Beau, Lee, The Bomb Read online

  Beau and I exchange glances. Omg; so glad we came!

  We finish a sick dinner, the kind where Leo’s meat is called medallions and my salmon is on a cedar plank and everything comes on gigantic plates drizzled with a bunch of arty sauces, complete with dessert and coffee and then, exactly as we are finishing, they bring the to-go order for Oscar.

  When the bill comes, I slowly reach for my money like a gunslinger, mentally doing the math since he really hadn’t offered, exactly, to take us out, but Frank shakes his head at me.

  Uncle Frank picks up the check.

  “Put your wallet away, Rusty! Tonight is an extra special ‘Welcome to The City Celebration,’ and it’s on me.”

  Yay!

  “So what do you do, Frank?” I ask him, while we wait for the bill to come back.

  “Well, I used to be a sous chef for a couple of swanky joints around here, but then I got hired as a personal chef.”

  “Cool. Who for? What all do you do?”

  “Oh, you know—one of these richy-rich Silicon Valley guys you’ve never heard of. He lives here in the city, except he’s in Nice right now, since I’m taking some vacation time. Mostly I create meals designed to keep him healthy. I’m studying to be a nutritionist.”

  “Cool.” We gaze at him. He smiles at us and takes a pen from his pocket. He clicks it against the tablecloth dreamily and adds an afterthought, “So I’m in school, too, or at least I will be when the quarter starts again.”

  “How long till you graduate?” asks Leonie.

  “I will be a nutritionist this time next year!” he answers, as the receipt comes back to be signed. “And I can hardly wait! I think we can prevent so much illness—in fact, I think we can turn the clock back on some diseases, just by eating right.” He smiles at the waiter and scribbles away, then sets down the pen and closes the little bill thingy.

  We leave.

  When we get back, it’s almost eleven and Oscar and Sylvester and The Bomb are all on the sofa watching TV. The Bomb is cool; she has forgiven Sylvester, and he is being a nice respectful doggy so it’s all good. Oscar has his arm around each of them, and they are all watching a movie about some punk rocker who likes to take everything. He’s a wreck, of course. All three viewers are very concerned.

  “What are you three up to?” Uncle Frank asks when we get inside.

  “We’re just watching poor Sid and Nancy, who have lost their way, as always . . . spectacularly.”

  We watch too, but it’s too depressing; in the scene he’s bellowing because he’s messed up on heroin and has to go do a concert, but can’t sing. So he just staggers around, bleeding and grunt-screeching, and it sucks so very bad.

  We are seriously freaked out after about one minute, and Oscar looks up. Then he giggles abruptly at the horrified looks on our faces.

  “I know! Never do drugs, um-kay? ’Cause drugs are bad, um-kay?” Which makes us feel better, ’cuz it’s true, um-kay?

  Seriously. Watch Sid and Nancy sometime—so wasted.

  Uncle Frank shows us how to make the sofa into a bed. He also has a chair that turns into a bed so it’s like a dormitory in their spare room/library/office. We get all settled then go out and watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with them in their living room. Stewart and Colbert are, as always, hilarious. Stephen Colbert kills it on Late Show. We miss them; we haven’t watched TV in a while. Or been online. At all.

  We’ve been off the grid.

  The guys go to bed and leave us up alone after Late Show is over. We turn down the volume and just start flipping through random channels. We are tired too and go to bed pretty soon after they do.

  I have the nightmare again for the first time in a long while.

  My mom is outside, and she can’t find me and she’s calling, “Rylee! Ryyyleeeeeeee!” And I am trying to go to her, but I’m frozen in place. Dad is gone and Paul is really little and I have to find him and get to Mom and I can’t move. And there’s something else. I don’t know what, I’ve never known what, but it’s coming—fast—and I’ve got to do something about it. Hurry! They are counting on me! I have to save them! It’s coming—maybe from everywhere—I don’t know. And I can’t budge and I try to call out to warn them . . . tell them to run . . . to save themselves . . . because I’m failing . . . I’m failing them! But I can’t make a sound, and I try to open my mouth in a silent scream, and then I can’t breathe and I’m suddenly falling up, rising rapidly, flailing, tumbling, then plummeting—

  I yell and jerk out of sleep and sit up, panting. I have tears on my face. I swipe them off.

