Beau, Lee, The Bomb Read online

  “Gina? Yeah, well, that’s different. She can.”

  We just look at him. He looks back at us. You can tell he’s deciding. Then he does.

  “Listen, do you guys want some tea or something? You may as well come in and sit down, since you’re here.”

  We have all been standing in the doorway. We go into the room where he was putting away the books. The little old dog is a lot less awful now that he’s inside and comes up and wags his tail and is friendly, but we are not. We only give him a courtesy pat till he has redeemed himself. The Bomb is quietly tense.

  The other guy comes in with four green bottles and hands us each one and cracks one for himself. I look at the bottle and it’s something called “gingerade.” I try a sip. It’s pretty good.

  Dude’s still grinning wickedly. He sits down in an easy chair. He looks at us, all disgusting and hungover and trashed, then stares at Beau’s face and giggles a little. Sylvester comes over and flops down at his feet.

  “Maybe you could do some sightseeing with Uncle Frank while you’re here,” he suggests. I hear attitude in his voice. He smiles über sweetly, but he’s pissed.

  “Hope so. What’s your name?” Beau asks, smiling in a neutral, if somewhat hesitant way.

  “You may call me Captain Marvel.” Dude sits up very tall. Waggles his eyebrows and eyeballs us, unsmiling.

  This guy is like a crazy person. We look at each other like what?

  “Why would we do that?” Beau asks carefully, like this guy might go off.

  “Because I am!” He cackles maniacally. We gather ourselves to run if we have to.

  “Stop scaring the kinder, Oscar, right now.” Uncle Frank rolls his eyes at us as he re-enters the room. “He’s been designing his pride costume all day—months in advance; he’s decided he’s going to be Captain Marvel on skates this year. That’s the only reason . . . so don’t worry—he’s just a little nutty.” He smiles down at him.

  “Wait—you march in the Gay Pride Parade?” Beau asks Oscar, like it’s too cool.

  “Indeed. Are you surprised? You’ve seen the one in Seattle, surely?”

  “I haven’t lived there that long. There isn’t one where my dad lives. That’s for sure.”

  Frank laughs out loud. “I imagine not. . . . How is that big jerk, by the way?”

  “Jerkier than ever.” Then Beau and Frank both laugh. They look at each other like, “Hey! Maybe you’re okay.”

  Captain Marvel pipes up.

  “Oh, good times! Maybe he can come visit, too! That would be wonderful!”

  I glance at Leonie, and we shrug. What’s the dude’s problem, anyway?

  Beau also shrugs. “Yeah. Not probable,” he says.

  “Honestly, Oscar, could you be just a little snarkier?” Frank looks over at him. “I know this is crazy, but let’s just roll with it, okay? This is exactly what the message of the retreat was: Letting go. Discovering peace. Let’s not argue with the path.”

  “I see. And this is peace how?”

  “By accepting that the kids are here and maybe with a new outlook for us too. A good wind . . . if we go along and see where it leads.”

  “I’m not babysitting!”

  “Honey, no one is asking you to. But if I had gotten the calls, I would have said to come down, so let’s pretend it’s all been planned from the start and our nephew is here to visit now. He’s brought a couple friends. Isn’t that great?”

  We glance at each other. He called him “honey.” Leonie’s eyes grow wide. Her mouth opens to say something. I try to signal her to please not be random.

  Okay, I was pretty sure they were more than “just friends” already, but now I’m certain that Oscar the Grouch here, aka Capt’n Marvel, lives here. He is Uncle Frank’s partner. His boyfriend—maybe his husband! It’s their apartment.

  They live together; we invaded and he’s mad.

  So . . . here is that which so freaks folks out. Two dudes live together and share a bedroom! Okay? Everyone survive? Did we spaz and soil our britches? No? Double check. Okay? Let’s roll.

  We’ve shown up with no notice and that’s why he’s being such a wanker. It’s Oscar’s apartment, too, that we have invited ourselves into. We should have guessed!

  I turn to him.

  “Dude, sorry! We didn’t think there would be anyone else when we came to visit.”

  He looks at me with a fraction of a pause. But then:

  “Well, for your information, dude, I too live here, so indeed, hella true dat, dude.”

