TELEMACHUS
KEVIN
WHITE 3-8-97
1.
THE MYTH OF ANASTASIA’S PARENTS
ANASTASIA
“He set out on his voyage from a coastal village, he went
alone. His specially designed 30 foot fiberglass kayak was shipped across the
country, and lowered gently into the water by a crane.
The small village honored the young man's heroicism by giving him a
send-off parade that escorted him alll of the way across the small ocean port,
to his tiny pod shaped vessel, bobbing violently in the water.
They sent him off amidst a flurry of trumpet blasts and fireworks.
He had brought enough food and water for a hundred days, the trip should
have taken only about eighty.
She had been working as a research psychologist for three years
and this was her first big grant-funded project.
She was studying the effects of isolation on the human mind.
To save money and get more accurate results, she decided from the
beginning, to do the test on herself. She knew that she could never find anyone
else who would be willing to do it.
Her family and friends begged her not to go, but she did.
He brought along a video camera to record his experience, Six
days out, during a thirteen hour wait for weather, of any kind, you can clearly
see that he is starting to lose it. His calm analytic composure, visible in the
first video log entries, cracks just a bit, as he questions his reasoning for
making the voyage.
He suddenly seems very young and very scared.
She
goes through a lengthy psychical exam, says good-bye to everyone, and climbs
down into the metal pod.
It is then lowered into the bottom of a an abandoned mine shaft, nearly a
mile down.
She is planning on staying in this metal pod for one hundred days.
His kayak flips over during a violent storm at night. The
camera tumbles through the tiny cabin, occasionally showing him, crying
hysterically.
Her research pod is connected to the surface by two tubes, one
carrying oxygen the other carrying electricity and telephone lines. These are
her only connections to the outside world.
She brings her laptop computer into the pod, first removing any
photographic images, so nothing will taint the results of the psychological
aspects of the test.
She allows herself no communication of any sort with the
outside world, they can listen to her up on the surface, and they can watch her
with a small video camera, but that’s it.
She spends most of her time, in the beginning, reading books. She seems
to be coping during the first week, but by the seventeenth day she has started
to obsess in a neurotic way about her reasons for taking on the experiment. By
the nineteenth day she is regularly crying.
He sees sharks begin to follow him during the fourteenth day.
By the fifth week he is spending all of his time sealed up inside, lying
on his back, with the windows covered, talking nonsense into the camera. It is
during this week that he uses up over one-hundred
hours of video tape.
During his last hours of recording, on day thirty-six, he is talking
about finding some way to go back in time, he seems hysterical, and very manic.
When his kayak drifts into the small harbor seventy-one days later the
empty video camera is still on the small tripod.
The only other thing in the kayak is a small bag of food, a jug of water
and him, laying down inside, naked and apparently resting.
She does not seem to be doing so well four weeks into the
project, and the scientists who are monitoring her are talking about taking her
out.
They had all signed a
document swearing that they would not pull her out unless she was dying. She did
not appear to be dying, and no one was willing to take the authority to overrule
her order, so she stayed.
Physically everything seemed to be ok. She was healthy, and
she managed to feed herself. What she couldn’t manage to do was to communicate
her mental condition back through the camera, or the microphone.
She kept the camera covered up starting on day thirty. Her vital signs
were still monitored through sensors (that she left) attached to her body.
She did not speak once during her last fifty three days, they knew this
up top because the mic. stayed on the whole time. The only thing they heard was
the sound of her typing. She typed into her computer almost constantly.
None of what she wrote was ever recovered. She had erased it all before
they brought her out on day one-hundred.
When news of his successful landing reached his home town, his
family and friends immediately made the trip to see him. When they arrived they
found him still in his boat, refusing any attempts to get him out. His family
and friends could get little response from him as they forced open the pod and
took him out.
He just sat there, motionless and mute on the beach, just
staring off to sea and grinning slightly. His expression seemed almost
euphoric.
It was clear right from the start that he did not want to be around
people. It only took a couple of days to drive everyone away. The last person to
leave him was his younger sister.
She spent days just sitting
on the beach watching him, wearing the orange parka someone had put on
him when he landed, with his beard and dark glasses. She tried to get him
to talk. She cried a lot before she left.
