Like The Wind

by Bengtsson, J.

  That only brought a fresh round of laughs. Certainly not the sympathy he desired but what did he expect? We’d all taken our tumbles on stage at one time or another. Dane’s clumsy ass wasn’t special by any means.

  “You’re having your face fixed with plastic surgery, you say?” RJ flashed a satisfied smirk as he patted Dane’s shoulder. “I think that’s probably best.”

  “Fuck you, dude. Your ass must be jealous of all the shit that comes out of your mouth.”

  RJ made a show of speaking in a low tone as he addressed me personally. “He’s just upset because I matched with his mom on Tinder.”

  Retaliation was swift with Dane jumping over a chair to get at RJ.

  Completely ignoring the combat zone behind him, Shawn formed his hands into prayer and pleaded, “Please. Please let someone have Dane’s face plant on video. We could switch it to slo-mo and add a little music montage. No offense, Bodhi, but I’m getting tired of all your Barbie doll sex tapes.”

  Oh god, don’t remind me. Shawn was referring to the special edition AnyDayNow collector set of dolls that some bigwig toy executive thought would be a moneymaker and preceded to sell the idea to our manager, also known as my father. Because we were just the hired help and had no real say in the business decisions, shit like those dolls flooded the market. Our images also adorned pillows, posters, key chains, and even toilet paper, where haters got to use our faces to wipe their shitty assholes. Sure, we got a cut of the profits, but was it really worth the loss of our dignity?

  “Oh trust me, no offense taken,” I said, and meant it. If I never saw another Barbie doll of any kind for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man. “I’m more than willing to hand over the YouTube crown to Dane here.”

  He waved me off as if the words were beyond ridiculous. “Dude, it’s gonna take a lot more than me flopping face-first on stage to unseat your dolly’s gangbang sessions with Ken and GI Joe.”

  When the faux Barbie dolls hit the store shelves, we tried to justify their existence by calling them action figures. “My action figure this” or “His action figure that.” It was our way of feeling better about the plastic, dickless versions of ourselves. And while everyone else’s doll was fairly well done, mine looked like a young Steven Tyler—had he been a boobless twelve-year-old girl. Okay sure, yes, I had the surfer boy fringed, shoulder-length dark brown hair… big, damn deal. A lot of guys had long hair without looking like chicks.

  Anyway, as you might imagine, my doll was a hit. For entirely the wrong reasons. It took all of two days for videos to spring up on YouTube, starring my doll in bikinis, evening gowns, and high heel shoes.

  The other guys harassed me relentlessly and what could I say? Had the stiletto been on the other foot, I never would have let them live it down. Still, it sucked that I couldn’t get behind my dolly the way the other guys had. In fact, every one of them had been thrilled with their likeness.

  RJ scored with an Enrique Iglesias look-a-like doll.

  Dane was more than stoked to discover his resembled the Dali Lama.

  Shawn, or ‘Blackout Shawn’ as we knew him, couldn’t have been happier with his doppelganger. And why wouldn’t he be? For the first time in his life he had abs. His love of beer had resulted in a pregnancy pouch that was none too funny to our handlers, who expected nothing short of physical perfection from the five of us. But due to Shawn’s hilarious escapades with alcohol, he didn’t have the stamina in the gym that the rest of us had. Not to mention, he surely had brain damage after the many times he’d passed out in the last four years. So excuse me if I was a tad bit irritated that the guy who spent half his life draped over a toilet got a cooler doll than me.

  And finally, there was Hunter. ‘The Sweet One’ as fans knew him. Oh Hunter. I mean if anyone deserved a pretty doll in our group, it was that guy. The dude spent more time in front of a mirror than anyone I knew. His hair alone took an hour to style, and don’t even get me started on his skin care regimen. Had I known charcoal masks were such a thing, I would have scooped the black residue out of the barbeque for him long ago.