  Leonie squawks, but squelches it when he stink-eyes her.

  “It just sounds so preposterous. When you say it,” she explains apologetically.

  Which is tragically true.

  Adults should never, ever, ever, ever, everevereverevereverever try to talk like teenagers. Ever.

  He gets up and gets another gingerade. I’m not even half through mine yet. Apparently, he can just shoot them. Maybe that’s his superpower. He does give me kind of a smile as he passes.

  I feel special.

  Oscar picks up the leash and puts on his coat. He and Uncle Frank look at each other hard. Then he leaves. He takes Sylvester and his green bottle.

  Uncle Frank stares at the door after he goes.

  “How long do you guys think you will be visiting?” he asks us. He sounds kind of fearful. We look at each other and shrug. He looks from one to the other of us. “Have you at least called your mom, Beau?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, boy,” Uncle Frankie mutters. He walks over and stares out the window. They have a pretty good view. “Well . . . wow!” He looks at Oscar. “Okay . . . I guess this is good practice for ‘letting go.’ ”

  He turns and gives us a rueful smile. We smile back, but with worried eyes.

  We shouldn’t be surprised. We are a pretty big interruption. I don’t know what else we expected when we arrived unexpectedly.

  Frank goes into another room. Their bedroom.

  “Should we just leave?” whispers Leo.

  “To where?” I hiss. “This is our destination!”

  Uncle Frankie comes out with a big old photo album. Stuffed with pictures with a giant rubber band to keep it shut. We look at him in surprise. I thought he might be calling Gina or something. He smiles, and we can tell he’s made up his mind about us.

  “Whatever, let’s go with it. Let’s enjoy the time we have together. I have baby pictures of you, Beau,” he says. Leonie and I crack up. Awesome! Plus—the relief!

  “Yay! Yes! Tiny baby Beau! Woo-hoo! Let’s see ’em!”

  Beau looks at us reprovingly, but we can see he’s intrigued.

  Frank sits on the sofa in the middle of their cluttered living room. He beckons us over.

  (I must say right here, my friends, I’m a little disappointed in their apartment. I thought gay guys were supposed to know how to decorate and all, but their apartment is really not fabulous. The coolest thing they have is a poster for this show or band or something, Zoroaster, with this weird, like mermaid-squid. Also, their bookshelf is so full of books it looks like it might topple over any second. Remember that show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Well, these dudes need queer eye for the gay guys. Just sayin’.)

  “Beau, sit here and look at these . . . all of you. I haven’t looked at these in so long!” He opens the yellowed book. “Oh, look—first page, here you are! The whole front page. All you! You’re about ten months old here, as I recall. . . . Yeah, it says so, right there.”

  Beau concentrates on the fading photos. They lean together, over the album, as they grow more absorbed in the pictures. Beau’s uncle turns a page slowly and then another and then stops. He points to another one of baby Beau right here in San Francisco, down in Chinatown, but this one with his mom. “Look, here’s Beau again . . . little chickadee . . . And look at your mom . . . look. How ’bout it? Was she not a babe? Like a movie star!”

  In the picture Beau is blond and chubby and adorable, and Gina looks a lot like
Leonie, only with long dark hair. She has crescent moon earrings. She looks really young and beautiful. Like a Madonna and child.

  They look. Frank grows quiet after a minute and almost reverent. He whispers to the image in the photo from long ago.

  “Gina, look at you, so beautiful. Wow, it seems like last week. . . .” Uncle Frank pauses and frowns. “Dear God, look at us . . . so different then. Where did our little time go?”

  Something sad catches in his voice and makes me look at him. It’s almost like a prayer.

  Beau and his uncle sit spellbound by the breathtaking picture.

  “I’ve never seen that photo.” Beau is mesmerized.

  “Your mom’s a goddess.” Frank looks at Beau and smiles. They smile at each other.

  “I’ll make you a copy,” he tells Beau. “We’ll make that a project while you’re visiting.”

  “Cool.” Beau nods in pleasant surprise.

