I heard a scraping sound somewhere to the side and turned to look. For a second I thought - or kind of hoped - that I’d lost my mind, but then Chase said “Holy shit, did you see that?” and there was no getting away from what I’d seen. There on the wall was the unmistakable shadow of Bigfoot. And it was moving.
“Bullshit,” I said, and marched forward to take a closer look.
It was a statue. Granted, statues weren’t supposed to move, but this one was. A guy was dragging it slowly across the floor.
“Hey, you need some help with that?” said Chase, and the old man stood up. And double-taked, naturally.
“Mike?” said the old man. My old man.
“Sean,” I corrected, out of old habit, not that he’d ever listen. You could never talk people out of a name they had picked out back when you were still a blip on the ultrasound screen.
“Finn?” said Chase, understandably confused.
“What are you doing here?”
“Cardio,” I said, and sighed. “Chase. This is Sean Senior, my dad.”
Chase stuck out a hand. “Um...hi. This is a surprise.” He motioned to the wooden Bigfoot statue. “Are you...?”
Dad puffed his chest out. “The artist? Yeah. I do a lot of sculpture.”
“Mostly sasquatch,” I said.
“Hey, supply and demand,” he said, and Chase was giving me this look, like ‘this explains everything’. Yep. Here we were. The thing I’d been trying to avoid telling him about my family. That they were absolutely fucking nuts.
“You had me going for a moment,” Chase said to Dad. “We saw the shadow on the wall and for a second it was like...wow. It’s very realistic.”
Dad ran a fond hand over the sculpture. A little too fond, if you’d asked me. “Well, thank you,” he said. “This little girl here. She’s special.”
“Your Mona Lisa?”
“You could say that, yeah,” said Dad, clearly warming to Chase. “This is a special commission to commemorate fifty years since the Patterson-Gimlin film.”
“Wow.”
“Yep. I studied that thing up and down and back to front to get the most realistic 3D rendering of that famous still shot. Note the angle of the knee there, an angle that countless experts agree is completely alien to the human knee, so - you know - not a man in a monkey suit. And you’ll also notice the breasts, of course, because this was a lady Bigfoot–”
“–Dad, please. Nobody needs to hear about sasquatch tits.”
“He might,” said Dad, homing in on the new recruit. “You a believer, Chase?”
“Uh, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m open-minded. I mean, I’d like to believe it…”
“Ah,” said Dad. “You’re a Jane Goodall.”
“Sure. Is she…?”
“A jury’s-out kind of gal? You bet. And bear in mind she’s probably the most eminent primatologist in the world–”
“–and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Hound of the Baskervilles,” I said, getting impatient. “Didn’t stop him making a fool of himself when some little girls got hold of a camera and a bunch of paper fairies, did it?”
Dad sighed. “You’ll have to excuse my son,” he said. “He’s a hard skeptic.”
“Yep. Why don’t you tell Chase about the birthday party, Dad?”
He was having none of it. “Did you call your mother?” he said, falling back on the old tried and tested guilt trip.
“Not since she called me, no.”
“We’re trying to go cold turkey with the whole phone thing,” said Chase. “Social media. All that.”
Dad nodded. “Sure. Sometimes you gotta shut that shit off and spend time one on one, especially your generation. Your social skills are gonna atrophy and you’ll–”
“–end up talking about sasquatch boobs to people you met thirty seconds ago,” I said. “Tell us more about the social superiority of Generation X, Dad.”
He leaned heavily on the statue, giving him room to insert a steel toecap under the base and shove it – her – up onto the shallow plinth. I knew what this meant. Conversation over. Back to work. “Dinner’s at six,” he said. “We eat early out here in the boonies.”
“Thank you,” said Chase, surprised. “You really don’t have to go to any trouble.”
