I brought him to the island of paperbacks, each one a story arc collected from a half-dozen or so monthly comics. I ran my hand against the books, sliding them back so their spines met.
“We used to have a yard sale like every summer when I was little,” he said. “And people would come browse, hemming and hawing over like the quality and value of our whatever, our items. And I remember being so offended if they didn’t buy anything. Like nothing we had was worthwhile or something. Oh this is junk. Which I guess it was, but still.”
“I felt like that here at first. Like what do you mean you’re not buying this issue? Are you a dumb-ass?”
He laughed. “You dig it, don’t you?”
“The store?”
“Mm.”
“I do.”
“How come?” He asked it not interrogatingly, but with curiosity. Pulling out a book and pushing it into its proper alphabetical place a few spaces over, he said, “What is it about this place that does it for you?”
“I guess I like having something to escape into. There’s so much continuity to learn in comics. It’s a good hobby.”
But it was more than a hobby. The world of comics was a refuge, a safe house. I thought of the slim, gay teenage boy perpetually in black clothes and eye-liner who came into the store almost every Wednesday morning, definitely during school hours, and headed for the shelf of new arrivals. His name was Abe; he was the kind of cute that made me feel like I missed something by not coming out until college.
“Hey, Vince,” he would say somberly, sliding an X-Men across the counter. I’d take it and ring him up. If it was raining out, or snowing, he’d want a bag; otherwise no. Usually he’d ask about some other title he hadn’t been able to find on the shelves, and if we were sold out, or if it had been delayed, I’d feel bad.
I knew why I liked being among comic book characters, and it wasn’t about a hobby. The X-Men are mutants, freaks—hated, hunted, cast out—but on the other hand, practically gods. Kids like Abe, digging out his wallet, pushing three dollars across the counter with skinny fingers and nails of chipped black polish, might be called a freak every day at school—on the days they could tolerate going—but in secret, in disguise, who knew what wonders they could create with waves of ice, what havoc they could wreak with their unbelievable strength.
“A lot of the queer kids like X-Men,” I explained to Griff.
“Not you?”
“Sure, but for me it’s always been Superman.”
“I don’t think of Superman as being angsty, though.”
“That’s the problem. Most people don’t. But really he’s pure angst. He has a Fortress of Solitude, you know? What do you think he does there, throw parties? No. He broods.”
“Good point.”
“But that’s not what I really like about him, though.”
“What do you like about him?” He smiled. He’d probably heard this a million times. A billion.
“You know, in the first movie, the scene in Lois Lane’s apartment? Right after Superman has taken her flying? He’s dressed up as Clark Kent now and he loves her and he wants to tell her his secret, he wants to share this giant secret. He takes off his glasses, straightens up, becomes an entirely different person—becomes, I don’t know, beautiful. Lois, he says, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“That part is good.”
I nodded. “I can always feel how much he wants to tell her, you know? How desperate he is to. This powerful man who can lift continents and shoot laser beams from his eyes. But then he gets scared. I can see the fear in his eyes, and I can feel that too.” It was the same fear I had when Griff sat down at my computer that night, when he clicked that little drop-down menu and learned that Truman and Vince were one and the same. “He puts his glasses back on—I know his heart is pounding—and his voice gets squeaky again. He calls the whole thing off and he feels both relieved and disappointed about not actually crossing that line he’s made for himself, you know? He’s the most powerful man in the world but he’s perpetually in the closet.”
“He just needs a good buddy to help him come out,” Griff said, and with a smile he moved another book to the right place.
I was ringing up a customer when Marissa arrived. According to the angle of the beam of sunlight coming through the glass door, it was a little after noon.
“Yo,” she said.
“Thanks for doing this,” I told her, sliding a credit card through the machine.
“No thanks necessary. I will extract payment at a later date.” She went to the back and I heard her say, “You new?”
And then Griff: “New to you. I’m Griff. Vince’s friend.”
“Ah, the ambiguously straight roommate. I’ve heard about you. I’m Marissa.”
“I’ve heard about you too,” Griff said. “Vince says you’re angsty.”
“He projects.”
The customer left the store with her bag and a puzzled expression. Marissa came out pulling her hair out of the neck of her Golden Age t-shirt, bedazzled with blue sequins on the sleeves. Griff followed her.
“You guys met, I heard?” I said.
“We’re practically engaged,” she said. Griff put his hand over his mouth to be silly but his surprise looked genuine. “OK boys, you can scoot out on whatever little Tour de Vince you have planned.”
In the back room Griff and I exchanged our t-shirts for coat and vest.
“Thanks again Marissa.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She smiled and waved us away.
Melting snow ran in little streams across the sidewalk Zane had shoveled so carefully last weekend, washing his sprinkled sand into the grass and the parking lot.
“She’s interesting,” Griff said as we climbed into the Jetta. He started it up. Cold air blew from the vents.
“I think she likes to make a strong first impression,” I said, cranking up the heat. “But she’s cool.”
“I couldn’t tell whether she wanted to make out with me or stomp on my toe.”
“Exactly!”
He was idling at the edge of the lot. Traffic rushed by in both directions. “OK, Vinny, where to?”