He stayed on the deserted beach, sleeping inside the kayak and foraging
in the nearby forest for food.
When they brought her out they took her to the hospital. She was
examined, but no conclusions could be made.
They could do nothing to reach her. Her mind seemed to be almost turned
off.
Her family and friends stopped visiting after about two weeks.
During her last visit, her younger sister left a newspaper on the table
near her bed and after she left,
late at night , she read it.
She read about the young man who had kayaked across the ocean
by himself, and how he had taken up residence on an isolated beach up to the
North of where she was.
That night she left the hospital and began walking to the beach. It was
almost a hundred miles away, she made it in just under three days, the whole
time managing to avoid and cities or roads.
She got there just as the sun was rising and made out the outline of his
overturned kayak right away. She approached him as he slept and quietly laid
down besides him.
Later, when the sun was almost at the top of the sky, he awoke to find
her next to him. A look of intense joy swept his face and he embraced her. She
opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“I’ve missed you.” She
said, brushing the hair out of his eyes.
“I’ve missed you , too.”
“I wasn’t sure I would be able
to find you.”
“I knew you would, and if you
didn’t come, I would have found you somehow.” He smiled at her and
kissed her. They laid there for a long while, just listening to the sounds of
the earth. The hum of the land and the crash of the ocean...”
"As far as Anastasia knew, these where the only words
her parents had ever said to each other. She never once heard them speak. She
claimed that she was conceived that same afternoon on the beach.
Her aunt had told her the whole story of her parents, what they did
before they met, about the strange journeys that they had taken into themselves
and of their isolation.
And now Anastasia was relaying their story to me.
She told me about moving into the home that had belonged to her
grand-parents, just after she was born, and about
how her grandparents had
died when she was very young.
She told me about going to see her parents with her younger sister, while she was living with her aunt.."
ANASTASIA
“The first time I remember seeing the hermit couple I was twelve. I was
with my younger sister, we were
exploring the woods near the beach.
We came out of the forest and there they where, crouched down in the tide
pool digging out sea urchins with sticks. They were very old and shaggy looking.
They were dressed in cloths that looked like they had been found in the garbage.
When they saw us they stood up very slowly.
They just looked at us for a long time, and then they went back to
digging out urchins. I am not even sure whether or not they recognized their
daughters.
Back in the city, everybody knew about the hermit couple. Some people
described them as soulmates, lost in their own world, still others called them
crazy hermits.
I used to go and spy on them, before
I moved away to go to school. I would sit hidden in the woods and watch them
hunting around the tide pools. They never seemed to talk, and I always wondered
if they were really crazy, or just quiet, isolated people.”
2. HER FATHER’S ISOLATION
"I didn’t know how much of Anastasia’s stories
were true, but I enjoyed them, and they seemed to help her in some way.
Sometimes, when she was telling me about her parents she would stop mid -sentence,
as if she had just received some
amazing revelation , from her own
story.
Most of Anastasia’s stories involved her father. She claimed that he
raised her like one might raise a pet, a pet that you would rather not spend too
much time with.
More than anything else, I think, Anastasia wanted to find her father,
and to be able to talk to him."
ANASTASIA
“For all of his life, for as long as he could remember, he had been
unable to achieve a state of lucidity. Tones of desperate ennui clung to his
every thought like permanent stains, dragging his head down by the horns...”
"Anastasia
told me this one night while we were smoking cigarettes out on the balcony.
I felt strange about having one of her cigarettes, I knew that she had to
essentially consent to doing something degrading, to get a pack from one of the
night orderlies.
She offered a cigarette to me (without me having even having asked for
one), and then continued on with her story.
My early evening dose of anti-depressants and tranquilizers was making it
seem like she was whispering
the story , so vividly, that it was becoming real for me..
ANASTASIA
“For a long time he kept it away, he kept himself busy. But one day the
stain creeped back over him, and through it, he saw her.
At first it was small, very small. She would give a look that seemed to
be indifferent, or a remark that really seemed to imply something much more.