“No trouble,” said Dad, and patted me on the shoulder, getting a whiff as he did so. “And take a damn shower. You smell worse than a sasquatch.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. Like I hadn’t noticed. We were both thoroughly sweaty, although our combined stink still couldn’t overpower that distinctive roadside attraction odor, a smell that as a teenager I’d identified with pointless pursuits and wasted time. I hurried back out, eager to get away from it, and headed back down Main Street, Chase following.
“Slow down,” he said, after a while, and I realized I’d broken into a run without even thinking about it. “Jesus, after all you screamed at me for starting without stretching properly…”
I slowed to a walk as we approached the trail back to the cabin. “Okay. You got me. I’m a hypocrite. Happy?”
“Not really,” said Chase. “Not while you appear to be literally trying to outrun your shit. How about we talk about what just happened…Mike?”
I sighed. This was getting way too heavy for anything that should ever have gone down in a Bigfoot Museum.
“I thought your name was Sean,” he said.
“It is,” I said. “Sean Michael. I had the names officially flipped around back in college, because I was born Michael Sean. Michael Finnegan.”
Chase blinked. “As in Finnegan begin again? He grew whiskers on his chinegan?”
“Yeah, you got it. Guess what my childhood sounded like?”
“Your parents really didn’t think that one through, huh?”
“As you might have noticed, my parents are not exactly normal. And stop fucking looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you just got handed the keys to all of my Bigfoot issues, because trust me, you don’t know the half of it.”
“There’s no need to get so defensive about it,” he said, and I knew I’d gone too far. I trudged up the path after him. Now he was hurrying ahead, and I wasn’t sure if I even deserved to catch up with him. He’d spilled his guts to me and I’d given him nothing back. In fact I’d probably fucked him over. God knows what the Hollywood rumor mill was saying now; I’d almost definitely made the situation back there worse and I was too chickenshit to even check.
We got back to the cabin. Chase toed his sneakers off and walked in, peeling off his shirt as he went. I hesitated and he stopped, standing in the bathroom doorway with his pants halfway down his hips, baring dimples and the top of that coveted V-line, the Adonis belt. “You coming?” he said.
“I don’t know. Do you want me to?”
“Yes. You need to shower.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. It felt weird to be getting naked with him in this mood, but I really did stink. I stripped off and joined him under the spray. He didn’t exactly flinch away when I put my hands on his waist, but he didn’t lean back into my touch the way he usually did. Tentatively I kissed his wet shoulder. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
I ran my hands over his skin, warm water streaming over us. He bent his head to scrub at his hair and I kissed the foam as it ran down over his neck and shoulders and I stood there figuring out what to say to him. This almost felt like a fight.
“You know what you said?” I asked. “About a part of you getting out of practice? At taking criticism or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re not the only one. Only in my case it’s the part of me that does…relationships or whatever. I haven’t done this for a very long time.”
He turned around slowly. “This?”
“Yeah. Whatever this is.”
I could tell by the set of his shoulders that I was saying all the wrong things again, but I couldn’t say that, no matter how much I wanted t
o. No matter how much I felt it. That was way too soon and we were living in a self-imposed bubble here. God knows what would happen when we had to return to our respective messy realities, but with every passing day I got more and more certain that when we did, it was not going to be pretty.
He rinsed off and got out.
“Are we fighting?” I said, raising my voice over the sound of the shower.
There was a pause. “You tell me. You were the one who snapped at me.”
I washed my hair in a hurry and got out. He was in the living area, leafing through a near pristine copy of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance that he had never found time to read in LA and found even less time to read here.
“Okay,” I said, taking a seat on the end of the couch.
“Okay?” he said, peering over the rims of his glasses.
“Truce. I didn’t mean to get pissy with you.”
“No, it’s okay. I know you didn’t want me to meet your family.”
“Because they’re weird, Chase,” I said, frustrated. “It’s no reflection on you. It’s them. Jesus, you just met my dad. That’s just one of the things he does. He carves Bigfoot shit for tourists and museums. I spent my formative years learning the difference between a yeti and a sasquatch, for God’s sake.”