“You mean you don’t have some big plan?” I pushed my gloves into the compartment in the door.
“The adventure was my idea. I’m not expected to come up with all the details too, am I?”
“The destination is hardly a detail.”
“It’s the journey, my friend.”
“Well, let me think. ... We could... Hmm.”
“What?”
“...”
“Any ideas?”
“No, I don’t fucking know!”
Even in college we never knew what to do. We used to sit around in our room, increasingly whiny and antsy as it became more and more evident that we were going to end up staying in for the night, watching movies or playing Trivial Pursuit in the common area with Gia. But those nights often ended up being the most fun. So it worked out.
“Just drive,” I told him. “See where the road takes us.”
“OK.” He pulled out of the lot and a little way down the street we stopped at a red light. Sun glinted off the shiny hood. “It’s fucking bright,” he said, lowering his visor. “I may crash us.”
“Please no. I don’t want any more wounds.”
“Looks better, by the way,” he said, jabbing his finger at my chin.
He put us on Route 6 and we headed northeast up the crook of the Massachusetts elbow.
***
From my desk I watched the door of room 907 open and Griff quietly enter, but I didn’t say anything and neither did he. He dropped his backpack onto his bed and sat down. He took off his sneakers and peeled off his socks, wincing in disgust as they unrolled down his clammy shins. They looked like he’d stepped in a puddle.
“So fucking hot out,” he said after sitting there a minute with his socks in his hand. “I hate being sweaty. I’d prefer anything to dampness. Frostbite, fine—but dampness...”
He walked barefoot to his computer, laughed at some forwarded email joke he didn’t share with me, poked around in his desk for a little while, and then asked me if I’d forgotten about the concert.
“The concert?”
“The Elsewhen show tonight.” That was all he said. He didn’t precede it with a duh and he didn’t shake me by the shoulders or playfully slap me across the face for forgetting.
“I guess I must’ve, yeah.”
“Oh.”
We bought the tickets months ago—eons in college time—stood in line for them out in the cold the morning of the welcome-back party. Now it was the last week of the semester. Classes were either over or winding down, and the same could’ve been said of our friendship. Room selection was three weeks ago. Griff, with his lucky number 13, took a single on the third floor of the little, less-nice dorm down the street, because there was no one else he wanted to live with. The remaining singles were long gone by the time my 947 rolled around, as I knew they would be. I took a double by myself and by that point Griff didn’t ask about trying to work something out with Housing.
“Well do you want to go?” He was fanning his flushed face with the tickets.
“I don’t know. I guess you can have my ticket. Take whoever you want.”
He stopped fanning. “Why do you have to be like that?”
“Like what?”
He sighed. “Fine, I’ll take whoever I want.” He put one ticket in the front pocket of his t-shirt, dark in the pits and sagging like too much skin over his thin chest, and threw the other one at me. It did a few curly loops in the air and came to rest against my shoe.
There was a silence between us that even punk rock filling the arena at a chest-pounding volume could not penetrate. Our tickets were general admission for the floor. We were twenty feet from the stage, on the edges of what was fast becoming a mosh pit. People kept stepping on my toes, bumping my shoulders, pressing against me. People in soaking wet shirts, in no shirts, in bone-white bras and bare flesh. Usually the idea of a crushing orgy of half-naked young men and women would be sexy, but not here and not now. I received an elbow in the ribs and I shoved the guy I assumed it belonged to. I expected him to retaliate; maybe even wanted him to—I was almost craving a fight. Instead he gave me a crazy-eyed grin and then shoved the guy standing next to him. Mosh dominoes.
I used the claustrophobia and the reeking strangers and my ringing ears to stoke a rage inside me. And when it was burning nice and hot I turned my eyes to Griff, who was hopping up and down beside me like a fucking pogo stick.
Was he happy in this place? Was he at home in this tight, smelly cacophony? Was this him? It was not me. We would never be compatible and we could never be together. There. Done. Finished. After all that, he wasn’t even someone I wanted to be with! We were too different. Way too different. It was easier then, easier to know that fate and biology were the least of our problems. When all was said and done, I could barely even stand the guy.
Right?
The frontman of Elsewhen, shirtless with sleeve tattoos and wearing cut-off Dickies, stopped screaming into his microphone long enough to do a back-flip off a speaker.
Griff, his face flushed in the swirling colored lights, his hair damp, was mouthing something at me. Though he was only inches away, I couldn’t hear him. I gave up after his second shout and returned my eyes to the stage. He cupped his fingers around my ear and screamed, “Are you having fun?” It was in the middle of the fourth or fifth song of the set. And after he’d said it, maybe a half-second later, the legs of some crowd-surfer went over us. I saw a black leather belt with metal studs. The crowd-surfer’s black boot met the back of Griff’s head. I heard the thump even over the music; maybe I felt it myself. His fingers tore away from my ear as he started to go down. I yelled but it made no sound. Not even I could hear it.
I had heard of people being trampled to death in crowds without anyone around them noticing, not until the crowd dispersed and a crushed body was discovered among the litter and footprints. I started to panic.
