There was a light scuffing sound of fabric against stone, and Wayne heaved himself up next to me with a light gasp. “What the fuck, man?” he said, breathing heavily, his blond hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. “You couldn't wait an extra ten minutes for me?”
I smiled, and lit him a cigarette from my own. “I didn't think you were coming,” I said.
“Well, you're an asshole,” Wayne said, accepting the cigarette. “Tradition is my middle name.”
“I thought it was Howard.”
“Remarks like that could lead to a nasty fall, if you catch my drift.”
“Sorry.”
“So,” he said, holding up his cigarette in a toast. “Senior year.”
“Senior year,” I said, remarkably glad that Wayne had come, that we were hanging out again like the old days. It somehow made it seem possible that as weird as things had gotten, everything could still return to normal.
Wayne took a long drag on his cigarette and appeared to consider me thoughtfully for a few moments. “Joe,” he finally said. “You're still my best friend.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
We sat in companionable silence, looking up at the night sky, the abundance of unsaid things floating in the smoke-filled air between us. If there was ever going to be a time to discuss everything, this was it. “Wayne,” I said tentatively.
“Don't say anything, man,” he said, smiling sadly. “I'm fucked up enough as it is. If I have to talk about it, I think I'll go insane.”
“Okay,” I said, and then performed a loud, hyperbolic sigh of relief that made us both laugh. Below us, a plump skunk appeared on the school lawn, scurrying around with its nose to the ground as if searching for a contact lens. I followed the skunk's movements while Wayne lit two more cigarettes for us.
“Our last year of high school,” he said, inhaling from both cigarettes at once before handing me mine. “It's all downhill from here.”
“If this is as good as it gets, kill me now,” I said.
Wayne grinned. “You should ask out that girl, Joe.”
“What girl?”
“That Carly what's-her-face.”
“Carly Diamond,” I said. I'd been nursing a quiet crush on her for the last half of our junior year, something I'd confided to Wayne on more than one occasion.
“She's cute,” Wayne said. “You should go for it.”
“Maybe.”
“What's the problem?”
“We've only talked once or twice,” I said. “How do you go from a few casual conversations to suddenly asking someone out?”
“But that's exactly when you have to do it.”
“I feel like we should know each other a little better first, so it's not, like, out of the blue.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Wayne said. “This very time, when you know each other but your relationship hasn't been defined, is your window of opportunity. Girls divide guys into friends and potential boyfriends. You have to get yourself into the right category from the get-go. You do it your way, you'll end up being friends, and there's nothing harder than trying to switch categories once that happens. She'll end up talking to you about all the other guys she likes, in which case you're better off being rejected from the start.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I think my way makes more sense.”
“And you've certainly got the results to back it up,” he said, smiling as he flicked his ashes over the edge of the building.
“Fuck you.”
“Sorry, I've made other plans.”
We smoked in silence for a while, watching as the scattered lights in the surrounding houses slowly went out. The hangnail moon took refuge behind a cluster of gray clouds, and I shivered as a slight chill took hold of the night. This is what it feels like when time speeds up, I thought.
Wayne turned to me, his expression earnest as he stubbed out his cigarette. “We should get tattoos,” he said.
eleven
I went in for rock posters in a big way back in the ninth grade, which is obviously the last time I redecorated my bedroom. Above the pine Workbench dresser in the corner hangs an enlarged poster of the painted girl from the cover of Duran Duran's Rio album. Beside the window, which looks out over the front door, is a poster of The Cure. On the far wall, above my bed, there was room for both Elvis Costello, peering inquisitively over his Buddy Holly glasses, and Howard Jones, relaxed and smiling under his hair spray, photographed sometime in the five minutes before synthesizer pop was laughed off the music scene. I seem to recall having had edgier taste in music, but I suppose that's just one more adjustment I'll have to make to my compromised memories. The young, bearded Springsteen sweating over his guitar on my bathroom door cheers me up for a second, even though I probably hung it there more for credibility than anything else.
On the door to my room, held up by thumbtacks, its white border ragged and torn in countless places from random human contact, is a Star Wars poster, just like in the song by Everclear. I hum the words softly to myself. “I want the things that I had before / like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.” You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.
Sitting on top of the dresser is my old Fisher stereo. I press the large silver power button, and the console lights up with an amplified squawk. I watch in awe as the phonograph arm rises automatically and swings over to the turntable, upon which spins an old 45. There is no reason it shouldn't work, and yet I'm surprised when it does. It's plugged in behind the dresser, and I remember struggling with the dresser to move it out far enough so that I could reach the outlet. It seems unbelievable to me that something the kid who would grow into me had done back then has remained intact until now, as if waiting for me to return. We are suddenly connected, he and I, as if by some cosmic warp in the time continuum, and I see him with perfect clarity, can feel his fears and thoughts suddenly running through my brain, his younger humors flowing through my veins, and for the briefest instant, through some act of molecular recall, I am him again. My thigh muscles falter and I sit down quickly on the bed. My bed. Through the speakers comes a scratchy rendition of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes,” and I have to smile.