He closed his book and frowned, setting his feet on the floor as he leaned forward. His robe slid open a little, baring part of his thigh. “I know I’m going to regret asking,” he said. “But what is the difference?”
“Yeti have thicker hair. Longer toes. They’re more adapted to altitude.”
“Right. Of course they are.”
There was a silence as I scrambled for the right words. “Look,” I said. “My parents love [MSOffice1] me, and I love them, but there’s no getting away from it: they fucked me up. When you’re little your parents are supposed to tell you that monsters aren’t real, not sit you down in front of old VCRs of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and fill your head with yetis. When I was in middle school it was kind of cool, because everyone wanted to hang out at my house and look at my dad’s collection of Bigfoot casts.”
“But it was social death in your teens,” said Chase, softening.
“Exactly. And how.” I adjusted the towel around my waist and sighed. “It was my twelfth birthday party. And you know how awkward that age is, especially when you’re gay. All the guys who just wanted to hunt for Bigfoot with me were now preoccupied with all these bigger questions, like reevaluating their previous stance on whether girls have cooties or not. Mom was going to bake a foot shaped cake for my birthday but I said no, because I was just starting to realize that the whole Bigfoot thing was not going to look as cool at thirteen as it did when I was nine.”
“Sure. I can see that.”
“Except my dad had a birthday surprise in mind, too,” I said. “Maybe he saw it coming, too. Saw me outgrowing his obsession and wanted to give me one last hurrah. And he knew I was too old for clowns, so he planned a different kind of special guest appearance at my birthday party.”
Chase covered his mouth with both hands. He’d seen what was coming, and I could hardly blame him for finding it funny. In retrospect even I had to admit it was kind of hilarious, even if it had substantially ruined my life until I escaped to college and reinvented myself.
“Bigfoot was coming to my party,” I said. “Except this was my dad. Fucking hardcore Bigfoot nerd. The guy who’s studied the knee angle on a minute of blurry footage from fifty years ago, or who thinks he knows a thing or two about yeti anatomy. He wasn’t going to go buy a Bigfoot costume from Party City. He’d studied the way these creatures were supposed to look and move and even smell. Whatever costume he came up with was going to be accurate.”
“What did it look like?” said Chase, in a breathless voice.
“Fucking terrifying. Imagine a tween kid’s birthday party, and then – out of this big thick hedge at the back of the house – it’s a goddamn sasquatch. Broad daylight. And the damn thing still looks real. One of the girls fainted on the spot. And I…well, I pissed myself.”
“Oh my God,” he said, looking appalled.
“Yep. So that was my life, basically. There is no coming back from public pant-wetting, let me tell you. That shit follows you all the way through high school.”
Chase exhaled. “Yeah. I can see that.”
“So, sorry to burst your bubble, but I was definitely not the perfect, untouchable jock in high school.”
He got up and joined me on the sofa. “I don’t mind,” he said, his thigh warm against mine. “It’s not like I was the prom king, either.”
“You weren’t?”
“Uh uh. I was weird and doughy. I read too many books and knew way too much about Prince.” He grinned. “And I briefly played the tuba, which is the most unsexy musical instrument in the world.”
“No. Not while bagpipes exist.” He laughed. “Come on. Bagpipes. Even the name sounds like some kind of medical procedure. And that’s even before you get into the god-awful noise they make.”
“And tuba sounds any better? Really?”
“I’m sure they’re a vital part of the brass section.”
“Stop trying to be nice,” he said. “Here is a sentence you will never hear. ‘You see that fantastically hot person? They’re sleeping with the tuba player.’ That never happens.”
“Excuse me? I’m sleeping with the tuba player. Am I not fantastically hot?”
Chase smiled and kissed my shoulder. “You are.”
He pushed me gently and I sank back into the depths of the sofa, the towel around my waist coming loose. His robe was between us, but I couldn’t help but untie it. He sighed into my mouth as the full lengths of our bodies touched, skin on skin. “I love your body,” he said. “It always seems to know what mine is going to do next.”