Her body would turn from his in their bed, and he would stay up all
night, watching her, wondering what was going on in her mind. He grew paranoid
and insecure. Through the stain he saw her secret life, her indifference to him,
her affairs, her plans to leave him. These fantasies snowballed, propelled by
the stain’s powerful emotional drive.
His desperate attempts to hold on to her seemed to convert
into electricity that then coursed through his body. He stayed up all night,
every night, playing out a million fatalistic scenarios over and over in his
mind.
She was growing away from him quickly and it was killing him. She seemed
oblivious to what she was doing to him.
When she finally left him he was just a hollow shell, slowly filling with
fear and resentment. In her mind she felt that leaving him was a painful
decision to make, but a necessary one.
He walked around the empty three bedroom house, with its avocado and
Hansa yellow carpeting, in boxer shorts, covered in a pattern of gin distillery
diagrams. Glasses and dirty plates covered the furniture. The tv was a constant,
noisy friend.
When he sat down hard on the couch the dust of a family rose up into the
slices of sunlight, the ghostly images of children, and a
wife.
His hair curved out from the left side of his head and he was very much
unshaven. In his left hand he held a Winchell’s donut mug full of gin, orange
juice and ice. In his right hand he clutched the remains of a joint that looked
like it had been rolled with oily
paper.
He wandered through the empty house dazed, with no expression whatsoever.
He always screened his calls and he never made it to the store.
The refrigerator contained only a jar of mayonnaise, that was so old it
was turning clear.
He stood in front of her full length dressing mirror and watched himself
smoke out of a small pipe. He looked deep into his eyes for long periods of
time. He constantly felt bad about himself. He was constantly trying to figure
out what bad
was, what pain was...
He read the points off like a shopping list in his mind. He did this every couple of hours. In-between these lofty self critiques were periods of animal abandon, a very reserved animal abandon.
These
points that he went over in his mind, were meant to deceive. The images and
happenings were a vague remembrance of things past.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Like a million others,
it was a ritual he had developed to distance himself from the possibility
of feeling pain...
BASEMENT. DAY
An emaciated figure lunges off the couch towards a light bulb swinging in
the center of the room.
An all consuming whiteness dissipates into a fire ball. The burning edges
pull into a figure lashing out through it, the explosion is
his vision.
The violent force of his reaction breaks him free of the chains that have
held him to the wall all of his remembered life, and now he stands alone, free
to move about in the center of the room. He rubs his wrists and looks down at
the handcuffs attached to the chains now lying dejected on the carpeted floor.
The room appears to be in a basement, the windows having been completely
boarded over. The only light source is a single 200 watt light bulb hanging from
the center of the ceiling. On one side of the room is a bed, desk, chair and a
night stand. All of these things are within the twenty foot length of chain
attached to the wall. A pattern of wear swings out into a wide arc half way
across the room. Beyond this area is a color tv on a table.
He walks up to the tv, slowly, unsure. On the screen a man in a beige
drip dry suit pleads violently with his eyes closed and his fists raised. He is
sweating and shaking, consumed by some force. He is pleading for money. Ten red
numbers flash incessantly at the bottom of the screen...
PREACHER
“PLLEEAASSEE!!! Hheeuueer
my prayer!”
He slowly reaches out towards the tv screen. As his fingers touch the
glass the reverend drops to his knees.
He makes his way to the top of the stairs like he had seen his father do
so many times. He learned the word father
from the television. He learned his name, Telemachus, from his father...
INT. HOUSE. DAY.
Stu checks the shopping list one last time, as he does this he looks at a
distant image of himself in the bathroom mirror. Stuck to the mirror is a yellow
post-it note that says; feed Telemachus.
Below that note there is another, it says; buy
food.
He takes the notes off the mirror and leaves the house, locking the front
door...
STAIRWELL. DAY
Once inside the house he proceeds slowly, with extreme caution. In his
eye a distant memory battles for recognition, superimposed over the house he is
walking through. He seems to be vaguely familiar with the layout of the house,
but he is not sure why.
In the kitchen he lifts the venetian blinds up and the noise startles him
so much that he throws the blinds back down towards the glass. The glass
shatters and falls down unto the lawn.
After a moment he lifts the blinds back up to survey the
damage. Shards of glass hang precariously, then fall noiselessly, to the lawn
below like icicles.