  We look at other pictures of Beau, which stop abruptly when he’s about three. There are several of him in San Francisco with Gina and a handsome man who must be his dad and a much younger Uncle Frank. The handsome man is not smiling in one single picture. He is noticeably glowering.

  Pictures of him stop abruptly too. Uncle Frank doesn’t comment. Neither does Beau.

  After a while we decide to go walk the dogs and then find something to eat. Oscar returned a while back, but declines another walk when we ask him to go with us. He tells Frank maybe he’ll come to dinner and to just give him a call when we’re ready.

  Sylvester has also amended his evil ways during our visit. While we were in the apartment, he and I had a stare down till he caved and now he is being very apologetic. Which is fine. He’s being very friendly (though fortunately not too friendly) to The Bomb, and that is also good.

  She is ignoring him.

  We walk a couple steep uphill blocks to the Fairmont Hotel, where Uncle Frank says Beau stayed when he was a baby. We leave the dogs outside with him and go into the lobby for a

  sec. It’s amazing: ornate, like gigantic high ceilings, and gilded, sparkling golden everything. We rotate, staring, our mouths dangle open briefly and then we go back outside to the dogs. Uncle Frank laughs when he sees our faces.

  “Dazzling, isn’t it? Just one more reason to make San Francisco your next vacation destination!” he tells us delightedly as we walk on. He is kind of making me laugh with the random way he phrases stuff.

  “Is there anything you want to see while you’re here? This city is made for tourists.”

  I pipe up.

  “Amoeba! I totally want to visit Amoeba Music!”

  Frank smiles and nods. “Okay!”

  We go back to drop off the dogs at the apartment and see if Oscar wants to come with us. It’s dark by the time we return. We went for a long walk.

  He’s sitting by the window, with a book open and the lights off. He has a different photo album, older than the one we were looking at. I don’t think from the look on his face he even realizes he’s sitting in the dark. He’s holding the open book in his lap. He closes his eyes when we come in, but other than that he doesn’t move.

  Frank stands still and then sees what he has.

  “Oh, dear . . . Oscar de la Renter, why do you have that picture book?” Frank’s voice is so tender and sad. He slowly comes into the room and gently pulls the book away from Oscar and whisks it into the bedroom. He comes back out and signals us to come into the other room, which is where we will be staying.

  “Hey, kids, why don’t you go get your stuff and give us a minute, okay?” he says.

  So we do. We take The Bomb so she won’t be a hassle.

  We dawdle. We lollygag. We try to take a long time.

  Both of them look like they’ve been crying when we get back. Their eyes are red, and their noses are plugged up.

  We pretend not to notice, and Frank says we’ll go without Oscar because Oscar doesn’t feel too social right now, but maybe we’ll bring him back a little something to eat later.

  Frank hails a cab on the streets of San Francisco, just like in the movies. We pile in.

  “Haight and Ashbury, Amoeba Music, please, and make it snappy, jack!” He’s clowning. The driver grins and says, “Okay, my friend!” And we scoot!

  Amoeba Music is awesome! Just amazing! I stand staring. It’s freaking ginormous!

  We fan out. I walk and gape.

  There is so much music and so many old-timey ways to play it that I am a little overwhelmed. I look over at Frank. He smiles. Beau is over by the counter, and Leo is somewhere out of sight.

  “You know about this stuff, right?” he asks as he gestures to the stacks. “Before CDs and cassette tapes, up to about the late ’80s, there were primarily record albums.”

  Duh. But I nod as we wander over to enormous racks of records. I start flipping through. Frank searches the Rs. He grins as he finds one and hoists the album out of the stack: Rocket to Russia by the Ramones.

  “I loved this album! Hee-hee! Check out these giant things we listened to in the day! I played mine to death . . . scratched up both sides. It sounded just gawd-awful after a couple of years.”

  I find an album that I’d heard in Mr. J’s class—Kate Bush, The Dreaming—and I hold it up and smell the oldness of it as Uncle Frankie continues.

  “That was the problem. You had a needle you set down—gently—on the record, which was made of super hard vinyl and really easy to scratch—way easier than CDs—which if you did would skip over entire lyrics, or endlessly repeat them, ‘like a broken record,’ which meant the record was ruined and you had to replace it . . . a lot. Also, you couldn’t really take your music with you in the day; it was too heavy and awkward.”