  Dream crying—only for the advanced multitasker.

  I check to see if I’m broken by the fall.

  Nope.

  The Bomb lifts her head, and Leo opens her eyes for a second, and they both look at me, before Lee plunges back into sleep. The Bomb touches my hand with her nose and lays her head back down.

  I lie back down, trying to be chill, but I do have to pee so I get up. As I am going past the living room, I notice that the TV is on mute and that Oscar is sitting in front of it on the couch with the photo album Frank magicked away earlier that afternoon. I head to the bathroom, and on my way back, he looks up at me and gestures with his head to come into the living room. He puts his finger to his lips like “keep it down” and pats the couch beside him. I go over and sit down on the couch too.

  The TV is on some station with some lady blabbing away silently and a bunch of tickers all over the screen telling you crappy things about the economy and terrorists and such. The screen flickers on us like a fireplace. We sit and watch the mute people argue in their little boxes from their different distant cities. Everyone has the whitest high-def teeth you’ve ever seen. Freaking neon. I can see the beard stubble on Oscar’s flickering face in profile. He looks down at the open book on his lap, then over at me. His smile is remote. I look at the book too. Photos of young folks.

  “Dear . . . dead . . . friends.” I see a glass of red wine beside him on the coffee table. He’s been drinking and is a little emotional. I look at the book. It’s an old book, the kind with photos that slip into sleeves. We look at the pictures. All young people, men and women, wearing the clothes of the late seventies—the dudes with these giant handlebar mustaches and mullets and really short shorts, which just look too hilarious to me because they are so not in style now. And the girls! They totally have armpit hair and unibrows! Seriously! The hot ones—all of them.

  It’s kind of horrifying, but fashion always is once it changes, right? The pictures from the eighties (even if I do like the music from back then) look ridiculous too, with their big old psycho shoulder pads, crazy clown-face Nagel makeup, and upright wall o’ bangs. And I know pics of our generation’s sad saggin’ britches are going to be material for mirth and blackmail forever.

  Hee-hee . . . I can hardly wait.

  There are photos of a young Oscar, and he has his arms around everyone and he’s smoking cigs in a lot of the photos, which he sees me notice and whispers, “Everybody smoked then,” and turns the page. There is a gang of friends all dancing on a huge boat in the summer. Everyone is tan and young, and there are some huge crazy-looking women there, and when I look closer at these amazons, he snorts. He points to one with a giant beehive hairdo.

  “Oh! I can’t stand it! God save the queens! Ahh! See, honey, those are drag queens. Men that dress up like women and then lip-synch, at least in this case.” He laughs nostalgically. “So funny! This was long ago and far away. . . . It was a magical time, in a magical land called Fire Island, and all the beautiful men in the world were there . . . and a lot of the beautiful women too. And a lot of beautiful men dressed as, um, maybe not so beautiful women. Oh! And here’s me! Here I am at a party I threw. I’m Oscar de la Renter. See my foil hat? And look at my costume! I went to the Goodwill and got this tacky bathrobe and hot-glued a bunch of stuffed cats to it. I was managing an apartment building, and that’s what all my renters were like.”

  We both
snort. But quietly. He turns another page.

  “Oh, my, now this child was a dear friend!” Oscar laughs. “His name was Mark, but we called him Jojo. Look at that hair! It’s just grown out natural for about two years at this point, and it’s a ’fro the size you just don’t see nowadays. Oh dear . . . that child was so not on the down low! We were so young then! Look at us—such babies!”

  Oscar is just blabbing away to himself. I’m not even sure what he’s saying, just that he hasn’t seen these pics in a long time and they are evoking a bunch of emotions in him. He smoothes the picture of the young Jimi Hendrix–looking man with a nostalgic touch, smiling, tracing his freaking huge ’fro. The sun is shining through it in the picture so it looks like a halo.

  I gather up my courage, along with my big mouth.

  “Was he your boyfriend?”

