by Joe Meno
The next week I met Jane for our counseling appointment in front of her art school, where a number of young men and women gathered to smoke cigarettes, looking purposeful and shabby. Jane marched up to me, said hello, and then pointed at a gawky-looking young man who was leaning against the wall, lighting a clove cigarette. “Look, how about him? Go tell him you’d like to give him a blowjob.”
I turned away, shaking my head, and said something like, “I don’t think so.”
“You need to grow up. Part of being an adult is dealing with adult feelings. Do you want to end up an old dirty queer getting teenage boys to suck you off in bathrooms or something? Because that’s what will happen, Jack. You have to deal with this openly before you sublimate it.”
I had no idea how I was supposed to answer.
Just then a girl came up to us and said, “My name is Jill Thirby. My father and mother are both famous artists. You may have heard of them.” Jill Thirby had a yellow dress on and long brown hair. She also had black-framed glasses and these dangly yellow earrings. “I’m working on this really intense project right now and I was wondering if you guys would like to help.”
“What is it?” I asked, staring at her long yellow scarf.
“Basically, I’m trying to make things fly.”
“What does that mean?” Jane asked tersely.
“I’m basically attaching hundreds of balloons to different things to see what’ll fly and what won’t.”
“Wow. That sounds cool,” I said.
“That sounds fucking stupid,” Jane snapped. “That’s exactly what the world needs. More childish, performance-art bullshit. Why don’t you do something meaningful? Like confront what’s happening in the Middle East.”
Jill Thirby looked ashamed all of a sudden, her yellow eye shadow going red. “You don’t have to talk to me like that. I was just trying to be … I’m just trying to do something nice.”
“Well, why don’t you do something nice somewhere else?” Jane said.
Jill Thirby nodded, still shocked, and walked away slowly.
I looked over at Jane and asked her, “What’s your problem?”
“She is my problem. I can’t believe how many girls there are like her. Their fathers don’t love them enough and so they go to art school and everything they make is this twee, meaningless bullshit. They don’t ever deal with anything serious, you know. Like I bet that girl never even heard of the Situationists. I bet she has no idea what’s going on in Palestine right now.”
“What?”
“Forget it. We’re late for Dr. Dank. Let’s go.”
That afternoon in therapy Jane suggested that the real reason I was afraid of bodily fluids was because I was in denial of my own sexuality. I did not argue with her. The rest of the week during gym class, I watched the other boys in class doing windsprints, their bodies virulent with overripe sweat. It was the intimacy I did not like, I wanted to tell her. The idea of sharing something vital with someone I did not know or understand.
Outside of the sculpture building the next Wednesday, while I was waiting for my sister, I ran into Jill Thirby again. She was still dressed in yellow, this time with a yellow stocking hat that had a yellow ball on the end. She had on yellow mittens and was chewing what appeared to be yellow gum.
“Hey,” I said, “I wanted to say I’m sorry. You know, about my sister, the other day.”
“I don’t get why some people have to be so negative. She’s really, really mean.”
“Have you gotten anything to fly yet?”
“Not yet,” she said, itching her nose. “I’ve tried a chair, a pineapple, and a bowling ball. None of them even got off the ground.”
“Well, if you ever need any help, I’d be happy to give you a hand.”
“What are you doing right now?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, glancing around, seeing my sister was late once again.
“Do you want to help me then? I was going to try and float a birdcage.”
A few moments later we climbed up the fire escape to the roof of the student dorm and stood looking out over the city. Jill Thirby had about fifty red helium balloons with her, which she promptly tied to an empty birdcage.
“Okay, here we go,” she said, and we both stepped away. The birdcage did not move, though the balloons fluttered back and forth in the wind, dancing ferociously.
“Maybe you need something smaller,” I suggested.
Jill Thirby kneeled beside the birdcage, inspecting it, and said: “Or more balloons possibly.” I thought about leaning over beside her and trying to kiss her. I think she saw me looking at her in a funny way and asked, “What is it? Is there something in my teeth? It’s this weird problem I have. My teeth are too far apart. I always have food stuck in them. My dad’s always reminding me to brush them.”
“No. I was just … It’s nothing.”
“Do you want to try and float something else tomorrow?”
“Okay,” I said, and took her hand as she stepped back onto the fire escape.
Jane was waiting outside the sculpture building swearing to herself when I found her. She squinted at me angrily when I said hello. “Do you know what time it is? Where the fuck were you? Mom and Dad pay by the hour if you didn’t happen to notice.”
“I was helping out that girl Jill Thirby.”
“What? Why were you hanging out with her?”
“I don’t know. She seems nice. I like her glasses and everything.”
“Why are you in such denial? Jesus, Jack, everyone’s trying to help you but you’re not even trying.”
“What did I do?”
“Just when we’re getting somewhere with your therapy, you decide to ditch your appointment to go ‘hang’ with a ‘girl.’ That’s textbook denial. Seriously.”
“I just wanted to see if she could make something float.”
“I guess we should just stop worrying about your severe emotional issues because, all of a sudden, you like some Jewish girl.”
“What? She’s not Jewish.”