  We walk it over to the counter dude and ask to listen to the Ramones album. He takes it out of the cover and holds it by its edges. Checks its face in the light for scratches. Holds it out for Frank to examine. He does.

  Pristine.

  Dude sets it up, expertly drops the needle, and gives me the headset. I put it on and am enveloped in super-fast-driving-eighth notes: “We’re a Happy Family,” which is a really funny song you should google if you don’t know. I take the headphones off and laugh.

  Frank puts them on and starts bopping. We grin at each other. He kind of yells.

  “Regardless, the sound is so great some people still prefer albums. Plus, there was artwork on the covers and that was cool. The covers meant something. We all had the same music . . . the same experience. I heard someone say that we used to have a few deep collective taproots in our culture, that have now become shallow ground cover. There’s just so much stuff!”

  He takes off the headphones. I’ve found the Beatles stack nearby. He walks over to where I’m standing and nods. Watches as I flip through the stack.

  “Look—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band! See, that’s a perfect example. We all knew it as the first ‘concept’ album. It had a theme instead of just being a bunch of songs.”

  He picks it up lovingly.

  “Everyone had this album. We all grew up with these faces and costumes every day in our consciousness. And it’s hard to explain what it meant to the era. . . . I can still sing every word on this album. Want me to?”

  I shake my head emphatically no. We laugh.

  We go deeper inside the store. It’s so much bigger than I expected that I am still kind of blown away. There are so many things I have read about right here in front of me. I feel like I’m in a museum. The Amazing Amoeba Music Museum!

  We stroll over to Beau and Leonie. They are at the counter looking at lighters shaped like guns and unicorns. I walk right by a Beatles “butcher” album cover hanging on the wall behind the counter. I can’t believe my eyes and turn around. I’ve read all about it and there it is—right there!

  Frank sees me looking.

  “Ah, yes, the infamous butcher cover. Are you going to be okay?” He’s teasing.

  It’s like five feet away from me! The sixties
Beatles, all wearing doctor coats and doll parts and splashed with red paint. I just stare at it, intrigued. This was what was so shocking?

  Leo and Beau wander over.

  “Omg! They want two thousand dollars for that?!” Leonie is scandalized.

  Frank laughs.

  “Look it up, you guys. It was a huge deal when it came out in the sixties. They had to stop the presses . . . literally. Everyone thought it was so horrifying they changed the cover.”

  We stare at it again. We try to see it like they did. . . .

  Whatevs . . . they thought it was so bad at the time but now that we are used to so much worse it just looks kind of cute.

  After Amoeba we amble into this candlelit café around the corner and are treated to a delicious dinner. I haven’t been to many fine dining establishments during my life yet, what with the single parenting budget and all, so I don’t have a lot for reference, but I must say this was the best dinner ever. There are more forks and weird spoons than I’ve ever seen on a table per place setting, but I carefully watch what Uncle Frank uses. Little dish on left for bread: Check. Use fork on the outside left first: Check. Give up fork with salad plate, switch to inner fork for meat: Check. Knife in the right hand, fork in the left to cut: Check. Eat with the fork in the left hand for some random reason: Check.

  Beau watches me and copies what Uncle Frank does too. Lee is oblivious. She’s just chowing down, gobbling like a wild animal, as usual.

  Don’t care. She’s getting a free pass from me for quite a while. I give her my dinner roll when she finishes hers. Uncle Frankie takes note with his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me for a sec.

  We talk about easy things: getting the print of his mom made and framed for Beau, stuff we want to see while we are here, bands that came from San Francisco, things like that. Frank gets really excited when I know so many songs of the retro bands he listened to in the day. He seriously cannot believe I know of the band Romeo Void, but when I quote a song lyric and mention the saxophones, he’s all impressed. Never say never!

  “That’s great! We loved that band! And now I’m friends with her, on Facebook.”

  I am quietly felled by how cool it would be to be able to just say stuff like that so casually: “Yeah, I’m chill with a bunch of rock stars . . . no big . . . you know.” I wanna be like this!