  Yet, instead of giving Hunter the high-maintenance doll he deserved, the toy makers inexplicably made him look like the ultimate player, complete with bulging muscles and a sexy come-hither expression.

  Let me be very clear here when I say, Hunter was no ladies’ man. He wasn’t even a dude’s man. In fact, the oldest member of our band was as celibate as they came. Hunter was saving himself for marriage and wanted that same lofty commitment from his bandmates. You can imagine the brick wall he came up against when he explained the benefits of abstinence before marriage to the rest of us horndogs.

  But a couple of years ago, after much debate, the four of us decided to open our minds to a new way of thinking… or at least humor Hunter with a stretch of celibacy. How hard could it be, right? Unfortunately, with our busses rolling through Sweden the first week of that crucial month, it was clear we’d chosen the wrong country to begin Hunter’s experiment.

  “I keep telling you to report copyright infringements on YouTube,” Hunter lectured.

  I groaned because it’s not like I hadn’t heard that exact same advice from his mouth numerous times before.

  “It’s a doll, Hunter.” I replied matter of factly. “It doesn’t have any legal rights. Besides, don’t you think if I could prevent my Barbie from getting porked in front of a live audience, I would?”

  Everyone laughed except Hunter who still seemed overly invested in the purity of my plastic clone.

  “Um… excuse me… Mr. Beckett?”

  I turned in search of my father before realizing that the security guard, standing in the doorway, was actually speaking to me. I didn’t recognize him and, from the look of his nervous shifting, he’d never seen me in person either.

  “Yeah?”

  “Um… sorry to bother you, but your mom is outside. She wants to see you.”

  My jaw dropped open in surprise. My mom? Well this certainly was news worthy of interruption. Glancing to the guys, I found them sporting the same disbelieving gape.

  My response required maximum clarity. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Carter.”

  “Well, Carter.” I was just being a dick, exaggerating his moniker for effect. But Carter deserved it after the bomb he’d dropped. “That’s just flippin’ awesome news. I can’t wait to see her again.”

  His face brightened. Apparently he thought he’d done good coming in here to bother me with his bogus news.

  The series of words that shot from my mouth hit their intended target. “Especially since my mother has been dead for the past twenty-four years.”

  Poor Carter. The hopeful expression on his face was no more. Now he resembled a man who’d just been clocked in the nuts with a twenty-pound weight. “I…I, oh god.”

  “Exactly,” I said, turning my back to him and wiping my hands of the conversation.

  Much to my surprise, Carter wasn’t giving up easily. “It’s just she… she asked me to give you this.”

  I craned my neck in his direction only to find him boldly stepping forward with an envelope in one hand and what appeared to be a photograph in the other.

  “Dude.” Dane cut in front of Carter, blocking him from reaching me. “Not cool. Shit like this happens all the time… fans trying to talk their way in. You’ve been had. Next time you get something like this bring it to the head of security. Don’t bother Bodhi with it. Now go. And don’t bring fan stuff back here again, got it?”

  Carter backed off immediately. “I … I’m sorry. She showed me this photograph of her holding a baby and Bodhi’s father was in the picture, so I guess I just assumed she was telling the truth. I’m really sorry.”

  What the fuck? My father? Now, I was more than just a little curious about the photograph he was holding.

  “Hey,” I called out to his retreating frame. “Give it to me.”

  Carter turned around, appearing horrified by his misstep. He knew
well that I could get him fired but what was the point? I was certain the security guard had learned a valuable lesson and would never again get within fifty feet of me. After placing both the photograph and the letter in my hand, he hurried out the door as if he feared the knob would knock him in the ass on the way out.

  “What was that all about?” RJ asked, leaning over my shoulder to get a look at the photograph in my hand. I shrugged him off, finding a vacant corner for this little blast from the past. After all, it’s not every day a guy gets a letter from his dead mother.