“She’s definitely Jewish.”
“So what? Mom’s Jewish,” I said.
“You are so completely clueless. Why don’t you screw this girl and get it over with? And maybe then you’ll be ready to admit what your problem really is.”
“I don’t want to screw anyone.”
“Bullshit. You want to screw her in her little Jew butt.”
“I’m going to walk home by myself now,” I said, and then, for once, I did.
* * *
The following week I did not wait for Jane to go to couples counseling. Instead I met Jill Thirby outside the sculpture building and we walked up and down the street looking for things in the trash that we could try and make fly. We were sorting through some garbage cans when she found a small gray cat. It was undernourished and hiding beneath a moldy cardboard box. Jill Thirby held it to her chest and decided to take it back to her dorm, where we washed it in the common bathroom sink, then fed it black licorice from the vending machine.
“I have the perfect name for it,” Jill Thirby said. “Blah-blah.”
“That’s good,” I said.
Jill Thirby leaned over and held the cat to her chest, burying her face in the animal’s wet gray fur. “Do you want to spend the night here?” she asked me suddenly. “I don’t have intercourse with anyone I don’t know intimately, but you can sleep here if you want.”
I told her okay. Later that evening, as we were lying in bed together, Jill Thirby began to cry. I didn’t know what was happening at first. I laid there, holding my breath, pretending to be asleep. Her shoulders were shaking, her back trembling before me. She was holding the cat to her chest and the cat was meowing, trying to get free. I thought about putting my hand on her arm or saying something out loud but I was afraid of what would happen if she knew I wasn’t asleep.
Finally, I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “I’m sick of being related to my father and mother.” Then she sniffle
d and added, “But I miss them both a lot,” and turned away from me, the cat leaping off the bed. In the darkness, Jill Thirby became quiet and it seemed like she had momentarily disappeared.
The next day I was late for school. I hurried into gym class and took my spot on the wood bleachers and watched the other poor saps running laps. Mr. Trask saw me and climbed the bleachers, then took a seat beside me, staring off into the distance at something that I don’t think existed. He turned and looked at me and said, “How old are you, Jack?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen. Jesus. You should have finished school a year ago.”
“I know.”
“Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Not really. I don’t have any idea what’s supposed to happen next.”
Mr. Trask nodded, then fumbled through his extremely tight shorts for a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one. I shook my head, feeling pretty uncomfortable all of a sudden. He inhaled deeply and started to cough, his rasps sounding exactly like a gym whistle, high and tinny. “I’ll tell you something: I don’t think anybody knows what the hell comes next. I mean, I see these kids, and some of them walk around like they got it all figured out—they’re going to this college or that college or what, I dunno. I’ll let you in on a little secret: if someone comes up to you and tells you they got anything figured out, you can be sure of one thing. They’re full of it. Because the thing is, as soon as you figure one thing out, you see there’s a whole other world of shit you don’t understand. The people who think they know it all, those are the ones to beware of. And that’s all I got to say about that.”
I nodded, seeing two pale sophomores in the middle of the track begin to collapse from exhaustion.
“Do you think your dad could get me some barbiturates? I think I need something stronger. I’m having a heck of a time sorting out my thoughts this week.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Great.” Mr. Trask nodded and then stood. He held his hands in front of his face like a megaphone and shouted, “Okay, ladies, bring it in!”
After class I waited around the art school campus all afternoon, hoping to find Jill Thirby again. It was getting dark when I saw her sneaking across the student pavilion with what looked to be several hundred red balloons. I followed her from a distance, watched as she climbed up the fire escape, back to the roof of the dorm. Halfway up, she heard me climbing beneath her and looked down, then smiled a wide, goofy smile, holding the balloons with one hand and her yellow stocking cap with the other.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Today I got a brilliant idea: I decided to try and float myself.”
“That doesn’t sound so good.”
“I did some calculations.” She scrambled into her pocket and handed me a piece of graph paper with the most incomprehensible drawing I had ever seen: there were numbers and arrows and what appeared to be a cloud of some kind.
“It doesn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe you should practice first.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Something not too high.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” Jill Thirby said. “That’s something my dad would probably tell me. I guess we could try it from my dorm room. I live on the second floor, so if I fell it wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Okay, that sounds good,” I said, but as soon as we got to her room, we started to kiss instead, and then Jill was pulling down her long yellow tights, and she had pale yellow underwear on, and then those were off, and I could see her thighs, the plain of her hips, the entire dark world between, and she was saying, “I usually don’t have sex with people I don’t know for at least three months,” but then we did it anyway.
For some reason, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not think about the danger of bodily fluids. Things were passed between us but it did not bother me. A few minutes later we were lying in bed, and she still had her yellow stocking hat on with the yellow ball at the end, and I don’t know why but I suddenly blurted out, “Jill Thirby, do you want to be my girlfriend?”
Jill Thirby’s face went blank. “I thought you were gay. That’s what your sister told me.”
“I know, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.” I looked her in the face, her lips smudged with yellow lipstick, and asked her again, “Do you want to be my girlfriend anyway?”
She smiled at me softly, blinked once, and then said: “Thanks but no thanks.”