He stares transfixed, overwhelmed by a memory from a childhood he thought
he had forgotten...
EXT. DAY
An old man across the street sees a strange man in the window, throws
down his garden hose and runs into his house, calling out to his wife...
INT. 78 BROWN FORD GRAN TORINO.
While driving slowly in early morning traffic Stu reaches across the
brown vinyl seats and forages through the shopping bag until he catches a beer.
He snatches it and leans over a bit more, keeping his eyes on the car in front
of him while he takes the bottle cap off with a quick swipe down
on the passenger side door handle. He then holds the bottle above the bag
for a couple of seconds and lets
the foam swarm down over his hand.
When he comes to a stop he takes a long snort on the bottle tilting his
head all the way back. A loud, painful belches escapes from his throat making
his eyes water. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and smiles just a
bit.
He makes it to work forty minutes late and nobody seems to notice, as
usual. He goes directly to his office and locks the door...
INTERIOR HOUSE. DAY
Telemachus looks under his father's bed and sees that the Christmas
presents are all still there, untouched. The are covered with dust and lint.
Some of them seem to have been partially squished by the mattress.
He gets back up to his feet and looks at his fathers bedside
table. A lamp and a flashing alarm clock share the dusty surface with a small
stack of porn mags and a (self-conscious) looking lime-green plastic bottle of
Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.
He goes through his father's closet and dresser. He picks out a wardrobe
and puts it on the bed. In the bathroom he showers and shaves. He combs his hair
back just like he does, with his hair
gel and comb, then puts on a large assortment of tonics, perfumes and skin gel
products.
When he is done he checks himself in the mirror while picking his teeth
with a cinnamon flavored toothpick.
“I think the story should change direction.” I say to Anastasia, not
really knowing why I have chosen to interrupt her at this point in her rather
involved story.
She looks at me for a while taking a drag on her cigarette, squinting at
me as if the sun was still out, and then she continues on;
Anastasia
“EXT. DAY. OIL REFINERY
Stu pulls into the gravel parking lot. It is for the most part empty. He
cuts the engine and pulls up to, but does not touch, the fence. He then puts the
car in park and takes one last drag on the bottle before tossing it out the
window.
He steps out into a blast of hot air and bright sun. His legs feel
unsteady in the loose gravel. His left hand reaches out for the hot brown vinyl
roof.
He looks to his right and sees a beige cinder block wall. Mounted on the
wall is a barometric meter. Stu squints at the small numbers, attempting to make
out a faint red line...
EXT. DAY
Telemachus shuts the door behind him and puts the sandwich he has made
into his jacket pocket. As he looks up he sees the neighbor across the street.
He makes eye contact with the old man standing
on his lawn with his hands in his pockets.
After a second the old man gets suddenly embarrassed and turns away.
Telemachus continues to watch him as he turns and goes back into his house. His
wife follows him, pretending to check on her dying rose bush
as she does...
EXT. DAY
Telemachus carefully crosses the smooth gray ice covering the cement
in front of the house....”
3.TELEMACHUS
I ask her where she comes up with these weird stories and she just stares
at me. She seems almost relieved to stop her diatribe. She closes her eyes and
slowly rolls her head back and forth to stretch out her neck. When she stops she
looks at me and smiles and then looks away to the vast expanse of crabgrass
lawns now invisible in the cool darkness. The lawn sprinklers and crickets beat
out a subtle rhythm in the summer
night sky.
I feel just a little sorry for Anastasia.
“Are you supposed to be Telemachus?” I ask, aware that analysis
always puts her on the defensive.
“Congratulations doctor Freud! What a stretch
! How did you come up with that !?” She says this in a way that lets me
know how much she appreciates the time I spend alone with her, a time when she
can feel safe, and tell her stories.
It is nearly dawn and everyone else is asleep. There are two orderlies
and two nurses on duty during the night for the whole ward. They rarely ever
checked in on the patients, but even if they did they wouldn’t have bothered
to tell us to return to our beds. At night authority was lax, but during the day
it was almost sadistic.
It was this wide range of authoritarian experience that made the hospital
seem so much like a home.