  The background noise faded the minute I laid eyes on the photograph. My brain struggled to make sense of what it was seeing. The woman in the picture looked identical to the woman in the photograph I kept of the mother who’d died giving birth to me. Yet here she was staring vacantly into the camera, holding a baby who looked suspiciously like me. It was as if she’d somehow checked out of the entire scene.

  My father, a good five to ten years older than the woman, stood off to the side, his arms folded in front of him, a scowl hardening his disgruntled expression. It was clear by their body language that these two people didn’t much like each other. None of it made any sense.

  With shaky fingers, I pulled the letter out of the envelope and read the first two lines before slumping against the wall in shock. Bodhi, I know what your father told you about me, but it was all a lie. My name is Marni Easton and I’m your mother.”

  2

  Bodhi: Twinkie Issue

  Three Months Later

  Sitting with my back propped against the bathroom door, I pressed my feet firmly to the wall, as if that extra little bit of resistance would somehow keep my female pursuers from busting through the barrier and devouring me. Minutes earlier, alone in the aisle of a grocery store, I’d come face to face with my worst nightmare—a giddy girls soccer team.

  Okay so maybe not my worst nightmare. It’s not like I’d just survived a terrorist attack or anything but, regardless, my heart was pounding. Sure, my pursuers wore braces and were armed with only their unmatched enthusiasm, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. And now here I was—trapped like some hapless victim in a slasher flick who’d chosen to hide from the chainsaw masochist instead of running. I was such an idiot. When had the ‘hide in plain sight’ approach ever worked in anyone’s favor? The world was filled with people who ran.

  I know what you’re thinking—that I’m over-exaggerating the threat to my person but, I can assure you, the risk was real. I, of all people, knew what little girls were made of and it wasn’t sugar and spice and everything nice. Oh no, they were made of skin-shredding nails, high-pitched squeals, and impromptu fainting spells. As far as I was concerned, I was lucky to get out of the cookie aisle alive.

  “Bodhi. Bodhi.”

  The chanting and pounding were getting louder and more insistent.

  “Just go away,” I pleaded quietly, knocking the back of my head against the door. A few months ago, I would have handled this fan encounter very differently, but I wasn’t the same golly-gee popstar I was back then. My dear ol’ not-dead mother had taken care of that.

  Twisting the cap off the Smirnoff, I took a long pull, wincing at the burn. You’d think I’d be stealthier when it came to pounding down the liquor seeing as I’d become well versed in the bottle of late. In fact, before making my Uber-led booze run, I’d been pregaming it quite effectively with the mini bottles I’d acquired on my last flight.

  Honestly, you’d never know that up until a few months ago, drinking hadn’t been my thing. Back then, I’d viewed alcohol as wasted calories, not worthy of the extra time in the gym it would take me to work them off. But that was before letter-gate … before I discovered that deception really wasn’t my thing either. It’s not every day you find out the man you thought was your father really may not actually be, and the woman you thought was your deceased mother had been alive and kicking your whole damn life.

  I mean, where does one even begin with bombshell information like that? I’ll tell you where—with the bottle! And although I’d once been a vocal opponent of the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, I could now objectively say the benefits clearly outweighed the harm. How else was I going to numb my mind to the realities of what I now knew?

  It was almost comical the way the bosses initially brushed my destructive behaviors under the rug. When they’d first discovered my burgeoning appetite for liquor, they’d reacted with surprised indifference. So what if their Golden Boy was blowing off a little steam? It wasn’t like their mild-mannered Clark Kent was going to suddenly morph into an unrecognizable badass flying machine. But then I did. And they were left dazed and confused in my wake.

  Once they understood this would not be a passing phase, the bolts were tightened on my freedom. Babysitters, disguised as security guards, reported on my every move. Mini fridges were emptied long before I ever stepped foot into my hotel rooms. And access to the outside world became a privilege I had to earn. I was twenty-four-years-old, for god’s sake. When had I suddenly become a hostage to my own life? Or maybe it had always been this way and I’d just been blind to the restraints securely wrapped around my wrists.