I use the hall bathroom, and my hand remembers that the flusher must be yanked up before being depressed, a plumbing quirk that has not been repaired since my childhood, because with my father living alone in the house, the hall toilet has basically gone unused. For a moment, I try to imagine a set of circumstances that might have led my father to use the hall toilet, but I cannot. Between the downstairs powder room and his own master bathroom, he'd have had no reason to come down this way, and Arthur Goffman is not the sort of man inclined toward whimsical changes of scenery when it comes to taking a dump.
I return to my room and walk over to the double windows that overlook the front yard, absently fingering the white plastic grille. My father had installed the grille because the pigeons kept mistaking the large window for open air and crashing into it. I can vividly recall the nauseating sound of those bone-jarring collisions jolting me out of my sleep in the early-morning hours. I would creep hesitantly to the window and look down to see the bird on our front stairs, dazed and shivering from the sudden, inexplicable crash. Usually they recovered after a few minutes and took to the air again on an erratic flight path, shaken and none the wiser for their bruising experience, left only with the vague and uncomfortable notion that the air will occasionally coagulate without warning and knock them out of the sky. Every so often the crash was fatal, and I was forced to remove the dead pigeon with one of the red snow shovels from the garage and inter the bird in a shallow, unmarked grave behind the hedges. The second time I buried a pigeon with a crushed skull, I vomited profusely and was sick for hours afterward, prompting my father to grudgingly install the grille, muttering under his breath about my fragile constitution.
The doorbell rings, and eager as I might be to continue my fond
reverie of bad hair bands, pulverized birds, and my insensitive father, I clear my head and run downstairs to open the door.
The pale, lingering shipwreck of a man standing on my father's front porch, in baggy jeans and an old Cougars jacket, turns out to be Wayne Hargrove, but it takes a few beats before I recognize him. His once-thick blond hair has thinned to a few colorless wisps that float disconnectedly around his scalp, and there are dark shadows under his eyes, which are gravely sunken in their sockets. He is terribly thin in an angular way, with the stooped shoulders and protruding elbows and overall sense of diminishment that belong to a much older man. Implanted on the pasty diaphanous flesh of his forehead and neck are the small merlot-colored clusters characteristic of Kaposi's sarcoma, as if further proof of his terrible condition were needed.
“So the rumors were true,” my old friend says, leaning against the door frame with familiar ease, as if it were yesterday and not seventeen years ago that he used to pop over whenever he felt the urge. “The prodigal son has returned.”
“Good news travels fast,” I say with a grin, shaking his hand. I can feel his bones, brittle and loose, shifting under his clammy, paper-thin skin as they yield to the pressure of my grip.
“News of any kind travels fast in this town,” Wayne says. “No one knows that better than the town faggot.”
We study each other for a moment or two.
“It's good to see you,” I say.
He smirks, and a hint of the old Wayne, young, cocky, perennially amused, briefly flashes across his drawn face. “Aren't you going to tell me how great I look? How kind the years have been?”
“I was just going to say, you must give me the name of your dietitian.”
Wayne's laugh is a strong and unfettered thing, and I congratulate myself on my direct approach. “Can I come in?” he asks hesitantly, and I see a subtle change in his expression, a quick flicker of doubt, as if he thinks he might very well be rebuffed. In that instant I catch the faintest whiff of the isolation and bigotry he's no doubt suffered as Bush Falls's only confirmed homosexual.
“That depends,” I say. “Are you mad at me?”
“I promise not to spill any drinks on you, if that's what you mean.”
“You heard about that.”
“Tongues are wagging,” he says, raising his eyebrows dramatically as he steps into the entry hall and looks around. “Wow. Time warp.”
“Tell me about it,” I say. “My bedroom is like a shrine to the eighties.”
“I'll bet.”
He asks after my father, and I give a summary of his condition and the generally pessimistic prognosis. He listens attentively, fiddling in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and a matchbook. He lights the match in the book one-handed, a trick he perfected back in high school, and takes a long, greedy drag on the cigarette. “Cigarette?”
“Yes, I know,” I say, and we smile at the old shared joke. “Should you be smoking in your condition?”
“Most definitely.” He arches his eyebrow cynically in what strikes me as a particularly gay manner: stately, self-deprecating, and slightly feminine. I wonder if he had these mannerisms back in high school and I was just oblivious, or if he'd cultivated this demeanor in the years after he left the Falls, living out in Los Angeles, working odd jobs, and auditioning for an endless stream of sitcom pilots. We'd stayed in touch sporadically, writing sarcastic letters to each other, documenting our latest, separate failures. At some point during my senior year at NYU, a routine HIV test Wayne took came back positive and his letters stopped coming. Only recently, in a rare conversation with Brad, had I learned that Wayne had moved back to the Falls, and more than once I'd resolved to give him a call, but predictably never did.
I look into Wayne's creased face and ravaged eyes, my throat constricting in an involuntary spasm of acute sadness, and I think that he's very much like those pigeons I buried in my youth, flying along minding his own business when the air suddenly turned solid on him. “How long have you been symptomatic?”