Anastasia would fall asleep, shivering in my arms, dressed only in her
nightgown. I would carry her to her bed and tuck her in, and then go to my own
bed. I would always dream about Telemachus after she told me her stories. In my
dreams Telemachus was a small young boy like me, with dark hair and narrow
shoulders.
My dreams where always the same. Telemachus would go out in search of his
father, crossing the vast expanse of the city, meeting interesting people, and
getting caught up in interesting adventures on the way.
The ends of the dreams were always exactly the same. Telemachus would
finally reach the refinery and walk right past his father, who was always
standing right next to his car. He would walk right past his father and continue
on walking right into the raging inferno.
As the white light engulfed Telemachus I would wake up suddenly,
startled, in a large room filled with sunlight.
Anastasia would almost always be sitting at the end of my bed, watching
me.
Anastasia used to tell me that she had royal Russian blood, she said her
great, great, grandfather was a czar.
I never found out why she was there, or who had sent her
there. I guess Anastasia figured it is worth the free rent. She didn't really
give much thought as to why
she was in there.
Anastasia was tall, thin and pale. Her look was extreme, but if you
turned away from her you remembered her as being beautiful.
Sometimes, late at night, I could heat Anastasia's muffled cries, and
pleas. I knew that she was being attacked by the night orderlies. Somehow I knew
that this nightmare was real,
The scary thing was that I was so out of it that I didn't even
think of it as a bad
dream. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware of how horrible
it was, I know because the sound of her voice, echoing down the darkened
hallways still haunts me at night.
Anastasia liked to sit on the big old decrepit Persian rug near the wood
and glass doors in the recreation room. She used to draw all day in the sun. By
mid afternoon she had followed the sunlight out onto the small balcony, her face
and hands would be covered in charcoal.
One day one of the orderlies spit some of his slurpee on to the drawing
she was working on, Anastasia’s newest masterpiece, making shiny dark rings of
purple on the charcoal covered paper, she destroyed the drawing completely, then
burnt it on the balcony with matches stolen from one of the doctors.
We watched together as large pieces of wildly burning paper drifted up
into the air, and then landed on the canvas canopies below. We were laughing
hysterically. The doors caught on fire and Mitchell wet her pants.
“This puts a big damper on things,” Dr. Elizabeth said, and directed
everyone back to their beds. Two orderlies took Mitchell away to clean her up.
Dr. Elizabeth told the room that “the boys from now on were to sleep on one
side of the room, and the girls on the other”.
She did this, she said, because things had gotten out of hand.
My bed it turns out was between the wall and Feris. Feris would not
shut-up. He made noise continually, he was quickly repeating phrases over and
over lying in the darkness on his bed. In the morning he began by shouting. He
followed me around all day. If I had a scheduled counseling appointment, he
followed me, going to the same sessions.
Feris didn’t sleep much. Mitchell told me that it was because of the
pills he took, the purple and white ones. Feris took them a lot, he always was
in hurry mode.
Sometimes I would just stop, and watch Feris go. I would sit there in the
recreation room and watch Feris pace the room, talking to himself quickly. He
would hold his arms behind his back, and look up to the ceiling. He looked
anguished and lucid. I could never figure out what
he was saying.
4. INTERIOR. DAY.
I was at the Cherry Hill Hospital for over three years. Towards the
end of the last year I was overcome with loss at the thought of leaving that
place. It had become home to me.
I am not quite sure what it was, the clean smell, never having
to change out of your pajamas, never having to comb your hair, never having to
worry where your next meal was going to come from, being dosed morning, noon and
night on the purest pharmaceuticals. I don’t know. I did not have any other
home, it was as simple as that.
I was not there cause I was crazy. I was there cause the lady next door
dosed me.
The hippie mom next door put a couple dozen hits in the food she brought
to the barbecue. She said she did it to add a little “spice”. She claimed
that her straight neighbors were in
need of some “vision”. My young mind was absolutely tweaked.
It was a barbecue with maybe eight people. Mrs. Morris brought
the macaroni and cheese. I loved macaroni and cheese, I had already had two
plates full, and was going back for my third when Mrs. Morris grabbed my arm.
She had a weird look on her face.