I sat in bed and watched her dress quickly.
“You should probably go,” she said. The cat we found, Blah-blah, seemed to look at me anxiously too, and so I got dressed and left in a hurry.
When I got home my parents and sister were there waiting for me. So was Dr. Dank. For the next two hours I sat in the gray armchair while my sister and Dr. Dank tried to get me to admit I was incredibly unhappy. I told them I had never been happier.
“Jack, how can you be happy?” my sister asked, arms folded, standing over me. Her silver hairpin looked like a threat, pointing down at me. “Look at you. You spend all your time alone. You’re completely disinterested in dating. You’re failing high school. You have no intellectual curiosity. It’s not normal, Jack. It’s not even abnormal. It’s subnormal or something like that.”
Dr. Dank puffed out two nostrils full of smoke and said, “I couldn’t agree more. It’s subnormal. And also, he hasn’t been flossing. He’s becoming a prime candidate for gum disease.”
“Why don’t you just admit you’re gay so we can all move on?” my sister groaned.
I stared at my parents, who hadn’t spoken a word since I walked in. My father looked exhausted. My mother looked bored. She had a pad in her lap, like she was taking notes, though I think she was actually finishing a crossword puzzle. It was pretty obvious, even in their professional detachment, who they were siding with. I sat in the armchair, facing them all, my father pulling off his glasses to clean them. He did this whenever he thought a patient was lying. I knew this because he had told me several times before that psychiatry was as much performance as it was science. Taking off his glasses and cleaning them was one of his signature moves. I tried to look at my mother but she was busy scribbling down the answer to 15 across. Neither one of them would dare to look me in the eye. So I glanced over at my sister, who was still standing above me, arms crossed, her dark eyebrows looking like they had not been groomed in some time. I understood right then that, no matter what, she would always be smarter than me, more sophisticated, as would the rest of my family. I thought maybe this was the reason all of them were, on their own, pretty miserable. I decided right then to just give in and agree and try to make them all happy.
“You’re right,” I said, peering down at my gray plaid socks. “It’s true. I’m gay. I’m really gay.”
Jane grinned, tears coming to her eyes. She slid her arms around my neck and hugged me savagely, saying, “Doesn’t it feel like an incredible weight has been lifted, Jack?” and I nodded because it was true in a way. She was hugging me and my father was patting me on the back and Dr. Dank was celebrating by lighting my mother’s cigarette. It did feel good to have Jane be proud of me, even for a moment, even for the absolute wrong reasons. I told everyone I loved them then and that I needed to get some sleep. Before I closed the door I heard Dr. Dank announce that couples counseling for my sister and I would resume the very next day, and now that everything was in the open, our sessions were going to have to be bumped up to twice a week.
I did not hear from Jill Thirby for almost a month, not until she called me to say that the cat we had found in the trash was dying. She asked me to come over and help her take it to the vet. I didn’t have any reason to say no. When I got to her room, Jill Thirby was standing in the door with a small cardboard box: inside the cat was curled up, mewling. Its eyes were barely open and its entire body seemed to shudder.
“He looks bad,” I said.
“Yeah. He keeps crying. I don’t know what to
do.”
“Why did you call me?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to go by myself.”
Jill Thirby had looked in the phone book and had found an animal shelter in midtown. We called and made an appointment and then waited at the bus stop. Twice I thought the cat was dead, its rheumy eyes gazing up at us without any kind of life, but then it started to cry again, the sound of which made my hands feel shaky.
After we got to the shelter, after we were led down the hall to a tiny examination room, after the vet looked at the cat’s scrawny stomach and weak legs and failing kidneys, he suggested Jill Thirby have it put to sleep. Jill Thirby immediately started sobbing. I had never seen anyone cry like that before. She was trying to say something but she was crying too hard and so I took her hand. She had yellow mittens on and I felt the stitches there against my palm and said, “It’s okay,” and Jill Thirby nodded and then the vet disappeared, taking the cat with him, and we stood alone in the tiny white room, like we were on the set of some soap opera, and Jill Thirby was still crying, and then we were waiting at the bus stop, and then we were getting on the bus, and the whole time we were sitting there she was still holding the empty cardboard box, and we sat beside each other, watching the buildings go by in a blur, riding past my stop, past the stop for her school, past the part of the city we knew, at that moment wondering who we were, what was going to happen to us, waiting, like everybody else, for someone to tell us what to do.
Todd Baxter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a photographer whose work has been featured in a number of galleries and in a variety of print ads. He now lives in Chicago.
www.baxterphoto.com
Kelsey Brookes was born in 1978. A formally trained scientist who spent years tracking viruses for the U.S. government, he now lives and works in San Diego as a painter. He blames his raw, anxious form of art on the U.S. university system, which refuses to teach its scientists how to draw.
www.kelseybrookes.com
Ivan Brunetti lives and works in Chicago. He is the author of Misery Loves Comedy and the ongoing Schizo series (both from Fantagraphics Books). His comics and illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker, the Chicago Reader, and McSweeney’s. He is currently editing the second volume of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories for Yale University Press.