But Griff didn’t go all the way down. He was supported by the tightness of the crowd—there was no empty space to slump into. I got my hands under his wet armpits and hoisted him to his feet. His hair had fallen down in front of his eyes and I couldn’t immediately tell that they were open, but fluttering and dazed. He started to sink back down. No one noticed. I knew no amount of yelling or flailing was going to clear anyone away.
I kneeled down, taking a deep breath first as though I were going under water, and leaned against his legs so that he tipped forward over my shoulder. Then I stood up, locked my arm around the backs of his thighs and fought my way forward. His black Converse stuck out in front of us and mercilessly crunched against shoulders, chests and faces, parting us a path through the crowd. I felt his fingers squeeze my waist and then clutch my belt but he made no other movement.
The crowd thinned at the outskirts of the pit. I carried him to the back of the floor, waiting there a moment because I thought I would need to catch my breath. His shoelaces swung in front of me; colored lights played over his jeans. I adjusted my grip on his legs and then I carried him to the landing at the top of the first set of stairs, past rows of people standing on seats, just scenery—it was just me and Griff in this arena. He felt light. Maybe I just didn’t want to ever put him down. I carried him up to the second landing and then out into the empty corridor that encircled the arena. I brought him to a soda machine and knelt down and, in a series of jerky movements, slid him off my shoulder and leaned him against it. The side of the machine dimpled. He promptly threw up in his lap.
I bought him an Elsewhen t-shirt, gray with blue letters, in a size that would actually fit him, and helped him change.
*
Griff turned down the Elsewhen and tapped the red dial behind the steering wheel. “Jetta needs gas,” he said.
“You still have almost half a tank.”
“It takes diesel,” he said. “You can’t find it everywhere so you have to get it where you find it.”
“Ah.”
We pulled into a Tedeschi’s with a gas station and I watched him in the side mirror as he unscrewed the tank cap and filled his new car. He drummed his fingers on the charcoal roof.
I liked watching people pump gas. It felt almost intimate, a thing they didn’t think about being observed at. Like watching someone brush their teeth—they get lost in themselves. He looked across the salt-white street, put his hair behind his ear, rubbed his nose between his forefinger and thumb. What was he thinking about, I wondered. About Beth? About packing up his new car and driving to Phoenix? About what highways he would take, what giant roadside balls of yarn and chocolate cows he would pose for photos with on the way?
When the nozzle clunked full he walked across the lot to the convenience store, pulling his wallet from his back pocket as he went. I leaned back on the headrest. I was glad I’d taken the afternoon off. For all the time he’d been at my house, we hadn’t had much time alone together. It was easy—it was just starting to be easy.
But Phoenix loomed.
He got back in the car, emptied some change into the cupholder between the bucket seats. He tossed into my lap a package of Hostess Snoballs—pink, coconutty, almost alive the way a sea sponge is alive. I tore open the cellophane wrapper and held one out to him.
“Come to daddy,” he said, coaxing it off the cardboard onto his palm. He pried off the coconut-and-marshmallow shell and ate the chocolate cupcake hidden underneath. He held the marshmallow, jiggling and quivering, in his open hand. “Isn’t it almost arousing? It’s practically begging me to fuck it.”
“I knew you weren’t completely straight,” I said, biting into the other Snoball. “You’re one of those cocosexuals, aren’t you?”
“You caught me. Should we go have an
awkward game of pool now?”
I laughed. He folded the marshmallow shell in half and crammed its entirety into his mouth. Pink strands of coconut poked out between his lips as he attempted to chew.
In Orleans we parked in the snow-packed lot of a little pub called Soundings. The walls inside were lined with old photos of fishermen, some in frames but most tacked up with push-pins; the bar was lined with old fishermen perched like gargoyles on wooden stools. All old men on the Cape looked like fishermen to me—they looked crusty, weathered, even if all they’d ever done was own a goldfish. Maybe it was the salt air.
A stereo behind the bar played Neil Young. Our waitress, a wide woman with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, whose name-tag said Lois, brought beers to our booth while we looked at the menu. It was written out longhand and the prices were marked on little white stickers.
Griff took a swig of beer, swished it through his teeth like mouthwash, swallowed, licked foam from his lips. “Talked to my cousin Dave yesterday,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I rotated my glass slowly counter-clockwise on a napkin. “He buy his hot-tub yet?”
“Yeah, it was delivered.”
“Cool.”
“One of those ones with all the spouts and seats for like twenty people.”
“I have a kiddie pool,” I said, looking across at him, not even sure what I meant by it.
“A what?”
“You know, those plastic kiddie pools.” I looked down at my glass. “It has pictures of starfish.”
“And you use this for what?”
“Came with the house. Last summer I’d fill it up and sit out there and read.”
“But it’s not deep, right?”
“About like this.” I held my hands a few inches apart.
Lois brought our burgers and then disappeared to find us a bottle of ketchup.
“Anyway,” he said, banging the bottle against his palm, “the trip’ll give me something to do, you know? I figure I can get out there pretty cheap.”
One of the old guys at the bar put his hand on the shoulder of the guy sitting next to him. “Barney?” he said.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 23