“You have had quite enough! Haven’t you?!” She looked very
concerned, for me. I saw her expression and started to cry. I was twelve at the
time, it was the last time I cried.
A lot of people at the barbecue started to feel strange. People where
being taken to the hospital by those who did not like macaroni and cheese. My
cousin Richie loved macaroni and cheese, he never really came back.
I did come back after about a month, only to find myself
institutionalized. During that month I was every character in the book. It was a
tough trip. Sometimes I thought I was dead, and then there were these periods of
time, some times as long as a week, when I understood everything, crystal clear.
My aunt Ruth and uncle Tim still keep Richie in what used to be their
den. There are no windows in the den, that is the only way aunt Ruth can
tolerate Richie. My cousins Steve and Mike don’t even go home anymore because
they are so ashamed of him.
When I think about Richie I feel lucky. Now, almost four years later, I
feel as if the whole thing had never happened. Like it was a movie I saw years
ago.
While I was in the hospital my parents friend, the lawyer, sued Miss
Morris’s rich family, and won a settlement of two million dollars. Later Miss
Morris and her fellow Stanford rich-hippie friends were convicted in court of
manufacturing huge quantities of liquid DMT, with the intent to sell. There was
a lawsuit against the chemical firm that supplied most of the chemicals to one
of the convicts, the settlement was
in excess of five million dollars.
All together seven million dollars had been won on my behalf. My aunt and
uncle showed not interest in the lawsuits. As far as they were concerned, it was
over .
Before I was released my parents successfully petitioned to have the
money taken out of my name and put in to theirs. They claimed I was mentally
incapacitated, unable to manage my own funds. At first the court was not willing
to authorize it, but after a special tax on the amount was paid
to some people, the necessary papers were signed.
A week before I was released my parents called me to tell me they where
moving, they did not tell me where they were going. They told me not to try and
contact them. They told me that I had hurt them.
5.
EXTERIOR. DAY.
When I got out there was no one there to meet me. After a while I got my
uncle Cal’s number from the reception and called him. He seemed surprised to
hear from me. He told me that he did not have the time to pick me up, (he lives
in Malibu and I was in Altadena, about twenty five miles or two hours away in
traffic).
He told me that I was welcome to stay at his house. He
suggested that I walk to his place, stopping by to visit my cousins Ben and
Fiona on the way. Ben and Fiona are his kids. My head was still cloudy and I was
feeling very insecure. His idea sounded reasonable at the time, and I took down
the addresses of Ben and Fiona, said
good-bye and hung up. Ben and Fiona live about ten miles apart from each other.
Fiona is about five miles from her dads house, Ben is about fifteen.
The woman at the reception gave me some cheese sandwiches and an old
stained electric hotel blanket that still had the electric plug sticking out of
it like a pigs tail. I waved good bye to Anastasia as she stood on the balcony,
and started walking out into the scorching sunlight. I was to preoccupied to
feel sad or scared.
I walked down steep, freshly paved streets. The heat and the smell of tar
was overwhelming. Glowing bright shiny orange cones punctured the black porous
road. There seemed to be no people around.
I followed the line sketched in pencil on the small map the woman at the
reception had given me. The line meandered wildly over the page, I had no idea
where I was going most of the time.
I walked past endless lines of yellow, California-bungalow style two
bedroom houses with iron bars over the windows and doors. Late model Buicks with
metallic paint jobs silently cruised the streets like trout,
aimlessly searching for food. Occasionally a young man would lean his
head out of one of these cars and say something to me that I couldn’t
understand.
After about fours hours I made it to Bens house. When I got there I
realized that I should have called, then I remembered that I didn’t have his
number to begin with.
Ben’s place is above Franklin, East of La Brea. It is old and falling
apart. One of the aluminum tubes holding up the green canvas awning was
drastically bent, so I sat there, in the heat, unable to find suitable shade and
fell asleep.
I woke up sweating, with incredible cotton mouth and drank some scalding
hot rust water from a hose carcass lying in the yellow patch that used to be a
lawn, and then I waited on the doorstep of the small bungalow apartment until
dusk. Right as the sun was dipping below the horizon a pickup roared down the
driveway along the side of the house. There were loud young people swarmed all
over it . I instantly realized that it was Saturday evening.