  He stares at me and kind of gives me a look like, “Okay, you asked.”

  And I did. So he tells.

  “Yes. For a little while. But he was my friend forever.”

  “Did he die?”

  Oscar answers slowly.

  “Yes . . . yes, he did. When he was twenty-six years old.”

  I don’t know what to say. He was less than ten years older than me, since I’m almost seventeen. I just sit and then Oscar turns the page. There is another picture of Jojo, obviously a professional shot, like for an actor or a model. He is so handsome. It’s in black and white, in front of some body of water, and there are leaves and trees behind his face and it’s an amazing shot. Oscar touches it with an air of satisfaction.

  “He got a lot of work from this shot. I took it. It was his head shot for years.”

  “Are you a professional photographer?”

  “Nope. Just occasionally lucky.”

  He looks at me and winks. He’s actually pretty nice.

  “Was Jojo your only boyfriend, till now?”

  He looks at me and laughs out loud, and then claps his hand over his mouth.

  “Oh, sweetheart! Hardly.” He is smiling at me like I’m adorable.

  “But it seems you were like deeply in love. . . .”

  “Yes. I was. We were.”

  I once again sit there with nothing whatsoever. We both sit and think about what to say next.

  Oscar goes first. He sounds tentative, choosing his way carefully.

  “Listen, I don’t know what your parents have told you about homosexuality—”

  I jump in.

  “Not much, but that’s not the point! I’m old enough to think for myself. And I think it’s just fine!”

  He looks at me and chuckles. But not in a making fun of me sort of way.

  (Believe me—because that I can recognize.)

  “Well, good! That makes it easier to talk to you. Lots of kids have grown up being taught to hate gay people without ever having even known one single person who was gay by parents who didn’t know anyone gay either. It’s ludicrous. But sadly, there are a lot of people sleepwalking out there.”

  “Sleepwalking how?”

  “Not thinking for themselves. Y’know? Just lurching through life without examining anything.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I do know.

  “Yeah. Well, back in the day we did have a lot of relationships. There are a million things I could say here, but suffice to say, it was a different mind-set. Gay and straight people both had a different priority after the pointless bloody Vietnam War ended. Make love, not war! Oh dear, and a lot of one-night stands. Bad, bad idea! But it was the seventies.

  “People thought sex was safe, and a lot of young people were very promiscuous; they slept around a lot, sometimes with strangers. Men and women . . . though gay men the most, I must admit. And it was a bad idea, it turns out, like how everyone smoked cigarettes back then too. We were responsible for a lot of self-destructive behavior. And, child, did we ever pay for it!

  “It was a strange time. A sea change . . . everything was being examined. Gay people were finally beginning to not only admit being gay but to rally for equal rights. Women wanted control of their own bodies, and they were marching right along beside us. Public opinion was starting to become more open, less hateful . . . till religious zealots got ahold of politics. They spread the hate. They said the whole AIDS thing was a punishment from God . . . a judgment.”

  I look at him carefully. I’d heard that. Never from my mom, but I had heard that before.

  “Never mind that it’s afflicted the gay community in America and the West, but that in Africa and other places in the third world, it is very much a heterosexual disease. Inflicted on women and girls who have no power over their lives. Nobody mentions that fact too often.” Oscar stretches and puts his stocking heels on the edge of the coffee table. He continues.

  “So here’s a confusing message from the God of Love: ‘Okay, I unconditionally love you, because I made you, but I also hate gays, and, uh, African women, and oh yeah, when I’m angry, I kill! Like a lot. Okay, figure that out and have a good day! See you this weekend! Praise me!’ ”

  I snicker, and he looks at me. To see how I’m taking it. I’m fine; I agree. He goes on.

  “Right? I pity those who demean the notion of ‘love’ like that . . . and as for God, it’s amazing how ‘he’—always he—agrees with their ideas so completely!”

  Oscar glances at me, and I nod. I’ve often thought so. Especially the “he” part.

  “I know! How’d they get so certain? Dang, must be nice!”

  He sighs.