  Now that my eyes were opened wide, I didn’t like what I was seeing. Not one bit. My team, the people who claimed to care about my well-being and who were supposedly committed to making my hectic life easier, had really just been prison guards milking me for every last dime I could give them. And that team included my father, Tucker Beckett, the man who made me call him by his first name in mixed company because he didn’t want others to think he was playing favorites. He was my father, for god’s sake, hadn’t I earned the right to call him Dad? I suppose it didn’t matter either way because it didn’t change the fact that he was the worst of them all. Under the guise of fatherly love, he’d kept me shackled to his side since I was a child. Not because he wanted what was best for me but because he wanted what was best for him.

  I shuddered to think of how long it would have taken me to uncover the truth had my mother not delivered her drop-the-mic message when she had. Would I have wasted even more of my life being danced around on strings by the puppet masters who controlled my every move?

  That’s not to say my so-called mother was some heroine coming to save the day. She had her own agenda, one I hadn’t figured out yet. But I wasn’t naïve enough to believe her intentions were pure. Who was to say the woe-is-me tale she’d woven was even the truth? Judging by her abandonment, it’s not like the woman had my best interests at heart either.

  The question wasn’t who was lying— it was pretty clear they both had their secrets— but who had the most to hide. Maybe I should have hunted down the security guard and demanded he deliver my newly resurrected mother to me on the spot, but I’d been too shocked to react in any coherent manner. Instead, I’d let her go and have since been lingering in this uncomfortable state of uncertainty. Who was she? Why had she left me? And most of all, who the hell was the man I’d been living with all these years?

  Confronting my father with the accusations seemed the most straightforward way to get answers, but he’d been lying to me my whole life so who was to say he’d tell me the truth anyway?

  So I’d made the guys promise not to tell a soul about Carter’s interruption and the unexpected message he’d delivered. I would deal with this information on my own terms but, for now, I was content to just let the man suffer, wondering what had happened to his perfectly obedient son.

  Asshole! If my father thought I would continue playing by his rules, he had another think coming. How could I have been such a wuss for so damn long? My sheer lack of gumption was embarrassing. I’d allowed myself to be led around like a mindless wooden puppet. Fuck that. I wasn’t some toy to be molded and manipulated. This was my life and that wake-up call was what I’d needed to finally take control. Pinocchio was going back in the drawer.

  Or…okay… so maybe I was over-stating my newfound supremacy. After all, I was currently sitting o
n a bathroom floor after fleeing from The Children of the Corn, and that certainly wasn’t the manly representation I wanted to project. Although, to be fair, I was in a boy band. It’s not like people hadn’t already formed their own opinions about my masculinity. Hell, there were blogs dedicated to it.

  The minute I’d signed my name on the dotted line and become a bona fide member of AnyDayNow, I’d lost the respect of nearly every red-blooded male on the planet. And for any guys still on the fence about whether I was a spineless wimp, this little grocery store stunt should seal the deal. Not that I really cared what other people thought of me. That was a luxury I didn’t have time for. Besides, growing up as a child star, you either developed a tough hide or you died young in a puddle of your own urine.

  My knee-jerk reaction after receiving the letter was to quit the band and run off into the night. But I was loyal to the guys and couldn’t just up and flee in the middle of a tour. They were like brothers to me. Not to mention the mountain of trouble I’d leave behind in terms of broken contracts, binding agreements, and lawsuits.

  So professionally, I still showed up for every appearance, giving the most I could to my performances. But something had dimmed in me and, try as I might, I couldn’t muster more than a half-assed rendition of my former self. Gone were the corny endearments and the playful stage antics with RJ. Pants me in front of a live audience now? Dude, I dare you.

  The ‘truth’ bomb my mother had detonated had robbed me of my sense of humor as well as my pride. When fans chanted for me now, I felt nothing. Their love and devotion rang hollow. I wasn’t who they thought I was. Hell, Bodhi Beckett wasn’t even my real goddamn name!