The truck screeched to a halt down the drive and then raced in reverse to
catch a glimpse of the weird looking guy in pajamas, carrying a blanket,
standing on the lawn.
I immediately recognized my cousin Ben, beer in hand, as the clown
spread-eagled on the roof of the cab, laughing hysterically. He saw me and
suddenly went serious, he climbed off the cab and jumped down to where I was
standing.
6. INTERIOR. DAY
“Where’s your fucking money at?” He says with his face in a snarl,
“where are you keeping it freak boy?” He grabs the front of my shirt pulling
me towards him. He has a demonic look on his face, like a pro wrestler.
“I don’t want you here, do you understand? No one wants you! You are
a freak and a disgrace! If you’re going to stay, its going to cost you.”
The rest of the band is off the truck now, and fanning out behind Ben,
not staying too close.
“You can certainly afford it” Says a skinny girl with long straight
black hair and pale skin. “What is
the big deal?”
I look at them, exhausted. “I don’t have control of any money, my
parents do. I don’t know where they are. They left with there lawyer friend off
to somewhere far away.”
“Oh, that’s right, I remember now!” Ben says, smiling, “ My mom
told me that your mom and her lawyer were getting it on. She said your dad
didn’t mind, in fact, mom said that your dad and the lawyer, had a thing going
also."
He was trying to get me but I was just too tired.
“Yeah right Ben, and your mom gives hand jobs to the young boys in her
seventh grade class.” When I say
this Ben just smiles.
“Now she teaches high school, she actually charges for it now!” We
both begin to laugh, leaning our heads together, arm in arm.
“I really missed you buddy” He says now, sounding like himself.
Sonia comes up and gives me a hug. She grins at me, as if to remind me of
her bizarre sense of humor, that which she shares with her boyfriend, Ben.
“Dad called and said you would be coming, we expected you earlier.”
“I waited here all day” I told him.
“Really? Hmmmmm.?!” He looked confused for a second.
Turns out they have been down at the Brig, drinking away the afternoon. I
was familiar with the routine in Ben’s place. My older brother Daryl, who is
Ben’s age, had lived with Ben before he disappeared almost four years ago when
I was twelve.
Wake and bake, and if you didn’t have work (and no one ever
did) then it was off to the Bowling alley for breakfast. After breakfast its
time to go fifteen feet over to the Sea Hunter bar, also conveniently located in
the bowling alley. Ben and his entourage usually stayed there till sundown and
then returned home.
Because it is Saturday Ben decides that it is time to celebrate. He calls
it my “welcome home party”. He does not see my age as a concern. Celebrating
consists of making the rounds in Hollywood, getting wasted, and spending lots of
money. Ben tries to get me stoned, or get me to drink, but I adamantly refuse.
He does not like this, and acts sullen and hurt. After a while he forgets, and I
just act a little wasted to make him feel better.
Finally the bar closes around two and we head to a club where we stay
until five thirty in the morning. By this point I am so tired I am in pain, and
the cigarette smoke has almost blinded me. Ben and his friends seem to be
having problems the whole evening. Whenever I catch a glimpse of them in the
smoky, sweaty blackness, they appear to be sick and upset.
A lot of people seem to be giving out important advice to each other.
Ben and Sonia fight a lot but towards the end of the night she is rubbing
up against him with this glazed, wasted, look on her face. He seems to be only
mildly annoyed. The whole team of six people manages to stagger and stumble back
into Ben’s truck, and I manage to drive them home.
When we get back everybody goes to bed and I am left sitting on the
couch. Some bizarre early morning church show is on the television.
After being alone on the couch for about half an hour, I hear Ben and
Sonia using the bathroom in the hall. Ben brings me a pillow and blanket from
his bedroom. He sits next to me on the couch. He looks like he has been in a
violent wrestling match. He scratches his underwear a lot, his breath smells
like an ashtray.
“Party down dude” He slurs to me, pathetically.
I just look at him, he catches my eyes and then shivers once,
dramatically. “You better go to bed” I tell him, pushing his shoulder with
one finger.
“thanks” I add, to be polite.
“Don’t mention it” He says with no expression.