people have their own shortcomings, but for reasons unknown to him, he was the only person who deserved to have them exposed in front of the world. Maybe if he knew what exactly made him flawed, he could overcome them. He couldn’t detect the scars in his mannerisms or his face or whatever, nor did he understand the complexity of himself. He expected no one else to, including doctors or Scientology auditors or his parents. “One day,” his mother once snarled when he announced he was not showing up to his Junior prom, “You’re going to be old and lonely, just like all old people. Only, you’ll have no reflective thoughts to keep you company.”
He kept his head down while she spoke, which seemed to only agitate her more. “What do you have against being young and happy?” He had nothing against it, he wanted to say. He just found that the fight was too hard to bother. He was already defeated, for some reason. Being defeated, he agreed to show up to his senior prom at Esther B. Williams high.
Being in Hawthorn, the high school gymnasium was in the middle of town, and its main focal point—all lit up, almost like Ground Zero or some type of indoctrination center. Fields, a church, some houses, dirt, and a cultish environment stand guard all around, a place where the Gods were mechanized beasts called tractors, that Jamie had only heard of in that Robert Redford movie and a country song fetishizing it on the radio one time on the way in to town. The gym was barren on the inside and sparsely populated, with a bored DJ playing that tractor-sex country song over and over again. Zombie-fied cheerleaders that were plainly good-looking, in a rural kind of way, held pep rallies there. Teachers pace the floors, always stoic and silent, and behave like government agents. It was in weird-ass Hawthorn where Jaime’s affliction was fostered and matured.
After thirty minutes of Prom festivities, Jamie’s mother, who was there to chaperone, was asked to leave for showing up drunk, and for being inappropriate with Jerry Winkler, the only twenty-two year old that ever existed at Jaime’s high school. Jaime considered this not only a betrayal of motherly duty--for Jerry Winkler was one of the few people with whom Jaime had a casual friendship, which presented a gross conflict of interest--but it was also the exact worst case scenario Jaime had feared before agreeing to go.
Jaime’s mother had no interest in enriching her son’s
life or experience. It became apparent that if Jaime sought the party once and a while, he’d see his mother more often, but as the fun-loving lush
that Jerry Winkler liked to take in the back seat of his Jeep.
After that, none of the other moms would talk to Jaime’s mom. Dad ordered her into rehab, for what, who knows. When she refused, it was only a matter of time, and Dad took Jaime to Nashville with him.