“I could say the same for you. You always took direction so well in the gym.” I pulled him even closer. “And in the bedroom.”
He was so hard. He thrust gently against me, making me tingle with the memory of last night, when he’d pushed a third finger inside me and I came helplessly into his mouth, swept over the edge by the thought of him on top. This whole ‘no sex’ resolution was going really badly.
“You’re amazing,” I said. “This is amazing.”
He nibbled the edge of my earlobe. “Whatever this is,” he said, making me stiffen.
“Chase…”
“No, it’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay. I’d hurt him because I couldn’t find the right words. And I knew the right words. All three of them. It’s just that the more I began to feel them the more afraid I was of actually saying them. “Chase,” I said, pushing him away enough to look him in the eye. “Listen to me, baby.”
He propped himself on his hands and looked down at me, his eyes shining. I could see the flutter of his pulse in his neck and I knew he was as nervous as I was. “This is a big deal,” I said. “At least, I feel like it is.”
He swallowed. “I know. I feel it, too.”
“It’s not that it isn’t wonderful, because it is. But it’s also really, really scary. And I’m so afraid that I might fuck this up.”
Chase shook his head and smiled down at me with almost unbearable tenderness. “Oh, Finn. How could you possibly fuck this up?”
I could call your agent. I could sit around on my ass canoodling with you while I’m all too aware that your career might be in serious trouble. And with every passing day it gets harder and harder to tell you what I know, because I never, ever want to be the person who wipes that smile off your face.
I pushed his damp hair back from his forehead. “I don’t know,” I lied. “But if I’m doing it all wrong then please be patient with me.”
“So far you’ve done everything right. Everything.”
I kissed him again, mostly to keep myself from saying it. I was so in love. And I’d probably already ruined his life.
“You know we can’t hole up alone like
this forever,” I said. “You know that, right?”
He gave a sad little laugh. “Alone. I’ve never felt less alone than I do here.”
“You can’t mean that,” I said, thinking of the red carpets, the flashing crowds, the Oscar parties and the constantly ringing phone.
“Can and do.” He snuggled down against my chest. “Haven’t you ever stood in a crowd and felt completely alone? When you look all around you – you turn on your heel and see you’re surrounded, but they don’t even look like people any more. They’re just like…like a wall. And about as likely to care about you and what you’re feeling. That’s what feeling alone feels like.”
I ran my hands through his hair again, where the strands were drying and turning from dark gold to vanilla. In spite of his muscle he looked fragile somehow, like he’d scrubbed off a protective layer in the shower and left his skin pink and raw.
“I never realized,” he said. “How lonely I used to be until I came here with you.”
Lonely, said Angie’s voice in my head. What did he do? Shake his ass at you and tell you he was lonely?
“Finn…” he whispered.
“Shh.. Just kiss me. Please. Just kiss me.”
8
There was always something a little bit surreal about rubbing shoulders with celebrities, like you’d blundered into one of your own dreams. Occasionally you met one of those stars so huge that you turned full fanboy and made a fool of yourself, like the time I burst into tears in front of Madonna, but over the years I’d got used to it.
Except for this. Bringing a movie star home to meet your mother was a whole different ball game.
Chase – looking lovely in a faded flannel shirt and jeans – was still glowing from our previous failure at not having sex. He was all beard-rash and eyelashes and I couldn’t seem to stop touching him. My hand lingered on the small of his back as I ushered him into the kitchen, where my mom was chopping celery.
“Mom, this is Chase.”
She dried her hands quickly and took one of his. I saw the little flicker of recognition in her eye. “Ohh,” she said, just about managing to keep her shit together. Knowing Dad he probably hadn’t told her who I was seeing, on the grounds that he had no idea himself. The only sneakily photographed things he was interested in had a whole lot more body hair than Chase.
Going Sasquatch Page 11