“I think I just crossed the line between long enough and too long,” he says with a rueful smile.
“You're living at home?”
“Yeah. Apparently, the AIDS alone wasn't enough to satisfy my masochistic nature.”
“And how are the Hargrove seniors?”
“Vindicated,” he says with a sour grin. “My mother warned me there'd be hell to pay for my abominations.”
Wayne's mother is a ball buster of a woman who embroiders obscure biblical verses on pillows and keeps an extensive collection of Reader's Digest magazines, which she weeps through every Sunday after church. Beside her, his father is practically invisible, a slight balding man who speaks in muted whispers, as if he's constantly afraid of waking someone up.
“Can I get you anything?” I say, although not having been to the kitchen yet, I have no idea what there might be to be gotten. Beer and Gatorade have always been my father's beverages of choice, but I suspect he still does his shopping one day at a time.
“No, thanks,” Wayne says. “I actually came here to get you.”
“Really? What for?”
“To go drinking,” he says as if it should have been obvious. “As unfortunate as the circumstances might be, this is still a homecoming, a reunion of sorts. We owe it to ourselves to get hammered.”
I look at his fragile form skeptically. “You're going to get hammered?” I say. “That can't be good for you.”
“Oh, come on,” he says with a frown. “Look at me, will you? It's a bit late to be implementing a policy of abstinence, don't you think?” There's a new quality to Wayne's speech, something I don't remember from our youth, a sharp thread of resigned bitterness woven into his wit.
“Is it really that bad?” I ask, and then quickly correct myself. “I mean, is the disease really that advanced?”
“The final countdown.” The remark and its accompanying expression reveal the first crack in his veneer of jocularity. We share a sad, comfortable silence, feeling the textured closeness of old friends soberly acknowledging tragedy together. I let out an audible sigh, wishing that I were by nature a more expressive person, and Wayne sighs as well, probably wishing he didn't have AIDS at all.
“I'm really sorry, man,” I say. “I don't know what to say.”
He nods and pulls open the front door. “You can think of something en route.”
We step outside into the muted pastels of suburban twilight. The cicadas have gone to sleep, the crickets have yet to strike up the band, and I pause on the porch for a moment, breathing in deeply the scents of freshly mowed lawns and cooling blacktop and the faintest trace of honeysuckle. I am suddenly awash in a confounding wave of nostalgia for my youth and the house in which I'd grown up.
“You forget something?” Wayne says from the stairs.
“A lot,” I say, perturbed.
His smile conveys telepathic understanding. “Welcome home, my friend.” He points to the Mercedes. “I take it this obscene status symbol is yours?”
“Afraid so.”
“Excellent,” he says, pulling open the passenger door. “Let's see what she can do.”
At Wayne's behest, I drive out to Pinfield Avenue, a desolate stretch of back road that winds its way quietly around Bush Falls, and floor it. The Mercedes growls with mythic energy as I push the needle up past ninety. In the passenger seat, Wayne opens his window completely to let in the angry, whipping wind, closing his eyes with a smile as it buffets his head, blowing the clinging remnants of his hair behind him comically. “Oh, come on!” he shouts above the combined din of the engine and the wind. “You can do better than that.”
I shake my head at him and step down harder on the accelerator. The needle creeps up past one hundred, and we can now feel every dip and pebble in the warped pavement of the old road. I tighten my grip on the wheel, thinking to myself that no good can come of this. In the passenger seat, Wayne appears even more depleted, and I find myself worrying irrationally about the pr
essure of the wind on him, as if it might pull his gossamer skin right off his flimsy bones. “Faster,” he says.
“You're not even wearing your seat belt.”
He turns to me and smiles ironically. “It's one of the few perks of my condition,” he says, and then, affecting an exaggerated Mexican lilt, shouts, “We don't need no stinking seat belts!”
The trees rush by us in a haze of green as the Mercedes' tires churn against the blacktop. The needle now hovers at 115, which is, to the best of my recollection, the fastest I've ever driven. We shoot through the night, Wayne and I, two lost, lonely souls, vibrating in our seats like pistons as we hurtle over the road on borrowed power, the air desperately parting and diving out of our path in the xenon glare of our low beams. And maybe it's not about speed exactly; maybe it's about time, and trying to catch it, to overtake it and just slow everything the fuck down for a little while.
“Faster!” Wayne bellows jubilantly. “You pussy!”
“You're really a terrible influence on me,” I say.
“Come on,” he exhorts me. “What are you so worried about?”
As if on cue, we hear the growing wail of a police siren behind us an instant before the flashing lights appear in my mirror. “Busted,” Wayne says, unable to conceal his glee.
“Shit.” I brake heavily. “I hope you're satisfied.”
Wayne leans forward to check his side-view mirror. “I think we can take him,” he says earnestly, a wild look in his eyes.
“You can't be serious.”
“Come on. Live a little.”
When I slow down, Wayne goes into a pout, staring out the window like a petulant adolescent. “Fine. Be that way,” he mutters.
The Book of Joe Page 8