  “Certainty can be very addictive. It’s a relief to stop asking questions, turn off your mind, and close the books. . . . And some people have. Others never asked a single question in the first place. They’re the same luminaries who declare Harry Potter—who, by the way, is not real—to be an enemy of God who should be put to death. They claim things like the earth is six thousand years old, when there have been toilets found that are older than that! I mean, for cryin’ out loud! You hear that and you’re like seriously? How can you even function in this world, running on that much stupid? It’s hard to respect other viewpoints when they are so unfair and unbalanced. Kind of takes your breath away, y’know?”

  He takes a sip of wine and continues.

  “The second you start to consider the possibility—what’s so wrong with two grown-ups who love each other and who want to get married?—is the moment you take that first step forward toward empathy.” Oscar smiles at me and checks again how I’m taking this. I nod.

  “I agree! Especially when everyone makes such a joke of it like getting married five or six times, or married and divorced the same day. I mean, like: What??”

  Oscar nods. “That behavior is legal? They can? But I don’t get that right, at all?” His brow furrows. “I can’t marry the person I honor and make sure that the things everyone wants for their loved ones are there for us. Things like the certainty that if I am hurt and hospitalized in any state in the union, he can be right there beside me. Oh, Rylee, do you have any idea how important that is? It has happened a lot, that the family of one of the members of a gay couple won’t let the partner into the room because they are prejudiced against gay people.”

  I stare in disbelief, and he looks at me and nods. “People have died without ever seeing their loved one, and they were right there! How could anyone be so cruel? And why would they be? Because they disapprove? They don’t like it? For real? How is that allowed?”

  “People are bullies when they get to call all the shots.” I say what I have noticed.

  “Boy, that’s for sure! ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ as they say. You know, I’d like to call the shots for a day! That would be a horse of a different color, let me tell you, because I have a lot of opinions!” Oscar pauses for air.

  I smile. I’d like to see a world with Oscar in charge. That would be a horse of a different color! He’s not quite done.

  “But you know what? I tell myself, ‘So what?’ Big deal whether or not I approve, right? This world will kee
p right on turning. Maybe it’s none of my business!”

  His eyes are blazing in the TV light. But he keeps his voice down. “And you know what else, Rusty? I’m not religious anymore but Frank is, and he told me once the one thing he’s found that is the same in all the religions he’s studied is the Golden Rule. Y’know? Do unto others? Treat other people like you want to be treated. He says there’s a version of it in all modern and ancient religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Wicca, Zoroastrianism—I mean, you name it! Shouldn’t that alone mean something? If it is that historically universal to empathize—to feel for each other—chances are that the concept has proved beneficial. Why don’t we just lose the ideology and keep the psychology?

  “ ‘Do unto others,’ by the way, doesn’t equate with just letting others run over you like a doormat either. Not if you believe everyone was born with the potential to be a decent human being. You can’t allow others to treat you badly. You have to stand tall and remind them. For their sake as well as yours . . . you see? It’s subtle. You have to think, and that is hard.”

  Oscar stops talking and takes another sip.

  We sit in flickering silence. I think about what he said.

  I think Oscar is pretty cool. I think he might be right.

  The next morning I wake up to the sound of voices. Beau and Frank are planning.

  “I know the best place to get a reprint, maybe framed by the next day! We’ll see if that can happen. Consider this your Christmas present, to make up for all the others you never got, okay?”

  Beau laughs. “Awesome.”

  Which reminds me that it’s Christmastime. We haven’t been really feeling the Christmas spirit yet, since every day is Christmas at the ocean. For me, anyway.

  It makes me think about Mom and Paul. I can actually see them in my mind’s eye.

  Usually I make their Christmas presents. I make Paul blue-gray shirts to match his eyes and sew clothes for Mom that fit her exactly. I wonder if Paul has gotten his growth spurt that Mom has been predicting all year and how her seven millionth diet is going, and suddenly I miss them so bad my nose swells shut. I roll over, avoid squashing The Bomb, and reach for my phone on the end table beside me. I don’t even listen to the messages I know are there. I text: Were here. Were gud. LUV u!!!!!! and send it. Then I turn my phone off because I would cry if she calls and I hear her voice, and I can’t yet. I’ll rust shut if I start.